Scott Hanselman

Well, my wife is out of town and as usual, I can't sleep at all. We've been married 5 years and we just can't sleep separate. This is both a good and a bad thing. Bad because it's 3:23am, good because I felt compelled to write some software.

I've been digging Watir lately and have introduced it around work. The question that everyone keeps asking is "ok, so how do I automatically record Watir scripts" and the answer has been, to the best of my knowledge, "um, you don't. Hopefully someone will do something soon."

I got tired of waiting. I started at 10pm and now it's 3:25 and Conan is being repeated. So, here's a screencast of my results after 5.5 hours. It's very rough but it supports text boxes, buttons, links, select lists (kinda), radios and checkboxes. It doesn't support frames, iframes, the back button, divs, tables, etc yet. It's also very sloppy code, so I think what I'm going to do is get a few volunteers in the Watir community who are also .NET savvy to help me out and I'll try to release it in a week or so.

There's some really crazy stuff going on in here with UCOMIConnectionPoint in order to get "IE on a string." Also, a lot of things are being caught on the onfocusout event. I also need to understand if HTMLDocumentEvents2 is the right object model to be watching.

If there's interest, we shall see. Interested? Here's the screencast of WatirMaker 0.1. I'm off to bed.

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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Internet Explorer 6 SP1 supports an extra "HttpOnly" cookie attribute, that prevents client-side script from accessing the cookie via the document.cookie property. Cookies still round trip.

The value of this property is questionable since any sniffer or Fiddler could easily remove it. That said, it could slow down the average script kiddie for 15 seconds.

You can do it a few ways. I added this to the Global.asax and catch all the cookies on the way out the door. You could choose to do this to specific cookies if you like.

protected void Application_EndRequest(Object sender, EventArgs e)

{

    foreach(string cookie in Response.Cookies)

    {

        const string HTTPONLY = ";HttpOnly";

        string path = Response.Cookies[cookie].Path;

        if (path.EndsWith(HTTPONLY) == false)

        {

            //force HttpOnly to be added to the cookie

            Response.Cookies[cookie].Path += HTTPONLY;

        }

    }

}

Of course, ASP.NET 2.0 can do all this for you via a Web.config setting.

SILLY GOTCHA: If you do this in your ASP.NET 1.1 app and then run your 1.1 app under 2.0 without changes, be aware that ASP.NET 2.0 will blindly append ANOTHER HttpOnly after every cookie giving you the value TWICE. You'll then need to turn if off in web.config as your code would be handling it.

<httpCookies httpOnlyCookies="false" requireSSL="false" domain="" />

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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A while back I posted some Presentation Tips. I will update them one day as I've learned oodles since then.

However, for the CodeCamp this weekend (surely you're going...) I've been asked to give a Presentation Skills Workshop.

That's a tall order, as everyone has their opinion about what makes a good or bad presentation. At any rate, here's the PPT I'm going to use during my talk.

Hanselman Presentation Tips.zip (1430 KB)

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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Even though the soon-to-come DasBlog 1.8 will include support for Custom Macros, you CAN get custom functionality now with this existing macro:

<%newtelligence.aspnetcontrol("TechEdBloggersFeed.ascx")%>

This will load the specified ASCX control into the page at this location. The code-behind can be in another (non-DasBlog) assembly.

This won't give you access to the DasBlog DataService, that's what the new Custom Macro support does. Still, pretty slick, and a good reminder from Michael Earls.

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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Sigh, well apparently no one in Microsoft marketing remembers the chaos caused (and still caused) by multiple versions of Windows Messenger versus Microsoft Messenger versus MSN Messenger. And it was only a year ago.

Well, anyway, you can switch your system over to Microsoft Update (I have) by visiting http://update.microsoft.com/microsoftupdate. Of course, switch only your personal computer unless your IT department has OK'ed this, yada yada. Looks like a new ActiveX control will be downloaded and you'll have Office Updates included within your Automatic BITS Updates. Shiny.

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.

About   Newsletter

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