Janne Mattila's blog : tips and tricks

Internet Explorer 8 and InPrivate Filtering

jannemattila — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 06:59:11 GMT

I just noticed pretty cool feature which I have previously managed to miss. And that is InPrivate Filtering in IE8. It’s basically mechanism that allows you to filter content from the web pages. Previously I haven’t thought this as “Adblock functionality” but I did a test and noticed huge difference on web page rendering performance after adding some filtering.

So if you like to also remove some noise (a.k.a. ads :-) from web pages just follow these steps:

Open InPrivate Filtering Settings under Safety menu:

I used “Choose content to block or allow” and then I selected all entries and clicked the Block button (this list was already populated by IE):

Since I wanted to add more filtering using regular expressions I clicked “Advanced settings” from the previous dialogs. It then shows you this list:

In this dialog you can “Import” or “Export” rules. I just exported rules to XML file and opened it in Visual Studio:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:wf="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/webfilter/2008">
 <channel>
  <title>IE Blocked URLs</title>
  <description>Export of InPrivate Filtering</description>
  <item>
   <description>example/*/examplescript.js</description>
   <wf:blockRegex><![CDATA[example/.*examplescript\.js.*]]></wf:blockRegex>
  </item>
  <!-- 
   Repeat "item" per regular expression 
   -->
 </channel>
</rss>

After that I added few item elements with most commonly used ad servers and saved the file. Then I just imported the XML and started enjoying much faster browsing experience! And I was also glad that I got rid of those flashy things on the web pages...

Now you might thing that this only works in InPrivate mode but that’s not the case. You can turn it on from the menu (see first screenshot) or just toggle it with Control+Shift+F even in normal browsing mode.

Hmm... I might even do some testing to get some performance numbers out from my system.

Anyways... Happy hacking!

J

Live Mesh + Visual SourceSafe = Code everywhere!

jannemattila — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:32:12 GMT

For long time I have wanted have my code _everywhere_. Just because I have 3 different computers that I use to write my own stuff. Obviously it would be nice to have version control system (such as Team Foundation Server) but for my own use it would be quite heavy solution. And many times when I have had inspiration to start development of my old project I haven’t had network connectivity at that moment :-( So I thought that I try untraditional solution:

Use Visual SourceSafe for source control
Synchronize VSS database across all my computers with Live Mesh
Use local VSS database and “get latest” from that in each computer

I know that this sounds *weird* but it turns out to be good and working solution! Now I can take my source from local VSS database whenever I need and it’s always up to date (since Live Mesh is constantly running on the background and it does all the synchronization stuff).

Future will show if I manage to destroy my VSS database using this this approach :-)

Anyways... Happy hacking!

J

Visual Studio 2008: Track Active Item in Solution Explorer

jannemattila — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 21:58:49 GMT

If you’re working on solution that has many projects and many project items and you tend to get lost between your files... You might want to go to Tools –> Options –> Projects and Solutions and set Track Active Item in Solution Explorer on. For me it was a big relief that I found it. I’m working on project that has quite many projects under the solution and I have found myself constantly “searching” for files that are at the same location as the currently open file. And this is the painkiller for that pain:

I’m not sure but if I have to guess... this was on by default on previous version of VS but not anymore on 2008. Because I know that I have enjoyed this feature in the past :-) But I might be wrong and I have manually set that on in the past too.

Anyways... Happy hacking!

J

Attaching debugger to w3wp.exe using nice and easy keyboard shortcut

jannemattila — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:56:43 GMT

How many times have you done some web development and used following method to attach your Visual Studio Debugger to w3wp.exe (a.k.a. Debug > Attach to Process –method):

And then you scroll the long list and find your w3wp.exe and press attach:

I’ll bet that you have done that a lot :-) At least I have.

Let’s create macro that does that very same thing but so that you don’t have to take your fingers of the keyboard.
First open up Macro Explorer (using View > Other windows > Macro Explorer or just hit Alt-F8). Then open up example AttachToCalc macro under Samples > VSDebugger:

Right click and select edit:

Copy contents of that and create new macro under My Macros:

And give it a name MyVSDebugger. Then paste the source code to it. Then modify the process name from calc.exe to w3wp.exe and remove the Exit For. You should have something like this left:

Imports System
Imports EnvDTE
Imports EnvDTE80
Imports EnvDTE90
Imports System.Diagnostics

Public Module MyVSDebugger

  ' This subroutine attaches to w3wp.exe:
  Sub AttachToW3WP()
    Dim attached As Boolean = False
    Dim proc As EnvDTE.Process

    For Each proc In DTE.Debugger.LocalProcesses
      If (Right(proc.Name, 8) = "w3wp.exe") Then
        proc.Attach()
        attached = True
      End If
    Next

    If attached = False Then
      MsgBox("Couldn't find w3wp.exe")
    End If

  End Sub

End

Now you should have this kind of view at the Macro Explorer:

Now let’s add keyboard shortcut for our macro from Tools > Options and Environment > Keyboard:

Just find your new macro and set focus to Press shortcut keys field and press your favorite keyboard shortcut and press Assign and then press OK. NOTE: You might have another command already using that combination but you can override it if you like.

Now we’re ready to use that. If you want to build your solution you can Ctrl-Shift-B and if you want to attach to w3wp.exe you’ll just press Ctrl-Shift-V. This is extremely handy if you have Post-Build event nicely set.

Anyways... Happy hacking!

J

Web Services and namespaces (or WCF?)

jannemattila — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 10:27:28 GMT

You might have encountered following situation:
1. You have created class library “MyLibrary” and it contains following class:

namespace MyLibrary
{
  public class Employee
  {
    public string FirstName;
    public string LastName;
  }
}

2. You have created Web Service “MyWeb” using following VS template:

- It references “MyLibrary”
- It contains following method:

public class MyWeb : System.Web.Services.WebService
{
  [WebMethod]
  public void AddNewEmployee(MyLibrary.Employee employee)
  {
    // TODO: implement
  }
}

3. Finally you create Windows Forms application “My Win App”:
- You “Add Web Reference” to “MyWeb” and you name it “WebServices”
- You write following code to use that web service:

WebServices.Employee employee = new WebServices.Employee();
employee.FirstName = "John";
employee.LastName = "Doe";
WebServices.MyWeb myWeb = new WebServices.MyWeb();
myWeb.AddNewEmployee(employee);

4. You run your application and all is fine.
5. Later you notice that you need to add reference to your “MyLibrary” into your “My Win App”
(There could be many reasons for this. For example you want to use same business logic that web service uses etc.)
6. You add following code to you “My Win App”:

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MyLibrary.Employee employee2 = new MyLibrary.Employee();
MyLibrary.EmployeeManager employeeManager = new MyLibrary.EmployeeManager();
employeeManager.AddNewEmployee(employee2);

7. Code works fine but then you notice that you actually have the same class from two different namespaces. What if you try to mix and match them (and sometimes you just have to do that)? Let’s see what happens:

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WebServices.Employee employee = new WebServices.Employee();
MyLibrary.EmployeeManager employeeManager = new MyLibrary.EmployeeManager();
employeeManager.AddNewEmployee(employee);

8. When you try to compile your application and you’ll receive following error:
Error    11    The best overloaded method match for 'MyLibrary.EmployeeManager.AddNewEmployee(MyLibrary.Employee)' has some invalid arguments    C:\<path>\MyWinApp\MainForm.cs    41    1    MyWinApp
Error    12    Argument '1': cannot convert from 'MyWinApp.WebServices.Employee' to 'MyLibrary.Employee'    C:\<path>\MyWinApp\MainForm.cs    41    32    MyWinApp

9. You open up the generated proxy code:

10. You locate the code where Employee is defined and comment that part. And then you compile again with following results:
Error    11    The type or namespace name 'Employee' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)    C:\<path>\MyWinApp\Web References\WebServices\Reference.cs    82    36    MyWinApp

11. You fix that by resolving the missing type:

12. You compile and you’re happy right (obviously you need to modify also all WebServices.Employee types to MyLibrary.Employee types)?

Well you might be happy since now your code works... BUT you have manually edited generated file which will be re-generated every time you do “Update Web Reference” from Visual Studio and you’ll lose you modifications. And that’s not nice.

If this would be question for me I would give you following answer (you might find different opinions on this one): Go to the WCF route instead :-) If Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is something new to you I think you should check these out and find more information on the web: Overview of WCF from Wikipedia and Windows Communication Foundation home on MSDN.

I’m going to run through this same example with WCF way and then we can (hopefully) see why it fits like good glove.

1. Create new WCF project called “MyWcf” using following VS template:

2. Add reference to “MyLibrary”
3. Delete IService1.cs and Service1.svc from your newly created project.
4. Add new item “MyWcfService.svc” (using WCF Service template)
5. Modify “IMyWcfService.cs” file:

using System.ServiceModel;
using MyLibrary;

namespace MyWcf
{
  [ServiceContract]
  public interface IMyWcfService
  {
    [OperationContract]
    void AddNewEmployee(Employee employee);
  }
}

6. Modify “MyWcfService.cs” file:

using System;
using MyLibrary;

namespace MyWcf
{
  public class MyWcfService : IMyWcfService
  {
    public void AddNewEmployee(Employee employee)
    {
      // TODO: implement
    }
  }
}

7. Open up “web.config” and modify the system.serviceModel section as follows:

<system.serviceModel>
 <services>
  <service behaviorConfiguration="MyWcf.MyWcfServiceBehavior" name="MyWcf.MyWcfService">
   <endpoint address="" binding="basicHttpBinding" contract="MyWcf.IMyWcfService">
    <identity>
     <dns value="localhost" />
    </identity>
   </endpoint>
   <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" />
  </service>
 </services>
 <behaviors>
  <serviceBehaviors>
   <behavior name="MyWcf.MyWcfServiceBehavior">
    <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true" />
    <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="false" />
   </behavior>
  </serviceBehaviors>
 </behaviors>
</system.serviceModel>

(you might notice that most important part is the binding what I have changed to be basicHttpBinding)

8. Go back to your “My Win App” project.
- Remove “WebServices” web references
- Add new “Service Reference” to your newly created WCF Service and name it “WcfServices”
- Verify that you have “Reuse types in referenced assemblies” checked in settings (you can see them if you click Advanced... button from the “Add Service Reference” dialog):

9. Modify your code to use this new service:

MyLibrary.Employee employee = new Employee();
employee.FirstName = "John";
employee.LastName = "Doe";
WcfServices.MyWcfServiceClient myWcf = new MyWinApp.WcfServices.MyWcfServiceClient();
myWcf.AddNewEmployee(employee);

10. Enjoy one of the benefits of WCF :-)

This is just one of the many benefits that WCF over the “good old ASP.NET Web Services”. So if you’re interested then you should start looking more information on the web.

Anyways... Happy hacking!

J

Tip: Disable RunOnce from Internet Explorer in your VPC images

jannemattila — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:30:37 GMT

If you’re working with VPC images that cannot connect to internet you might have noticed annoying thing at Internet Explorer. IE tries to connect to internet so that it could finish up the setup. It’s good if you CAN connect to internet but it’s really annoying if you won’t ever have network connection (and this happens typically if you don’t want to connect your VPC to network). And waiting for the timeout isn’t that nice (+ pressing the stop button doesn’t help that much).

This can be however changed through registry. Just add two keys (or modify existing) RunOnceHasShown and RunOnceComplete. Here is example .reg file for that:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main]
"RunOnceHasShown"=dword:00000001
"RunOnceComplete"=dword:00000001

After that you should have following keys under HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main:

And now if you launch IE it won’t try to connect to internet. You might also want to change your home page to be something simple like about:blank.

This was just small tip to make your development life a bit easier in the world of VPC images.

Anyways… Happy hacking!

J

Use LINQ to access CRM objects

jannemattila — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:43:07 GMT

If you have written small console application to check some data from CRM database you have probably already read this article from MSDN: Use Filtered Views. That is okay but honestly I’m currently more into LINQ solution. I’ll show you what I mean...

First I'll create new Console Application project and Add New Item to it and select LINQ to SQL Classes and name it CRMDataClasses.dbml:

Then I'll use Server Explorer to connect to CRM database:

And then I'll drag Account, Contact, FilteredAccount and FilteredContact to the canvas of our newly created CRMDataClasses.dbml:

Now I'm ready to use LINQ to these views:

CRMDataClassesDataContext dataContext = new CRMDataClassesDataContext();

var queryContact = from contact in dataContext.Contacts
          where contact.MobilePhone.Length > 0 &&
          contact.LastName.Length > 0
    select contact;

Console.WriteLine("Contact(s):");
foreach (Contact c in queryContact)
{
  Console.WriteLine(c.FirstName + " " + c.LastName + ", " + c.MobilePhone);
}

var queryFilteredContact = from contact in dataContext.FilteredContacts
          select contact;
Console.WriteLine("");

Console.WriteLine("Filtered contact(s):");
foreach (FilteredContact c in queryFilteredContact)
{
  Console.WriteLine(c.lastname);
}

On lines 3 to 6 I queried all contacts that have lastname and mobilephone filled in. On lines 14 to 15 I'm querying all contacts where current user has access to. NOTE: It doesn't return anything if you use SQL Authentication! So both of these can be used to fill you applications needs. But do notice that for some reason the attributes at the FilteredContacts are all lower case and in Contacts their naming is a bit different. So if you plan to change from Contacts to FilteredContact your going to have to change the casing of the attributes little bit.

This was just quick advice how you can leverage LINQ to your CRM solutions.

Anyways... Happy hacking!

J

Maximize the use of CPU with parallel extensions (+ some WPF stuff)

jannemattila — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 22:03:00 GMT

Since this is my 40th post to this blog I decided to go back to square one… or post one actually :-) I’m going to create Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application that solves the Knight’s Tour puzzle. I actually didn’t know about this puzzle before I bought book called Puzzles for Programmers and Pros. That book had interesting puzzle that lead in to this post. So here we go!

I said that I’m going to create WPF application for my UI. You might ask why not the “good old” Windows Forms application...? Well for these simple reasons:

1. I don’t like to write code to OnPaint / MainForm_Paint methods.
2. I wanted to define my user interface and then just say in code “hey knight go there” and it should just draw the UI with the knight in the correct position. But the defined UI must be also scalable.
3. WPF doesn’t have same barriers than Windows Forms does => It’s the face of future applications!

I don’t probably have to explain my reason #1 for you if you have experienced the same that I have :-) You’ll end up writing the UI code a lot and that’s not what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to solve puzzle and you are suddenly focusing for the UI code. That’s wrong approach. Therefore reason #2 goes hand-in-hand with #1.

So let’s look the the UI of the running application:

It’s the view of the classic chess board and I decided to take shortcut when creating the knight. I decided to use gray circle instead (or ellipse actually) :-) And for the layout management I just took the easy approach by using Grid and defining Columns and Rows. Here is the XAML for the UI:

<Window x:Class="Window1"
   xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
   xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
   Title="Knight's Tour" MinHeight="100" MinWidth="100" 
     Width="300" Height="300" Loaded="Window_Loaded">
  <Grid x:Name="Board">
    
    <Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
      <ColumnDefinition />
      <ColumnDefinition />
      <ColumnDefinition />
      <ColumnDefinition />
      <ColumnDefinition />
      <ColumnDefinition />
      <ColumnDefinition />
      <ColumnDefinition />
    </Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
    <Grid.RowDefinitions>
      <RowDefinition />
      <RowDefinition />
      <RowDefinition />
      <RowDefinition />
      <RowDefinition />
      <RowDefinition />
      <RowDefinition />
      <RowDefinition />
    </Grid.RowDefinitions>

    <Ellipse x:Name="Knight" Fill="Gray" Panel.ZIndex="1"
         Grid.Column="{Binding Path=KnightX}" 
         Grid.Row="{Binding Path=KnightY}" />
    
    <Rectangle x:Name="A8" Fill="White" />
    <Rectangle x:Name="B8" Grid.Column="1" />
    <!-- Etc... -->
  </Grid>
</Window>

You probably noticed the interesting part of the XAML... and that’s the lines 30 and 31 where Binding is defined. It means that these values coming from the public properties of the DataContext. So let’s look at the code behind that XAML and let’s discuss the binding little bit more:

using System;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Media;
using System.Windows.Shapes;

public partial class Window1 : Window, INotifyPropertyChanged
{
  private int knightX = 0;
  public int KnightX
  {
    get { return knightX; }
    set
    {
      knightX = value;
      NotifyPropertyChanged("KnightX");
    }
  }

  private int knightY = 0;
  public int KnightY
  {
    get { return knightY; }
    set
    {
      knightY = value;
      NotifyPropertyChanged("KnightY");
    }
  }

  private void Window_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
  {
    Knight.DataContext = this;
    // Now moving the Knight is easy!
    KnightX = 3;
    KnightY = 3;
  }

  public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged;
  private void NotifyPropertyChanged(String info)
  {
    if (PropertyChanged != null)
    {
      PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(info));
    }
  }
  //...

You might already noticed that my window also implements INotyfyPropertyChanged interface. And my two properties actually call NotifyPropertyChanged method when they are changed. So what’s this all about? Well if you don’t do this your values will be updated for the first time and after that they don’t actually get “bubbled” up to the ellipse anymore... unless you implement the notify mechanisms yourself. This is quite important and you should probably read more information about it on MSDN.

For the actual solving part I just used classic “old recursion” to solve the puzzle. And this is the part where we finally are going to the title of my post...

Classic one worker thread approach gives “fairly easy to implement but sub-optimal” solution. And you might ask why? And to answer this question I’m going so show you picture of task manager:

This picture was taken when my solver was running in “full speed ahead” –mode. And guess what... I’m not impressed! I’m actually just using single CPU (see the third box where green line has reached the roof)!!! So my worker thread approach is far from optimal resource usage.

Okay... What can I do then? I could do multiple threads and handle them manually but that’s again writing a lot of code that doesn’t have anything to do with the actual solving!? So if I would chosen Windows Forms + manual handling of multiple threads I would have a lot of code and just small fraction of that would actually do work that I was originally planning to do.

This is where Parallel Extensions (download) comes into the game! It’s additional library (System.Threading.dll) sitting on top of .NET Framework 3.5 and it’s currently in CTP phase. But I still highly recommend you to check it out if you want easily get more horse power to your algorithms.

I analyzed my code and noticed part where I could do things differently:

// My code was this:
foreach (int location in startLocations)
{
  // Calculations here!
}

// And I changed it to this:
Parallel.ForEach<int>(startLocations, (location) =>
{
  // Calculations here!
});

So I changed code in line 2 to be the code at line 8. What was the result at the task manager then:

Well I believe that I managed to get better use of the available horse power :-) It shows of course in the results:
“foreach”: ~50 solved solutions in ~5 minutes
”Parallel.ForEach”: ~450 solved solutions in < 5 minutes

To summarize... I just changed 1 line of code and I was able to get unbelievable results from it! So if you’re doing something similar then I recommend checking out the parallel extensions first before doing “own custom solution” for that.

I originally thought that I would go little bit deeper into the details of my solver but this post ended up too long even without it so maybe I’ll pass this time... But I’ll include video clip that shows the UI of the application when it’s solving.

Anyways... Happy hacking!

J

P.S. I’m also interested in F# and I’m probably going to do something fun with that too.

Link: SharePoint slow spin-up times…

jannemattila — Thu, 29 May 2008 18:14:50 GMT

I accidently found myself on this page: SharePoint 2007 Quirks - Solving painfully slow spin-up times. After reading that article I was forced to test that. And my stsadm experience was really fast after that! So this link deserves a link post even if I don’t do those normally :-)

Anyways... Happy hacking!

J

Adding CRM 4.0 to your own win app with web form authentication

jannemattila — Mon, 26 May 2008 09:15:49 GMT

Last year I wrote small article Adding MS CRM to your own windows forms applications that demonstrates the usage of CRM in your own custom windows forms applications. In CRM 4.0 the story is pretty much the same but there’re few things that you need to take into account so that everything works as you expect. One thing is multi-tenancy and another one is different authentication mechanisms. CRM 4.0 introduces new authentication mechanism called Service Provider License Agreement / SPLA / IFD / Internet Facing Deployment (it has sooo many names :-). Basicly it just means that you login to CRM using web form so it isn’t anything fancier. And that authentication is of course cookie based so if you use Fiddler you’ll see something like this (Note: image is clipped):

So there is MSCRMSession ticket that authenticates the user to the system. Okay fine… but what if I want to spawn CRM session whenever I like and still provide “auto login” for my end users (and of course you’re not using windows authentication a.k.a. On Premise authentication)? Let’s first use Fiddler to determine what’s happening under covers in IFD (and compare it to win auth):

Here’s screenshot of Fiddler when user logs on (see highlighted username and password). So the login is just normal HTTP POST.

If we compare that to win auth then we’ll see that there’s that normal authorization headers that makes the magic happen:

You have probably noticed the other difference... which is status code 401. In win auth the system returns 401 which starts the authentication routine. In IFD you’ll save time because you don’t do those 401 round-trips.

But okay.. now we need to achieve “auto login" and for that we’ll need little bit of code. Example code has been taken from How To Use the PostData Parameter in WebBrowser Control and it has been modified for this case. And here we go:

string signInUrl = "http://mcs.mycrmserver.local/signin.aspx?targeturl=";
string destinationUrl = HttpUtility.UrlEncode("http://mcs.mycrmserver.local/loader.aspx");
using (WebBrowser browser = new WebBrowser())
{
  string postData = "txtUserName=" + username + "&txtPassword=" + password;
  browser.Navigate(
    signInUrl + destinationUrl /* Url */,
    "_blank" /* Target */,
    Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(postData) /* Postdata */,
    "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded" + Environment.NewLine /* Headers */);
}

That code clips uses System.Windows.Forms.WebBrowser component to POST the login information to CRM so that end user won’t notice the logon event at all. In this example the user will be redirected into the main CRM page (as defined at line 2) but you can of course use any page under CRM if you need to.

Obviously this approach poses some security threats since you need to store username and especially password in memory. But you can make this thing better by storing the confidential values at System.Security.SecureString (more info can be found in MSDN). SecureString is designed for storing confidential text. And of course you should use HTTPS so that you don’t pass on the information plain text.

Anyways... Happy hacking!

J

CRM 4.0 (or SharePoint or custom application) and DebugView

jannemattila — Wed, 07 May 2008 10:04:03 GMT

Every now and then I’m find myself trying to solve same issues over and over again :-) That’s why I found myself (again) using DebugView as my debugging assistant at remote box. If you don’t know what DebugView is then you should definitely try it out. I’m going to give you few ideas how you could use it at your applications. You can download the DebugView from Technet.

Why do I use DebugView? Well I want to get debug messages from running system BUT... I don’t want to write to EventLog or to File since it’s totally unnecessary to write all the messages all the time. I just want messages when I’m ready to observe the system. And DebugView is handy tool for that. Here is list of steps how I normally implement that kind of approach:
1) Create log class that implements logging/tracing/debugging (this is pretty much just wrapper to few simple method calls) (I recommend making this as singleton)
2) Use you log class in your application/solution
3) Use DebugView to follow the trace messages written by your log class

In 1) I mention that I recommend using singleton approach at the log class. This is important especially at the CRM 4.0 where you need to add default trace listener so that you’ll get the trace messages. Here is the code example for that:

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using System.Diagnostics;
// ...
Trace.Listeners.Add(new DefaultTraceListener());

After you have added the default listener you can just use this oneliner:

1	Trace.WriteLine("My Trace: " + message);

Now your trace can be seen at the DebugView:

(here is CRM 4.0 where I have menu item that points to custom ASPX page and I’m using “My Trace” to see what’s happening in there)

DebugView has many built-in functionalities like “Save As” etc. that can help you on your debug/trace efforts. So I recommend that you learn to play around with it.

I also had the magic word “SharePoint” in my title. That is for the simple reason that this same story applies to SharePoint too. And don’t forget... Since System.Diagnostics.Trace is implemented at the .NET Framework this story also applies to all other applications which are built on top of that.

You might also want to read my previous post about tracing: CRM 4.0, SharePoint and ASP.NET Trace.

Anyways... Happy hacking!

J

Custom SharePoint application and System.IO.FileNotFoundException

jannemattila — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 23:55:32 GMT

Question: I have normal user access rights at SharePoint but I'm administrator of the physical SharePoint box. I don't have access rights to SharePoint databases but I still need to run few lines of code against SharePoint. I have created small console application but when I run it I get nasty System.IO.FileNotFoundException:

What can I do?

My answer: So you have used Microsoft.SharePoint.dll and probably you have something like this in your code: "using (SPSite site = new SPSite("..."))" and that causes the exception. Well that exception is actually pretty understandable since you're using API that connects directly to the SharePoint databases... and you mentioned that you don't have access rights to databases so it makes sense. And on top of that you have only standard user rights to SharePoint so we're at the dead end anyway.

That means that we need to change our approach a little bit. Of course the solution differs little bit what you're trying to do but I think that you have few options. First one is that you could use SharePoint web services to implement your functionality. I know that it's not the easiest way to go but it should to the trick. Another approach could be custom application page that does the trick. It is a bit "hacky" approach but if you need to "do something against SharePoint" that is something you could try. I'll give you example so that you'll get the idea what I mean.

First create your custom aspx page into layouts folder (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\). I created MySharePointAdminTask.aspx to the root of layouts but you should add subfolder with correct naming (e.g. Company.Project.Functionality). I added following code to my page:

<%@ Page language="C#" %>
<%@ Import Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint" %>
<%@ Import Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls" %>

<script runat="server">
 void Page_load(object sender, EventArgs e)
 {
  if (Request.IsLocal == true && Request.IsSecureConnection == true)
  {
    SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(delegate()
    {
      using (SPSite site = new SPSite(SPControl.GetContextSite(HttpContext.Current).ID))
      {
        using (SPWeb web = site.RootWeb)
        {
          // TODO: add your code here
          // Example:
          Response.Write(web.Title + " at url " + web.Url);
        }
      }
    });
  }
  else
  {
    Response.StatusCode = 404;
    Response.SuppressContent = true;
    Response.End();
  }
 }
</script>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" 
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
 
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head id="Head1" runat="server">
  <title>MySharePointAdminTask</title>
</head>
<body>
  <form id="form1" runat="server">
  <div>
    <!-- TODO: add your code here -->
  </div>
  </form>
</body>
</html>

I have some basic checks at line 8 to see that is this request local and is the connection secure but in order to make this even a bit safe you need to add more checks to it. If that line fails then everybody who knows the url can execute code with elevated privileges. So you need to be really careful if you want to use this kind of approach and using code behind class would be much better than this inline example. On lines 12 to 20 I'll just do my fancy SharePoint stuff (in this example I'll just write out title and url of the site).

On lines 25 to 27 I'll just make the page look like 404 page just in case some of our checks didn't pass. We only want to run this code by the local user. So let see what is the end result:

For the local user it looks like this (and the user has only normal SharePoint access rights):

For the remote user (even with System admin rights):

So this kind of approach is okay for small SharePoint operations but if you need to do more complex and long running operations then you need to reconsider your options. It's a bit hacky approach but it works :-)

Anyway... Happy hacking!

J

CRM 4.0, SharePoint and ASP.NET Trace

jannemattila — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 21:12:25 GMT

Sometimes I tend to forget how much stuff is built into .NET Framework. Framework gives you nice set of features that you can use without writing a single line of code. ASP.NET Trace is one of them. I know that it's nothing new but I think that it's still used mainly in custom ASP.NET applications. But if you work with products like CRM or SharePoint... you kind of forget that those applications are built on top of ASP.NET and you can still benefit from the features that are part of the framework. So let's refresh our memory so that we can use this feature to build better solutions.

See also good post regarding tracing SharePoint in here "Enabling Page Level Tracing For SharePoint ASPX Forms".

Okay let's first enable trace at the web.config (same changes apply for CRM and SharePoint):

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
 <!-- ... -->
 <system.web>
  <!-- ... -->
  <trace requestLimit="100" enabled="true"/>
  <compilation debug="true" />
  <!-- ... -->
 </system.web>
 <!-- ... -->
</configuration>

So in order to enable the trace you just have to make sure that you have trace (line 6) and debug enabled (line 7). After that you're good to go and trace your application.

I just retrieved front page from my SharePoint (http://demo1) and then clicked url to custom application page. Then I typed in the trace url http://demo1/Trace.axd and checkout the results:

And in more detailed (I just clicked the Pages/Default.aspx):

And same thing works with CRM 4.0 too... but remember that it's unsupported to modify web.config in CRM so create back up copy so that you can restore the original file when you need to clean up your modifications.

In my CRM I opened url http://crmserver/Contoso to goto tenant named Contoso. After that I used my custom aspx page from ISV-folder. And then I checked the trace:

And if you look at more detailed view of the trace:

And you can easily see the amount of stuff that is put into the application state and especially for CRMWindowInfo_CacheKey. Using this technique you can find e.g performance issues in your code quite easily.

I actually used this method to debug some AJAX and web services issues and it worked really well because I could check out from the trace what has happened and when.

To summarize.... you should refresh your memory about things that you get straight from the platform. It can save lot of your time. At least it happened to me :-)

Anyways... Happy hacking!

J

Comparing two databases (schema and/or data)

jannemattila — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 22:28:30 GMT

Quite often people like to know what's happening under the covers when they do something through user interface. For example they use CRM, SharePoint or some other product through user interface and they would like to know what has happened at the database. Normally my answer is that you don't need to know that because "Don't touch the database rule still applies" but this time I have different answer :-)

I'll shortly explain how can you check that stuff yourself using Visual Studio 2008 and Schema compare and/or Data compare functionalities. But it's important to understand that this kind of approach shouldn't be ever executed against production databases. So you really need to have separate dev environment (and databases) for this kind of testing.

Now we're ready to go. I'll use Microsoft CRM 4.0 in my example. I have created two tenants and named them Demo and DemoEmpty. And that of course means that I have databases Demo_MSCRM and DemoEmpty_MSCRM at my SQL Server. If I now start up my Visual Studio 2008 and connect those two databases to the server explorer and start playing around with this (Data -> Schema Compare -> New Schema Comparison...):

Then I get this dialog and select those two databases (NOTE: Right hand side is the target database!):

And when I click the OK-button the Visual Studio starts crawling the two databases and then creates list of differences:

Currently we're not yet interested at the differences since we just want to make the databases equal. So I just pressed Write updates button from the toolbar to make the DemoEmpty_MSCRM same as the Demo_MSCRM (remember DemoEmpty was the target database). Obviously this makes my DemoEmpty database useless but I use it only to track changes at the Demo database.

I also used Data Compare -> New Data Comparison... so that both databases would then have same content (of course you can achieve this same with backup/restore but it's not as fun as this approach!):

Now if I refresh the Schema compare we'll get this view:

Or closer view of the schema compare:

We can easily see that our database schemas are equal since the Status is Equal for the tables and Update Action is set to Skip.

And now we're finally ready to go to the user interface for the tenant Demo and make some changes. I'll type http://crmserver/Demo into my browser and go to the Settings and Customization -> Customize Entities. And I'll just add new custom entity called MyDemo (how original name!) and it makes my entity name new_demo (since I didn't even change the default prefix... and this is just lazyness I know!):

After I have saved my new entity I'm ready to re-run the Schema compare:

And of course the changes we're something that you could expect... two new tables called New_demoBase and New_demoExtensionBase. If you look at the definitions:

New_demoBase:

-- Columns
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[New_demoBase]
(
[New_demoId] [uniqueidentifier] NOT NULL,
[CreatedOn] [datetime] NULL,
[CreatedBy] [uniqueidentifier] NULL,
[ModifiedOn] [datetime] NULL,
[ModifiedBy] [uniqueidentifier] NULL,
[OwningUser] [uniqueidentifier] NULL,
[OwningBusinessUnit] [uniqueidentifier] NULL,
[statecode] [int] NOT NULL,
[statuscode] [int] NULL,
[DeletionStateCode] [int] NULL,
[VersionNumber] [timestamp] NULL,
[ImportSequenceNumber] [int] NULL,
[OverriddenCreatedOn] [datetime] NULL,
[TimeZoneRuleVersionNumber] [int] NULL,
[UTCConversionTimeZoneCode] [int] NULL
) ON [PRIMARY]
-- ...

New_demoExtensionBase:

-- Columns
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[New_demoExtensionBase]
(
[New_demoId] [uniqueidentifier] NOT NULL,
[New_name] [nvarchar] (100) COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AI NULL
) ON [PRIMARY]
-- ...

You'll understand that actually only those base CRM columns are at the New_demoBase table and all the other (1 in my case since I was lazy and didn't add more fields :-) fields are at the New_demoExtensionBase table. Of course there are other important changes too like the two new views: FilteredNew_demo and New_demo. FilteredNew_demo is view that uses the users rights to retrieve data... so it automatically filters out all the rows that user doesn't have access to (that's why it's called Filtered :-). And the other view just combines the two tables (Base + ExtensionBase) together.

But this was just small example how you could compare databases and see what is happening at your application. Remember to use this compare tool carefully... because you could easily make you target database useless... so it would be wise to create backup before playing around with it.

Anyways... Happy hacking!

J

Catching unhandled exceptions in SharePoint

jannemattila — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 19:13:14 GMT

If you have done some dev stuff with MOSS you have most likely seen this:

"An unexpected error has occurred. " is something that you probably don't want to see at your browser.... you want to have customized error page. In ASP.NET application you normally put Application_Error into you global.asax file. However in SharePoint that place has been taken by the product itself :-) So if you want to do customized approach then you can take HttpModule approach which I'm going to go through in this post.

So let's create our custom exception handler http module. Here's the code for that:

using System;
using System.Web;

public class MyExceptionHandler : IHttpModule
{
  public void Dispose()
  {
  }

  public void Init(HttpApplication context)
  {
    context.Error += new EventHandler(context_Error);
  }

  void context_Error(object sender, EventArgs e)
  {
    Exception[] unhandledExceptions = HttpContext.Current.AllErrors;

    foreach (Exception ex in unhandledExceptions)
    {
      // TODO: log your errors
    }

    HttpContext.Current.Server.ClearError();
    HttpContext.Current.Response.Clear();
    HttpContext.Current.Server.Transfer("/_layouts/MyCustomErrorPage.aspx");
  }
}

You can probably see from the code that I'll attach my code to the Error event and in my event I'll do some basic stuff and then transfer to my MyCustomErrorPage.aspx. I used Server.Transfer just because I want user to stay at the same url where exception happened. If I would use Response.Redirect it would "change" the url at the users browser. Same "change" would happen if your custom error page would be normal SharePoint publishing page (i.e. /Pages/MyCustomErrorPage.aspx). If the url stays the same the user can actually press F5 and retry the operation right away. Of course it can be bad thing too and you may want to redirect to another page to avoid creating the same exception all over again. I'll let you decide what you want :-) So do some testing and then decide what's good for you.

But one important thing to notice. You need to put your IHttpModule before SharePoint specific modules in your web.config or otherwise your error routines may not work as you would expect. Here's example from that:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<configuration>
 <!-- ... -->
  <httpModules>
   <clear />
   <add name="MyExceptionHandler" type="MyExceptionHandler,Example, 
      Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=34a2bd01f6f6eb10" />
   <add name="SPRequest" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationRuntime.SPRequestModule, 
      Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
   <add name="OutputCache" type="System.Web.Caching.OutputCacheModule" />
   <!-- ... -->

  </configuration

See line 6 where I put my exception handler definition.

Anyways... Happy hacking!

J