C#

NStub, finished before it ever really started...

Tony Yates — Sun, 13 May 2007 21:06:09 GMT

The creator of NStub, Jeremy Jarrell (sometimes referred to his blog handle: Digital Blasphemy), has just announce that NStub Beta 2 has been released. Unfortunately, he also says that that will not be any more effort going into that project. Thats too bad because its a cool idea! Expecially for lazy-ass programmers! Then again, it does kind of go against the point of TDD - write tests first, then code. Oh well... :-(

Open Source C# Project Hosting Site

Tony Yates — Sun, 13 May 2007 20:40:18 GMT

For those people who don't like to mess around with interpreted-language sites (e.g based on php, python, perl, etc), and have a desire to host a .Net project-based, subversion-friendly site, you need to check out SharpForge.

Its no TRAC, thats for sure! However, the project and site have been around for awhile, and more and more effort going into it makes it a worthwhile option for managing small to medium-sized projects. Expecially if you prefer .Net.

Interesting features include:

Multi Portal
Multi Project
Subversion Administration
Work Item Tracking
Project Forums
Release Management
Subversion Wiki
Browse Source Code
News Feed Aggregation

The best thing about this is that no Apache is needed to communicate with Subversion. Not that I have an issue with doubling up software suites. Heck, I can remember a time when I has both MS Office and Word Perfect installed on my machine. There was even a time when I had two or three music players installed too, but hello! Why try and fix what's not broken? Apache should be used, not seen - via error message after error message. Why install tempermental software on my machine when I don't have to?

Anyway, I'm not trying to start any web-server-religious wars here, just passing on the word to my .Net-friendly buddies out there.

Shameless plug:

For rock-solid project hosting, with more features than [fill-in your favorite software product here], check out http://www.coderesort.com (pun intended).

Machine Key Generator

Tony Yates — Thu, 10 May 2007 15:33:23 GMT

So there I was, strolling along minding my own SharePoint custom Membership Provider business, when all of a sudden I ran across some information (issue???) about Client Integration and persistent cookies. Then there was more information about cookie timeouts, and what a hassle it is to recover from the timeout on a machine with a default machine key in the machine.config file. THEN, there was a link to a microsoft article that describes the process to create new keys for use in Forms Authentication. So, I thought to myself, "Self, feels like a good time to write a simple windows form application to easily do this." All the code is there, its just a matter of retrofitting it for a form.

So, here it is in all its glory. The valid values for decryptionKey is 8 or 24. This creates a 16 byte key for Data Encryption Standard (DES) or a 48 byte key for Triple DES, respectively. Valid values for validationKey are 20 to 64. This creates keys from 40 to 128 bytes in length. The output from the code is an entire <machineKey> element that you can copy and paste into a Machine.config file. Simply right-click in the text box and choose copy, then past it in your machine.config. Easy, huh?

Download it here (Contains Source and Binaries for 32 and 64 bit).