Wednesday, February 1, 2017

Classic ASP

I am currently learning Angular 2 and it makes me glad I never learned Angular 1 honestly. The two are so very different and one is of the past and one (two) is of the future. I've been doing C# for a decade now and the modern Angular 1 versus Angular 2 circumstance makes me think of the old Active Server Pages in contrast to more modern modernity and makes me glad I never learned it given that it was all to get abandoned for .NET. Sure I dabbed in PHP and Cold Fusion in the ASP era, but in bailing for .NET it was like I was escaping to something better, not reluctantly cursing the fact that someone made a wildly different version of the thing I already knew. I've been there before in moving from the DOS (disk operating system) version of 3D Studio to 3D Studio Max back in the 1990s. PHP and Cold Fusion were probably better than ASP by a hair. You couldn't do any file uploading in old school ASP I recall. Cold Fusion had a low barrier to entry and PHP ran on dirt cheap hosting. Anyways, I do have a funny story to tell. In 2006 I was working at a consultancy which had a client that was a sizable organization with many departments. For example, Mechanical Engineering was one of the departments. The departments didn't have their own IT subdepartments within however. There was a common IT across all departments which was thus inattentive as everyone fought for its attention and Mechanical Engineering wanted to create an intranet site while sidestepping actually setting it up through IT as that would be a tedious waiting process with a bunch of red tape. This was a windowsland LAN environment and I was dispatched to see what could be done. I determined that without being able to set up a site in IIS (which only the ivory tower IT department could) that there would be no way to see the code inside a .NET .dll and hence .NET was out. I did determine that one could drop an old school ASP web site on a file share and hit the pages at a browser URL by way of going to an IP address in lieu of a domain name and then specifying the applicable file name for an entry point after a forward slash. What was more such an ASP site could successfully talk to a Microsoft Access database which could also just be dropped onto a file share! When I got back to the office I told Karl Parker my idea and he vetoed it. We ended up building the app the right way in .NET and then there was a bunch of drama and heartache in the name of getting IT involved to roll it out. And yet, I am proud of my ability to hack as exemplified here and I also wonder if this sort of hacking can't just be done at Windowland LANs today. Could you set up a rouge intranet site at your work with Classic ASP as the engine? What's in the way per se? Will this get me the ten at Black Hat I crave?

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