From googling around in trying to get HTTP put enabled on IIS 7, I have concluded that turning on HTTP PUT verb support requires the installation of the WebDAV handler extension and that even then it only works in integrated authentication mode.  If this is not true, please let me know as I was forced to write my own put HTTP handler.  It actually turned out to be a lot easier than I thought it was going to be though.  Implementing IHttpHandler, I ended up just having to binaryread the request into a byte array and then use a binarywriter to write it to a file after validating the PhysicalPath of the request for user permissions and validating that the "pattern" is safe (ex. file extension, path).  I haven't tested the performance against the IIS 6 native solution, but it seems quite fast on today's server hardware.

I was recently involved in migrating a web application from IIS 5 to IIS 7 on Server 2008.  One of the quintessential components to this app was originally written as a VC++ ISAPI server extension.  I've read many articles touting the efficiency of the integrated .Net pipeline in IIS 7, so I thought I would rewrite this legacy component in C# as an Http handler instead.  Once the code was written, I was looking for a way to test the speed of the old implementation versus the new.  To my surprise, there were very few free tools available to do this type of testing easily and quickly.  Microsoft offers two tools, Web Application Stress Tool and Web Capacity Analysis Tool.  Both were a complete disappointment for me.  WAST seems like it hasn't been updated or recompiled for years, and I couldn't even get it to install without errors on Windows 2008 x64.  WCAT installed, but it offers no GUI and seemed buggy.  So being the geek that I am, I wrote my own.

The tool that I wrote lets you enter multiple URLs to test and allows you to control the number of concurrent requests (threads) that attempt to retrieve the URLs.  You can also specify if you would like the URLs to be requested in a round-robin fashion or randomly.  Statistics are then displayed for all the requests, and per each URL.  Stats given include: the average number of bytes in response, the average round trip request-response time in milliseconds, requests per second, the total number of requests, and the total elapsed time.

This application was written in C# and it requires .Net 2.0+ or Mono 2.0+ to run.  It is available free of charge via the download link below, but if you find it useful, please feel free to donate a few bucks via the paypal link at the top right of this page.

 Download: SimpleMultiThreadedWebStressTester.exe (18.50 kb)

I recently attended Dev Connections and was shown the benefits of decoupling business logic from aspects such as authentication, authorization, security, transaction support, threading model, instantiation model, encoding, and transport mechanism.  In Juval Lowy's Windows Communication Framework (WCF) seminar, I was exposed to the idea of our software tools and runtime environments evolving to allow us to utilize these functionalities in business application without even doing anything additional.  Juval reiterated that WCF is not just about web service and explained many of the benefits that you would get for using WCF even on an application that does not span CPUs.  These benefits include fault tolerance, fault screening (or formal fault contracts), contract first development, and the benefit of a thought out framework that provides separation of concerns for many aspects of enterprise software development.

At PDC at the end of October, Microsoft announced Azure, Oslo, and Dublin.  So Azure, or the "cloud", will let you deploy and run your production applications easily and supposedly allow them to dynamically scale up on-the-fly as demand warrants.  I heard this maybe being accomplished by dynamically spawning new virtualized servers from software and data that are stored in a massive partitioned and redundant sql server cluster (or I may have dreamt all this).  Oslo is the hybrid (both visual (Quadrant) and textual) programming environment for creating and using custom Domain Specific Languages (DSL) and Dublin is a SQL server based repository and runtime environment for the resulting Oslo DSL programs and data structures.  The DSLs are written in Mgrammer ("Mg") and the modeling language itself is just called "M".  There is a silverlight video from MS on http://modelsremixed.com/ that shows the history of "modeling", starting with prehistoric times.  In it, you will notice that one of the process models that they show is comprised of a component with the tiny logo that reads "Wcf" in its top left corner.

So that is a lot of new information to absorb.... but what does this all mean?  Will we all really be orchestrating business process workflows written in "vertical" DSLs?  Where does BPEL fit in?  Is this Microsoft's killer-app ESB?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/oslo/default.aspx

 

 

I remember back to the old days of my Commodore 64 .  Way back in the early eighties, I had a command line program to be able to have the computer say what you type on the command line.  I was very surprised that nothing like this is freely available on the net for windows.  Microsoft provides both the "MS Agent" COM api as well as the SAPI api, but no easy way to utilize either.

This is a real simple program that simple uses the MS SAPI api.  Simple run "Say.exe Hello world!" and have your computer say hello to the world.

Here is a link to a statically linked EXE:  SayStatic.exe

Here is a link to a dyncamically linked EXE (MSVCRT.dll version 8 / Visual Studio 2008 (9) ):  SayDynamic.exe

 

Here is a link to the source code.

Put it up on a publically accessible network share and use System Internal's psexec.exe (now owned by Microsoft) and have fun freaking folks out.

 

A while back, I looked around the internet for a simple one button mouse that my 3 year old could use to play the games on PBSKids.org.  I was surprised that there was no cheap mice like this available.  My kid was young and having a hard time clicking only the left mouse button, so I decided to write a small program that would allow me to easily switch so that all the mouse buttons functioned as the left mouse button.

Now I simply fire up one exe and then I can launch IE in kiosk mode (via "c:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" -k http://www.pbskids.org ) and I can walk away and let my kids have relatively safe fun playing games on the computer.

Here is a link to the program:  SingleButtonMouse.exe

When run, it will automatically go into single button mode and add a notification icon to your task bar (click on this to toggle back to multi button mode).  It has been tested to work in Windows 2000, XP, and 2008.  (It should work in Vista too.)

 

For those interested, the source code is available here.  It is written in C# (requires .Net 2.0 runtime) and uses windows api hooking.

Here is a simple little stop watch program that I wrote as my first Smart Device application some time ago.  It works on XP/Vista too.  Maybe somebody will find it useful.

Screen shot:

Download the program:  StopWatch.exe (10.00 kb)

 

Download the source code:  StopWatch.zip (33.89 kb)