mikedopp

This is a very short post. so bear with me.

SELECT *
FROM Northwind..Orders 
ORDER BY NEWID()

The Magic here is NewID()

To those whom love Commerce Server 2007 as much as I do. Here is a little script to help you determine the Service Pack level of each database.

use MSCS_Admin
select s_PropertyName, s_Value
From dbo.resourceProps

This will return multiple values. This is helpful in knowing if you have Commerce Server 2007 installed correctly as well as helping you to identify the correct service pack upgrade number per database.

SP1

Transaction Database = 7.0

Transaction Config Database = 7.0

Product Catalog Database = 7.2

Inventory Database = 7.1

Direct Mailer Database = 6.0

SP2

Transaction Database = 7.1

Transaction Config Database = 7.1

Product Catalog Database = 7.3

Inventory Database = 7.2

Direct Mailer Database = 6.0

Enjoy!

Um  so you know its your dream to use windows server 2003/2008 as your desktop Operating system right? So most of you just said no. However for the small amount that might just be curious here is a little script to stop installed server applications built into these server installs.

@echo off

    :start
    set /p _input="Server? [y/n]"

    if %_input% equ y (
        echo Starting server services…
        sc start HTTPFilter     REM HTTP SSL
        sc start IISADMIN        REM IIS Admin
        sc start lanmanserver    REM Server
        sc start MSSQLSERVER    REM SQL Server
        sc start SQLBrowser        REM SQL Server Browser
        sc start SQLWriter        REM SQL Server VSS Writer
        sc start W3SVC            REM World Wide Web Publishing
        sc start WebClient        REM WebClient

        set /p ="Hit any key to continue…"
    ) else (
        echo STOPPING server services…
        sc stop HTTPFilter
        sc stop IISADMIN
        sc stop lanmanserver
        sc stop MSSQLSERVER
        sc stop SQLBrowser
        sc stop SQLWriter
        sc stop W3SVC
        sc stop WebClient

        set /p ="Hit any key to continue…"
    )

    :end

In case you are wondering what is the “Shadow” command? Well in most server installs that have been built on the NT kernal there has been a version of the shadow command.

What is the “Shadow” command?  Lets for instance say you are using windows 2003 and want to gain screen(session) access to another users screen(session). Perhaps the person you are asking for shadow permission has an issue on his desktop and cannot figure it out.  Think Remote Desktop access without the Remote part.

To “Shadow” you have to know the session id of the user’s session that you want to view and or take over. This is done very easily. Right click on your taskbar and select task manager. Go to Users and pick the users name and the session number should be located to the left of the name.

Open up a command prompt(start->run in the open prompt type “cmd”) type:

Shadow 0(or the number of the session) and on the users session it will pop up a dialog box asking the other user for permission for you to access the screen(session).

Of course this can be denied from the other user. Frustrating? Yes.

Try this technique to gain that access you want without the permission of the other user or users.

To shadow any other session, without a prompt, you would use the RDP-TCP Properties dialog, on the Remote Control tab, and clear the require users permission box.

To remote control the console (session 0) without a prompt for approval:

1. On the Terminal Services server, Start / Run / Gpedit.msc / OK.

2. Navigate through Computer Configuration / Administrative templates / Windows Components / Terminal Services.

3. Right-click Remote Control Settings and press Properties.

4. Select the Enabled option.

5. Select Full Control without user's permission, under Options.

6. Press OK.

7. Exit the Group Policy Editor.

8. To force this local policy to update now, open a CMD prompt, type gpupdate /force, and press Enter.

When you establish a Remote Desktop session, you can connect to the console and remote control it:

1. Open a CMD prompt.

2. Type Shadow 0 and press Enter.

The user will NOT be prompted for permission.

Sweet eh? Well this can be exploited and used in many wrong ways. So just be careful and use it wisely.

Youtube - You know that site with videos and all. Yeah! It turns out that its quite popular and you happen to visit and use it quite often. Instead of just searching and playing here are some top Youtube URL tricks that you should know about:

1. View high quality videos

Youtube gives you the option to switch to high quality videos for some of the videos, however you can check if a video is available in high quality format by appending ‘&fmt=18′(stereo, 480 x 270 resolution) or ‘&fmt=22′(stereo, 1280 x 720 resolution) for even higher quality.

2. Embed Higher Quality Videos

While the above trick works for playback, if however you want to embed hig quality videos you need to append “&ap=%2526fmt%3D18″ and “&ap=%2526fmt%3D22″ to the embed url.

3. Cut the chase and link to the interesting part

Linking to a video where the real action starts at 3 minutes 22 seconds, wondered if you could make it start at 03:22? You are in luck. All you have to do is add #t=03m22s (#t=XXmYYs for XX mins and YY seconds) to the end of the URL.

4. Hide the search box

The search box appears when you hover over an embedded video. To hide the search box add ‘&showsearch=0′ to the embed url.

5. Embed only a part of Video

Just append ‘&start=30′ to skip first 30s of the video. In general you can modify the value after start= to the number of seconds you want to skip the video for.

6. Autoplay an embedded video

Normally when you embed a Youtube video and load the page, the player is loaded and it sits there waiting for you to hit the play button. You can make the video play automatically by adding ‘&autoplay=1′ to the url part of the embed code.

7. Loop an embedded video

Append ‘&loop=1′ to make the video start again without user intervention after it reaches the end.

8. Disable Related Videos

Publishing your content in the form of Youtube video? Don’t want people to see other people’s content that may be related but may as well be in competition to you? Just add ‘&rel=0′ to the end of the url part of the embed code and you just turned off the related video suggestions!

9. Bypass Youtube Regional Filtering

Some videos are only available in certain parts of the world. Your IP Address is used to determine your location and then allow or deny access to the video. Change the url from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<somecode> to http://www.youtube.com/v/<somecode>

So a couple of weeks ago I wrote about how to back up your data on a windows(XP(home and Pro) Vista (all versions)) machine. Some great little apps to backup data to external drives even to a network allocated storage device.

Did you however think great I have a way to backup the data and its working however my hard drives are filling up quickly. What do I do now?

Well you have options:

1. Backup Less often (this can make things a bit interesting if you are constantly changing files and you may lose critical info.)
2. Delete older backup files. (if your paranoid like me how far do you go back and delete backups?)
3. Backup your data to a outside source.

So I am going to talk about option 3.  We want to publish all the backups to a outside source. Well what source or applications are available?

There are a ton of great backup applications/services on the web. I decided to just reference a few:

Microsoft Skydrive

Amazon S3 and Jungle Disk

Carbonite

Mozy

Sugar Sync

Yes I have tested these applications/services. Here is the break down.

Microsoft Skydrive: 25gigs of Storage. No automatic backup and have to be signed in to upload. Web interface to upload only. Non Encrypted. Free

Amazon S3: Pay per Gig use. Only a service. To be able to interface the service you have to use 3rd party applications (Jungle Disk) to do your backup. Encrypted transfers. Pay.

Carbonite: Unlimited storage. Installs to your local c drive and you can drag and drop files. Non Encrypted. Monthly service plan. *Used this service for 12months. Did not like the inflexibility of the service. Also after multiple emails asking if the data uploads and storage was encrypted. I was told in summary: Not to worry about what we do with your data. I promptly Canceled the service.

Mozy: Limited storage as of writing. A lot like carbonite. Non Encrypted. Monthly service plan

SugarSync : Another Clone to Carbonite and Mozy. Non Encrypted. Monthly service plan.

So there is the run down on services. However some things you might consider because it is your data. Right?

-Auto Backup?

-Where is the Data really going?

-Who has permission to view your data?

-Availability?

-Encryption?

-Support?

-How to Restore?

In summary all these services are very good. It is hard to choose a service unless you really nitpick.

My personal choice after using all these services. Is amazon s3 and Jungle Disk. As a second backup I use SkyDrive and for stuff I want to just publish to the web I use Drop.io.

Why I use these services is partly out of habit. However I like the pricing schema of Amazon s3 and the ease of making the files stored there made public.

Your thoughts are always appreciated.

Being a System Administrator as well as a Web Developer I run into issues with the Mail protocol SMTP.

Things hang or people want their email better formatted. Or simply test out you spam messages you are going to blast before you well blast them.

Of course you run into issues like is my ports open correctly, is the SMTP server setup to block relaying? Has my domain been blacklisted from spamming?

These kind of questions are important. While I can’t fix the blacklisting domain issue the rest is well my night job.

However during the day I develop lots and lots of web code and sometimes and most often these applications need a way to contact people via email, txt and so forth.

Being behind a great firewall and sending test email can be a long and drawn out process. I found a  great application to do the SMTP testing for you inside you own localhost(127.0.0.1) Yes that is my localhost ip if you would like to “hack me” go ahead Ill wait.(if you don’t already know that is the IP of your pc).

PaperCut

This little app allows you to send SMTP messages without sending them anywhere.

Paper Cut is my favorite application for development. It allows me to debug the SMTP messages without sending them to anyone.

I have been coding using Microsoft technologies for a long while. Recently I was given the chance to do a little bit of web mastering. Due to my system admin background I was most definitely game for this.

Learning IIS 6.0 was not a huge leap as I had done a lot of development using IIS5.1(Windows XP Professional); however I had not as yet used Host headers in IIS (IIS 5.1 only allows for one site. I will post about that later.). This was a learning experience (Don’t even get me started on the issue of multiple SSL sites or web gardens).

I was doing some trail blazing while coming up with a build document to track my progress and to double check all my configurations. I highly recommend this process due to it has saved my bacon multiple times.

Uploaded all the sites and got the host headers configured correctly and moved the SSL (Secure Socket Layer)certifications over to the virgin IIS server when I noticed that not all my sites were happily working. Rendering was slow and some were just crashing. Crap time to take out the build document and rehearse my steps.

Getting through all the steps and all seemed fine. I could not find a reason my sites were acting all sorts of funky and the server processes were pegged out (running at 100%). I stressed and then went to my friend Google for some answers. I found some interesting little applications to monitor and test your sites.

IISReporter Cool little app to see how many people are logged in as well as a log viewer.

IISTrafficMonitor Another great application for watching real time traffic as well as a log viewer *may add extra cpu cycles*

IIS Web Application Stress Tool Just like the name implies it stresses your web applications

LoadRunner Add web traffic load to see what you Server(IIS) can handle. Before it all comes crashing down.

Web Application Stress Tool Another great Stress tool.

The rest are Microsoft utilities for your disposal.

IIS Diagnostics Toolkit 

IIS 6.0 Resource Kit Tools

Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools

Creating Stress Tests for Web Applications

WCat Web Capacity Analysis Tool

These tools are guaranteed to help you in testing your server as well as your applications.

Too Many cooks in the kitchen. When is too many developers one project a bad idea?

So I had the chance to meet with some friends the other day. Of course they work as developers like me. They work for one of those companies with allot of money to throw at a web site (a == 1). I found it interesting having 20 developers writing code for a web site. They called it Agile programming or Extreme Programming (Developer Humping). The reason I  called it this was as they (my friends) described agile as two developers sit in a cubicle(but of course no office unless your management right?) one developer coded while the other sat behind him correcting his mistakes.

So what bothered me most was having another developer watching over your shoulder as you coded. Like what the hell. How is that environment inviting to any developer? So here is my way of disgracing this habit as well as promoting it I guess.

Disgracing:

1. Cost is way more than your ROI (Return of Investment) on any project (yes I will argue this.)

2. It is said this type (Developer Humping) of development is good for the customer. what? how does that translate?

3. Somehow Projects get done faster? (wow I could argue that all day.) This goes back to the too many cooks in the kitchen mentality.

Promoting:

1. Both developers learn quick and bounce ideas off of each other.

2. Micro management of developers is much easier.

So in theory if your company has the money to spend tons of money on 2 developers per cubie(cubicle for those not in cubicles) and developing for 1 web site good on you. Truly in my humble opinion Agile development should be used for large “Software” companies with budgets for multiple projects.

This is what our friends at Wikipedia had to say:

Extreme Programming (or XP) is a software engineering methodology (and a form of agile software development)^[1][2][3] prescribing a set of daily stakeholder practices that embody and encourage particular XP values (below). Proponents believe that exercising these practices—traditional software engineering practices taken to so-called "extreme" levels—leads to a development process that is more responsive to customer needs ("agile") than traditional methods, while creating software of better quality.

So why do I seem against this type of development? I guess I am not all that much impressed with it. I love team development. I truly encourage it. I am not of the mind “put a developer in a closet with pizza and a coke and leave him/her be”. I however like my space and love to collaborate with my fellow developers on multiple projects.

Currently I work on multiple web sites at the same time. I like to call it the shotgun development method. I work with 2 other excellent web developers. One is front end (the famous joe) his code is second to none. Then I work with new guy Bryan (still waiting on a blog bryan) who is the C# guru. We all have our pieces of the projects we work on. This is a great work environment. Typically called the Waterfall method.

No developer humping here just straight work hard and enjoy the team work involved.

Let me know how you feel.

I know what your thinking. Oh crap here he goes again with recommending tools and or services. My question is have I ever steered you wrong?

Yes I normally deal in freeware tools. Mostly due to me being cheap and thinking my skills should push me past that latest issue with code. So why recommend a commercial tool? Good question. A friend recommended to me this tool. I had used tools like .net reflector to look into DLL’s to understand the application I am adding. I had heard rumor of NDepend however with all the different “N” products out there I was like another database OR mappers right? Or maybe another subversion type software.

So I downloaded the tool to see what if anything this tool had to offer. So once I downloaded the software and ran it. I was interested to see what it would do.

It installed nicely into Visual Studio 2005 as well as Visual 2008. A plugin for an Addin for Reflector.

I wanted to see what it would do with one of my most complicated E-commerce applications (http://www.Buylifetime.com). I was surprised to notice the amount of extra DLL’s I was not in need of to make the application to work.

Simply put this application should be included with all Visual Studio Installs. It is that important. If Performance as well as clean code is important to you or your business you should have this to view all your important applications.

I would like to go over all the great features as well as the benefits however they are too much and too many to list.Purchase your copy today and see how much more rapid your development becomes.

NDepend  includes a list of CQL rules and queries in VisualStudio that will update it in real-time each time the developer compiles. This way, the developer know as soon as he is doing a mistake. Also, the possibilituy to query the codebase real-time can be useful in Visual Studio.