geeks on hugs - Page 75

How to work around a possible XNA Game Studio or Windows Phone SDK install failure on Windows 8

- by Laurent Bugnion

I am not sure if you guys know Aaron Stebner. Aaron works at Microsoft, and has pulled thorns from my side many many times already. His blog is at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner and it is a gold mine of tips and tricks to debug and solve many cryptic issues happening during installation and removal of programs. For example, Aaron taught me how to remove programs that do not appear in the Programs and Features list, amongst many other things. The last nugget I used from Aaron’s blog saved my butt just before a presentation where I had to run both Visual Studio 10 with the Windows Phone SDK, and Visual Studio 11 for WinRT development. Of course this had to be on Windows 8. Unfortunately when you install the Windows Phone SDK on Windows 8, you may (or may not, I saw both scenarios) encounter an issue with XNA, and the installation fails. Unfortunately, even if you don’t use XNA in your apps, this will prevent even normal Windows Phone app development. Fortunately, Aaron has a fix for that. I hope that this helps spread the word, and increase Aaron’s blog’s visibility! Happy coding, Laurent Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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BizTalk 2009 - Pipeline Component Wizard Error

- by Stuart Brierley

When attempting to run the BizTalk Server Pipeline Component Wizard for the first time I encountered an error that prevented the creation of the pipeline component project: System.ArgumentException : Value does not fall withing the expected range I found the solution for this error in a couple of places, first a reference to the issue on the Codeplex Project and then a fuller description on a blog referring to the BizTalk 2006 implementation. To resolve this issue you need to make a change to the downloaded wizard solution code, by changing the file BizTalkPipelineComponentWizard.cs around line 304 From // get a handle to the project. using mySolution will not work. pipelineComponentProject = this._Application.Solution.Projects.Item(Path.Combine(Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(projectFileName), projectFileName)); To // get a handle to the project. using mySolution will not work. if (this._Application.Solution.Projects.Count == 1) pipelineComponentProject = this._Application.Solution.Projects.Item(1); else { // In Doubt: Which project is the target? pipelineComponentProject = this._Application.Solution.Projects.Item(projectFileName); } Following this you need to uninstall the the wizard, rebuild the solution and re-install the wizard again.

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Extreme Optimization Numerical Libraries for .NET – Part 1 of n

- by JoshReuben

While many of my colleagues are fascinated in constructing the ultimate ViewModel or ServiceBus, I feel that this kind of plumbing code is re-invented far too many times – at some point in the near future, it will be out of the box standard infra. How many times have you been to a customer site and built a different variation of the same kind of code frameworks? How many times can you abstract Prism or reliable and discoverable WCF communication? As the bar is raised for whats bundled with the framework and more tasks become declarative, automated and configurable, Information Systems will expose a higher level of abstraction, forcing software engineers to focus on more advanced computer science and algorithmic tasks. I've spent the better half of the past decade building skills in .NET and expanding my mathematical horizons by working through the Schaums guides. In this series I am going to examine how these skillsets come together in the implementation provided by ExtremeOptimization. Download the trial version here: http://www.extremeoptimization.com/downloads.aspx Overview The library implements a set of algorithms for: linear algebra, complex numbers, numerical integration and differentiation, solving equations, optimization, random numbers, regression, ANOVA, statistical distributions, hypothesis tests. EONumLib combines three libraries in one - organized in a consistent namespace hierarchy. Mathematics Library - Extreme.Mathematics namespace Vector and Matrix Library - Extreme.Mathematics.LinearAlgebra namespace Statistics Library - Extreme.Statistics namespace System Requirements -.NET framework 4.0 Mathematics Library The classes are organized into the following namespace hierarchy: Extreme.Mathematics – common data types, exception types, and delegates. Extreme.Mathematics.Calculus - numerical integration and differentiation of functions. Extreme.Mathematics.Curves - points, lines and curves, including polynomials and Chebyshev approximations. curve fitting and interpolation. Extreme.Mathematics.Generic - generic arithmetic & linear algebra. Extreme.Mathematics.EquationSolvers - root finding algorithms. Extreme.Mathematics.LinearAlgebra - vectors , matrices , matrix decompositions, solvers for simultaneous linear equations and least squares. Extreme.Mathematics.Optimization – multi-d function optimization + linear programming. Extreme.Mathematics.SignalProcessing - one and two-dimensional discrete Fourier transforms. Extreme.Mathematics.SpecialFunctions

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MVC Portable Areas – Deploying Static Files

- by Steve Michelotti

This is the second post in a series related to build and deployment considerations as I’ve been exploring MVC Portable Areas: #1 – Using Web Application Project to build portable areas #2 – Conventions for deploying portable area static files #3 – Portable area static files as embedded resources As I’ve been digging more into portable areas, one of the things I’ve liked best is the deployment story which enables my *.aspx, *.ascx pages to be compiled into the assembly as embedded resources rather than having to maintain all those files separately. In traditional web forms, that was always the thing to prevented developers from utilizing *.ascx user controls across projects (see this post for using portable areas in web forms). However, though the aspx pages are embedded, the supporting static files (e.g., images, css, javascript) are *not*. Most of the demos available online today tend to brush over this issue and focus solely on the aspx side of things. But to create truly robust portable areas, it’s important to have a good story for these supporting files as well. I’ve been working with two different approaches so far (of course I’d really like to hear if other people are using alternatives). Scenario For the approaches below, the scenario really isn’t that important. It could be something as trivial as this partial view: 1: <%@ Control Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl" %> 2: <img src="<%: Url.Content("~/images/arrow.gif") %>" /> Hello World! The point is that there needs to be careful consideration for *any* scenario that links to an external file such as an image, *.css, *.js, etc. In the example shown above, it uses the Url.Content() method to convert to a relative path. But this method won’t necessary work depending on how you deploy your portable area. One approach to address this issue is to build your portable area project with MSDeploy/WebDeploy so that it is packaged properly before incorporating into the host application. All of the *.cs files are removed and the project is ready for xcopy deployment – however, I do *not* need the “Views” folder since all of the mark up has been compiled into the assembly as embedded resources. Now in the host application we create a folder called “Modules” and deploy any portable areas as sub-folders under that: At this point we can add a simple assembly reference to the Widget1.dll sitting in the Modules\Widget1\bin folder. I can now render the portable image in my view like any other portable area. However, the problem with that is that the view results in this: It couldn’t find arrow.gif because it looked for /images/arrow.gif and it was *actually* located at /images/Modules/Widget1/images/arrow.gif. One solution is to make the physical location of the portable configurable from the perspective of the host like this: 1: <appSettings> 2: <add key="Widget1" value="Modules\Widget1"/> 3: </appSettings> Using the <appSettings> section is a little cheesy but it could be better formalized into its own section. In fact, if were you willing to rely on conventions (e.g., “Modules\{areaName}”) then then config could be eliminated completely. With this config in place, we could create our own Html helper method called Url.AreaContent() that “wraps” the OOTB Url.Content() method while simply pre-pending the area location path: 1: public static string AreaContent(this UrlHelper urlHelper, string contentPath) 2: { 3: var areaName = (string)urlHelper.RequestContext.RouteData.DataTokens["area"]; 4: var areaPath = (string)ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[areaName]; 5: 6: return urlHelper.Content("~/" + areaPath + "/" + contentPath); With these two items in place, we just change our Url.Content() call to Url.AreaContent() like this: 1: <img src="<%: Url.AreaContent("/images/arrow.gif") %>" /> Hello World! and the arrow.gif now renders correctly: Since we’re just using our own Url.AreaContent() rather than the built-in Url.Content(), this solution works for images, *.css, *.js, or any externally referenced files. Additionally, any images referenced inside a css file will work provided it’s a relative reference and not an absolute reference. An alternative to this approach is to build the static file into the assembly as embedded resources themselves. I’ll explore this in another post (linked at the top).

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InvokeRequired not reliable?

- by marocanu2001

InvalidOperationException: Cross-thread operation not valid: Control 'progressBar' accessed from a thread other than the thread it was created ... Now this is not a nice way to start a day! not even if it's a Monday! So you have seen this and already thought, come on, this is an old one, just ask whether InvokeRequired before calling the method in the control, something like this: if (progressBar.InvokeRequired) { progressBar.Invoke ( new MethodInvoker( delegate { progressBar.Value = 50; }) ) }else progressBar.Value = 50; Unfortunately this was not working the way I would have expected, I got this error, debugged and though in debugging the InvokeRequired had become true , the error was thrown on the branch that did not required Invoke. So there was a scenario where InvokeRequired returned false and still accessing the control was not on the right thread ... Problem was that I kept showing and hiding the little form showing the progressbar. The progressbar was updating on an event , ProgressChanged and I could not guarantee the little form was loaded by the time the event was thrown. So , spotted the problem, if none of the parents of the control you try to modify is created at the time of the method invoking, the InvokeRequired returns true! That causes your code to execute on the woring thread. Of course, updating UI before the win dow was created is not a legitimate action either, still I would have expected a different error. MSDN: "If the control's handle does not yet exist, InvokeRequired searches up the control's parent chain until it finds a control or form that does have a window handle. If no appropriate handle can be found, the InvokeRequired method returns false. This means that InvokeRequired can return false if Invoke is not required (the call occurs on the same thread), or if the control was created on a different thread but the control's handle has not yet been created." Have a look at InvokeRequired's implementation: public bool InvokeRequired { get { HandleRef hWnd; int lpdwProcessId; if (this.IsHandleCreated) { hWnd = new HandleRef(this, this.Handle); } else { Control wrapper = this.FindMarshallingControl(); if (!wrapper.IsHandleCreated) { return false; // <========== } hWnd = new HandleRef(wrapper, wrapper.Handle); } int windowThreadProcessId = SafeNativeMethods.GetWindowThreadProcessId(hWnd, out lpdwProcessId); int currentThreadId = SafeNativeMethods.GetCurrentThreadId(); return (windowThreadProcessId != currentThreadId); } } Here 's a good article about this and a workaround http://www.ikriv.com/en/prog/info/dotnet/MysteriousHang.html

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Silverlight Cream for April 30, 2010 -- #852

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Michael Washington, Tim Greenfield, Jaime Rodriguez, and The WP7 Team. Shoutouts: Mike Taulty has a pretty complete set of links up for information about VS2010, Silverlight, Blend, Phone 7 Upgrade Christian Schormann announced Blend for Windows Phone: Update Available, and has other links up as well. From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight Simplified MVVM Modal Popup Michael Washington is demonstrating a modal popup in MVVM and also shows the implementation of a value converter XPath support in Silverlight 4 + XPathPad Tim Greenfield blogged about XPath support in Silverlight 4 and his XPathPad tool... check out what all you can do with it... then go grab it, or the source too! Windows phone capabilities security model Jaime Rodriguez is discussing the WP7 capabilities exposed with the latest refresh such as location services, microphone, media library, gamer services, phone dialoer, push notification... how to code for them and other tips. Windows Phone 7 Series Developer Training Kit The WP7 Team is discussing the WP7 capabilities exposed with the latest refresh such as location services, microphone, media library, gamer services, phone dialoer, push notification... how to code for them and other tips. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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Running Teamsite User Admin tool IWUSERADM.exe from ASP.NET

- by Narendra Tiwari

It has really been a head scratching task for me. I 've tried many options but nothing worked. Finally I found a workaround on google to achive this by TaskScheduler. PROBLEM When we run Teamsite user administration command line tool IWUSERADM.exe though ASP.Net it gives following error: Application popup: cmd.exe - Application Error : The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000142). Click on OK to terminate the application. CAUSE No specific cause, it seems to be a bug, supposed to be resolved with this Microsoft patch http://support.microsoft.com/kb/960266. and there is nothing related to permission issue, y web application is impersonated with an administrator account. off course running a bat file from dmin account is a potential secury threat but for this scenario lets conifned our discussion to run the command line tool. RESOLUTION I have not tried this patch as I have not permitted to run this patch on server. Below are the steps to achive the requirement. 1/ Create a batch file which runs the IWUSERADM.exe. echo - Add Teamsite User CD E:\Appli\GN00\iw-home\bin iwuseradm add-user %1 2/ Temporarily create a schedule task and run the .bat file by scheduled task by ASP.Net code using TaskScheduler http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/tsnewlib.aspx. 3/ Here is the function: private int AddTeamsiteUser(string strBatchFilePath, string strUser) { //Get a ScheduledTasks object for the local computer. ScheduledTasks st = new ScheduledTasks(); // Create a task Task t; try{ t = st.CreateTask("~AddTeamsiteUser"); } catch { throw new Exception("Schedule Task ~AddTeamsiteUser already exist."); } t.SetAccountInformation(yourLogin, yourPassword); //Set the account under which the task should run. t.Save(); t.Run(); Thread.Sleep(2000); //for sync issue //Remove the scheduled task st.DeleteTask("~AddTeamsiteUser"); return t.ExitCode; Below are few resources related to the above scenario:- - Task Scheduler Class Library for .NET http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/tsnewlib.aspx - Run a .BAT file from ASP.NET http://codebetter.com/blogs/brendan.tompkins/archive/2004/05/13/13484.aspx - TaskScheduler Class http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.threading.tasks.taskscheduler.aspx - Application Hangs whle running iwuseradm.exe through ASP.Net http://bytes.com/topic/asp-net/answers/733098-system-diagnostics-process-hangs t.ApplicationName = strBatchFilePath; t.Parameters = strUser; t.Comment = "Adding user to Teamsite Application"

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Keep your Root Authorities up to date

- by John Breakwell

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Plumbersmate/archive/2013/06/20/keep-your-root-authorities-up-to-date.aspxBy default, Windows will automatically update it’s internal list of trusted root authorities as long as the Update Root Certificates function is installed. This should be enabled by default and takes manual intervention to remove it. With this component enabled, the following happens: If you are presented with a certificate issued by an untrusted root authority, your computer will contact the Windows Update Web site to see if Microsoft has added the CA to its list of trusted authorities. If it has been added to the Microsoft list of trusted authorities, its certificate will automatically be added to your trusted certificate store. If the component is not installed and a certificate from an untrusted CA is encountered then the following text will be seen: This is an inconvenience for the person browsing the site as they need to click to continue. Applications, though, will be unable to proceed and will throw an exception. Example: ERROR_WINHTTP_SECURE_FAILURE 12175 (0x00002F8F) One or more errors were found in the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate sent by the server. If you look at the certificate’s properties, you can see the “Issued by:” value: This must match a Trusted Root Certificate Authority in the current user’s certificate store. So turn on automatic updating of trusted root authority certificates. For Windows Vista and above, this option is controlled through Group Policy. See the “To Turn Off the Update Root Certificates Feature by Using Group Policy” section of the following Technet article: Certificate Support and Resulting Internet Communication in Windows Vista If Windows Update is a blocked site then download and deploy the latest pack of root certificates from Microsoft: Update for Root Certificates For Windows XP [May 2013] (KB931125) Failing that, find a machine that has the latest root certificates installed and export them from there: Open up the Certificates console. Right-click the required Trusted Root Certificate Authority certificate Choose Export from “All Tasks” to open up the Certificate Export Wizard Choose an export file format – DER should be fine Provide a file name and complete the export. Move the file to the machine that’s missing the certificate Right-click the file and choose “Install Certificate” to open up the Certificate Import Wizard Allow the wizard to automatically select the certificate store and complete the import On a side note, for troubleshooting certificate issues it can be helpful to clear the SSL state:

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More Fun with C# Iterators and Generators

- by James Michael Hare

In my last post, I talked quite a bit about iterators and how they can be really powerful tools for filtering a list of items down to a subset of items. This had both pros and cons over returning a full collection, which, in summary, were: Pros: If traversal is only partial, does not have to visit rest of collection. If evaluation method is costly, only incurs that cost on elements visited. Adds little to no garbage collection pressure. Cons: Very slight performance impact if you know caller will always consume all items in collection. And as we saw in the last post, that con for the cost was very, very small and only really became evident on very tight loops consuming very large lists completely. One of the key items to note, though, is the garbage! In the traditional (return a new collection) method, if you have a 1,000,000 element collection, and wish to transform or filter it in some way, you have to allocate space for that copy of the collection. That is, say you have a collection of 1,000,000 items and you want to double every item in the collection. Well, that means you have to allocate a collection to hold those 1,000,000 items to return, which is a lot especially if you are just going to use it once and toss it. Iterators, though, don't have this problem. Each time you visit the node, it would return the doubled value of the node (in this example) and not allocate a second collection of 1,000,000 doubled items. Do you see the distinction? In both cases, we're consuming 1,000,000 items. But in one case we pass back each doubled item which is just an int (for example's sake) on the stack and in the other case, we allocate a list containing 1,000,000 items which then must be garbage collected. So iterators in C# are pretty cool, eh? Well, here's one more thing a C# iterator can do that a traditional "return a new collection" transformation can't! It can return **unbounded** collections! I know, I know, that smells a lot like an infinite loop, eh? Yes and no. Basically, you're relying on the caller to put the bounds on the list, and as long as the caller doesn't you keep going. Consider this example: public static class Fibonacci { // returns the infinite fibonacci sequence public static IEnumerable<int> Sequence() { int iteration = 0; int first = 1; int second = 1; int current = 0; while (true) { if (iteration++ < 2) { current = 1; } else { current = first + second; second = first; first = current; } yield return current; } } } Whoa, you say! Yes, that's an infinite loop! What the heck is going on there? Yes, that was intentional. Would it be better to have a fibonacci sequence that returns only a specific number of items? Perhaps, but that wouldn't give you the power to defer the execution to the caller. The beauty of this function is it is as infinite as the sequence itself! The fibonacci sequence is unbounded, and so is this method. It will continue to return fibonacci numbers for as long as you ask for them. Now that's not something you can do with a traditional method that would return a collection of ints representing each number. In that case you would eventually run out of memory as you got to higher and higher numbers. This method, though, never runs out of memory. Now, that said, you do have to know when you use it that it is an infinite collection and bound it appropriately. Fortunately, Linq provides a lot of these extension methods for you! Let's say you only want the first 10 fibonacci numbers: foreach(var fib in Fibonacci.Sequence().Take(10)) { Console.WriteLine(fib); } Or let's say you only want the fibonacci numbers that are less than 100: foreach(var fib in Fibonacci.Sequence().TakeWhile(f => f < 100)) { Console.WriteLine(fib); } So, you see, one of the nice things about iterators is their power to work with virtually any size (even infinite) collections without adding the garbage collection overhead of making new collections. You can also do fun things like this to make a more "fluent" interface for for loops: // A set of integer generator extension methods public static class IntExtensions { // Begins counting to inifity, use To() to range this. public static IEnumerable<int> Every(this int start) { // deliberately avoiding condition because keeps going // to infinity for as long as values are pulled. for (var i = start; ; ++i) { yield return i; } } // Begins counting to infinity by the given step value, use To() to public static IEnumerable<int> Every(this int start, int byEvery) { // deliberately avoiding condition because keeps going // to infinity for as long as values are pulled. for (var i = start; ; i += byEvery) { yield return i; } } // Begins counting to inifity, use To() to range this. public static IEnumerable<int> To(this int start, int end) { for (var i = start; i <= end; ++i) { yield return i; } } // Ranges the count by specifying the upper range of the count. public static IEnumerable<int> To(this IEnumerable<int> collection, int end) { return collection.TakeWhile(item => item <= end); } } Note that there are two versions of each method. One that starts with an int and one that starts with an IEnumerable<int>. This is to allow more power in chaining from either an existing collection or from an int. This lets you do things like: // count from 1 to 30 foreach(var i in 1.To(30)) { Console.WriteLine(i); } // count from 1 to 10 by 2s foreach(var i in 0.Every(2).To(10)) { Console.WriteLine(i); } // or, if you want an infinite sequence counting by 5s until something inside breaks you out... foreach(var i in 0.Every(5)) { if (someCondition) { break; } ... } Yes, those are kinda play functions and not particularly useful, but they show some of the power of generators and extension methods to form a fluid interface. So what do you think? What are some of your favorite generators and iterators?

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Where's My Windows Azure Subscriptions

- by Shaun

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/shaunxu/archive/2013/11/03/wheres-my-windows-azure-subscriptions.aspxYesterday when I opened Windows Azure manage portal I found some resources were missed. I checked the website for those missed cloud service and they are still live. Then I checked my billing history but didn't found any problem. When I back to the portal I found that all of those resource are under my MSDN subscription. So I remembered that if this is related with the recently Windows Azure platform update. This feature named "Enterprise Management", which provides the ability to manage your organization in a directory which is hosted entirely in the cloud, or alternatively kept in sync with an on-premises Windows Server Active Directory solution. By default, all existing windows azure account would have a default Windows Azure Active Directory (a.k.a. WAAD) associated. In the address bar I can find the default login WAAD of my account, which is "microsoft.onmicrosoft.com". To change the WAAD we can click "subscriptions" on top of the manage portal, select the active directory from the list of "filter by directory" and select the subscription we want to see, then press "apply". As you can see, the subscription under my MSDN was located in a WAAD named "beijingtelecom.onmicrosoft.com". This is because when Microsoft applied this feature, they will check if you have an existing WAAD in your subscription. If not, it will create a new one, otherwise it will use your WAAD and move your subscription into this directory. Since I created a WAAD for test several months ago, this subscription was moved to this directory. To change the subscription's directory is simple. First we need to create a new WAAD with the name we preferred. As below I created a new directory named "shaunxu". Then select "settings" from the left navigation bar, select the subscription we wanted to change and click "edit directory". You don't have the permission to edit/change directory unless your Microsoft Account is the service administrator of this subscription. Then in the popup window, select the WAAD you want to change and press "next". All done. You need to log off and log in the portal then your subscription will be in the directory you wanted. And after these steps I can view my resources in this subscription. Summary In this post I described how to change subscriptions into a new directory. With this new feature we can manage our Windows Azure subscription more flexible. But there are something we need keep in mind. 1. Only the service administrator could be able to move subscription. 2. Currently there's no way for us to see our Windows Azure services in more than one directory at the same time. Like me, I can see my services under "shaunxu.onmicrosoft.com" and I must change the filter directory from the "subscriptions" menu to see other services under "microsoft.onmicrosoft.com". 3. Currently we cannot delete an existing WAAD. Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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Code Reuse is (Damn) Hard

- by James Michael Hare

Being a development team lead, the task of interviewing new candidates was part of my job. Like any typical interview, we started with some easy questions to get them warmed up and help calm their nerves before hitting the hard stuff. One of those easier questions was almost always: “Name some benefits of object-oriented development.” Nearly every time, the candidate would chime in with a plethora of canned answers which typically included: “it helps ease code reuse.” Of course, this is a gross oversimplification. Tools only ease reuse, its developers that ultimately can cause code to be reusable or not, regardless of the language or methodology. But it did get me thinking… we always used to say that as part of our mantra as to why Object-Oriented Programming was so great. With polymorphism, inheritance, encapsulation, etc. we in essence set up the concepts to help facilitate reuse as much as possible. And yes, as a developer now of many years, I unquestionably held that belief for ages before it really struck me how my views on reuse have jaded over the years. In fact, in many ways Agile rightly eschews reuse as taking a backseat to developing what's needed for the here and now. It used to be I was in complete opposition to that view, but more and more I've come to see the logic in it. Too many times I've seen developers (myself included) get lost in design paralysis trying to come up with the perfect abstraction that would stand all time. Nearly without fail, all of these pieces of code become obsolete in a matter of months or years. It’s not that I don’t like reuse – it’s just that reuse is hard. In fact, reuse is DAMN hard. Many times it is just a distraction that eats up architect and developer time, and worse yet can be counter-productive and force wrong decisions. Now don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of reusable code when it makes sense. These are in the few cases where you are designing something that is inherently reusable. The problem is, most business-class code is inherently unfit for reuse! Furthermore, the code that is reusable will often fail to be reused if you don’t have the proper framework in place for effective reuse that includes standardized versioning, building, releasing, and documenting the components. That should always be standard across the board when promoting reusable code. All of this is hard, and it should only be done when you have code that is truly reusable or you will be exerting a large amount of development effort for very little bang for your buck. But my goal here is not to get into how to reuse (that is a topic unto itself) but what should be reused. First, let’s look at an extension method. There’s many times where I want to kick off a thread to handle a task, then when I want to reign that thread in of course I want to do a Join on it. But what if I only want to wait a limited amount of time and then Abort? Well, I could of course write that logic out by hand each time, but it seemed like a great extension method: 1: public static class ThreadExtensions 2: { 3: public static bool JoinOrAbort(this Thread thread, TimeSpan timeToWait) 4: { 5: bool isJoined = false; 6: 7: if (thread != null) 8: { 9: isJoined = thread.Join(timeToWait); 10: 11: if (!isJoined) 12: { 13: thread.Abort(); 14: } 15: } 16: return isJoined; 17: } 18: } 19: When I look at this code, I can immediately see things that jump out at me as reasons why this code is very reusable. Some of them are standard OO principles, and some are kind-of home grown litmus tests: Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) – The only reason this extension method need change is if the Thread class itself changes (one responsibility). Stable Dependencies Principle (SDP) – This method only depends on classes that are more stable than it is (System.Threading.Thread), and in itself is very stable, hence other classes may safely depend on it. It is also not dependent on any business domain, and thus isn't subject to changes as the business itself changes. Open-Closed Principle (OCP) – This class is inherently closed to change. Small and Stable Problem Domain – This method only cares about System.Threading.Thread. All-or-None Usage – A user of a reusable class should want the functionality of that class, not parts of that functionality. That’s not to say they most use every method, but they shouldn’t be using a method just to get half of its result. Cost of Reuse vs. Cost to Recreate – since this class is highly stable and minimally complex, we can offer it up for reuse very cheaply by promoting it as “ready-to-go” and already unit tested (important!) and available through a standard release cycle (very important!). Okay, all seems good there, now lets look at an entity and DAO. I don’t know about you all, but there have been times I’ve been in organizations that get the grand idea that all DAOs and entities should be standardized and shared. While this may work for small or static organizations, it’s near ludicrous for anything large or volatile. 1: namespace Shared.Entities 2: { 3: public class Account 4: { 5: public int Id { get; set; } 6: 7: public string Name { get; set; } 8: 9: public Address HomeAddress { get; set; } 10: 11: public int Age { get; set;} 12: 13: public DateTime LastUsed { get; set; } 14: 15: // etc, etc, etc... 16: } 17: } 18: 19: ... 20: 21: namespace Shared.DataAccess 22: { 23: public class AccountDao 24: { 25: public Account FindAccount(int id) 26: { 27: // dao logic to query and return account 28: } 29: 30: ... 31: 32: } 33: } Now to be fair, I’m not saying there doesn’t exist an organization where some entites may be extremely static and unchanging. But at best such entities and DAOs will be problematic cases of reuse. Let’s examine those same tests: Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) – The reasons to change for these classes will be strongly dependent on what the definition of the account is which can change over time and may have multiple influences depending on the number of systems an account can cover. Stable Dependencies Principle (SDP) – This method depends on the data model beneath itself which also is largely dependent on the business definition of an account which can be very inherently unstable. Open-Closed Principle (OCP) – This class is not really closed for modification. Every time the account definition may change, you’d need to modify this class. Small and Stable Problem Domain – The definition of an account is inherently unstable and in fact may be very large. What if you are designing a system that aggregates account information from several sources? All-or-None Usage – What if your view of the account encompasses data from 3 different sources but you only care about one of those sources or one piece of data? Should you have to take the hit of looking up all the other data? On the other hand, should you have ten different methods returning portions of data in chunks people tend to ask for? Neither is really a great solution. Cost of Reuse vs. Cost to Recreate – DAOs are really trivial to rewrite, and unless your definition of an account is EXTREMELY stable, the cost to promote, support, and release a reusable account entity and DAO are usually far higher than the cost to recreate as needed. It’s no accident that my case for reuse was a utility class and my case for non-reuse was an entity/DAO. In general, the smaller and more stable an abstraction is, the higher its level of reuse. When I became the lead of the Shared Components Committee at my workplace, one of the original goals we looked at satisfying was to find (or create), version, release, and promote a shared library of common utility classes, frameworks, and data access objects. Now, of course, many of you will point to nHibernate and Entity for the latter, but we were looking at larger, macro collections of data that span multiple data sources of varying types (databases, web services, etc). As we got deeper and deeper in the details of how to manage and release these items, it quickly became apparent that while the case for reuse was typically a slam dunk for utilities and frameworks, the data access objects just didn’t “smell” right. We ended up having session after session of design meetings to try and find the right way to share these data access components. When someone asked me why it was taking so long to iron out the shared entities, my response was quite simple, “Reuse is hard...” And that’s when I realized, that while reuse is an awesome goal and we should strive to make code maintainable, often times you end up creating far more work for yourself than necessary by trying to force code to be reusable that inherently isn’t. Think about classes the times you’ve worked in a company where in the design session people fight over the best way to implement a class to make it maximally reusable, extensible, and any other buzzwordable. Then think about how quickly that design became obsolete. Many times I set out to do a project and think, “yes, this is the best design, I can extend it easily!” only to find out the business requirements change COMPLETELY in such a way that the design is rendered invalid. Code, in general, tends to rust and age over time. As such, writing reusable code can often be difficult and many times ends up being a futile exercise and worse yet, sometimes makes the code harder to maintain because it obfuscates the design in the name of extensibility or reusability. So what do I think are reusable components? Generic Utility classes – these tend to be small classes that assist in a task and have no business context whatsoever. Implementation Abstraction Frameworks – home-grown frameworks that try to isolate changes to third party products you may be depending on (like writing a messaging abstraction layer for publishing/subscribing that is independent of whether you use JMS, MSMQ, etc). Simplification and Uniformity Frameworks – To some extent this is similar to an abstraction framework, but there may be one chosen provider but a development shop mandate to perform certain complex items in a certain way. Or, perhaps to simplify and dumb-down a complex task for the average developer (such as implementing a particular development-shop’s method of encryption). And what are less reusable? Application and Business Layers – tend to fluctuate a lot as requirements change and new features are added, so tend to be an unstable dependency. May be reused across applications but also very volatile. Entities and Data Access Layers – these tend to be tuned to the scope of the application, so reusing them can be hard unless the abstract is very stable. So what’s the big lesson? Reuse is hard. In fact it’s damn hard. And much of the time I’m not convinced we should focus too hard on it. If you’re designing a utility or framework, then by all means design it for reuse. But you most also really set down a good versioning, release, and documentation process to maximize your chances. For anything else, design it to be maintainable and extendable, but don’t waste the effort on reusability for something that most likely will be obsolete in a year or two anyway.

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Most Unprofessional Workplace

- by TehGrumpyCoder

I've worked lots of places in lots of roles: Delivery truck driver, Boilermaker, antenna rigger, Professional Musician, Electronic Technician, Electrical Engineer, and for most of my career: Software Turkey. I want to say this large company is the most unprofessional place I've ever worked, but then I think about other jobs such as TTI that stiffed us all for 10 months salary -- or had us work 2-1/2 years at 66% however you want to look at it, or maybe NeoPlanet with a cast from a bad sitcom running the show, I could go on, but I digress (as usual). So maybe this place isn't the *most* unprofessional, but the personnel rank up there. I'm in a small room off a factory. There are 3 managerial offices, and 36 common-folk of various skill-sets in a variety of single to quad cubicles. No matter where you sit though, because of the layout and location, you've got a hard wall as one wall of your cubicle. Because of that hard wall, everything echoes. I get off the phone, and the guy in the next cubicle makes a comment in response to my phone conversation... I hate that it can be heard and I hate that they do that! These people have no problem yelling from cube to cube to carry on running conversations some of which are actually work-related. There's a lady two cubes away that talks so loud I can clearly hear every phone conversation she has... all work-related but still... Then the one in the next cubicle must have been raised on a farm because there's only one volume setting: LOUD... "HEY MARGE, CAN I GET IN FOR A QUICK APPOINTMENT AFTER WORK TONIGHT?" ... sigh Also that cube is the 'party cube' so that's where all the candy, cake, donuts, and leftovers sits. Anything MzLoud brings in has to have a verbal recipe associated with it at least 10 times during the day, and of course at volume. I've had running conversations over the top of my cube from people in the next one on each side. The weird thing is... the boss sits with an open door closer to this whole fiasco than me. So I wear a pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and crank up Kenny Burrell, Herb Ellis, Wes Montgomery, or Jimmy Smith to the point I can't hear the racket... what the heck, I already have a hearing loss from playing guitar.

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Starting Spring Lineup

- by onefloridacoder

This morning I finished removing all VS2008 related frameworks and installed items related to VS2010 based on posts around the community. Here’s what I started with on my dev laptop, the config for my laptop: HP Pavilion dv6 Win7 64-bit 4Gb RAM Installed Developer Tools and Frameworks: Sync 2.0 SDK Visual Studio 2010 Pex Power Tools Enterprise Library 5.0 SQL Server 2008 Developer Edition Visual Studio 2008 Ultimate Expression Blend 4 RC Team Foundation Server 2010 Team Foundation Server 2010 SDK The only item I did not reinstall on top of VS2010 was ReSharper 4.5 only because I read mixed reviews on the dev experience. At this point I really just want to get use to the new(er) IDEs without adding any confusion to my dev machine. I’ll level off my desire for early adoption at Blend, EntLib 5.0, and Pex - I’m also interested in the Moles integration as well. Something else I didn’t have to install was my IDE theme which was left behind in my user folder was merged during installation – afterwards it was nice to see once the dust settled.

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BizTalk ESB Toolkit Architecture Poster

- by Rajesh Charagandla

Microsoft BizTalk Server Team Released ESB ToolKit Architecture Poster recently. Get from Here.

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SharePoint 2007 Parser Error after updating master page

- by Kelly Jones

A few weeks ago I was updating the master page for a SharePoint 2007 (WSS) site. The client wanted the site updated to reflect the new look and feel that is being applied to another set of sites in the organization. I created a new theme and master page, which I already wrote about here and here. It worked well, except for a few pages on a subsite. On those pages, I got the following error: Server Error in '/' Application. Parser Error Description: An error occurred during the parsing of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific parse error details and modify your source file appropriately. Parser Error Message: Code blocks are not allowed in this file. I decided to go comb through my new master page and compare it to the existing master page that was already working. After going through them line by line several times, I had no clue what would be causing the error because they were basically the same! It turns out, it was a combination of two things. First, on a few of the pages in the site, there was some include code (basically an <% EVAL()%> snippet). This was the code that was triggering my error “Code blocks are not allowed in this file”. However, this code was working fine with the previous master page. I decided to then try doing a full deployment of the site with the new master page, and it worked fine! Apparently, if the master page is deployed using a Feature, then it is granted permission to allow code blocks, but if you upload pages either using web UI or SharePoint Designer, then the pages won’t be able to use code blocks. I haven’t been able to pin down the rules or official info about this, but I thought others might find it useful anyway.

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Welcome to the new home of the Plumber's Mate

- by John Breakwell

If you are a fan of my MSDN technical blog about (in the main) MSMQ then you've come to the right place. Additionally, If you've arrived here through searching the Internet for answers on MSMQ problems then you're in luck too. Should you be after some copper piping and a U-bend then you are going to be greatly disappointed ... unless I get a lot of such requests and decide that the IT business is not for me.

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Using Sitecore RenderingContext Parameters as MVC controller action arguments

- by Kyle Burns

I have been working with the Technical Preview of Sitecore 6.6 on a project and have been for the most part happy with the way that Sitecore (which truly is an MVC implementation unto itself) has been expanded to support ASP.NET MVC. That said, getting up to speed with the combined platform has not been entirely without stumbles and today I want to share one area where Sitecore could have really made things shine from the "it just works" perspective. A couple days ago I was asked by a colleague about the usage of the "Parameters" field that is defined on Sitecore's Controller Rendering data template. Based on the standard way that Sitecore handles a field named Parameters, I was able to deduce that the field expected key/value pairs separated by the "&" character, but beyond that I wasn't sure and didn't see anything from a documentation perspective to guide me, so it was time to dig and find out where the data in the field was made available. My first thought was that it would be really nice if Sitecore handled the parameters in this field consistently with the way that ASP.NET MVC handles the various parameter collections on the HttpRequest object and automatically maps them to parameters of the action method executing. Being the hopeful sort, I configured a name/value pair on one of my renderings, added a parameter with matching name to the controller action and fired up the bugger to see... that the parameter was not populated. Having established that the field's value was not going to be presented to me the way that I had hoped it would, the next assumption that I would work on was that Sitecore would handle this field similar to how they handle other similar data and would plug it into some ambient object that I could reference from within the controller method. After a considerable amount of guessing, testing, and cracking code open with Redgate's Reflector (a must-have companion to Sitecore documentation), I found that the most direct way to access the parameter was through the ambient RenderingContext object using code similar to: string myArgument = string.Empty; var rc = Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.RenderingContext.CurrentOrNull; if (rc != null) { var parms = rc.Rendering.Parameters; myArgument = parms["myArgument"]; } At this point, we know how this field is used out of the box from Sitecore and can provide information from Sitecore's Content Editor that will be available when the controller action is executing, but it feels a little dirty. In order to properly test the action method I would have to do a lot of setup work and possible use an isolation framework such as Pex and Moles to get at a value that my action method is dependent upon. Notice I said that my method is dependent upon the value but in order to meet that dependency I've accepted another dependency upon Sitecore's RenderingContext. I'm a big believer in, when possible, ensuring that any piece of code explicitly advertises dependencies using the method signature, so I found myself still wanting this to work the same as if the parameters were in the request route, querystring, or form by being able to add a myArgument parameter to the action method and have this parameter populated by the framework. Lucky for us, the ASP.NET MVC framework is extremely flexible and provides some easy to grok and use extensibility points. ASP.NET MVC is able to provide information from the request as input parameters to controller actions because it uses objects which implement an interface called IValueProvider and have been registered to service the application. The most basic statement of responsibility for an IValueProvider implementation is "I know about some data which is indexed by key. If you hand me the key for a piece of data that I know about I give you that data". When preparing to invoke a controller action, the framework queries registered IValueProvider implementations with the name of each method argument to see if the ValueProvider can supply a value for the parameter. (the rest of this post will assume you're working along and make a lot more sense if you do) Let's pull Sitecore out of the equation for a second to simplify things and create an extremely simple IValueProvider implementation. For this example, I first create a new ASP.NET MVC3 project in Visual Studio, selecting "Internet Application" and otherwise taking defaults (I'm assuming that anyone reading this far in the post either already knows how to do this or will need to take a quick run through one of the many available basic MVC tutorials such as the MVC Music Store). Once the new project is created, go to the Index action of HomeController. This action sets a Message property on the ViewBag to "Welcome to ASP.NET MVC!" and invokes the View, which has been coded to display the Message. For our example, we will remove the hard coded message from this controller (although we'll leave it just as hard coded somewhere else - this is sample code). For the first step in our exercise, add a string parameter to the Index action method called welcomeMessage and use the value of this argument to set the ViewBag.Message property. The updated Index action should look like: public ActionResult Index(string welcomeMessage) { ViewBag.Message = welcomeMessage; return View(); } This represents the entirety of the change that you will make to either the controller or view. If you run the application now, the home page will display and no message will be presented to the user because no value was supplied to the Action method. Let's now write a ValueProvider to ensure this parameter gets populated. We'll start by creating a new class called StaticValueProvider. When the class is created, we'll update the using statements to ensure that they include the following: using System.Collections.Specialized; using System.Globalization; using System.Web.Mvc; With the appropriate using statements in place, we'll update the StaticValueProvider class to implement the IValueProvider interface. The System.Web.Mvc library already contains a pretty flexible dictionary-like implementation called NameValueCollectionValueProvider, so we'll just wrap that and let it do most of the real work for us. The completed class looks like: public class StaticValueProvider : IValueProvider { private NameValueCollectionValueProvider _wrappedProvider; public StaticValueProvider(ControllerContext controllerContext) { var parameters = new NameValueCollection(); parameters.Add("welcomeMessage", "Hello from the value provider!"); _wrappedProvider = new NameValueCollectionValueProvider(parameters, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture); } public bool ContainsPrefix(string prefix) { return _wrappedProvider.ContainsPrefix(prefix); } public ValueProviderResult GetValue(string key) { return _wrappedProvider.GetValue(key); } } Notice that the only entry in the collection matches the name of the argument to our HomeController's Index action. This is the important "secret sauce" that will make things work. We've got our new value provider now, but that's not quite enough to be finished. Mvc obtains IValueProvider instances using factories that are registered when the application starts up. These factories extend the abstract ValueProviderFactory class by initializing and returning the appropriate implementation of IValueProvider from the GetValueProvider method. While I wouldn't do so in production code, for the sake of this example, I'm going to add the following class definition within the StaticValueProvider.cs source file: public class StaticValueProviderFactory : ValueProviderFactory { public override IValueProvider GetValueProvider(ControllerContext controllerContext) { return new StaticValueProvider(controllerContext); } } Now that we have a factory, we can register it by adding the following line to the end of the Application_Start method in Global.asax.cs: ValueProviderFactories.Factories.Add(new StaticValueProviderFactory()); If you've done everything right to this point, you should be able to run the application and be presented with the home page reading "Hello from the value provider!". Now that you have the basics of the IValueProvider down, you have everything you need to enhance your Sitecore MVC implementation by adding an IValueProvider that exposes values from the ambient RenderingContext's Parameters property. I'll provide the code for the IValueProvider implementation (which should look VERY familiar) and you can use the work we've already done as a reference to create and register the factory: public class RenderingContextValueProvider : IValueProvider { private NameValueCollectionValueProvider _wrappedProvider = null; public RenderingContextValueProvider(ControllerContext controllerContext) { var collection = new NameValueCollection(); var rc = RenderingContext.CurrentOrNull; if (rc != null && rc.Rendering != null) { foreach(var parameter in rc.Rendering.Parameters) { collection.Add(parameter.Key, parameter.Value); } } _wrappedProvider = new NameValueCollectionValueProvider(collection, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture); } public bool ContainsPrefix(string prefix) { return _wrappedProvider.ContainsPrefix(prefix); } public ValueProviderResult GetValue(string key) { return _wrappedProvider.GetValue(key); } } In this post I've discussed the MVC IValueProvider used to map data to controller action method arguments and how this can be integrated into your Sitecore 6.6 MVC solution.

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Ping.eu

- by Sarang

Found an interesting resource thanks to a close friend. Ping.eu is a free service which would let you test various aspects related to networks which would typically be pain inducing doing it on your own. For seasoned network professional having a MAC address of their own instead of a name :) this might not be that useful. However for a layperson like me this an invaluable resource. These guys provide you with following services: Ping – Shows how long it takes for packets to reach host Traceroute – Traces the route of packets to destination host from our server DNS lookup – Look up DNS record WHOIS – Lists contact info for an IP or domain Port check – Tests if port is opened on specified IP Reverse lookup – Gets hostname by IP address Proxy checker – Detects a proxy server Mail relaying – Tests relaying capabilities of specified mail-server Bandwidth meter – Detects your download speed from our server Network calculator – Calculates subnet range by network mask Network mask calculator – Calculates network mask by subnet range Country by IP – Detects country by IP or hostname Unit converter – Converts values from one unit to another Taken straight from their site. Thanks Ping.eu

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New Blog Site

- by Miguel A. Castro

Effective immediately, my blog is hosted on www.dotnetdude.com. This blog will no longer be updated so please check out my new one and update your RSS feed with this link. Miguel

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XAML2CPP 1.0.1.0

- by Valter Minute

I upgraded XAML2CPP to fix some bugs and support some new features that will be used in my next tutorial step (that I hope to publish very soon!). Bug fixed: the listbox selection changed event was generated with an incorrect prototype events generated by the XAML tree root element (UserControl) were not handled. New features: XAML2CPP generates panels (dynamically generated XAML subtrees that may be added to a page) and user controls (those will be the object of my next post, stay tuned!). XAML2CPPXRValue class has been added to XAML2CPPbase.h. This class will allow single-line declaration of XRValue objects (I’m lazy!) and destroys automatically objects and string XRValues when the object itself is destroyed. You can download the latest XAML2CPP release here: http://cid-9b7b0aefe3514dc5.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/XAML2CPP.zip

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Slides and links for Entity Framework 4 and Azure from Devweek 2010

- by Eric Nelson

Last week (March 2010) I presented on Entity Framework 4 and the Windows Azure Platform at www.devweek.com. As usual, it was a great conference and I caught up with lots of old friends and made some new ones along the way. Entity Framework 4 Entity Framework 4 In Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 View more presentations from Eric Nelson. Windows Azure and SQL Azure Building An Application For Windows Azure And Sql Azure View more presentations from Eric Nelson. Entity Framework 4 Related Links Poll on Entity Framework 4 – one year on 101 EF4 Resources Recent resources on Entity Framework 4 Installing all the bits to demo Entity Framework 4 on the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate Azure Related Links UK Azure Online Community – join today. UK Windows Azure Site Start working with Windows Azure TCO and ROI calculator for Windows Azure

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Adding and accessing custom sections in your C# App.config

- by deadlydog

So I recently thought I’d try using the app.config file to specify some data for my application (such as URLs) rather than hard-coding it into my app, which would require a recompile and redeploy of my app if one of our URLs changed. By using the app.config it allows a user to just open up the .config file that sits beside their .exe file and edit the URLs right there and then re-run the app; no recompiling, no redeployment necessary. I spent a good few hours fighting with the app.config and looking at examples on Google before I was able to get things to work properly. Most of the examples I found showed you how to pull a value from the app.config if you knew the specific key of the element you wanted to retrieve, but it took me a while to find a way to simply loop through all elements in a section, so I thought I would share my solutions here. Simple and Easy The easiest way to use the app.config is to use the built-in types, such as NameValueSectionHandler. For example, if we just wanted to add a list of database server urls to use in my app, we could do this in the app.config file like so: 1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> 2: <configuration> 3: <configSections> 4: <section name="ConnectionManagerDatabaseServers" type="System.Configuration.NameValueSectionHandler" /> 5: </configSections> 6: <startup> 7: <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.5" /> 8: </startup> 9: <ConnectionManagerDatabaseServers> 10: <add key="localhost" value="localhost" /> 11: <add key="Dev" value="Dev.MyDomain.local" /> 12: <add key="Test" value="Test.MyDomain.local" /> 13: <add key="Live" value="Prod.MyDomain.com" /> 14: </ConnectionManagerDatabaseServers> 15: </configuration> And then you can access these values in code like so: 1: string devUrl = string.Empty; 2: var connectionManagerDatabaseServers = ConfigurationManager.GetSection("ConnectionManagerDatabaseServers") as NameValueCollection; 3: if (connectionManagerDatabaseServers != null) 4: { 5: devUrl = connectionManagerDatabaseServers["Dev"].ToString(); 6: } Sometimes though you don’t know what the keys are going to be and you just want to grab all of the values in that ConnectionManagerDatabaseServers section. In that case you can get them all like this: 1: // Grab the Environments listed in the App.config and add them to our list. 2: var connectionManagerDatabaseServers = ConfigurationManager.GetSection("ConnectionManagerDatabaseServers") as NameValueCollection; 3: if (connectionManagerDatabaseServers != null) 4: { 5: foreach (var serverKey in connectionManagerDatabaseServers.AllKeys) 6: { 7: string serverValue = connectionManagerDatabaseServers.GetValues(serverKey).FirstOrDefault(); 8: AddDatabaseServer(serverValue); 9: } 10: } And here we just assume that the AddDatabaseServer() function adds the given string to some list of strings. So this works great, but what about when we want to bring in more values than just a single string (or technically you could use this to bring in 2 strings, where the “key” could be the other string you want to store; for example, we could have stored the value of the Key as the user-friendly name of the url). More Advanced (and more complicated) So if you want to bring in more information than a string or two per object in the section, then you can no longer simply use the built-in System.Configuration.NameValueSectionHandler type provided for us. Instead you have to build your own types. Here let’s assume that we again want to configure a set of addresses (i.e. urls), but we want to specify some extra info with them, such as the user-friendly name, if they require SSL or not, and a list of security groups that are allowed to save changes made to these endpoints. So let’s start by looking at the app.config: 1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> 2: <configuration> 3: <configSections> 4: <section name="ConnectionManagerDataSection" type="ConnectionManagerUpdater.Data.Configuration.ConnectionManagerDataSection, ConnectionManagerUpdater" /> 5: </configSections> 6: <startup> 7: <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.5" /> 8: </startup> 9: <ConnectionManagerDataSection> 10: <ConnectionManagerEndpoints> 11: <add name="Development" address="Dev.MyDomain.local" useSSL="false" /> 12: <add name="Test" address="Test.MyDomain.local" useSSL="true" /> 13: <add name="Live" address="Prod.MyDomain.com" useSSL="true" securityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges="ConnectionManagerUsers" /> 14: </ConnectionManagerEndpoints> 15: </ConnectionManagerDataSection> 16: </configuration> The first thing to notice here is that my section is now using the type “ConnectionManagerUpdater.Data.Configuration.ConnectionManagerDataSection” (the fully qualified path to my new class I created) “, ConnectionManagerUpdater” (the name of the assembly my new class is in). Next, you will also notice an extra layer down in the <ConnectionManagerDataSection> which is the <ConnectionManagerEndpoints> element. This is a new collection class that I created to hold each of the Endpoint entries that are defined. Let’s look at that code now: 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Configuration; 4: using System.Linq; 5: using System.Text; 6: using System.Threading.Tasks; 7: 8: namespace ConnectionManagerUpdater.Data.Configuration 9: { 10: public class ConnectionManagerDataSection : ConfigurationSection 11: { 12: /// <summary> 13: /// The name of this section in the app.config. 14: /// </summary> 15: public const string SectionName = "ConnectionManagerDataSection"; 16: 17: private const string EndpointCollectionName = "ConnectionManagerEndpoints"; 18: 19: [ConfigurationProperty(EndpointCollectionName)] 20: [ConfigurationCollection(typeof(ConnectionManagerEndpointsCollection), AddItemName = "add")] 21: public ConnectionManagerEndpointsCollection ConnectionManagerEndpoints { get { return (ConnectionManagerEndpointsCollection)base[EndpointCollectionName]; } } 22: } 23: 24: public class ConnectionManagerEndpointsCollection : ConfigurationElementCollection 25: { 26: protected override ConfigurationElement CreateNewElement() 27: { 28: return new ConnectionManagerEndpointElement(); 29: } 30: 31: protected override object GetElementKey(ConfigurationElement element) 32: { 33: return ((ConnectionManagerEndpointElement)element).Name; 34: } 35: } 36: 37: public class ConnectionManagerEndpointElement : ConfigurationElement 38: { 39: [ConfigurationProperty("name", IsRequired = true)] 40: public string Name 41: { 42: get { return (string)this["name"]; } 43: set { this["name"] = value; } 44: } 45: 46: [ConfigurationProperty("address", IsRequired = true)] 47: public string Address 48: { 49: get { return (string)this["address"]; } 50: set { this["address"] = value; } 51: } 52: 53: [ConfigurationProperty("useSSL", IsRequired = false, DefaultValue = false)] 54: public bool UseSSL 55: { 56: get { return (bool)this["useSSL"]; } 57: set { this["useSSL"] = value; } 58: } 59: 60: [ConfigurationProperty("securityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges", IsRequired = false)] 61: public string SecurityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges 62: { 63: get { return (string)this["securityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges"]; } 64: set { this["securityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges"] = value; } 65: } 66: } 67: } So here the first class we declare is the one that appears in the <configSections> element of the app.config. It is ConnectionManagerDataSection and it inherits from the necessary System.Configuration.ConfigurationSection class. This class just has one property (other than the expected section name), that basically just says I have a Collection property, which is actually a ConnectionManagerEndpointsCollection, which is the next class defined. The ConnectionManagerEndpointsCollection class inherits from ConfigurationElementCollection and overrides the requied fields. The first tells it what type of Element to create when adding a new one (in our case a ConnectionManagerEndpointElement), and a function specifying what property on our ConnectionManagerEndpointElement class is the unique key, which I’ve specified to be the Name field. The last class defined is the actual meat of our elements. It inherits from ConfigurationElement and specifies the properties of the element (which can then be set in the xml of the App.config). The “ConfigurationProperty” attribute on each of the properties tells what we expect the name of the property to correspond to in each element in the app.config, as well as some additional information such as if that property is required and what it’s default value should be. Finally, the code to actually access these values would look like this: 1: // Grab the Environments listed in the App.config and add them to our list. 2: var connectionManagerDataSection = ConfigurationManager.GetSection(ConnectionManagerDataSection.SectionName) as ConnectionManagerDataSection; 3: if (connectionManagerDataSection != null) 4: { 5: foreach (ConnectionManagerEndpointElement endpointElement in connectionManagerDataSection.ConnectionManagerEndpoints) 6: { 7: var endpoint = new ConnectionManagerEndpoint() { Name = endpointElement.Name, ServerInfo = new ConnectionManagerServerInfo() { Address = endpointElement.Address, UseSSL = endpointElement.UseSSL, SecurityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges = endpointElement.SecurityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges.Split(',').Where(e => !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(e)).ToList() } }; 8: AddEndpoint(endpoint); 9: } 10: } This looks very similar to what we had before in the “simple” example. The main points of interest are that we cast the section as ConnectionManagerDataSection (which is the class we defined for our section) and then iterate over the endpoints collection using the ConnectionManagerEndpoints property we created in the ConnectionManagerDataSection class. Also, some other helpful resources around using app.config that I found (and for parts that I didn’t really explain in this article) are: How do you use sections in C# 4.0 app.config? (Stack Overflow) <== Shows how to use Section Groups as well, which is something that I did not cover here, but might be of interest to you. How to: Create Custom Configuration Sections Using Configuration Section (MSDN) ConfigurationSection Class (MSDN) ConfigurationCollectionAttribute Class (MSDN) ConfigurationElementCollection Class (MSDN) I hope you find this helpful. Feel free to leave a comment. Happy Coding!

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Red Gate in the Community

- by Nick Harrison

Much has been said recently about Red Gate's community involvement and commitment to the DotNet community. Much of this has been unduly negative. Before you start throwing stones and spewing obscenities, consider some additional facts: Red Gate's software is actually very good. I have worked on many projects where Red Gate's software was instrumental in finishing successfully. Red Gate is VERY good to the community. I have spoken at many user groups and code camps where Red Gate has been a sponsor. Red Gate consistently offers up money to pay for the venue or food, and they will often give away licenses as door prizes. There are many such community events that would not take place without Red Gate's support. All I have ever seen them ask for is to have their products mentioned or be listed as a sponsor. They don't insist on anyone following a specific script. They don't monitor how their products are showcased. They let their products speak for themselves. Red Gate sponsors the Simple Talk web site. I publish there regularly. Red Gate has never exerted editorial pressure on me. No one has ever told me we can't publish this unless you mention Red Gate products. No one has ever said, you need to say nice things about Red Gate products in order to be published. They have told me, "you need to make this less academic, so you don't alienate too many readers. "You need to actually write an introduction so people will know what you are talking about". "You need to write this so that someone who isn't a reflection nut will follow what you are trying to say." In short, they have been good editors worried about the quality of the content and what the readers are likely to be interested in. For me personally, Red Gate and Simple Talk have both been excellent to work with. As for the developer outrage… I am a little embarrassed by so much of the response that I am seeing. So much of the complaints remind me of little children whining "but you promised" Semantics aside. A promise is just a promise. It's not like they "pinky sweared". Sadly no amount name calling or "double dog daring" will change the economics of the situation. Red Gate is not a multibillion dollar corporation. They are a mid size company doing the best they can. Without a doubt, their pockets are not as deep as Microsoft's. I honestly believe that they did try to make the "freemium" model work. Sadly it did not. I have no doubt that they intended for it to work and that they tried to make it work. I also have no doubt that they labored over making this decision. This could not have been an easy decision to make. Many people are gleefully proclaiming a massive backlash against Red Gate swearing off their wonderful products and promising to bash them at every opportunity from now on. This is childish behavior that does not represent professionals. This type of behavior is more in line with bullies in the school yard than professionals in a professional community. Now for my own prediction… This back lash against Red Gate is not likely to last very long. We will all realize that we still need their products. We may look around for alternatives, but realize that they really do have the best in class for every product that they produce, and that they really are not exorbitantly priced. We will see them sponsoring Code Camps and User Groups and be reminded, "hey this isn't such a bad company". On the other hand, software shops like Red Gate, will remember this back lash and give a second thought to supporting open source projects. They will worry about getting involved when an individual wants to turn over control for a product that they developed but can no longer support alone. Who wants to run the risk of not being able to follow through on their best intentions. In the end we may all suffer, even the toddlers among us throwing the temper tantrum, "BUT YOU PROMISED!" Disclaimer Before anyone asks or jumps to conclusions, I do not get paid by Red Gate to say any of this. I have often written about their products, and I have long thought that they are a wonderful company with amazing products. If they ever open an office in the SE United States, I will be one of the first to apply.

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Poner aplicación Asp.Net en modo OFFLINE

- by Jason Ulloa

Una de las opciones que todo aplicación debería tener es el poder ponerse en modo OFFLINE para evitar el acceso de usuarios. Esto es completamente necesario cuando queremos realizar cambios a nuestra aplicación (cambiar algo, poner una actualización, etc) o a nuestra base de datos y evitarnos problemas con los usuarios que se encuentren logueados dentro de la aplicación en ese momento. Muchos ejemplos a través de la Web exponen la forma de realizar esta tarea utilizando dos técnicas: 1. La primera de ellas es utilizar el archivo App_Offline.htm sin embargo, esta técnica tiene un inconveniente. Y es que, una vez que hemos subido el archivo a nuestra aplicación esta se bloquea completamente y no tenemos forma de volver a ponerla ONLINE a menos que eliminemos el archivo. Es decir no podemos controlarla. 2. La segunda de ellas es el utilizar la etiqueta httpRuntime, pero nuevamente tenemos el mismo problema. Al habilitar el modo OFFLINE mediante esta etiqueta, tampoco podremos acceder a un modo de administración para cambiarla. Un ejemplo de la etiqueta httpRuntime <configuration> <system.web> <httpRuntime enable="false" /> </system.web> </configuration> Tomando en cuenta lo anterior, lo mas optimo seria que podamos por medio de alguna pagina de administración colocar nuestro sitio en modo OFFLINE, pero manteniendo el acceso a la pagina de administración para poder volver a cambiar el valor que pondrá nuestra aplicación nuevamente en modo ONLINE. Para ello, utilizaremos el web.config de nuestra aplicación y una pequeña clase que se encargara de Leer y escribir los valores. Lo primero será, abrir nuestro web.config y definir dentro del appSettings dos nuevas KEY que contendrán los valores para el modo OFFLINE de nuestra aplicación: <appSettings> <add key="IsOffline" value="false" /> <add key="IsOfflineMessage" value="Sistema temporalmente no disponible por tareas de mantenimiento." /> </appSettings> En las KEY anteriores tenemos el IsOffLine con value de false, esto es para indicarle a nuestra aplicación que actualmente su modo de funcionamiento es ONLINE, este valor será el que posteriormente cambiemos a TRUE para volver al modo OFFLINE. Nuestra segunda KEY (IsOfflineMessage) posee el value (Sistema temporalmente….) que será mostrado al usuario como un mensaje cuando el sitio este en modo OFFLINE. Una vez definidas nuestras dos KEY en el web.config, escribiremos una clase personalizada para leer y escribir los valores. Así que, agregamos un nuevo elemento de tipo clase al proyecto llamado SettingsRules y la definimos como Public. Está clase contendrá dos métodos, el primero será para leer los valores: public string readIsOnlineSettings(string sectionToRead) { Configuration cfg = WebConfigurationManager.OpenWebConfiguration(System.Web.Hosting.HostingEnvironment.ApplicationVirtualPath); KeyValueConfigurationElement isOnlineSettings = (KeyValueConfigurationElement)cfg.AppSettings.Settings[sectionToRead]; return isOnlineSettings.Value; } El segundo método, será el encargado de escribir los nuevos valores al web.config public bool saveIsOnlineSettings(string sectionToWrite, string value) { bool succesFullySaved; try { Configuration cfg = WebConfigurationManager.OpenWebConfiguration(System.Web.Hosting.HostingEnvironment.ApplicationVirtualPath); KeyValueConfigurationElement repositorySettings = (KeyValueConfigurationElement)cfg.AppSettings.Settings[sectionToWrite]; if (repositorySettings != null) { repositorySettings.Value = value; cfg.Save(ConfigurationSaveMode.Modified); } succesFullySaved = true; } catch (Exception) { succesFullySaved = false; } return succesFullySaved; } Por último, definiremos en nuestra clase una región llamada instance, que contendrá un método encargado de devolver una instancia de la clase (esto para no tener que hacerlo luego) #region instance private static SettingsRules m_instance; // Properties public static SettingsRules Instance { get { if (m_instance == null) { m_instance = new SettingsRules(); } return m_instance; } } #endregion instance Con esto, nuestra clase principal esta completa. Así que pasaremos a la implementación de las páginas y el resto de código que completará la funcionalidad. Para complementar la tarea del web.config utilizaremos el fabuloso GLOBAL.ASAX, este contendrá el código encargado de detectar si nuestra aplicación tiene el valor de ONLINE o OFFLINE y además de bloquear todas las paginas y directorios excepto el que le hayamos definido como administrador, esto para luego poder volver a configurar el sitio. El evento del Global.Asax que utilizaremos será el Application_BeginRequest protected void Application_BeginRequest(Object sender, EventArgs e) { if (Convert.ToBoolean(SettingsRules.Instance.readIsOnlineSettings("IsOffline"))) { string Virtual = Request.Path.Substring(0, Request.Path.LastIndexOf("/") + 1); if (Virtual.ToLower().IndexOf("/admin/") == -1) { //We don't makes action, is admin section Server.Transfer("~/TemporarilyOfflineMessage.aspx"); } } } La primer Línea del IF, verifica si el atributo del web.config es True o False, si es true toma la dirección WEB que se ha solicitado y la incluimos en un IF para verificar si corresponde a la Sección admin (está sección no es mas que un folder en nuestra aplicación llamado admin y puede ser cambiado a cualquier otro). Si el resultado de ese if es –1 quiere decir que no coincide, entonces, esa será la bandera que nos permitirá bloquear inmediatamente la pagina actual, transfiriendo al usuario a una pagina de mantenimiento. Ahora, en nuestra carpeta Admin crearemos una nueva pagina asp.net llamada OnlineSettings.aspx para actualizar y leer los datos del web.config y una pagina Default.aspx para pruebas. Nuestra página OnlineSettings tendrá dos pasos importantes: 1. Leer los datos actuales de configuración protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (!IsPostBack) { IsOffline.Checked = Convert.ToBoolean(mySettings.readIsOnlineSettings("IsOffline")); OfflineMessage.Text = mySettings.readIsOnlineSettings("IsOfflineMessage"); } } 2. Actualizar los datos con los nuevos valores. protected void UpdateButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { string htmlMessage = OfflineMessage.Text.Replace(Environment.NewLine, "<br />"); // Update the Application variables Application.Lock(); if (IsOffline.Checked) { mySettings.saveIsOnlineSettings("IsOffline", "True"); mySettings.saveIsOnlineSettings("IsOfflineMessage", htmlMessage); } else { mySettings.saveIsOnlineSettings("IsOffline", "false"); mySettings.saveIsOnlineSettings("IsOfflineMessage", htmlMessage); } Application.UnLock(); } Por último en la raíz de la aplicación, crearemos una nueva página aspx llamada TemporarilyOfflineMessage.aspx que será la que se muestre cuando se bloquee la aplicación. Al final nuestra aplicación se vería algo así Página bloqueada Configuración del Bloqueo Y para terminar la aplicación de ejemplo

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St. Louis Day of .NET 2010

- by Scott Spradlin

Register now at http://www.stlouisdayofdotnet.com/registration.aspx The Date This year's conference will be held on Friday and Saturday, August 20-21, 2010, at the Ameristar Conference Center in St. Charles, Missouri. Sessions will begin at 8:00 a.m. and run through 4:30 p.m. on both days. Registration and sign-in will open at 7:00 a.m. on Friday morning, and will run throughout the event. The Venue Based on the almost unanimous feedback from last year's event, we are very excited to bring our conference back to the Ameristar Conference Center. The Ameristar has worked with us to offer a great rate on their large suites, should you be traveling from out-of-town -- or are just interested in a night away from home. Attendees can book a suite at a discounted rate of only $139/night, which is a substantial discount from their standard rates. We encourage you take the opportunity to hang around, spend the night, and enjoy the social events and networking opportunities that we have planned. If you are interested in taking advantage of the discounted hotel rate, you can reserve your room online at Ameristar's Online Registration Site, using the special offer code: GDOTH10. You can also call the hotel's reservation number at (636) 940-4301 and let them know you are attending the St. Louis Day of .NET 2010 to receive your discounted rates. The Content All attendees will have access to over 80 technical sessions by many great regional and national technology experts, covering a wide range of .NET development topics. In addition to refreshments throughout the event, all attendees will be provided with breakfast and lunch on both days of the conference. You will find sessions on many of the most current .NET development topics including: Visual Studio .NET 2010 Silverlight 4.0 Windows 7 Series Phone Development ASP.NET MVC DotNetNuke SharePoint 2010 Architecture Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) And much, much more... This year's event will also include many informal "Open Space" sessions where all attendees with similar interests can discuss current trends or issues they are facing in today's real-world development environments. Finally, all attendees are invited to a social networking event at the HOME Nightclub at the Ameristar, which will be held on the Friday evening of the conference. The Cost The cost of this year's conference is $200 per attendee. However, for a limited time we are offering a $75 discount for early registrants. To take advantage of this discounted rate, you must register on our site prior to July 10, 2010. We accept Visa, MasterCard, and American Express. In addition, this year we allow for a single user of our site to easily register multiple attendees at once. To register, please visit the official St. Louis Day of .NET site at www.stldodn.com, and click on the "Registration" tab. For More Information And for the most up-to-the-minute information on the event, please follow us online: Twitter: @stldodn Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/stldodn We strongly encourage you to share this email, as well as the attached flier, with your peers and colleagues, and anyone else you think might be interested in this exciting event. If you have any questions regarding registration, you can email us at [email protected] and we will be happy to address them. Sponsors We are extremely thankful to the many great sponsors who are partnering with us this year to help make the St. Louis Day of .NET 2010 a huge success. (There are still sponsorship opportunities available. For complete information, visit the sponsor page on the web site.)

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