Well, I had a hair pulling session trying to recover the passwords on my hobby site. Both my admin and host paswords got hosed, so I couldn't just login and fix them.
I first went Googling to find a winform app to help with this problem. Well, all the solutions were just modules to install on your DotNetNuke installation. Since I can't even login as host, this approach is just totally useless. Thankfully, DNN uses the ASP.NET 2.0 Membership Providers.
So, I started with Membership.Provider.RetrievePassword(). Oops, "Bad Data". Crap! I tried other account passwords with the same result. Double-Crap! I modified my little winform app, to now reset passwords. This time I used Membership.Provider.ResetPassword(). Got a new password for host, and I was able to login now. YES! I'm using .NET 2.0 for this winform app.
So if you want to get this working, here is what you need to do:
Make sure that you include the following sections from your DNN's website web.config file:
connectionStrings
system.web
You only need the membership and machineKey sections inside system.web.
Import System.Configuration and System.Web into your project. All of the needed API calls will be under Membership.Provider namespace. You'll find a lot of samples on how to use on Google.

Anyways, I wanted to put it somewhere, so that I can find it later, WHEN I would need to do this again.

It seems that there is a problem with Subversion 1.4.x running on Windows 2008 Server. Specifically svnserve.exe throws an exception when run either manually or as a service. This happens for all editions of Windows 2008 server, in both x86 and x64 versions.

I was able to get the 1.5 version (RC5) of svnserve.exe to run on Windows 2008 server. I used the CollabNet version of 1.5. Be aware that CollabNet bundles the binaries in different directories than the Tigris.org packages.

I came across this problem because I'm updating my servers in my private network. I thought others might find this information useful.

I know this is not much, but I got quite a bit of the online store infrastructure setup tonight.

What you see above is Active Purchase from Active Modules. It's a small ecommerce module for DotNetNuke (DNN).

Today, I had the opportunity to be the hero/savior of the day. The marketing department of my employer has been sending some data to be analyzed by a third party. One of the files was a monster 2.2 gig text file.

None of the text editors that we tried could cope with this titanic file. So at a conference call, we were going back and forth trying to find a solution to this dilemma. I suggested to split it up into more manageable chunks. I got Text File Splitter and let it work on this file.

So it took about 36 minutes to split this file into eleven (11) 200 meg chunks, and a remainder 68 meg file.

Nice!

Here are the binaries for the Subversion RSS Log post commit hook that I created in C#:

 SubversionRssLog.zip

This doesn't have a readme.txt yet, but I wanted to put up a download for those that wanted to play with it right away. This requires that you have .NET 2.0 installed in the machine that is running Subversion. So the instructions are:

1. Unzip this file into your repository's hooks directory
2. Edit the post-commit.exe.config file
3. Let it rip!

Enjoy!

PS. Feel free to give me feedback on this.

I know that there are a lot of people wondering about PainlessSVN. So here's the scoop:

I have been upgrading my server hardware in my private LAN, as the server that is serving this website is overloaded. I built 2 new servers, one to handle database duties and the other to handle web duties. I got the last of the Seagate hard drives that I ordered. I already installed one, and will be installing the other one here shortly.

My licensing tracker application uses MS Access as its default database, and I found that unacceptable. Plus I needed to integrate the license creation, so that it gets automatically added to the tracker application when a purchase is made. So, I'm still fighting with the licensing stuff.

I just didn't realize how much stuff needs to be done to handle all the other things like sales, customer support, and the million other details that a business needs to handle. I'm behind about two months from being sick at the beginning of this year.

As I said before, the code and installation script is already done. It's the other business related activities that are holding it back. I already had somebody tell me to "Just get it out already!" So yes, I'm still working on it, and it will be out as my free time permits.

I finally nailed down the last bit of the wierd issue that I had with the custom Subversion post-commit hook that I wrote using C#. The cofiguration file was being read correctly in development, but that part of the code was failing on the Subversion server's hook directory. Here's actual exception from the Application Event Log:

Event Type:    Error
Event Source:    .NET Runtime 2.0 Error Reporting
Event Category:    None
Event ID:    5000
Date:        4/27/2008
Time:        12:06:29 AM
User:        N/A
Computer:    VULCAN
Description:
EventType clr20r3, P1 post-commit.exe, P2 1.0.0.0, P3 481409ae, P4 mscorlib, P5 2.0.0.0, P6 471ebc5b, P7 3404, P8 d8, P9 system.io.filenotfoundexception, P10 NIL.

I ended up removing all the code that used the System.Configuration namespace for native .NET 2.0 reading stuff, and using Nini instead.

This is now working correctly.

I needed to replace the rss feed functionality that a third party was providing for one of my public Subversion repositories, so I created a .NET 2.0 post-commit hook. I couldn't find anything out there that actually worked. The source for this hook is here:

Post-Commit Hook Project

To see a live feed with a nice xslt template, please visit WheelMUD's RSS Check-In Feed

I will be putting together a binary package around Monday or Tuesday.

I just read that a Google Group was created for .NET Reactor. Here's the link to the blog where I read it: Agile Micro ISV Blog and here is the link to the .NET Reactor Support Group

"I heard from the chap who develops Reactor a few months ago, and it seems he has some health issues that mean he has to spend some time in hospital. As such, I'm sure I speak for all Reactor users when I wish him a speedy recovery. Being a micro ISV is tough, especially when you're ill."

I share those those feelings as well. I just wish that this information would have gotten out earlier. I know that there were a lot of us micro ISVs that had a few moments of fear wondering if this tool was going to disappear.

I have several Subversion servers on my network, so I'm registering new servers in PainlessSVN fairly often. I got tired of trying to figure out what server I was hooked to, so I added a little visual tweak on the server node.

So now, I can tell exactly what server I'm working with at a glance. I will probably end up adding the ability to keep several servers registered, a la Enterprise Manager and SQL Server Management Studio.

I had to mess with Win32 APIs in order to get this working correctly. Here are the API calls that I used:

public const uint DRIVE_UNKNOWN = 0; // unknow drive type
public const uint DRIVE_NO_ROOT_DIR = 1; // invalid root path was given to the function
public const uint DRIVE_REMOVABLE = 2; // removeable drive like a floppy
public const uint DRIVE_FIXED = 3; // a fixed drive like a hard disk
public const uint DRIVE_REMOTE = 4; // a network drive
public const uint DRIVE_CDROM = 5; // a cd-rom drive
public const uint DRIVE_RAMDISK = 6; // a ram disk
 
[DllImport("Kernel32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto, SetLastError = true)]
public static extern uint GetDriveType(string lpRootPathName);

[DllImport("mpr.dll")]
[return: MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.U4)]
public static extern int WNetGetUniversalName(
string lpLocalPath,
[MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.U4)] int dwInfoLevel,
IntPtr lpBuffer,
[MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.U4)] ref int lpBufferSize);