Internet Sellout

I like applications to write to the Windows Event Logs unless they are going to be verbose. Windows Event Logs can be collected and forwarded with a variety of tools for continuous monitoring. Sometimes logging errors is going to be way to noisy and an alternative is needed. But it is a good idea to write at least some things to the Windows Event Logs. .NET has a framework for the config files that can be used so that if you need to change the logging behavior it is somewhat configurable as opposed to a code change. The basic way to write is this System.Diagnostics http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/xzwc042w(v=vs.110).aspx technique. But App.config and web.config can have something like:

  <system.diagnostics>
    <sources>
      <source name="DefaultSource" switchName="DefaultSwitch">
        <listeners>
          <add name="EventLog"/>
        </listeners>
      </source>
    </sources>
    <switches>
      <add name="DefaultSwitch" value="Information"/>
    </switches>
    <sharedListeners>
      <add name="EventLog" type="System.Diagnostics.EventLogTraceListener" initializeData="MyLogs"/>
    </sharedListeners>
    <trace autoflush="true" indentsize="4"></trace>
  </system.diagnostics>

 in this example, MyLogs is the event source. Not all users, especially weak web app pool users can create an event source and you need one before you can write. If it is a windows app, maybe you can do that in the app code or maybe you can push it with group policy. If it is a web server then maybe just running this command:

eventcreate /ID 1 /L APPLICATION /T INFORMATION  /SO MyLogs /D "MyLogs Event Source exists now if it didn't before."

This will create the Event Source.

Now in ASP.NET VB.NET, this works: 

        Try
            My.Log.WriteException(exCurrentException, Diagnostics.TraceEventType.Warning, System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.AppSettings("ApplicationName"))
        Catch
        End Try

Or for a Windows application 

        Try
            My.Application.Log.WriteException(exCurrentException, Diagnostics.TraceEventType.Warning, System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.AppSettings("ApplicationName"))
        Catch
        End Try

 It is not clear to me if a C# developer needs to use the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace and assembly or if these settings in the config files mean anything for anything out of this namespace.

Learn things you think will help your career by creating useful projects for yourself or friends using technology you want to explore. Learning by doing is best but doing without your job's business requirements lets you actually explore.

If your job requires licenses to do it, if you can’t own them (afford them) yourself or the vendor doesn’t have a licensing model that allows you to get your hands on the equivalent technology for educational and non-commercial purposes, maybe that’s not a technology that you want to learn.

Be interested in technologies that will evolve and survive. We live in an era where often something great and simple becomes a piece of crap over time only to be forked and have the process start over again. There have also been cycles where the formalization and standardization of technology has led to complexity that makes it unattractive to new developers. Often they reject a standard and implement a new more straight forward approach to solve the immediate problem. The beauty and elegance of the solution for the initial use case draws contributors until the beauty is marred by attempts to re-add all the lesser use cases. There are so many ways for a technology to die or become dormant. Sometimes you can’t help yourself, but try to assess the future of a technology when creating synergy between your career and your side projects.

If you like the advice from Mr. Frank, you may like other business insights with these tags, and these special links:

Just-In-Time-Development

Risk-Voodoo-1

Risk-Voodoo-2

addselftosqlsysadmin.cmd (5.25 kb)

Crap, why can't I connect to SQL Server, I am a local Admin what's the problem?

I am starting a post on my struggles convincing spamassassin's Bayes classification system to learn ham. When I su into the user account I can run this command:

sa-learn --dump magic

and it tells me how many ham and spam it thinks it has seen. when I train spam it goes up, but not when I train ham.

I was trying to diagnose some issues with ASP.NET Web Forms post backs so I turned off IPv6 even though none of my websites were bound to IPv6 addresses. I unchecked it on the adapter property page. I had no logical reason for doing this. Then Windows Update stopped working. This was from a Rackspace Cloud Server. I cannot imagine what kind of tunneling is taking place in various parts of the internet with IPv6 getting rolled out (finally).

Oh and by the way, I had trouble uploading this picture with BlogEngine.NET and I saw this article:

http://blogengine.codeplex.com/workitem/12382

I did what the user said (in settings unchecked optimize which minifies) and it solved the problem, however I am on IIS 8 not IIS Express.

Videos of the Blow Hole:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=sunny%20cove%20blow%20hole&sm=3

What is my preferred IP anyway?

Not this:

Set-NetIPAddress -IPAddress xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx -SkipAsSource 1

You can do that in Power Shell on all the IP addresses you don't want to be chosen as your preferred IP address for your windows 2012 machine.

This will tell you what is set:

Netsh int ipv4 show ipaddresses level=verbose

I have read that once you start managing this with Power Shell you will lose information if you try and edit with the GUI.

This is not going well...

The page size of asp.net had increased when comparing to 2008 R2 IIS 7.5 ASP.NET 4.0

C:\Windows\System32\Inetsrv\Appcmd.exe  set config -section:httpCompression   -[name='gzip'].staticCompressionLevel:9  -[name='gzip'].dynamicCompressionLevel:4

 All of a sudden they got smaller...

This modified the applicationHost.config file.

I just moved from one Rackspace cloud server to another. The main purpose was to get IIS 8 so I could do TLS/SNI. I got a skimpy partition for the system and the preinstalled SQL Server Web Edition databases were taking up precious space so I moved them with help from this article:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms345408.aspx

SELECT name, physical_name AS CurrentLocation
FROM sys.master_files
WHERE database_id = DB_ID(N'tempdb');
GO


USE master;
GO
ALTER DATABASE tempdb 
MODIFY FILE (NAME = tempdev, FILENAME = 'K:\Data\tempdb\tempdb.mdf');
GO
ALTER DATABASE tempdb 
MODIFY FILE (NAME = templog, FILENAME = 'K:\Data\tempdb\templog.ldf');
GO

SELECT name, physical_name AS CurrentLocation
FROM sys.master_files
WHERE database_id = DB_ID(N'reportserver');
GO


USE master;
GO
ALTER DATABASE ReportServer 
MODIFY FILE (NAME = ReportServer, FILENAME = 'K:\Data\reporting\ReportServer.mdf');
GO
ALTER DATABASE ReportServer 
MODIFY FILE (NAME = ReportServer_log, FILENAME = 'K:\Data\reporting\ReportServer_log.ldf');
GO

SELECT name, physical_name AS CurrentLocation
FROM sys.master_files
WHERE database_id = DB_ID(N'reportserverTempDB');
GO


USE master;
GO
ALTER DATABASE ReportServerTempDB 
MODIFY FILE (NAME = ReportServerTempDB, FILENAME = 'K:\Data\reporting\ReportServerTempDB.mdf');
GO
ALTER DATABASE ReportServerTempDB 
MODIFY FILE (NAME = ReportServerTempDB_log, FILENAME = 'K:\Data\reporting\ReportServerTempDB_log.ldf');
GO

Don't forget to delete the old tempdb after restart SQL Server and move the reportserver databases when the service is stopped after the commands and before turning SQL Server back on.

CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[ufn_TallyHo] (@quantity int)
RETURNS TABLE AS
RETURN(
with cte(tally)as(select 1 union all select tally +  1 from cte where tally < @quantity)SELECT tally FROM cte
)

I found a table at work called Tally that was a list of numbers. I thought it was sad until I needed something like it, so I created the above function. But this one is better, no recursion:

ALTER FUNCTION [dbo].[ufn_TallyHo2] (@quantity bigint)
RETURNS TABLE AS
RETURN(
WITH CTE1(N) AS (SELECT N FROM (VALUES(1),(1))a(N)),
CTE2(N) AS (SELECT 1 FROM CTE1 x, CTE1 y),
CTE3(N) AS (SELECT 1 FROM CTE2 x, CTE2 y),
CTE4(N) AS (SELECT 1 FROM CTE3 x, CTE3 y),
CTE5(N) AS (SELECT 1 FROM CTE4 x, CTE4 y),
CTE6(N) AS (SELECT 1 FROM CTE5 x, CTE5 y)
SELECT TOP (@quantity) ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY (SELECT NULL)) AS RowNum FROM CTE6 x, CTE6 y
)

Const ValueSheetName As String = "MyParamSheet"
Const ServerName As String = "ServerName"
Public Sub GetData()

	ThisWorkbook.Names("Results").RefersToRange.Value = "Getting..."
	Dim oWorksheet As Worksheet
	On Error Resume Next
	Set oWorksheet = ThisWorkbook.Worksheets(ValueSheetName)
	On Error GoTo 0
	If Not oWorksheet Is Nothing Then
		If Not Len(ThisWorkbook.Names("ListName").RefersToRange.Value) = 0 Then
			ThisWorkbook.Names("Results").RefersToRange.Value = GetItems(ThisWorkbook.Names("ListName").RefersToRange.Value, ThisWorkbook.Names("DateName").RefersToRange.Value, ThisWorkbook.Names("ValueName").RefersToRange.Value)
			Exit Sub
		End If
	End If
	MsgBox ("Need " & ValueSheetName & " sheet with first column list of values!")
End Sub
Public Function ConCatEndBlank(Delimiter As Variant, ParamArray CellRanges() As Variant) As String

	Dim Cell As Range, Area As Variant
	ConCatEndBlank = ""
	For Each Area In CellRanges
		If TypeName(Area) = "Range" Then
			For Each Cell In Area
				If Len(Cell.Value) > 0 Then
					ConCatEndBlank = ConCatEndBlank & Delimiter & Cell.Value
				Else
					Exit For
				End If
			Next
		Else
			ConCatEndBlank = ConCatEndBlank & Delimiter & Area
		End If
	Next
	ConCatEndBlank = Mid(ConCatEndBlank, Len(Delimiter) + 1)
End Function
Public Function GetItems(sList As String, dDate As Date, sValue As String) As Integer
	GetItems = 0
	If sList = "" Then
		GetItems = -1
	Else
		On Error GoTo Error1
		If sList = "All" Then sList = ""
		Dim oConn As New ADODB.Connection
		oConn.ConnectionString = "Provider=SQLOLEDB;Data Source=" & ServerName & ";Initial Catalog=DataBaseName;"
		Dim oCmd As New ADODB.Command
		oCmd.CommandType = adCmdStoredProc
		oCmd.NamedParameters = True
		oCmd.CommandText = "mystoredprocedure"
		oCmd.Parameters.Append oCmd.CreateParameter("@list", adVarChar, adParamInput, 2147483647, sList)
		oCmd.Parameters.Append oCmd.CreateParameter("@date", adDate, adParamInput, -1, dDate)
		oCmd.Parameters.Append oCmd.CreateParameter("@value", adVarChar, adParamInput, 8, sValue)
		oConn.Open
		Set oCmd.ActiveConnection = oConn
		Dim oRS As New ADODB.Recordset
		oRS.Open oCmd
		Dim oTarget As ListObject
		Dim oWorksheet As Worksheet
		On Error Resume Next
		Set oWorksheet = ThisWorkbook.Worksheets("QueryResults")
		On Error GoTo Error1
		If oWorksheet Is Nothing Then
			Set oWorksheet = ThisWorkbook.Worksheets.Add(After:=ThisWorkbook.Worksheets(ThisWorkbook.Worksheets.Count))oWorksheet.Name = "QueryResults"
		End If
		On Error Resume Next
		Set oTarget = oWorksheet.ListObjects("QueryData")
		On Error GoTo Error1
		If oTarget Is Nothing Then
			Set oTarget = oWorksheet.ListObjects.Add(xlSrcExternal, oRS, True, xlNo, oWorksheet.Range("A1"))
			oTarget.Name = "QueryData"
		Else
			Set oTarget.QueryTable.Recordset = oRS
		End If
		If Not oTarget Is Nothing Then
			Call oTarget.QueryTable.Refresh(False)
			GetParts = oTarget.ListRows.Count
		End If
		oRS.Close
		oConn.Close
		Set oRS = Nothing
		Set oConn = Nothing
		Set oCmd = Nothing
	End If
	Exit Function
Error1:
	MsgBox (Err.Description)
	On Error Resume Next
	oRS.Close
	oConn.Close
	Set oRS = Nothing
	Set oConn = Nothing
	Set oCmd = Nothing
End Function