Is software development getting harder?
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I'm trying to develop some new software using the Silverlight 3 beta, as Silverlight is finally starting to acquire the features needed to develop serious non-trivial applications. My application requires duplex web services, and needs authentication of users. The recommended method to achieve this is to use the new in-message soap authentication features supported by Silverlight 3. The first hurdle was that the aspnet_regsql command that is supposed to generate a membership database didn't. Cue lots of fiddling around for hours trying to work out why. Eventually I gave up and installed MySQL, and fussed around with that for awhile before finding that I would have to implement my own membership providers (some kind soul did develop a set once, and hosted them here, but they don't seem to support any recent versions). I also discover that the entity data model wizard won't do anything with a MySQL backend, which means prototyping my app is going to be a real headache. I went back to trying to bludgeon SQL Express 2005 into behaving as it should, and eventually discover that it won't run and connect to an APP_DATA file hosted database unless you have administrator privileges. Okay fine. I'll develop software whilst logged in as administrator. Whatever. No idea if this is a documented feature or not, I just want to write some code. The next hurdle is that the new authentication support requires SSL. Whilst it's good to know that MS realise that sending credentials unencrypted is a bad thing, this is going to somewhat hamper development, because Visual Studio's built-in testing webserver Cassini does not support SSL. Oh well, I'm running XP Pro. Maybe I'll just install the crippled version of IIS that only supports one website, and spend ages moving files around and remapping virtual directories every time I want to run anything else. Perhaps it won't be too painful - MS have certainly saved me the problem of dealing with cross domain access issues :/ So I install IIS. Wow, great. Except that it doesn't work. For some reason, the out of the box settings mean that I can't access the built-in demo page without entering a local machine login and password. All the settings look right, but it just will not serve any dynamic content without a login. Which is odd, as it is happy to send GIFs and HTML files. After yet more fiddling around, it seems that IE requires special settings to allow it to view local websites without prompting for login. So it isn't IIS at all, just some piece of gruesome windows
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I'm trying to develop some new software using the Silverlight 3 beta, as Silverlight is finally starting to acquire the features needed to develop serious non-trivial applications. My application requires duplex web services, and needs authentication of users. The recommended method to achieve this is to use the new in-message soap authentication features supported by Silverlight 3. The first hurdle was that the aspnet_regsql command that is supposed to generate a membership database didn't. Cue lots of fiddling around for hours trying to work out why. Eventually I gave up and installed MySQL, and fussed around with that for awhile before finding that I would have to implement my own membership providers (some kind soul did develop a set once, and hosted them here, but they don't seem to support any recent versions). I also discover that the entity data model wizard won't do anything with a MySQL backend, which means prototyping my app is going to be a real headache. I went back to trying to bludgeon SQL Express 2005 into behaving as it should, and eventually discover that it won't run and connect to an APP_DATA file hosted database unless you have administrator privileges. Okay fine. I'll develop software whilst logged in as administrator. Whatever. No idea if this is a documented feature or not, I just want to write some code. The next hurdle is that the new authentication support requires SSL. Whilst it's good to know that MS realise that sending credentials unencrypted is a bad thing, this is going to somewhat hamper development, because Visual Studio's built-in testing webserver Cassini does not support SSL. Oh well, I'm running XP Pro. Maybe I'll just install the crippled version of IIS that only supports one website, and spend ages moving files around and remapping virtual directories every time I want to run anything else. Perhaps it won't be too painful - MS have certainly saved me the problem of dealing with cross domain access issues :/ So I install IIS. Wow, great. Except that it doesn't work. For some reason, the out of the box settings mean that I can't access the built-in demo page without entering a local machine login and password. All the settings look right, but it just will not serve any dynamic content without a login. Which is odd, as it is happy to send GIFs and HTML files. After yet more fiddling around, it seems that IE requires special settings to allow it to view local websites without prompting for login. So it isn't IIS at all, just some piece of gruesome windows
I think we're forced to spend far too much time faffing around with "infrastructure" than actually writing the code to solve our business problem. A lot of the infrastructure gets addressed in the next version but then a whole bunch more complexity comes along so we're always chasing our tails! :(
Kevin
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I'm trying to develop some new software using the Silverlight 3 beta, as Silverlight is finally starting to acquire the features needed to develop serious non-trivial applications. My application requires duplex web services, and needs authentication of users. The recommended method to achieve this is to use the new in-message soap authentication features supported by Silverlight 3. The first hurdle was that the aspnet_regsql command that is supposed to generate a membership database didn't. Cue lots of fiddling around for hours trying to work out why. Eventually I gave up and installed MySQL, and fussed around with that for awhile before finding that I would have to implement my own membership providers (some kind soul did develop a set once, and hosted them here, but they don't seem to support any recent versions). I also discover that the entity data model wizard won't do anything with a MySQL backend, which means prototyping my app is going to be a real headache. I went back to trying to bludgeon SQL Express 2005 into behaving as it should, and eventually discover that it won't run and connect to an APP_DATA file hosted database unless you have administrator privileges. Okay fine. I'll develop software whilst logged in as administrator. Whatever. No idea if this is a documented feature or not, I just want to write some code. The next hurdle is that the new authentication support requires SSL. Whilst it's good to know that MS realise that sending credentials unencrypted is a bad thing, this is going to somewhat hamper development, because Visual Studio's built-in testing webserver Cassini does not support SSL. Oh well, I'm running XP Pro. Maybe I'll just install the crippled version of IIS that only supports one website, and spend ages moving files around and remapping virtual directories every time I want to run anything else. Perhaps it won't be too painful - MS have certainly saved me the problem of dealing with cross domain access issues :/ So I install IIS. Wow, great. Except that it doesn't work. For some reason, the out of the box settings mean that I can't access the built-in demo page without entering a local machine login and password. All the settings look right, but it just will not serve any dynamic content without a login. Which is odd, as it is happy to send GIFs and HTML files. After yet more fiddling around, it seems that IE requires special settings to allow it to view local websites without prompting for login. So it isn't IIS at all, just some piece of gruesome windows
Whilst not relevant to the general thread, I have solved the SSL certificate problem, by using the guide available here: http://www.dylanbeattie.net/docs/openssl_iis_ssl_howto.html[^] which seems to work for generating a CA and signing a key using xp pro sp3, IIS 5.1 and openssl 0.9.8k. Thought I'd link it in case this thread shows up from a search for CA problems or somesuch. Disclaimer: I have not had time to look into the security implications of this approach, and don't know if there are any problems with following it. Don't use this on a publically accessible machine unless you know what you are doing. I'm only using it for a test certificate.