Brussell's Blog

I thought I would drop the news of what I have been up to lately behind the scenes in programming. I’m currently working on starting up my own Software company on the side. This blog will be the first mention on this new company that I’m calling IronWorks Software. I have a domain up and a base website just up for place holding till I get some of my work done to showcase and offer on it. The website can be found here: http://www.ironworkssoftware.com/.

One of the first pieces of a possible product that might be found offered on it is a pure Win32 Menu system for developers to use. It’s different in that this menu system is built from the ground up using straight OS API access for speed and durability. So far the feature list is far too much to write here and much of it is going to be re-worked before release I’m sure. I have a peek at this new component in action in a win32 test program.

I haven’t ironed out the name of this new component ( “ironed out” heh, no pun intended ). So I’ll just call it IronMenu for now.

Enjoy,
-Brandon

Finally, after days of toying and learning how the new Authorization system in .NET 2.0 worked I managed to get it to work properly on my Win2k3 box for the production server. If you have ever worked with the new Authorization system in 2.0 .NET then you may already know the troubles you can run into.

I implement a MySQL 5.0 server system for all my websites currently so I needed to write my own Authorization systems to work with MySQL. The only ones supported out of the box was a MDF SQL Server file for use with MS SQL Server Express, MS SQL Server, Windows Auth, and I believe a Active Directory version. Once I implemented my own library for use with MySQL server + Authorization I implemented it on my latest version of the Sumiton Fire and Rescue site on my local Vista Dev box. Well of course it ran fine and worked fine on it. When the time came to do a push to my production server ( Windows Server 2003 box ) nothing worked. Go figure =/.

Over the next few days I managed to track down the problem, which was a silly one if you ask me. I ended up removing the System.Authorization tags and allowdeny tags from the main web.config file located in the main branch of the site, and creating a new web.config file inside the directories that needed security with just the allowdeny tags. After some forum reading, I managed to get the tags just right and BINGO !!! A new .NET 2.0 Authorization system that works fully with MySQL on the backend.

I still can’t see why putting the allowdeny tags in the main config file worked on dev box, yet borked on production. Microsoft, I swear they love messing with us developers sometimes. =/

-Brandon
One Tired Dev Monkey