Inherited from System.Object

Speeding up your CCF Workflow

2008-04-28T13:20:00Z

CCF Workflows takes several seconds to start for the first time. This is to do with the fundamental .Net feature called JIT. When you first launch the workflow, CCF creates the workflow engine for the first time and starts the engine before working on your request. This eats up so much of processor... remember the JIT compiler compiles the IL instructions only when required? One workaround for this problem would be warm up your workflow before the user actually uses this. This will help in faster...(read more)

Adding CCF Agents Programmatically

2008-04-26T21:46:00Z

One of the most annoying features for admins with managing CCF is adding Agents. Updating/Deleting are less annoying as they are not in bulk most of the times. Even manually adding Agents using CCF Admin Console is not productive when adding more than few users. CCF Admin Console, internally uses WCF web services (in CCF 2008) to perform database related activities. You can write a custom program consuming these web services to ease your configuration. This is much faster way of handling the agents...(read more)

Reason behind AdapterContextChange()'s failure

2007-12-21T10:42:00Z

I know very few people are working in CCF currently. But here is an undocumented life saver. The Context that is passed in the NotifyContextChange event is a reference to the object and not a value. Most of you might already know this as it is a reference type. If you have a requirement to update the context based on some user activity and notify the context change to all the applications, you simply invoke the ContextChange or AdapterContextChange methods with appropriate values. However, there...(read more)

Getting away with client Config in WCF

2007-09-01T12:47:00Z

Introduction This weblog provides a solution to one of the most common problem faced by developers while developing their projects involving WCF Services using Visual Studio. Background To give you a little background on what this is all about… when you are working with WCF services and using Visual Studio for development, it becomes annoying as to how Visual Studio screws up the configuration settings. This is a small problem with an even smaller solution. Hence, it might be the smallest article....(read more)

Method Overloading in WCF

2007-09-01T12:47:00Z

WCF solves so many complex problems of the distributing computing, yet when it comes to simple things like overloading it fumbles. This is not what I say, but what I heard from some developers at my customer's site. So, I thought how can such a small thing could not be achievable in WCF when the underlying platform (.Net framework) support this by design. After little thought, it is all clear why it does not work the same way it works with compiled languages. Its all the underlying protocols that...(read more)

WSDL for WCF Service

2007-04-09T05:10:00Z

This can be tricky at times. If all you want is the basic communication WSDL, you can get it by appending ?WSDL to the .svc file. This will output the required WSDL. A sample for this would be something like: http://localhost/MyService/Service.svc?WSDL But sometimes you want to see everything that is produced. Especially, if you are used to ASMX way of development, you'd want to see the complete WSDL instead of the communicaiton portion. Here is where WCF strikes. There is not just one, but several...(read more)

No More DLL Hell - The Song

2006-10-10T13:18:00Z

Spike Xavier & Dan Wahlin came up with this song while carpooling to their work... Is starts like a rock song, then loses track. They have however tried to keep onto the same genre, but... They realized that they created a new genre of music and promply gave it the name Heavy .Net al Check this link for the song...(read more)

Google... I'm really feeling lucky today :)

2006-10-10T08:47:00Z

Long long ago... when people tried "Failure" in the search box and tried their luck (I'm Feeling lucky), they were directed to President Bush related website... How obvious!!! And they say... history repeats... and here is another proof... Try "Search" in the searchbox and try your luck. I'm sure you'll Live with the result. It seems Google... is now feeling the heat... Long LIVE. Not sure how many days this will survive... So guys try this... fast...(read more)

Using Windows Form with InfoPath 2003

2006-10-02T13:58:00Z

InfoPath 2003 does not provide any password field. So, storing passwords on the form is not recommended as it is in clear text. To have something really critical as passwords on the InfoPath forms is not a straightforward task. I've used a workaround for this. I'll showup a Windows Form and capture the credentials on that form, encrypt the credentials there and save that encrypted information back on the InfoPath form. This way, the user will never get to read the password in clear text. Attached...(read more)

Using user roles with InfoPath 2003

2006-09-08T14:29:00Z

Lab 7 of the InfoPath labs discuss about the using user roles with InfoPath.

This is one of the most useful features in InfoPath. You can do anything with this based on the role. For example, the admin user can be shown some admin views which are not visible for a normal user.

We can even get this information in the attached code by using the following api:

bool userRole = thisApplication.User.IsUserMemberOf(@"Domain\Group");

if (userRole)
{
//do something cool here
}

However, there is a catch here. This works only if the user who is accessing the form and the group specified in the user roles are of the same domain.

So, the following are the valid and invalid combinations

Invalid Combination:

User: AMERICA\Employees
Group: ASIA\SecurityGroup

Valid Combination:

User: AMERICA\Employees
Group: AMERICA\SecurityGroup

70-528 Conquered!!!

2006-09-04T08:35:00Z

On Friday (1st Sept 2006) I wrote 70-528 (developing web client applications in .net framework 2.0).

The material available on the test was pretty little and the topics to cover were many. Though, I was very sure about the result... I myself was shocked when the machine displayed... "Congratulations you have passed the exam".

I thought that was a dream, but turned out to be a reality. Anyways, the result is encouraging.

This is not a milestone achievement, but when the expectations are none, any positive result is a big achievement.

Regards,
IamJunk.

Dynamically Hide/Disable controls in InfoPath 2003

2006-08-24T09:38:00Z

Working on InfoPath form is an easy affair as long as, developers use it for the sole purpose of its creation (Creating a simple forms to capture data and publish them to a server for sharing). The moment this rule is broken, the increase in the complexity will be directly proportional to the features being implemented.

There are situations where you may need to perform some action based on the currently logged in User, the role of the user or some other parameter.

Recently, I was working on something which required us to do some UI validations based on the user logged in. We cannot directly use the user roles provided as the user names will be stored in a database and we need to set the UI according to the user preferences.

This is not a straight forward task in InfoPath (though, I dont want to call it tedious aswell) as InfoPath does not work that way.

So, we had to work on several work arounds and found a very simple alternative.

In the attached sample, you can type in the any username in the user name textbox and the dropdown will be disabled as soon as the username is identified as the current windows username.

Pretty simple code... just look at how simple InfoPath makes things.

Open and copy contents from one form to another in InfoPath 2003

2006-08-11T11:58:00Z

Open and copy contents from one form to another in InfoPath 2003...(read more)

Using configuration file with InfoPath 2003

2006-08-03T09:43:00Z

If you are working with InfoPath 2003, sooner or later you’ll encounter situations requiring you to obtain information from a config file. If you are using Visual Studio 2003 you can add a config file to the project, but reading from that file is not possible using the configuration reader. You can load that file as an XML file and have to read from that. So, loading data from config file is not a straight forward task. However, there are certain workarounds for this.

Instead of using the app.config file, we can create a simple XML file and read from that file using the classes in System.Xml namespace. This also gives you the leisure of having the required schema, so you can load directly into, say, a dataset if the config file is complex.

To give a more professional look for this, it would be friendly for the user to provide an InfoPath form that will save the information into the required config xml file.

Attached is the sample InfoPath 2003 form (using Visual Studio 2005) which uses config settings taken from the xml file generated using another Config form to send mails.

NOTE:

This approach requires the forms to be provided with Full-trust and digitally signed

Hello, World!

2006-07-11T09:39:00Z

I am sure this is not the first time you are looking at that title.

I am pretty excited to start my blog at blogs.msdn.com. Though, this is not the first time I am saying "Hello, World!" in the blogging space, this is a special one for me.

I'm working with Microsoft Global Services, where we help customers build enterprise level applications using .Net and other Microsoft Server technologies. I don't assure that you'll get to know what we are doing in detail, but certainly will know some of the challenges we face here.

So, Stay tuned while I try and do something and share it...

Best Regards,

IamJunk:)