Wictor Wilen

Welcome to my new space and domain at www.wictorwilen.se. This new place will host my blog (previously at http://dotnetjunkies.com/weblog/wicwil/).During the next few days all old posts and comments will be moved to this location. Having my own place will make it more easy for me to create what I want and to present and blog about more stuff. This site will be an experimental playground for me and I will blog about some of the interesting stuff that I stumble upon. So expect some changes to the site and functionality.The site is just a hobby, besides my work and family, which both takes a lot of time, but it is fun to have something to rest your mind on.

Rob Mensching writes in a post that WiX has an online manual for version 2 and that eventually a manual for version 3 will show up.

So, after some installation trouble the Microsoft Expression Web Designer was installed, read more about it in the EWD Discussion group.The Expression Web Designer is for me a new and improved FrontPage more focused on the layout. I made some initial pages/sites and I feel that it works pretty smoothly to work with. The target group for this product is purely front-end/html programmers.The EWD will complement the Visual Studio development but the lack of source control integration is not just irritating - it’s a “application breaker”. I think the usage of EWD when building large and complex projects will not be that high if this is not implmented. I think my company will still be using Visual Studio for editing webpages for a while….I also lack a nice integration with the Expression Graphics Designer, it would be nice to right-click an image and open the EGD editor within EWD! (When is the next CTP/beta/Gold for EGD coming???) But, I think I’ll give it a shot and try to use it some more before I give it my final judgement. Do you agree or disagree?

Finally there is a CTP of Microsoft Expression Web Designer.I have been working with the Microsoft Expression softwares now for a while and I like what I see and use. I really hopes that this version of the Expression suite really fits my needs, since I work a lot with web development. The Expression Graphics Designer, which is the one i have used a lot the last few months is really nice, but I think making (small) pixelbased images which are used for web is not that smooth.Download is complete, time to install it. I will get back with some more Impressions of Expression in a while.Update: The download from the Microsoft download site did not work out correctly, but the download from connect.microsoft.com installed fine!

Scott Guthrie announced that the VS 2005 Web Application Project V1.0 Released . Great! I’ve been waitning for this one, the VS 2003 way of working with web projects worked really nice - and now we can use it with VS 2005!Thanks!!!

Tristank has a nice article 3 Simple Rules to Kerberos Authentication/Delegation SPNs on how Kerberos authentication via HTTP should be configured. It contains well explained steps using the SETSPN utility.

Have you ever experienced the 0xe0434f4d exit code and thought, what the heck is that has a nice blog If broken it is, fix it you should which in a post explains how to interpret the exit code which is very good. 0xe0434f4d means that it is an exception from the CLR, ie any managed exception is referred to with this code. And she also explains what the funny 0xe0434f4d means:0x43 0x4f 0x4d are the ASCII codes for COM!

Wow, thats my opinion of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, beta 2. I have been running the preview of the beta 2 for a while and I am so pleased with the upgrade (ahem - new) browser. I have been faithful to Internet Explorer through the last years and I sure will be one truly loyal user for a few more years - if they will speed up the adaptation to new techniques in the upcoming releases. The tabbed interface works smoothly, rendering feels faster, RSS reader is really good and simple, and it feels pretty compatible with older sites (except my internet bank and the community server version that dotnetjunkies run on :-). I really recommend everyone to take part of the beta and evaluate the beta - which Microsoft even have phone support on (in US and some other contries).

My last post showed how to use VBScript functions as CustomActions. More than often you need to access some of the properties you have defined in your WIX files, for example an installation directory, a connection string etc.To access these properties just use the Session object and it’s a Property property.Here’s an example with two properties used: set adam = GetObject(Session.Property("ADSERVER") & "/" & Session.Property("ADSPATH")) The WIX file should contain two properties: <Property Id="ADSERVER" Admin="yes" >LDAP://server</Property><Property Id="ADSPATH" Admin="yes" ></Property> The Property property is read/write so you can manipulate the properties within your code.