Taken from the SysInternals website:
The SysInternals web site was created in 1996 by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell to host their advanced system utilities and technical information. Microsoft acquired Sysinternals in July, 2006. Whether you’re an IT Pro or a developer, you’ll find Sysinternals utilities to help you manage, troubleshoot and diagnose your Windows systems and applications.
One of the must-have SysInternals tools for a developer is DebugView.
DebugView is an application that lets you monitor debug output on your local system, or any computer on the network that you can reach via TCP/IP. It is capable of displaying both kernel-mode and Win32 debug output, so you don't need a debugger to catch the debug output your applications or device drivers generate, nor do you need to modify your applications or drivers to use non-standard debug output APIs.
So that means that an easy Debug.Write (or Debug.WriteLine) statement is picked up by the DebugView tool, and displayed in the tool. From there, you can filter the lines, search them and more...!
The code that made this screenshot: Debug.WriteLine("Written through a simple Debug.WriteLine statement");
Earlier this week the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit was held. On 10 was on the scene, and has a nice movie about the Sphere. For the entire article @ on 10, have a look over here: http://on10.net/blogs/laura/Sphere-multi-touch-computing/.
This is just another sign that the best is yet to come... Good times :)
Rob Enderle, columnist at TechNewsWorld, gives a new/changed view on Microsoft, Google, Apple and Linux in his article The Fall of Google, the Rebirth of Microsoft and the Changing Face of Apple and Linux. A nice read...
One of the cool quotes from the article:
...but it becomes risky for anyone to depend on the other guy screwing up as they typically don't forever.
Avanade Netherlands released a new website [1]. Unlike the previous one, this one is here to stay ;)
The website holds information about events, career possibilities, publications, videos, links to blogs of Avanade Netherlands employees and more... Have a look!
It is in Dutch, by the way.
[1] http://www.werkenbijavanade.nl (Dutch)
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When you want to implement a custom stsadm for SharePoint, all you realy have to do is implement the Microsoft.SharePoint.StsAdmin.ISPStsadmCommand interface. Because I develop on a machine with no SharePoint installed, I (only) copy the assemblies I need to develop locally. For the stsadm command I was working on recently (more on this in a future post) I only needed the Microsoft.SharePoint and Microsoft.Office.Server assemblies. Or at least I thought so...
After implementing the functionality I tried running code analysis, and I got two errors:
CA0052 : No targets were selected.
CA0055 : Could not load AssemblyName.
After trying several ways to fix this, I finally compiled the project on a machine with SharePoint installed. At that point, compiling and running code analysis both worked fine. Code analysis then gave a warning that pointed me to the solution of the problem:
CA2123 : Microsoft.Security : Add the following security attribute to 'ClassName.MethodName(string)' in order to match a LinkDemand on base method 'ISPStsadmCommand.GetHelpMessage(string)': [SharePointPermission(SecurityAction.LinkDemand, ObjectModel = true)].
Apparently the attribute requires an extra reference. When I copied that assembly (Microsoft.SharePoint.Security) to my non-SharePoint development machine, all worked correctly. FYI: I did add the attribute code analysis suggested by the way.
While writing a custom stsadm command for SharePoint (more on that in a future post) and having to do something based on the command the user typed in, I used ToLower(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture) on the command string to be able to check without the hassle of differences in casing. When I ran code analysis on my project, I got this somewhat cryptic message:
CA1308 : Microsoft.Globalization : In method 'CommandParser.Run(string, StringDictionary, out string)', replace the call to 'string.ToLower(CultureInfo)' with String.ToUpperInvariant().
So in order to solve a code analysis warning I should change lowercasing a string to a call to ToUpperInvariant? That seems a bit strange, right? Because I was almost sure this could not be a typo, I searched around a bit. When you search for the error number, you get an explanation from Microsoft through the MSDN article Normalize strings to uppercase [1]. Apparently there's an issue with a small group of characters which are unable to round trip when converted to lowercase. For more information: have a look at Michael Kaplan's post Get off my (lower) case! (or: Casing, the 1st) which explains it pretty well [2].
Hope this helps some of you ;)
[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386042.aspx
[2] http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2004/12/02/273619.aspx
One of the posts that is being read quite frequently over here is HOWTO: Encode a password using MD5 in C# (or: howto calculate the MD5 hash for a string). One of the (many) reactions to that post was from one Simucal, stating:
Also, to the original poster, Rick van den Bosch... shame on you for using ASCIIEncoding.Default.GetBytes(). You do realize that would seriously restrict the usefulness of your method to working only in languages that ASCII has the character sets for, right?
I suggest you read this article entitled:
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
Yes, I do realize that using ASCIIEncoding.Default.GetBytes() would seriously restrict the usefulness of the method to working only in languages that ASCII has the character sets for. The primary reason for the post was to illustrate the way to calculate the hash. Representing it as a string was only there to be complete for a specific scenario. I did not try to write a hashing function for every language ;)
That being said, the post Simucal refers to is a good one, and it truly is the absolute minimum every software developer absolutely, positively must know about unicode and character sets. And I guess there are no excuses ;). So if you haven't done so already, go and read it.
The situation I talked about in my previous post had one very big issue: LINQ sometimes just is too dynamic... ;)
The fact that I changed the value for the Ranking property for each SpecificObject that got matched, made the primary LINQ query have a different outcome. LINQ uses lazy evaluation and because of that, the contents of finalGroups and exitGroups changed every time I changed the Ranking value for one of the SpecificObjects. Each time the variable containing the outcome of the LINQ query is iterated through, the query is evaluated again. This made that the matching was all off, and I ended up with a bunch of exit groups that got matched!
To have a simple solution, I did the following. This holds the final and exit objects in a 'static' list in stead of a dynamic query result. This way, the SpecificObjects in the finalObjects and exitObjects lists stay the same, regardless of the changes you make to any of the SpecificObjects.
int count;
int numberOfPossibilities;
IEnumerable<SpecificObject> temp;
List<SpecificObject> finalObjects;
List<SpecificObject> exitObjects;
count = 0;
finalObjects = new List<SpecificObject>();
exitObjects = new List<SpecificObject>();
temp = from SpecificObject specificObject in AllSpecificObjects
orderby specificObject.Ranking
select specificObject;
foreach (SpecificObject specificObject in temp)
{
if (count < numberOfPossibilities)
{
finalObjects.Add(specificObject);
}
else
{
exitObjects.Add(specificObject);
}
count++;
}
By the way, we have a winner. Ruud Campsteijn was pretty quick with the right answer!
While developing an algorithm to match preferences to possibilities, I had to sort a generic list of a specific object type (SpecificObject). The first x objects would be matched, the rest would be excluded because of the number of available places. To determine the group of objects that would be matched and the group that would be excluded, I did something like this:
IEnumerable<SpecificObject> sortedObjects;
IEnumerable<SpecificObject> finalObjects;
IEnumerable<SpecificObject> exitObjects;
sortedObjects = from SpecificObject specificObject in AllSpecificObjects
orderby specificObject.Ranking
select specificObject;
finalObjects = sortedObjects.Take<SpecificObject>(numberOfPossibilities);
exitObjects = sortedObjects.Skip<SpecificObject>(numberOfPossibilities);
Next I would iterate through the possibilities and look for a match in (a subset of) the 'finalObjects' list. To be sure the matching would be done honestly during this process, I changed the value for the Ranking property after a positive match. This way, SpecificObjects that had no match yet would move up in the ranking and would be matched before SpecificObjects that already had one or more positive matches. Unfortunately, this had a very unwanted side-effect.
Can you think of it? Let me know and put it in the comments. The answer can be found in my next post.
After developing a custom Web Service to be hosted in SharePoint (based on this HowTo article on MSDN) and deploying it on a testing environment, I got some entries in the EventLog over there, stating:
"Unable to connect publishing custom string handler for output caching. IIS Instance Id is 'xxxxxxxxx', url is 'http://internalsharepointserver/somesubfolder/services.asmx"
The PublishingHttpModule trying to cache an unmanaged path seems to be the problem here. When enabled for a custom web application (such as my web service), it causes the eventlog entry each time certain requests like web service calls or static CSS files are made.
The quick solution is to simply remove the PublishingHttpModule for the custom web application. You can do so by editing the web.config file:
<httpModules>
<remove name="PublishingHttpModule" />
...
</httpModules>
To completely switch back to all default ASP.NET modules, use these settings in the web.config file:
<httpModules>
<clear/>
<add name="OutputCache" type="System.Web.Caching.OutputCacheModule" />
<add name="Session" type="System.Web.SessionState.SessionStateModule" />
<add name="WindowsAuthentication" type="System.Web.Security.WindowsAuthenticationModule" />
<add name="FormsAuthentication" type="System.Web.Security.FormsAuthenticationModule" />
<add name="PassportAuthentication" type="System.Web.Security.PassportAuthenticationModule" />
<add name="UrlAuthorization" type="System.Web.Security.UrlAuthorizationModule" />
<add name="FileAuthorization" type="System.Web.Security.FileAuthorizationModule" />
...
</httpModules>
I only had time for a quickie:
The page containing all my online profiles has been updated...
When interested, have a look at them.
After extending a textbox with a NumberUpDownExtender, which comes with the AJAX Control Toolkit, I recieved the error "the number of fractional digits is out of range". This happened when debugging my web application and using the extender. When using the web app in non-debug mode, nothing happened. This included the value change 'not happening'.
Fortunately, this one was REALY easy, but it is not to be found on the web. That's why I am posting this embarassing personal slip-up anyway. As it turned out, I switched the values in minimum and maximum. Make sure the Maximum property of the extender holds the highest value of the two and you should be good to go ;)
By the way, you would think something like this a) could be determined design- or compiletime, and b) could generate a better exception than 'number of fractional digits out of range'.
While developing a web application for a friend of mine, I ran into a Visual Studio error message I hadn't seen before: Error connecting to undo manager of source file 'D:\Development\SomeWeb Application\Default.master.designer.cs'.
The error occured whenever I tried to start the (web) application in debug mode. The application did start OK after the error message though. Starting the application without debugging didn't cause the error.
I closed the solution file I had opened, but that didn't solve the issue. Stopping the ASP.NET Development Server didn't do anything either. I had to exit Visual Studio al together to get this error to go away.
I searched for this specific error, and saw it already occured in Visual Studio 2005 SP1. Scott Hanselman has a blog post on how he solved this issue. Now, in Visual Studio 2008, this error still seems to be in there...
The EntLib Extensions to WSSF have gotten more and more attention lately. There now is a (very positive) announcement about the extensions on the WSSF site, and there is a complete article on MSDN explaining how to use the extensions. Check it out!
Links:
EntLib Extensions to WSSF: http://www.codeplex.com/EntLibExtensionsWSSF
MSDN article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164250.aspx
WSSF site: http://www.codeplex.com/servicefactory
It's here: the Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit. This first release contains two tools, both supported on WSS 3.0 and SharePoint Server 2007.
Batch Site Manager
From the "Move, Lock, and Delete Site Collections" page on Applications Management you can schedule bulk operations against site collections in the farm—including moving site collections between content databases (!!).
stsadm extension: UpdateAlert
This command will refresh all alert URLs in a specific site collection, which is extremely important should you change the URL of a web application or after an upgrade.
For more information and links for downloads, have a look at the original article on MSDN: Announcing the First Release of the Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit.
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