MohamedG's Log

Running a SQL Statement on all Databases

Mohamed Mahmoud El-Geish — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 23:36:00 GMT

exec sp_MsForEachDB 'SELECT "?", 1' The ? will be replaced by the current database name. To run a query that references a table, you need to make sure that the table exists first, as this query will run on system databases as well....(read more)

Adding HTTP Headers to WCF Calls

Mohamed Mahmoud El-Geish — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 07:41:00 GMT

To add HTTP headers, request messages have to be intercepted before they are sent to the server. This can be done by implementing the IClientMessageInspector.BeforeSendRequest method: /// <summary> /// Represents a message inspector object...(read more)

Extending XElement to Match Child Elements by LocalName

Mohamed Mahmoud El-Geish — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 08:14:42 GMT

If you want to ignore the child elements’ namespaces, and match by local name only, you can do something similar to the following: /// <summary> /// Represents an extension for <see cref="XElement"/>. /// </summary> internal...(read more)

Using Fiddler on Local Windows 8 Machine

Mohamed Mahmoud El-Geish — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 04:32:06 GMT

If you used Fiddler before, you would know that it doesn’t work out of the box on localhost. The instructions on how to hook it up didn’t work for me trying to debug traffic of a .Net app on Windows 8. After applying those steps, I had tried 127.0.0.1...(read more)

Reflector Visual Studio Extension - Enable Debugging

Mohamed Mahmoud El-Geish — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 07:50:23 GMT

I’ve been using the standalone Reflector.exe for so many years now, and recently I’ve been using JustDecompile too. They have different accuracy levels and different set of distinguishing features, but the one I use in VS is Reflector. I was excited about...(read more)

Adding Custom SOAP Headers in WCF

Mohamed Mahmoud El-Geish — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 04:10:48 GMT

First, you need to decide whether to create the custom header using the MessageHeader.CreateHeader method, or by extending the abstract MessageHeader class. Under the hood, the CreateHeader method returns an instance of an internal class called XmlObjectSerializerHeader...(read more)

Overriding an Abstract Property vs. Passing a Parameter

Mohamed Mahmoud El-Geish — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 02:36:54 GMT

An abstract class may require a value to be passed through the constructor like the following example: public abstract class Node { private readonly Uri _uri; protected Node( string address, string relativePath) { _uri = new Uri(Path.Combine(address...(read more)

Changing the Foreground Color of an Indeterminate ProgressBar

Mohamed Mahmoud El-Geish — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 09:01:55 GMT

You would think that the following XAML changes the indeterminate progress bar’s foreground color: < ProgressBar IsIndeterminate ="True" Foreground ="Aquamarine" /> Unfortunately, that doesn’t work. You will need to override...(read more)

Making HTML Elements Scrollable

Mohamed Mahmoud El-Geish — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 04:33:00 GMT

I’ve been styling my blog recently to make it more Win8-like (thank you for noticing!). I created some custom CSS file, but I ran into a problem with code. I use wide screens at work and at home, so I tend to break the guidelines and write more...(read more)

Windows Store App Settings Flyout

Mohamed Mahmoud El-Geish — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 10:31:55 GMT

Prerequisites Please read the following articles first: Guidelines for app settings (Windows Store apps) Quickstart: Adding app settings using Windows Runtime In this post, I’ll be walking through how to create a custom UI for settings (required for C#...(read more)

Margin in XAML vs. CSS

Mohamed Mahmoud El-Geish — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 07:36:45 GMT

According to W3C : “The 'margin' property is a shorthand property for setting 'margin-top', 'margin-right', 'margin-bottom', and 'margin-left' at the same place in the style sheet” respectively. Here’s the example W3C used to illustrate the order of properties...(read more)

DefaultNetworkCredentials in Windows Store Apps

Mohamed Mahmoud El-Geish — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 11:15:00 GMT

Disclaimer: I'm still getting acquainted with Windows Store Apps, so I could be totally wrong; proceed with caution. It's been a while since I last wrote a blog post, and it's 4 AM right now, this may give you an idea why I had to get this out. Hopefully...(read more)

Useful Segoe UI Symbols

Mohamed Mahmoud El-Geish — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 09:39:00 GMT

I compiled a list of symbols that can be used to copy Windows 8’s style: Note: I can see all of them in IE 10 on Windows 8. U+E000  U+E001  U+E002  U+E003  U+E004 ...(read more)

Visual GCRoot via DGML

Mohamed Mahmoud El-Geish — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:55:00 GMT

I was inspired by Lovett 's post about Visualizing Runtime Object Graphs to create my first debugger extension that takes the output of !gcroot and creates a graph that one can interact with easily in Visual Studio 2010. So, what does my extension do...(read more)

Tiny C++ Unit Test Framework

Mohamed Mahmoud El-Geish — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 11:56:24 GMT

I was working on a small project for personal use that I wrote in C++ and I wanted to test it. Since it’s a tiny project, I didn’t bother installing a well-known test framework that ships with a plethora of features. I just wanted a simple test runner...(read more)

ExtensionDataObject is not Marked as Serializable

Mohamed Mahmoud El-Geish — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 09:29:34 GMT

If you use Data Contracts , then probably your classes implement the IExtensibleDataObject interface to allow (de)serialization of different versions of the data contract. I won’t go into details about the use of ExtensionDataObject , the type of the...(read more)

How to: Create Interfaces with Static Methods via IL?

Mohamed Mahmoud El-Geish — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:24:00 GMT

If you try to add a static member to an interface, you will get the following error: The modifier 'static' is not valid for this item In this case, you should create an abstract class instead of an interface, because interfaces are contracts and should...(read more)

On Testability

Mohamed Mahmoud El-Geish — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 20:58:36 GMT

Acceptance testing is basically black-box testing done by the QA team to sign off. It’s very important to have clear pre-defined goals for acceptance testing as early as possible during the planning phase. In fact, the requirements specifications should...(read more)

How to: Use Locks and Prevent Deadlocks?

Mohamed Mahmoud El-Geish — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 07:53:00 GMT

Multi-threading is used in almost all real-life applications. I summed up my thoughts on use of locks and deadlock prevention in the following related topics: Thread Safety From a thread safety perspective, resources (memory) is classified as either...(read more)

How to: Debug Deadlocks Using Windbg?

Mohamed Mahmoud El-Geish — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:24:00 GMT

Attach the debugger to the process Load SOS ~* e !clrstack to view the CLR stack of all the threads and where they are Look for System.Threading.Monitor.Enter(System.Object) in the top frames Load SOSEX.dll from http://www.stevestechspot.com...(read more)

Cartoon #8: Subclass

Mohamed Mahmoud El-Geish — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:49:51 GMT

Inheritance (C# Programming Guide)...(read more)

WCF Service Throttling

Mohamed Mahmoud El-Geish — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 07:03:29 GMT

Throttling, generally speaking, is tricky. Get the limits low and you may be prone to DoS and clients timing out trying to connect to your service in vain; Get them high and you may end up with an overloaded service that’s eating up machine resources...(read more)

VSTS 2010 and .Net 4.0 Beta 2

Mohamed Mahmoud El-Geish — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:20:37 GMT

Beta 2 is here , give it a try and let us know what do you think....(read more)

C++: Calling a Virtual Function From a Constructor is not Polymorphic

Mohamed Mahmoud El-Geish — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 16:59:00 GMT

In C++, if you call a virtual function form a constructor, it won’t be polymorphic, meaning that the following code won’t behave as you may have expected: class Foo { public : Foo() { whoAmI() ; } virtual void whoAmI() { cout << "Foo::whoAmI()"...(read more)

Selection of Majority in O(n)

Mohamed Mahmoud El-Geish — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 08:58:00 GMT

Selection algorithms are very useful in many instances, like finding the majority. Given an array of size n that contains a majority item (an item that's repeated more than n/2 times), we can find that item in O(n). Basically, we can consider it as a...(read more)