PowerShell script to Delete Temporary Internet Files

Wanted to write a quick PowerShell script to delete IIS Temporary Internet Files and thought I would share. If there is a better or less verbose way of writing this, feel free to post a comment. I would love to see other ways of doing it.

$sleepDuration = 5 write-host "Restarting IIS and sleeping $sleep seconds!" Stop-Service W3SVC,WAS -force Start-Sleep -s $sleepDuration write-host "Deleting Temporary Internet Files!" $dirName = "Temporary ASP.NET Files"; $directories = @(gci "c:\windows\Microsoft.Net" -r -force -i $dirName) foreach($x in $directories){ $childDirectories = @(gci $x) foreach($y in $childDirectories){ remove-item "$x\$y" -r -force; } } Start-Service W3SVC,WAS

Why My Netflix Password is My Weakest Password!

EDIT: Had the occasion to change my Netflix password again recently. To my surprise, they now allow up to 60 characters. My Netflix password is no longer my least secure password!..

I just spent the last hour and a half updating all of my passwords. Not a favorite task of mine, but something that definitely needs to be done occasionally. The task was pretty uneventful but something really annoyed, so I thought I would share. While updating my Netflix password, I got the following error.

“Your password must contain between 4 and 10 characters”

The Hell You Say!!!

I was able to enter my new password into EVERY site that I tried, except for Netflix. Every bank, utility and online service accepted my password, but for some silly reason Netflix requires users to enter a password with a  length of 4-10 characters.
I definitely understand setting a minimum password length to force a standard for password strength, but why would you ever impose a maximum length on users? Rather than being able to enter my strong password of 14 character, I have to shave off the last 4 just to conform to Netflix’s password rules. My password is now weaker and I’m much more likely to forget it because I was forced to make it different from all my others. *sigh*
And that, is why my Netflix password is my weakest password.

Microsoft Outlook Web App’s Annoying Quirks

I was initially impressed with the latest Outlook Web App. It looks fairly nice and the Outlook UX isn’t horrible. I was surprised that it even worked really well on my iPad via the Chrome App. Well, at least until I tried to change my password.

Upon reaching the password reset page, I noticed that I could enter my old password, new password and new password confirmation, but there was no way to submit the form. Repeatedly spamming the iOS keyboard “GO” button did nothing and there was no visible link/button to click on the web form. How exactly should I change my password?

No worries, I’ll wait until I get home and change my password on my PC… Log in from my PC, change my password and I get the following confirmation screen and message “Your password has been changed. Click OK to sign in with your new password.” Hrm, I’d love to, but where can I find this mysterious “OK” button you speak of? Perhaps I’ll just have to refresh the page…

 

Definitely not huge, issues, but it really makes the entire Outlook Web App feel unpolished. Which is a shame since my initial impressions were good.

Subversion/SVN 1.7 upgrade causes CruiseControl.Net to checkout instead of update

I upgraded my Subversion to 1.7+ and ran the svn upgrade command to update my working copy to the new format. As a side effect, my CruiseControl.Net builds started to fail with the following error when it tried to update my repository from source control.

Source control operation failed: svn: E155000: ‘c:\myRepo\repoSubDirectory’ is already a working copy for a different URL

After banging my head on my keyboard for a while, I finally found out why. I found the following snippet about CCNet 1.2+ releases which shed some light on the problem.

SVN Checkout
As of the CCNet 1.2 release, the SVN provider now supports automatic checkout of source. If the working directory does not contain a .svn folder (or _svn folder), the SVN block will automatically perform a checkout instead of an update. The trunkUrl must be specified for checkout to function.

In Subversion 1.7+ there are no longer .svn files in sub folders of the working directory. Because of this, if you have a <workingDirectory> defined for a folder in your repository other than the root folder Cruise Control thinks it needs to do a checkout rather than an update. This will fail because the directory you’ve specified is already part of a working directory.

In my case, I was able to change the working directory to the root of my repository so that cruise control would correctly update instead of trying to checkout. Does anyone know of a way to get around this so you can continue to use a sub folder in your working directory instead of the root? Another option could be to remove the <trunkUrl> from your ccnet.config so that the checkout feature wont work, but I didn’t actually give this a try.

Hope this helps someone.

Diablo 3 Launch - Error 37 - AutoIt Login Script

Like millions of other Diablo 3 fans, I decided to try and get a bit of Diablo 3 in tonight before getting some sleep. Unfortunately, when users try to log into the game the majority of them are being greeted by the following error screen (Error 37) stating that “The servers are busy at this time. Please try again later.”

What’s even more unfortunate is that Blizzard is making us all log into Battle.Net before we can even play Diablo 3 single player. Out of pure boredom brought on by this situation, I put together the following AutoIt script to assist with my login efforts so that I can focus on more productive activities, like watching a show or reading a book. Fire the script in AutoIt, replace YourPasswordHere with your password, hit F5, bring up Diablo 3 and press “=” to start the script. Press “-“ at any time to end it…

I take no responsibility for what you use the script for. Just posting it for educational purposes. Enjoy.

 

Global $Paused

HotKeySet("-", "Stop") ;script can be stopped by pressing -
HotKeySet("=", "Try") ;script can be stopped by pressing -

$go = True
$try = False
$password = "YourPasswordHere"
$sleepDuration = 500

While $go
   if($try) Then
      Send ($password)
      Sleep($sleepDuration)
      Send ("{ENTER}")
      Sleep($sleepDuration)
   EndIf
WEnd

Func Stop() ;to allow the script to stop
    Exit
EndFunc
 
Func Try()
    $try = True
EndFunc

FormsAuthentication.Encrypt returns null

I was refactoring some of our ASP.Net authentication code this weekend and ran into a problem when calling FormsAuthentication.Encrypt(ticket) after creating my FormsAuthenticationTicket. Calling the Encrypt method kept returning null instead of the encrypted ticket.

After a quick Google search, someone mentioned that they would also get null if their userData was null when creating their ticket. I double checked that my userData was valid and continued to scratch my head for a minute. Luckily, it was enough to set me on the right path.

It seems that FormsAuthentication. Encrypt will also return null if the name you pass into your ticket is null.

FormsAuthenticationTicket ticket = new FormsAuthenticationTicket(1, principal.Name,	
DateTime.Now, DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(30), rememberMe, userData, FormsAuthentication.FormsCookiePath);

Essentially, the two items in red above cannot be null if you want FormsAuthentication.Encrypt to return the valid encrypted ticket. Hope this helps someone!