Something about RSS [RSS news and comments]

Silence...

It's been a while since I haven't updated this blog. The end of the year is comming and projects should be finished. So, this period I was much busy than usual. Maybe the same happened to you.

However, today's subject is ...

Microsoft Shell (MSH)

I've just read this article from developer.com. This looks like a very interesting idea: to create "commandlets" using .NET framework wich work in the same way in command prompt and GUI programs.
If .bat files were replaced by Windows shell scripts or HTA scripts, why don't we have a .NET version of them? Everything should be .NET, right?

We'll see if they are really the solution for these problems.

Regular expressions

Many of you are already using regular expressions. Basically they are a pattern that match a text string. These are not new concepts but many people are not using them. Regular expressions (regex or regexp) are very powerful and used in many languages (scripts or compiled): PERL, VBScript, JavaScript, C++, etc. Try this Google search.

If you are using MS technologies you may find interesting these MSDN articles.
Let's see an example (VBScript / ASP):

<%
Set rex = New RegExp
rex.Pattern = "^[A-Za-z]{3}[0-9]{5,7}$"
rex.Ignorecase = false
response.write ( rex.Test("ABC1234567"))
%>

This will print True/False for expression tested, based on the pattern (valid codes must have 3 letters and 5-7 digits).

The Spoke

What is The Spoke? This is a new web blog site that comes from Microsoft. Now there are many sites which offer weblogs, not only Blogger or LiveJournal, but this new one will succesful (with such parents :) ). As I read in many articles, weblogs, RSS and news aggregators will be part of the next Windows (Longhorn). Very interesting.

IIS upload

IIS 6.0 (maybe others, too) has a default value for uploads of only 200 kb. If you upload bigger files you'll get an error: "Operation not allowed".

This value is controlled by a variable called AspMaxRequestEntityAllowed kept in metabase.xml file (usually %WINDIR%\system32\inetsrv). You can change this value.
Here is how:

Solution #1: manually
- You can stop IIS (net stop iisadmin) or check an option in IIS manager (Properties): "Enable Direct Metabase Edit"
- Open %WINDIR%\system32\inetsrv\metabase.xml with Notepad
- Change values for AspMaxRequestEntityAllowed (maybe from 204800 to 1024000)
- Restart IIS, if stopped (net start w3svc)

Solution #2: with a script (found here [chinese], translated here)
Add these lines in an *.vbs file and execute it:

'use VBS
Set obj1=GetObject ("winmgmts:/root/MicrosoftIISv2")
Set obj2=obj1.get ("IIsWebVirtualDirSetting='W3SVC/1/ROOT'")
'Output default value
WScript.Echo "AspMaxRequestEntityAllowed Default Value: "& obj2.AspMaxRequestEntityAllowed
'Reset the value
Obj2.AspMaxRequestEntityAllowed=1024000 ' set to 1mbyte, u can set to other what you want:)
' Save data
Obj2.Put_ ()
'Output new value
WScript.Echo "AspMaxRequestEntityAllowed New Value: "& obj2.AspMaxRequestEntityAllowed

Not sure is this script works correctly because looks like changing the value only for IIS ROOT (<IIsWebVirtualDir>) but not for the whole service (<IIsWebService>). So first solution should works better.