Guido van Loon

Discontinued

2007-01-09T07:55:00Z

With the tagging game going around the bloggosphere lately it was only a matter of time before I got tagged too. First Ramon tagged me and a few hours later I got tagged by Raimond, as het puts it "to get me blogging again". This tagging madness is not only a fun way to learn about the people behind the blog, it also made me aware a lot of people do not know this blog is discontinued. Yes people, it true! This blog is discontinued.

I'm hosting my own blog on blog.guidol.nl for quite some time now. The posts that where posted here will be kept on-line for reference only. If you want to read what I have to reveal about myself, you should browse to my new blog or update your feed.

I never posted a message about this here because I wanted to see if Google would pick up on my new blog without a reference to it from this one, which is well indexed. That little experiment finished a while ago when Google indeed added my new blog to it's index.

Thank you.

Creating an X509 test certificate FAST!

2005-07-31T19:26:00Z

I was playing around with WS-Security and needed a X509 certificate to test my service but I didn't want to go through the hassle of installing that dreaded Microsoft Certificate Services and use that to create a new certificate for my needs. With Visual Studio comes a tool called makecert.exe just for the purpose of creating a quick test certificate.

I read the command line help and used all the appropriate command line switches but was unable to produce a working certificate. After some searching on the web I found a little note of Christian d'Heureuse on How to use makecert.exe to create a self-signed test certificate that can be used with IIS for SSL. It seems that makecert will not make the private key exportable as I had expected. Instead you must use an extra command line switch -pe to be able to export the private key with the certificate. This command line switch is not supported by the version of makecert that is installed with Visual Studio. You need a new version of makecert.exe that can be downloaded from Microsoft.

I want to thank Christian for pointing this out on his website, else I would never have known that a new version of makecert was the difference between success and failure when it comes to creating a quick test certificate.

EDRA vs Indigo

2005-07-05T18:49:00Z

Today I met a guy from Microsoft who was hired by a customer to evaluate the technical architecture and implementation of the project I'm working on. This project is implemented using SOA. I was asked to show him some of our code and we got talking about SOA and the struggles we had mapping our database model to business objects to messages and vice versa. When I mentioned EDRA he told me that EDRA is outdated already. That there is another product group, you probably have heard of before, called Indigo. And that Indogo is the future.

Indigo will take it's time before it is widely available and accepted. Until then I like to think the Enterprise Development Reference Architecture has many good patterns and ideas to learn from.

Enterprise Development Reference Architecture (EDRA)

2005-07-03T15:01:00Z

EDRA is an Enterprise Development Reference Architecture for Services Oriented Applications build with .Net. The project was formerly know as ShadowFax.

The project website is at http://practices.gotdotnet.com/workspace.aspx?id=9c29a963-594e-4e7a-9c45-576198df8058.

I would say this is a must read for anyone who is involved in developing applications with a services oriented architecture.

Use CSS instead of HTML tables for page layout

2005-06-19T19:18:00Z

Well I'm not the first to say this, but when I look around I notice that a lot of people still use HTML tables for their page layout. I develop a lot of web applications and each time I've to advocate the same thing over and over to the people I'm working with. Don't use tables for page layout!

Tables might have been "the way" of doing things in the early days. But we have to move on! These days there are much better ways of laying out our content on a webpage. Let those tables go and step into the world of CSS.

I've gathered some links to prove my point on why and how you should be using CSS for more than just a few nice fonts and colors.

First off all read Why tables for layout is stupid. This is a nice and funny way of telling what I'm trying to say.
When it comes to prove that it's much more efficient to use CSS instead of tables have a look at this article on www.stopdesign.com: Throwing Tables Out the Window. In this article the author takes a page from the Microsoft website and redesigns it without tables, saving 62% in file size. With the heavy traffic Microsoft gets, the author claims they could save 329 terabytes per year by not using tables...
For some more examples of other sites that could easily do without tables have a peek at www.tableless.com.br/en/.
A very well known and often used example of the flexibility of CSS is the www.csszengarden.com. People always are impressed by this site when I point it out to them.
Another site I would like to point out is www.alistapart.com. It contains a section of CSS articles that describe how to accomplish the most amazing things like the well known suckerfish dropdowns that describe how to take an unordered list and make it into a dropdown menu with CSS and just a pinch of JavaScript.
A good starting point for those who I have inspired to get the most out of their page designs is the following article from a list apart: Practical CSS Layout Tips, Tricks, & Techniques.

Wanted: the path of a substituted virtual drive

2005-05-23T19:24:00Z

Today I needed to get the path of a substituted virtual drive through C# code. A substituted device can be made by using the subst command from the console. See subst form more info. Typing subst in the console with no parameters gives you a list of substituted drives with their physical path. It's this path I wanted and I wanted it with as little effort as possible.

A quick search through the .Net Framework learnt me that there is no easy way to retreive the so much wanted path. So I turned to Google and searched for a while when I found A Delphi implementation of an “API for work with substitution device”. I noticed the use of the kernel32 function QueryDosDevice. This could be just the thing I needed.

I did a litle test with .Net Platform Invoke (PInvoke) and there it was, the path I was looking for. If you want to know how to import the QueryDosDevice function from the kernel32 library all you have to to is to find it on www.pinvoke.net or click here.