Just a short, simple blog for Bob to share his thoughts.
21 October 2010 • by Bob • Humor, Military
I served in the Army for 8 years as a Russian translator. When I was still in Russian school, we were required to attend "conversation" class, where a group of students would sit down and discuss various topics with one of the instructors.
One day the instructor asked me what I had been doing the previous evening, and I said that I had played soccer. She asked what position I played, and since I didn't know the Russian noun for a goal keeper, I took a chance and replied in Russian that "I played goalie." She looked surprised, and asked if I was often goalie when playing soccer, and I replied yes - I usually play goalie. After that we chatted back and forth about how I preferred to play goalie, why I preferred to play goalie, etc. This conversation continued for about a minute, when she switched to English and informed me that in Russian "goalie" (голый) is the adjective for "naked".
So I had spent the last part of the conversation waxing poetic about my preference for playing soccer... well... you know. ;-)
04 August 2010 • by Bob • IIS
One of my coworkers (Mike Pope) sent me the link to a great blog post by Raymond Chen that was titled "Don't forget to replace your placeholder bitmaps with real bitmaps". Raymond's blog was a good story, but he referenced another great blog post titled "We Burned the Poop", and let's be honest - who can resist reading a blog post with a great title like that? (Note: I won't spoil the impact of that blog - you should read it first.)
But reading those two blog posts made me think back about the various code blunders that I've made over the years, which have [thankfully] never been as bad as the stories in those blog posts.
But one mistake that I made which I have never been able to live down is when I wrote the MetaEdit 2.x utility for editing the IIS metabase.
Every day I was making a huge number of changes to the MetaEdit code, and it was getting hard to keep track of everything that I needed to finish. Of course, there are several ways to track work items, and the preferred method is to keep track of everything in a bug database. But I also like to flag sections of code with comments that say things like "TODO" or "BUGBUG", that makes it easier to do a search on the code before inadvertently checking it in with something that needed to be completed.
As the deadline was rapidly approaching for me to check in the final build of MetaEdit for the Windows Server 2000 Resource Kit, I decided to add a dialog box that MetaEdit would display if you were using it with a version of IIS that was later than IIS 5.0, which we were shipping with Windows Server 2000. I wanted to make sure that MetaEdit would warn users that they might have problems using MetaEdit with a later version of IIS since I didn't know how the metabase would work in the future, or if we would deprecate the metabase like we eventually did in Windows Server 2008. I was obviously distracted for some reason and I didn't finish that section of code, but I hadn't added a comment with the text "TODO" or "BUGBUG", so I dutifully checked the code into the Resource Kit database and I didn't think anything about it.
At least I didn't think about it until we released Windows Server 2003.
If you'll recall, IIS 6.0 was shipped with Windows Server 2003, which meant that anyone who wanted to use MetaEdit in order to modify their metabase was rudely greeted with the following nonsensical and ultimately useless dialog box:
Suddenly I was receiving emails from all over the place asking me what the heck that dialog box meant. The text was supposed to have a generic warning about damaging your metabase with some sort of "use-at-your-own-risk" verbiage and a set of Yes/No buttons that would allow you to opt out of opening the application.
(Deep Sigh)
Eventually Henrik Walther wrote KB 555081 that informed users what to do, but still - I should have fixed that. Darn.
My apologies to everyone that ever saw that dialog box. ;-]
Note: This blog was originally posted at http://blogs.msdn.com/robert_mcmurray/
30 July 2010 • by Bob • FTP
For this installment in my series about FTP Clients I'm going to review the FTP features in Microsoft's Expression Web 4 (EW4). You can find out more about the Microsoft Expression series of products from the following URL:
Note: There are a lot of really cool features that are built into EW4, like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools, rich extensibility APIs, previewing content side-by-side in multiple browser windows through SuperPreview, built-in support for programming languages like ASP/ASP.NET/PHP/etc. But that being said, in keeping with the main theme of my FTP client series, this review is focusing on just the FTP aspects of EW4 - not the entire product.
At the time of this blog post, EW4 is a for-retail product that is available as part of the Expression Studio 4 Web Professional and Expression Studio 4 Ultimate suites.
The EW4 user interface follows the same design paradigm as earlier versions of Expression Web, albeit with the darker color scheme that Expression products have been using in recent versions. While EW4 contains many features that you would expect in a Microsoft Office application, it does not resemble the Office 2007/2010 user interface, so there is no ribbon-style toolbar. (This is a bad thing if you love the Office ribbon and a good thing if you hate the Office ribbon; but I'll leave that up to you to decide. <grin>)
One minor personal issue that I have with Expression Web is that VBA was deprecated a while ago, so EW4 doesn't have a macro language that I can use to automate tasks like I would do with previous versions. It's possible to create "add-ins" for Expression Web, but there's a lot of overhead associated with that. From my perspective, that's pretty much like saying to someone, "I know that you would like to get across town and you already have a really nice car, but we're going to take that away. If you take 17 different buses and then walk three or four blocks, you will eventually wind up where you want to go. Of course, it will take you several hours longer and it's a really big hassle, but sooner or later you'll get there." (No comments about carbon footprint - please. <grin>)
That being said, EW4 is a great web site editor and is a good FTP client, and EW4 is much better than its predecessors. (Note: By "predecessors" I mean earlier versions of Expression Web and FrontPage.) I'll explain more in the following sections of this post.
Opening a site is straight-forward, and for the most part the user interface is the same whether you are opening a site over FTP/FTPS or over HTTP using WebDAV or FPSE.
When you are opening an FTP or HTTP site for the first time, your list of managed sites will be empty. As you open sites, the list of sites will be populated for each site there you have the Add to managed sites check box selected.
Once you have entered your site information, EW4 will prompt you for your remote editing options. This allows you to choose between editing the live site over FTP or editing a local copy and publishing your changes at a later date & time.
The last dialog before opening the FTP site is the all-too-familiar prompt for your user credentials, albeit with a warning about FTP credentials being transmitted without encryption. (This is why you should use FTPS, but I'll discuss that later in this post.)
Once the credentials have been verified by the FTP server, EW4 will display your site and you can begin editing your content.
EW4 has some basic site management functionality, which is accessed through the Site -> Manage Site List menu. From there you can add or remove sites from the list. Unfortunately you cannot modify the settings for sites in the list; you have to remove and re-add sites with different settings.
That's it for the simple stuff - now we'll take a look at the specific FTP topics that I've discussed in my other FTP client blog posts.
EW4 supports both Implicit and Explicit FTPS, so the choice is up to you to decide which method to use. The FTPS method is specified by the port number that you choose when you are connecting.
I realize that I have posted the following information in almost all of my posts in this FTP client series, but in the interests of completeness it needs to be said again - the following rules apply for FTP7 when determining whether you are using Implicit or Explicit FTPS:
EW4 doesn't have a way of specifying Explicit or Implicit FTPS other than the port numbers listed above. That being said, more often than not you will probably be using Explicit FTPS on the default port (21) so you won't need to enter a port at all.
For example, if you are using EW4 with Explicit FTPS on the default port, you can skip adding a port number.
However, if you are using Implicit FTPS, you need make sure that you configure EW4 to connect on port 990.
Because EW4's login dialog allows you to specify the virtual host name as part of the user credentials, EW4 works great with FTP7's virtual host names. All that you need to do is use the "ftp.example.com|username" or "ftp.example.com\username" syntax when specifying your username, and when you connect to the FTP7 server it will route your requests to the correct FTP virtual host site.
Unfortunately EW4 does not have built-in for the HOST command, nor does it have support for entering commands that will be sent before the client has logged in, so you cannot use true FTP host names when using EW4 to connect to FTP7 sites that are configured with host names.
This concludes our quick look at some of the FTP features that are available with EW4, and here are the scorecard results:
Client Name | Directory Browsing | Explicit FTPS | Implicit FTPS | Virtual Hosts | True HOSTs |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Y | Y | Y | Y | N1 | |
1 As noted earlier, EW4 has no way to send a HOST command, so true FTP HOSTs are not supported. |
Note: I've included the following disclaimer in all of my posts, and this post is no exception - there are a great number of additional features that EW4 provides - once again I'm just keeping the focus on those topic areas that apply to FTP7. ;-]
Note: This blog was originally posted at http://blogs.msdn.com/robert_mcmurray/
09 July 2010 • by bob • Rants
I saw a video the other day for the song "Crying for John Lennon," which is a truly pathetic piece of hero worship about a boorish, drug addicted, womanizing narcissist. Putting aside the fact that John Lennon is no person to be admired, this video and song are another entry in a long line of juvenile visions of a world where nothing evil ever happens. The trouble with such a naïve approach to life is that it presupposes that everyone agrees with your interpretation of evil. How utterly immature.
Some cultures ignore their neighbors, some cultures fight their neighbors, while other cultures eat their neighbors. There is no common ground - there is no singular interpretation of what constitutes the concept of good or bad, much less a concept of "peace."
But for that matter, many a conquered people in western cultures have believed in peace at all costs. Crowds of angry youths who have been so sheltered by the blanket of freedoms which have been thanklessly provided for them are lulled into adolescent complacency and they form a misguided view of the world that ultimately leads to their destruction. I think that John Stuart Mill put it best when he said:
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
For every person who dreams of pacifism no matter the cost, there are a dozen people who are willing to kill them simply for their shoes. I have travelled abroad - and I have met some of these types of people. It is difficult for simple minds to understand that there are some people in the world who hate you just because you exist. It's nothing that you have done, it's nothing that you believe, and there's nothing that you can do about it.
So while the songwriter who inspired me to write this post may be crying for John Lennon, I am weeping for our future - because if people like this songwriter continue to persist in their delusions, we are truly doomed.
15 June 2010 • by Bob • Humor
Let there be no misunderstanding – I love Famous Amos cookies. But that being said, Famous Amos is out to kill me.
If I eat a small handful of Famous Amos cookies, I will pay for it with severe heartburn that lasts for several hours. But the following week, I’ll buy another package – I know that I'm going to be in pain, but I just can't help myself.
I know that one of the hardest experiences for mankind is trying to kick the smoking habit, but I have to be honest – trying to stay away from Famous Amos cookies is much harder. At least for me, anyway.
What’s even worse is when I have just enough pocket change to buy a little bag of cookies from the vending machine and the @#$% machine won’t take one of my coins. Those machines do that just to mess with me, I’m sure of it. All I can do is stare at the bag of cookies – just out of reach – and there’s nothing that I can do. There they sit – right in front of me – taunting me to resort to drastic measures.
[Deep Sigh.]
I have to go – the day is getting late and I feel like a snack.
I wonder how much change I have?
07 May 2010 • by Bob • FTP
For this installment in my series about FTP Clients I'm going to review the SmartFTP Client from SmartSoft Ltd. For this blog post I used the SmartFTP Client Ultimate Edition version 4.0.1105.0, and it is available from the following URL:
At the time of this blog post, SmartFTP is a for-retail product that is available in three editions: Home, Professional, and Ultimate. A description of the prices and features that are available in each edition is currently available from the following URL:
As for myself, I would use at least the Professional edition, and that statement is based on the features that I typically look for in an FTP client. (Although I would have loved to have had the Ultimate Edition several years ago when I used Telnet to connect to servers. <grin>)
The SmartFTP Client is pretty intuitive and it's easy to navigate within the application. If you are used to using typical Windows applications then you should find that the user interface follows most of the established paradigms that you would expect from a Microsoft application; it seemed to me that the design emulated the relevant parts of Windows Explorer, Visual Studio, and Office with an FTP focus.
For example, switching your directory listing views align with most Windows applications, and the site management functionality is managed through a hierarchical set of "Favorites."
Each "Favorite" has a variety of additional settings that you can edit by open the properties dialog for the favorite.
One of the great features in all editions of the SmartFTP client is a nicely-implemented Remote Edit functionality, which allows you to invoke your favorite editor from inside the client's GUI.
The SmartFTP Client does not have a built-in command-line interface, although there is a script-based command-line interface that you can download separately from the SmartFTP web site. That being said, that script is not created by the folks at SmartSoft, and it's functionality is extremely limited.
For me personally, the SmartFTP Client's extensibility model more than makes up for the lack of command-line functionality. More often than not I'm simply using the command-line in order to script FTP operations, and the SmartFTP extensibility features provide a great deal more capabilities than I would have available to me when automating a command-line FTP client.
I haven't spent a great deal of time working with the extensibility features, but so far I am pretty impressed. I was able to take one of the samples and retool it into a simple FTP client pretty easily. (I will include that as an example in a later blog post.) In the meantime, you can download the SDK for the SmartFTP Client from the following URL:
The SmartFTP Client supports both Implicit and Explicit FTPS, so the choice is up to you to decide which method to use. The FTPS method is stored as the Protocol in a favorite's properties, which is easily located in the General settings for a favorite.
Once again, the following rules apply for FTP7 when determining whether to specify Implicit or Explicit FTPS:
If you are using Implicit FTPS, make sure that you configure your FTP client to connect on port 990.
Because the SmartFTP Client's properties for favorites allow you to specify the virtual host name as part of the user credentials, the SmartFTP Client works great with FTP7's virtual host names. All that you need to do is use the "ftp.example.com|username" syntax when specifying your username, and when you connect to the FTP7 server it will route your requests to the correct FTP virtual host site.
The SmartFTP Client provides built-in support for the HOST command, which means that you can have real multi-homed FTP sites when using the SmartFTP Client to connect to FTP7 sites that are configured with host names. In order to use true HOSTs in the SmartFTP Client, you need to configure the client to send the FEAT command before logging in. This is configured in the Connection settings in the drop-down menu for "Send FEAT."
As an FYI - I had some discussions with Mat Berchtold from SmartSoft while I was writing this review, and Mat informed me that the SmartFTP Client doesn't automatically assume support for the HOST command; sending the FEAT command before logging in allows the client to discover if HOST is supported before continuing.
Mat Berchtold from SmartSoft also mentioned that some firewalls do not yet recognize the HOST command, and therefore those firewalls may not pass the HOST command through the firewall. That's something to think about if you start to see connection failures related to hostnames not being found - you can check your FTP server's logs to see if the HOST command is arriving at the server.
This concludes our quick look at some of the features that are available with the SmartFTP Client, and here's the scorecard results:
Client Name | Directory Browsing | Explicit FTPS | Implicit FTPS | Virtual Hosts | True HOSTs |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
SmartFTP Client Ultimate 4.0.1105.0 | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y 1 |
1 As noted earlier, true FTP HOSTs are fully supported, but you need to configure the SmartFTP Client to send the FEAT command before logging in. |
Note: I've included the following disclaimer in all of my posts, and this post is no exception. ;-] There are a great number of additional features that the SmartFTP Client provides - once again I'm just keeping the focus on those topic areas that apply to FTP7.
Note: This blog was originally posted at http://blogs.msdn.com/robert_mcmurray/
02 May 2010 • by Bob • Windows
I put together this list for my brother when Windows 7 launched. I got the information from a variety of sources, thereby living up to the old adage that "Copying from one person is plagiarism, copying from a hundred people is research." Some of these are new to Windows 7, while others have been around a little while. In any event, here are some notes that explain how to interpret the keystrokes:
Shift+Click | Open a new instance of the program |
Ctrl+Click | Cycle between windows in a group |
Middle Click | Open a new instance of the program |
Ctrl+Shift+Click | Open a new instance of the program as Administrator |
Shift+Right-Click | Show window menu |
Alt+F4 | Close the active window |
Alt+Tab | Switch to previous active window |
Alt+Esc | Cycle through all open windows |
Win+Tab | Flip 3D |
Ctrl+Win+Tab | Persistent Flip 3D |
Win+T | Cycle through applications on taskbar (showing its live preview) |
Win+M | Minimize all open windows |
Win+Shift+M | Undo all window minimization |
Win+D | Toggle showing the desktop |
Win+P | Open the projection menu (generally used for laptops connected to projectors) |
Win+[Up] | Maximize the current window |
Win+[Down] | If the current window is maximized, restore it; if the current window is restored, minimize it |
Win+[Left] | Dock the current window to the left half of the screen • If it is already docked left, it is moved to the right half of the screen • If it is already docked right, it is restored to its original size |
Win+[Right] | Dock the current window to the right half of the screen • If it is already docked right, it is moved to the left half of the screen • If it is already docked left, it is restored to its original size |
Win+Shift+[Left] | Move current window to the left monitor (with dual monitors) |
Win+Shift+[Right] | Move current window to the right monitor (with dual monitors) |
Win+Home | Minimize all but the current window |
Win+Space | Peek at the desktop |
Win+[Plus sign] | Zoom in |
Win+[Minus sign] | Zoom out |
Win+1 | Open the first program on your Quick Launch bar |
Win+2 | Open the second program on your Quick Launch bar |
Win+n | Open the nth program on your Quick Launch bar |
Win+U | Open the ease of access center |
Win+F | Open the search window |
Win+X | Open the Mobility Center |
Win+E | Open Explorer |
Win+R | Open the Run window |
Win+B | Move focus to notification tray (the right-most portion of the taskbar) |
Win+Pause | Open the System Properties portion from the Control Panel |
Ctrl+Shift+Esc | Open Windows Task Manager |
Win, [Right], Enter | Shutdown |
Win, [Right], [Right], R | Restart |
Win, [Right], [Right], S | Sleep |
Win, [Right], [Right], H | Hibernate |
Win, [Right], [Right], W | Switch Users |
Win+L | Locks computer |
Alt+[Left] | Go back |
Alt+[Right] | Go forward |
Alt+[Up] | Go up a directory |
Alt+D | Move focus to address bar |
Alt+D, Tab | Move focus to search bar |
Alt+Enter | Open the Properties window of the current selection |
Ctrl+Mousewheel | Change the view type (extra large, small, list view, detail, etc.) |
Alt+P | Show/hide the preview pane |
28 April 2010 • by Bob • FrontPage
I've had a few questions about getting the FrontPage 2002 Server Extensions (FPSE2002) AllowUNC feature to work with Windows Server 2008, so I thought that I would put together a blog from some of the information that I had been giving out whenever someone was having problems.
As a little bit of background information, Windows 2003 Server shipped with a later version of FPSE2002 than had previously been released, and that version of FPSE2002 was used as the code base for the version of FPSE2002 that was later shipped for Windows Server 2008. One the great features of this release was the ability to host your content on a remote server using a UNC share, which is something that web administrators had been requesting for years. Microsoft wrote a full whitepaper that details all of the possible configurations and steps to configure FPSE2002 with this feature at the following URL:
That being said, that whitepaper is quite large, and not all of it is necessary if you simply want to host FPSE2002-based content on a UNC path. With that in mind, I have come up with an abbreviated set of steps that uses the whitepaper as a base for enabling this feature. To be more specific, I was able to implement this feature by using only the following sections of that whitepaper:
The body of this blog post is an excerpt from the whitepaper, and contains only the steps that I used to get my test scenario up and running. For my test, I set up a domain controller, a file server, and a web server; all running Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2003. I include notes when necessary to highlight issues that I ran into.
Additional Notes:
You must configure a shared folder on the file server and grant the Web server access to the contents of that folder. Note that you must set the permissions for the folder itself, not a parent folder. It is recommended that you also implement IP Security on the file server, so that only the Web server, the domain controller, and other administrator computers can access the file server over TCP/IP. For more information about configuring IP Security, see Setting Up IPsec Domain and Server Isolation in a Test Lab.
Giving Everyone full control to your server share is necessary so that all users of your Web site can view the Web site information and run the ASP pages required to use FrontPage 2002 Server Extensions. However, you do not want to allow other computers or other servers access to the file share and those ASP pages. It is recommended that you implement Internet Protocol (IP) Security to help prevent users and computers from circumventing the FrontPage 2002 Server Extensions and Internet Information Services security for the file share and ASP pages.
Note - The separate user management feature for FrontPage 2002 Server Extensions also helps secure the process for accessing ASP pages through the file system. It is recommended that you implement this feature if you are connecting Web sites to UNC shares. For more information about managing users separately, see Authenticating Users Separately For Each Virtual Server.
You use Internet Information Services (IIS) to create your new virtual server. You must also decide how to configure the security settings for your virtual server.
Note - If you chose to allow anonymous access for the virtual server, you must specify the domain account to use for anonymous users. When you use a local folder, you can use the default anonymous user (usually IUSR or IUSR_Machinename). To connect to a shared resource on a domain, however, you must specify an account with rights to the domain. Be sure to use an account with limited rights to the computers and resources in your domain. Do not unintentionally give anonymous users the ability to administer your server or print to your network printers.
Note from me:
As stated by me earlier, this entire article does not appear to work unless you specify a domain-level IUSR account in IIS, even if you are going to not allow anonymous access. In my testing, it seems to fail when anonymous is disabled and the anonymous user had been local, whereas it succeeded when the anonymous user is a domain-account with rights to the share, even though anonymous is disabled for the site.
After you have created the virtual server, you must configure the security settings. When a Web site user requests a file that actually resides on a network share, there are two methods that FrontPage Server Extensions can use to provide the required authentication information:
Warning - Basic authentication forwards the requestor's username and password over the network. This means that usernames and passwords can be captured using a network packet analyzer. Only use basic authentication if you are sure that potential hackers don't have access to your network cabling or wireless media.
Note from me:
As stated by me earlier, I only tested with Basic Authentication; I did not try Kerberos. Since we are making a single hop to another server, I would expect simple NTLM to fail. See KB 315673 for a description of single versus double hop setups when working with IIS configurations. But that being said, Windows Authentication in an Internet environment is impractical, so in most scenarios this point is moot.
After you create the virtual server, and before you can extend it with FrontPage 2002 Server Extensions, you must set the following registry entries to enable your Web server to work with a shared UNC folder:
Both subkeys are under the following path in the registry depending on your version of Windows:
If these subkeys do not exist yet, you can add them as new string values, and then set them to 1.
After the virtual server has been created and configured, you are ready to extend it with FrontPage 2002 Server Extensions. You must extend the virtual server before you can publish Web site content to it.
After you extend the site, it is recommended that you run server health to make sure the permissions are set correctly and do not allow unauthorized access. To run server health, use the following command-line operations:
cd /d "%ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\50\bin"
owsadm.exe -o check -p 80 -w /
As I mentioned in the beginning of this post, there are a lot of steps to get this working, but it's possible to do so.
I hope this helps. ;-]
22 April 2010 • by Bob • IIS, WebDAV, IIS 6
We recently ran into a situation where a customer thought that they were seeing file corruption when they were transferring files from a Windows 7 client to their IIS 6.0 server using WebDAV. More specifically, the file sizes were increasing for several specific file types, and for obvious reasons the checksums for these files would not match for verification. Needless to say this situation caused a great deal of alarm on the WebDAV team when we heard about it - file corruption issues are simply unacceptable.
To alleviate any fears, I should tell you right up front that no corruption was actually taking place, and the increase in file size was easily explained once we discovered what was really going on. All of that being said, I thought that a detailed explanation of the scenario would make a great blog entry in case anyone else runs into the situation.
First of all, the customer was copying installation files using a batch file over WebDAV; more specifically the batch file was copying a collection of MSI and MST files. After the batch file copied the files to the destination server it would call the command-line comp utility to compare the files. Each MSI and MST file that was copied would increase by a small number of bytes so the comparison would fail. The customer computed checksums for the files to troubleshoot the issue and found that the checksums for the files on the source and destination did not match. Armed with this knowledge the customer contacted Microsoft for support, and eventually I got involved and I explained what the situation was.
Windows has a type of file format called a Compound Document, and many Windows applications make use of this file format. For example, several Microsoft Office file formats prior to Office 2007 used a compound document format to store information.
A compound document file is somewhat analogous to a file-based database, or in some situations like a mini file system that is hosted inside another file system. In the case of an MST or MSI file these are both true: MST and MSI files store information in various database-style tables with rows and columns, and they also store files for installation.
With that in mind, here's a behind-the-scenes view of WebDAV in IIS 6.0:
The WebDAV protocol extension allows you to store information in "properties", and copying files over the WebDAV redirector stores several properties about a file when it sends the file to the server. If you were to examine a protocol trace for the WebDAV traffic between a Windows 7 client and an IIS server, you will see the PUT command for the document followed by several PROPPATCH commands for the properties.
IIS needs a way to store the properties for a file in a way where they will remain associated with the file in question, so the big question is - where do you store properties?
In IIS 7 we have a simple property provider that stores the properties in a file named "properties.dav," but for IIS 5.0 and IIS 6.0 WebDAV code we chose to write the properties in the compound document file format because there are lots of APIs for doing so. Here's the way that it works in IIS 5 and IIS 6.0:
So believe it or not, no harm is done by modifying a compound document file to store the WebDAV properties. Each application that wants to pull information from a compound document file simply asks for the data that it wants, so adding additional data to a compound document file in this scenario was essentially expected behavior. I know that this may seem counter-intuitive, but it's actually by design. ;-]
Once I was able to explain what was actually taking place, the customer was able to verify that their MST and MSI files still worked exactly as expected. Once again, no harm was done by adding the WebDAV properties to the compound document files.
You needn't take my word for this, you can easily verify this yourself. Here's a simple test: Word 2003 documents (*.DOC not *.DOCX) are in the compound document file format. So if you were to create a Word 2003 document and then copy that document to an IIS 6.0 server over WebDAV, you'll notice that the file size increases by several bytes. That being said, if you open the document in Word, you will see no corruption - the file contains the same data that you had originally entered.
I hope this helps. ;-]
08 April 2010 • by Bob • Rants
I had originally written the following for a Facebook note, but I think that it's better as a blog post:
Let's face it, if you have known me for any period of time during the past two decades you would quickly realize that outside of church, family, and music, working with computers is my next biggest passion. Being been hired by Microsoft in late 1995 was one of those moments where I smacked myself on the head and questioned why I hadn't thought of that before. It's just great when it turns out that you can actually make a living doing one of your hobbies. (Making a living making music would be great, too, but I work with a large number of people who have all realized that having a normal day job means that you can actually afford your music hobby. Whereas trying to make a living at music often means wondering where your next meal is coming from. But I digress...)
Anyway, I've had several different jobs since I joined Microsoft, which always leads to the following question from friends and family: "So, what do you do for Microsoft?"
Over the past few years I have worked on a team with several gifted people that create several technologies that perform a lot of the behind-the-scenes work for the Internet, and these days I spend my time writing about these products and telling people how they can use them. With that in mind, I thought that I'd answer a little bit of the "What do you do for Microsoft?" question by way of illustration.
The following blog post that I wrote recently branches off into several links where I discuss writing a bunch of code to do a variety of things that many people would probably find... well... less than exciting:
MSDN Blog: Merging FTP Extensibility Walkthroughs
As I said, you might not find it exciting - but for me, this why I get up in the morning, and at the end of the day it's why I still love my job.
;-)