Sean

Programmatic generation of word documents

I had the opportunity to play around with generating word documents last week. At first I looked at what I had used before (the Office PIA). I quickly remembered that it was not very easy to work with because most of it is based on COM interop anyways. Further-more, I

CSharp

IIS7 URL Rewrite Basic Authentication Problems

I have an IIS7 machine that is redirecting traffic for a tomcat application on our network. It was working fine until I realized that the webdav module of the application wasn't authenticating. However, the un-proxy'd URL works just fine, so I figured it had to have

Bill Gates had it easy

Flying on the airplane the other day I was trying to think of some cool ideas for software that would already have been developed 10k times over... Then it dawned on me; Bill Gates had it easy. Back in the early 80's, it seems to me that it

IT

Migrating Crowd Directories

When I originally started using Crowd, I set it up with an internal directory... A type of directory that is proprietary to the Crowd application. Ideally, I would have set it up with an AD/LDAP directory, but at the time I did not have one setup. Now, of course,

Database

Hidden tables when restoring MySQL databases

This last week I was working a lot with MySQL databases... Trying to upgrade Confluence and JIRA. In the process of doing so I ended up having to backup and restore the MySQL databases a number of times to try and get the upgrades to work correctly (in my dev

IT

Securing IIS FTP from brute attacks

The other day I checked out the FTP logs on my server and found that there had been thousands of hits on random usernames like “Administrator”, “Anonymous” and “Guest”. I figured surely there was something built into Windows Server 2003’s IIS that supported brute force prevention, but sadly I

IT

Skype with Outlook 2010 Contacts

A while back when I was using Outlook 2007, the contacts from Outlook would show up in Skype with a different icon so that I knew they were Skype contacts. This worked really well for me because I keep all my contacts in Exchange and Outlook (synch'd to

Plugged in

I've been working out of home for 4+ years now. When I tell this to people I get mixed responses; some say "wow that must be nice" while other says "wow I bet that's tough". When they say "nice" they

IT

First experience with MS Support

Yesterday I called up Microsoft Support to discuss the calendaring sharing issue I am experiencing. At first I was directed to Exchange support. They quickly established that it wasn't an exchange problem because the calendar sharing permissions work fine in OWA and Outlook 2010. So, they forwarded me

IT

Exchange Server 2010 calendar sharing. Administrator hell.

For the most part, navigating the Exchange Management Console has been very intuitive. The location of the Send Connectors, the Receive Connectors, the Mailboxes; they all make sense and are (within reason) easy to find. One seriously lacking administration feature is permissions. There is no built-in permissions-editing tool in the

IT

Setting Up Exchange

This last couple weeks I've been slowly setting up a new install of Exchange 2010. Needless to say, it was a very interesting experience. My job description may not be "Administrator" but I do enjoy setting up systems like that. Even more-so when it adds structure

IT

IIS FTP 7.5 Broken Site

I performed a fresh install of Windows Server 2008 about two weeks ago. Although the setup was easy as can be, I ran into some issues with IIS/FTP. First off, the FTP that is packaged with the server is garbage, don't even bother. After IIS is installed

IT

Google Apps and Outlook... success

I have been using Outlook since the beginning of time. It has always been good to me. I even hopped on the Office 2010 beta and eventually purchased Office 2010 when it was released. I have several machines, not including my smart-phone (previously a windows mobile phone, now the DROID

IT

Logging Full SOAP Messages

Working with SOAP so much often leaves me needing to view the entire SOAP message that is being sent to (or from) my WCF services. For a long while I had the chunk of XML configuration code stored away on my machine knowing that I would have to use it

Standards

Validating CDA XML with C#

Validating CDA documents in C# seems to be a bit tricky… At first, I started out just copying the infrastructure and processable schemas to a project and creating the code to use those schemas to validate. Unfortunately, I kept getting errors like “Missing complexType ‘II’ used in restriction base”. The

CSharp

Generating CDA Code

Generating C# code from the CDA schemas is a little different than in my previous article about XCA implementation… With XCA, svcutil doesn’t recognize <import> and <include> so you have to specify each XSD and WSDL on the command-line of the svcutil call. However, with

CSharp

XCA Implementation

A while back I began working on a project where I had to develop an XCA service. For those of you who don.t know what XCA is, see this: Cross-Community Access (XCA). XCA is a supplement of the XDS.b standard, which is Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (the .b. as

Standards

Introduction to CDA

My most recent work has put me in a position to learn a great deal more about the health care IT industry. It has been quite an interesting learning curve over the past few months. Looking back, I’ve worked on hospital scheduling systems for an extensive period of time,

IT

Testing Outlook 2010

A couple days back I installed Outlook 2010 Beta because I read an article about it that described a couple features that I could really use. So far, I must say, I am reallyimpressed with the product. Although the interface hasn.t been changed that much, the changes that they

My Software

Earlier I was thinking about all the different tools I use and how neat they are and I thought I would share the (vast?) list of tools with everyone and individual thoughts on them. Productivity * Microsoft Office 2007 * Outlook: The best email tool, ever. I use outlook in conjunction with

IT

XPS 420 Vista Bluetooth Headset Problems (Dell fails, I win)

A while back I ran into some issues with my system getting BSOD'd... The dell online chat representative (after remote assisting me) suggested that I re-install windows. After I did that I could no longer properly use my bluetooth headset devices. Today, I spent about 30 minutes with

Windows PHP Development

Any developer that has programmed PHP can recognize that PHP was intended for Linux distributions and web servers. However, coming from a windows background I generally fancy windows web servers (not Linux). Don.t get me wrong, I am very familiar with Linux and at one point ran my own

IT

Experiences with my new Acer easyStore Server Continued (with problems)

So my home server has been running now for almost a week (sort of). On Saturday the power went out in my basement and all my machines were shut off. When I flipped the breaker everything started coming back up and online, except for my new server. I talked to

CSharp

Performance of Finding Duplicates in LINQ

Today I saw about a dozen lines of code in a project that I was working on simply dedicated to determining whether or not there are duplicates within a stringlist (List). This made me start to question whether or not there was a better way of doing this, to which

IT

Experiences with my new Acer easyStore server

Yesterday I received my new Acer easyStore server. For a while now I have been needing a new server and this one caught my eye with the competitive cost and the extra memory. For the same price of the HP home server I was able to get an extra 1.