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Monday, May 04, 2009
Building a Mini URL Service – Part 1

This set of posts is about a "Mini URL" service that I created initially to help provide a means to automate shortening of URL's for sending in emails to users in SharePoint. If you've used SharePoint and at times you need to send a link to a List or Document item one way is to "right-click" the item (whether it's a folder, list item, or document) then if it's IE choose "Copy Shortcut". You can then just past that into an email and send over to your recipient.

Recently, I also noticed that even the White House Tweets (http://twitter.com/whitehouse ) are using another well known URL shortening service. A quick look around and you'll see that there are quite a few out there now.

So, I stripped what I built into very basic ASP.NET Web Site and created a service that is now hosted at GoDaddy at http://MyMiniUrl.net. This intended as a pure demo project and the full SharePoint integration won't initially be made available until I work out some minor issues – mostly related to "packaging". But for now, I wanted to just document some of the initial steps, challenges, and work-around that I encountered building this along with some of the decisions (trade-offs) I made along the way.

The initial technical goals of the service are as follows:

  1. Provide a very basic redirection service for short URL – i.e. http://myminiurl.net/B
  2. Hosted on IIS7
  3. Hosted on GoDaddy with their form of "Application/Domain" mapping – you'll see a minor challenge here later related to how Request.ApplicationPath, the tilde (“~”) don’t work as expected…
  4. Provide Persistence tier independence through Provider model <system.data/DbProviderFactories>
    1. MS SQL
    2. MySQL
    3. Future (SQL Lite)
  5. Pluggable HttpModule for incorporating into existing web sites

The SharePoint integration aspect, not yet provided here, is implemented as an ECB (Edit Control Block) menu option that allows immediate automated generation (or lookup if the URL has been shortened already) then presentation of a quick Application page that allows the user to specify an email or pick from People Picker to send out.

MyMiniUrlEcb

Again, I've not published that part of this yet until I address a few issues.

 

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posted @ Monday, May 04, 2009 11:15 AM | Feedback (0)
Making a Win7 Bootable USB device.

I have an old Toshiba that has no optical drive.  To install Win7, I needed a bootable USB stick.  Here are the basic steps

0. Download Win7 http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/

1. Get a USB stick – need a 4 gig one here – the ISO is about 2.5 GIG

2. Format the USB as NTFS (use quick – no need for sector check) – it MUST be NTFS

3. Run DISKPART from an elevated command prompt

4. Make the new USB volume “ACTIVE”

5. Extract the Win7 ISO somewhere (not the USB) – you can use ImgBurn, IsoBuster, WinRar or some tool that can extract direct from an ISO – or mount with Daemon tools or similar, then copy the files from there.  We need to extract first as we’ll need to run a quick program off of the Win7 ISO

6. On the recent Win7 extract, change to the BOOT subdirectory

7. Run BOOTSECT /NT60 <targetDrive:>

       where , <targetDrive> is the drive the USB stick is mounted as….

8. Copy all the files from step 5 above to the ROOT of the USB stick (with subdirectories of course)

Now, you may be able to skip step 5 copying files across and running BOOTSECT directly – I hadn’t but doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t work.

 

 

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posted @ Monday, May 04, 2009 6:21 AM | Feedback (3)
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