If you read this blog using an RSS reader you might want to take a moment and check out the changes made to the entire ORCS Web blogging system along with our entirely new website. We went ahead and made a migration to BlogEngine.NET 1.4.5. We are really excited to support this open source project and pleased with the power and scalability we have seen in the product so far.

There are various reasons that we made the migration and I will take the time to explain a few of them:

Lightweight: BlogEngine.NET has low overhead and is easy to scale out to the webfarm our site sits on. This allows us to move our blogs onto the same highly available platform our main site lives on with no extra work.

Themes: As we evaluated our options of upgrade our current platform and then upgrading the theme or migrating to a new platform we found the BlogEngine.NET themes were easy to work with and keep consistent with our main site theme. This removed a lot of man ours having to deal with such an in-depth system we had to work with before.

Simplicity: This is a blog, with multiple authors from members of our team—we did not need a full suite of community applications we just needed a simple and easy to use blog. BlogEngine.NET just does the job.

Open Source: Having access to all of the code and supporting an open source project is important to us. We are excited about where BlogEngine.NET is headed and hope running it as our corporate blogging platform can help bring some awareness to the ASP.NET community and our clients. We run it because we know you want to run it—what better way to support your apps then to run them ourselves?

ASP.NET: This is an obvious one but we are a 100% Microsoft managed hosting provider so ASP.NET was a must!

While I could go on and on those are the 5 core reasons we chose to make the migration to BlogEngine.NET. Be sure to contact us and let us know what you think and if you have any feedback we are always here to listen.

I want to thank Dave Burke for posting his BlogEngine.NET migration SQL scripts as those came in handy while migrating all of our posts and categories.

Windows Server 2008 Releases to Manufacturing

"February 4th marked a milestone for customers and partners with the release to manufacture of Windows Server 2008. Windows Server 2008 is the most advanced Server operating system we’ve developed to date and has had more testers in beta programs than any other server product in our history. We also announced the release Windows Vista SP1 which will be available to download shortly."

Ask your ORCS Web representative about running Windows Server 2008 today!

You may have noticed my Mac OS X theme in my blogging this week, and now I've got a simple post to wrap it up. Over the last couple of days I have been off of my laptop and working mostly on my desktop because I have been doing some C# programming. Of course I could still use my laptop yet boot into Windows Vista, but my ergonomic keyboard and dual 19" monitors are a must when programming.

While being back on my desktop in Vista so much, I realized something that I have found to be invaluable on Mac OS X: spell checker! It is everywhere, even when I am filling out a form on the web it is telling me where I am messing up so much. In "TextEdit" (much like Notepad) it works there--how many times have you been working on typing something up (maybe even a blog comments) and copy-past into Word just to check the spelling.

I know this is a simple thing, but a simple thing that makes life better for me when I am using my Mac vs running Vista. Maybe the Microsoft programmers are just smarter and don't have issues with spelling ;).

Microsoft has recently released Office 2007 on the PC. With this new version of Office comes a new file format, and thus causes documents created with Office 2007 to be useless for Mac OS X, and Office:mac 2004 users.

Thanks to the great people at the Microsoft MacBU there is a way to convert these documents for use with Office:mac 2004, and Office:mac X. The Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 0.2 (Beta) is now available for download.

While still in beta, and not guaranteed to work with all Office 2007 scenarios, at least we have a way that these files are no longer useless to us.

I think one of the biggest issue people run into when switching to or running Mac OS X is that things are just not named the same as they are on Windows based computers and programs. With such a high user rate of Windows many vendors that you will deal with on a day to day bases use terminology that does not match up to what the Mac OS X users are seeing.

One of these is "SMTP Authentication". This is used by most ISPs and e-mail hosters to force the mail server to require the username\password combination before it will send mail. It will generally allow you to send mail to the same domain name even when it is not working, but will fail when you try to send to any other domain name. 

The issue for Mac OS X users that are using the built in Mail for e-mail services, is there is no setting called "SMTP Authentication" or "Require SMTP Authentication" like you would see in Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express. This setting is what most ISPs and e-mail hosters will tell you to look for, and you may be stumped when you are unable to find it.

Like so many other features between Mac OS X and Windows the same ability really is there, it is just laid out differently.  Assuming that your mail provider is using basic password authentication, to turn on SMTP authentication for your Mail account you will need to following these steps:

1. Open Mail.
2. From the Mail menu, choose Preferences.
3. Click the Accounts icon.
4. Click the arrow box on the Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP) pop-up list and choose Add Server.
5. In the Outgoing Mail Server field, type in your mail providers SMTP server address (e.g., mail.orcsweb.com).
6. Click the arrow box on the Authentication pop-up list and choose Password.
7. In the User Name field, type your full email address or username.
8. In the Password field, type your e-mail password.
9. Click the OK button.
10. Close the Accounts window.
11. Click the Save button.

Step 6 is the one to really pay attention to. There is where you are actually turning on SMTP authentication. Now you know when someone says to turn on SMTP authentication, and you are using Mail on Mac OS X, where to go and turn that on.

As you may have learned from my post yesterday, I have recently taken the plunge into life on Mac OS X. With this came setting up Microsoft Office:mac Entourage 2004 to work with our Exchange 2007 server. I fought with this for quite some time until browsing over to Rob Baugh's blog post where the answers where held! Thank you Rob!

Once getting this to work, I have been quite happy with how well it has performed. Keep in mind that my laptop is running Mac OS X with Entourage, but I still run Windows Vista with Outlook 2007 on my desktop and my phone has Windows Mobile Smartphone Edition. I am able to keep all three of these synced up as well as OWA with no problem. My Contacts, Calendar and Email all just show up on each.

There are a few features that are missing such as access to server side rules (although they still work great) and server side categories. If you are Mac OS X only, you would hardly notice, but for me I just set my categories sometime when I am using Outlook 2007. I am excited with the next version of Entourage, but for now I am quite pleased.

Recently I have become a bit of the technology "black sheep" at ORCS Web with my move to a Black MacBook. Due to some internally written software, I was originally required to run Windows Vista on it just about full time (could have run XP, but chose Vista). With my recent move out of the webteam, I've moved fully over to Mac OS X--as this software is no longer needed.

I've made the move to Mac OS X not because I am a "Mac head" and will fight to the death that it is a superior operating system, but for a couple of other reasons. The first reason being that it just runs better then Windows does on my MacBook. I get better battery life and it does not get as hot. This of course is understandable, as it was not made to run Vista nor was Vista made to run on the MacBook--but it was pretty sweet seeing how well it worked. The second reason that I have made this jump is to just learn a new set of tools, a new OS, and a new perspective.

Just this past weekend I started writing my first Mac OS X based program. On the Windows side of things I have been programming\scripting in VB Script and C and then VB.NET and most recently made the move over to writing all my programs (more like "gadgets") in C#. Of course both VB.NET and C# have been from Visual Studio 2005 (and a bit in 2008 beta versions). My first program on the Mac was a tutorial from Apple on Cocoa (Apple's Objective-C based programming environment) using Xcode and Interface Builder. It was truly a beginners tutorial and very step by step, but I learned the fundamentals of programming on the Mac. It was a pleasant experience once I knew what tools to use where. I was not use to having one program for the UI and another for the back-end (although they are highly integrated) but was impressed with Interface Builder.

This has taken my "learning a new platform" to the next level, and I believe will make me better at all things I do--computer-wise anyway.  Along with learning this new platform and set of tools requires you to learn how to make the two worlds "play nice" with each other. One of the key things for me at ORCS Web is connecting to our Windows based (all of them are) servers. The great Mac Business Unit over at Microsoft just released to us the Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac 2.0 (Beta). It has some enhancements over the old Remote Desktop Connection that you can see from the download page. You are supposed to be able to run multiple connections now, although I have not yet figured out how.

The Mac Business Unit there at Microsoft is supposed to be releasing a new version of the Office for Mac sometime in the near future. While they seem to be very tight lipped about when and what it will consist of, I know I will be a happy camper when they are released.
 

The most recent version of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit came with a new control called SlideShow. This is a nifty little control that extends the ASP.NET image control into an AJAX slideshow. It uses a web service call to retreive the images of the slideshow. This web service call just returns an array of "AjaxControlToolkit.Slide".

So in the example that comes with the toolkit, there are four or five hard coded images in the array. This really is not very useful in a real life scenario. Most of the time if you are displaying a slideshow, these images will need to be filled dynamically either through a database, or my flavor of choice, from the file system.

What I wanted to be able to do was just add an image to my assigned photos directory, and have it automatically show up in my slideshow. No admin section, no file uploader, and no database.

To do this I create a class called 'PhotoGallery' with a public shared function called 'GetSlides'. GetSlides returns as an array of "AjaxControlToolkit.Slide". This function goes out to my file system, returns all the files in the given directory, and adds them to the array. It really is that simple.

I am sure there is a bit simplier way to do this, as far as the array. You can download my VB.NET class below.

[ DOWNLOAD CODE ]

I have just recently started using PowerShell. While this blog will not be where you want to go to learn PowerShell, as I pick up little pearls here and there, I will try to share them with small samples and quick PowerShell scripts. I am no PowerShell expert, so if you find any errors, please let me know. 

Today's Pearl: 

If you are returning a set of results and you want to filter those results by text contained in one of the fields there are two ways I found you can do this. The first is using a Field.Contains(“search text”) –eq “true” and the other (thanks Scott) is doing a Field –match “search text”. 

So if you wanted to see all of the System Event logs that have cmd.exe is the message you could get this using either of these methods: 

Get-EventLog system | where { $_.Message.Contains("cmd.exe") -eq "true" }

or…

Get-EventLog system | where { $_.Message -match "cmd.exe" }

Either of these can be used in the negative form just as easily:

Get-EventLog system | where { $_.Message.Contains("cmd.exe") -eq "false" }

Get-EventLog system | where { $_.Message -notmatch "cmd.exe" }

That’s it! The –match and –notmatch are probably the easier of the two to use, although I am sure there is a reason for each of them that I am not aware of. Hopefully things like this will come to be part of my knowledge as I know more.

Update:

Okay, I just learned that -match and -nomatch are regular expression comparison operators. Another set comparison operators you could use are -like and -notlike. These are the wildcard comparison operators. It could be used like so:

Get-EventLog system | where { $_.Message -like "*cmd.exe*" }

Very cool post today at nikhilk.net about using Script# to be able to author sidebar gadgets in C#. Check it out:

http://www.nikhilk.net/Entry.aspx?id=153