How To: Open Source + Windows + IIS… with Stability

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As we mentioned back in March, we switched NeoSmart Technologies over from PHP‘s ISAPI extension for Windows/IIS to Microsoft’s “FastCGI for IIS” implementation instead in hopes of achieving better reliability and uptime during times of heavy load.

Whether you like Windows or not, at some point or the other, you may find yourself using IIS 6 or even 7, and then you’ll be wondering why the open source technologies you’re using aren’t as stable as ASP or MSSQL on Windows. However, ever since the release of IIS 6, Microsoft has truly remade Internet Information Services as a real contender in the server market, providing a highly secure, stable, fast, and flexible web server for the masses. IIS 7 (due to ship with Longhorn Server sometime in 2007) is currently showing all the signs of being even better, with complete modularization of all components and a highly extensible, XML-based framework.

We’re really happy to be able to finally say with all conviction that it really works! This week, NeoSmart Technologies was featured on the homepages of many link aggregation sites (including Slashdot) for our Desktop vs. Web RIAs article. And we’re glad to say that even with the extreme load, for the entire past week we’ve had 100.00% uptime with respect to network, IIS, MySQL, and everything else!

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Who Killed DZone?!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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While heading off to DZone to check out the latest programming headlines, we were shocked to see the new interface. What happened to DZone!?

The new interface is cluttered and unintuitive. It stinks like Digg, and is a hundred times more bloated than the previous edition. The DZone that used to be there was a organizend and professional place for programmers to submit links. It required a reason before you “dugg down” entries, and it loaded a hundred times faster.

But the new DZone is just scary. It’s as if Kevin Rose bought DZone and handed it over to the teenagers to play. It has the same blue shades, the same cliche rounded tabs, the same “Web 2.0” look, and the same exact concept…

How long will it take for DZone to add a general news section next?

“People Hate Making Desktop Apps…” Since When!?

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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What a crazy day for technology. It all started with Paul Graham’s ridiculous link-bait article “Microsoft is Dead,” earlier today. Since then, the web has been in an uproar – just how do you define success, innovation, power, creativity, and can companies just “die” anyway? Never mind that conversation – Paul Graham surprised us there though. He’s normally a sane and very much down-to-earth person with a lot of insight on Web 2.0 and what it takes to be a startup. But that’s not what we’ve taken up a problem with – what’s really gotten to us is how some people are using his article as grounds for an argument that Desktop apps are old, dead, and a pain-in-the-ass to make.

The particular post being referred to is Ryan Stewart’s “Why Do People Hate to Build Desktop Apps?” It comes in response to the article by Don Dodge and a conversation with Simon Bateman. Now that the background’s succinctly (hopefully) out of the way: While Ryan’s article makes a valid a point about the ease-of-use of Microsoft’s .NET Framework and Adobe’s Apollo and just how powerful-yet-easy these two technologies make desktop software development – his entire article is based on an invalid premise! People don’t hate making desktop apps!

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Windows Longhorn Server April CTP

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Windows Longhorn Server April CTP has just been made available for download to official tech beta testers over at Microsoft Connect. The last build available was 6001-16497-070330-1510 for the February CTP, released two months ago.

The LHS April ’07 CTP is build 6001-16497-070330-1720 and adds quite a few new features, and brings LHS down to the real playing field. With the April CTP, it seems we can finally say that Microsoft has a real beta product on their hands – unlike previous LHS builds that had a general incomplete feel to them.

Pay close attention to the services, application server, and MMC – quite a few changes to keep up with. With 1720, Microsoft has made available 9 binary downloads, including the general x86/x64 installation media, the LHS WDK, the April CTP for the Itanic, in addition to the usual symbol packages for each build as well as the Checked Builds for developers.

x64: wsl_6001-16497-070330-1720_x86fre_server-KB3SFRE_EN_DVD.iso crc: 0x238801E6 x86: wsl_6001-16497-070330-1720_x64fre_server-KB3SxFRE_EN_DVD.iso crc: 0xB27FF9A0 Continue reading →

Vista’s (Ridiculous) Revenge

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Apparently Windows Vista saw our last post – it’s trying to get even! What kind of crazy sociapath of an operating system is this!?!

Not even minutes after we blogged about WGA giving us trouble, explorer.exe crashed. After some CPR, a bit of mouth-to-mouth (it was disgusting!), and plenty of swearing, explorer.exe was successfully revived… Until we minimized Visual Studio to grab a file off the desktop and saw this:

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Is Microsoft Killing off WGA?

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If you’re planning on downloading any additional updates for Windows, forget about that for a while, because Microsoft has decided to just stop validating Windows any more at all!

Instead of having 60% of all WGA reports come back as false negatives, 30% as false positives, and a mere 10% come back as accurate, Microsoft appears to have decided that its users don’t need validation – nor do they need the updates and hotfixes available for download either. Today, if you try to download the Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage Validation Tool, it won’t run at all. Good job Microsoft, thanks for cutting to the chase!

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Don’t unplug your boot drive before installing a new OS! Please!

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Please, please, we beg you, don’t do it! Even if it seems logical, like it’s the right thing to do, we urge you not to change the boot/primary drive, or otherwise disconnect other drives when installing another OS!

Seriously, we had no idea so many people engaged in this activity until EasyBCD started spreading like wild fire. Here’s a fact for you: 95% of all support requests for EasyBCD in our forums come as a direct result of users disconnecting their Windows Vista/XP drive before installing Linux, Vista, BSD, OS X, Windows 2000, XP, etc. It’s one thing to reinstall the bootloader when you’re done, and quite another to have to recreate the required boot files to make them point the right drive/partition combo.

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MessengerLite for Windows

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[poll=2]

A lot of people have been complaining (within earshot of course) about Windows Live Messenger: it’s too slow, too resource intensive, and has just too many useless features they’ll never use and don’t like to have.

At NeoSmart Technologies, we hear you. So in order to hear you even louder, vote above and let us know if you’d be interested in a lite version of Windows Live Messenger. Something that’s fully compatible with the latest WLM protocol, and can share text, streaming webcam content, audio, and avatars with all MSN Messenger clients – and nothing more. This means no search, no silly themes, no advertisements, no games, no sharing folders, no winks, and definitely no nudges.

We like to do things right, so if our programmers were to create a lite version of WLM that just works and does just what you need and nothing more, doesn’t take much memory, and is 100% compatible with the MSN Messenger protocol, would you use and support such a thing?

Whether you would or you wouldn’t, vote above. If you would, vote so our programmers can get cracking, and if you wouldn’t, vote and let us know to focus our resources elsewhere — after all, NeoSmart Technologies is here for you.

Just How Serious Creative is(n’t) About Open Source….

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To show you just how serious Creative is about open source and the Linux community, just take a (good) look at two of their sites: the main site, and the open source division. No, your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you, nor is the open source site run by 3rd graders from 1993 – it’s just that Creative doesn’t think it’s open source division deserves at least a moderately useable interface for their users.

Forget the quality of the drivers – after all, the Windows drivers are utter garbage as well compared to some of the other companies out there. So if you put aside the fact that their Linux drivers hardly work, the X-Fi isn’t even supported (they ask you to upgrade to Windows if you want to listen to hi-def audio…), and that the site looks like it hasn’t been touched since the X-Fi originally came out, you’re still left with a little problem: Linux users like music too! 

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WordPress 2.2 Adds Tagging Support!

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It seems like the latest SVN commits to WordPress have added tagging support to the popular open-source blogging platform… and it’s about time, too! It’s no longer stuff you have to add by plugin, so WordPress is finally getting with the times and adding this much-requested functionality to the upcoming WordPress 2.2 (due to be released April 22, 2007). See for yourself:

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