dougv.com « Doug Vanderweide

I’ve recently despammed my Twitter follower list. If you were following me, and now find yourself blocked, you have my apologies. Please send me an e-mail and I’ll unblock you.

This provides me with a great opportunity to discuss my attitude about Twitter followers and following.

Generally speaking, if someone starts following me, I follow them. If I follow someone, I usually expect to be followed back, and likely will stop following, after a week or so, someone who isn’t following me.

Exceptions to this rule are announcement accounts (e.g, @MSDN, @GoogleCode, @APStylebook) and major celebrities (guideline: someone whose identity has been verified by Twitter, e.g. @SethMacFarlane).

I may decide not to follow someone, but that doesn’t mean I mind them following me. I prefer a two-way street, but that’s not to say that people who only want to listen aren’t welcome to follow me.

I do mind being followed by Twitter accounts that are:

• Obviously meant only to spam. If all a follower does on Twitter is solicit business, please keep me out of it.
• Astroturfing. This one is sometimes a judgment call, but if a follower’s tweets are about things other than the kinds of things I am talking about (or the follower hasn’t  tweeted at all), and that tweeter is following a lot of other people with whom he is not communicating / has no common interests, I’ll probably toss him into this category and block him.
• Patently offensive. Profanity, sexually suggestive comments, edgy humor; these are all fine. Trolling and hating are not.
• Malicious bots. I am followed by a handful of IT bots; so long as they’re reposting / harvesting relevant info, I’m OK with that. All other bots can GTFO.

There are a couple of ways to create an RSS feed from a SQL database store. Over at 4GuysFromRolla.com, there’s a post explaining how to create an RSS feed using a regular old ASP.NET Web Form.

Another option would be to write a script that creates an actual XML file on some periodic basis (probably just before the recommended “time to live” setting of the feed). The benefit of that is, one taxes the database server a little every now and then, and a “real” XML file does the work.

But as a rule, for ASP.NET applications, Microsoft recommends using HTTP handlers or modules whenever one wants to present data other than HTML.

(Aside on handlers vs. modules: A handler is a special ASP.NET Web page; a module is a plug-in one can install in Internet Information Server. If you’ve got a lot of different, special-case Web processing, or one need that is near-constant — such as processing images stored in a database every time a specific page is called — then you’ll want to consider a module. For occasional or lightweight processing, such as serving up a low-use RSS stream, a handler will do fine. End of aside.)

So that’s what we’ll use here. Let’s begin by creating an ASP.NET HTTP handler, which is written in the same way one would write the code behind for an ASP.NET page, but uses the file extension .ashx.

Continue reading: Creating An ASP.NET RSS Feed, Using Data From SQL Server And HTTP WebHandler »

After writing so much about the ASP.NET cryptographic padding oracle exploit, and the recommended workaround of a static error document, it dawned on me that I should probably make some custom error documents for my domains.

And then I decided I should share them. So, if you’re so inclined, you can download the custom error documents I use on this site. I release all code under the latest version of the GNU GPL.

I’ve created pages for 401 (unauthorized), 403 (forbidden), 404 (not found) and 500 (internal server) HTTP errors. Here’s how they look (click thumbnails for larger image):

I designed these to be valid XHTML 1.0; to appear well in all screen resolutions from 1024 x 768 and greater; and to appear the same on most Web browsers. (Of course, I exclude Internet Explorer prior to version 7 from that list.)

This little exercise also gave me a chance to play with the Google Font API. There aren’t a lot of fonts available yet, but using the API couldn’t be simpler.

Instructions on implementing custom error document on Apache can be found here. Microsoft documents how to add customError files to your ASP.NET web.config file here.

All links in this post on delicious: http://www.delicious.com/dougvdotcom/custom-errordocuments-available-for-download

The first New England GiveCamp was this weekend at Microsoft’s Northeast Research and Development building in Cambridge, MA, and it was, by far, one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had in the 15 years I have been professionally coding.

About 100 technical and non-technical volunteers spent the weekend of June 11-13 writing code for charities. Most projects were Web site upgrades — either installing a content management system, or extending that system to do something it didn’t do before, such as collecting very specific data, integrating with a customer relationship management tool, etc.

Other projects were more complex. For example, my project was data normalization and version control.

I was assigned to the Goshen Land Trust, a charity that protects open and green space in Goshen, CT. My team members were Kriss Aho and Pat Tormey, both from the Boston area; and Chris Craig, the president of GLT.

Prior to last weekend, GLT tracked all its customer relationships in Excel spreadsheets. They do their accounting in Quickbooks.

If someone was a volunteer, his name went into the volunteer spreadsheet. If he owned land, his name was in the landowner spreadsheet. If he was a land or money donor, his name went into another spreadsheet. And so on, and so on; this story has been told a thousand times before, we all know it by heart.

And, of course, there were several versions of each of these spreadsheets out there: They were exchanged back and forth via e-mail, meaning no two copies of the same spreadsheet were alike. Again, stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

Finally, donor payments are managed entirely separate from the spreadsheets, via entries into Quickbooks. So there’s a completely different store of around 800 mostly duplicate names in Quickbooks, too, which isn’t easily compared to a spreadsheet of about 2,000 names.

So we had to figure out a way to impose some version control on these sheets; we had to create a master data store, so we could have an authoritative source of customer relationship information; and we had to sync customer information in Quickbooks to match the master data store.

Sounds like fun, I know. It actually was, after it stopped being awful.

Continue reading: New England GiveCamp 2010: What A Great Experience »

One of the things I found out about at Tuesday’s MSDN Northeast Roadshow stop in Augusta is the first New England GiveCamp, June 11-13 at Microsoft’s Northeast Research and Development center in Cambridge, MA.

I’m attending, and I’d urge you to do so.

A GiveCamp is basically a gathering of developers, DBAs, project managers, designers and other IT folks in a given place, to donate their time and skills to charitable projects.

In the case of the New England GiveCamp, typical projects include upgrading Access databases, or converting Excel spreadsheets to Access; integrating open-source tools, such as Joomla, Drupal and Django, into existing Web sites; adding various gizmos to and tuning up existing Web sites; and several requests to spruce up the look of various types of collateral.

I believe the biggest mistake you could make in deciding whether to participate is thinking that you don’t have the kind of skills needed. From what’s been said at the GiveCamp’s Web site, there’s going to be plenty to do, whether you’re Linus Torvalds or Linus Van Pelt.

I think this goes doubly for graphic designers. Trust me, if you are an artistic person, no matter how little you think of your work, your worst effort is 10 times better than the best design ever produced by a programmer. I am speaking from extensive personal experience here. We’re the people who gave the Internet Comic Sans, animated GIFs and the <marquee> tag, remember. Please, save us from ourselves.

As the Northeast GiveCamp put it, “If you have the passion, we’ll find a place for you.”

In addition to the technical work on site, there are a myriad other volunteer opportunities both before and during the event, including registration, sponsor solicitation, organizing the development teams and matching them to non-profit organizations, handling logistics for food and snacks, and others we’ll discover along this journey!

Continue reading: Designers And Developers: Donate Your Time, Talent At New England GiveCamp, June 11-13, 2010 »