HTTP Signed Requests with PHP

I thought I'd write a quick primer on a basic implementation of HTTP request signing with PHP. I see a lot of posts dealing with the topic, especially by people writing homebrew REST services. What are signed HTTP requests? Signed HTTP requests are simply a normal HTTP request, such as a GET or a POST, that happens to include a signature as part of the request.  A signature is just a string of characters generated in a...

Installing Gearman and gearmand on Windows with Cy...

Recently I've come face-to-face with a significant processing task for a web application written in PHP.  I haven't worked with process control very much, so I started researching ways of distributing the calculations to multiple processes.  PHP offers several libraries for doing this (pcntl, POSIX), but it quickly became clear that if you're running Windows these libraries are not an option, and unfortunately at work I...

MSB1025 – Adventures in Visual Studio Projec...

So we had a Sql Server Integration Services project that wasn't really being used currently, so one of our guys removed the project from our VS2008 solution file and checked it in. Worked fine on his machine - heck, it worked on all our machines. The build server? Not so much. Immediate barfing with the cryptic message of "MSBUILD : error MSB1025: An internal failure occurred while running MSBuild". CruiseControl looked at...

Manually validate an ASP.Net MVC form on the clien...

A recent problem cropped up in my Asp.Net MVC application. Its using the standard setup of DataAnnotations + MicrosoftMvcValidation.js + jQuery 1.4.2, and I needed to check the validation state of a form before performing some client-side actions. No problem, right? Obviously not. This second part of this post gets in depth as to what's going on with the MicrosoftMvcValidation script, but to save you some time, I'll post the...