joeware - never stop exploring... :)

I am finally writing code again… I am happy about that because I was effectively not coding for over a year. Yes, for over a year, almost 15 months actually. That is a long time for me not to write code because it is one of my main creative outlets.

I will be releasing one of the tools because it is an update to GCChk. When I originally wrote GCChk I thought about allowing you to specify the DCs to use to check and then decided that AD is probably better at picking the DCs to use than most admins and didn’t allow you to specify the DCs. Well my good friend Guido ran into an issue that was a perfect example of why you may need to specify a DC to use to do the check. He actually needed to check one GC against the partitions on another GC. Now this normally wouldn’t be a good idea because you should probably check against a writeable partition as it would be considered a bit more authoritative but Guido was in a position where he didn’t have network access to a writeable DC for the partitions he was checking due to the network configuration. The ONLY way to check for lingering objects would be to daisy chain from the writeable to the closest GC to the next closest GC etc all the way to the end of the WAN. The MSFT lingering object check in repadmin just can’t do it and trying to get that updated to do that would take an OS release and Guido was on a project that needed a very troubled forest checked out and fixed quickly. I couldn’t help him with the correcting the issues, but I could help him out with identifying GCs and their specific issues. And so I updated GCChk to to allow specifying GCs for the comparison. Again that will be uploaded in the next few weeks.

And the second tool I worked on was a complete surprise for me…. This one I had to work on for my day job so obviously I will never be releasing it. It is… yes wait for it… a C# utility… Yes I wrote my first .NET program. I will admit it was better than I expected but at the same time it was worse. The ".NET is so intuitive and easy" really wasn’t the case, at least not for me. And System.DirectoryServices has some serious issues and bad assumptions. I know I know Eric and JoeK and BrianD and everyone else who told me to use System.DirectoryServices.Protocols. Next time I play with .NET, I will do so. But I think it was good for me to see what most people who jump into .NET (and PowerShell) are likely going to use for directory access and I feel for them. I will try to write a blog or two on a few things that I found to be really annoying and/or bad.