I have several tables in my application where I add some basic auditing columns, such as CreateDate, CreatedBy, LastUpdatedDate, and LastUpdatedBy.  These columns are pretty self explanatory, and I prefer to use the SQL GETDATE() function as the default value for the date columns.  This way I don’t have to worry about setting these dates when a new row is inserted, because SQL will handle it for me.

The first thing you have to do is tell EF4 that these columns are computed by SQL server.  The way you do this is by opening the Entity Data Model (EDM) and finding the matching columns in each entity.  Once you select a column, check out the Properties pane for the column.  You should see something like this:

Notice that I’ve highlighted the StoreGeneratedPattern property in this image.  This property tells EF4 how to handle the default value of this column.  More specifically, toggling this property to Computed will tell EF4 that you want the database to handle initializing this property for you.  If you don’t set this properly, EF4 will attempt to insert the default value for whatever data type the column is.  In this case, in .NET 4.0, the DateTime default is DateTime.MinValue, which is “1/1/1 00:00:00.000.”  If you try to insert this into a regular SQL datetime field, you’ll generate an exception because SQL’s regular datetime type cannot handle a date that far in the past.

One would think that simply setting StoreGeneratedPattern to Computed would fix this problem (and it actually should), however there’s a nice bug in the EDM designer that prevents this from working as intended.  Basically, EF4 EDM’s are broken into a few areas.  You have the SSDL, which is how the EDM describes your database objects and their relationships (think storage models).  Then there is the CSDL which is how your entities themselves are defined (think classes).  Finally there’s the mapping layer which acts as the man in between the SSDL and CSDL.  It’s in charge of mapping the storage models in the SSDL with the entity models in the CSDL.

So what about this bug?  Well, the problem is that when you change the StoreGeneratedPattern property in the EDM designer, only the CSDL is updated.  The SSDL is left in the dark about this change, and because of that, you will continue to experience the out of range exceptions generated above.  There is a way, however, to fix this problem if you aren’t afraid of cracking open an text editor.

First you need to open your *.edmx file in any text editor.  I prefer to use one with XML syntax highlighting just because it makes things easier to find, and it helps me avoid typos.  Right at the top of the file, you should see the SSDL defined.  First you will see the main tables defined, followed by any relationships.  Finally you will start to see your tables defined as storage models like this:

<EntityType Name="tblAnswerDefinitions">
  <Key>
    <PropertyRef Name="AnswerDefinitionID" />
  </Key>
  <Property Name="AnswerDefinitionID" Type="int" Nullable="false" StoreGeneratedPattern="Identity" />
  <Property Name="QuestionID" Type="int" Nullable="false" />
  <Property Name="AnswerTypeID" Type="int" Nullable="false" />
  <Property Name="Value" Type="varchar" Nullable="false" MaxLength="50" />
  <Property Name="Points" Type="int" Nullable="false" />
  <Property Name="IsDeleted" Type="bit" Nullable="false" />
  <Property Name="CreatedBy" Type="int" Nullable="false" />
  <Property Name="CreatedDate" Type="datetime" Nullable="false" />
  <Property Name="LastUpdatedBy" Type="int" Nullable="false" />
  <Property Name="LastUpdatedDate" Type="datetime" Nullable="false" />
</EntityType>

Notice that the CreatedDate and LastUpdatedDate columns don’t have the StoreGeneratedPattern property set, even though we’ve defined them in the EDM designer!  The fix is to simply change the lines and add the property.  When you’re done, it will look like this:

<EntityType Name="tblAnswerDefinitions">
  <Key>
    <PropertyRef Name="AnswerDefinitionID" />
  </Key>
  <Property Name="AnswerDefinitionID" Type="int" Nullable="false" StoreGeneratedPattern="Identity" />
  <Property Name="QuestionID" Type="int" Nullable="false" />
  <Property Name="AnswerTypeID" Type="int" Nullable="false" />
  <Property Name="Value" Type="varchar" Nullable="false" MaxLength="50" />
  <Property Name="Points" Type="int" Nullable="false" />
  <Property Name="IsDeleted" Type="bit" Nullable="false" />
  <Property Name="CreatedBy" Type="int" Nullable="false" />
  <Property Name="CreatedDate" Type="datetime" Nullable="false" StoreGeneratedPattern="Computed" />
  <Property Name="LastUpdatedBy" Type="int" Nullable="false" />
  <Property Name="LastUpdatedDate" Type="datetime" Nullable="false" StoreGeneratedPattern="Computed" />
</EntityType>

The final step is to save the EDMX file, and then open it in Visual Studio.  Make a minor change (like moving the position of one of the entities in the design view), and then save it.  Once the file is saved, the code generator will re-run, and the problem should be solved.  One other pretty annoying thing I’ve noticed is that if you ever have to set another field’s StoreGeneratedPattern property, you actually have to repeat this entire process for all fields, because the designer will wipe out your manual changes.  There is a Microsoft Connect ticket open on this issue, but it has been closed as fixed.  It’s most definitely not fixed, so it could use your attention!  Cheers!

Today, however, I came across perhaps one of the most ridiculous design flaws I’ve ever seen.  Anyone that uses Visual Studio will tell you that the right-click context menus in the solution explorer are critical.  As developers we’re constantly right-clicking stuff in solution explorer and accessing the “Properties” command or perhaps some source control commands.  Much to my surprise, Microsoft decided to implement scrolling in these context menus for reasons unknown to me.  Check this out:

Now before you reply telling me about a lack of screen real estate, let me ensure you that this isn’t the problem.  It has some sort of weird dependency on the item you click being positioned somewhere near the center of the solution explorer.  For example: if I simply expand a few more folders and force the selected item closer to the bottom of the solution explorer, the context menu renders fine:

This issue was reported in February.  Remember when Microsoft delayed the release of VS2010 to fix some speed and usability issues?  Why wasn’t this fixed?  GRRRRR!  Please vote on the Microsoft Connect issue to get this fixed as soon as possible.  Asking us to wait until SP1 is asinine.

Step 1:  Prerequisites

Since my VPS runs Ubuntu Linux 9.10, there are a few packages to install before we get started.  Run the following command to install them:

sudo apt-get install python-setuptools acl python-dev spawn-fcgi

Now you need to make sure your main partition has the acl system enabled in /etc/fstab.  Modify the partition options to look something like this:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
/dev/xvda       /               ext3    noatime,errors=remount-ro,acl 0       1
/dev/xvdb       none            swap    sw              0       0

Pay attention to that acl option in the default partition above.  Now you can just remount the partition:

sudo mount -o remount,acl /

Step 2:  Install Mercurial and flup

Mercurial is obvious, but flup might be new to you.  Flup is a python module that allows us to create a WSGI server to host the repositories.

sudo easy_install mercurial
sudo easy_install flup

Step 3:  Create a user account to hold your repositories

I prefer to place my repositories underneath a normal user account and then add www-data and myself to the group.  Here are the commands to set it all up:

sudo /usr/sbin/groupadd hg
sudo /usr/sbin/useradd -g hg -s /bin/false hg
sudo mkdir /var/hg
sudo chown hg:hg /var/hg
sudo /usr/sbin/usermod -G hg www-data
sudo /usr/sbin/usermod -G hg scott

The next part deserves a little bit of explaining.  Basically the whole /var/hg folder should be owned by the group hg that we just created.  But what we need to ensure three things.  First, the hg group should have write permissions to the root folder.  Second, we need to make sure that any new files created under this folder will belong to the group hg also.  And third, we need to make sure that the default permissions for this folder are read/write for the owner and the group.  These two commands will ensure each of these rules is followed, which is why we added the acl package earlier and remounted the main filesystem.

I’m sure there are other ways to accomplish this (like running Nginx and the FastCGI process as the hg user), but this is the method I prefer, and it saves a lot of headaches down the road dealing with why a push won’t go.  So here are the three commands you need to execute:

sudo chmod -R g+rwxs,o+rx /var/hg
sudo setfacl -R -m d:u::rwx,d:g::rwx,d:m:rwx,d:o:r-x /var/hg

Step 4:  Create the hgwebdir.cgi script

This script is used to serve the incoming requests for the FastCGI interface, mine is /opt/hg-fastcgi/hgwebdir.fcgi

#!/usr/bin/env python
#
# An example CGI script to export multiple hgweb repos, edit as necessary

# adjust python path if not a system-wide install:
#import sys
#sys.path.insert(0, "/path/to/python/lib")

# enable demandloading to reduce startup time
from mercurial import demandimport; demandimport.enable()

# Uncomment to send python tracebacks to the browser if an error occurs:
#import cgitb
#cgitb.enable()

# If you'd like to serve pages with UTF-8 instead of your default
# locale charset, you can do so by uncommenting the following lines.
# Note that this will cause your .hgrc files to be interpreted in
# UTF-8 and all your repo files to be displayed using UTF-8.
#
#import os
#os.environ["HGENCODING"] = "UTF-8"

from mercurial.hgweb.hgwebdir_mod import hgwebdir
from flup.server.fcgi import WSGIServer

# The config file looks like this.  You can have paths to individual
# repos, collections of repos in a directory tree, or both.
#
# [paths]
# virtual/path1 = /real/path1
# virtual/path2 = /real/path2
# virtual/root = /real/root/*
# / = /real/root2/*
#
# [collections]
# /prefix/to/strip/off = /root/of/tree/full/of/repos
#
# paths example:
#
# * First two lines mount one repository into one virtual path, like
# '/real/path1' into 'virtual/path1'.
#
# * The third entry tells every mercurial repository found in
# '/real/root', recursively, should be mounted in 'virtual/root'. This
# format is preferred over the [collections] one, using absolute paths
# as configuration keys is not supported on every platform (including
# Windows).
#
# * The last entry is a special case mounting all repositories in
# '/real/root2' in the root of the virtual directory.
#
# collections example: say directory tree /foo contains repos /foo/bar,
# /foo/quux/baz.  Give this config section:
#   [collections]
#   /foo = /foo
# Then repos will list as bar and quux/baz.
#
# Alternatively you can pass a list of ('virtual/path', '/real/path') tuples
# or use a dictionary with entries like 'virtual/path': '/real/path'

WSGIServer(hgwebdir('/var/hg/hgweb.config')).run()

Make sure you set this script as executable with the following command:

chmod +x /opt/hg-fastcgi/hgwebdir.fcgi

Step 5:  Create the Mercurial hgweb.config

There’s a simple INI-style config file we have to create.  I called mine /var/hg/hgweb.config.  If you decide to place yours elsewhere, you need to modify the last line of the hgwebdir.fcgi script you created in step 4.

[web]
baseurl = /
allow_push = *
push_ssl = false

[collections]
/var/hg = /var/hg

Step 6:  Create the FastCGI init.d script

This script will not only handle starting and stopping your FastCGI process for Mercurial; it will also handle restarting the service on reboot.  Make sure you save this as /etc/init.d/fcgi-hg.

#! /bin/sh
#
# fcgi-hg     Startup script for the nginx HTTP Server
#
# chkconfig: - 84 15
# description: Loading php-cgi using spawn-cgi
#	       HTML files and CGI.
#
# Author:  Ryan Norbauer <ryan.norbauer@gmail.com>
# Modified:     Geoffrey Grosenbach http://topfunky.com
# Modified:     David Krmpotic http://davidhq.com
# Modified:	Kun Xi http://kunxi.org
PATH=/opt/python/bin:$PATH
DAEMON=/usr/bin/spawn-fcgi
FCGIHOST=127.0.0.1
FCGIPORT=9003
FCGIUSER=www-data
FCGIGROUP=www-data
FCGIAPP=/opt/hg-fastcgi/hgwebdir.fcgi
PIDFILE=/var/run/fcgi-hg.pid
DESC="HG in FastCGI mode"

# Gracefully exit if the package has been removed.
test -x $DAEMON || exit 0
test -x $FCGIAPP || exit 0

start() {
	$DAEMON -a $FCGIHOST -p $FCGIPORT -u $FCGIUSER -g $FCGIGROUP -f $FCGIAPP -P $PIDFILE 2> /dev/null || echo -en "\n already running"
}

stop() {
	kill -QUIT `cat $PIDFILE` || echo -en "\n not running"
}

restart() {
	kill -HUP `cat $PIDFILE` || echo -en "\n can't reload"
}

case "$1" in
  start)
    echo -n "Starting $DESC: "
    start
  ;;
  stop)
    echo -n "Stopping $DESC: "
    stop
  ;;
  restart|reload)
    echo -n "Restarting $DESC: "
    stop
    # One second might not be time enough for a daemon to stop,
    # if this happens, d_start will fail (and dpkg will break if
    # the package is being upgraded). Change the timeout if needed
    # be, or change d_stop to have start-stop-daemon use --retry.
    # Notice that using --retry slows down the shutdown process somewhat.
    sleep 1
    start
  ;;
  *)
    echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|restart|reload}" >&2
    exit 3
  ;;
esac

exit $?

Now you need to update the rc.d directories so this service will start when you reboot your box.  This simple command will do it for you:

update-rc.d fcgi-hg defaults

Now you’ll be able to start and stop your service like this:

/etc/init.d/fcgi-hg start
/etc/init.d/fcgi-hg stop
/etc/init.d/fcgi-hg restart

Step 7:  Create hguser.config for user setup

I prefer not to keep my repositories open to everyone (for obvious reasons) so we need to create an htpasswd-style user configuration file.  Note that since this will be used for basic authentication, credentials will be sent in plain text.  If that matters to you, then you should configure your Nginx install to use SSL, but this is outside the scope of this article.  Anyway, onward.  You should put this file at /var/hg/hguser.config

# Format <user>:<encrypted-password>:<comment>
scott:myencryptedpassword:Scott Anderson

Obviously you need to replace the username with your username, and the password with an appropriately encrypted value.  If you have Ruby installed, this is easy, just launch irb and type the following command:

"password".crypt("salt")

Copy the encrypted value into the file and you’re all set.

Step 8:  Modify your Nginx configuration

There are about 100 ways to setup websites in Nginx, so I’ll assume you know where to place server sections.  If you followed my previous tutorial, this will be in a file something like /usr/local/nginx/sites-enabled/geeksharp.com.  The block should look something like this:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name dev.geeksharp.com;
    root /var/hg/;
    gzip on;

    location / {
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9003;
        fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_ROOT /var/hg/;
        fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string;
        fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method;
        fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type;
        fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /opt/hg-fastcgi/hgwebdir.fcgi;
        auth_basic 'geek# Source Control';
        auth_basic_user_file /var/hg/hgusers.config;
    }
}

That’s it!  You can edit all these miscellaneous files to suit your needs.  If you did everything correctly, all you need to do is start the fcgi-hg script and then restart nginx.  When you want to create a new repository, you should create it in /var/hg like so:

hg init /var/hg/project

Once you get everything running and you create a few repositories, you should see something like this:

Hope this helps someone out there.  If you have questions, or something doesn’t work, let me know and I try and help you out.  Good luck!

As you know, I swapped my Windows development environment for Mac OSX, and so far learning Rails has been a great pleasure thanks to Agile Web Development with Rails (Third Edition) from The Pragmatic Programmers.  When I found this alternate method for installing ruby-debug-ide I decided to fire up my Windows 7 VM and give it a go.  Here are the gems I have currently installed on my VM:

To get this working on my VM, here’s the steps I followed:

1. Install Ruby 1.9.1 from RubyInstaller.org.  When you run the installer, make sure you pay attention to the checkboxes under the install path and check both of them:
   
2. Now that you have Ruby installed, you need to get the devkit package from Rubyforge.  You should see an archive in the “Development Kit” section of that page.  The current version as of this writing is 3.4.5r3 (20091110).
3. Once you have the archive, you’ll need 7-zip to decompress it, so go get it and install it.
4. When you open the archive in 7-zip, click the Extract button and make sure you extract it to wherever you installed Ruby.  In my case this was C:\Ruby19.
   
5. The last step is to make the devkit fstab file point to the proper Ruby folders.  The fstab file is underneath your Ruby install.  Mine was located at C:\Ruby19\devkit\msys\1.0.11\etc\fstab.  Just open this file in notepad and change it.
   
6. Now the devkit is installed properly, all you have to do is open up a command prompt (make sure you Run As Administrator) and type the following commands (if you want to get the same gems as me):

   gem install rails
   gem install mongrel
   gem install cucumber
   gem install rspec
   gem install ruby-debug-ide

That’s it!  If you run into any weird issues, let me know in the comments.  Enjoy your new Windows-based Ruby on Rails development environment running the latest and greatest Ruby 1.9.1!

In the spirit of truly immersing myself in Rails development, I’ve come to realize that even though it’s 100% possible to write Rails applications on Windows, the experience is less than ideal.  I’m sure some of you out there are very successful Rails developers using Windows as your primary OS and more power to you!  But this is my journey, and I feel like I really should use the best-of-breed development environment for the task at hand, and Windows just isn’t going to cut it.  So… I decided that OSX was the best for me.  It seems like the vast majority of the Rails community uses OSX for development, and I don’t mind following in their well-established footsteps!

“But wait!,” I hear you say, “Aren’t you a .NET developer, and don’t you have production websites running on ASP.NET MVC?”  Ah, yes, my fair reader, you are correct!  But in today’s world of virtualization, especially on an OSX host, there’s no reason you can’t run your entire .NET development environment inside a beefy VM, and my main machine is definitely beefy enough to handle it!  See for yourself:

On my main machine, I’m actually running Snow Leopard now.  I installed OSX 10.6 from a retail DVD (thanks Apple Store!) and I’m loving every minute of it.  My virtual machine is a Windows 7 32-bit install with the “Windows Classic” theme because it honestly looks cleaner to me.  VMWare Fusion makes all of this possible, and I couldn’t be happier.  My performance is rock solid, so far.  And the best part is, now I can work in the best .NET environment through sweet virtualization, and the best Rails environment because let’s face it:  TextMate on OSX is sexy as hell:

If there’s interest in a more specific outline of how I got all this set up, I could definitely make a “How To” post or maybe a screencast that details everything.

Before I get going with NetBeans, I want to make sure my Ruby environment is ready.  The version of Ruby I have installed is from the one-click installer on ruby-lang.org.  The current version is 1.8.6 and it’s about 25 MB.  During installation, it will give you the opportunity to install rubygems, and I always check that box.  Once the installer is finished, you will notice that the “gem” and “ruby” executables have been added to your path.  There are 3 packages that need to be installed after that to get your Rails environment ready:

gem install rails
gem install mongrel
gem install sqlite3-ruby

You’ll get a lot of various “No definition” warnings when installing sqlite3-ruby which can safely be ignored.  When I’m developing locally, I tend to use sqlite3 for my Rails databases because it’s quick and painless.  I also prefer the Mongrel webserver over the default WEBrick because it’s much faster.

Now that Ruby on Rails is ready, I loaded up NetBeans for the first time.  One of the nice things about NetBeans is that it detected my default Rails environment almost immediately, however when examining the settings for this environment, I noticed that the “Classic Debugger” was installed:

When I tried to click the “Install Fast Debugger” button, gem spit out some nasty errors about not being able to build the packages from source.  The error it specifically stated that it couldn’t find nmake, despite the fact that I have Visual C++ 2008 Professional installed.  The fix for this error was easy.  I popped open a Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt:

From this prompt, I attempted to install the package manually by running the following command:

gem install ruby-debug-ide

Which ultimately lead to this lovely error:

c:\ruby\lib\ruby\1.8\i386-mswin32\config.h(2) : fatal error C1189: #error :  MSC version unmatch
NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\BIN\cl.EXE"' : return code '0x2'
Stop.

At this point I do a little digging and find this post on RubyForge about building ruby-debug from scratch on Windows.  I’m no C++ guru, but the last comment by Fred Seltzer says:

Hmmm. I just hacked up my copy of config.h to no longer
require the specific version of the C compiler and it built
and ran just fine. I don’t want to go back and revisit
this. Let’s call it closed…

Fredonrails…

Aha!  The light bulb in my head turns on and I decide to go check out this nefarious “config.h” sitting in my Ruby installation (you can see the full path in the error message above).  When I open the config.h, I see the first 3 lines look something like this:

#if _MSC_VER != 1200
#error MSC version unmatch
#endif

After I removed these 3 lines, I tried the command again, and alas, ruby-debug-ide installed!

I hope this helps other folks out there to get ruby-debug-ide installed.  I know it’s sort of a pain in the rear, but it worked for me.  I’m pretty sure this will work with Visual C++ 2008 Express, also, but I don’t have it installed so I couldn’t confirm for sure.  If you don’t mind chewing up a little hard drive space, this method will save you some time in the long run.  Happy coding!

Earlier this year I attended MIX09, and one of the key takeaways was the Microsoft Web Platform Installer.  Microsoft has realized that for the “average Joe,” setting up a new Windows-based web server with all the necessary configurations and supporting frameworks can be rather cumbersome.  This is even more obvious when you begin to work with IIS7, given the fact that the administration system has changed drastically.  The idea behind this specialized installer is to perform all of the work for you.  Sounds neat, huh?  Well after screwing around with my VPS for hours, I can tell you that things aren’t exactly as easy as they seem.  To make a very long story quite a bit shorter, I’ve found through my troubles that things need to be installed in a very specific order:

1. Grab the Web Platform Installer.
2. Open the “Web Platform” tab and ensure that you only install components from the “Web Server” and “Frameworks and Runtimes” sections.  You might be tempted to add in SQL Server 2008 Express, but don’t.  Trust me when I tell you this.
3. Once everything is finished (which will take forever), now you can attempt to install the SQL Server 2008 Express SP1 package, but don’t bother with the Express Management Studio because it will fail no matter what.  If you must have this package, I recommend purchasing a license for Microsoft SQL Server Developer edition and installing only the client tools on the VPS.  No matter which way I tried, I could never get the Express Management Studio to install properly.
4. Pray to the Microsoft gods that everything goes without a hitch.
5. If you’re lucky, you have a working Windows-based web server.

Good luck to the brave souls that wish to venture into this territory.  I had nothing but issues with it and I wonder if I wouldn’t have been more successful if I’d have just done it manually from the start.  Perhaps these issues are just because of the VPS environment that I’m installing in, but I can’t be the only one out there that uses a virtual server for their web deployments!

Over the next few weeks I plan on spending a lot more time with Rails and ASP.NET MVC.  My end goal is to present an overview of the benefits and faults of each technology, and hopefully I can provide a somewhat objective point of view for people new to MVC.  Stay tuned!

Given that I have a MySQL database laying around, I decided to poke around in the source code to see exactly how MySQL’s PASSWORD() function really works.  It didn’t take me long to find inside the file “libmysql/password.c” this little gem:

/*
    MySQL 4.1.1 password hashing: SHA conversion (see RFC 2289, 3174) twice
    applied to the password string, and then produced octet sequence is
    converted to hex string.
    The result of this function is used as return value from PASSWORD() and
    is stored in the database.
  SYNOPSIS
    make_scrambled_password()
    buf       OUT buffer of size 2*SHA1_HASH_SIZE + 2 to store hex string
    password  IN  NULL-terminated password string
*/

void
make_scrambled_password(char *to, const char *password)
{
  SHA1_CONTEXT sha1_context;
  uint8 hash_stage2[SHA1_HASH_SIZE];

  mysql_sha1_reset(&sha1_context);
  /* stage 1: hash password */
  mysql_sha1_input(&sha1_context, (uint8 *) password, (uint) strlen(password));
  mysql_sha1_result(&sha1_context, (uint8 *) to);
  /* stage 2: hash stage1 output */
  mysql_sha1_reset(&sha1_context);
  mysql_sha1_input(&sha1_context, (uint8 *) to, SHA1_HASH_SIZE);
  /* separate buffer is used to pass 'to' in octet2hex */
  mysql_sha1_result(&sha1_context, hash_stage2);
  /* convert hash_stage2 to hex string */
  *to++= PVERSION41_CHAR;
  octet2hex(to, (const char*) hash_stage2, SHA1_HASH_SIZE);
}

As you can see, the password algorithm uses a double-SHA1 hash to format the password.  The other little tidbit is that any passwords generated post-4.1 will be pre-pended with an asterisk (*).  Given that I have spent a fair amount of time recently working with cryptography in .NET, it didn’t take long to adapt this code to C#.  The following function produces the same output as the MySQL PASSWORD() function.

public string GeneralteMySQLHash(string key)
{
    byte[] keyArray = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(key);
    SHA1Managed enc = new SHA1Managed();
    byte[] encodedKey = enc.ComputeHash(enc.ComputeHash(keyArray));
    StringBuilder myBuilder = new StringBuilder(encodedKey.Length);

    foreach (byte b in encodedKey)
        myBuilder.Append(b.ToString("X"));

    return "*" + myBuilder.ToString();
}

I hope this helps someone out there. I know it was kinda of fun to put on my super-slueth hat for a while .

Update 5/29/2009: I found a neat way to do this in T-SQL also. It’s a bit ugly, but it works!

SELECT '*' + SUBSTRING(master.dbo.fn_varbintohexstr(HASHBYTES('SHA1',HASHBYTES('SHA1','VALUE-TO-ENCRYPT-GOES-HERE'))),1,42)

When I logged into my VPS, one of the things I wanted to install right away was SQL Server 2008.  In order for SQL Server 2008 to install, you must first have installed the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.  I figured it was no big deal and decided to let SQL handle my install.  Once the installer got going, it immediately halted and displayed an error message telling me it couldn’t be installed.  After checking the log file, I found the following:

WapUI: [2] DepCheck indicates Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0SP1 (x64) (CBS) is not installed.

Obviously on Windows Server 2008 SP1, the .NET Framework 2.0SP1 is already installed by default.  Just to prove it to myself, I downloaded and ran the installer.  Sure enough, it failed before it even started, telling me that it could not be installed on Windows Vista.  So I began to poke around the VPS.  One of the things that jumped out at me was the fact that the Windows Update service was disabled.  When I checked with my VPS provider’s documentation, they indicated that Windows updates must be disabled because they are slipstreamed into the OS build.  Updating your VPS through Windows Update can (and probably will) break it.  Yikes!

After a bit more searching, I found a solution to the problem.  It turns out that the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installer requires the Windows Update service to be running, but you can still set your server to “Never check for updates.”  By temporarily enabling the Windows Update service, I was able to install .NET 3.5 SP1 without a hitch.  I hope this helps anyone else using a VPS, because it sure gave me a little bit of a headache!