blog.sallarp.com

Welcome to my “new” blog! I’ve finally come out of the closet and to make it obvious I changed the layout as well. However, it looks different and has a different URL, but it’s still the same old blog.

Random picture with servers.
My server probably not visible.

I’ve hosted this blog on my old (PPC) Mac Mini in my bedroom closet for a few months. When I started out I didn’t think I would write so much and definitely didn’t think I would have this many visitors. About a week ago Avantime got a brand new Linux environment over at the ever friendly EPiServer hosting so I moved my blog there instead.

The GSA (Google Search Appliance) has support for forms based authentication but there are situations when configuring the authentication through the administration panel won’t work. A situation like that could be that you have an intranet or extranet with forms based authentication (such as EPiServer) but the authentication is acutally done by a third party (SSO). In this particular case it’s our own SAML-SSO service that authenticate the user on behalf of the intranet.

HTTPHeaders to the rescue!
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The war on terror, or Internet Explorer 6, started in our neighboring country: Norway. For once they’ve actually come up with something good and it caught on. Wired wrote about it yesterday, Swedens largest news site Aftonbladet and the largest IT site IDG.se added the IE6 warning today. This of course was something we discussed at work along with the Piratebay trial. I think we can all agree that IE6 comes pretty close after war, religion and toilets that won’t flush on our “things we dislike”-list. Of course we wanted to do our part and help this war on terror and fortunately for us Gunilla Matsson from Svenskfast.se was at our office. We quickly explained what the IE6 warning was all about and she wanted Svensk Fastighetsförmedling to be a part of it too. Not only is it a great cause, it’s also great for publicity! Svenskfast.se is Swedens ~30th most visited site.

To join the war, go to jardenberg.se and get your own warning snippet. Read more about it on mindpark.se, Wired, the site where it all started finn.no and Microsoft Norway is positive to the campaign.

I promise to post statistics on the effect of this campaign in a week or so. Let’s hope the rest of the world joins the war too!

Last week I was investigating the editor plugin capabilities of EPiServer CMS R2. My goal was to plug into the context menu with my own submenu, you know the kind of menu item that opens another list of options. The lack of documentation in the SDK and elsewhere made the task a bigger headache than it should have. So here’s an example of how to create a context menu item with a submenu, or subitems if you like.
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UPDATE – 2009-07-07: I’ve updated this post and the example project to support iPhone OS 3.0. The code is now compliant and work in all currently existing versions of iPhone OS, latest right now is iPhone OS 3.0

This post is something I’ve worked on for quite a while. One of the biggest challenges building HittaHem was the photo-mode. I wanted the images in full screen and of course I wanted the images to rotate as the iPhone was rotated. At first this seemed like a piece of cake, just return YES to the shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation event! Sure, that does it, but I didn’t want the whole application to rotate because the rest of the UI didn’t look good that way.

Instead of redesigning the entire application just to support rotating images I decided to solve the problem myself. I’ve seen other people ask how to accomplish this on other blogs etc so I know I’m not the only stupid person who thinks it’s a good idea to only rotate a part of the application. I did ask the Italian evangelist person at the iPhone Tech Talk World Tour if there really wasn’t an easier way to do it, his response was “why would you want to do that?”. I tried to explain but apparently it didn’t make sense to him. At least I knew I wasn’t a complete fool investing hours on rewriting something that could be done with one line of code. Facebook rotates the images in the albums without rotating the entire app, and Facebooks (as my mom calls it), can’t be idiots, right?

Instead of pasting tons of code here I’ll try to explain my solution and the biggest problems implementing it. As usual you’ll find a complete demo project at the end of the post.
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Great success!

HittaHem was launched a week ago and it was a great success! It took just over 24 hours to become the most popular free application on the Swedish AppStore both in the Lifestyle category and overall. The application was praised and mention on many of Sweden’s largest sites. Here’s a list of sites that wrote about the application (Swedish language warning!)

On top of that, the video of the application was the most watched/popular video on YouTube Sweden! HittaHem maintained it’s position as the most downloaded free app on AppStore Sweden for almost a whole week. Today it fell one place to nr2. Which brings us to something interesting that very few developers share, “How many downloads does it take to reach the most downloaded spot?”, I’ll give you the numbers!
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There’s a YouTube video of the application I’ve developed together with my long time friend Hampus Nilsson for Svensk Fastighetsförmedling.

Hitta hem on YouTube

Download the app here.

*NOTE* Yes, that is my iPhone in the video. Some comments on YouTube implies that it’s an unlocked/hacked iPhone because Telia is not the carrier. This is not the case. It’s an original untouched iPhone 3g 16gb bought in Italy this summer (in Trieste to be exact). iPhones are sold without contracts in Italy and Hampus and  I were lucky enough to score 3 phones from TIM. To be honest we discussed the Telenor carrier logo before the videoshoot and decided to keep it just to create some rumors and more buzz on the blogs etc. My iPod Touch however, is PWND!

You’re having problems with ImageVault and can’t really understand why, ImageVault can tell you what’s up! The most common problem when ImageVault images are broken or doesn’t resize etc is because of user rights on the Data folder where ImageVault reads and writes images. A tool you can’t live without as a web developer is Filemon from SysInternals (now bought by Microsoft), it will tell you if access rights is the problem. But if you’re still having problems or perhaps something else inside ImageVault isn’t working the way it should there’s an undocumented web.config setting that enables debug output to a text file. I don’t really understand why this setting is never mentioned in the SDK or anywhere else for that matter. I found it a while ago through Reflector (now bought by RedGate but still available in a free version), another tool you just can’t live without! Reflector can disassemble a compiled .NET dll or exe and show the real code behind it unless it’s obfuscated.

This is how you enable debug output from ImageVault:

• Create a folder to hold the output text file and make sure your application pool user can read/write files in it. Create the output file in the folder aswell, it seems ImageVault doesn’t create it if it doesn’t exist. Of course the file must also be read/writeable by the application pool user.
• Add this key to your ImageVault config in web.config: DebugErrorLog=”c:\pathtologfolder\logfile.txt”. Example:
  <imageVault DebugErrorLog=”c:\Inetpub\mysite\ImageStoreNET\Data\iv.log” ImagePathOriginal=”c:\Inetpub\mysite\ImageStoreNET\Data\ImageDB” ShoppingOrderPath=”c:\Inetpub\mysite\ImageStoreNET\Data\Orders” AdminGroups=”ImageVault Admins” EditorGroups=”ImageVault Editors” ImageVaultConnStr=”Server=sqlserver;Database=iv_database;UID=user;password=password;” />

Now perform whatever steps to produce the problem and check the errorfile to get a clue about what’s wrong. If you still can’t solve the problem now it’s time to contact Meridium for expert help, they are usually very good at helping out and provide workarounds or implement a feature that you need in a future version.

Avantime has been working with ImageVault for 4+ years for a number of customers and run the largest(?!) existing ImageVault implementation at Electrolux for their Intranet.