Microsoft Solutions
Sometimes it takes a disaster to realize the importance of backing up your digital information. I’ve had the same computer running at home for nearly 6 years. Like many others out there, I store everything on it: family pictures, videos, music, financial records, tax returns, … The list goes on and on. I went for years without any worry at all about the implications of losing all that data. Fortunately for me, I didn’t. Well, not that data anyway… I showed up for work one Monday morning a few years back and found my development computer was turned off. ...
For the last few months I’ve been negligent on my regular blogging. I can come up with a bunch of excuses but it all boils down to feeling that I’ve got something meaningful to say. I’m not the type to just blog for the sake of blogging but I’ve begun to miss the great feedback I receive when I put something out there that helps folks. What has worked for me in the past is to come up with the concept of an ABC’s series where I put sequential posts out with each post having a topic based...
So, a few weeks ago, Lori asked me if I’d be up for writing a plugin for Windows Live Writer to insert DevCentral related links into her blog posts. For those that don’t know about Windows Live Writer and post to a blog regularly, you are doing yourselves a disservice by not checking it out (that is, if you are a Windows user). I’ve messed around with some Live Writer plugins in the past and figured this wouldn’t be too big a task. In fact, Microsoft has made it brain-dead simple to build a plugin and hook into...
For those who of you that are having problems with logging client addresses in their server logs because you are running your web servers behind a proxy of some sort, never fear, your solution is here. For those that don't, I already discussed in my previous posts about what the X-Forwarded-For header is so feel free to click back into those to read about it. History Back in September, 2005 I wrote and posted a 32-bit ISAPI filter that extracted the X-Forwarded-For header value and replaced the c-ip value (client ip) that is stored in the...
Those who know me, can attest that I'm a early adopter when it comes to social networking systems. The latest one I've been getting into lately is FourSquare.com. FourSquare.com describes itself as 50% friend finder, 30% social city guide, and 20% nightlife game. They include ways to keep up with what your friends are doing as well as offering up some fun challenges to have you explore cities in different ways. Once I've played around with a social networking site for a bit, my next step is to see what kind of API's they have exposed...
For those of you who don't know what Delicious.com is (yes it's the same as del.icio.us), I'll just borrow their overview from their getting started page: Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows you to tag, save, manage, and share Web pages all in one place. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet. Here on DevCentral, when new content is added, we regularly add it to various social networking sites, including Delicious. There are some great browser...
For those that don't know what X-Forwarded-For is, then you might as well close your browser because this post likely will mean nothing to you… A Little Background Now, if you are still reading this, then you likely are having issues with determining the origin client connections to your web servers. When web requests are passed through proxies, load balancers, application delivery controllers, etc, the client no longer has a direct connection with the destination server and all traffic looks like it's coming from the last server in the chain. In the following diagram, Proxy2 is the last...
Shrinking your Url’s is all the rage nowadays. If you are on Twitter, then odds are you have used one. Despite CodingHorror’s distaste for them in his recent blog post on Url Shorteners: Destroying the Web since 2002, they are a fact of life when we live in a world of 140 character status updates. So what’s a URL shrinking service anyway? Well, to put it simply, you supply them with a URL, they then supply you with a shorter URL containing a lookup “key”. When future requests are made to this shorter URL, connections are routed to that...
Twitter, for those who don’t know about it, is a status updating service that is all the rage nowadays. It’s popularity is primarily due to it’s simplistic nature. You post a 140 character status (known as a “tweet”) about what you are doing. You can also friend other folks to see what they are doing. If you are still lost, read up on the entry in Wikipedia and you should get the gist of it. The downside to this minimalistic approach is that it does not allow for rich multimedia content such as images or videos to be...
Last week I posted a PowerShell function library for Microsoft’s newly introduced search engine at Bing.com. The function library was appropriately named PoshBing. There was a log of interest in the script so I quickly moved it off my blog and onto a CodePlex project under PoshBing. Working on the command line is fun and all, but since I spend a good portion of my time accessing my twitter account, I figured it would be a bit of fun to integrate it with my previously released PoshTweet PowerShell twitter library. So, after an hour or so of coding...
Microsoft released their new search engine called “Bing” at, aptly named, http://www.bing.com. Microsoft is getting positive reviews from the likes of CNET, The Wall Street Journal, and TechCrunch. Instead of posting my review of the site, I’ll let you browse the above links to find out what the services is all about. What interested me about Bing is that Microsoft has released a full API to allow you to use their services in your applications. The Bing API is documented at Microsoft’s developer site and I thought to myself how I could test it out. The obvious answer...
PowerShell is definitely gaining momentum in the windows scripting world but I still hear folks wanting to rely on Unix based tools to get their job done. In this series of posts I’m going to look at converting some of the more popular Unix based tools to PowerShell. md5 The Unix “md5” command (aliased to “openssl dgst –md5” or “md5sum”) calculates and verifies 128-bit MD5 hashes as described in RFC 1321. The MD5 hash (or checksum) functions as a compact digital fingerprint of a file. It is extremely unlikely that any two non-identical files existing in the...
PowerShell is definitely gaining momentum in the windows scripting world but I still hear folks wanting to rely on Unix based tools to get their job done. In this series of posts I’m going to look at converting some of the more popular Unix based tools to PowerShell. touch The Unix “touch” command is used to change a file’s access and modification timestamps. It can also be used to create a new empty file. The options to the Unix touch command are implemented with the following PowerShell parameters: ...
PowerShell is definitely gaining momentum in the windows scripting world but I still hear folks wanting to rely on Unix based tools to get their job done. In this series of posts I’m going to look at converting some of the more popular Unix based tools to PowerShell. cut The Unix “cut” command is used to extract sections from each link of input. Extraction of line segments can be done by bytes, characters, or fields separated by a delimiter. A range must be provided in each case which consists of one of N, N-M, N- (N to...
PowerShell is definitely gaining momentum in the windows scripting world but I still hear folks wanting to rely on Unix based tools to get their job done. In this series of posts I’m going to look at converting some of the more popular Unix based tools to PowerShell. cat The Unix “cat” command is used to concatenate and display files. Given a file or filename list, it will print the contents of that file to standard output. There are several options in the Unix command that are implemented with the following PowerShell arguments: ...
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