Converting Data From ASP.NET to Classic ASP

Recently I came across a situation when I had to encrypt certain piece of data into ASP.NET and then read the same encrypted data for decryption into Classic ASP. Spent several hours and could not understand why the same encryption/decryption method used in both are producing entirely two different characters. After doing some tests, finally concluded that it is an issue of character Encoding.  By default ASP.NET produces data in UTF8 Charset and UTF8Encoding Content Encoding . Whereas Classic ASP defaults to null Charset. After all research and headache following one line of code fixed this issue and both started talking to each other.

In ASP.NET Page, on page Load event add following line

Response.ContentEncoding = Encoding.Default

This default value shows as SBCSCodePageEncoding, not sure if that is showing because of my environment or configuration settings but it fixed my issue.

Marriage and Divorce

I found the following story on my favorite actor Amitabh Bachchan’s Blog, this is about marriage and divorce. Sometime people take such hasty decision without thinking properly and giving sufficient time. I hope you will like it too. Here the story goes…

 

“When I got home that night as my wife served dinner, I held her hand and said, I’ve got something to tell you. She sat down and ate quietly. Again I observed the hurt in her eyes.

Suddenly I didn’t know how to open my mouth. But I had to let her know what I was thinking. I want a divorce. I raised the topic calmly. She didn’t seem to be annoyed by my words, instead she asked me softly, why? I avoided her question. This made her angry. She threw away the chopsticks and shouted at me, you are not a man!

That night, we didn’t talk to each other. She was weeping. I knew she wanted to find out what had happened to our marriage. But I could hardly give her a satisfactory answer; I had lost my heart to a lovely girl called
Dew. I didn’t love her anymore. I just pitied her!

With a deep sense of guilt, I drafted a divorce agreement which stated that she could own our house, 30% shares of my company and the car. She glanced at it and then tore it into pieces. The woman who had spent ten years of her life with me had become a stranger. I felt sorry for her wasted time, resources and energy but I could not take back what I had said for I loved Dew so dearly.

Finally she cried loudly in front of me, which was what I had expected to see. To me her cry was actually a kind of release. The idea of divorce which had obsessed me for several weeks seemed to be firmer and clearer now.

The next day, I came back home very late and found her writing something at the table. I didn’t have supper but went straight to sleep and fell asleep very fast because I was tired after an eventful day with Dew. When I woke up, she was still there at the table writing. I just did
not care so I turned over and was asleep again.

In the morning she presented her divorce conditions: she didn’t want anything from me, but needed a month’s notice before the divorce. She requested that in that one month we both struggle to live as normal a life as possible. Her reasons were simple: our son had his exams in a months time and she didn’t want to disrupt him with our broken marriage.

This was agreeable to me. But she had something more, she asked me to recall how I had carried her into out bridal room on our wedding day.. She requested that everyday for the month’s duration I carry her out of our bedroom to the front door ever morning. I thought she was going crazy.

Just to make our last days together bearable I accepted her odd request.

I told Dew about my wife s divorce conditions. She laughed loudly and thought it was absurd. No matter what tricks she applies, she has to face the divorce, she said
scornfully. My wife and I hadn’t had any body contact since my divorce intention was explicitly expressed. So when I carried her out on the first day, we both appeared clumsy.. Our son clapped behind us, daddy is holding mummy in his arms. His words brought me a sense of pain. From the bedroom to the sitting room, then to the door, I walked over ten meters with her in my arms. She closed her eyes and said softly; don’t tell our son about the divorce. I nodded, feeling somewhat upset..

I put her down outside the door. She went to wait for the bus to work. I drove alone to the office.

On the second day, both of us acted much more easily. She leaned on my chest.. I could smell the fragrance of her blouse. I realized that I hadn’t looked at this woman carefully for a long time. I realized she was not young any more. There were fine wrinkles on her face, her hair was graying! Our marriage had taken its toll on her. For a minute I wondered what
I had done to her.

On the fourth day, when I lifted her up, I felt a sense of intimacy returning. This was the woman who had given ten years of her life to me. On the fifth and sixth day, I realized that our sense of intimacy was growing again. I didn’t tell Dew about this. It became easier to carry her as the month slipped by. Perhaps the everyday workout made me stronger.

She was choosing what to wear one morning. She tried on quite a few dresses but could not find a suitable one. Then she sighed, all my dresses have grown bigger. I suddenly realized that she had grown so thin, that was the reason why I could carry her more easily. Suddenly it hit me; she had buried so much pain and bitterness in her heart.

Subconsciously I reached out and touched her head. Our son came in at the moment and said, Dad, it’s time to carry mum out. To him, seeing his father carrying his mother out had become an essential part of his life. My wife
gestured to our son to come closer and hugged him tightly. I turned my face away because I was afraid I might change my mind at this last minute. I then held her in my arms, walking from the bedroom, through the sitting room, to the hallway. Her hand surrounded my neck softly and naturally. I held her body tightly; it was just like our wedding day.

But her much lighter weight made me sad. On the last day, when I held her in my arms I could hardly move a step. Our son had gone to school. I held her tightly and said, I hadn’t noticed that our life lacked intimacy. I drove to office… jumped out of the car swiftly without locking the door. I was afraid any delay would make me change my mind… I walked upstairs. Dew opened the door and I said to her, Sorry, Dew, I do not want the divorce anymore.

She looked at me, astonished. Then touched my forehead. Do you have a fever? She said. I moved her hand off my head. Sorry, Dew, I said, I
won’t divorce.. My marriage life was boring probably because she and I didn’t value the details of our lives, not because we didn’t love each other any more.. Now I realize that since I carried her into my home on our wedding day I am supposed to hold her until death does us apart.

Dew seemed to suddenly wake up. She gave me a loud slap and then slammed the door and burst into tears. I walked downstairs and drove away. At the floral shop on the way, I ordered a bouquet of flowers for my wife. The salesgirl asked me what to write on the card. I smiled and wrote:
‘I’ll carry you out every morning until death do us apart’ “

 

The small details of our lives are what really matter in a relationship. It is not the mansion, the car, the property, the bank balance that matters. These create an environment conducive for happiness but cannot give happiness in themselves. So find time to be your spouse’s friend and do those little things for
each other that build intimacy. Do have a real happy marriage!

If you don’t share this, nothing will happen to you, but if you do, you just might save a marriage.
Relationships are made not to exploit, not to be broken.
We teach some by what we say
We teach some more by what we do
But we teach most by what we are
You don’t get to choose how you are going to die, or when, but, you can decide how you are going to live, here and now.

Custom Service or RESTful Service?

REST, or Representational State Transfer, is a type of Web service that is rapidly gaining in popularity. So you might ask yourself what the difference is between RESTful services and custom Web services, and why you might choose one type over the other. The key difference between the two types is that REST services are resource-centric while custom services are operation-centric. With REST, you divide your data into resources, give each resource a URL, and implement standard operations on those resources that allow creation, retrieval, update, and deletion (CRUD). With custom services, you can implement any arbitrary method, which means that the focus is on the operations rather than the resources, and those operations can be tailored to the specific needs of your application.

Some services fit very naturally into the REST model—usually when the resources are obvious and much of the service involves management of those resources. Exchange Server, for instance, has a REST API for organizing e-mail and calendar items. Similarly, there are photo-sharing Web sites on the Internet that expose REST APIs. In other cases, the services less clearly match REST operations, but can still be made to fit. Sending e-mail, for example, can be accomplished by adding a resource to an outbox folder. This is not the way you would most naturally think about sending e-mail, but it is not too much of a stretch.

In other cases, though, REST operations just do not fit well. Creating a resource in order to initiate a workflow that drives monthly payroll check printing, for example, would be much less natural than having a specific method for that purpose.

If you can fit your service into the constraints of REST, doing so will buy you a lot of advantages. ADO.NET Data Services in combination with the Entity Framework makes it easy to create both RESTful services and clients to work with them. The framework can provide more functionality to RESTful services automatically because the services are constrained to follow a specific pattern. In addition, RESTful services have a very broad reach because they are so simple and interoperable. They work especially well when you do not know in advance who the clients might be. Finally, REST can be made to scale to handle very large volumes of operations.

For many applications, the constraints of REST are just too much. Sometimes the domain does not divide clearly into a single pattern of resources or the operations involve multiple resources at once. Sometimes the user actions and business logic around them do not map well to RESTful operations, or more precise control is required than can fit into those operations. In these cases, custom services are the way to go.

You can always build an application that has a mix of REST and custom services. Often the ideal solution for an application is a mixture of both.

Source: MSDN Magazine Jun 2009