Ryan Rinaldi's Blog

This Blog has moved

2008-07-24T18:35:00Z

Please update your readers! Ryan Rinaldi: .NET development served with a slice of sarcasm. (RSS)

Programatically change the identity of an AppPool

2007-09-28T20:22:31Z

A couple weeks ago we were making some changes to our web servers that required all the Application Pools to be running as a known domain user. While it’s not hard to change it by hand, I figured it would be smarter for me to have 2 scripts, one to make the changes and the other to roll them back. So in the interests of the greater good, here they are:

Change to a domain account -

Dim locatorObj, ProviderObj, Pools, strQuery, appPool

Set locatorObj = CreateObject("WbemScripting.SWbemLocator")
Set ProviderObj = locatorObj.ConnectServer(".", "root/MicrosoftIISv2")

strQuery = "Select * from IIsApplicationPool"
For Each Item In ProviderObj.ExecQuery(strQuery)
    WScript.Echo Replace(Item.Name, "W3SVC/AppPools/", "")
    WScript.Echo "IIS://localhost/" & Item.Name
    Set appPool = GetObject("IIS://localhost/" & Item.Name)
    appPool.AppPoolIdentityType = 3
    appPool.WAMUserName = "UserNameGoesHere"
    appPool.WAMUserPass = "PasswordGoesHere"
    appPool.SetInfo()
Next
WScript.Echo "Done!"

Change to Network Service -

Dim locatorObj, ProviderObj, Pools, strQuery, appPool

Set locatorObj = CreateObject("WbemScripting.SWbemLocator")
Set ProviderObj = locatorObj.ConnectServer(".", "root/MicrosoftIISv2")

Chicago Area Job Opening: Trading Technologies - Application Administrator

2007-07-12T18:22:45Z

Application Administrator (Enterprise Applications)

Trading Technologies international inc. (TT) is a cutting edge, profitable software development firm committed to providing robust, reliable trading systems to professional derivatives traders and brokers. We pioneered electronic trading when we were founded 12 years ago. Today TT is the leading provider of order entry software for professional derivatives traders. Due to tremendous growth in annualized revenues, we are expanding our organization. TT is committed to building a company where highly talented, challenge-hungry people thrive. Therefore, we invest heavily in employee satisfaction. We offer a competitive salary, stock options, low cost but progressive medical and dental benefits, pre tax commute to work benefits and health club subsidies, 401(k) plan and other employee-focused programs. TT is looking for candidates that put forth a serious effort for a serious reward!

Ten Great Reasons to Work at TT:

1.Entrepreneurial, fast-paced environment where serious effort results in serious reward.

2.Ranked the best software company to work for in Chicago by Chicago magazine and

3.Ranked by Deloitte and Touche as one of Chicagoland’s fastest growing tech companies for five consecutive years.

4.Volume share leader among futures order-entry software providers.

5.Cutting-edge technology.

6.Stock options for all full-time employees.

7.Recognized as the leading Illinois tech company in 2006 with the ITA Lighthouse Award.

8.Liberal PTO and holiday policy.

9.Breakfast and beverages provided by the company…and dinner if you work late.

10.Relaxed “shorts and sandals” environment.

Title: Application Administrator (Enterprise Applications)

SUMMARY

We are looking to add an experienced Application Administrator to our IT – Enterprise Applications team. Person in this position will maintain Microsoft CRM, Forecaster, Accounting Systems and other assigned enterprise applications. As an Application Administrator, he/she is primarily responsible for upgrades, performance, availability, security and integrity of our enterprise application systems.

Responsibilities:

Provide prompt and consistent support to Enterprise Applications Systems.

Duties include Application System installation, integration, incident / problem diagnosis and resolution, capacity planning and performance tuning.

Design & implement reports & KPIs for various Enterprise Applications systems.

Perform a variety of ad-hoc data analysis and reports as requested by users.

Plan and Apply upgrades and patches to Enterprise Application Products.

Set standards and procedures for Applications Installs and Applications Management.

Work closely with internal development and infrastructure teams to manage the deployment of new applications and systems.

Create technical documentation of installation/configuration procedures.

Produce and interpret Enterprise Applications performance trends.

Make recommendations as needed to improve functionality, performance, enterprise impacts, and standards compliance.

Perform SQL DBA functions when needed.

Serve as an escalation point for Enterprise Applications issues within IT.

Qualifications:

BS in Computer Science or related field or 5 years experience demonstrating equivalent knowledge

2-3 years of experience specifically in support and integration of various packaged Applications such as Microsoft CRM, Forecaster, Sage, etc.

1 -2 years of data analysis, T-SQL and reporting experience with SQL Server 2005 reporting services.

Some MS-SQL server DBA experience, preferably with SQL Server 2005.

Some development experience with the .NET development framework including Visual Studio 2005 and C#

Strong understanding of Microsoft Operating Systems, Exchange and Active Directory

Familiarity with Microsoft SharePoint 2003 or MOSS 2007

Skills:

Demonstrated problem solving and analytical skills

Excellent interpersonal, organizational, and leadership skills

Strong verbal and written communication skills

Strong ability to interpret impact of technology choices

Please send your resumes to:

careers@tradingtechnologies.com

Never ever catch System.Exception...

2007-06-29T22:06:50Z

…except when you should. :)

Patrick Cauldwell wrote a great post on how to handle exceptions and I agree with everything he says except for this:

"If you find yourself arguing for catching Exception, you probably have a design problem."

In most cases he is completely right. In every web app I write I never catch System.Exception and I have no reason to. If I'm code reviewing and I see somebody catch System.Exception I flag it as something that needs to be changed. But in the last app I wrote I needed to catch System.Exception and there is only one good reason why: Microsoft gave me no choice.

Yep. I have no other option. Here's the background: I wrote a nice little server application that receives multiple kinds of data. Xml files, CSV, structured text documents, etc. Each piece of data is labeled with what kind data it is and as the data comes in I store it and it's label to disk. I have client software that has plugins that are specifically written for each type of data. When the clients start up they read in from a config file what types of data they support and register themselves with the server and start polling. The server then responds with a payload that the client supports and the client loads up the plugin that handles that data type and pass the payload along to it. The data is processed and then the client polls for more and the process repeats until there is nothing left to process.

So here is where the big problem is that makes me catch System.Exception: When the plugin crashes, the client needs to keep on chugging. It tells the server there is a problem, marks the data as problematic, notifies the appropriate people and then it keeps on keeping on. I know that catching System.Exception is bad. What if I'm out of memory or the application domain is being torn down for some reason? What if it really is one of those unrecoverable exceptions? But you never can tell the difference between the unrecoverable and recoverable exceptions since they all inherit from System.Exception. The other part of this problem is that I have no control over what exceptions the plugin can throw and I need to handle all of them.

Microsoft tried to have different base classes (System.ApplicationException) for different types of exceptions. That didn't work to well and since System.ApplicationException has only 10 exceptions in the entire framework that inherit from it.

I would love to be able to just catch System.ApplicationException and know that anything else that should crash my app will crash my app but since I can't I have to go on catching System.Exception.

weblogs.asp.net has been upgraded

2007-05-16T21:26:02Z

2 words: Not. Better.

My new favorite numbers (in hex)

2007-05-04T21:19:53Z

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Those are pretty nice numbers.

Twitter Twitter

2007-03-13T20:56:12Z

I’m twittering. I’m not sure why, but I am and so should you.

MS is killing J#

2007-03-07T15:09:31Z

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vjsharp/default.aspx

So that’s awesome…

And the Dojo is back up!

2007-01-04T04:06:00Z

After a scare, we are back up and running! I really need to thank Brian for coming through with a server to host the dojo!

As soon as things get settled, there will be a few changes around here. First of all, now that the Geekdojo has a second lease on life, I'm not going to take it for granted. Maybe it's because of the new year or because I almost had my "voice on the internet" taken away from me, but I'll try my best to post more often. When I think back and realize that three years ago we started this humble site I had a pretty powerful voice in the .NET development community and for some reason or another I've let that slide. I'm resolving to try to change that. There are a lot more voices out there now then there were three years ago, but my opinion is as valid as the next and by God I'll be out there shouting it! :)

Second, I'm sorry to say, is that I'm going to be putting up more Google Ads. I wish I didn't have to, but now that the site is being hosted on server that a friend is shelling out good money for I feel that it is a necessity. If there are any problems with that, or you have a better idea on how to try to generate revenue to cover our costs let me know.

Thanks again Brian! You've truly blessed us and it is greatly appreciated!

Quick update

2006-12-27T15:12:00Z

Not all is lost yet. A couple people have come forward with offers to host the site! I'm working with them to see what our options are and if we can work something out. I'll keep everybody posted with any updates. Keep your fingers crossed.

A bit of bad news

2006-12-25T22:20:00Z

My friend Andy who blogs here, maintains the server and helped start the GeekDojo is moving to Utah to take a very non IT job. :( He'll be doing some camping and building the self esteem of teenagers through bonding with nature (or something like that!). The sad part is that since he'll be leaving I'll have even less access to the server that the Dojo is running on than I had before pretty much forcing my hand to shut it down.

Shutting down the Dojo isn't something that I took lightly. I've been trying to figure out what to do with the site for months. The site has a pretty decent amount of traffic and has been saturating the business class DSL line it's been running on causing all sorts of problems with Andy's father's business that has been so gracious to host the site. I've tried putting up Google Ads to help pay for more bandwidth, but the revenue generated has been almost non-existent. I've tried to find other places to host, but the hosting packages I've found have been way to expensive for me to afford.

Over the next week I'll be exporting all the data to BlogML. If you are a blogger here and would like your content, let me know and I'll send you a URL where you can download the BlogML file. When you find another home I'm willing to redirect all traffic to your site here to a single URL at your new host. I'll also setup redirects of all your RSS feeds to a new site.

Again, I apologize. This isn't something that I would like to happen and I wish I was able to give everyone more notice.

Merry Christmas!

2006-12-25T22:19:00Z

I would just like to take a quick opportunity to wish you and yours a very merry Christmas!

TFS and name changes

2006-10-18T18:36:03Z

One of my fellow developers on my team just had her name change. We figured there would be a few issues when her login name changed and TFS pretty much puked on it. It seems that TFS stores some workspace mapping info locally and part of that information is the owner name. When it connects to the server it gets all sorts of conflicts because the workspace on the server has the same mappings as the workspace on the client but they are owned by different logins. After a bit of digging, I found the solution.

If this happens to you go to “C:\Documents and Settings\{login}\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Team Foundation\1.0\Cache\” and open the VersionControl.config file and delete all of the WorkspaceInfo nodes. Don’t worry, they will be recreated once you connect to the server again. There you have it! And next time, try to convince your coworkers to leave their names alone!

Whoops

2006-08-23T05:10:00Z

Looks like the registration slipped for the Dojo! Sorry about that! All seems to be back to normal again. (At least DNS seems to have propagated correctly to the South Loop in Chicago)

As an FYI to all y'all, if I have a few spare cycles this weekend, I'll be upgrading the dojo yet again but this time it will be to CS 2.1.

Who needs the GAC?

2006-08-17T23:43:00Z

I certainly don't. Most of the time.

Lately I've been spending time working with Team Build to automate the builds of a few of our applications and I've discovered that way too many apps deploy themselves into the GAC. Discovered isn't the right word, I've known for awhile that all of our 3rd party controls go into the GAC, but I didn't realize how big of a pain it was going to be.

In my not-so-humble opinion, if you aren't creating a framework of some sort that is going to be versioned fairly slowly (I'm talking 1 1/2 to 2 year dev cycles) don't be putting yourself in the GAC. Controls that update themselves monthly are not candidates to be installed in the GAC. They are just to volatile. Also, my build server is going to be building various web apps, some windows services, and a winforms app or two. I don't want to be constantly installing software onto that machine.

Another issue of having every Tom, Dick, and Harry install things into the GAC is it now makes it more difficult for me get another developer up and running. Instead of a simple "Get the latest code from this branch of the Acme Project" it turns into a "Get the latest, install Xyz Corps MegaControls package, then install Abc Systems SimpleGrid Plus, then install...". Let me drop all of the references I need in a directory that is in source control and the new developer is up and running and building in a couple minutes. Otherwise he will be burning a day or more installing software.