Matthew1471's ASP BlogX

I have used this for ages and figured it would be a good tip to share.

I wanted a way to mute phone call ringtones and messages while I sleep but still needed to be woken up by the phone's alarm and calendar events the following morning.

Changing the "Ringing volume" to off also stops alarms and calendar alerts from sounding (which is quite misleading and after missing my alarm that morning quite frustrating).

After fiddling with the phone for a while I eventually came up with a workaround which I must admit was not obvious:

Simply create a new profile called "Alerts Only". set the "Ringing volume" to high and the message alert tone to "Off". Next create an empty call group (call it "Empty") and in the profile set "Alert For" for only that call group.

In effect you are saying you want to be notified when nobody rings you. It is a bizzare form of logic but does indeed work.

Now you will not be notified of messages, will not hear your ringtone as any callers will not match the empty group, yet all of your calendar alerts and alam clock alarms will continue to sound as normal.

Additionally you can just place your phone in "Offline" mode which will disconnect you from the mobile network but then you won't be able to pickup/recieve messages until you put the phone back online again. Given past text messages can sometimes take a while to come through putting the phone online after pulling the phone offline overnight shortly before leaving the house can be quite dangerous.

Developers might be used to using code like this:
Set objXMLHTTP = Server.CreateObject("MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP")

What is this version? Is this preferable to specifying the version number? Is there a newer version? Would my applications benefit from using a newer version?

MSXML (now "Microsoft Core XML Services") is the Microsoft XML Parser.

ServerXMLHTTP (the "Server-Safe HTTP" method) was introduced with MSXML 3.0.

A quick search through regedit (the registry editor) for "ServerXMLHTTP" reveals the following ProgIDs are available:
Msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP.3.0
Msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP.4.0
Msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP.5.0
Msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP.6.0

So what happens when you do not specify the version number and merely call Msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP? Simple there is a "VersionIndependentProgID" value of "Msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP" under the key for Msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP.3.0. Therefore your program defaults back to using MSXML 3.0. Microsoft have no plans to change this as they decided they did not want to support the same methods and features from one version to the next.

If you want to run the latest and greatest version of ServerXMLHTTP you are currently looking at using the following code:
Set objXMLHTTP = Server.CreateObject("MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP.6.0")

Of course if you are distributing this code to others you will want to include the old line commented out with a comment also stating where they can download MSXML 6.0 Service Pack 2 (with patch) (often referred to as "MSXML 6.2") or how they can (assuming you are not doing anything particularly weird) always use the older version.

MSXML 6.0 Service Pack 2 (with patch) is the latest (as of writing) but should this change there is a Microsoft page listing the "Microsoft XML Parser Versions" (though the page is not 100% accurate, it fails to list all of the new version numbers after the recent MS08-069 bulletin).

The page above will also helpfully list which versions come with which products. This is useful because if you know your target users all run certain Microsoft products (perhaps your program even has a dependency of them being there like SQL Server or Office) you can safely assume the relevant version of XML is installed with it.

So lastly, why should you use the newer versions? There are many strong cases for this, firstly in MSXML 4 the code was changed to use the standard WinHTTP library that many applications have come to use and rely on, this is far better supported (and more likely optimised) than having all your HTTP code running in some crummy XML DLL and waiting for people to try all sorts of weird combinations. To quote Microsoft "This release provides the slimmer, faster, and more conformant XML processing components". Microsoft argue some of the new versions have "Substantial Improvements". Additionally various bugs have been fixed in the XML libraries itself as well as important security holes.

Speaking of security the latest version on the list of versions is "6.0 Post SP2 (MS08-069)" this is because on 11 November 2008 MS released a patch fixing some very serious security holes. This affected MSXML 3 right through to version 6. You should download each of the patches for each version from MS08-069 until your version numbers match the following:
msxml6.dll (version 6) - SP2, 6.20.1099.0
msxml5.dll (version 5 for Office) - Office 2007 Fix, 5.20.1087.0
msxml4.dll (version 4) - SP2, 4.20.9870.0
msxml3.dll (version 3) - SP9 Fix, 8.100.1048.0

The latest patches and updates for XML 2 and below appear to be in the Windows operating system service packs.

With all this in mind do you want to continue running code that calls the older versions? I certainly do not.

Sources:
What's New in MSXML - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms753751(VS.85).aspx

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