Allowing Web Service host to run locally without Administrator rights

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

If you’re writing WCF Web Services you maybe came to the point when you needed Administrator rights to start the Web ServiceHost. As a matter of fact the only thing you need is the right to use a that URL space.

So for  a WCF Web Service running on http://localhost:80/TestService/Ep2 you would use the netsh command line tool to set the correct rights.

Step 1: Start an Administrator-Commandline

Step 2: run “netsh http add urlacl url=http://+80/TestService/Ep2 user=SONES\bietiekay”

(SONES\bietiekay = the Domain+User to grant the right)

netsh

Hail Eris! All Hail Discordia!

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

pope

I was in desperate need for an DDate equivalent running on Windows. DDate is an unix implementaion of date accoridng to the erisian calendar described in the principia discordia.

I only found some C Implementations. And since it’s fun to do I ported the original Discordian Date C code to C#.

You can download the C# sourcecode, licensed under CC-BY-NC here.

I also created a web page which displays the current discordian date and offers you to convert any gregorian date into discordian date representation.

This page can be accesses here. You can call another page with parameters and you only will get the ddate output back:

for example: http://ddate.schrankmonster.de/DiscordianDate.aspx?year=2009&month=6&day=9

Source 1: http://ddate.schrankmonster.de/
Source 2: http://dropbox.schrankmonster.de/dropped/SharpDDateLib.zip

farewell Songbird

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

sonb

After not less than 3 and a half hour Songbird finished with importing the iTunes library I am using for about 6 years.

The first impression is: Cool, it’s got plugins!

The second impression is: Booh, it wants to restart (while stopping the music) to install!

It’s not faster than iTunes. And this is a sad thing, because the only thing I hoped it would be was faster. It’s not – the UI it’s as fast and responsive as iTunes’ UI – at best. With just a few clicks the whole songbird window went into sleep mode and the well known beachball came into the play.

Even worse: for some strange reason Songbird consumes considerably more CPU time while just sitting there and playing an MP3 than iTunes does:

songbirdcpu

18,7% CPU load used by songbird just by playing an mp3 (no filtering, no visualisation, no nothing)

itunescpu

2,3% CPU load for iTunes while doing exactly the same. Even the same mp3 was played.

iTunes even takes less memory… oh dear: A long way to go for the Songbird team.

taking Songbird for a spin (again)

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Since my last Songbird experiences were not that great I thought it would be a great idea to take the newly released 1.2 version of Songbird for a spin.

It’s said that the new version is faster and more stable. I installed 3 hours ago and I still cannot use it since it’s syncing with iTunes ever since.

songbird

More on that topic when songbird is ready….

Source: http://getsongbird.com/

Google Copy-Wave

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Oh dear. Another hyped protocol/platform from Google… oh wait. It’s not from Google. It’ all started in Xerox PARC…

There are several papers that describe what Google now claims to have developed…

copywave
left: Xerox PARC Paper; right: Google Wave

Conclusion: Go and read old Papers. As it turns out almost all newly hyped things have been described in papers from years ago.

Source 1: http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepapers/operational-transform
Source 2: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/215585.215706

getting System.ServiceModel.AddressAccessDeniedException in automated WCF Tests

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

We’re currently running several build processes. So each time someone checks new code in one of the build machines gets the whole package and builds it, runs tests on it and stores the result of this whole process on the Team Foundation Server. Great stuff so far.

Until you start to do things like automated WCF Testing. We’re using the selfhosting capabilities of the WCF to start a ServiceHost and then run tests against it. This works great locally. It does not on the build machines. Even if you promote the Build-Service User to Administrator you won’t get the love.

The error you might get would look something like this:

Capture

The exception contains an URL which tells you to add the Service URL to the machines URL Access Control List. On Windows XP and 2003 you have to install the Windows Support Tools and use the httpcfg command. On Windows Vista and 2008 you should use the already installed netsh commandline tool.

Since we need to get this to work on all current and future build servers I decided to add the netsh call to the build script, which looks like this:

” border=”0″ alt=”” src=”http://www.schrankmonster.de/content/binary/WindowsLiveWriter/get.AddressAccessDeniedExceptioninautoma_9859/Capture2_thumb.png” width=”400″ height=”109″ />

Add this Target before any tests in the .proj file and you’re set.

Source 1: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=70353