trace of thought (Scott Colestock)

Talk on Velocity (AppFabric Caching)…

Scott Colestock — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 18:30:31 GMT

A blog post? Here?? Yes, I know it has been an extremely long while. I've been doing some writing over here, for the blog associated with my new company (Marcato Partners, LLC) that is focused on agile development coaching. Even with that focus, I'm still doing technical consulting of course - I just delivered this talk on Velocity (AppFabric Caching) at the Twin Cities Code Camp this past weekend (April 10, 2010). I’ll be delivering something close to this again at the May 20th, 2010 at the local Connected Systems User Group.

Retrieving "FullName" property for a local account...

Scott Colestock — Wed, 13 May 2009 14:24:59 GMT

You see quite a few code samples for retrieving "FullName" (or other properties) from an Active Directory that look like this:

string directoryPath = "WinNT://somedomain/someuser";

string fullName;



DirectoryEntry directoryEntry = new DirectoryEntry(directoryPath);

if (directoryEntry.Properties["FullName"].Value != null)

{

fullName = directoryEntry.Properties["FullName"].Value.ToString();

}

One issue with this code is that when "somedomain" actually corresponds to the local machine name (because your are trying to retrieve the "FullName" of a local account), it can take an extremely long time to run. This is probably because the underlying framework is off trying to find a domain controller before falling back to the local security store.

To work around this, consider code that would look like the following when formulating the directory path:

string[] identities = windowsIdentity.Name.Split('\\');

string directoryPath;

if(Environment.UserDomainName.Equals(Environment.MachineName,StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))

{

// special case needed for "off domain" case.

directoryPath = "WinNT://localhost/" + identities[1];

}

else

{

directoryPath = "WinNT://" + identities[0] + "/" + identities[1];

}

Using "localhost" will cause the property retrieval to be just about instantaneous, whereas using the computer name (from a local account Windows identity) results in up to a twelve second delay.

MIX09 Recap and Star Trek premier...

Scott Colestock — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:12:44 GMT

Star Trek Premier and MIX09 recap, all in one night in the Twin Cities on May 8th.
A match made in heaven, naturally.

Code Profiling talk (and utility)...

Scott Colestock — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 19:18:10 GMT

I had a chance to do a talk on profiling code for Microsoft's "Build Your Skills" event on March 24th in St. Louis (and March 31st in Minneapolis). I mentioned a utility I'd written for cleaning up performance session files that are generated from URLs (so that only DLL/EXE remain.) You can find that here. In addition, you can find the slides here. All sorts of fun details on profiling terminology, types of profiles, resigning assemblies (or turning off assembly verification), etc. I'm hoping to record a screen cast of the talk soon...

Fantastic turnout at both locations, and really great questions - thanks to those who attended!

TFS 2008 / Scrum talk at MN VSTS User Group...

Scott Colestock — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:42:42 GMT

I had a chance to do an updated version of my TFS 2008 / Scrum talk at the MN VSTS User Group. Slides are here.
What a great turnout! And great questions from the group...