Most of us have seen the new car commercials that promise “lose your job, we’ll make your payments”. Saturn, Chrysler and a few others have made these claims to keep making payments for a few months. Another step forward in the right direction. Now, I honestly haven’t read the fine print, and I would say that if you are in for losing your job, buying a new car might not be the best investment unless you have no other choice.

The point here is not if these companies are doing this for the right reasons or not, the marketing tactic is genius, and fixates on helping people which is what we need today. I am hoping that companies follow this example and we see more of this activity in the near future.

This could also be some good information for those who do interviews as I am also relying on them to help with guiding the candidates.

Clear and Concise
Resume: A resume is a representation of yourself in short form. It is there to capture the reader in a short amount of time and easily achieve your message without a lot of time and decoding of the message within. I rifled through a half dozen resumes that were novels. Some of those folks made the cut, but trying to then do the interview with 10 pages to flip through can be quite cumbersome.

Interview: When you are asked a question in an interview, do your best to stay on topic. Too often I hear people try to over explain a simple question and that begins to trail off into the distance. This muddies the water on what you understand and what you are trying to fluff.

Be Honest
Resume: Seriously… do you know every single language that is out there? If you put it down on your resume, expect that you will be quizzed on it. If you are the interviewer, you had better be sure your candidate didn’t just read a book or hear about the technology in passing. Have questions and dig into detail.

Interview: It is OK to say “I don’t know” in an interview. Not all interview questions are must have questions. If you try and be the all knowing interview candidate, you will sound fake and will most likely miss out on the opportunity. It doesn’t benefit you or the company you are interviewing for to lie and force an awkward termination soon thereafter.

—

The short of this all is don’t be a dog coming too hungry. Pick and choose your battles in your resume and your interview. I will agree that you are trying to sell yourself in a resume, just don’t be the greasy car sales person.

After finally getting on the phone with someone who was experiencing the issue, I was able to determine the issue was related to a JS error. ‘AJAXControlToolkit’ is undefined. GREAT, but WHY???

SIDE NOTE: We were very early adopters of the toolkit during its beta stages. MS was great with helping to resolve issues as well as incorporate our feedback in future releases. One of those items was the script combiner in the library. The toolkit is VERY heavy when it is not compressed (~500k) based on what controls you are using. This amounts to 14 different scripts being pulled down on our servers which is one for every control type and a few for the framework itself. As you can guess, this is pretty taxing on the client vs. just getting one file. We manually implemented the script combining on our customer site which took 3 seconds off the average download time due to less items having to be called from the server. Not to mention compression that took the ~500k script to ~90k. With the following in the latest release you can do this without having a manual work around.

The problem

Bad
<ajaxtoolkit:ToolkitScriptManager ID="_ScriptManager"
     runat="server" combinescripts="true" />

Great right? Wrong… this is what was causing the issue!!! The script combiner for some reason doesn’t always generate the script for the client. It is pretty buggy actually. We were finding that clearing the users cache would only work until the next build would come out. After that, we would have to clear the cache again for all 400 clients. Because of this we were ready to scrap the controls (which MADE the application) for standard ASP.NET controls.

So, the workaround… go back to our standard hack that combined the files… and for those that don’t want to do the hack? Switch the combinescripts tag to true and your problem will go away!

The fix:

Good
<ajaxtoolkit:ToolkitScriptManager ID="_ScriptManager"
     runat="server" combinescripts="false" />

Needless to say, this was a big “phew” from us. We believe the framework has a lot of great potential for internal apps by allowing us to have a windows like feel without the deployment nightmare. The application has already proved to have a huge payoff with this fix alone. We were able to deploy enterprise wide in less than 10 seconds with an automated build.

This was a pain for me, but the fix is simple. Set your Team Foundation Server Service Account (used for TFS Web Services) to a non system account. You will need to setup a domain account and not a local account to support this. Why give me the option????

Let’s start with a simple object:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
 
namespace JSONCookie.Customer
{
    [Serializable]
    public class Address
    {
        private Guid _id;
        private string _address1;
        private string _address2;
        private string _city;
        private string _state;
        private int _postalCode;
        private DateTime _lastUpdated;
 
        public Guid ID
        {
            get { return _id; }
            set { _id = value; }
        }
 
        public string Address1
        {
            get { return _address1; }
            set { _address1 = value; }
        }
 
        public string Address2
        {
            get { return _address2; }
            set { _address2 = value; }
        }
 
        public string City
        {
            get { return _city; }
            set { _city = value; }
        }
 
        public string State
        {
            get { return _state; }
            set { _state = value; }
        }
 
        public int PostalCode
        {
            get { return _postalCode; }
            set { _postalCode = value; }
        }
 
        public DateTime LastUpdated
        {
            get { return _lastUpdated; }
            set { _lastUpdated = value; }
        }
    }
}

As you can see the above is a very simple object with strings, int, Guid, and DateTime fields just to show how the data looks when converted. Now, say you want to store this object into a cookie*. How would we get it to the text level we need for cookie use? There are many articles out there on how to compress a cookie using .NET’s MemoryStram and DeflateStream compression, but all have been showing how to do this with the XML provided back from serialization of an object.

Here is are the two methods I will be comparing:

/// <summary>
/// Here we are just doing plain 'ol serialization
/// </summary>
/// <param name="obj">Object to serialize</param>
/// <returns>Serialized object as string</returns>
public static string SerializeIt(object obj)
{
    XmlSerializer ObjSerializer =
        new XmlSerializer(typeof(Customer.Address));
 
    TextWriter XMLObject = new StringWriter();
    ObjSerializer.Serialize(XMLObject, obj);
 
    return XMLObject.ToString();
}
 
/// <summary>
/// Here we take an object and Serialize it into JSON
/// </summary>
/// <param name="obj">Object to be serialized</param>
/// <returns>JSON string</returns>
public static string JSONit(object obj)
{
    StringBuilder JSONObject = new StringBuilder();
 
    JavaScriptSerializer JSON = new JavaScriptSerializer();
    JSON.Serialize(obj, JSONObject);
 
    return JSONObject.ToString();
}

Now, let’s see what the results are:

Serialized

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<ArrayOfCustomer
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
  <Customer>
    <ID>83a8e9c8-dc2c-4ba7-a17d-86a7f0d1820b</ID>
    <Name>Carina</Name>
    <Blah>Alberto</Blah>
    <Addresses>
      <Address>
        <ID>26c71b32-6e91-4663-b740-81893c28939d</ID>
        <Address1>4957 Isabela</Address1>
        <Address2>Apt: 200</Address2>
        <City>Jaylyn</City>
        <State>Camden</State>
        <PostalCode>95638</PostalCode>
        <Updated>2007-09-28T16:37:26.9334017-07:00</Updated>
      </Address>
      <Address>
        <ID>156e4962-f810-4b7c-be39-6bb07f70989b</ID>
        <Address1>55114 Josephine</Address1>
        <Address2>Apt: 625</Address2>
        <City>Jermaine</City>
        <State>Konner</State>
        <PostalCode>31317</PostalCode>
        <Updated>2007-09-28T16:37:26.9334017-07:00</Updated>
      </Address>
      <Address>
        <ID>5cce9640-95d0-4579-b248-abce62c2225f</ID>
        <Address1>2940 Lillie</Address1>
        <Address2>Apt: 208</Address2>
        <City>Jonas</City>
        <State>Cael</State>
        <PostalCode>31946</PostalCode>
        <Updated>2007-09-28T16:37:26.9334017-07:00</Updated>
      </Address>
      <Address>
        <ID>85655341-4a98-41d8-8cae-155bf902240b</ID>
        <Address1>80959 Giovani</Address1>
        <Address2>Apt: 872</Address2>
        <City>Jade</City>
        <State>Keshawn</State>
        <PostalCode>98534</PostalCode>
        <Updated>2007-09-28T16:37:26.9334017-07:00</Updated>
      </Address>
      <Address>
        <ID>7718ea1c-3282-47b1-9f1f-b546ca905a61</ID>
        <Address1>76381 Maia</Address1>
        <Address2>Apt: 367</Address2>
        <City>Graham</City>
        <State>Natalie</State>
        <PostalCode>79905</PostalCode>
        <Updated>2007-09-28T16:37:26.9334017-07:00</Updated>
      </Address>
    </Addresses>
  </Customer>
</ArrayOfCustomer>

JSON’ized

[{"ID":"83a8e9c8-dc2c-4ba7-a17d-86a7f0d1820b","Name":"Carina","Blah":"Alberto","Addresses":[{"ID":"26c71b32-6e91-4663-b740-81893c28939d","Address1":"4957 Isabela","Address2":"Apt: 200","City":"Jaylyn","State":"Camden","PostalCode":95638,"Updated":"\/Date(1191022646933)\/"},{"ID":"156e4962-f810-4b7c-be39-6bb07f70989b","Address1":"55114 Josephine","Address2":"Apt: 625","City":"Jermaine","State":"Konner","PostalCode":31317,"Updated":"\/Date(1191022646933)\/"},{"ID":"5cce9640-95d0-4579-b248-abce62c2225f","Address1":"2940 Lillie","Address2":"Apt: 208","City":"Jonas","State":"Cael","PostalCode":31946,"Updated":"\/Date(1191022646933)\/"},{"ID":"85655341-4a98-41d8-8cae-155bf902240b","Address1":"80959 Giovani","Address2":"Apt: 872","City":"Jade","State":"Keshawn","PostalCode":98534,"Updated":"\/Date(1191022646933)\/"},{"ID":"7718ea1c-3282-47b1-9f1f-b546ca905a61","Address1":"76381 Maia","Address2":"Apt: 367","City":"Graham","State":"Natalie","PostalCode":79905,"Updated":"\/Date(1191022646933)\/"}]}]

The JSON version is a little more difficult to read, but honestly, who cares… that isn’t your job, you use .NET for that. Now this is great, but not really all that helpful. We currently have one customer with 5 addresses and a lot of data… we could just jamb this into a cookie, but that would actually present some more format issues and to fix them we would nee to take up more space. So… let’s compress. I have attached the project for this so you can try it out and see how the compression works. From here… just put it into your cookie. Here are some interesting stats.

* This data is just an easy example of what you can do to cram into a cookie. Customer data is a very bad example as you wouldn’t want to make this information public even if just session based. There are many other applications for this to utilize the power of the client machine vs. relying on IIS to maintain state on your entire application. This is actually a mini db at the client level. Just make sure you realize how mini… 4kb total… or so they say. Still haven’t broken this with slightly larger cookies in most mainstream browsers.

- JSON Cookie Example (.NET 2.0)

Well, thanks Google… I am officially a beaten nerd. I finally read into it a little more and I was caught by the April fools joke. How great!! Happy April 1st everyone.

Gmail Paper

Matt

“There is a problem with this website’s security certificate. This organization’s certificate has been revoked. Security certificate problems may indicate an attempt to fool you or intercept any data you send to the server. We recommend that you close this webpage and do not continue to this website.”

The last line “We recommend that you close this webpage and do not continue to this website.” is something I don’t like my customers seeing, and neither do my clients. =) After doing some research and coming up completely empty handed I decided to trial and error the issue myself.

My certificate is a High Assurance type from GoDaddy.com. This is there middle version of their SSL Certificates which is plenty for our needs. I had my host reinstall my cert with the old information that I had from a while back. This was from the originally generated CSR for IIS. This didn’t fix the problem. I decided to re-key the cert which required getting a new CSR from the host. Once I had this GoDaddy’s admin made it very easy to get my new key.

I was given three files. cross_intermediate.crt, intermediate.crt and site.crt. The files had to be installed in this order. Once I handed these over to the host and they re-installed… BOOM… worked great.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Word,
Matt

Maybe someday I can fine the image and post it here.Z Found it! I am sure I am already in trouble for using the word “Superbowl” in the title. Oh well… it was still funny. At least something was. Commercials weren’t all there. I did like the rock paper scissors.

Word,
Matt

I need my music to run because it really does take my mind off the fact that I am running which makes it 20 times easier. When the damn Zune locks up I have mess with it which causes me to get burnt out much more quickly. I have tried reloading the software, the Zune, and nothing makes it work for me.

My next step is simple. I am taking it back to Costco and waiting for the next gen to come out. They have some major bugs to work out of this thing and I don’t want to wait for that to happen.

My theory as to what is causing the issue? Since the Zune only locks up in the gym I am wondering if the wireless (even though turned off) is getting some interferance from the Polar heart rate monitors that are built into the machine? Either that or it just doesn’t like exercise.

Looks like I will have to eat crow and stick with my iPod for a little while longer. Damn you Microsoft for allowing me to back you up and then crushing me like this!!! DAMN YOU!!!! I’m fine now.

Word,
Matt

click to biggerize

Notice how the text that would be caught by the spam filters is wiggled. This is so the actual image attachment can’t be read by OCR. This technique was employed to stop spamming. Pretty ironic really.

I am getting about 10-15 of these a day. I really don’t need the penny stock updates. =) Thanks though.