WebDirProperties: AnonymousUser attribute is not obligatory

When you specify a WebDirProperties element to be used by the sites you install (configure) with WiX, you might also want to allow anonymous access to this site. Fortunately, there’s an attribute AnonymousAccess, which being set to ‘yes’ allows anonymous access to IIS web site.

NOTE: If you don’t address any property of “authorization” group (AnonymousAccess, BasicAuthentication, DigestAuthentication, PassportAuthentication or WindowsAuthentication) in your WebDirProperties, the site inherits those from w3svc root. If you set at least one explicitly, you need to set others the way you wish, because WiX defaults might not work for you.

The wix.chm states that “When setting this (AnonymousAccess) to 'yes' you should also provide the user account using the AnonymousUser attribute, and determine what setting to use for the IIsControlledPassword attribute.” But it turns out you are not forced to provide the AnonymousUser attribute and I suppose you never wanted to – you should provide a password as well, but who knows the password of IUSR on a target machine?

Instead, just omit the AnonymousUser attribute and this part of IIS metabase will stay untouched. The username/password will inherit from higher node (again, w3svc). And yes, don’t forget IIsControlledPassword=”yes”.

Hope this helps you tuning the website during the installation.

A warning to VB.NET developers

Avoid defining methods with default arguments!

Today I have been exploring the “Member design” chapter of a great book of Cwalina/Abrams “Framework Design Guidelines”, and found a guideline which shocked me a bit. No, the guideline itself is correct and valuable. I just was never thinking it works like this.

VB.NET has a language feature called default arguments. When you define a method in your class, you can specify default values to the optional parameters to be taken when this parameter is omitted. As far as I understand, this is a kind of alternative to the method overloading.

Consider the following code:

Public Class DefaultValues
    Public Function Sum(ByVal a As Integer, Optional ByVal b As Integer = 100)
        Sum = a + b
    End Function
  End Class

(I speak C# myself, so excuse me my poor VB ;-))

Let’s say we compile this code into a DLL and we have a client console application to utilize that library:

Module TestDefaultValues
    Sub Main()
        Dim df As DefaultValues.DefaultValues = New DefaultValues.DefaultValues()
        Console.WriteLine(df.Sum(55))
    End Sub
  End Module

Compile everything and run TestDefaultValues.exe. The result is predictable: 155.

Now change the default value from 100 to 200 and compile only the library. DO NOT recompile the client application. Run it again, and it is still 155!

This is why it is strongly not recommended to use default arguments instead of normal method overloading. And this issue is why C# doesn’t expose this technique.

Be careful, VB.NET developers! And long live C#! :-)