Annoying Windows Behavior

You cannot create an executable in Visual Studio both inherits its parents standard in/out handles so that it can write to the console if run from a console. If you create a console application, it will inherit from its parent, but it will always create a console window even if not run from a command line.

So, say you would like to create a windows GUI application that you want to be able to pass command line parameters to. This works fine, but imagine you would like to print out a usage message to current console window if parameter is set.

Annoying windows behavior:

You cannot create a shortcut with a relative path to its target. This is annoying in the following situation. Say you want to create a shortcut that sets command arguments for an executable. Then say you would like this directory to be copied to another machine (say from a network drive) and have the shortcut reference the executable in the same directory. There is no way to do this with a shortcut.

Getting your favorite home brew application to run on the corporate servers can always be a chore. This is especially true when your corporate servers are exclusively Windows/IIS and single sign on is a requirement for all internal applications. Getting you app up and running is made even harder when you went out on a limb and wrote it using ruby on rails.

Now you are in a pickle. You now love ruby and rails, but in order to show off your new application you have to run it on the previously mentioned environment. Following is my solution to this very problem.

First get your hands on a ReverseProxy (I used http://www.saltypickle.com/Home/16). Install your application as a windows service using mongrel (http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/) a very fine and easy http/rails server. Set your IIS virtual directory to use only integrated authentication. Next setup (configure or hack) your ReverseProxy to forward request onto your mongrel service, and to add an http header populated with the authenticated users user name. Finally add a before filter guarding any actions you want to limit access to and match the value past in the http header from the ReverseProxy to grant or deny access. Finally, fix any bugs you may encounter (there were a few to get redirects working), and happy days, you are in business!

Details to come...

The office is a funny show. Dwight was trying to move his boggle head of himself with his mind. Jim and Pam watched videos of local cover bands. Great times.