Tentacle Software

TinyMCE is a great little WYSIWYG JavaScript text editor that we use quite often inside administration pages. It’s lightweight and just works out of the box. Well, except for the little issue of HTML encoding its output. When you submit an ASP.NET form that contains the TinyMCE text editor, you get this lovely message: A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detected from the client (ctl00$ContentBody$TextBoxBodyHtml="<p>Test!</p>"). Which is good, because that’s ASP.NET doing some checking and helping to protect your site from XSS attacks. The standard solution you see floating around the web...

Ran across this one today, and because it’s weird and annoying I thought I’d post a solution. You can thank me later! The problem goes like this: You’re using Visual Studio 2010 and trying to add a control to an APSX page in an ASP.NET Web Application targeted to .NET 4.0, and some controls don’t show up in IntelliSense. When you type the tag manually, Visual Studio complains that Element 'ListView' is not a known element. This can occur if there is a compilation error in the Web site, or the web.config file is missing....

Great video on Channel 9 with Fabian Uhse evangelising the “Vail” SDK. Confirms Microsoft’s commitment to Windows Home Server extensibility. Fabian hints that retail “Vail” will be running .NET 4.0 and not .NET 3.5, so we won’t have to wait for it to be pushed via Windows Update. Awesome.

The Windows Home Server “Vail” preview is here. There have been lots of in-depth technical reviews of the new and updated bits in Vail, which is not surprising given how anticipated the new version has been. Overview and Review (MediaSmartServer.net) Overview and Review (We Got Served) Drive Extender v2 (HomeServerLand) Drive Extender v2 (AnandTech) Remote Access (UWHS) Server and Client Backup (UWHS) The new functionality and improvements to the basic Windows Home Server...

These are actually pretty funny! Starting today, two, 30-second Windows Home Server commercials will run for 3 months throughout 25 different shows that are aired on Hulu. The videos were created to be metaphors of Windows Home Server, and convey 2 of the key features – Backup and Recovery, and using it as a Media Server.In the 30-second clips, Windows Home Server is described as a “Genie in the Box” who magically works to keep your data safe, and in one central location.

This isn't a WHS-related post, but I'm throwing this out to Google as a vote for a specific solution to a specific problem. If you're trying to copy some really large files from an OSX user, ones that don't fit on a FAT32 volume, use HSFExplorer. To transfer large files from an OSX machine to Windows, if you don’t want to mess around with Bootcamp drivers: Copy large files from the OSX machine to an HSF-formatted USB disk Plug USB disk into your Windows machine Run HSFExplorer and locate...

Feel like getting a free trip to PDC? If you’re a developer in New Zealand, Microsoft wants you to fill in a survey for a chance to win a trip to PDC in Los Angeles: If you’d like a trip to the Microsoft’s next Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, simply fill out our survey and you will go into the draw! We are really interested in your opinions – so we can better communicate with you and where possible tailor international resources and information for you....

The Windows Home Server Team Blog has a post up announcing the release of the Japanese version of the WHS SDK, and a Japanese WHS trial download to go along with it. The Windows Home Server team is very pleased to announce the availability of the Japanese Software Development Kit (SDK).  The SDK provides developers with guidance, for example application programming interface (API) information, on how to create programs that integrate with the Windows Home Server Console. The Japanese SDK can be found here, and the trial here. Here’s hoping this sparks another round...

Brendan Grant at Microsoft has provided an answer to a question we get about WHS Disk Management fairly often: Why are internal SATA disks identified as SCSI? Short answer: You’re using a 3rd party driver to control the SATA adapter, which reports itself as a “SCSI” controller. Long answer: ATA miniports in Windows (until Vista) had no capability to support more than one outstanding request at a time.  This is because ATA devices were originally able to handle only a single request at a time.  Although native command queuing (NCQ...

Brendan Grant has posted code that extends the MSDN sample for interacting with WHS Notifications to provide alerting functionality in an external application when WHS health status changes. Unfortunately there is no quick and easy GetHealthState() method within the Windows Home Server SDK, instead the value is determined by going through each outstanding Notification and determining if any exist that are marked as a Warning or Error... and if so we consider the overall state to be same as the most severe, non-suppressed notification. Over on MSDN there exists a bit of sample...

Brendan has posted a great overview of the API changes in Power Pack 2. There’s a few in there I didn’t know about, and some that will come in really handy for the next version of WHS Disk Management. Microsoft.HomeServer.SDK.Interop.v1.dll Rather than describe each of these, I am going to let their names speak for them and what they can do: IDiskInfo2 LocationDisplayName IShareInfo2 GetPermissions()...

Surprise! It’s Power Pack 2! Also, after a bit of back and forth, WHS is now available for those with a TechNet or MSDN subscription to download. We even have an official announcement this time. I’m off to grab my keys before it gets pulled again…

Further to my previous post, Microsoft has informed us that WHS showed up prematurely on TechNet and MSDN due to internal testing processes; we weren’t supposed to have seen it. I guess that just shows how keen we are to have Windows Home Server available for all TechNet and MSDN subscribers! Look for an announcement from Microsoft in the near future on TechNet/MSDN availability.

Finally, WHS is available on TechNet and MSDN for subscribers! A big thanks to the WHS team at Microsoft for pushing this through (I heard that it was quite the task). Looks like TechNet and MSDN get two retail keys each, so that’s four full retail installs total if you have both subscriptions. This will definitely open WHS up to the wider Microsoft developer community, and that can only be a great thing. Thanks to Alex for the tip. Err… or not. After seeing some forum reports that the download was removed, I checked this...

Brendan Grant from the Microsoft Windows Home Server team has posted an excellent walk-through on configuring your custom WHS web application to leverage the existing WHS forms-based authentication provider. Lets take a look at the web.config (c:\Inetpub\remote\web.config) from a Home Server sitting under my desk at work: <?xml version="1.0"?> <configuration>     <system.web>         <machineKey validationKey="<key removed for length>"    decryptionKey="<key removed for length>"   ...

I’m excited. We’ve seen some awesome and shiny new functionality over the last few days. Most of it is under NDA, and could potentially remain that way for a long time yet. There’s some great stuff coming down the pipeline, revolutionary stuff, and I can’t wait to get my hands on it. But trust me when I say this: I’m more excited about the discussions we’ve had with the Windows Home Server team than the actual technology demonstrations I’ve watched. Let me share a little secret here. When you and a couple of fellow community developers sit...

It looks like our friends at Microsoft have finally pushed .NET 3.5 as an important update to all Windows Server 2003 machines; luckily for us, Windows Home Server fits into that category too! Here’s the proof (screenshot from my production Windows Home Server, that definitely did not have .NET 3.5 installed prior to this update): It’ll be interesting to see if we get a spike in the number of Add-Ins built with .NET 3.5 in the next few months. Bring on the W*F Add-Ins.

Great stuff in here, so go patch. Shared Folders and Server Storage Issue 1 Before this update is installed, the ability to copy large files or folders from a home computer that is running Windows Vista to a shared folder on the home server is limited by the free space on the primary hard disk drive of the Windows Home Server-based system. After this update is installed, the file size is limited to the free space on the target hard disk drives that are connected to the home server. ...

From the ‘Entirely Unexpected But Definitely Awesome’ department comes an MVP award from Microsoft, for my development work with Windows Home Server. I’m now amongst such illustrious luminaries as Terry, Phil, and Ken Warren. Between you and me, I almost deleted the welcome email as spam. Now, of course, I have to live up to the hype. I’ve mostly been posting on the We Got Served forums, and occasionally on the Windows Home Server Microsoft Forum, so I haven’t had a central place from which to pontificate about Windows Home Server development topics. Good excuse for...