Category: Microsoft

  • OSCON 2006: Day 2

    Keynotes: The Zen of Free Simon Phipps, Sun “Opening” the Possibilities: APIs and Open Source Gary Lang, AutoDesk, Inc. Ugh — As good as the first day’s keynotes were — these were not.  I was nearly ready to bag the keynotes when… 5 a day Robert “rOml” Lefkowitz, Root Markets This was a fantastic keynote. …

  • Amazon jumps off the Google ship

    Its been noted in a few places around the blogsphere, but a number of notable Google-partners have been jumping ship.  The largest of these partners has been Amazon.  Amazon, who’s search engine, A9, utilized google to provide web search results, has moved to Microsoft’s new Live search service.  The switch came as a bit of…

  • Dealing with malformed http headers

    If you have a link checker, you invariably want to just read page headers.  Well, in .NET, they enforce a very strict interpretation of the HTTP header standard.  Unfortunately, a great number of servers (Innovative Interface’s ILS for one), don’t follow the output rules, so .NET’s HTTPWebRequest object will throw a webexception when requesting headers…

  • Dealing with expired certificates and .NET’s HTTPWebRequest object

    Some folks that had tried using the Verify URL utility had notified me that it wasn’t reporting a response status when attempting to query materials through an ezproxy url.  The problem it appears, was that the servers in question had either expired security certificates or certificates that were not issued by a trusted site (i.e.,…