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• Creating a dynamic proxy generator with c# – Part 4 – Calling the base method

  - by SeanMcAlinden

  Creating a dynamic proxy generator with c# – Part 1 – Creating the Assembly builder, Module builder and caching mechanism Creating a dynamic proxy generator with c# – Part 2 – Interceptor Design Creating a dynamic proxy generator with c# – Part 3 – Creating the constructors   The plan for calling the base methods from the proxy is to create a private method for each overridden proxy method, this will allow the proxy to use a delegate to simply invoke the private method when required. Quite a few helper classes have been created to make this possible so as usual I would suggest download or viewing the code at http://rapidioc.codeplex.com/. In this post I’m just going to cover the main points for when creating methods. Getting the methods to override The first two notable methods are for getting the methods. private static MethodInfo[] GetMethodsToOverride<TBase>() where TBase : class {     return typeof(TBase).GetMethods().Where(x =>         !methodsToIgnore.Contains(x.Name) &&                              (x.Attributes & MethodAttributes.Final) == 0)         .ToArray(); } private static StringCollection GetMethodsToIgnore() {     return new StringCollection()     {         "ToString",         "GetHashCode",         "Equals",         "GetType"     }; } The GetMethodsToIgnore method string collection contains an array of methods that I don’t want to override. In the GetMethodsToOverride method, you’ll notice a binary AND which is basically saying not to include any methods marked final i.e. not virtual. Creating the MethodInfo for calling the base method This method should hopefully be fairly easy to follow, it’s only function is to create a MethodInfo which points to the correct base method, and with the correct parameters. private static MethodInfo CreateCallBaseMethodInfo<TBase>(MethodInfo method) where TBase : class {     Type[] baseMethodParameterTypes = ParameterHelper.GetParameterTypes(method, method.GetParameters());       return typeof(TBase).GetMethod(        method.Name,        BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.NonPublic,        null,        baseMethodParameterTypes,        null     ); }   /// <summary> /// Get the parameter types. /// </summary> /// <param name="method">The method.</param> /// <param name="parameters">The parameters.</param> public static Type[] GetParameterTypes(MethodInfo method, ParameterInfo[] parameters) {     Type[] parameterTypesList = Type.EmptyTypes;       if (parameters.Length > 0)     {         parameterTypesList = CreateParametersList(parameters);     }     return parameterTypesList; }   Creating the new private methods for calling the base method The following method outline how I’ve created the private methods for calling the base class method. private static MethodBuilder CreateCallBaseMethodBuilder(TypeBuilder typeBuilder, MethodInfo method) {     string callBaseSuffix = "GetBaseMethod";       if (method.IsGenericMethod || method.IsGenericMethodDefinition)     {                         return MethodHelper.SetUpGenericMethod             (                 typeBuilder,                 method,                 method.Name + callBaseSuffix,                 MethodAttributes.Private | MethodAttributes.HideBySig             );     }     else     {         return MethodHelper.SetupNonGenericMethod             (                 typeBuilder,                 method,                 method.Name + callBaseSuffix,                 MethodAttributes.Private | MethodAttributes.HideBySig             );     } } The CreateCallBaseMethodBuilder is the entry point method for creating the call base method. I’ve added a suffix to the base classes method name to keep it unique. Non Generic Methods Creating a non generic method is fairly simple public static MethodBuilder SetupNonGenericMethod(     TypeBuilder typeBuilder,     MethodInfo method,     string methodName,     MethodAttributes methodAttributes) {     ParameterInfo[] parameters = method.GetParameters();       Type[] parameterTypes = ParameterHelper.GetParameterTypes(method, parameters);       Type returnType = method.ReturnType;       MethodBuilder methodBuilder = CreateMethodBuilder         (             typeBuilder,             method,             methodName,             methodAttributes,             parameterTypes,             returnType         );       ParameterHelper.SetUpParameters(parameterTypes, parameters, methodBuilder);       return methodBuilder; }   private static MethodBuilder CreateMethodBuilder (     TypeBuilder typeBuilder,     MethodInfo method,     string methodName,     MethodAttributes methodAttributes,     Type[] parameterTypes,     Type returnType ) { MethodBuilder methodBuilder = typeBuilder.DefineMethod(methodName, methodAttributes, returnType, parameterTypes); return methodBuilder; } As you can see, you simply have to declare a method builder, get the parameter types, and set the method attributes you want.   Generic Methods Creating generic methods takes a little bit more work. /// <summary> /// Sets up generic method. /// </summary> /// <param name="typeBuilder">The type builder.</param> /// <param name="method">The method.</param> /// <param name="methodName">Name of the method.</param> /// <param name="methodAttributes">The method attributes.</param> public static MethodBuilder SetUpGenericMethod     (         TypeBuilder typeBuilder,         MethodInfo method,         string methodName,         MethodAttributes methodAttributes     ) {     ParameterInfo[] parameters = method.GetParameters();       Type[] parameterTypes = ParameterHelper.GetParameterTypes(method, parameters);       MethodBuilder methodBuilder = typeBuilder.DefineMethod(methodName,         methodAttributes);       Type[] genericArguments = method.GetGenericArguments();       GenericTypeParameterBuilder[] genericTypeParameters =         GetGenericTypeParameters(methodBuilder, genericArguments);       ParameterHelper.SetUpParameterConstraints(parameterTypes, genericTypeParameters);       SetUpReturnType(method, methodBuilder, genericTypeParameters);       if (method.IsGenericMethod)     {         methodBuilder.MakeGenericMethod(genericArguments);     }       ParameterHelper.SetUpParameters(parameterTypes, parameters, methodBuilder);       return methodBuilder; }   private static GenericTypeParameterBuilder[] GetGenericTypeParameters     (         MethodBuilder methodBuilder,         Type[] genericArguments     ) {     return methodBuilder.DefineGenericParameters(GenericsHelper.GetArgumentNames(genericArguments)); }   private static void SetUpReturnType(MethodInfo method, MethodBuilder methodBuilder, GenericTypeParameterBuilder[] genericTypeParameters) {     if (method.IsGenericMethodDefinition)     {         SetUpGenericDefinitionReturnType(method, methodBuilder, genericTypeParameters);     }     else     {         methodBuilder.SetReturnType(method.ReturnType);     } }   private static void SetUpGenericDefinitionReturnType(MethodInfo method, MethodBuilder methodBuilder, GenericTypeParameterBuilder[] genericTypeParameters) {     if (method.ReturnType == null)     {         methodBuilder.SetReturnType(typeof(void));     }     else if (method.ReturnType.IsGenericType)     {         methodBuilder.SetReturnType(genericTypeParameters.Where             (x => x.Name == method.ReturnType.Name).First());     }     else     {         methodBuilder.SetReturnType(method.ReturnType);     }             } Ok, there are a few helper methods missing, basically there is way to much code to put in this post, take a look at the code at http://rapidioc.codeplex.com/ to follow it through completely. Basically though, when dealing with generics there is extra work to do in terms of getting the generic argument types setting up any generic parameter constraints setting up the return type setting up the method as a generic All of the information is easy to get via reflection from the MethodInfo.   Emitting the new private method Emitting the new private method is relatively simple as it’s only function is calling the base method and returning a result if the return type is not void. ILGenerator il = privateMethodBuilder.GetILGenerator();   EmitCallBaseMethod(method, callBaseMethod, il);   private static void EmitCallBaseMethod(MethodInfo method, MethodInfo callBaseMethod, ILGenerator il) {     int privateParameterCount = method.GetParameters().Length;       il.Emit(OpCodes.Ldarg_0);       if (privateParameterCount > 0)     {         for (int arg = 0; arg < privateParameterCount; arg++)         {             il.Emit(OpCodes.Ldarg_S, arg + 1);         }     }       il.Emit(OpCodes.Call, callBaseMethod);       il.Emit(OpCodes.Ret); } So in the main method building method, an ILGenerator is created from the method builder. The ILGenerator performs the following actions: Load the class (this) onto the stack using the hidden argument Ldarg_0. Create an argument on the stack for each of the method parameters (starting at 1 because 0 is the hidden argument) Call the base method using the Opcodes.Call code and the MethodInfo we created earlier. Call return on the method   Conclusion Now we have the private methods prepared for calling the base method, we have reached the last of the relatively easy part of the proxy building. Hopefully, it hasn’t been too hard to follow so far, there is a lot of code so I haven’t been able to post it all so please check it out at http://rapidioc.codeplex.com/. The next section should be up fairly soon, it’s going to cover creating the delegates for calling the private methods created in this post.   Kind Regards, Sean.

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• Creating a dynamic proxy generator with c# – Part 3 – Creating the constructors

  - by SeanMcAlinden

  Creating a dynamic proxy generator with c# – Part 1 – Creating the Assembly builder, Module builder and caching mechanism Creating a dynamic proxy generator with c# – Part 2 – Interceptor Design For the latest code go to http://rapidioc.codeplex.com/ When building our proxy type, the first thing we need to do is build the constructors. There needs to be a corresponding constructor for each constructor on the passed in base type. We also want to create a field to store the interceptors and construct this list within each constructor. So assuming the passed in base type is a User<int, IRepository> class, were looking to generate constructor code like the following:   Default Constructor public User`2_RapidDynamicBaseProxy() {     this.interceptors = new List<IInterceptor<User<int, IRepository>>>();     DefaultInterceptor<User<int, IRepository>> item = new DefaultInterceptor<User<int, IRepository>>();     this.interceptors.Add(item); }     Parameterised Constructor public User`2_RapidDynamicBaseProxy(IRepository repository1) : base(repository1) {     this.interceptors = new List<IInterceptor<User<int, IRepository>>>();     DefaultInterceptor<User<int, IRepository>> item = new DefaultInterceptor<User<int, IRepository>>();     this.interceptors.Add(item); }   As you can see, we first populate a field on the class with a new list of the passed in base type. Construct our DefaultInterceptor class. Add the DefaultInterceptor instance to our interceptor collection. Although this seems like a relatively small task, there is a fair amount of work require to get this going. Instead of going through every line of code – please download the latest from http://rapidioc.codeplex.com/ and debug through. In this post I’m going to concentrate on explaining how it works. TypeBuilder The TypeBuilder class is the main class used to create the type. You instantiate a new TypeBuilder using the assembly module we created in part 1. /// <summary> /// Creates a type builder. /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="TBase">The type of the base class to be proxied.</typeparam> public static TypeBuilder CreateTypeBuilder<TBase>() where TBase : class {     TypeBuilder typeBuilder = DynamicModuleCache.Get.DefineType         (             CreateTypeName<TBase>(),             TypeAttributes.Class | TypeAttributes.Public,             typeof(TBase),             new Type[] { typeof(IProxy) }         );       if (typeof(TBase).IsGenericType)     {         GenericsHelper.MakeGenericType(typeof(TBase), typeBuilder);     }       return typeBuilder; }   private static string CreateTypeName<TBase>() where TBase : class {     return string.Format("{0}_RapidDynamicBaseProxy", typeof(TBase).Name); } As you can see, I’ve create a new public class derived from TBase which also implements my IProxy interface, this is used later for adding interceptors. If the base type is generic, the following GenericsHelper.MakeGenericType method is called. GenericsHelper using System; using System.Reflection.Emit; namespace Rapid.DynamicProxy.Types.Helpers {     /// <summary>     /// Helper class for generic types and methods.     /// </summary>     internal static class GenericsHelper     {         /// <summary>         /// Makes the typeBuilder a generic.         /// </summary>         /// <param name="concrete">The concrete.</param>         /// <param name="typeBuilder">The type builder.</param>         public static void MakeGenericType(Type baseType, TypeBuilder typeBuilder)         {             Type[] genericArguments = baseType.GetGenericArguments();               string[] genericArgumentNames = GetArgumentNames(genericArguments);               GenericTypeParameterBuilder[] genericTypeParameterBuilder                 = typeBuilder.DefineGenericParameters(genericArgumentNames);               typeBuilder.MakeGenericType(genericTypeParameterBuilder);         }           /// <summary>         /// Gets the argument names from an array of generic argument types.         /// </summary>         /// <param name="genericArguments">The generic arguments.</param>         public static string[] GetArgumentNames(Type[] genericArguments)         {             string[] genericArgumentNames = new string[genericArguments.Length];               for (int i = 0; i < genericArguments.Length; i++)             {                 genericArgumentNames[i] = genericArguments[i].Name;             }               return genericArgumentNames;         }     } }       As you can see, I’m getting all of the generic argument types and names, creating a GenericTypeParameterBuilder and then using the typeBuilder to make the new type generic. InterceptorsField The interceptors field will store a List<IInterceptor<TBase>>. Fields are simple made using the FieldBuilder class. The following code demonstrates how to create the interceptor field. FieldBuilder interceptorsField = typeBuilder.DefineField(     "interceptors",     typeof(System.Collections.Generic.List<>).MakeGenericType(typeof(IInterceptor<TBase>)),       FieldAttributes.Private     ); The field will now exist with the new Type although it currently has no data – we’ll deal with this in the constructor. Add method for interceptorsField To enable us to add to the interceptorsField list, we are going to utilise the Add method that already exists within the System.Collections.Generic.List class. We still however have to create the methodInfo necessary to call the add method. This can be done similar to the following: Add Interceptor Field MethodInfo addInterceptor = typeof(List<>)     .MakeGenericType(new Type[] { typeof(IInterceptor<>).MakeGenericType(typeof(TBase)) })     .GetMethod     (        "Add",        BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.NonPublic,        null,        new Type[] { typeof(IInterceptor<>).MakeGenericType(typeof(TBase)) },        null     ); So we’ve create a List<IInterceptor<TBase>> type, then using the type created a method info called Add which accepts an IInterceptor<TBase>. Now in our constructor we can use this to call this.interceptors.Add(// interceptor); Building the Constructors This will be the first hard-core part of the proxy building process so I’m going to show the class and then try to explain what everything is doing. For a clear view, download the source from http://rapidioc.codeplex.com/, go to the test project and debug through the constructor building section. Anyway, here it is: DynamicConstructorBuilder using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Reflection; using System.Reflection.Emit; using Rapid.DynamicProxy.Interception; using Rapid.DynamicProxy.Types.Helpers; namespace Rapid.DynamicProxy.Types.Constructors {     /// <summary>     /// Class for creating the proxy constructors.     /// </summary>     internal static class DynamicConstructorBuilder     {         /// <summary>         /// Builds the constructors.         /// </summary>         /// <typeparam name="TBase">The base type.</typeparam>         /// <param name="typeBuilder">The type builder.</param>         /// <param name="interceptorsField">The interceptors field.</param>         public static void BuildConstructors<TBase>             (                 TypeBuilder typeBuilder,                 FieldBuilder interceptorsField,                 MethodInfo addInterceptor             )             where TBase : class         {             ConstructorInfo interceptorsFieldConstructor = CreateInterceptorsFieldConstructor<TBase>();               ConstructorInfo defaultInterceptorConstructor = CreateDefaultInterceptorConstructor<TBase>();               ConstructorInfo[] constructors = typeof(TBase).GetConstructors();               foreach (ConstructorInfo constructorInfo in constructors)             {                 CreateConstructor<TBase>                     (                         typeBuilder,                         interceptorsField,                         interceptorsFieldConstructor,                         defaultInterceptorConstructor,                         addInterceptor,                         constructorInfo                     );             }         }           #region Private Methods           private static void CreateConstructor<TBase>             (                 TypeBuilder typeBuilder,                 FieldBuilder interceptorsField,                 ConstructorInfo interceptorsFieldConstructor,                 ConstructorInfo defaultInterceptorConstructor,                 MethodInfo AddDefaultInterceptor,                 ConstructorInfo constructorInfo             ) where TBase : class         {             Type[] parameterTypes = GetParameterTypes(constructorInfo);               ConstructorBuilder constructorBuilder = CreateConstructorBuilder(typeBuilder, parameterTypes);               ILGenerator cIL = constructorBuilder.GetILGenerator();               LocalBuilder defaultInterceptorMethodVariable =                 cIL.DeclareLocal(typeof(DefaultInterceptor<>).MakeGenericType(typeof(TBase)));               ConstructInterceptorsField(interceptorsField, interceptorsFieldConstructor, cIL);               ConstructDefaultInterceptor(defaultInterceptorConstructor, cIL, defaultInterceptorMethodVariable);               AddDefaultInterceptorToInterceptorsList                 (                     interceptorsField,                     AddDefaultInterceptor,                     cIL,                     defaultInterceptorMethodVariable                 );               CreateConstructor(constructorInfo, parameterTypes, cIL);         }           private static void CreateConstructor(ConstructorInfo constructorInfo, Type[] parameterTypes, ILGenerator cIL)         {             cIL.Emit(OpCodes.Ldarg_0);               if (parameterTypes.Length > 0)             {                 LoadParameterTypes(parameterTypes, cIL);             }               cIL.Emit(OpCodes.Call, constructorInfo);             cIL.Emit(OpCodes.Ret);         }           private static void LoadParameterTypes(Type[] parameterTypes, ILGenerator cIL)         {             for (int i = 1; i <= parameterTypes.Length; i++)             {                 cIL.Emit(OpCodes.Ldarg_S, i);             }         }           private static void AddDefaultInterceptorToInterceptorsList             (                 FieldBuilder interceptorsField,                 MethodInfo AddDefaultInterceptor,                 ILGenerator cIL,                 LocalBuilder defaultInterceptorMethodVariable             )         {             cIL.Emit(OpCodes.Ldarg_0);             cIL.Emit(OpCodes.Ldfld, interceptorsField);             cIL.Emit(OpCodes.Ldloc, defaultInterceptorMethodVariable);             cIL.Emit(OpCodes.Callvirt, AddDefaultInterceptor);         }           private static void ConstructDefaultInterceptor             (                 ConstructorInfo defaultInterceptorConstructor,                 ILGenerator cIL,                 LocalBuilder defaultInterceptorMethodVariable             )         {             cIL.Emit(OpCodes.Newobj, defaultInterceptorConstructor);             cIL.Emit(OpCodes.Stloc, defaultInterceptorMethodVariable);         }           private static void ConstructInterceptorsField             (                 FieldBuilder interceptorsField,                 ConstructorInfo interceptorsFieldConstructor,                 ILGenerator cIL             )         {             cIL.Emit(OpCodes.Ldarg_0);             cIL.Emit(OpCodes.Newobj, interceptorsFieldConstructor);             cIL.Emit(OpCodes.Stfld, interceptorsField);         }           private static ConstructorBuilder CreateConstructorBuilder(TypeBuilder typeBuilder, Type[] parameterTypes)         {             return typeBuilder.DefineConstructor                 (                     MethodAttributes.Public | MethodAttributes.SpecialName | MethodAttributes.RTSpecialName                     | MethodAttributes.HideBySig, CallingConventions.Standard, parameterTypes                 );         }           private static Type[] GetParameterTypes(ConstructorInfo constructorInfo)         {             ParameterInfo[] parameterInfoArray = constructorInfo.GetParameters();               Type[] parameterTypes = new Type[parameterInfoArray.Length];               for (int p = 0; p < parameterInfoArray.Length; p++)             {                 parameterTypes[p] = parameterInfoArray[p].ParameterType;             }               return parameterTypes;         }           private static ConstructorInfo CreateInterceptorsFieldConstructor<TBase>() where TBase : class         {             return ConstructorHelper.CreateGenericConstructorInfo                 (                     typeof(List<>),                     new Type[] { typeof(IInterceptor<TBase>) },                     BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.NonPublic                 );         }           private static ConstructorInfo CreateDefaultInterceptorConstructor<TBase>() where TBase : class         {             return ConstructorHelper.CreateGenericConstructorInfo                 (                     typeof(DefaultInterceptor<>),                     new Type[] { typeof(TBase) },                     BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.NonPublic                 );         }           #endregion     } } So, the first two tasks within the class should be fairly clear, we are creating a ConstructorInfo for the interceptorField list and a ConstructorInfo for the DefaultConstructor, this is for instantiating them in each contructor. We then using Reflection get an array of all of the constructors in the base class, we then loop through the array and create a corresponding proxy contructor. Hopefully, the code is fairly easy to follow other than some new types and the dreaded Opcodes. ConstructorBuilder This class defines a new constructor on the type. ILGenerator The ILGenerator allows the use of Reflection.Emit to create the method body. LocalBuilder The local builder allows the storage of data in local variables within a method, in this case it’s the constructed DefaultInterceptor. Constructing the interceptors field The first bit of IL you’ll come across as you follow through the code is the following private method used for constructing the field list of interceptors. private static void ConstructInterceptorsField             (                 FieldBuilder interceptorsField,                 ConstructorInfo interceptorsFieldConstructor,                 ILGenerator cIL             )         {             cIL.Emit(OpCodes.Ldarg_0);             cIL.Emit(OpCodes.Newobj, interceptorsFieldConstructor);             cIL.Emit(OpCodes.Stfld, interceptorsField);         } The first thing to know about generating code using IL is that you are using a stack, if you want to use something, you need to push it up the stack etc. etc. OpCodes.ldArg_0 This opcode is a really interesting one, basically each method has a hidden first argument of the containing class instance (apart from static classes), constructors are no different. This is the reason you can use syntax like this.myField. So back to the method, as we want to instantiate the List in the interceptorsField, first we need to load the class instance onto the stack, we then load the new object (new List<TBase>) and finally we store it in the interceptorsField. Hopefully, that should follow easily enough in the method. In each constructor you would now have this.interceptors = new List<User<int, IRepository>>(); Constructing and storing the DefaultInterceptor The next bit of code we need to create is the constructed DefaultInterceptor. Firstly, we create a local builder to store the constructed type. Create a local builder LocalBuilder defaultInterceptorMethodVariable =     cIL.DeclareLocal(typeof(DefaultInterceptor<>).MakeGenericType(typeof(TBase))); Once our local builder is ready, we then need to construct the DefaultInterceptor<TBase> and store it in the variable. Connstruct DefaultInterceptor private static void ConstructDefaultInterceptor     (         ConstructorInfo defaultInterceptorConstructor,         ILGenerator cIL,         LocalBuilder defaultInterceptorMethodVariable     ) {     cIL.Emit(OpCodes.Newobj, defaultInterceptorConstructor);     cIL.Emit(OpCodes.Stloc, defaultInterceptorMethodVariable); } As you can see, using the ConstructorInfo named defaultInterceptorConstructor, we load the new object onto the stack. Then using the store local opcode (OpCodes.Stloc), we store the new object in the local builder named defaultInterceptorMethodVariable. Add the constructed DefaultInterceptor to the interceptors field collection Using the add method created earlier in this post, we are going to add the new DefaultInterceptor object to the interceptors field collection. Add Default Interceptor private static void AddDefaultInterceptorToInterceptorsList     (         FieldBuilder interceptorsField,         MethodInfo AddDefaultInterceptor,         ILGenerator cIL,         LocalBuilder defaultInterceptorMethodVariable     ) {     cIL.Emit(OpCodes.Ldarg_0);     cIL.Emit(OpCodes.Ldfld, interceptorsField);     cIL.Emit(OpCodes.Ldloc, defaultInterceptorMethodVariable);     cIL.Emit(OpCodes.Callvirt, AddDefaultInterceptor); } So, here’s whats going on. The class instance is first loaded onto the stack using the load argument at index 0 opcode (OpCodes.Ldarg_0) (remember the first arg is the hidden class instance). The interceptorsField is then loaded onto the stack using the load field opcode (OpCodes.Ldfld). We then load the DefaultInterceptor object we stored locally using the load local opcode (OpCodes.Ldloc). Then finally we call the AddDefaultInterceptor method using the call virtual opcode (Opcodes.Callvirt). Completing the constructor The last thing we need to do is complete the constructor. Complete the constructor private static void CreateConstructor(ConstructorInfo constructorInfo, Type[] parameterTypes, ILGenerator cIL)         {             cIL.Emit(OpCodes.Ldarg_0);               if (parameterTypes.Length > 0)             {                 LoadParameterTypes(parameterTypes, cIL);             }               cIL.Emit(OpCodes.Call, constructorInfo);             cIL.Emit(OpCodes.Ret);         }           private static void LoadParameterTypes(Type[] parameterTypes, ILGenerator cIL)         {             for (int i = 1; i <= parameterTypes.Length; i++)             {                 cIL.Emit(OpCodes.Ldarg_S, i);             }         } So, the first thing we do again is load the class instance using the load argument at index 0 opcode (OpCodes.Ldarg_0). We then load each parameter using OpCode.Ldarg_S, this opcode allows us to specify an index position for each argument. We then setup calling the base constructor using OpCodes.Call and the base constructors ConstructorInfo. Finally, all methods are required to return, even when they have a void return. As there are no values on the stack after the OpCodes.Call line, we can safely call the OpCode.Ret to give the constructor a void return. If there was a value, we would have to pop the value of the stack before calling return otherwise, the method would try and return a value. Conclusion This was a slightly hardcore post but hopefully it hasn’t been too hard to follow. The main thing is that a number of the really useful opcodes have been used and now the dynamic proxy is capable of being constructed. If you download the code and debug through the tests at http://rapidioc.codeplex.com/, you’ll be able to create proxies at this point, they cannon do anything in terms of interception but you can happily run the tests, call base methods and properties and also take a look at the created assembly in Reflector. Hope this is useful. The next post should be up soon, it will be covering creating the private methods for calling the base class methods and properties. Kind Regards, Sean.

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• Creating STA COM compatible ASP.NET Applications

  - by Rick Strahl

  When building ASP.NET applications that interface with old school COM objects like those created with VB6 or Visual FoxPro (MTDLL), it's extremely important that the threads that are serving requests use Single Threaded Apartment Threading. STA is a COM built-in technology that allows essentially single threaded components to operate reliably in a multi-threaded environment. STA's guarantee that COM objects instantiated on a specific thread stay on that specific thread and any access to a COM object from another thread automatically marshals that thread to the STA thread. The end effect is that you can have multiple threads, but a COM object instance lives on a fixed never changing thread. ASP.NET by default uses MTA (multi-threaded apartment) threads which are truly free spinning threads that pay no heed to COM object marshaling. This is vastly more efficient than STA threading which has a bit of overhead in determining whether it's OK to run code on a given thread or whether some sort of thread/COM marshaling needs to occur. MTA COM components can be very efficient, but STA COM components in a multi-threaded environment always tend to have a fair amount of overhead. It's amazing how much COM Interop I still see today so while it seems really old school to be talking about this topic, it's actually quite apropos for me as I have many customers using legacy COM systems that need to interface with other .NET applications. In this post I'm consolidating some of the hacks I've used to integrate with various ASP.NET technologies when using STA COM Components. STA in ASP.NET Support for STA threading in the ASP.NET framework is fairly limited. Specifically only the original ASP.NET WebForms technology supports STA threading directly via its STA Page Handler implementation or what you might know as ASPCOMPAT mode. For WebForms running STA components is as easy as specifying the ASPCOMPAT attribute in the @Page tag:<%@ Page Language="C#" AspCompat="true" %> which runs the page in STA mode. Removing it runs in MTA mode. Simple. Unfortunately all other ASP.NET technologies built on top of the core ASP.NET engine do not support STA natively. So if you want to use STA COM components in MVC or with class ASMX Web Services, there's no automatic way like the ASPCOMPAT keyword available. So what happens when you run an STA COM component in an MTA application? In low volume environments - nothing much will happen. The COM objects will appear to work just fine as there are no simultaneous thread interactions and the COM component will happily run on a single thread or multiple single threads one at a time. So for testing running components in MTA environments may appear to work just fine. However as load increases and threads get re-used by ASP.NET COM objects will end up getting created on multiple different threads. This can result in crashes or hangs, or data corruption in the STA components which store their state in thread local storage on the STA thread. If threads overlap this global store can easily get corrupted which in turn causes problems. STA ensures that any COM object instance loaded always stays on the same thread it was instantiated on. What about COM+? COM+ is supposed to address the problem of STA in MTA applications by providing an abstraction with it's own thread pool manager for COM objects. It steps in to the COM instantiation pipeline and hands out COM instances from its own internally maintained STA Thread pool. This guarantees that the COM instantiation threads are STA threads if using STA components. COM+ works, but in my experience the technology is very, very slow for STA components. It adds a ton of overhead and reduces COM performance noticably in load tests in IIS. COM+ can make sense in some situations but for Web apps with STA components it falls short. In addition there's also the need to ensure that COM+ is set up and configured on the target machine and the fact that components have to be registered in COM+. COM+ also keeps components up at all times, so if a component needs to be replaced the COM+ package needs to be unloaded (same is true for IIS hosted components but it's more common to manage that). COM+ is an option for well established components, but native STA support tends to provide better performance and more consistent usability, IMHO. STA for non supporting ASP.NET Technologies As mentioned above only WebForms supports STA natively. However, by utilizing the WebForms ASP.NET Page handler internally it's actually possible to trick various other ASP.NET technologies and let them work with STA components. This is ugly but I've used each of these in various applications and I've had minimal problems making them work with FoxPro STA COM components which is about as dififcult as it gets for COM Interop in .NET. In this post I summarize several STA workarounds that enable you to use STA threading with these ASP.NET Technologies: ASMX Web Services ASP.NET MVC WCF Web Services ASP.NET Web API ASMX Web Services I start with classic ASP.NET ASMX Web Services because it's the easiest mechanism that allows for STA modification. It also clearly demonstrates how the WebForms STA Page Handler is the key technology to enable the various other solutions to create STA components. Essentially the way this works is to override the WebForms Page class and hijack it's init functionality for processing requests. Here's what this looks like for Web Services:namespace FoxProAspNet { public class WebServiceStaHandler : System.Web.UI.Page, IHttpAsyncHandler { protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e) { IHttpHandler handler = new WebServiceHandlerFactory().GetHandler( this.Context, this.Context.Request.HttpMethod, this.Context.Request.FilePath, this.Context.Request.PhysicalPath); handler.ProcessRequest(this.Context); this.Context.ApplicationInstance.CompleteRequest(); } public IAsyncResult BeginProcessRequest( HttpContext context, AsyncCallback cb, object extraData) { return this.AspCompatBeginProcessRequest(context, cb, extraData); } public void EndProcessRequest(IAsyncResult result) { this.AspCompatEndProcessRequest(result); } } public class AspCompatWebServiceStaHandlerWithSessionState : WebServiceStaHandler, IRequiresSessionState { } } This class overrides the ASP.NET WebForms Page class which has a little known AspCompatBeginProcessRequest() and AspCompatEndProcessRequest() method that is responsible for providing the WebForms ASPCOMPAT functionality. These methods handle routing requests to STA threads. Note there are two classes - one that includes session state and one that does not. If you plan on using ASP.NET Session state use the latter class, otherwise stick to the former. This maps to the EnableSessionState page setting in WebForms. This class simply hooks into this functionality by overriding the BeginProcessRequest and EndProcessRequest methods and always forcing it into the AspCompat methods. The way this works is that BeginProcessRequest() fires first to set up the threads and starts intializing the handler. As part of that process the OnInit() method is fired which is now already running on an STA thread. The code then creates an instance of the actual WebService handler factory and calls its ProcessRequest method to start executing which generates the Web Service result. Immediately after ProcessRequest the request is stopped with Application.CompletRequest() which ensures that the rest of the Page handler logic doesn't fire. This means that even though the fairly heavy Page class is overridden here, it doesn't end up executing any of its internal processing which makes this code fairly efficient. In a nutshell, we're highjacking the Page HttpHandler and forcing it to process the WebService process handler in the context of the AspCompat handler behavior. Hooking up the Handler Because the above is an HttpHandler implementation you need to hook up the custom handler and replace the standard ASMX handler. To do this you need to modify the web.config file (here for IIS 7 and IIS Express): <configuration> <system.webServer> <handlers> <remove name="WebServiceHandlerFactory-Integrated-4.0" /> <add name="Asmx STA Web Service Handler" path="*.asmx" verb="*" type="FoxProAspNet.WebServiceStaHandler" precondition="integrated"/> </handlers> </system.webServer> </configuration> (Note: The name for the WebServiceHandlerFactory-Integrated-4.0 might be slightly different depending on your server version. Check the IIS Handler configuration in the IIS Management Console for the exact name or simply remove the handler from the list there which will propagate to your web.config). For IIS 5 & 6 (Windows XP/2003) or the Visual Studio Web Server use:<configuration> <system.web> <httpHandlers> <remove path="*.asmx" verb="*" /> <add path="*.asmx" verb="*" type="FoxProAspNet.WebServiceStaHandler" /> </httpHandlers> </system.web></configuration> To test, create a new ASMX Web Service and create a method like this: [WebService(Namespace = "http://foxaspnet.org/")] [WebServiceBinding(ConformsTo = WsiProfiles.BasicProfile1_1)] public class FoxWebService : System.Web.Services.WebService { [WebMethod] public string HelloWorld() { return "Hello World. Threading mode is: " + System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.GetApartmentState(); } } Run this before you put in the web.config configuration changes and you should get: Hello World. Threading mode is: MTA Then put the handler mapping into Web.config and you should see: Hello World. Threading mode is: STA And you're on your way to using STA COM components. It's a hack but it works well! I've used this with several high volume Web Service installations with various customers and it's been fast and reliable. ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET MVC has quickly become the most popular ASP.NET technology, replacing WebForms for creating HTML output. MVC is more complex to get started with, but once you understand the basic structure of how requests flow through the MVC pipeline it's easy to use and amazingly flexible in manipulating HTML requests. In addition, MVC has great support for non-HTML output sources like JSON and XML, making it an excellent choice for AJAX requests without any additional tools. Unlike WebForms ASP.NET MVC doesn't support STA threads natively and so some trickery is needed to make it work with STA threads as well. MVC gets its handler implementation through custom route handlers using ASP.NET's built in routing semantics. To work in an STA handler requires working in the Page Handler as part of the Route Handler implementation. As with the Web Service handler the first step is to create a custom HttpHandler that can instantiate an MVC request pipeline properly:public class MvcStaThreadHttpAsyncHandler : Page, IHttpAsyncHandler, IRequiresSessionState { private RequestContext _requestContext; public MvcStaThreadHttpAsyncHandler(RequestContext requestContext) { if (requestContext == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("requestContext"); _requestContext = requestContext; } public IAsyncResult BeginProcessRequest(HttpContext context, AsyncCallback cb, object extraData) { return this.AspCompatBeginProcessRequest(context, cb, extraData); } protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e) { var controllerName = _requestContext.RouteData.GetRequiredString("controller"); var controllerFactory = ControllerBuilder.Current.GetControllerFactory(); var controller = controllerFactory.CreateController(_requestContext, controllerName); if (controller == null) throw new InvalidOperationException("Could not find controller: " + controllerName); try { controller.Execute(_requestContext); } finally { controllerFactory.ReleaseController(controller); } this.Context.ApplicationInstance.CompleteRequest(); } public void EndProcessRequest(IAsyncResult result) { this.AspCompatEndProcessRequest(result); } public override void ProcessRequest(HttpContext httpContext) { throw new NotSupportedException("STAThreadRouteHandler does not support ProcessRequest called (only BeginProcessRequest)"); } } This handler code figures out which controller to load and then executes the controller. MVC internally provides the information needed to route to the appropriate method and pass the right parameters. Like the Web Service handler the logic occurs in the OnInit() and performs all the processing in that part of the request. Next, we need a RouteHandler that can actually pick up this handler. Unlike the Web Service handler where we simply registered the handler, MVC requires a RouteHandler to pick up the handler. RouteHandlers look at the URL's path and based on that decide on what handler to invoke. The route handler is pretty simple - all it does is load our custom handler: public class MvcStaThreadRouteHandler : IRouteHandler { public IHttpHandler GetHttpHandler(RequestContext requestContext) { if (requestContext == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("requestContext"); return new MvcStaThreadHttpAsyncHandler(requestContext); } } At this point you can instantiate this route handler and force STA requests to MVC by specifying a route. The following sets up the ASP.NET Default Route:Route mvcRoute = new Route("{controller}/{action}/{id}", new RouteValueDictionary( new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }), new MvcStaThreadRouteHandler()); RouteTable.Routes.Add(mvcRoute);   To make this code a little easier to work with and mimic the behavior of the routes.MapRoute() functionality extension method that MVC provides, here is an extension method for MapMvcStaRoute(): public static class RouteCollectionExtensions { public static void MapMvcStaRoute(this RouteCollection routeTable, string name, string url, object defaults = null) { Route mvcRoute = new Route(url, new RouteValueDictionary(defaults), new MvcStaThreadRouteHandler()); RouteTable.Routes.Add(mvcRoute); } } With this the syntax to add  route becomes a little easier and matches the MapRoute() method:RouteTable.Routes.MapMvcStaRoute( name: "Default", url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}", defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } ); The nice thing about this route handler, STA Handler and extension method is that it's fully self contained. You can put all three into a single class file and stick it into your Web app, and then simply call MapMvcStaRoute() and it just works. Easy! To see whether this works create an MVC controller like this: public class ThreadTestController : Controller { public string ThreadingMode() { return Thread.CurrentThread.GetApartmentState().ToString(); } } Try this test both with only the MapRoute() hookup in the RouteConfiguration in which case you should get MTA as the value. Then change the MapRoute() call to MapMvcStaRoute() leaving all the parameters the same and re-run the request. You now should see STA as the result. You're on your way using STA COM components reliably in ASP.NET MVC. WCF Web Services running through IIS WCF Web Services provide a more robust and wider range of services for Web Services. You can use WCF over HTTP, TCP, and Pipes, and WCF services support WS* secure services. There are many features in WCF that go way beyond what ASMX can do. But it's also a bit more complex than ASMX. As a basic rule if you need to serve straight SOAP Services over HTTP I 'd recommend sticking with the simpler ASMX services especially if COM is involved. If you need WS* support or want to serve data over non-HTTP protocols then WCF makes more sense. WCF is not my forte but I found a solution from Scott Seely on his blog that describes the progress and that seems to work well. I'm copying his code below so this STA information is all in one place and quickly explain. Scott's code basically works by creating a custom OperationBehavior which can be specified via an [STAOperation] attribute on every method. Using his attribute you end up with a class (or Interface if you separate the contract and class) that looks like this: [ServiceContract] public class WcfService { [OperationContract] public string HelloWorldMta() { return Thread.CurrentThread.GetApartmentState().ToString(); } // Make sure you use this custom STAOperationBehavior // attribute to force STA operation of service methods [STAOperationBehavior] [OperationContract] public string HelloWorldSta() { return Thread.CurrentThread.GetApartmentState().ToString(); } } Pretty straight forward. The latter method returns STA while the former returns MTA. To make STA work every method needs to be marked up. The implementation consists of the attribute and OperationInvoker implementation. Here are the two classes required to make this work from Scott's post:public class STAOperationBehaviorAttribute : Attribute, IOperationBehavior { public void AddBindingParameters(OperationDescription operationDescription, System.ServiceModel.Channels.BindingParameterCollection bindingParameters) { } public void ApplyClientBehavior(OperationDescription operationDescription, System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ClientOperation clientOperation) { // If this is applied on the client, well, it just doesn’t make sense. // Don’t throw in case this attribute was applied on the contract // instead of the implementation. } public void ApplyDispatchBehavior(OperationDescription operationDescription, System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.DispatchOperation dispatchOperation) { // Change the IOperationInvoker for this operation. dispatchOperation.Invoker = new STAOperationInvoker(dispatchOperation.Invoker); } public void Validate(OperationDescription operationDescription) { if (operationDescription.SyncMethod == null) { throw new InvalidOperationException("The STAOperationBehaviorAttribute " + "only works for synchronous method invocations."); } } } public class STAOperationInvoker : IOperationInvoker { IOperationInvoker _innerInvoker; public STAOperationInvoker(IOperationInvoker invoker) { _innerInvoker = invoker; } public object[] AllocateInputs() { return _innerInvoker.AllocateInputs(); } public object Invoke(object instance, object[] inputs, out object[] outputs) { // Create a new, STA thread object[] staOutputs = null; object retval = null; Thread thread = new Thread( delegate() { retval = _innerInvoker.Invoke(instance, inputs, out staOutputs); }); thread.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA); thread.Start(); thread.Join(); outputs = staOutputs; return retval; } public IAsyncResult InvokeBegin(object instance, object[] inputs, AsyncCallback callback, object state) { // We don’t handle async… throw new NotImplementedException(); } public object InvokeEnd(object instance, out object[] outputs, IAsyncResult result) { // We don’t handle async… throw new NotImplementedException(); } public bool IsSynchronous { get { return true; } } } The key in this setup is the Invoker and the Invoke method which creates a new thread and then fires the request on this new thread. Because this approach creates a new thread for every request it's not super efficient. There's a bunch of overhead involved in creating the thread and throwing it away after each thread, but it'll work for low volume requests and insure each thread runs in STA mode. If better performance is required it would be useful to create a custom thread manager that can pool a number of STA threads and hand off threads as needed rather than creating new threads on every request. If your Web Service needs are simple and you need only to serve standard SOAP 1.x requests, I would recommend sticking with ASMX services. It's easier to set up and work with and for STA component use it'll be significantly better performing since ASP.NET manages the STA thread pool for you rather than firing new threads for each request. One nice thing about Scotts code is though that it works in any WCF environment including self hosting. It has no dependency on ASP.NET or WebForms for that matter. STA - If you must STA components are a  pain in the ass and thankfully there isn't too much stuff out there anymore that requires it. But when you need it and you need to access STA functionality from .NET at least there are a few options available to make it happen. Each of these solutions is a bit hacky, but they work - I've used all of them in production with good results with FoxPro components. I hope compiling all of these in one place here makes it STA consumption a little bit easier. I feel your pain :-) Resources Download STA Handler Code Examples Scott Seely's original STA WCF OperationBehavior Article© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in FoxPro   ASP.NET  .NET  COM   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• [Windows 8] Update TextBox’s binding on TextChanged

  - by Benjamin Roux

  Since UpdateSourceTrigger is not available in WinRT we cannot update the text’s binding of a TextBox at will (or at least not easily) especially when using MVVM (I surely don’t want to write behind-code to do that in each of my apps !). Since this kind of demand is frequent (for example to disable of button if the TextBox is empty) I decided to create some attached properties to to simulate this missing behavior. namespace Indeed.Controls { public static class TextBoxEx { public static string GetRealTimeText(TextBox obj) { return (string)obj.GetValue(RealTimeTextProperty); } public static void SetRealTimeText(TextBox obj, string value) { obj.SetValue(RealTimeTextProperty, value); } public static readonly DependencyProperty RealTimeTextProperty = DependencyProperty.RegisterAttached("RealTimeText", typeof(string), typeof(TextBoxEx), null); public static bool GetIsAutoUpdate(TextBox obj) { return (bool)obj.GetValue(IsAutoUpdateProperty); } public static void SetIsAutoUpdate(TextBox obj, bool value) { obj.SetValue(IsAutoUpdateProperty, value); } public static readonly DependencyProperty IsAutoUpdateProperty = DependencyProperty.RegisterAttached("IsAutoUpdate", typeof(bool), typeof(TextBoxEx), new PropertyMetadata(false, OnIsAutoUpdateChanged)); private static void OnIsAutoUpdateChanged(DependencyObject sender, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs e) { var value = (bool)e.NewValue; var textbox = (TextBox)sender; if (value) { Observable.FromEventPattern<TextChangedEventHandler, TextChangedEventArgs>( o => textbox.TextChanged += o, o => textbox.TextChanged -= o) .Do(_ => textbox.SetValue(TextBoxEx.RealTimeTextProperty, textbox.Text)) .Subscribe(); } } } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The code is composed of two attached properties. The first one “RealTimeText” reflects the text in real time (updated after each TextChanged event). The second one is only used to enable the functionality. To subscribe to the TextChanged event I used Reactive Extensions (Rx-Metro package in Nuget). If you’re not familiar with this framework just replace the code with a simple: textbox.TextChanged += textbox.SetValue(TextBoxEx.RealTimeTextProperty, textbox.Text); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } To use these attached properties, it’s fairly simple <TextBox Text="{Binding Path=MyProperty, Mode=TwoWay}" ic:TextBoxEx.IsAutoUpdate="True" ic:TextBoxEx.RealTimeText="{Binding Path=MyProperty, Mode=TwoWay}" /> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Just make sure to create a binding (in TwoWay) for both Text and RealTimeText. Hope this helps !

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• Windows Phone 7 development: Using isolated storage

  - by DigiMortal

  In my previous posting about Windows Phone 7 development I showed how to use WebBrowser control in Windows Phone 7. In this posting I make some other improvements to my blog reader application and I will show you how to use isolated storage to store information to phone. Why isolated storage? Isolated storage is place where your application can save its data and settings. The image on right (that I stole from MSDN library) shows you how application data store is organized. You have no other options to keep your files besides isolated storage because Windows Phone 7 does not allow you to save data directly to other file system locations. From MSDN: “Isolated storage enables managed applications to create and maintain local storage. The mobile architecture is similar to the Silverlight-based applications on Windows. All I/O operations are restricted to isolated storage and do not have direct access to the underlying operating system file system. Ultimately, this helps to provide security and prevents unauthorized access and data corruption.” Saving files from web to isolated storage I updated my RSS-reader so it reads RSS from web only if there in no local file with RSS. User can update RSS-file by clicking a button. Also file is created when application starts and there is no RSS-file. Why I am doing this? I want my application to be able to work also offline. As my code needs some more refactoring I provide it with some next postings about Windows Phone 7. If you want it sooner then please leave me a comment here. Here is the code for my RSS-downloader that downloads RSS-feed and saves it to isolated storage file calles rss.xml. public class RssDownloader {     private string _url;     private string _fileName;       public delegate void DownloadCompleteDelegate();     public event DownloadCompleteDelegate DownloadComplete;       public RssDownloader(string url, string fileName)     {         _url = url;         _fileName = fileName;     }       public void Download()     {         var request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(_url);         var result = (IAsyncResult)request.BeginGetResponse(ResponseCallback, request);            }       private void ResponseCallback(IAsyncResult result)     {         var request = (HttpWebRequest)result.AsyncState;         var response = request.EndGetResponse(result);           using(var stream = response.GetResponseStream())         using(var reader = new StreamReader(stream))         using(var appStorage = IsolatedStorageFile.GetUserStoreForApplication())         using(var file = appStorage.OpenFile("rss.xml", FileMode.OpenOrCreate))         using(var writer = new StreamWriter(file))         {             writer.Write(reader.ReadToEnd());         }           if (DownloadComplete != null)             DownloadComplete();     } } Of course I modified RSS-source for my application to use rss.xml file from isolated storage. As isolated storage files also base on streams we can use them everywhere where streams are expected. Reading isolated storage files As isolated storage files are opened as streams you can read them like usual files in your usual applications. The next code fragment shows you how to open file from isolated storage and how to read it using XmlReader. Previously I used response stream in same place. using(var appStorage = IsolatedStorageFile.GetUserStoreForApplication()) using(var file = appStorage.OpenFile("rss.xml", FileMode.Open)) {     var reader = XmlReader.Create(file);                      // more code } As you can see there is nothing complex. If you have worked with System.IO namespace objects then you will find isolated storage classes and methods to be very similar to these. Also mention that application storage and isolated storage files must be disposed after you are not using them anymore.

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• LINQ Query using Multiple From and Multiple Collections

  1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Text; 5:  6: namespace ConsoleApplication2 7: { 8: class Program 9: { 10: static void Main(string[] args) 11: { 12: var emps = GetEmployees(); 13: var deps = GetDepartments(); 14:  15: var results = from e in emps 16: from d in deps 17: where e.EmpNo >= 1 && d.DeptNo <= 30 18: select new { Emp = e, Dept = d }; 19: 20: foreach (var item in results) 21: { 22: Console.WriteLine("{0},{1},{2},{3}", item.Dept.DeptNo, item.Dept.DName, item.Emp.EmpNo, item.Emp.EmpName); 23: } 24: } 25:  26: private static List<Emp> GetEmployees() 27: { 28: return new List<Emp>() { 29: new Emp() { EmpNo = 1, EmpName = "Smith", DeptNo = 10 }, 30: new Emp() { EmpNo = 2, EmpName = "Narayan", DeptNo = 20 }, 31: new Emp() { EmpNo = 3, EmpName = "Rishi", DeptNo = 30 }, 32: new Emp() { EmpNo = 4, EmpName = "Guru", DeptNo = 10 }, 33: new Emp() { EmpNo = 5, EmpName = "Priya", DeptNo = 20 }, 34: new Emp() { EmpNo = 6, EmpName = "Riya", DeptNo = 10 } 35: }; 36: } 37:  38: private static List<Department> GetDepartments() 39: { 40: return new List<Department>() { 41: new Department() { DeptNo=10, DName="Accounts" }, 42: new Department() { DeptNo=20, DName="Finance" }, 43: new Department() { DeptNo=30, DName="Travel" } 44: }; 45: } 46: } 47:  48: class Emp 49: { 50: public int EmpNo { get; set; } 51: public string EmpName { get; set; } 52: public int DeptNo { get; set; } 53: } 54:  55: class Department 56: { 57: public int DeptNo { get; set; } 58: public String DName { get; set; } 59: } 60: } span.fullpost {display:none;}

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• Modify “Link”/ "HyperLink"/URL field using Powershell

  - by KunaalKapoor

  If you are trying to update a hyperlink/url type of column of a SharePoint list item using PowerShell and are getting the exception:Unable to index into an object of type Microsoft.SharePoint.SPListItem.At C:\mypowershell.ps1:39 char:10+       $item[ <<<< "Website"] = $itemUrl          + CategoryInfo          : InvalidOperation: (RW_Website:String) [], RuntimeException    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : CannotIndexThen look no further :)The url is basically stored like a simple string with url, description divided by comma.So all you need to do is:$myUrl = "http://www.google.com, Google"$listitem["Link"] = $myUrlThat will, assuming "Link" is a type of "Hyperlink or Picture" (Hyperlink), create a link that says Google and links to http://www.google.com.Also make sure you don't miss out on the 'http://' part as without that the value will not pass the SharePoint validation of allowed values.

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• TOTD #166: Using NoSQL database in your Java EE 6 Applications on GlassFish - MongoDB for now!

  - by arungupta

  The Java EE 6 platform includes Java Persistence API to work with RDBMS. The JPA specification defines a comprehensive API that includes, but not restricted to, how a database table can be mapped to a POJO and vice versa, provides mechanisms how a PersistenceContext can be injected in a @Stateless bean and then be used for performing different operations on the database table and write typesafe queries. There are several well known advantages of RDBMS but the NoSQL movement has gained traction over past couple of years. The NoSQL databases are not intended to be a replacement for the mainstream RDBMS. As Philosophy of NoSQL explains, NoSQL database was designed for casual use where all the features typically provided by an RDBMS are not required. The name "NoSQL" is more of a category of databases that is more known for what it is not rather than what it is. The basic principles of NoSQL database are: No need to have a pre-defined schema and that makes them a schema-less database. Addition of new properties to existing objects is easy and does not require ALTER TABLE. The unstructured data gives flexibility to change the format of data any time without downtime or reduced service levels. Also there are no joins happening on the server because there is no structure and thus no relation between them. Scalability and performance is more important than the entire set of functionality typically provided by an RDBMS. This set of databases provide eventual consistency and/or transactions restricted to single items but more focus on CRUD. Not be restricted to SQL to access the information stored in the backing database. Designed to scale-out (horizontal) instead of scale-up (vertical). This is important knowing that databases, and everything else as well, is moving into the cloud. RBDMS can scale-out using sharding but requires complex management and not for the faint of heart. Unlike RBDMS which require a separate caching tier, most of the NoSQL databases comes with integrated caching. Designed for less management and simpler data models lead to lower administration as well. There are primarily three types of NoSQL databases: Key-Value stores (e.g. Cassandra and Riak) Document databases (MongoDB or CouchDB) Graph databases (Neo4J) You may think NoSQL is panacea but as I mentioned above they are not meant to replace the mainstream databases and here is why: RDBMS have been around for many years, very stable, and functionally rich. This is something CIOs and CTOs can bet their money on without much worry. There is a reason 98% of Fortune 100 companies run Oracle :-) NoSQL is cutting edge, brings excitement to developers, but enterprises are cautious about them. Commercial databases like Oracle are well supported by the backing enterprises in terms of providing support resources on a global scale. There is a full ecosystem built around these commercial databases providing training, performance tuning, architecture guidance, and everything else. NoSQL is fairly new and typically backed by a single company not able to meet the scale of these big enterprises. NoSQL databases are good for CRUDing operations but business intelligence is extremely important for enterprises to stay competitive. RDBMS provide extensive tooling to generate this data but that was not the original intention of NoSQL databases and is lacking in that area. Generating any meaningful information other than CRUDing require extensive programming. Not suited for complex transactions such as banking systems or other highly transactional applications requiring 2-phase commit. SQL cannot be used with NoSQL databases and writing simple queries can be involving. Enough talking, lets take a look at some code. This blog has published multiple blogs on how to access a RDBMS using JPA in a Java EE 6 application. This Tip Of The Day (TOTD) will show you can use MongoDB (a document-oriented database) with a typical 3-tier Java EE 6 application. Lets get started! The complete source code of this project can be downloaded here. Download MongoDB for your platform from here (1.8.2 as of this writing) and start the server as: arun@ArunUbuntu:~/tools/mongodb-linux-x86_64-1.8.2/bin$./mongod./mongod --help for help and startup optionsSun Jun 26 20:41:11 [initandlisten] MongoDB starting : pid=11210port=27017 dbpath=/data/db/ 64-bit Sun Jun 26 20:41:11 [initandlisten] db version v1.8.2, pdfile version4.5Sun Jun 26 20:41:11 [initandlisten] git version:433bbaa14aaba6860da15bd4de8edf600f56501bSun Jun 26 20:41:11 [initandlisten] build sys info: Linuxbs-linux64.10gen.cc 2.6.21.7-2.ec2.v1.2.fc8xen #1 SMP Fri Nov 2017:48:28 EST 2009 x86_64 BOOST_LIB_VERSION=1_41Sun Jun 26 20:41:11 [initandlisten] waiting for connections on port 27017Sun Jun 26 20:41:11 [websvr] web admin interface listening on port 28017 The default directory for the database is /data/db and needs to be created as: sudo mkdir -p /data/db/sudo chown `id -u` /data/db You can specify a different directory using "--dbpath" option. Refer to Quickstart for your specific platform. Using NetBeans, create a Java EE 6 project and make sure to enable CDI and add JavaServer Faces framework. Download MongoDB Java Driver (2.6.3 of this writing) and add it to the project library by selecting "Properties", "LIbraries", "Add Library...", creating a new library by specifying the location of the JAR file, and adding the library to the created project. Edit the generated "index.xhtml" such that it looks like: <h1>Add a new movie</h1><h:form> Name: <h:inputText value="#{movie.name}" size="20"/><br/> Year: <h:inputText value="#{movie.year}" size="6"/><br/> Language: <h:inputText value="#{movie.language}" size="20"/><br/> <h:commandButton actionListener="#{movieSessionBean.createMovie}" action="show" title="Add" value="submit"/></h:form> This page has a simple HTML form with three text boxes and a submit button. The text boxes take name, year, and language of a movie and the submit button invokes the "createMovie" method of "movieSessionBean" and then render "show.xhtml". Create "show.xhtml" ("New" -> "Other..." -> "Other" -> "XHTML File") such that it looks like: <head> <title><h1>List of movies</h1></title> </head> <body> <h:form> <h:dataTable value="#{movieSessionBean.movies}" var="m" > <h:column><f:facet name="header">Name</f:facet>#{m.name}</h:column> <h:column><f:facet name="header">Year</f:facet>#{m.year}</h:column> <h:column><f:facet name="header">Language</f:facet>#{m.language}</h:column> </h:dataTable> </h:form> This page shows the name, year, and language of all movies stored in the database so far. The list of movies is returned by "movieSessionBean.movies" property. Now create the "Movie" class such that it looks like: import com.mongodb.BasicDBObject;import com.mongodb.BasicDBObject;import com.mongodb.DBObject;import javax.enterprise.inject.Model;import javax.validation.constraints.Size;/** * @author arun */@Modelpublic class Movie { @Size(min=1, max=20) private String name; @Size(min=1, max=20) private String language; private int year; // getters and setters for "name", "year", "language" public BasicDBObject toDBObject() { BasicDBObject doc = new BasicDBObject(); doc.put("name", name); doc.put("year", year); doc.put("language", language); return doc; } public static Movie fromDBObject(DBObject doc) { Movie m = new Movie(); m.name = (String)doc.get("name"); m.year = (int)doc.get("year"); m.language = (String)doc.get("language"); return m; } @Override public String toString() { return name + ", " + year + ", " + language; }} Other than the usual boilerplate code, the key methods here are "toDBObject" and "fromDBObject". These methods provide a conversion from "Movie" -> "DBObject" and vice versa. The "DBObject" is a MongoDB class that comes as part of the mongo-2.6.3.jar file and which we added to our project earlier.  The complete javadoc for 2.6.3 can be seen here. Notice, this class also uses Bean Validation constraints and will be honored by the JSF layer. Finally, create "MovieSessionBean" stateless EJB with all the business logic such that it looks like: package org.glassfish.samples;import com.mongodb.BasicDBObject;import com.mongodb.DB;import com.mongodb.DBCollection;import com.mongodb.DBCursor;import com.mongodb.DBObject;import com.mongodb.Mongo;import java.net.UnknownHostException;import java.util.ArrayList;import java.util.List;import javax.annotation.PostConstruct;import javax.ejb.Stateless;import javax.inject.Inject;import javax.inject.Named;/** * @author arun */@Stateless@Namedpublic class MovieSessionBean { @Inject Movie movie; DBCollection movieColl; @PostConstruct private void initDB() throws UnknownHostException { Mongo m = new Mongo(); DB db = m.getDB("movieDB"); movieColl = db.getCollection("movies"); if (movieColl == null) { movieColl = db.createCollection("movies", null); } } public void createMovie() { BasicDBObject doc = movie.toDBObject(); movieColl.insert(doc); } public List<Movie> getMovies() { List<Movie> movies = new ArrayList(); DBCursor cur = movieColl.find(); System.out.println("getMovies: Found " + cur.size() + " movie(s)"); for (DBObject dbo : cur.toArray()) { movies.add(Movie.fromDBObject(dbo)); } return movies; }} The database is initialized in @PostConstruct. Instead of a working with a database table, NoSQL databases work with a schema-less document. The "Movie" class is the document in our case and stored in the collection "movies". The collection allows us to perform query functions on all movies. The "getMovies" method invokes "find" method on the collection which is equivalent to the SQL query "select * from movies" and then returns a List<Movie>. Also notice that there is no "persistence.xml" in the project. Right-click and run the project to see the output as: Enter some values in the text box and click on enter to see the result as: If you reached here then you've successfully used MongoDB in your Java EE 6 application, congratulations! Some food for thought and further play ... SQL to MongoDB mapping shows mapping between traditional SQL -> Mongo query language. Tutorial shows fun things you can do with MongoDB. Try the interactive online shell  The cookbook provides common ways of using MongoDB In terms of this project, here are some tasks that can be tried: Encapsulate database management in a JPA persistence provider. Is it even worth it because the capabilities are going to be very different ? MongoDB uses "BSonObject" class for JSON representation, add @XmlRootElement on a POJO and how a compatible JSON representation can be generated. This will make the fromXXX and toXXX methods redundant.

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• TOTD #166: Using NoSQL database in your Java EE 6 Applications on GlassFish - MongoDB for now!

  - by arungupta

  The Java EE 6 platform includes Java Persistence API to work with RDBMS. The JPA specification defines a comprehensive API that includes, but not restricted to, how a database table can be mapped to a POJO and vice versa, provides mechanisms how a PersistenceContext can be injected in a @Stateless bean and then be used for performing different operations on the database table and write typesafe queries. There are several well known advantages of RDBMS but the NoSQL movement has gained traction over past couple of years. The NoSQL databases are not intended to be a replacement for the mainstream RDBMS. As Philosophy of NoSQL explains, NoSQL database was designed for casual use where all the features typically provided by an RDBMS are not required. The name "NoSQL" is more of a category of databases that is more known for what it is not rather than what it is. The basic principles of NoSQL database are: No need to have a pre-defined schema and that makes them a schema-less database. Addition of new properties to existing objects is easy and does not require ALTER TABLE. The unstructured data gives flexibility to change the format of data any time without downtime or reduced service levels. Also there are no joins happening on the server because there is no structure and thus no relation between them. Scalability and performance is more important than the entire set of functionality typically provided by an RDBMS. This set of databases provide eventual consistency and/or transactions restricted to single items but more focus on CRUD. Not be restricted to SQL to access the information stored in the backing database. Designed to scale-out (horizontal) instead of scale-up (vertical). This is important knowing that databases, and everything else as well, is moving into the cloud. RBDMS can scale-out using sharding but requires complex management and not for the faint of heart. Unlike RBDMS which require a separate caching tier, most of the NoSQL databases comes with integrated caching. Designed for less management and simpler data models lead to lower administration as well. There are primarily three types of NoSQL databases: Key-Value stores (e.g. Cassandra and Riak) Document databases (MongoDB or CouchDB) Graph databases (Neo4J) You may think NoSQL is panacea but as I mentioned above they are not meant to replace the mainstream databases and here is why: RDBMS have been around for many years, very stable, and functionally rich. This is something CIOs and CTOs can bet their money on without much worry. There is a reason 98% of Fortune 100 companies run Oracle :-) NoSQL is cutting edge, brings excitement to developers, but enterprises are cautious about them. Commercial databases like Oracle are well supported by the backing enterprises in terms of providing support resources on a global scale. There is a full ecosystem built around these commercial databases providing training, performance tuning, architecture guidance, and everything else. NoSQL is fairly new and typically backed by a single company not able to meet the scale of these big enterprises. NoSQL databases are good for CRUDing operations but business intelligence is extremely important for enterprises to stay competitive. RDBMS provide extensive tooling to generate this data but that was not the original intention of NoSQL databases and is lacking in that area. Generating any meaningful information other than CRUDing require extensive programming. Not suited for complex transactions such as banking systems or other highly transactional applications requiring 2-phase commit. SQL cannot be used with NoSQL databases and writing simple queries can be involving. Enough talking, lets take a look at some code. This blog has published multiple blogs on how to access a RDBMS using JPA in a Java EE 6 application. This Tip Of The Day (TOTD) will show you can use MongoDB (a document-oriented database) with a typical 3-tier Java EE 6 application. Lets get started! The complete source code of this project can be downloaded here. Download MongoDB for your platform from here (1.8.2 as of this writing) and start the server as: arun@ArunUbuntu:~/tools/mongodb-linux-x86_64-1.8.2/bin$./mongod./mongod --help for help and startup optionsSun Jun 26 20:41:11 [initandlisten] MongoDB starting : pid=11210port=27017 dbpath=/data/db/ 64-bit Sun Jun 26 20:41:11 [initandlisten] db version v1.8.2, pdfile version4.5Sun Jun 26 20:41:11 [initandlisten] git version:433bbaa14aaba6860da15bd4de8edf600f56501bSun Jun 26 20:41:11 [initandlisten] build sys info: Linuxbs-linux64.10gen.cc 2.6.21.7-2.ec2.v1.2.fc8xen #1 SMP Fri Nov 2017:48:28 EST 2009 x86_64 BOOST_LIB_VERSION=1_41Sun Jun 26 20:41:11 [initandlisten] waiting for connections on port 27017Sun Jun 26 20:41:11 [websvr] web admin interface listening on port 28017 The default directory for the database is /data/db and needs to be created as: sudo mkdir -p /data/db/sudo chown `id -u` /data/db You can specify a different directory using "--dbpath" option. Refer to Quickstart for your specific platform. Using NetBeans, create a Java EE 6 project and make sure to enable CDI and add JavaServer Faces framework. Download MongoDB Java Driver (2.6.3 of this writing) and add it to the project library by selecting "Properties", "LIbraries", "Add Library...", creating a new library by specifying the location of the JAR file, and adding the library to the created project. Edit the generated "index.xhtml" such that it looks like: <h1>Add a new movie</h1><h:form> Name: <h:inputText value="#{movie.name}" size="20"/><br/> Year: <h:inputText value="#{movie.year}" size="6"/><br/> Language: <h:inputText value="#{movie.language}" size="20"/><br/> <h:commandButton actionListener="#{movieSessionBean.createMovie}" action="show" title="Add" value="submit"/></h:form> This page has a simple HTML form with three text boxes and a submit button. The text boxes take name, year, and language of a movie and the submit button invokes the "createMovie" method of "movieSessionBean" and then render "show.xhtml". Create "show.xhtml" ("New" -> "Other..." -> "Other" -> "XHTML File") such that it looks like: <head> <title><h1>List of movies</h1></title> </head> <body> <h:form> <h:dataTable value="#{movieSessionBean.movies}" var="m" > <h:column><f:facet name="header">Name</f:facet>#{m.name}</h:column> <h:column><f:facet name="header">Year</f:facet>#{m.year}</h:column> <h:column><f:facet name="header">Language</f:facet>#{m.language}</h:column> </h:dataTable> </h:form> This page shows the name, year, and language of all movies stored in the database so far. The list of movies is returned by "movieSessionBean.movies" property. Now create the "Movie" class such that it looks like: import com.mongodb.BasicDBObject;import com.mongodb.BasicDBObject;import com.mongodb.DBObject;import javax.enterprise.inject.Model;import javax.validation.constraints.Size;/** * @author arun */@Modelpublic class Movie { @Size(min=1, max=20) private String name; @Size(min=1, max=20) private String language; private int year; // getters and setters for "name", "year", "language" public BasicDBObject toDBObject() { BasicDBObject doc = new BasicDBObject(); doc.put("name", name); doc.put("year", year); doc.put("language", language); return doc; } public static Movie fromDBObject(DBObject doc) { Movie m = new Movie(); m.name = (String)doc.get("name"); m.year = (int)doc.get("year"); m.language = (String)doc.get("language"); return m; } @Override public String toString() { return name + ", " + year + ", " + language; }} Other than the usual boilerplate code, the key methods here are "toDBObject" and "fromDBObject". These methods provide a conversion from "Movie" -> "DBObject" and vice versa. The "DBObject" is a MongoDB class that comes as part of the mongo-2.6.3.jar file and which we added to our project earlier.  The complete javadoc for 2.6.3 can be seen here. Notice, this class also uses Bean Validation constraints and will be honored by the JSF layer. Finally, create "MovieSessionBean" stateless EJB with all the business logic such that it looks like: package org.glassfish.samples;import com.mongodb.BasicDBObject;import com.mongodb.DB;import com.mongodb.DBCollection;import com.mongodb.DBCursor;import com.mongodb.DBObject;import com.mongodb.Mongo;import java.net.UnknownHostException;import java.util.ArrayList;import java.util.List;import javax.annotation.PostConstruct;import javax.ejb.Stateless;import javax.inject.Inject;import javax.inject.Named;/** * @author arun */@Stateless@Namedpublic class MovieSessionBean { @Inject Movie movie; DBCollection movieColl; @PostConstruct private void initDB() throws UnknownHostException { Mongo m = new Mongo(); DB db = m.getDB("movieDB"); movieColl = db.getCollection("movies"); if (movieColl == null) { movieColl = db.createCollection("movies", null); } } public void createMovie() { BasicDBObject doc = movie.toDBObject(); movieColl.insert(doc); } public List<Movie> getMovies() { List<Movie> movies = new ArrayList(); DBCursor cur = movieColl.find(); System.out.println("getMovies: Found " + cur.size() + " movie(s)"); for (DBObject dbo : cur.toArray()) { movies.add(Movie.fromDBObject(dbo)); } return movies; }} The database is initialized in @PostConstruct. Instead of a working with a database table, NoSQL databases work with a schema-less document. The "Movie" class is the document in our case and stored in the collection "movies". The collection allows us to perform query functions on all movies. The "getMovies" method invokes "find" method on the collection which is equivalent to the SQL query "select * from movies" and then returns a List<Movie>. Also notice that there is no "persistence.xml" in the project. Right-click and run the project to see the output as: Enter some values in the text box and click on enter to see the result as: If you reached here then you've successfully used MongoDB in your Java EE 6 application, congratulations! Some food for thought and further play ... SQL to MongoDB mapping shows mapping between traditional SQL -> Mongo query language. Tutorial shows fun things you can do with MongoDB. Try the interactive online shell  The cookbook provides common ways of using MongoDB In terms of this project, here are some tasks that can be tried: Encapsulate database management in a JPA persistence provider. Is it even worth it because the capabilities are going to be very different ? MongoDB uses "BSonObject" class for JSON representation, add @XmlRootElement on a POJO and how a compatible JSON representation can be generated. This will make the fromXXX and toXXX methods redundant.

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• Packing a DBF

  - by Tom Hines

  I thought my days of dealing with DBFs as a "production data" source were over, but HA (no such luck). I recently had to retrieve, modify and replace some data that needed to be delivered in a DBF file. Everything was fine until I realized / remembered the DBF driver does not ACTUALLY delete records from the data source -- it only marks them for deletion.  You are responsible for handling the "chaff" either by using a utility to remove deleted records or by simply ignoring them.  If imported into Excel, the marked-deleted records are ignored, but the file size will reflect the extra content. So, I went hunting for a method to "Pack" the records (removing deleted ones and resizing the DBF file) and eventually ran across the FOXPRO driver at ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vfoxpro/bb190233.aspx ).  Once installed, I changed the DSN in the code to the new one I created in the ODBC Administrator and ran some tests.  Using MSQuery, I simply tested the raw SQL command Pack {tablename} and it WORKED! One really neat thing is the PACK command is used like regular SQL instructions; "Pack {tablename}" is all that is needed. It is necessary, however, to close all connections to the database before issuing the PACK command.    Here is some C# code for a Pack method.         /// <summary>       /// Pack the DBF removing all deleted records       /// </summary>       /// <param name="strTableName">The table to pack</param>       /// <param name="strError">output of any errors</param>       /// <returns>bool (true if no errors)</returns>       public static bool Pack(string strTableName, ref string strError)       {          bool blnRetVal = true;          try          {             OdbcConnectionStringBuilder csbOdbc = new OdbcConnectionStringBuilder()             {                Dsn = "PSAP_FOX_DBF"             };             string strSQL = "pack " + strTableName;             using (OdbcConnection connOdbc = new OdbcConnection(csbOdbc.ToString()))             {                connOdbc.Open();                OdbcCommand cmdOdbc = new OdbcCommand(strSQL, connOdbc);                cmdOdbc.ExecuteNonQuery();                connOdbc.Close();             }          }          catch (Exception exc)          {             blnRetVal = false;             strError = exc.Message;          }          return blnRetVal;       }

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• Packing a DBF

  - by Tom Hines

  I thought my days of dealing with DBFs as a "production data" source were over, but HA (no such luck). I recently had to retrieve, modify and replace some data that needed to be delivered in a DBF file. Everything was fine until I realized / remembered the DBF driver does not ACTUALLY delete records from the data source -- it only marks them for deletion.  You are responsible for handling the "chaff" either by using a utility to remove deleted records or by simply ignoring them.  If imported into Excel, the marked-deleted records are ignored, but the file size will reflect the extra content.  After several rounds of testing CRUD, the output DBF was huge. So, I went hunting for a method to "Pack" the records (removing deleted ones and resizing the DBF file) and eventually ran across the FOXPRO driver at ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vfoxpro/bb190233.aspx ).  Once installed, I changed the DSN in the code to the new one I created in the ODBC Administrator and ran some tests.  Using MSQuery, I simply tested the raw SQL command Pack {tablename} and it WORKED! One really neat thing is the PACK command is used like regular SQL instructions; "Pack {tablename}" is all that is needed. It is necessary, however, to close all connections to the database (and re-open) before issuing the PACK command or you will get the "File is in use" error.    Here is some C# code for a Pack method.         /// <summary>       /// Pack the DBF removing all deleted records       /// </summary>       /// <param name="strTableName">The table to pack</param>       /// <param name="strError">output of any errors</param>       /// <returns>bool (true if no errors)</returns>       public static bool Pack(string strTableName, ref string strError)       {          bool blnRetVal = true;          try          {             OdbcConnectionStringBuilder csbOdbc = new OdbcConnectionStringBuilder()             {                Dsn = "PSAP_FOX_DBF"             };             string strSQL = "pack " + strTableName;             using (OdbcConnection connOdbc = new OdbcConnection(csbOdbc.ToString()))             {                connOdbc.Open();                OdbcCommand cmdOdbc = new OdbcCommand(strSQL, connOdbc);                cmdOdbc.ExecuteNonQuery();                connOdbc.Close();             }          }          catch (Exception exc)          {             blnRetVal = false;             strError = exc.Message;          }          return blnRetVal;       }

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• Restful Services, oData, and Rest Sharp

  - by jkrebsbach

  After a great presentation by Jason Sheehan at MDC about RestSharp, I decided to implement it. RestSharp is a .Net framework for consuming restful data sources via either Json or XML. My first step was to put together a Restful data source for RestSharp to consume.  Staying entirely withing .Net, I decided to use Microsoft's oData implementation, built on System.Data.Services.DataServices.  Natively, these support Json, or atom+pub xml.  (XML with a few bells and whistles added on) There are three main steps for creating an oData data source: 1)  override CreateDSPMetaData This is where the metadata data is returned.  The meta data defines the structure of the data to return.  The structure contains the relationships between data objects, along with what properties the objects expose.  The meta data can and should be somehow cached so that the structure is not rebuild with every data request. 2) override CreateDataSource The context contains the data the data source will publish.  This method is the conduit which will populate the metadata objects to be returned to the requestor. 3) implement static InitializeService At this point we can set up security, along with setting up properties of the web service (versioning, etc)   Here is a web service which publishes stock prices for various Products (stocks) in various Categories. namespace RestService {     public class RestServiceImpl : DSPDataService<DSPContext>     {         private static DSPContext _context;         private static DSPMetadata _metadata;         /// <summary>         /// Populate traversable data source         /// </summary>         /// <returns></returns>         protected override DSPContext CreateDataSource()         {             if (_context == null)             {                 _context = new DSPContext();                 Category utilities = new Category(0);                 utilities.Name = "Electric";                 Category financials = new Category(1);                 financials.Name = "Financial";                                 IList products = _context.GetResourceSetEntities("Products");                 Product electric = new Product(0, utilities);                 electric.Name = "ABC Electric";                 electric.Description = "Electric Utility";                 electric.Price = 3.5;                 products.Add(electric);                 Product water = new Product(1, utilities);                 water.Name = "XYZ Water";                 water.Description = "Water Utility";                 water.Price = 2.4;                 products.Add(water);                 Product banks = new Product(2, financials);                 banks.Name = "FatCat Bank";                 banks.Description = "A bank that's almost too big";                 banks.Price = 19.9; // This will never get to the client                 products.Add(banks);                 IList categories = _context.GetResourceSetEntities("Categories");                 categories.Add(utilities);                 categories.Add(financials);                 utilities.Products.Add(electric);                 utilities.Products.Add(electric);                 financials.Products.Add(banks);             }             return _context;         }         /// <summary>         /// Setup rules describing published data structure - relationships between data,         /// key field, other searchable fields, etc.         /// </summary>         /// <returns></returns>         protected override DSPMetadata CreateDSPMetadata()         {             if (_metadata == null)             {                 _metadata = new DSPMetadata("DemoService", "DataServiceProviderDemo");                 // Define entity type product                 ResourceType product = _metadata.AddEntityType(typeof(Product), "Product");                 _metadata.AddKeyProperty(product, "ProductID");                 // Only add properties we wish to share with end users                 _metadata.AddPrimitiveProperty(product, "Name");                 _metadata.AddPrimitiveProperty(product, "Description");                 EntityPropertyMappingAttribute att = new EntityPropertyMappingAttribute("Name",                     SyndicationItemProperty.Title, SyndicationTextContentKind.Plaintext, true);                 product.AddEntityPropertyMappingAttribute(att);                 att = new EntityPropertyMappingAttribute("Description",                     SyndicationItemProperty.Summary, SyndicationTextContentKind.Plaintext, true);                 product.AddEntityPropertyMappingAttribute(att);                 // Define products as a set of product entities                 ResourceSet products = _metadata.AddResourceSet("Products", product);                 // Define entity type category                 ResourceType category = _metadata.AddEntityType(typeof(Category), "Category");                 _metadata.AddKeyProperty(category, "CategoryID");                 _metadata.AddPrimitiveProperty(category, "Name");                 _metadata.AddPrimitiveProperty(category, "Description");                 // Define categories as a set of category entities                 ResourceSet categories = _metadata.AddResourceSet("Categories", category);                 att = new EntityPropertyMappingAttribute("Name",                     SyndicationItemProperty.Title, SyndicationTextContentKind.Plaintext, true);                 category.AddEntityPropertyMappingAttribute(att);                 att = new EntityPropertyMappingAttribute("Description",                     SyndicationItemProperty.Summary, SyndicationTextContentKind.Plaintext, true);                 category.AddEntityPropertyMappingAttribute(att);                 // A product has a category, a category has products                 _metadata.AddResourceReferenceProperty(product, "Category", categories);                 _metadata.AddResourceSetReferenceProperty(category, "Products", products);             }             return _metadata;         }         /// <summary>         /// Based on the requesting user, can set up permissions to Read, Write, etc.         /// </summary>         /// <param name="config"></param>         public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config)         {             config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.All);             config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2;             config.DataServiceBehavior.AcceptProjectionRequests = true;         }     } }     The objects prefixed with DSP come from the samples on the oData site: http://www.odata.org/developers The products and categories objects are POCO business objects with no special modifiers. Three main options are available for defining the MetaData of data sources in .Net: 1) Generate Entity Data model (Potentially directly from SQL Server database).  This requires the least amount of manual interaction, and uses the edmx WYSIWYG editor to generate a data model.  This can be directly tied to the SQL Server database and generated from the database if you want a data access layer tightly coupled with your database. 2) Object model decorations.  If you already have a POCO data layer, you can decorate your objects with properties to statically inform the compiler how the objects are related.  The disadvantage is there are now tags strewn about your business layer that need to be updated as the business rules change.  3) Programmatically construct metadata object.  This is the object illustrated above in CreateDSPMetaData.  This puts all relationship information into one central programmatic location.  Here business rules are constructed when the DSPMetaData response object is returned.   Once you have your service up and running, RestSharp is designed for XML / Json, along with the native Microsoft library.  There are currently some differences between how Jason made RestSharp expect XML with how atom+pub works, so I found better results currently with the Json implementation - modifying the RestSharp XML parser to make an atom+pub parser is fairly trivial though, so use what implementation works best for you. I put together a sample console app which calls the RestSvcImpl.svc service defined above (and assumes it to be running on port 2000).  I used both RestSharp as a client, and also the default Microsoft oData client tools. namespace RestConsole {     class Program     {         private static DataServiceContext _ctx;         private enum DemoType         {             Xml,             Json         }         static void Main(string[] args)         {             // Microsoft implementation             _ctx = new DataServiceContext(new System.Uri("http://localhost:2000/RestServiceImpl.svc"));             var msProducts = RunQuery<Product>("Products").ToList();             var msCategory = RunQuery<Category>("/Products(0)/Category").AsEnumerable().Single();             var msFilteredProducts = RunQuery<Product>("/Products?$filter=length(Name) ge 4").ToList();             // RestSharp implementation                          DemoType demoType = DemoType.Json;             var client = new RestClient("http://localhost:2000/RestServiceImpl.svc");             client.ClearHandlers(); // Remove all available handlers             // Set up handler depending on what situation dictates             if (demoType == DemoType.Json)                 client.AddHandler("application/json", new RestSharp.Deserializers.JsonDeserializer());             else if (demoType == DemoType.Xml)             {                 client.AddHandler("application/atom+xml", new RestSharp.Deserializers.XmlDeserializer());             }                          var request = new RestRequest();             if (demoType == DemoType.Json)                 request.RootElement = "d"; // service root element for json             else if (demoType == DemoType.Xml)             {                 request.XmlNamespace = "http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom";             }                              // Return all products             request.Resource = "/Products?$orderby=Name";             RestResponse<List<Product>> productsResp = client.Execute<List<Product>>(request);             List<Product> products = productsResp.Data;             // Find category for product with ProductID = 1             request.Resource = string.Format("/Products(1)/Category");             RestResponse<Category> categoryResp = client.Execute<Category>(request);             Category category = categoryResp.Data;             // Specialized queries             request.Resource = string.Format("/Products?$filter=ProductID eq {0}", 1);             RestResponse<Product> productResp = client.Execute<Product>(request);             Product product = productResp.Data;                          request.Resource = string.Format("/Products?$filter=Name eq '{0}'", "XYZ Water");             productResp = client.Execute<Product>(request);             product = productResp.Data;         }         private static IEnumerable<TElement> RunQuery<TElement>(string queryUri)         {             try             {                 return _ctx.Execute<TElement>(new Uri(queryUri, UriKind.Relative));             }             catch (Exception ex)             {                 throw ex;             }         }              } }   Feel free to step through the code a few times and to attach a debugger to the service as well to see how and where the context and metadata objects are constructed and returned.  Pay special attention to the response object being returned by the oData service - There are several properties of the RestRequest that can be used to help troubleshoot when the structure of the response is not exactly what would be expected.

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• Getting a Web Resource Url in non WebForms Applications

  - by Rick Strahl

  WebResources in ASP.NET are pretty useful feature. WebResources are resources that are embedded into a .NET assembly and can be loaded from the assembly via a special resource URL. WebForms includes a method on the ClientScriptManager (Page.ClientScript) and the ScriptManager object to retrieve URLs to these resources. For example you can do: ClientScript.GetWebResourceUrl(typeof(ControlResources), ControlResources.JQUERY_SCRIPT_RESOURCE); GetWebResourceUrl requires a type (which is used for the assembly lookup in which to find the resource) and the resource id to lookup. GetWebResourceUrl() then returns a nasty old long URL like this: WebResource.axd?d=-b6oWzgbpGb8uTaHDrCMv59VSmGhilZP5_T_B8anpGx7X-PmW_1eu1KoHDvox-XHqA1EEb-Tl2YAP3bBeebGN65tv-7-yAimtG4ZnoWH633pExpJor8Qp1aKbk-KQWSoNfRC7rQJHXVP4tC0reYzVw2&t=634533278261362212 While lately excessive resource usage has been frowned upon especially by MVC developers who tend to opt for content distributed as files, I still think that Web Resources have their place even in non-WebForms applications. Also if you have existing assemblies that include resources like scripts and common image links it sure would be nice to access them from non-WebForms pages like MVC views or even in plain old Razor Web Pages. Where's my Page object Dude? Unfortunately natively ASP.NET doesn't have a mechanism for retrieving WebResource Urls outside of the WebForms engine. It's a feature that's specifically baked into WebForms and that relies specifically on the Page HttpHandler implementation. Both Page.ClientScript (obviously) and ScriptManager rely on a hosting Page object in order to work and the various methods off these objects require control instances passed. The reason for this is that the script managers can inject scripts and links into Page content (think RegisterXXXX methods) and for that a Page instance is required. However, for many other methods - like GetWebResourceUrl() - that simply return resources or resource links the Page reference is really irrelevant. While there's a separate ClientScriptManager class, it's marked as sealed and doesn't have any public constructors so you can't create your own instance (without Reflection). Even if it did the internal constructor it does have requires a Page reference. No good… So, can we get access to a WebResourceUrl generically without running in a WebForms Page instance? We just have to create a Page instance ourselves and use it internally. There's nothing intrinsic about the use of the Page class in ClientScript, at least for retrieving resources and resource Urls so it's easy to create an instance of a Page for example in a static method. For our needs of retrieving ResourceUrls or even actually retrieving script resources we can use a canned, non-configured Page instance we create on our own. The following works just fine: public static string GetWebResourceUrl(Type type, string resource ) { Page page = new Page(); return page.ClientScript.GetWebResourceUrl(type, resource); } A slight optimization for this might be to cache the created Page instance. Page tends to be a pretty heavy object to create each time a URL is required so you might want to cache the instance: public class WebUtils { private static Page CachedPage { get { if (_CachedPage == null) _CachedPage = new Page(); return _CachedPage; } } private static Page _CachedPage; public static string GetWebResourceUrl(Type type, string resource) { return CachedPage.ClientScript.GetWebResourceUrl(type, resource); } } You can now use GetWebResourceUrl in a Razor page like this: <!DOCTYPE html> <html <head> <script src="@WebUtils.GetWebResourceUrl(typeof(ControlResources),ControlResources.JQUERY_SCRIPT_RESOURCE)"> </script> </head> <body> <div class="errordisplay"> <img src="@WebUtils.GetWebResourceUrl(typeof(ControlResources),ControlResources.WARNING_ICON_RESOURCE)" /> This is only a Test! </div> </body> </html> And voila - there you have WebResources served from a non-Page based application. WebResources may be a on the way out, but legacy apps have them embedded and for some situations, like fallback scripts and some common image resources I still like to use them. Being able to use them from non-WebForms applications should have been built into the core ASP.NETplatform IMHO, but seeing that it's not this workaround is easy enough to implement.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in ASP.NET  MVC   Tweet (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Sixeyed.Caching available now on NuGet and GitHub!

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2013/10/22/sixeyed.caching-available-now-on-nuget-and-github.aspxThe good guys at Pluralsight have okayed me to publish my caching framework (as seen in Caching in the .NET Stack: Inside-Out) as an open-source library, and it’s out now. You can get it here: Sixeyed.Caching source code on GitHub, and here: Sixeyed.Caching package v1.0.0 on NuGet. If you haven’t seen the course, there’s a preview here on YouTube: In-Process and Out-of-Process Caches, which gives a good flavour. The library is a wrapper around various cache providers, including the .NET MemoryCache, AppFabric cache, and  memcached*. All the wrappers inherit from a base class which gives you a set of common functionality against all the cache implementations: •    inherits OutputCacheProvider, so you can use your chosen cache provider as an ASP.NET output cache; •    serialization and encryption, so you can configure whether you want your cache items serialized (XML, JSON or binary) and encrypted; •    instrumentation, you can optionally use performance counters to monitor cache attempts and hits, at a low level. The framework wraps up different caches into an ICache interface, and it lets you use a provider directly like this: Cache.Memory.Get<RefData>(refDataKey); - or with configuration to use the default cache provider: Cache.Default.Get<RefData>(refDataKey); The library uses Unity’s interception framework to implement AOP caching, which you can use by flagging methods with the [Cache] attribute: [Cache] public RefData GetItem(string refDataKey) - and you can be more specific on the required cache behaviour: [Cache(CacheType=CacheType.Memory, Days=1] public RefData GetItem(string refDataKey) - or really specific: [Cache(CacheType=CacheType.Disk, SerializationFormat=SerializationFormat.Json, Hours=2, Minutes=59)] public RefData GetItem(string refDataKey) Provided you get instances of classes with cacheable methods from the container, the attributed method results will be cached, and repeated calls will be fetched from the cache. You can also set a bunch of cache defaults in application config, like whether to use encryption and instrumentation, and whether the cache system is enabled at all: <sixeyed.caching enabled="true"> <performanceCounters instrumentCacheTotalCounts="true" instrumentCacheTargetCounts="true" categoryNamePrefix ="Sixeyed.Caching.Tests"/> <encryption enabled="true" key="1234567890abcdef1234567890abcdef" iv="1234567890abcdef"/> <!-- key must be 32 characters, IV must be 16 characters--> </sixeyed.caching> For AOP and methods flagged with the cache attribute, you can override the compile-time cache settings at runtime with more config (keyed by the class and method name): <sixeyed.caching enabled="true"> <targets> <target keyPrefix="MethodLevelCachingStub.GetRandomIntCacheConfiguredInternal" enabled="false"/> <target keyPrefix="MethodLevelCachingStub.GetRandomIntCacheExpiresConfiguredInternal" seconds="1"/> </targets> It’s released under the MIT license, so you can use it freely in your own apps and modify as required. I’ll be adding more content to the GitHub wiki, which will be the main source of documentation, but for now there’s an FAQ to get you started. * - in the course the framework library also wraps NCache Express, but there's no public redistributable library that I can find, so it's not in Sixeyed.Caching.

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• Earthquake Locator - Live Demo and Source Code

  - by Bobby Diaz

  Quick Links Live Demo Source Code I finally got a live demo up and running!  I signed up for a shared hosting account over at discountasp.net so I could post a working version of the Earthquake Locator application, but ran into a few minor issues related to RIA Services.  Thankfully, Tim Heuer had already encountered and explained all of the problems I had along with solutions to these and other common pitfalls.  You can find his blog post here.  The ones that got me were the default authentication tag being set to Windows instead of Forms, needed to add the <baseAddressPrefixFilters> tag since I was running on a shared server using host headers, and finally the Multiple Authentication Schemes settings in the IIS7 Manager.   To get the demo application ready, I pulled down local copies of the earthquake data feeds that the application can use instead of pulling from the USGS web site.  I basically added the feed URL as an app setting in the web.config:       <appSettings>         <!-- USGS Data Feeds: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/ -->         <!--<add key="FeedUrl"             value="http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/1day-M2.5.xml" />-->         <!--<add key="FeedUrl"             value="http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/7day-M2.5.xml" />-->         <!--<add key="FeedUrl"             value="~/Demo/1day-M2.5.xml" />-->         <add key="FeedUrl"              value="~/Demo/7day-M2.5.xml" />     </appSettings> You will need to do the same if you want to run from local copies of the feed data.  I also made the following minor changes to the EarthquakeService class so that it gets the FeedUrl from the web.config:       private static readonly string FeedUrl = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["FeedUrl"];       /// <summary>     /// Gets the feed at the specified URL.     /// </summary>     /// <param name="url">The URL.</param>     /// <returns>A <see cref="SyndicationFeed"/> object.</returns>     public static SyndicationFeed GetFeed(String url)     {         SyndicationFeed feed = null;           if ( !String.IsNullOrEmpty(url) && url.StartsWith("~") )         {             // resolve virtual path to physical file system             url = System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(url);         }           try         {             log.Debug("Loading RSS feed: " + url);               using ( var reader = XmlReader.Create(url) )             {                 feed = SyndicationFeed.Load(reader);             }         }         catch ( Exception ex )         {             log.Error("Error occurred while loading RSS feed: " + url, ex);         }           return feed;     } You can now view the live demo or download the source code here, but be sure you have WCF RIA Services installed before running the application locally and make sure the FeedUrl is pointing to a valid location.  Please let me know if you have any comments or if you run into any issues with the code.   Enjoy!

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• Part 14: Execute a PowerShell script

  In the series the following parts have been published Part 1: Introduction Part 2: Add arguments and variables Part 3: Use more complex arguments Part 4: Create your own activity Part 5: Increase AssemblyVersion Part 6: Use custom type for an argument Part 7: How is the custom assembly found Part 8: Send information to the build log Part 9: Impersonate activities (run under other credentials) Part 10: Include Version Number in the Build Number Part 11: Speed up opening my build process template Part 12: How to debug my custom activities Part 13: Get control over the Build Output Part 14: Execute a PowerShell script Part 15: Fail a build based on the exit code of a console application With PowerShell you can add powerful scripting to your build to for example execute a deployment. If you want more information on PowerShell, please refer to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa973757.aspx For this example we will create a simple PowerShell script that prints “Hello world!”. To create the script, create a new text file and name it “HelloWorld.ps1”. Add to the contents of the script: Write-Host “Hello World!” To test the script do the following: Open the command prompt To run the script you must change the execution policy. To do this execute in the command prompt: powershell set-executionpolicy remotesigned Now go to the directory where you have saved the PowerShell script Execute the following command powershell .\HelloWorld.ps1 In this example I use a relative path, but when the path to the PowerShell script contains spaces, you need to change the syntax to powershell "& '<full path to script>' " for example: powershell "& ‘C:\sources\Build Customization\SolutionToBuild\PowerShell Scripts\HellloWorld.ps1’ " In this blog post, I create a new solution and that solution includes also this PowerShell script. I want to create an argument on the Build Process Template that holds the path to the PowerShell script. In the Build Process Template I will add an InvokeProcess activity to execute the PowerShell command. This InvokeProcess activity needs the location of the script as an argument for the PowerShell command. Since you don’t know the full path at the build server of this script, you can either specify in the argument the relative path of the script, but it is hard to find out what the relative path is. I prefer to specify the location of the script in source control and then convert that server path to a local path. To do this conversion you can use the ConvertWorkspaceItem activity. So to complete the task, open the Build Process Template CustomTemplate.xaml that we created in earlier parts, follow the following steps Add a new argument called “DeploymentScript” and set the appropriate settings in the metadata. See Part 2: Add arguments and variables  for more information. Scroll down beneath the TryCatch activity called “Try Compile, Test, and Associate Changesets and Work Items” Add a new If activity and set the condition to "Not String.IsNullOrEmpty(DeploymentScript)" to ensure it will only run when the argument is passed. Add in the Then branch of the If activity a new Sequence activity and rename it to “Start deployment” Click on the activity and add a new variable called DeploymentScriptFilename (scoped to the “Start deployment” Sequence Add a ConvertWorkspaceItem activity on the “Start deployment” Sequence Add a InvokeProcess activity beneath the ConvertWorkspaceItem activity in the “Start deployment” Sequence Click on the ConvertWorkspaceItem activity and change the properties DisplayName = Convert deployment script filename Input = DeploymentScript Result = DeploymentScriptFilename Workspace = Workspace Click on the InvokeProcess activity and change the properties Arguments = String.Format(" ""& '{0}' "" ", DeploymentScriptFilename) DisplayName = Execute deployment script FileName = "PowerShell" To see results from the powershell command drop a WriteBuildMessage activity on the "Handle Standard Output" and pass the stdOutput variable to the Message property. Do the same for a WriteBuildError activity on the "Handle Error Output" To publish it, check in the Build Process Template This leads to the following result We now go to the build definition that depends on the template and set the path of the deployment script to the server path to the HelloWorld.ps1. (If you want to see the result of the PowerShell script, change the Logging verbosity to Detailed or Diagnostic). Save and run the build. A lot of the deployment scripts you have will have some kind of arguments (like username / password or environment variables) that you want to define in the Build Definition. To make the PowerShell configurable, you can follow the following steps. Create a new script and give it the name "HelloWho.ps1". In the contents of the file add the following lines: param (         $person     ) $message = [System.String]::Format(“Hello {0}!", $person) Write-Host $message When you now run the script on the command prompt, you will see the following So lets change the Build Process Template to accept one parameter for the deployment script. You can of course make it configurable to add a for-loop that reads through a collection of parameters but that is out of scope of this blog post. Add a new Argument called DeploymentScriptParameter In the InvokeProcess activity where the PowerShell command is executed, modify the Arguments property to String.Format(" ""& '{0}' '{1}' "" ", DeploymentScriptFilename, DeploymentScriptParameter) Check in the Build Process Template Now modify the build definition and set the Parameter of the deployment to any value and run the build. You can download the full solution at BuildProcess.zip. It will include the sources of every part and will continue to evolve.

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• How to perform feature upgrade in SharePoint2010 part2

  - by ybbest

  In my last post, I showed you how to perform feature upgrade and upgrade my feature from 0.0.0.0 to 1.0.0.1. In this post, I’d like to continue on this topic and upgrade the feature again. For the first version of my solution, I deploy a document library with a custom document set content type and then upgrade the solution so I index the application number column. Now , I will create a new version of the solution so that it will remove the threshold of the list. You can download the solution here. Once you extract your solution, the first version is in the original folder. In order to deploy the original solution, you need to run the sitecreation.ps1 in the script folder. The version 1.1 will be in the Upgrade folder and version 1.2 will be in the Upgrade2 folder. You need to make the following changes to the existing solution. 1. Modify the ApplicationLibrary.Template.xml as highlighted below: 2. Adding the following code into the feature event receiver. </pre> public override void FeatureUpgrading(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties, string upgradeActionName, System.Collections.Generic.IDictionary<string, string> parameters) { base.FeatureUpgrading(properties, upgradeActionName, parameters); SPWeb web = GetFeatureWeb(properties); SPList applicationLibrary = web.Lists.TryGetList(ApplicationLibraryNamesConstant.ApplicationLibraryName); switch (upgradeActionName) { case "IndexApplicationNumber": if (applicationLibrary != null) { SPField queueField = applicationLibrary.Fields["ApplicationNumber"]; queueField.Indexed = true; queueField.Update(); } break; case "RemoveListThreshold": applicationLibrary.EnableThrottling = false; applicationLibrary.Update(); break; } } <pre> 3. Package your solution and run the feature upgrade PowerShell script. $wspFolder ="v1.2" $scriptPath=Split-Path $myInvocation.MyCommand.Path $siteUrl = "http://ybbest" $featureToCheckGuid="1b9d84cd-227d-45f1-92d4-a43008aa8fe7" $requiredFeatureVersion="1.0.0.1" $siteUrlOfFeatureToBeChecked="http://ybbest" AppendLog "Starting Solution UpgradeSolutionAndFeatures.ps1" Magenta & "$scriptPath\UpgradeSolutionAndFeatures.ps1" $siteUrl $wspFolder $featureToCheckGuid $requiredFeatureVersion $siteUrlOfFeatureToBeChecked Write-Host AppendLog "All features updated" "Green" References: Feature upgrade.

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• Searching for the last logon of users in Active Directory

  - by Robert May

  I needed to clean out a bunch of old accounts at Veracity Solutions, and wanted to delete those that hadn’t used their account in more than a year. I found that AD has a property on objects called the lastLogonTimestamp.  However, this value isn’t exposed to you in any useful fashion.  Sure, you can pull up ADSI Edit and and eventually get to it there, but it’s painful. I spent some time searching, and discovered that there’s not much out there to help, so I thought a blog post showing exactly how to get at this information would be in order. Basically, what you end up doing is using System.DirectoryServices to search for accounts and then filtering those for users, doing some conversion and such to make it happen.  Basically, the end result of this is that you get a list of users with their logon information and you can then do with that what you will.  I turned my list into an observable collection and bound it into a XAML form. One important note, you need to add a reference to ActiveDs Type Library in the COM section of the world in references to get to LargeInteger. Here’s the class: namespace Veracity.Utilities { using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.DirectoryServices; using ActiveDs; using log4net; /// <summary> /// Finds users inside of the active directory system. /// </summary> public class UserFinder { /// <summary> /// Creates the default logger /// </summary> private static readonly ILog log = LogManager.GetLogger(typeof(UserFinder)); /// <summary> /// Finds last logon information /// </summary> /// <param name="domain">The domain to search.</param> /// <param name="userName">The username for the query.</param> /// <param name="password">The password for the query.</param> /// <returns>A list of users with their last logon information.</returns> public IList<UserLoginInformation> GetLastLogonInformation(string domain, string userName, string password) { IList<UserLoginInformation> result = new List<UserLoginInformation>(); DirectoryEntry entry = new DirectoryEntry(domain, userName, password, AuthenticationTypes.Secure); DirectorySearcher directorySearcher = new DirectorySearcher(entry); directorySearcher.PropertyNamesOnly = true; directorySearcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add("name"); directorySearcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add("lastLogonTimeStamp"); SearchResultCollection searchResults; try { searchResults = directorySearcher.FindAll(); } catch (System.Exception ex) { log.Error("Failed to do a find all.", ex); throw; } try { foreach (SearchResult searchResult in searchResults) { DirectoryEntry resultEntry = searchResult.GetDirectoryEntry(); if (resultEntry.SchemaClassName == "user") { UserLoginInformation logon = new UserLoginInformation(); logon.Name = resultEntry.Name; PropertyValueCollection timeStampObject = resultEntry.Properties["lastLogonTimeStamp"]; if (timeStampObject.Count > 0) { IADsLargeInteger logonTimeStamp = (IADsLargeInteger)timeStampObject[0]; long lastLogon = (long)((uint)logonTimeStamp.LowPart + (((long)logonTimeStamp.HighPart) << 32)); logon.LastLogonTime = DateTime.FromFileTime(lastLogon); } result.Add(logon); } } } catch (System.Exception ex) { log.Error("Failed to iterate search results.", ex); throw; } return result; } } } Some important things to note: Username and Password can be set to null and if your computer us part of the domain, this may still work. Domain should be set to something like LDAP://servername/CN=Users,CN=Domain,CN=com You’re actually getting a com object back, so that’s why the LongInteger conversions are happening.  The class for UserLoginInformation looks like this:   namespace Veracity.Utilities { using System; /// <summary> /// Represents user login information. /// </summary> public class UserLoginInformation { /// <summary> /// Gets or sets Name /// </summary> public string Name { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets LastLogonTime /// </summary> public DateTime LastLogonTime { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets the age of the account. /// </summary> public TimeSpan AccountAge { get { TimeSpan result = TimeSpan.Zero; if (this.LastLogonTime != DateTime.MinValue) { result = DateTime.Now.Subtract(this.LastLogonTime); } return result; } } } } I hope this is useful and instructive. Technorati Tags: Active Directory

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• Use Extension method to write cleaner code

  - by Fredrik N

  This blog post will show you step by step to refactoring some code to be more readable (at least what I think). Patrik Löwnedahl gave me some of the ideas when we where talking about making code much cleaner. The following is an simple application that will have a list of movies (Normal and Transfer). The task of the application is to calculate the total sum of each movie and also display the price of each movie. class Program { enum MovieType { Normal, Transfer } static void Main(string[] args) { var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfNormalMovie = 0; int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = 0; foreach (var movie in movies) { if (movie == MovieType.Normal) { totalPriceOfNormalMovie += 2; Console.WriteLine("$2"); } else if (movie == MovieType.Transfer) { totalPriceOfTransferMovie += 3; Console.WriteLine("$3"); } } } private static IEnumerable<MovieType> GetMovies() { return new List<MovieType>() { MovieType.Normal, MovieType.Transfer, MovieType.Normal }; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } In the code above I’m using an enum, a good way to add types (isn’t it ;)). I also use one foreach loop to calculate the price, the loop has a condition statement to check what kind of movie is added to the list of movies. I want to reuse the foreach only to increase performance and let it do two things (isn’t that smart of me?! ;)). First of all I can admit, I’m not a big fan of enum. Enum often results in ugly condition statements and can be hard to maintain (if a new type is added we need to check all the code in our app to see if we use the enum somewhere else). I don’t often care about pre-optimizations when it comes to write code (of course I have performance in mind). I rather prefer to use two foreach to let them do one things instead of two. So based on what I don’t like and Martin Fowler’s Refactoring catalog, I’m going to refactoring this code to what I will call a more elegant and cleaner code. First of all I’m going to use Split Loop to make sure the foreach will do one thing not two, it will results in two foreach (Don’t care about performance here, if the results will results in bad performance, you can refactoring later, but computers are so fast to day, so iterating through a list is not often so time consuming.) Note: The foreach actually do four things, will come to is later. var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfNormalMovie = 0; int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = 0; foreach (var movie in movies) { if (movie == MovieType.Normal) { totalPriceOfNormalMovie += 2; Console.WriteLine("$2"); } } foreach (var movie in movies) { if (movie == MovieType.Transfer) { totalPriceOfTransferMovie += 3; Console.WriteLine("$3"); } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } To remove the condition statement we can use the Where extension method added to the IEnumerable<T> and is located in the System.Linq namespace: foreach (var movie in movies.Where( m => m == MovieType.Normal)) { totalPriceOfNormalMovie += 2; Console.WriteLine("$2"); } foreach (var movie in movies.Where( m => m == MovieType.Transfer)) { totalPriceOfTransferMovie += 3; Console.WriteLine("$3"); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The above code will still do two things, calculate the total price, and display the price of the movie. I will not take care of it at the moment, instead I will focus on the enum and try to remove them. One way to remove enum is by using the Replace Conditional with Polymorphism. So I will create two classes, one base class called Movie, and one called MovieTransfer. The Movie class will have a property called Price, the Movie will now hold the price:   public class Movie { public virtual int Price { get { return 2; } } } public class MovieTransfer : Movie { public override int Price { get { return 3; } } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The following code has no enum and will use the new Movie classes instead: class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfNormalMovie = 0; int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = 0; foreach (var movie in movies.Where( m => m is Movie)) { totalPriceOfNormalMovie += movie.Price; Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); } foreach (var movie in movies.Where( m => m is MovieTransfer)) { totalPriceOfTransferMovie += movie.Price; Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); } } private static IEnumerable<Movie> GetMovies() { return new List<Movie>() { new Movie(), new MovieTransfer(), new Movie() }; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   If you take a look at the foreach now, you can see it still actually do two things, calculate the price and display the price. We can do some more refactoring here by using the Sum extension method to calculate the total price of the movies:   static void Main(string[] args) { var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfNormalMovie = movies.Where(m => m is Movie) .Sum(m => m.Price); int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = movies.Where(m => m is MovieTransfer) .Sum(m => m.Price); foreach (var movie in movies.Where( m => m is Movie)) Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); foreach (var movie in movies.Where( m => m is MovieTransfer)) Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Now when the Movie object will hold the price, there is no need to use two separate foreach to display the price of the movies in the list, so we can use only one instead: foreach (var movie in movies) Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } If we want to increase the Maintainability index we can use the Extract Method to move the Sum of the prices into two separate methods. The name of the method will explain what we are doing: static void Main(string[] args) { var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfMovie = TotalPriceOfMovie(movies); int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = TotalPriceOfMovieTransfer(movies); foreach (var movie in movies) Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); } private static int TotalPriceOfMovieTransfer(IEnumerable<Movie> movies) { return movies.Where(m => m is MovieTransfer) .Sum(m => m.Price); } private static int TotalPriceOfMovie(IEnumerable<Movie> movies) { return movies.Where(m => m is Movie) .Sum(m => m.Price); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Now to the last thing, I love the ForEach method of the List<T>, but the IEnumerable<T> doesn’t have it, so I created my own ForEach extension, here is the code of the ForEach extension method: public static class LoopExtensions { public static void ForEach<T>(this IEnumerable<T> values, Action<T> action) { Contract.Requires(values != null); Contract.Requires(action != null); foreach (var v in values) action(v); } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } I will now replace the foreach by using this ForEach method: static void Main(string[] args) { var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfMovie = TotalPriceOfMovie(movies); int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = TotalPriceOfMovieTransfer(movies); movies.ForEach(m => Console.WriteLine(m.Price)); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The ForEach on the movies will now display the price of the movie, but maybe we want to display the name of the movie etc, so we can use Extract Method by moving the lamdba expression into a method instead, and let the method explains what we are displaying: movies.ForEach(DisplayMovieInfo); private static void DisplayMovieInfo(Movie movie) { Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Now the refactoring is done! Here is the complete code:   class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfMovie = TotalPriceOfMovie(movies); int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = TotalPriceOfMovieTransfer(movies); movies.ForEach(DisplayMovieInfo); } private static void DisplayMovieInfo(Movie movie) { Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); } private static int TotalPriceOfMovieTransfer(IEnumerable<Movie> movies) { return movies.Where(m => m is MovieTransfer) .Sum(m => m.Price); } private static int TotalPriceOfMovie(IEnumerable<Movie> movies) { return movies.Where(m => m is Movie) .Sum(m => m.Price); } private static IEnumerable<Movie> GetMovies() { return new List<Movie>() { new Movie(), new MovieTransfer(), new Movie() }; } } public class Movie { public virtual int Price { get { return 2; } } } public class MovieTransfer : Movie { public override int Price { get { return 3; } } } pulbic static class LoopExtensions { public static void ForEach<T>(this IEnumerable<T> values, Action<T> action) { Contract.Requires(values != null); Contract.Requires(action != null); foreach (var v in values) action(v); } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } I think the new code is much cleaner than the first one, and I love the ForEach extension on the IEnumerable<T>, I can use it for different kind of things, for example: movies.Where(m => m is Movie) .ForEach(DoSomething); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } By using the Where and ForEach extension method, some if statements can be removed and will make the code much cleaner. But the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What would you have done different, what do you think will make the first example in the blog post look much cleaner than my results, comments are welcome! If you want to know when I will publish a new blog post, you can follow me on twitter: http://www.twitter.com/fredrikn

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• Automapper: Handling NULL members

  - by PSteele

  A question about null members came up on the Automapper mailing list.  While the problem wasn’t with Automapper, investigating the issue led to an interesting feature in Automapper. Normally, Automapper ignores null members.  After all, what is there really to do?  Imagine these source classes: public class Source { public int Data { get; set; } public Address Address { get; set; } }   public class Destination { public string Data { get; set; } public Address Address { get; set; } }   public class Address { public string AddressType { get; set; } public string Location { get; set; } } And imagine a simple mapping example with these classes: Mapper.CreateMap<Source, Destination>();   var source = new Source { Data = 22, Address = new Address { AddressType = "Home", Location = "Michigan", }, };   var dest = Mapper.Map<Source, Destination>(source); The variable ‘dest’ would have a complete mapping of the Data member and the Address member. But what if the source had no address? Mapper.CreateMap<Source, Destination>();   var source = new Source { Data = 22, };   var dest = Mapper.Map<Source, Destination>(source); In that case, Automapper would just leave the Destination.Address member null as well.  But what if we always wanted an Address defined – even if it’s just got some default data?  Use the “NullSubstitute” option: Mapper.CreateMap<Source, Destination>() .ForMember(d => d.Address, o => o.NullSubstitute(new Address { AddressType = "Unknown", Location = "Unknown", }));   var source = new Source { Data = 22, };   var dest = Mapper.Map<Source, Destination>(source); Now, the ‘dest’ variable will have an Address defined with a type and location of “Unknown”.  Very handy! Technorati Tags: .NET,Automapper,NULL

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• OpenGL's matrix stack vs Hand multiplying

  - by deft_code

  Which is more efficient using OpenGL's transformation stack or applying the transformations by hand. I've often heard that you should minimize the number of state transitions in your graphics pipeline. Pushing and popping translation matrices seem like a big change. However, I wonder if the graphics card might be able to more than make up for pipeline hiccup by using its parallel execution hardware to bulk multiply the vertices. My specific case. I have font rendered to a sprite sheet. The coordinates of each character or a string are calculated and added to a vertex buffer. Now I need to move that string. Would it be better to iterate through the vertex buffer and adjust each of the vertices by hand or temporarily push a new translation matrix?

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• Coding error at open URL

  - by Lobo

  Hi, I have the following method to open a URL API String c=""; URL direccionURL; try { direccionURL = new URL("http://api.stackoverflow.com/1.0/users/523725"); BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader( direccionURL.openStream())); String inputLine; while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null) c+=inputLine; in.close(); } catch (MalformedURLException e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e.printStackTrace(); } catch (IOException e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e.printStackTrace(); } return c; In the end, the "c" variable contains a set of characters that are not the same I get if I open the same URL with a browser. Why?, What am I doing wrong? Thank's for help. Regards!

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• ASP.NET MVC: Converting business objects to select list items

  - by DigiMortal

  Some of our business classes are used to fill dropdown boxes or select lists. And often you have some base class for all your business classes. In this posting I will show you how to use base business class to write extension method that converts collection of business objects to ASP.NET MVC select list items without writing a lot of code. BusinessBase, BaseEntity and other base classes I prefer to have some base class for all my business classes so I can easily use them regardless of their type in contexts I need. NB! Some guys say that it is good idea to have base class for all your business classes and they also suggest you to have mappings done same way in database. Other guys say that it is good to have base class but you don’t have to have one master table in database that contains identities of all your business objects. It is up to you how and what you prefer to do but whatever you do – think and analyze first, please. :) To keep things maximally simple I will use very primitive base class in this example. This class has only Id property and that’s it. public class BaseEntity {     public virtual long Id { get; set; } } Now we have Id in base class and we have one more question to solve – how to better visualize our business objects? To users ID is not enough, they want something more informative. We can define some abstract property that all classes must implement. But there is also another option we can use – overriding ToString() method in our business classes. public class Product : BaseEntity {     public virtual string SKU { get; set; }     public virtual string Name { get; set; }       public override string ToString()     {         if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(Name))             return base.ToString();           return Name;     } } Although you can add more functionality and properties to your base class we are at point where we have what we needed: identity and human readable presentation of business objects. Writing list items converter Now we can write method that creates list items for us. public static class BaseEntityExtensions {            public static IEnumerable<SelectListItem> ToSelectListItems<T>         (this IList<T> baseEntities) where T : BaseEntity     {         return ToSelectListItems((IEnumerator<BaseEntity>)                    baseEntities.GetEnumerator());     }       public static IEnumerable<SelectListItem> ToSelectListItems         (this IEnumerator<BaseEntity> baseEntities)     {         var items = new HashSet<SelectListItem>();           while (baseEntities.MoveNext())         {             var item = new SelectListItem();             var entity = baseEntities.Current;               item.Value = entity.Id.ToString();             item.Text = entity.ToString();               items.Add(item);         }           return items;     } } You can see here to overloads of same method. One works with List<T> and the other with IEnumerator<BaseEntity>. Although mostly my repositories return IList<T> when querying data there are always situations where I can use more abstract types and interfaces. Using extension methods in code In your code you can use ToSelectListItems() extension methods like shown on following code fragment. ... var model = new MyFormModel(); model.Statuses = _myRepository.ListStatuses().ToSelectListItems(); ... You can call this method on all your business classes that extend your base entity. Wanna have some fun with this code? Write overload for extension method that accepts selected item ID.

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• Getting WCF Bindings and Behaviors from any config source

  - by cibrax

  The need of loading WCF bindings or behaviors from different sources such as files in a disk or databases is a common requirement when dealing with configuration either on the client side or the service side. The traditional way to accomplish this in WCF is loading everything from the standard configuration section (serviceModel section) or creating all the bindings and behaviors by hand in code. However, there is a solution in the middle that becomes handy when more flexibility is needed. This solution involves getting the configuration from any place, and use that configuration to automatically configure any existing binding or behavior instance created with code.  In order to configure a binding instance (System.ServiceModel.Channels.Binding) that you later inject in any endpoint on the client channel or the service host, you first need to get a binding configuration section from any configuration file (you can generate a temp file on the fly if you are using any other source for storing the configuration).  private BindingsSection GetBindingsSection(string path) { System.Configuration.Configuration config = System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.OpenMappedExeConfiguration( new System.Configuration.ExeConfigurationFileMap() { ExeConfigFilename = path }, System.Configuration.ConfigurationUserLevel.None); var serviceModel = ServiceModelSectionGroup.GetSectionGroup(config); return serviceModel.Bindings; }   The BindingsSection contains a list of all the configured bindings in the serviceModel configuration section, so you can iterate through all the configured binding that get the one you need (You don’t need to have a complete serviceModel section, a section with the bindings only works).  public Binding ResolveBinding(string name) { BindingsSection section = GetBindingsSection(path); foreach (var bindingCollection in section.BindingCollections) { if (bindingCollection.ConfiguredBindings.Count > 0 && bindingCollection.ConfiguredBindings[0].Name == name) { var bindingElement = bindingCollection.ConfiguredBindings[0]; var binding = (Binding)Activator.CreateInstance(bindingCollection.BindingType); binding.Name = bindingElement.Name; bindingElement.ApplyConfiguration(binding); return binding; } } return null; }   The code above does just that, and also instantiates and configures the Binding object (System.ServiceModel.Channels.Binding) you are looking for. As you can see, the binding configuration element contains a method “ApplyConfiguration” that receives the binding instance that needs to be configured. A similar thing can be done for instance with the “Endpoint” behaviors. You first get the BehaviorsSection, and then, the behavior you want to use.  private BehaviorsSection GetBehaviorsSection(string path) { System.Configuration.Configuration config = System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.OpenMappedExeConfiguration( new System.Configuration.ExeConfigurationFileMap() { ExeConfigFilename = path }, System.Configuration.ConfigurationUserLevel.None); var serviceModel = ServiceModelSectionGroup.GetSectionGroup(config); return serviceModel.Behaviors; }public List<IEndpointBehavior> ResolveEndpointBehavior(string name) { BehaviorsSection section = GetBehaviorsSection(path); List<IEndpointBehavior> endpointBehaviors = new List<IEndpointBehavior>(); if (section.EndpointBehaviors.Count > 0 && section.EndpointBehaviors[0].Name == name) { var behaviorCollectionElement = section.EndpointBehaviors[0]; foreach (BehaviorExtensionElement behaviorExtension in behaviorCollectionElement) { object extension = behaviorExtension.GetType().InvokeMember("CreateBehavior", BindingFlags.InvokeMethod | BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance, null, behaviorExtension, null); endpointBehaviors.Add((IEndpointBehavior)extension); } return endpointBehaviors; } return null; }   In this case, the code for creating the behavior instance is more tricky. First of all, a behavior in the configuration section actually represents a set of “IEndpoint” behaviors, and the behavior element you get from the configuration does not have any public method to configure an existing behavior instance. This last one only contains a protected method “CreateBehavior” that you can use for that purpose. Once you get this code implemented, a client channel can be easily configured as follows  var binding = resolver.ResolveBinding("MyBinding"); var behaviors = resolver.ResolveEndpointBehavior("MyBehavior"); SampleServiceClient client = new SampleServiceClient(binding, new EndpointAddress(new Uri("http://localhost:13749/SampleService.svc"), new DnsEndpointIdentity("localhost"))); foreach (var behavior in behaviors) { if(client.Endpoint.Behaviors.Contains(behavior.GetType())) { client.Endpoint.Behaviors.Remove(behavior.GetType()); } client.Endpoint.Behaviors.Add(behavior); }   The code above assumes that a configuration file (in any place) with a binding “MyBinding” and a behavior “MyBehavior” exists. That file can look like this,  <system.serviceModel> <bindings> <basicHttpBinding> <binding name="MyBinding"> <security mode="Transport"></security> </binding> </basicHttpBinding> </bindings> <behaviors> <endpointBehaviors> <behavior name="MyBehavior"> <clientCredentials> <windows/> </clientCredentials> </behavior> </endpointBehaviors> </behaviors> </system.serviceModel>   The same thing can be done of course in the service host if you want to manually configure the bindings and behaviors.  

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• Connecting to Magento Web Services with Java

  - by kerry

  I was in the unenviable position of needing to connect to Magento, a PHP ecommerce platform, web services using Java.  It was kind of difficult to get the classes generated from the WSDL so I figured I would throw the results up on my github account for any other poor sap in a similar position. First, pull down the project using git: git clone git://github.com/webdevwilson/magento-java.git and build it with maven: mvn install Here is a quick example of how to pull an order using the generated classes: MagentoServiceLocator serviceLocator = new MagentoServiceLocator(); String url = "http://domain.com/index.php/api/v2_soap"; Mage_Api_Model_Server_V2_HandlerPortType port = serviceLocator.getMage_Api_Model_Server_V2_HandlerPort(url); String sessionId = port.login("username", "key"); SalesOrderEntity salesOrder = port.salesOrderInfo(sessionId, orderId); I also have some wrapper code in there that makes it a little easier to call the API. Checkout the project at https://github.com/webdevwilson/magento-java There is another option. it’s called Magja and it is located at google code.

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