Leader's window...

I was in SFO last few days back for "Leader's Window" training organized by my company and i was very pleased that i attended this. It was refreshing and gave my a thought on where i am suppose to head! This in turn was a good reflection on me and has motivated me to kick start a new blog in this direction... Keep watching this space for more! Cheers - Dipesh

how to setup IIS over secure communications - HTTPS/SSL?

To change websites hosted over IIS onto HTTPS/SSL we want to do this from IIS
- Obtain a server certificate.
- Specify the server certificate to a default web site in IIS.

The sever certificate could be obtained by any third party CA (credential authority) like Verisign that authenticates your web server. However, for reasons of test or with limited resources/pages access you may not want to reach out to them. In that case, the easiest way is to get an SSL from SelfSSL.exe that comes bundled with IIS resources toolkit 6.0 available from Microsoft for free!

The toolkit includes bring along many other tools but you can select only SelfSSL.exe by itself.
This is a commmand line utility which you can just execute it and say "Yes" when prompted to override any server certificate existing.

Test it by accessing https://localhost... and it should load fine.
Also, ideally this certificate be installed in your local Directory store to have IIS recognize it valid. This is applicable to IIS 5.0, 5.1 and 6.0

HTH, Thanks - Dipesh

IE 8 released

IE 8 developer preview found here - http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/default.mspx

Visual Studio Rosario CTP

This month can definitely be termed as "March madness"... lot of things happened to me in my personal life and career life..but you bet this was all fun! I am writing this after a long halt... sorry about that, i will try to keep it more updated on regular basis!

News here is that i was still trying to get around with VS Orcas/2008 release...and have learned that Microsoft is already preparing for the next release Visual Studio Rosario...crazy ? :) Regardless, here's the link to VPC - Aug 2007 CTP if you are interested to dive in new features of Visual Studio Rosario.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8450eff5-24ad-44c3-ab91-1ed88ef2f4f0&DisplayLang=en

Cheers - Dipesh

What do i need to create my first WCF service?

What do you need to create a WCF service from scratch?
You can either create a WCF service in Visual Studio 2008 or you can also create a WCF Service with Visual Studio 2005 as well. What do you need ...
1> Visual Studio 2005 extensions.
2> .net 3.0 runtime (redistributable package, not Service pack release or 3.5)

This will get you the templates needed as well for you to quick start with you creating your WCF service. You can find the SDK for the same on msdn site too.

Happy servicing :) Thanks - Dipesh

Powercommands for Visual studio 2008

Powercommands for Visual studio 2008 released...
http://blogs.msdn.com/vsxteam/archive/2008/02/29/PowerCommands-for-Visual-Studio-2008-released.aspx

Cheers - DJ