Author: Kevin Miller

Software Creator

About:

I am an Austin Texas based software developer flying his geek flag proudly. I work hard creating customer service and support software and web experiences. When I am not creating software or gushing about my toddler. I soak neck deep in Twitter, discover new music at Rdio, host "European" board game meet ups, and read nerdy stuff like Vernor Vinge.

Posts by Kevin Miller:

Dovetail Mobile Agent and Your Recent Case Activity

October 23, 2008 One of my favorite features in Dovetail Mobile Agent is the Recent Workgroup Case Activity view which displays a listing of all the cases recently modified by agents in my workgroup. At the end of the day I sometimes browse Recent Case Activity using my Dash from the comfort of a bar stool or easy chair. Here is a snapshot of the Call Administrator workgroup (my emphasis not some silly CSS style) This is also quite a handy view for Support Managers wishing to keep tabs on their minions agents. Why filter by workgroup? The short answer is to avoid drinking from the support information fire hose. We are using the employee workgroup as an way to logically divide up an organization. For most organizations trying to see all case activity for any reasonable time period, say a day or…

Blackberry’s Web Browser Caching Stinks

Ran into an issue taking Dovetail Mobile Agent for a test spin on a Sam’s Blackberry Pearl. We noticed pretty quick that web pages were not getting refreshed. It was really obvious when I logged in to my account using Sam’s phone and saw his cases rather than mine. It turns out that the web browser on this particular Blackberry does not check with the web server to see if a particular web page has been updated. We found a pretty easy fix. Just add a Cache-Control HTTP header to every web page sent by the web application. Every page?! Isn’t that hard? Nope. Here is how to solve the problem on IIS6:

Creating IIS7 web applications from the command line

October 9, 2008 While trying to decide if I should create a Windows Installer for Dovetail Mobile Agent. I was doing some research on how to automate the setup of web applications on IIS7. Turns out it is quite easy from the command line when you are local to the web server using AppCmd. With the helpful batch prowess of of Chad Myers I cooked up this batch file which creates a web application with its own application pool. @echo OFF SETLOCAL SET webSiteName="Default Web Site" SET vdir=/mobile SET physicalPath=C:\projects\mobile\source\Dovetail.Agent.Mobile SET applicationPoolName=dovetailmobile SET APPCMD=%SYSTEMROOT%\System32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe %APPCMD% DELETE APPPOOL %applicationPoolName% %APPCMD% DELETE APP %webSiteName%%vdir% %APPCMD% ADD APPPOOL /name:%applicationPoolName% %APPCMD% ADD APP /site.name:%webSiteName% /path:%vdir% /physicalPath:%physicalPath% /applicationPool:%applicationPoolName% ENDLOCAL

Deploying an ASP.Net MVC web application to IIS7

October 7, 2008 The next installment in my exciting series where I capture what I know about deploying Dovetail Mobile Agent which could be boiled down to How To Be a Web Server Administrator in the year 2008. Moving from IIS6 this time we take a look at getting an ASP.Net MVC application deployed to IIS7. Thankfully this is pretty easy. To try out this experience I created a Vista SP1 Enterprise virtual machine and added the IIS 7 windows feature. I know. I know. Most enterprise customers will want to use Windows 2008 as their favorite IIS7 platform, I had to use Vista because I use VMWare Server v1.x which supports Vista not Windows 2008. Revenge of the Basics Install the .Net 3.5 Framework. Add the Internet Information Services Windows Feature To Vista. In Windows 2008 this process is very similar in cases you will…

Installing a ASP.Net MVC web application on IIS6

October 6, 2008 Getting ready to release Dovetail Agent Mobile I am working on what our installation story will look like. I want to keep things simple (for me) right now because it is currently tricky to support IIS6 and IIS7 using a Wix based windows installer. For the documentation I am compiling a list of operations to get what is essentially a ASP.Net MVC web application up and going on different web servers. Later we may later add an installer that encapsulates this pain but right now it is just too darn hard to do this well usingWix. Do you hear me Microsoft? Getting Down With The Basics Install the .Net 3.5 Framework. Copy web application files to a directory our your web server. Create a Virtual Directory using Internet Information Services Manager that points to this directory. ASP.Net…

Getting WebDev.WebHost to work on 64 bit Windows

October 2, 2008 In the past I wrote on how we are doing integration testing of a web services using the WebDev.WebHost assembly. This technique has found its way into Dovetail Seeker and is really handy to do an end to end test against a live web server. I ran into trouble running the tests now that I am running a 64bit OS. You get this error when trying to spin up the test web server: An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format. It turns out the WebDev.WebHost assembly is flagged as a 32bit which forces it to be run only within a 32bit version of the framework. In my build automation nunitconsole.exe is the test runner and it is likely flagged as Any CPU and thus running in 64bit mode by default. After checking out Scott Hanselman’s post…

Email Agent 1.5 Heads Up

September 19, 2008 This post is for my readers who are Dovetail Email Agent customers. We are getting ready to release Email Agent 1.5 which contains some breaking changes that Gary Sherman has already posted about. I wanted to give our customers a heads up of what has changed to facilitate upgrade planning. Below is a draft of the “What’s New” from Version 1.5 this may change so remember to check your local listings for more details. Breaking Changes Email Agent now logs "Email In" events to a case rather than logging a note. This change will mainly affect customers using our Rule Manager product having business rules that are setup to fire on "Log Notes" events, in particular those that are meant to capture "Log Notes" events created by Email Agent. Affected business rules should be changed to include a start event…

Automating Multi-Platform Database Integration Tests

September 5, 2008 When you have to support multiple database platforms it can be challenging to automate integration tests against more than one DBMS. Dovetail is using build automation driven by with NAnt and virtual machines running on VMWare Server to automate the setup and execution of our integration test suite against multiple versions of Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases. I want to share some of the lessons learned from our journeys along the way . Integration Tests Make your integration tests data driven. If at all possible setup your tests so that they create their own test data. Tests responsible for their own data setup are simply less fragile. A lot of dev cycles got wasted trying to understand why a test is failing that was caused by one test messing up the data another was dependent on. Automate automate automate.…

Installing Dovetail Classic ASP Web Applications on IIS7

August 19, 2008 Here at Dovetail I recently started developing on a Windows Server 2008 64bit OS. Today I wanted to install Dovetail Agent as a web application on IIS7. I ran into a few problems. After gnashing my teeth for a bit I found a path to goodness. My biggest problem was 64bit related. I hope this post saves you some time getting our web applications up and running. ASP Needs To Be Enabled I believe that by default when you are adding the Web Server (IIS) role to Windows Server 2008 that the ASP feature is not added by default. Start Server Manager select the Web Server (IIS) Role. Click on Add Role Services. Make sure you have at least ASP and Server Side Includes and ASP.NET selected. IIS 6 Management Compatibility You may also want to select the IIS 6…

Creating a Windows 2008 Server x64 Developer Workstation

August 3, 2008 For about a year now I have been running Ubuntu on my personal laptop. A stab at diversity. I was playing with Rails in my spare time and also needed to brush up on my Unix. I was young… willing to experiment. My direction changed back to .Net, I am loving C# 3.0 by the way, yet I kept my Linux laptop because it was so swift and easy to use. A poor man’s Mac Book really. The only thing I couldn’t do with Hardy Heron, yes that is the name of the distribution, was .Net development with my familiar toolset. I am very very addicted to Visual Studio.Net IDE (sorry MonoDevelop, I know cop out.) Doing some development with ASP.Net MVC has had me wishing for a development machine that supports IIS 7 and I saw all the cool…

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