Authentication and Access Control Diagnostics 1.0 (AuthDiag)

Download details: AuthDiag

"Authentication and Access Control Diagnostics 1.0 (more commonly known as AuthDiag) is a tool released by Microsoft aimed at aiding IT professionals and developers at more effectively finding the source of authentication and authorization failures.

These users have often seen behavior from Internet Information Services (IIS) that doesn't seem appropriate or random when users authenticate to the IIS server. The complex world of authentication types and the various levels of security permissions necessary to allow a user to access the server causes many hours of labor for those tasked with troubleshooting these problems.

AuthDiag 1.0 offers a robust tool that offers a efficient method for troubleshooting authentication on IIS 5.x and 6.0. It will analyze metabase configuration and system-wide policies and warn users of possible points of failure and guide them to resolving the problem. AuthDiag 1.0 also includes a robust monitoring tool called AuthMon designed at capturing a snapshot of the problem while it occurs in real-time. AuthMon is robust and specially designed for IIS servers removing any information not pertinent to the authentication or authorization process."

If you need this, then you really need this...

(via Michael Howard's Web Log-IIS Auth Diagnostic tool now available)

VS 2005 - Team System On MSDN Tonight

VS 2005 - Team System On MSDN Tonight

"Just passing on the word that VSTS should be available for download to MSDN subscribers starting tonight. I for one am super psyched to get my hands on these bits since I will finally have support for all the team based tasks I do on a daily basis baked right into my favorite development environment."

Downloading it now...

The Code Project - SILVER BULLETS TOOLKIT. Reference Book of Successful Project Solutions in the process of Software Development - Design and Strategy

The Code Project - SILVER BULLETS TOOLKIT. Reference Book of Successful Project Solutions in the process of Software Development - Design and Strategy

Free 98 page PDF related to the software development process...

The author's main idea seems to be to take cumbs of SD knowledge/info found around the Net, etc and put them into book form.

Nice overview of a number of topics (RUP, XP, Career Growth, Developer Functions, Life Cycle stuff, etc, etc).

Very update to date, the version on the cover is 8/28/2004...

For the price, it's a nice reference.

NxBRE: Edit Inference Engine Rules in Visio 2003

SourceForge.net: Edit Inference Engine Rules in Visio 2003!

"NxBRE v2.1 will leverage the DatadiagramML schema of Visio 2003 XML files and a specific set of shapes for bringing the users a new experience in term of rule base edition!

No more clumsy-home-made-buggy user interfaces! The intuitive environment of Visio 2003 allows a very comfortable management of implications, queries and facts.

See: http://nxbre.org/visio.png"


Now that's cool...

Blawger Bowl

Blawger Bowl

There are some blawer blogs listed here that I want to check out...

How To: Win an Autographed Visual Studio 2005 Baseball [VSS Bug]

How To: Win an Autographed Visual Studio 2005 Baseball

"...an email about VSS performance arrived from one of our hardworking VSS Product Support representatives.

"When using the restore wizard via the SourceSafe admin, you'll notice the CPU using up to 90% processor, but if you click on the title bar of the progress window and hold, utilization goes down to ~15 percent and the restore completes much quicker."

Go figure! This issue appears to repro on all VSS 6.0 builds.

Imagine... You're fresh out of college with a computer science degree. You apply for and get hired as a "Configuration Manager" at a little software company down the street. On your first day, your manager says, "Okay, you've used VSS before, right? Your first task is to sit here and hold down the mouse button on the title bar of this progress window until the restore operation completes." LOL."


LMAO... Nice.

Check out the blog for a contest for the best work around/hack/etc for this...

Big Guns [Army Steve]

Big Guns

"...The M82 is a beast of a gun. It fires the same rounds as the .50 cal machine guns that we use. It's heavy and extremely loud. You'll see what I mean in the movie below - it literally causes a shockwave that shakes the ground enough to raise a big cloud of dust for like a 4 or 5 foot radius around the gun... "

I so want one of these... :)

The ArmySteve blog is pretty cool. Written by 1LT Steve Smith who is currently stationed in Iraq.

Even though he's an officer, he still sounds pretty cool... ;)

DAEMON Tools Updated to 3.47

DAEMON Tools Homepage :: News

"... is a hotfix-version to adress the latest issues
(especially the atapi.sys-lock with XP SP2).

The changelog for V3.47:

* Fixed lockup with some images containing bad sectors made by Alcohol (MDS)
* Fixed Nero InCD formatting problem with DAEMON Tools present
* Fixed atapi.sys locking problem (as a result, some emulation ability is removed for PCD5 until new release)

we greatly suggest to upgrade to V3.47 ! "

Looks like my fav CD-ROM emulator, virtulizer, ISO mounting tool has been rev'ed.

Since I have XP2 on all my hope machines, I should get this...

(via BetaNews)

BVS Free Solitaire - Reviews and free downloads at Download.com

BVS Free Solitaire - Reviews and free downloads at Download.com

This is something my wife might be interested in. It's nice that she uses her 1 year old uber-Dell to play card games...

:|

Bob Beauchemin's Blog - Good XQuery Books

Bob Beauchemin's Blog - Good XQuery Books

Bob Beauchemin lists a couple XQuery books...

Having seen XQuery in SQL 2K5, I can see I'll need a couple of these...

Five More GMail Invites to Give Out...

I have 5 more GMail invites to give out... (Just got them... seems the more I give out, the more invites I get to give... :)

gduncan411 >at> hotmail. First five emails in get the invites.

No strings, no contests, no BS.


Update #1 8/29/2004 @ 12:13 PM PDT:
Wow, that was fast...

One down, four to go.

Man, I love the communication that the internet enables. I've just added a new blog to my subscribed list, DarthPedro: Random Thoughts. Seems Darth and I share a number of common interests. D&D/RPG, Reading Science Fiction and .Net coding...

He's also got some interesting gadgets on his blog. Will have to check them out. (I like blog free gadgets.. can you tell? :)

Update #2 8/30/2004 @ 6:36 AM PDT:
Two down... three to go.

Update #3 8/30/2004 @ 7:26 PM PDT:
One left...

And another cool blog subscribed too...www.coreyhaines.com (South Park rocks :)

Update #4 8/30/2004 @ 7:35 PM PDT:
Well well... Gmail says I have 3 invites left to give out. I can't seem to give them away fast enough!! lol

Update #5 9/1/2004 @ 2:07 PM PDT:
Two left...

Update #6 9/1/2005 @ 6:05 AM PDT:
Google is now providing free accounts to any who ask... Please go to gmail.google.com for your free GMail account. Thanks.

"Essential SQL Server 2005 "Yukon" for Developers" Developmentor Course

"Essential SQL Server 2005 "Yukon" for Developers"

Last week I was at a Developmentor course on SQL2K5. It was instructed by Dan Sullivan, the coauthor of "A First Look at Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for Developers". Overall I have to say it was a great course.

My co-attendees were a pleasure to be with and provided a great cross slice of the development community. They were from around the US, form different companies all doing different things. They added a great deal to the class as they asked questions, made observations and had points of view that I didn't have.

Any training on a beta product is tough for the instructor, but Dan did a good job of handling with it. It's nice to attend a class given by someone who wrote the book on the subject. It would have been nice if Developmentor had thrown in a copy of the book though (which I made clear in the course eval).

5 solid days and we still were only able to cover about 1/4 of the new stuff in SQL2K5.... Man there's some cool stuff. It's going to drive DBA's insane. ;)

This was my 4th Developmentor course and I've been able to walk away with something usable from everyone. I wish they had a better location though. They are in a cookie-cutter industrial park in Torrance, CA. For me, that's a commute from hell (about 3 1/2 hours a day). It's actually geographically closer to my house than my work, but the freeways to get there just byte.

Developmentor is not cheap, but the investment in going to their courses always seems pay off...

Microsoft Office 2003 and Research Services Development Extras

"Very shortly, we will publish the Research Services Development Extras (RSDE) on our MSDN Office Developer Center (http://msdn.microsoft.com/office). I wanted to give you a heads-up on what's involved. If you have written your Research Service for Office 2003, you have noticed that there is a fair amount of XML work that could be encapsulated so as to eliminate busy work. In your Web service that communicates with Office, you need to volley back and forth with Office in XML streams that conform to the Research Service schemas. This work can get repetitive because it is predictable and straight-forward, and that makes it a good candidate for a wrapper. This wrapper is done, and it is in the RSDE download. We have also included a very cool trace utility that lets you intercept the XML converstation going on between Office and your Web service."

Cool...

There are also some links on this page related to Research Services development.

Research Services or IBF? Guess it depends on if you/your users need the document interactivity that IBF provides or if you just need to "look up" something while in Office...

MSF Agile preview is now available!

MSF Agile preview is now available!

"MSF Agile is one of our new methodologies. These methodologies will be baked directly into the tool. By selecting one, you will change the way the source control, work item tracking, reporting, and many other tool features work. Of course, they are extensible and replaceable if you want to do something different."

Randy Miller's, the principle designer of MSF Agile, description for this framework.

"Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) Agile is a scenario-driven, context-based, agile software development process for building and improving .NET and other object-oriented applications. MSF Agile directly incorporates practices for handling quality of service requirements such as performance and security. It is also context-based and uses a context-driven approach to determine how to operate the project. This approach helps create an adaptive process that overcomes the boundary conditions (such as project size and system criticality) of most agile software development processes while achieving the objectives set out in the vision of the project.

MSF Agile is highly customizable, scalable, and will be fully integrated with Visual Studio 2005 Team System. The tooling and processes will work together to provide a more productive user experience than the process or tooling could provide alone. This is because both tooling and processes are built using the same meta-model. In other words, MSF harvests proven guidance from inside and outside of Microsoft and provides a seamless experience with Visual Studio 2005 Team System for process automation and guidance within the software development life cycle."

Sounds cool... Less reinventing the same wheel...

I can't get into the workspace yet (standard GotDotNet "Your request cannot be processed at this time" error when I try to sign in.), but when I can I plan on checking this out...

Update #1 8/28/2004 8:22AM PDT:
GotDotNet Workspaces are up again... The team was applying a performance upgrade, which by the way seems to be working great. The workspaces now seem to be much faster.

Downloaded the release. This first version is pretty much "informational," i.e some stuff to read... But since VS2K5 is still a while away, makes sense there's not much content yet.

Pretty cool information delivery though. A single XML document, a html document and a bunch of XSLT files to transform the XML doc.

So this is currently on a "watch on a scheduled process" monitoring.

OT: Wish Release Date Postponed

Wish Warcry#28664

Sigh... I've been really looking forward to this game. I was in Beta 1 and it was very cool then...

Guess I'll just have to wait. (I hate waiting). sigh

Paying the Rent...

I now have AdSense on my blog! Yeah!

:)

I saw yesterday that Blogger/Google was starting to push adding Google's AdSense to Blogger blogs... So I said, what the heck. Now all my happy readers can see AdSense Ad's for my content (I hope).

I'm sure this will bring in enough money so I can quit my day job...

LOL

Ok. Hey, it's free and kind of cool (in a sick way)? So I gave it a go.

Visual Studio Beta 1 Refresh with Team System announced

Visual Studio Beta 1 Refresh with Team System announced

"Rick has announced on his blog that we've signed off on a new CTP of Visual Studio 2005. The exciting thing for me is that this is a refresh of Beta 1, but this time includes Team System!..."


Cool... So I guess this will be like Beta1.1...?

I wonder if this will jack up my SQL 2K5 install?

sigh... Time for a new VPC image. :)

"Interviewing at Microsoft"

Some links on interviewing at MS.

Not that I'm going to say I might need this kind of information soon, but you never know... ;)

"Part I -- What is it like to interview at Microsoft?
Part II -- Riding the recruiting shuttle
Part III -- Mock whiteboard session"

Update #1 8/25/2004 12:49 PDT:
Here's another MS info link.

"Interviewing at Microsoft" http://www.sellsbrothers.com/fun/msiview/

EffectiveBrand - Create Your Own Toolbar in 4 easy steps

This is interesting... an IE toolbar creation service where you can create your own IE toolbar, all online.

Sounds cool and also sounds like a great way to get spyware installed :

But I've always wanted my own toolbar... sigh.

More to play with :)

Software maker exposes hidden data | CNET News.com

Software maker exposes hidden data | CNET News.com

"Workshare, a specialist in collaboration software built around Microsoft Office applications, is aiming to alert businesses to the danger of hidden data lurking in their documents.
The company on Monday launched Metadatarisk.org, a Web site with information on the dangers posed by hidden metadata in documents. The site includes Metafind, a downloadable tool for automatically analyzing and exposing metadata in documents posted on a given Web site.
'There's up to 25 different types of hidden metadata that exists in Microsoft documents,' said Matthew Brown, Workshare product manager. 'And the more documents get passed around, the bigger the risk becomes.' "

Interesting and very related to my work...

Forwarding...

(via ActiveWin)