I have downloaded many apps in the past to use at work only to find out that they do not properly handle the proxy authentication at my location. At home they work just fine, but at work no way! One was Witty the WPF twitter client, I actually downloaded the code and patched and submitted that back to the developer. You now have the option to configure the proxy settings in the options windows.
Recently I downloaded Podder, version 2 has some awesome new skins for an WPF application but still doesn’t work through my proxy server.
I did some research and did find a solution, by adding the following to the config file, Podder.exe.config in this case you can define the default proxy behavior for the application.
<system.net>
<defaultProxy enabled="true" useDefaultCredentials="true">
<proxy bypassonlocal="True" proxyaddress="http://proxy.example.com:8080"/>
</defaultProxy>
</system.net>
It needs to be in the <configuration> node and it worked best if I put it at the bottom below everything else. Putting it at the top made Podder crash, not sure that really had anything to do with it, but putting it at the bottom didn’t crash.
I wish more developers provided ways to configure the proxy server in their internet enabled apps, but they don’t. At least now if can work around their laziness and hopefully get it to work any way.
Other apps that I plan to try this on are Blu, and DigiTweet to start.
Chris Tavares wrote a great article no creating applications with the ASP .NET MVC Framework in the March Issue of the MSDN Magazine.
Chris does a great job of grounding the reader with an understanding of the Model View Controller design pattern. The article also comes with a download code sample to help you get started.
This is the future of web development get a jump start with the article on Building Web Apps without Web Forms.