Inveigled By Design

One of my latest quests is to learn more about Silverlight.

One of the first things I wanted to figure out is how, if I’m going to be developing Silverlight apps, can I publish them on my site so I can share them. So far I’ve found three ways to do it. For purposes of this demo, I created a very simple silverlight app that just has a single button. Each time you click the button, the text toggles between “Click Me” and “Reset”.

Embedding Silverlight Content in an HTML page

Since I plan on posting a series of Silverlight projects as I learn more about what can be done with it, I thought one way to show them was to give each one it’s own html page. This involves using the object element and setting its source property to point to the .xap file that’s generated when you compile your silverlight app.
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I have a linux server I’m hosting over at Linode that I use to host this blog along with a git repository for my development projects. I found that there are many guides on configuring git for use with your own remote repositories on linux, but getting things set up on windows was a little different.

A few notes:

• I’m using Windows Vista, though the set up should be very similar (if not the same) for XP or Windows 7.
• I won’t cover installing git on the server, since there are already many resources on that around the web. If you’re running one of the Debian linux families it’s as simple as sudo apt-get install git
• I also won’t cover how to generate a key for use with openssh, but you can find instructions here: Public key authentication

Configuring OpenSSH:

First you need to download and install Msysgit. I’m using version Git-1.6.4-preview20090730.exe. During the installation I accepted all of the defaults. You can choose other options, but be sure to select OpenSSH as your SSH executable.
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I’ve been playing around with Silverlight 3 on Vista and having problems getting the test pages to display in IE 8. IE had the very helpful message “Internet Explorer cannot display the page”.


Thanks to Vijay Kodali I was able to find the answer.


Go to c:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\ and open the hosts file. You have to open it as admin to be able to save it, so the easiest thing to do is to click the start button and right click on Notepad to Run as Administrator. Then open the file via the file menu and you’ll be able to save.


Look for the line with “::1 localhost” and change it to “:::1 localhost” by adding an extra “:” before the 1. That fixed it on my machine.


Thanks Vijay!

For some reason I had a tough time finding this one, so for my own future use and in case it helps anyone else, here’s how you rewrite a url inside an nginx config file.

Calling the old url OldUrl and the url to map to newUrl, here it is:

server {
   listen 80;
   server_name siteName;

    ... (other configuration)

    location oldUrl
    {
         rewrite oldUrl
         newUrl permanent;
     }
}

Not that hard, but hard to find

In the previous article, we set up Nginx with Ruby Enterprise Edition and Passenger support. Now we need to get php running if we want to run wordpress or drupal or other php-based sites. We’ll also add mysql so we have a database back end for these sites

Installing mysql:

This is pretty simple, do the installation:

sudo aptitude install mysql-server mysql-client libmysqlclient15-dev

You will be asked to supply a root password. Make sure you store it so it doesn’t get lost.

Since this is a production server, it should be secured:

sudo mysql_secure_installation

Setting up Php:

First the installation:

sudo aptitude install php5-cgi php5-mysql

Note that if you need to access the php.ini file, it will be located here: /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini
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