I’ve always kept an eye on the Mono project, mostly out of curiosity and intrigue. The last time I played around with Mono it was at version 2.0, and at the time I didn’t really spend a lot of time on it because it didn’t support some of the things I was using. Well recently, I regained interest in Mono when I saw it now supports MVC and some of Dblinq. And since I’ve been buzzing on the whole MVC thing for awhile, I decided to check Mono out for myself and start a fun little porting project. So this is the first part of a three part series describing everything I did to get a server up and running and one of my Asp.Net MVC applications ported to Mono.
This first part will cover installing and configuring an OpenSuse 11.2 server with Apache/Mono and SSH. The second part will talk about how to setup a MySql Membership provider (with mono and Windows), and the third part is a walkthrough showing how to port a simple Asp.Net MVC site to mono and MySql. I’m also targeting those of you who use virtual hosting where you might only have SSH (after install) to configure your server, so I will be using text based tools: SSH, vi, and yast for all my installations and configuration after getting the base system installed.
Read more…
Nathan Bridgewater Mono .NET, apache, installing, linux, mod_mono, Mono, MVC, openSuse
Every once in awhile I have a need to use regular expressions in code. I love using them in Visual Studio find/replace. And one of my favorite features in the find/replace dialog is tagged expressions. This allows me to make a regular expression match and at the same time extract pieces of it for use in my replace with expression.
So today, I’m toying around with Regex and find a need to have the same behavior in code. The difference is, tagged expressions in code are referred to as matching groups. Normally you would use braces for your tagged expressions in a find/replace dialog; but in code, you would use parentheses instead. Read more…
Nathan Bridgewater .NET .NET, Group, Regex, regular expression, tagged expression, visual studio
Well this was a fun one. For onelittlebow.com, we’re using Google Checkout as one of our checkout methods. Recently we just switched to using a virtual dedicated server rather than the normal shared hosting environment at GoDaddy. Their shared hosting never really supported Google Checkout notifications because their shared IIS servers were configured to use Basic Authentication with Windows and always pre-authenticated the request. Since the merchantID and key wasn’t a valid NT account on the server IIS would always kick back a 401 response and ASP.NET wouldn’t even touch the request.
Now with the virtual dedicated environment, we are finally able to use these callbacks and handle the authentication header ourselves in code (or by setting up an account on the server). But in production, we must use fully trusted SSL. That’s not a huge deal; we just purchased one of their SSL certs and installed in on our server. Easy peasy right? Well if you’re like me and you’re not super familiar with the nitty gritty details of SSL and certificate validation, then you might be getting this error in the Integration Console on Google Checkout’s admin page.
We encountered an error trying to access your server at https://somewhere.com/callback_endpoint — the error we got is javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException: sun.security.validator.ValidatorException: PKIX path building failed: sun.security.provider.certpath.SunCertPathBuilderException: unable to find valid certification path to requested target
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Nathan Bridgewater .NET, ASP.Net, Google Checkout .NET, Certificate Path, Google Checkout, Notification, SSL
A buddy of mine recently had mentioned he wanted a web based program he could use to listen to his music from home. As a contractor, we move around a lot. At some locations, we can’t install any software; others, we have firewall issues. Our mobile devices couldn’t hold every song we stored at home, and copying our music around everywhere just didn’t seem like a great idea. So we thought… wouldn’t it be cool if we could have just a simple website that could stream our music from anywhere? It’s an easy install…
So I started digesting the idea and thought yeah, we could do that. At first we’ll have to just use something simple like streaming the files directly from IIS in a silverlight music player of sorts. But eventually, we can really take advantage of some cool WCF hosting features in windows and not require IIS at all, which would be great for most of us since everyone doesn’t have a windows server sitting around at home. After a tiny bit of research, I realize we could also take advantage of the Media Services component built into windows server and IIS, which from the sound of it are pretty comprehensive. But with our end goal in mind, we’ll want to find a way to stream it right out of a simple windows app available to any edition of Windows.
Having said all that, I decided to start writing about this little toy project. To begin, we have a simple Silverlight application with a music player, list manager, and an IIS server hosting a virtual directly to our mp3 repository.
Nathan Bridgewater .NET, Silverlight, WCF .NET, music, Silverlight, streaming, WCF
These links might come in handy. It’s the ADO.NET provider for iseries dB2 and has links to the VS Add Ins. I think you need a login to download some of them. And it says that they’re looking at a LINQ to iSeries provider via Entity Framework.
IBM .Net downloads
IBM .NET FAQ
To get a description of files, schemas, columns, you can use the views under QSYS2. I noticed some nice views that bring together the physical files and logical files.
Nathan Bridgewater ADO.Net .NET, ADO.Net, DB2, iSeries
