Elastic Beanstalk offers both a Web tier and a Worker tier. This allows developers to build reasonably complex applications without having to maintain moving pieces. Offloading heavy-duty workloads to the worker in order to keep the web tier responsive is as easy as putting a message on a queue.

One annoyance that I have with Beanstalk is that there is no way to direct a message to a specific endpoint, hence leaving a single endpoint the responsibility of distributing the messages to all their handlers and potentially leading to brittle code. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Every now and then I stumble upon a brilliant post on Internet, I share some of those links on my Diigo profile but the format is very succinct. I decided to start a new experiment and instead write full blog posts about those links. The first reason is quite selfish as I would like to keep a record of what I thought was interesting and why, I also hope to empower the reader so that she can decide if she wants to read the full post as some of them are lengthy.

I’m considering limiting each of those post to up to three links as to not require too much time from the reader.

This is inspired by the excellent work that Chris Alcock and Michael Wolfenden are doing with respectively The Morning Brew and The Wolf Report. Don’t be surprised if I end up stealing borrowing some links from them.

Without further ado let me get started with the first links.

Another day, another “interesting” issue at a customer. After deploying our product we were left with a partially working web application. The product has been developed over many years and is a mix of ASP Classic, Web Forms, MVC and Web API. In this case ASP Classic pages were broken and would throw an error.

Ensuring ASP Classic is configured properly

The first step is to ensure that IIS has been configured to execute ASP Classic and this is done easily by adding a dummy ASP page to the web application. After deploying this page I was able to confirm that it was working as expected.

I like football, even with the time difference I try to watch at least the World Cup and the European Championship. I watched the last World Cup on SBS but this time around they only managed to secure a handful of games. As they’re a public service it makes sense after all that they wouldn’t buy the rights for all the games. A quick search on Google indicated that beIN SPORTS CONNECT is the way to go in Australia - I will refer to this service as beIN for the rest of this post.

Subscribing

As the pricing seems reasonable I decided to go ahead. The page is loaded over HTTPS so we start well but to my surprise the form contains a password remainder field. Password remainders are a bad practice as users tend to fill them with their password (when allowed) or with a hint that is an obvious give away.