the advents with nyxtom

When was the last time you decided you needed to deploy a product of yours. How often is it that you run into a situation where configuration and the manual to installation of your projects becomes a royal pain in the neck? Well, for most, maybe not all that often, but for the few in the corporate world - this may happen all too often.

Every now and then it's always nice to have a little system of automation to ease your way into deployment, packaging and all sorts of interesting things. To do so, all you have to do is dance dance! :D

A lot has changed in the world of web services. This series is to get you on the right track to building incredible web services using a ridiculously easy model in the .NET 3.0 Framework.

A thousand times over, I will explain this one seemingly simple concept. Whenever you feel like you are running into a keyset does not exist issue. There are several plausible causes to this.

As a quick measure, open Start - Run and type in MMC.

Click File - Add/Remove Snap-In - Select Certificates and Click Add. Select Computer and Local. Then OK.

1. Make sure that the certificate you are looking for is actually in the certificate store. You can see above that I am in the Local Machine certificate store. If you are attempting to load a certificate from the LocalMachine Personal Store then it should be located there.
   
   
2. Does the certificate have a private key? Every certificate is associated with a private key, but it may not actually be available with the certificate itself. And, depending on how you imported the certificate, many times the private key may have been imported under your user account - but if you by chance copied a certificate into a different store, the private key may not go with it. It's important that you import the certificates to the right place the first time.
   
   
3. Does your process have sufficient rights to access the certificate? With a web-application you will need to grant the web app access through a tool called winhttpcertcfg.exe. Otherwise, you will probably need to run the process under the same account that the certificate is running with. System is sufficient for a certificate in the Local Machine. For developing in Vista and above, simply run Visual Studio in Administrator mode and you should have access to it.

And in case you were wondering exactly how to load a certificate in the first place. It's actually quite trivial. Use the following snippet to help with that.

X509Certificate2 cert = null;

X509Store store = new X509Store(StoreName.My, StoreLocation.LocalMachine);

store.Open(OpenFlags.ReadOnly);

X509Certificate2Collection coll = store.Certificates.Find(X509FindType.FindBySubjectName, 

"MyCertSubjectName", false);

if (coll.Count == 1)

cert = coll[0];

store.Close();

return cert;

Enjoy :)

I did a search to do this and the few links that came up happened to not work. However after a few iterations and a few adjustments to the examples I did find, I managed to get it working. Create a text file and copy in the following:

It isn't enough to pass by a statement without making it bold so I'll just state it as plain and straight as I can.

Software Development, better so product development, does not require a breath-first approach. Software is about building structure out of a unstructured idea. Design is about attempting to capture that for what it's worth to a humane understanding. Management is the process of ensuring that all this knowledge is kept synchronized and a flow is followed to the end-goal.

I found a nice old web application I created a little less than a year ago during my Spanish class. The objective was simple, create a "wiki-esque" site that allows you to enter verbs, words and definitions and associate those with a picture. The idea was focused on being able to compose it as I was learning Spanish. At any rate:

The one feature I especially like about this site is the ability to add accents as you type in any text box.

Simply type the character of interest: a, then type the character ` (the backquote/tilda key on the top-left of the keyboard). This will immediately make any of the characters, accented. ?` = ¿, a` = á, n` = ñ... etc. Pretty neat eh?

http://theadvents.com/linguist/wiki

Network monitoring is a pain in the neck. The major reason this is that way is party because it is a manual job for the most part. Writing scripts to automate, log and track information. But on the other hand, if we were to have a simple tool that shows the most important alerts front and center with a nice user interface - it is possible that network monitoring could be easier. Like this:

Here we can create an alert system on the right (always visible and automatically updating) and on the left hand side we can create column views. As an alternative to this, I was thinking of a canvas like area that we can zoom in and out of for context.

Here you can represent the monitoring objects of interest by icons and should there be any issues you add error, critical or warning icons to show that there is an issue. We could create different types of icons to represent things like servers, server applications, websites, clients, network routers, printers, fax machines and more. Best of all, we can maintain this is a small space since we are only displaying the most important information first.

I came up with a new design for my alter ego - theadvents - where I have a place to post project links, videos, and a mini-blog feed all on the home page. It hides a lot of the content from view so whenever people poke around I could have it display content. I was also thinking of having a live comment canvas where people can write comments and see others live (temporarily of course).

This way, the site can grow in content rather than be forced into it. :)

Remember a long time ago we built a few neat audio tools together? Then if you remember even further back I talked a bit about my involvement with some helpdesk systems. Well, we're going to revisit pieces of those in order to build something spectacular. We are going to build our own home-grown conference software. Here's a few ideas I had in mind for this:

Chatters

Chatters are little dots that radiate sound. Whenever someone logs-in or is available to talk to, or is in the queue to be talked to, then the little dot pops up on your desktop. If you click on the dot you can get more information about the person and options to talk with them.

Group Chatter

When you want to hold a conference you simply have to group a few people up together into a roughly drawn circle. A brush on the desktop to draw that circlish figure and dragging your buddies in there. Of course, this would have to notify the intending parties that a conference is being held, to which they may or may not join.

Let's start with those first and work our way up.