.NET

I just put up my new web site at KenCox.ca which is based on Microsoft's Small Business Site Starter Kit . One of the problems with sample sites is that they're often too elaborate and completely undocumented. By the time you reverse engineer the code to figure out what's going on, you could have built your own site from scratch. This small business kit is quite easy to work with and has just enough functionality for my needs. If you're design-challenged like me, a starter kit is...(read more)

As some of you may (or may not) know I'm a developer working at Microsoft on the Outlook team. My primary focus is Outlook Programmability (i.e. Outlook COM Object Model). Now that Office 2007 is complete I would like to post some code samples of how to use some of the new Outlook Object Model API's. Two new API's I plan on discussing are the PropertyAccessor and the Table. However, if there are any general questions about Outlook programming that you would like me to discuss or post code samples for please let me know. I've already had a request for sample Powershell scripts that automate Outlook, so I will try to provide a couple examples of that.

Most of my posts are generally technical code samples or tips and tricks. Usually they are solutions to a problem I was faced with and had to spend some time researching to find or develop. I post them to help reduce research time for others (and myself 2 years from now it is a great way to remember things) who are faced with a similar problem.

That said I'm now looking for post ideas that will help give more back to the community that provided me with some many solutions over the years. So if you have a technical question that can best be addressed by a small code sample I'm your man. Off the top of my head some areas I consider myself proficient in are: Outlook Programmability, VBA, Regular Expressions, C# and .NET development.

I'm currently exploring Windows Vista and particularly Vista media center (got my first media center PC setup a couple months ago and just upgraded to Vista), so don't be surprised to see some posts in that area over the coming months.

So if you have a requests please leave a comment and I will see what I can come up with.

Obviously I missed the boat somewhere along the line. I realized today that I've never used FormsAuthentication in an ASP.NET v2.0 application before. As it turns out, it doesn't work the same as it used to.

Back in the old days of v1.x, you could call FormsAuthentication.SetAuthCookie(name, persist), then change its expiration date and make it last for a year. Just to make sure I wasn't crazy, I checked some of my old and yellowing v1.x books to make sure that this is what you did. I hope I didn't write that into my book, because the persistance part doesn't work anymore, or rather, doesn't work the same.

Sure, the cookie will be there, but the plumbing will consider it invalid once the session times out. As Scott mentions in a link from the comments, you can change the timeout, but this isn't exactly what I was going for since it creates a sliding expiration. I wanted a finite ending in 30 days.

This article on MSDN describes what you should do. I'm a little annoyed that this change happened without changing the interface, or rather adding a different one for the current behavior. Having some arbitrary sliding timeout is weird to me, and having a "persist cookie" value in SetAuthCookie implies that it's going to stick around until you tell it otherwise.

Of course, maybe I just feel really silly for not having been exposed to the change ages ago. 

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Actually this post has nothing to do with llamas but Flickr never fails me:

I"ve been personally putting off trying to get my head around Lambda expressions in C# 3.0 for awhile as I"m trying to get everything wrapped up with what came with 2.0 however a little gem has come out of the quagmire we call the internet. My good friend Howard Dierking, not a llama but a certification guy and all around cool developer over at the evil empire, has put together an awesome explaination of Lambda expressions and C# 3.0 by walking us through what we do in 2.0 and now C# 3.0.

His explanation and example makes perfect sense, cuts down the clutter of delegate code, is easy to understand, and if you don"t get it now you"ll really be in trouble when the .NET 3.5 framework hits. Check out Howards blog entry here and judge for yourself.

I've developed a strange problem. I'm using FormsAuthentication to login users. I persist the .ASPXAUTH cookie and set its expiration to today plus 30 days.

The cookie doesn't go anywhere, but the app stops recognizing it. I check it and, indeed, the cookie is still there with an expiration a month away. The only thing "exotic" that I can think of that I do is assign some roles to the principal, but I've done that before without consequence.

Any suggestions? 

C"est une question qui revient régulierement à mes oreilles (voir le NG et/ou mon blog). La réponse trés rapide serait d"utiliser les Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (VSeWSS) de Microsoft. Certes, elles sont encore ...

J"en parle souvent dans mon Blog, mais cette Toolbar m"a plus d"une fois était BIEN utile lors de correction de cahrte CSS ou de montage HTML particulierement hardue (ahhh SPS 2003 ...) >>> Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar : BETA 2 Bien d...

Je suis et je resterais un FAN absolu des moteurs de recherche. Je ne parle pas de Yahoo, Google ou Live mais des moteurs de recherche/indexation d"entreprise. Je fait bien la différence. Il ne faut pas confondre l"indexation Web et celle d"un volume ...

Comme le disais Coq, les vidéos de la WEB TV de Microsoft sur le lancement d"Office et de Vista sont en ligne. Bien des têtes connus de CodeS-Sources et d"ASP-PHP Votre serviteur par exemple sur la chaine DEV - Plus la chaîne des développeurs Au men...