You can now use the Amazon Look Inside feature to view many parts my book that is going to be released June 22, 2009.  So if you are interested use the links below to go to different parts of the book or search for specific things.

• Front Cover
• Table of Contents
• First Pages
• Index
• Back Cover
• Surprise Me!
• Search Inside This Book:

Tags: Book

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I am happy to announce the 3.0 release of the Managed Fusion URL Rewriter & Reverse Proxy. Since my previous release in February I have been working hard on a significant rewrite of the core, that to be honest really needed refactoring if I hoped to extend the rewriter is some interesting ways in the future.

Download: Binary Release
View: Source Code
Discuss: Forum
Issues: Report

Release Notes

If you would like to find out more about the past releases please visit us at http://www.managedfusion.com/products/url-rewriter/release-notes.aspx

Version 3.0

• Breaking Change Configuration in the web.config has been reorganized.
• Major rewrite to the URL Rewriter to provide better performance and more reliable logging.
• Major update to the proxy handler, it is much faster, and provides an exact duplication of headers from the proxied server.
• Fixed many issues with the chunked encoding, so you are now able to proxy web based services, such as SVN.
• Full rewrite of the rule, condition, and flag handling system to provide better performance and more flexibility for developers.
• More extensibility points have been created for developers interested in creating their own handlers for rules, conditions, and flags.
• More extensive testing of internal mechanics of the rewriter.
• Added thread safety to the Apache rule set refresh.
• Added initial support for Microsoft UrlRewriter IIS 7 module, this will provided a starting point for extension of the Microsoft configuration to support proxying and other more advanced Apache features.

Featured at PDC 2008

Tags: Managed Fusion URL Rewriter and Reverse Proxy, URL Rewriter

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I have always been driven by the idea that computers and to the greater extent the internet should be as transparent as possible to the users.  People shouldn’t care about what the hot new websites are to meet people with similar interests.  In fact I think this is most of the problem why people are becoming more and more disconnected from each other on a personal level.  And more and more disconnected from the human experience, of social interaction.  There is so much communication that is lost when you cannot see a person face to face, and experience things in the same environment that they do.  Wouldn’t it be great if you could find and meet new local people with similar interests, hobbies, and ambitions, whatever they maybe.  The Internet currently excels at all of this even getting people physically together to meet.

However, this requires a lot of active participation of the person searching and trying to find the right website where everybody of a particular interest meets, and then you need to find somebody locally who is willing to meet up for dinner or a gathering of some kind.  This is a lot of work to find people who are interested in the same stuff as you are.  And it is no wonder so many people just give up.  Now imagine that barrier is removed and finding people with similar interests, hobbies, and ambitions is a passive activity.  Where you are automatically alerted to a new person or group in your area that shares your interests, sort of like Google Alerts for real life.

I would really like to start working on this problem with a small group of developers and people that share a similiar passion to physically connect people in a meaningful way with other people that share their interests.

Tags: Google Alerts, Real Life

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The Managed Fusion URL Rewriter, that I work on and that runs this blog, was featured in PDC 2008 by CJ Saretto (Senior Program Manager for Microsoft Home Server). He used it as a reverse proxy to demonstrate streaming video and music from Windows Home Server to the internet from a simulated internal home network.

I have cut down the actual video presentation to the segment that mentioned the Managed Fusion URL Rewriter. If you want to skip to the good parts in this segmented video, I recommend:

• 2:20 - Managed Fusion URL Rewriter is first mentioned
• 7:00 - An impressive video demonstration streaming through the rewriter

Clips comes from about 18:00 minutes in to http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/ES12/

If you are actually wondering why I am bringing this up now, and not 6 months ago when PDC 2008 was going on… Well it is because I just found out about it at the end of last month, 5 months after the fact. And to be totally honest the video presentation blew me away, because that is some serious bandwidth to show a video of that high of a quality. Especially because the ProxyHandler.cs code was suppose to handle at most small images and HTML being served from a remote server.

Tags: Managed Fusion, Managed Fusion URL Rewriter and Reverse Proxy, PDC, PDC 2008

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In this economy you have to do everything to keep your skills fresh and current so that employers find you a desirable hire.  I really though the tips provided in 8 Ways to Recession-Proof Your Programming Career where spot on when this article came out last year.  And now that the TechRepublic has released 10 kills developers will need in the next 5 years.  I have decided to give you some of my favorite Wrox books that align very well to this TechRepublic article.

Learn C#

Learn ASP.NET

Learn ASP.NET MVC

didn’t think I would leave my book out, did you?

Learn Java

Learn PHP

Learn RIA & Web 2.0

I beleive all these books are a nessisty in helping you improve your career.  You don’t have to understand or know all of this technology, but you should at least have one of these books on your shelf.

Tags: programming skills, recession proof

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I saw this code over on Ayende’s website. I see at least 4 things wrong with this code, which was found here.

public object DeepCopy (object value)
{
    try {
        return value;
    } catch (Exception ex) {
        throw ex;
    }
}

See if you can find them all.

Tags: Bad Code

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It was just announced at MIX09 that ASP.NET MVC 1.0 has been released for general use and is out of the Release Candidate phase.  There has been no word on the changes form RC 2 to this release version.  But I will keep this post updated as I learn more.  Also as of writing this the download hasn’t been posted to CodePlex either, but I am sure that it will be posted pretty soon.

I am assured by Wrox that the cover of the book will be updated to look like what is on the right of your screen.  So it should be any day now, so go pre-order a copy today by clicking on the cover image to your right and it will take you to the Amazon page where you can place your pre-order.  That way as soon as the book ships you will have a copy waiting on your front porch.

Update: It is available from Microsoft Download.  Probably on CodePlex by the end of the day.  Here is the final description of the download for your reading pleasure.

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 provides a new Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework on top of the existing ASP.NET 3.5 runtime. This means that developers can take advantage of the MVC design patterns to create their Web Applications which includes the ability to achieve and maintain a clear separation of concerns (the UI or view from the business and application logic and backend data), as well as facilitate test driven development (TDD). The ASP.NET MVC framework defines a specific pattern to the Web Application folder structure and provides a controller base-class to handle and process requests for “actions”. Developers can take advantage of the specific Visual Studio 2008 MVC templates within this release to create their Web applications, which includes the ability to select a specific Unit Test structure to accompany their Web Application development.

The MVC framework is fully extensible at all points, allowing developers to create sophisticated structures that meet their needs, including for example Dependency Injection (DI) techniques, new view rendering engines or specialized controllers.

As the ASP.NET MVC framework is built on ASP.NET 3.5, developers can take advantage of many existing ASP.NET 3.5 features, such as localization, authorization, Profile etc.

Update: Phil Haack just posted his MVC 1.0 Release Anouncement.

Tags: asp.net mvc

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Phil Haack has announced the availability of ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Release Candidate 2.

You can download the new version from Microsoft. Source code and samples are also available on the ASP.NET CodePlex workspace.

Overall, this new version doesn’t have many changes in the area of development and tooling, but there has been improvement for deploying ASP.NET MVC applications.  The setup process now requires .NET 3.5 SP1 to be installed, where in the past it was optional because the additional assemblies where included with the install.

Don’t worry though /bin deployment is still supported, they are not taking a runtime dependency on SP1 other than our existing dependency on System.Web.Routing.dll and System.Web.Abstractions.dll. Thus you can still bin deploy your application to a hosting provider who has .NET 3.5 installed without SP1 by following these instructions.

They are also adding an option to the installer that enables installing on a server that does not have Visual Studio at all on the machine, which is useful for production servers and hosting providers.  To do a server install you just need to run the following command to install MVC on your server.

msiexec /i AspNetMvc-setup.msi /q /l*v .\mvc.log MVC_SERVER_INSTALL="YES"

Also because of the latest breaking changes from Beta to RC 1 & 2, we are taking the time between now and the final release of the MVC Framework to work on the book and make sure all the loose ends are tied up.

I also got noticed today that our final cover design is done.  So we are in the final stretch of this book.  The cover hasn’t been uploaded to Amazon yet, but if you are interested in pre-ordering a copy just click on the cover image to your right and it will take you to the Amazon page where you can place your order.

Tags: asp.net mvc, Book, Wrox

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Happy What?

The number you see in the title is also known as Epoch (UNIX) time.  When Epoch time was created, they set the “beginning” to January 1, 1970.  Like the Year 2000 bug, this was done to save storage space.  Because if all time was based around the assumption that January 1, 1970 is equal to zero, and every second past that represents the date since 1/1/1970 00:00:00, then they could store relatively small numbers for calculating a date and time and easy calculate the date since the “beginning of computer time” with simple math.  This also allowed them to calculate how much time has passed by just taking the difference of the two numbers and running it though the same simple math.  However the time is based on the belief that there are 86,400 seconds in each day.  (60 seconds x 60 minutes x 24 hours = 86,400)

On, today, Friday, February 13, 2009 at 6:31:30 PM EST, we reach a unique number of seconds in Unix time.

1234567890

You can see the countdown here: http://www.coolepochcountdown.com/

Tags: 1234567890, epoch, UNIX time

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Many different sources are announcing that Windows 7 will have 6 different SKU’s available, and many are touting the end of Windows, because they are making the same marketing mistakes as Windows Vista.  I have a different perspective on this that I will justify after the SKU breakdown.  Here are the SKU’s and features that everybody is reporting:

Windows 7 Starter

• Available worldwide to OEMs on new PCs
• Missing Aero UI tweaks
• Limited to 3 simultaneous applications

Windows 7 Home Basic (Vista equivalent: $200)

• Only available in emerging markets
• Missing Aero UI tweaks

Windows 7 Home Premium (Vista equivalent: $260)

• Available worldwide, to OEMs and in retail
• Includes Aero UI tweaks
• Features multi-touch capabilities
• Adds “premium” games
• Adds media capabilities (Media Center, DVD playback, DVD creation, etc.)
• Can create home network groups

Windows 7 Professional (Vista equivalent: $300)

• Available worldwide, to OEMs and in retail
• Includes all features of Premium
• Adds enhanced networking capabilities (Remote Desktop host, domain support, offline folders, etc.)
• Adds Mobility Center
• Adds Presentation Mode

Windows 7 Enterprise

• Available only in volume licenses
• Includes all features of Professional
• Adds Branch Cache
• Adds Direct Access
• Adds BitLocker

Windows 7 Ultimate (Vista equivalent: $320)

• Limited OEM and retail availability
• Includes all features of Enterprise

Lets Break It Down

I am going to break this down, for Personal and Business users, in a couple of different ways:

1. First by SKU.
2. Then by who the feature set is targeted.
3. Then by the different user segments.

The first one is based on SKU and who will likely use each SKU and the XP Equivalent of the SKU.

So as you can see there are only a couple options available to you based on if you are a Personal or Business user.   The second break down I want to show you is who each of the feature sets is targeted at:

Finally, if we are to break this down even farther in to obvious user segments, and split Personal in to Average Joe and Power User, and Business in to Small Business (Average User) and Enterprise (Power User) you will see that there is really only one option available to each type of user:

I actually think this is quite smart, because each market segment: Average Joe, Power User, Small Business, and Enterprise, hits a different set of criteria and a different set of requirements for each segment.  So given the above and how they will be distributed you are probably only going to see one of two different SKU’s on your favorite OEM’s site, which is pretty equivilent to the XP SKU’s that you are use to:

So all in all I am pretty happy with this. I still think the marketing department could have gone with out the Starter and Home Basic versions, and privately marketed the Enterprise to Volumn License customers.  But it is what it is, and if they can keep the OEM’s selling on the Home Premium and Professional version only, I think Microsoft will have a great Windows Operating System both in perception and technically.  And we can all forget about the last 2 years of Windows Vista, sort of like we have done for Windows ME.

Tags: Windows 7, Windows Vista

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