Robert McMurray

I have found myself using IIS Express for a bunch of web projects these days, and each of these projects is using different frameworks and different authoring systems. (Like Windows Notepad, which is still the one of the world's most-used code editors.) Anyway, there are many times when I need multiple copies of IIS Express...

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Like many self-proclaimed geeks, I can't resist a change to play with new technology. So when the Raspberry Pi 2 was released a short time ago, I didn't hesitate buying one. My first impressions was: for $35, that's a lot of computer power in a very small package. And because I really am a geek, I will admit that the first thing I tried to do with it was to install DOSBOX and run Microsoft Flight Simulator 4...

A couple of days ago I posted a blog which I titled Creating an HTML Application to Convert Text Files to Audio Files, in which I showed how to create an HTML Application that will convert a text file to an audio file. I thought that I would follow up that article with a quick demonstration which compares some of the built-in text-to-speech voices that ship with Windows 7 and Windows 8.

I'd like to take a brief departure from my normal collage of web-related and server-management examples and share a rather eclectic code sample.

Like many IIS administrators, I usually install the local SMTP service on my IIS servers when I am setting up a new server from scratch. When I install the SMTP service, I configure it so that it only listens on the IP address of 127.0.0.1, so it can only send emails which originate on the server itself. What's more, I configure the SMTP service to relay all emails to a downstream SMTP service which can send emails out to the Internet. By configuring these options, I can write my ASP.NET, PHP, and Classic ASP applications so that they use the local SMTP service for all email-related functionality, which acts as a sort of message server for my applications. This system works great, and I have used this particular setup since the days of IIS 4.0. (Which was released in late 1997, as you may recall.)

I ran into an interesting predicament the other day, and I thought that both the situation and my solution were worth sharing. Here's the scenario: I host websites for several family members and friends, and one of my family member's uses BlogEngine.NET for her blog. (As you may have seen in my previous blogs, I'm a big fan of BlogEngine.NET.) In any event, she forgot her password, so I logged into the admin section of her website, only to discover that there was no way for me to reset her password – I could only reset my password. Since it's my webserver, I have access to the physical files, so I decided to write a simple utility that can create the requisite SHA256/BASE64 password hashes that BlogEngine.NET uses, and then I can manually update the Users.xml file with new password hashes as I create them.

I ran into an interesting predicament the other day, and I thought that both the situation and my solution were worth sharing. Here's the scenario: I host websites for several family members and friends, and one of my family member's uses BlogEngine.NET for her blog. (As you may have seen in my previous blogs, I'm a big fan of BlogEngine.NET.) In any event, she forgot her password, so I logged into the admin section of her website, only to discover that there was no way for me to reset her password – I could only reset my password. Since it's my webserver, I have access to the physical files, so I decided to write a simple utility that can create the requisite SHA256/BASE64 password hashes that BlogEngine.NET uses, and then I can manually update the Users.xml file with new password hashes as I create them.

For the next installments in my series about FTP clients, I will be taking a look at two FTP redirectors at the same time. In this specific blog post, I will focus on NetDrive (from Bdrive Inc.), whereas my previous post looked at WebDrive (from South River Technologies).