MPLS ALT .NET

Yesterday was the first ever MPLS ALT.NET get together at the Bulldog N.E Thanks Ira Mitchell and Jim Swanson for hosting. Judging by the turnout at the initial meet one can easily tell that there is a great enthusiasm for alt .net in Minneapolis.

Jim and Ira do a better job of explaining What ALT .NET is all about.

The folks at Redmond, WA do a great job trying to build awesome tools for developers but often times committing resources to every available tool in the open source community is not possible. Filling this gap is where a community like ALT .NET can help.

The state of Microsoft and the OSS community is better explained by Ayende Rahien.

I hope that this community becomes successful and brings in the best of the OSS, Java and RoR communities into the .NET world.

Fiddler does not capture packets sent to the localhost URL which makes debugging web applications hosted in your local machine painful.

Here is how I configured Fiddler to debug web applications hosted in your local machine,

Lets say your application is accessed using the URL http://localhost:8090/MySpiffyApp/default.aspx. To make fiddler capture the HTTP requests sent to this URL, all you have to do is edit the HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Fiddler\ReverseProxyForPort and set the decimal value to 8090. This tells fiddler to proxy all traffic sent to HTTP port 8888 (default proxy port) to HTTP port 8090. Now access the application using the fiddler proxy port

http://localhost:8888/MySpiffyApp/default.aspx

and you should be able to see the packet trace in Fiddler.

If you see the page below instead of your application then try restarting Fiddler and make sure the registry key name matches exactly as above.

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:8888
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: ASPSESSIONIDAADBDSRQ=NJJLKNGCKNJMNIIFAIDFCEIB
Cache-Control: max-age=0

Let me know if this didn’t work for you or if you have another way of debugging web applications hosted on your local machine.

Online communities are popular. In case, you are interested in building one here are some tips from the trenches.

Highlights from the original article

* Build a personal profile:

While it was difficult to get the attention of the mainstream media, Hamilton did find a receptive audience writing for community and neighborhood papers, and speaking to local women’s groups.

* Take advantage of technology:

Linking up with like-minded sites and including lots of references to other electronic sources — especially to lesser known causes such as Ovarian Cancer Canada — has really helped, Hamilton says.

* Seek sponsorships, not advertising:

Traditional advertising is not always available to website developers and the big companies tend to be interested mainly in an audience of millions, but there are tons of smaller sources of support, she says.

* Building a network of skills:

There is only so much one person can do, and Hamilton draws from a loosely knit association of professionals that ranges from web designers, to regular contributors, to brand management specialists. She gets the skills she needs without the expense of a full-time staff.

Here are some useful CSS links from Christopher M. Leighton-Brooder. Christopher was my colleague and a great designer/ IA.

I asked him for some good CSS links for a beginner and he suggested these, I haven’t gone through all of these links and I am repeating these links verbatim , in his memory.

http://www.gne.net/
http://stopdesign.com/log/2004/07/06/filtering-css.htm
http://glish.com/css/
http://www.thenoodleincident.com/tutorials/box_lesson
http://www.stylegala.com/articles/no_more_css_hacks.ht
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/holygrail

In case you are wondering how the Hacker News karma point system works you can follow this thread.

The internet was supposed to be scalable in its original design. Its debatable whether that definition extends to applications built for the web.

Apparently not..

The struggle to maintain websites up and running 24/7 is currently a lost battle. Atleast for myspace and twitter. I tried myspace.com a year back and the page won’t even load. I am trying it again for the past couple of days and its only marginally better. I lost all my friend requests and/or invites.

Thank God the software from these guys is not used by my bank. You can only guess what happens if they write software for pacemakers.

Another quick hit in the web 2.0 that is plagued with intermittent service errors is twitter. You read about it here, pictures and all http://mashable.com/2007/12/17/twitter-maintenance/

Update (2007-12-21T04:14:30+00:00):

Techcrunch had a report on the raising twitter downtime, validating my earlier observation.

A beta version is out and its available with WS2008

The launch press release is very promising.

This deserves more than just a press release. I will update this post with more details, especially how it relates to VMWare’s technology.

A while back I subscribed to the Microsoft Architecture Journal. Over the years it has been one of those magazines that finds it’s way to my desk and remains there till I get to see some of the pictures.

There was a pleasant surprise for me last week when I discovered that Microsoft had come out with a beta version of an Architecture Journal Reader

It is a .NET 3.0 desktop application that is built using WPF . Here is a brief description of the application from the application download page,

“Demonstrating many of the UX principles highlighted in recent issues, this new reader is a locally installed application that enables you to take every issue of the Journal into a searchable, immersive, and easy-to-read experience. The application synchronizes with our content management services so that you’ll automatically have access to the latest Journal issues without needing to download PDF files or checking online.”

The Architecture Journal as you know is a magazine and the Journal Reader application essentially gives you all the Journal content in a digital format right on your desktop without some of the usual browser annoyances. Its goal is to improve the overall user experience of the magazine reader.

Here is a sample screenshot of the Front Page,

Apparently, A lot of publishers have adopted this technology and have implemented news readers using “a news reader SDK”.

I haven’t tried any of these readers yet but the idea is certainly catchy. I for one have always enjoyed a cup of coffee and a newspaper without being distracted on weekend mornings.

If you are new to facebook application development here are ten rules that should help you,

This is just a compilation of a message thread from the facebook developers forum.

1. Add viral features as soon as possible (best before launching your app)
2. Make things simple. Users don’t read.
3. Stupid ideas work best. Don’t try to change the world.
4. Build and program on a platform with scalability in mind.
5. KISS ( Keep it Simple Stupid )
6. If you bother to put the time in, make sure you are on a good service provider so your app actually works!
7. The answer is in the forum.
8. If you think something is broken, check facebook bugs before making massive changes
9. Don’t neglect or quit your day job, as this is all fun and games.
10. Don’t jump in head first. Create a simple app to start and learn the framework, shoot for the stars later.

Here are some more tips for social app developers from the open social folks at google

Its Day Nine and HappyWishes on FaceBook has over 100 installs. Thanks to all the users of HappyWishes, you are all in for a very surprising treat.

Thanks again and please post your reviews and suggestions on the application discussion board.