Scott Hanselman

A big (and long and exhausting) day for the Hanselman family. My wife has just today become a citizen! She took her Civics test (Quick! What amendments to the Constitution specifically address voting rights?) We attended the ceremony this afternoon.

Her thoughts from when this process started (and the previous decade) are on her blog. She says she'll get another essay or two up soon. Congrats to the wife!

UPDATE: Mo has add a new entry to her blog entitled "American By Choice."

As an interesting side note, Mo has a featured article in this month's issue of Multilingual Living Magazine (TOC PDF - subscripton required - $12 a year to subscribe) on how we met!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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For some reason, I just thought this screenshot was funny at 1:05AM. Something I'm working on in my spare time.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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130 years later and the typewriter is still slowing me down. When you type on a typewriter (for those of you under 25(?) who've never seen one) and reach the end of a line you grasp the "carriage return bar" which would return the carriage to the home position while simultaneously rotating the platen to feed the paper.

Aside: I spent the better part of the summer 1985 manually typing up the screenplay to Ghostbusters (as a reference material) on a manual Smith-Corona Typewriter.

Fast-forward to Teletype machines and now the carriage return/line feed combination is encoded into the wire protocol, then baked into ASCII text encoding itself in the 60s.

Fast-forward to lunchtime today when I was trying to commit some user-submitted changes to DasBlog via TortoiseSVN and got this fantastic error message "Commit failed: file has inconsistent newlines." What application would be so clever as to patch a file with consistent CR/LF pairs with a band-aid of just LFs? Why TortoiseMerge of course! But I'm not bitter.

How do you fix something like this? Well, a number of ways.

• Sometimes if you open the file in Visual Studio it will detect the inconsistencies and offer to fix them.
• You can use some of the dos2unix or unix2dos tools at the command line.
• You can use Notepad++ or Notepad2 (or Scite) - for this I prefer the cleaner Notepad2 status-bar implementation.

Here's screenshots of the same file opened in Notepad++ and Notepad2.

Notepad2 shows the the CR/LF status in the status bar and also optionally at the end of each line. It also lets you switch line endings by simply double clicking on the status bar indicator. Slick. Anyway, crisis averted and changes successfully committed. 

Will we ever be rid of this problem?

No, just like Intel will always been little-endian while the rest of the world will be big-endian. As an unrelated aside from Alex McLellan:

The terms big-endian and little-endian were taken from the Big-Endians and Little-Endians of Gulliver’s Travels, when Lilliput and Blefuscu Gulliver finds two factions fighting over which end of a boiled egg should be cracked open.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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UPDATE: Here is how we solved this problem.

So, this is bizarre. The idea is this:

We want to share FormsAuth cookies between two ASP.NET sites on the same box. No biggie, right? However, one of the ASP.NET sites also has some Classic ASP pages in it. Still, no worries, right?

• The Classic ASP pages happen to use .NET objects that expose themselves to Classic ASP via COM Interop…
• If ASP.NET pages are hit ONCE in both sites (pools/appdomains) to 'bootstrap' the CLR, all is well and FormsAuthTickets will be sharable and jointly decryptable.
• .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0 are installed on the systems
• Both ASP.NET applications/vdirs are configured to use .NET 1.1 in IIS

PROBLEM: If the site that creates the FormsAuthenticationTickets instead has the CLR 'bootstrapped' into the process/pool/domain by hitting a Classic ASP page that calls the COM-interop DLL, it causes later FormsAuthentication crypto to produce tickets that can't be decrypted by the other application.

QUESTION: What's going on? Both sites have web.config files with synchronized machinekeys (the machinekey is used by FormsAuth).

PARTIAL ANSWER: Turns out that if the Classic ASP page (that uses the .NET object that is used via COM) is hit first then .NET 2.0 gets loaded up inside that IIS Managed Application even if the ASP.NET application is set to use .NET 1.1!

Am I missing something? Does this mean that I can't have two classic ASP apps that use .NET objects via Interop, one using 1.1 and one using 2.0 on the same computer? Seems like it.

The issue is that ASP.NET doesn't start up the CLR because it's not hit first. The Classic ASP page is hit first, and apparently can't control the CLR version it gets! By the time someone hits an ASP.NET page, the CLR is already loaded up with a different version.

HERE'S THE KICKER: I don't yet understand why (on Win2k3, in our tests) the problem only happens when the anonymous identity for the web site is a domain account.  If the anonymous identity was left as the default IUSR_xxxx, the CLR loaded is still 1.1 when a CCW is created. (!)

OUR WORKAROUND: We just let .NET 2.0 load up anyway and run our 1.1 application. We have to synchronize the machinekeys in BOTH CLR versions' machine.config files though.

Kudos to Peter Wong for figuring this stuff out. Now the question is - is there a good workaround or better explanation? My guess is we'll hear "functions as designed" but it seems to me that even though you can't indicate in the COM Registration stuff in the Registry what CLR Version to use (it's listed in the Registry, but the values are ignored) there should be some way.

Repro attached. Unzip this file into a c:\inetpub\wwwroot\wong test and make an IIS Application (isolated, or in its own AppPool in IIS). Get Process Explorer from SysInternals and hit x.asp after a fresh reset.

File Attachment: NET11_NET20_ASP.zip (894 bytes)

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I just checked in support for generation of Google Sitemaps directly from DasBlog. Omar anticipates a release this week. We also have a continuous integration build going internally thanks to Paul van Brenk so we may be able to have always-fresh" releases soon (remember to back up your stuff and manually merge the httpHandlers section of your web.config). We also will have an AJAX-based "autosave draft" feature as well thanks to Steven Rockarts and Justice Gray.

NOTE: The daily builds from Paul are DAILY BUILDS. They are not the official release. We'll release the final one SourceForge. However, I'm ALWAYS running the daily build on this blog, so it's pretty baked. Upgrading is just copying a few new files and merging your web.config.
UPDATE: Daily Builds of DasBlog are at http://dasblog.info/dbftp/

If you haven't yet, go log into Google Webmaster Tools and check out what Google knows about your site. It includes a robots.txt validator and lets you know what keywords folks are using to get to your site.

Google sitemaps are very simple and a pretty good idea, I think. It lets me, as a blog publisher, provide a great deal of context and "freshness" data to Google that I have stored (trapped) inside the blog.

Sure, arguably they could get a lot of that information by gleaning it from If-Modified-Since headers, but this is such a simple format, why NOT do it?

Here's an example snippet. The lastmod element can include time detail as well, but I think date is enough for blog purposes. The priority is pretty much relative. In this case, the home page is more important than a post and a comments page is less important than a post page.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<urlset xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.hanselman.com/blog/default.aspx</loc>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
    <lastmod>2006-08-22</lastmod>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.hanselman.com/blog/archives.aspx</loc>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
    <lastmod>2006-08-22</lastmod>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.hanselman.com/blog/CommentView.aspx?...</loc>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.7</priority>
    <lastmod>2006-08-22</lastmod>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.hanselman.com/blog/FinePrintChangesTheWayIPrint.aspx</loc>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.9</priority>
    <lastmod>2006-08-22</lastmod>
  </url>
....SNIP....

Aside, I had no idea I was the 3rd (or so) Scott if you search just for "Scott" on Google One day I'll crush Scott Fly Rods, but until that day, it's the Bronze for me. ;)

I also encourage folks to "sesha iWeb" with Google ngaisiZulu. ;)

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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