iFinity

A lot of people use Sql Server express for the reason of it’s generous licensing.  One of the drawbacks of Sql Server express is that it comes without the Sql Agent – which is the batch-running part of Sql Server.  Sql Agent is used to run jobs to do all sorts of things with Sql Server, and one of the most common jobs is to run a backup schedule.  And, as everyone knows, you need to have a daily backup schedule on your database, or one day, you’re going to pay for it.

This blog post will cover how to setup a backup procedure which will backup databases, zip them up, copy them to a location, ftp them to a backup server for long term storage, and clean up after itself.   I’ve done this without purchasing a single piece of backup software, and relied on in-built tools or shareware.

It’s targeted towards people who are running their own web server, whether it’s co-located, hosted or a VPS.  If the thought of command line utilities, scheduled tasks and file permissions stresses you, then I’d suggest the...

This is a philosophical post targeted at anyone who messes about with code, and from time to time comes across intractable problems that they just can’t get around.

When I first started writing code for a living (as opposed to messing about) I had a mentor who got placed into the role by simple fact that she sat at the desk behind me in my very first job.   As the newbie on the team, I was pretty much less than useless, because not only could I not produce anything worthwhile, I actively took up peoples time trying to figure out why I couldn’t produce anything worthwhile.  I knew this for a fact when I was assigned to ‘tidy up the team bookshelf’ – then a mess of programming and system manuals in those natty clip-open binders, so you could plug in the latest updates.  Remember those?

Anyway, my self-appointed mentor (shamefully I can’t remember her name, though I’d run with Christina) basically got to the point where she told me “you can solve the problem, just keep tracing it until it presents itself”. ...

This blog post is going to cover a pretty small subset of problems that people have with auto-generated Urls using Friendly Urls in DotNetNuke.    All Friendly Url solutions in DNN, regardless of what module used to generate them, approach the problem of making Urls better by converting some of the querystring values into the actual Url path.

Explained simply, a url which looks like this :

/default.aspx?tabid=64&key=value&text=description

will be converted to a url which looks like this (assume tabid 64 is ‘DNNPage’)

/Tabid/64/DNNPage/key/value/text/description/default.aspx or /DNNPage/key/value/text/description.aspx

The differences between the DNN Friendly Url Provider and the Url Master module is that the DNN provider will keep the tabid and the /default.aspx on the end, whereas the Url Master disposes of these parts of the Url.  However, the main similarity remains : the querystring items are converted to be part of the Url path.

In most cases this is advantageous,...

I recently had a problem writing a PayPal Instant Payment Notification (IPN) listener.  The problem was that the PayPal Sandbox environment (now puzzlingly called x.com) would process my IPN requests OK, but any ‘live’ request that came through my site ended in error.

Now the PayPal support people assured me that this wasn’t possible, but after dumping most of the actual code out of my module, and replacing it with highly-sensitive ‘gotcha’ error capturing code, I worked out the problem was due to a slight difference in the date formats between the Sandbox and Live environments.

The Sandbox date looked like this:

22:40:29 Dec. 16, 2009 PST

The live date looked like this:

13:02:26 Dec 21, 2009 PST

Eagle eyed readers will detect the difference straight away.  It was a bit more difficult for me, as I was looking through raw logs and all I could see was 22%3A40%3A29+Dec.+16%2C+2009+PST as the values are encoded.  It was a surprise for me, but I guess I should have been more...