Inherited from System.Object

Speeding up your CCF Workflow

Sidhartha — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 13:20:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Adding CCF Agents Programmatically

Sidhartha — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 21:46:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Reason behind AdapterContextChange()'s failure

Sidhartha — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 10:42:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Getting away with client Config in WCF

Sidhartha — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 12:47:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Method Overloading in WCF

Sidhartha — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 12:47:00 GMT

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...(read more)

WSDL for WCF Service

Sidhartha — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 05:10:00 GMT

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...(read more)

No More DLL Hell - The Song

Sidhartha — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 13:18:00 GMT

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...(read more)

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

Sidhartha — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 08:47:00 GMT

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"...(read more)

Using Windows Form with InfoPath 2003

Sidhartha — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 13:58:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Using user roles with InfoPath 2003

Sidhartha — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 14:29:00 GMT

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!!!

Sidhartha — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 08:35:00 GMT

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

Sidhartha — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 09:38:00 GMT

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

Sidhartha — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 11:58:00 GMT

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

Using configuration file with InfoPath 2003

Sidhartha — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 09:43:00 GMT

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!

Sidhartha — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 09:39:00 GMT

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:)