You can also read the article that describes how this is implemented.

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Aug 1 2001 ____________________________________________________________               C o v e r Y o u r A S P . c o m              Welcome to the latest newsletter!                  http://CoverYourASP.com/ ____________________________________________________________ What a fun two weeks! Three very cool new features have been added to the site - first, a huge new job section covering the whole IT industry is now live. Built in association with DeveloperNetworks.com http://jobs.CoverYourASP.com/ has already proven a popular place to check out your next employer! Second, the CoverYourASP store is now open. I just had to do it for a laugh! I don't make a cent off the items for sale, but if you need a new mug, cap, or even boxer shorts you know where to go. And, no, unfortunately they wouldn't let me print the CYA logo in the obvious position on the boxer shorts. =;-) Check it the store at http://www.cafepress.com/CoverYourASP/ Last but definitely not least Charles Carroll of http://LearnASP.com and http://ASPlists.com/ fame has created a mailing list just for you and I to discuss the CoverYourASP code, and to continue to build the great CYA community we have! More on that later... ____________________________________________________________         A   W O R D   F R O M   M Y   S P O N S O R S                 http://www.nsoftware.com/ ____________________________________________________________ IP*Works! V5 ASP Edition includes 35 components, optimized for Active Server Page programming.  The standard IP*Works! components are all included, HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP, IMAP, REXEC etc. Also included are new, higher level components such as WebUpload, WebForm, FileMailer, TraceRoute, and more.   The package includes sample ASP pages demonstrating how to access Web Services such as Yahoo Stock Quotes and UPS Address Verification.                 http://www.nsoftware.com/ ____________________________________________________________                     T H E   D I A R Y                The events of the last 2 weeks             http://CoverYourASP.com/ShowDiary.asp ____________________________________________________________ ______ 15 Jul ______ - The site had some serious problems this weekend! Starting Friday PM the site was down almost all weekend - with only 300 page views by 7pm Sunday you understand the enormity of the problem. My mail was probably bouncing too, so if you sent me one please send it again. Sorry! ______ 16 Jul ______ - Many thanks to the Rene Lariviere and Mark Johnson who reported that their IE6 crashes when visiting my front page. It turns out that some (but not all) versions of IE6 don't like the iframe that this diary appears in! For now I have disabled the diary for IE6 users, but to see if it crashes for you you can append ?ShowIE6 to the URL: http://CoverYourASP.com/default.asp?ShowIE6 ______ 20 Jul ______ - Fancy a pair of boxer shorts with the CoverYourASP logo? Thought not! But if you did, you could buy some at the CoverYourASP store! [1] Get your mugs, mouse mats, T-shirts here too... [1] http://www.cafepress.com/CoverYourASP/ ______ 24 Jul ______ - It's a little late to mention this, but tonight is the Atlanta ASP User Group meeting - read all about it [1]. Tonight Kenny Jones from Microsoft is talking about "ADO.NET: Powering Data Access in ASP.NET Applications." See you there?... [1] http://www.aspusergroup.com/atlanta/index.asp ______ 25 Jul ______ - I'm proud to announce a huge new section on CoverYourASP - jobs[1]! Many of you have asked the best way to get yourself a job working with ASP - now you need look no further. Good luck! [1] http://jobs.CoverYourASP.com/ ____________________________________________________________         A   W O R D   F R O M   M Y   S P O N S O R S                 http://www.WebServerList.com ____________________________________________________________                 Ready for a Dedicated Server?               Start shopping for your web server               today. Take control of your web               server and realize the benefits of               increased  reliability and security    Visit Web Server List at http://www.WebServerList.com ____________________________________________________________               H E R O   O F   T H E   W E E K ! ____________________________________________________________ Steve Gibson of http://grc.com/ is this weeks hero. I've mentioned his website briefly before when recommending that you read his article[1] about battling a DDOS attack against his site, but this week I'm concentrating on his Shields UP! online utility[2]. My development computer at home has a permenant cable connection, and I leave my computer turned on 24/7, so I'm a perfect target for people trying to find computers to use for directing DDOS attacks. Previously I had used the free ZoneAlarm software[3] to protect my computer, but a number of minor problems made me uninstall that a few months ago. Since then I've been meaning to try another solution, and after running Shields UP! I finally have solved the problem by buying a LinkSys router[4]. If you haven't tested your computer security with Shields UP! DO IT NOW[1]. My computer was  w i d e  open. After simply plugging in the new router (it was that easy) my computer does not even appear to exist to anyone probing my IP address. Now THAT's Stealth mode. By the way, buy.com was the cheapest place to find the router, and were excellent. The router got shipped same day, and arrived 2 days after placing the order. At $84 (after $15 rebate), this router is a steal. [1] http://grc.com/dos/intro.htm [2] https://grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2 [3] http://zonealarm.com/ [4] http://www.us.buy.com/retail/computers/product.asp?sku=10235958&loc=219 ____________________________________________________________            R E C O M M E N D   T H E   S I T E !         Please recommend my site to your colleagues            http://CoverYourASP.com/Recommend.asp ____________________________________________________________ OK, more about our mailing list. To start small I'm not announcing it on the site yet, instead just telling newsletter subscribers and members. You get to go first! The list is fully moderated by me, so there won't be any off-topic mails getting through - if it's not about CYA, it won't be here. There are already hundreds of asplists to ask other questions on - 9,000,000 emails last month were moved by http://asplists.com/ ! ______ To subscribe/unsubscribe from the list, visit:   http://asplists.com/asplists/aspcya.asp ______ I think it's going to be great. And don't think that you have to just listen - if you know the answer to a question or have some tips or tricks, speak up! Everybody is welcome. There are some very experienced ASP developers and some complete newbies - and me somewhere in the middle. =;-) ____________________________________________________________                N E E D   A N   A S P   I S P ?         Use mine. You won't find a nicer bunch of guys.            Cheap, efficient and extremely helpful.                   http://EverPlanet.com/ ____________________________________________________________ More and more people are moving their sites to EverPlanet - even some famous ASP sites like http://FuzzySoftware.com/ and a soon-to-be-released "kickin" ASP site. (hush) =;-) Whether you want to host a little site like my friends cute http://BuggyBagg.com/ or a 1,000,000 page view monster, call Chris Oak at 770 234 9909 and have a chat. He's a nice guy. ____________________________________________________________                      F E E D B A C K             Have something to say? Please share!             http://CoverYourASP.com/Contact.asp ____________________________________________________________ Steve Smith (President of ASP Alliance): "You don't need application.lock and unlock in application_OnStart -- it's only ever executed once, single threaded, so there are no concurrency issues.  (that's the one place where you can avoid using lock/unlock)." Me: Thanks. I guess I knew that but have such an in-grained habit of using Application.Lock and Unlock they slipped in! ______ Andrew Haslett: "Hi James, First of all.. great site. Have found it very useful even though I'm a VB script man! lol Anyway, was reading your article about rendering blocks and the feedback section and remembered reading a test that had been done.  You may find the experiment done by Ken Schaefer quite interesting.. he's a pretty reputable source and contributes to a number of newsgroups that I frequent (eg p2p.wrox etc) Anyway, it can be found here:   http://www.adopenstatic.com/experiments/stringconcantenation.asp Cheers, Andrew" ______ David Levine: "Thanks for the site and the link to the HitBox Doctor[1]. First thing I usually do is run a program like the one you listed against the sites own homepage. They should use their own tool! Try entering their home page http://www.hitbox.com as the site to check..." [1] http://resources.hitbox.com/cgi-bin/page.cgi?tools/doc Me: hehehe! That *is* a little bizarre! ______ Hi Fredrik. ______ Dan McKelvy: "James, I am writing to thank you for all the wonderful examples. They have been an invaluable aid in my quest to learn ASP. I was hoping you could help by answering a question concerning MapPath. I understand it is used to translate a relative path to an absolute path on the server. The question is how does it even know what the relative path is? You pass it a filename only. If I assume the file could be stored in any directory how does MapPath know what to return? If I send MapPath a NULL will it return the server path associated with the main directory of the URL. This would look something like: sPath = Server.MapPath('') might return: sPath = "d:\\www" I know the folders that exist and what files are in them. What I do not know is how to determine the root path for my files and folders as the server sees them. Thanks for any help you can offer, Dan" Me: MapPath does different things depending on the first character in the path sent in. If it starts with / the path is treated as a virtual path, and the physical path computed from there. If it starts with another character the path is computed relative to the position of the asp file calling it. So, calling Server.MapPath ( '/images/hello.gif' ) from an asp page in C:\Inetpub\Wwwroot\ would return C:\Inetpub\Wwwroot\images\hello.gif To see where (physically) your current asp page is, you could do this: Server.MapPath ( Request.ServerVariables("PATH_INFO") ) ______ Conan: "...for those who have their 404 handling file sending out emails! Opening my Outlook Inbox this morning I was greeted with no less than 6800 emails from my web-site! ALL 404's, all from Internet Explorer 3.02, and ALL seemed to be the result of HREF's that include JavaScript somehow. Your site gets quite a bit more coverage than any of mine, I hope you will include a little mention of this in your diary or newsletter somewhere to warn any would-be-hapless webmaster!" Me: Yes, we've talked about this before. I can't remember the last time I got a 404 email from the site that was actually a missing file. They are all browser bugs! Nevertheless, they're handy to know and sometimes worth fixing. A better solution anyway is to add the file info to an Application variable[1] and send a single email once an hour or so... [1] http://CoverYourASP.com/Application.asp ______ Here's an email I snagged from one of the private ASPACE mailing lists that I was kindly invited to join recently...this was from a thread started when I asked about port scanning: G. Andrew Duthie: "Here are some good resources for hardening an IIS box (I just finished a chapter on Security for one of the ASP.NET books I'm working on): http://nsa2.www.conxion.com/win2k/download.htm - Guides from the NSA for securing Win2K, IIS, and other MS software. Good stuff. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/notify.asp - site to subscribe to Microsoft's Security Notification Service...one way to keep up with when you need to install patches. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/tools.asp - List of security tools offered by Microsoft, including the IIS Hotfix Checker, IMO the BEST way to automate making sure that your server(s) have the latest patches installed. I use this, and modified the scripts to send me email when a new patch is available (instructions on how to do this are included with the tool). http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/iis5chk.asp - IIS 5 Security Checklist. Great doc for what you need to do to secure IIS. That's a good start. For hardware, have a look at the Cable/DSL routers offered by NetGear and Linksys (I use a NetGear RT 314, but I've heard good things about the Linksys models as well). Make sure that the model you buy can do NAT (network address translation) and packet filtering. Getting one with a web-based admin interface would be a bonus (mine's telnet-based, and none too intuitive, but it works)." ______ Abdel: "Hi James, I know you do that everyday, but don't know how you do to merge different tables from your DB. My users connect to my application through a DB, such as yours. My DB tables are linked together with id, Now when a user is identified, I'd like to show him data from more than one table. Is the best way to do this "merging tables ?" Thanks again James" Me: Well, it's not merging, but to show info from two related tables, use this type of SQL statement: DBGetRecords ( 'SELECT Table1.id, Table1.a, Table2.b FROM Table1 INNER JOIN Table2 ON Table1.id = Table2.id' ); This populates the recordset with the id and a columns from Table1 and the b column from Table2. It matches up the two tables by saying that they both have an id column which matches. Let's see how this works with a simple example: Create Table1 with an "id" autonumber (i'm using Access of course) and an "a" text column. Enter the following data:   1 james   2 fred   3 joe Create Table2 with an "id" autonumber and a "b" text column, and enter:   1 shaw   2 smith   3 deleteme   4 bloggs Then delete the "deleteme" row (!) Now when you run the query above you'll get the following returned:   1 james shaw   2 fred smith The "joe" and "bloggs" rows didn't have any matching entries in the other table, so neither are shown. ______ This all started when I got yet another test newsletter from someone using my code. I have to leave some email address in the downloaded database, so I can always tell when someone is testing. I sent several emails to them asking them to remove my email but all went unanswered, so instead I went to their CYA-based web site to have a look around. Here's the funny part - the DBadmin.asp page was still there and the password had not been changed! If you're using my code, ALWAYS change the password! Anyway, it was easy then to edit their database and remove my email address myself... =;-) ______ Chuck: "Some guys and I have got into it recently regarding server-side JavaScript. They claim it is impossible outside of Netscape servers.  I showed them some examples of your pages (on IIS), but they still don't see. All of the documentation seems to support them. So, how do your pages run on IIS?" Me: Hehehe. ASP can be written in many languages, even perl, but VBScript and JScript (MS' identical version of JavaScript) are the most common. So, *of course* it's possible to run JavaScript server-side on IIS - I do not write *anything* in VBScript. If they don't believe you, download the entire site[1] and let them inspect it! [1] http://CoverYourASP.com/CYA.asp ______ Abdel: "Is there any mean to get the first - day of the week - date and the week number?" Me: All the objects and their methods are well documented on MSDN, here are the Date object docs: http://msdn.microsoft.com/scripting/jscript/doc/jsobjdate.htm ____________________________________________________________             H A V E   I   H E L P E D   Y O U ?           If I've helped you, help me help others!             http://CoverYourASP.com/Donate.asp          ===> now with new ways to say thanks! <=== ____________________________________________________________ Please, join our aspcya list, especially if you're experienced with the CoverYourASP site and code and would like to share answering the questions. I will remove moderation from users who I already know when they first post to the list, and any others that show they won't stray off-topic. Your replies will then go straight through without any delay. In the meantime, while you're moderated, please bear with me as your emails will be delayed until I approve them to the list. It's all done this way to keep the quality of the list high, which obviously benefits everyone. Thanks Guys! Speak to you later. Warmest Regards, James Shaw [email protected] 885 Woodstock Road, Suite 430, #108 Roswell, GA 30075-2247, U.S.A. ____________________________________________________________                 S U B S C R I P T I O N S           Do you want to subscribe or unsubscribe?             http://CoverYourASP.com/Subscribe.asp ____________________________________________________________