ASP.NET Debugging : SharePoint

WCF, Silverlight, and SharePoint… Oh my!

Tom — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 22:33:42 GMT

I was recently working on a project and needed to have Silverlight make a WCF call. That is pretty straight forward until you place the Silverlight code inside SharePoint and want it to call a WCF that is also inside SharePoint.

The first problem that I had to solve was getting Silverlight to be able to call the WCF correctly. Since in Visual Studio when you make the connection, it will have the local server for the path. Like http://localhost:95559/MyService.svc and for SharePoint I wanted it to point to the local server’s name and in the _layouts directory. Luckily I came across the following blog that helped with getting that to work: Silverlight ServiceReferences.ClientConfig Alternatives

The only change I had to make was to the BasicHttpBinding:

        1: BasicHttpBinding binding = new BasicHttpBinding(

       2:             Application.Current.Host.Source.Scheme.Equals("https", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase) 

       3:             ? BasicHttpSecurityMode.Transport : BasicHttpSecurityMode.TransportCredentialOnly);

Then I had to figure out how to get WCF hosted in SharePoint correctly. For that, I turned to this post: Hosting a WCF service in Windows Sharepoint Services v3.0

So I now had a httpModule that would handle the *.svc requests that start with a ~. That is important to make sure because you will get called again without the ~ so make sure you check for that before removing the first character. I also had Silverlight setup where it could call the SharePoint machine regardless of what Visual Studio wanted to do. I followed the “Dynamic Configuration” setup.

When I had this setup, I then got problems still. The only way I could see the problem was running something like Network Monitor or Web Development Helper. In there I saw a 500 error being returned from the server. I attached a debugger and saw that it was giving me this message:

Security settings for this service require ‘Anonymous’ Authentication but it is not enabled for the IIS application that hosts this service.

From this error, I realized that WCF uses anonymous by default. So I went into my web.config file and changed the binding to support Windows:

       1: <bindings>

       2:     <basicHttpBinding>

       3:         <binding name="MyBinding">

       4:             <security mode="TransportCredentialOnly">

       5:                 <transport clientCredentialType="Windows"/>

       6:             </security>

       7:         </binding>

       8:     </basicHttpBinding>

       9: </bindings>

Then you just add a bindingConfiguration=”MyBinding” on your service endpoint.

After I made that change, I ran it again and this time I got the following error:

Security settings for this service require Windows Authentication but it is not enabled for the IIS application that hosts this service.

So I changed my binding to:

       1: <bindings>

       2:     <basicHttpBinding>

       3:         <binding name="basicHttpBinding">

       4:             <security mode="TransportCredentialOnly">

       5:                 <transport clientCredentialType="Ntlm"/>

       6:             </security>

       7:         </binding>

       8:     </basicHttpBinding>

       9: </bindings>

Note: If you have a ”mex” endpoint you may get another error about ‘anonymous’ because that uses anonymous by default. If you do, you can delete the mex endpoint unless you need discoverability. Then you will need to remove anonymous from that as well.

After making these changes, Silverlight was able to call back into the ASP.NET project that it was loaded from and call a WCF service that was running inside SharePoint.

Adventures with Silverlight 3.0 and SharePoint – Part 2

Tom — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:02:14 GMT

Just a quick update on this. I had to make a few changes to my site and I now have it working!

To fix the master page problem, I needed to load it from code behind. Once I did that, I was able to have that show up. But then I had a problem of the Silverlight application didn’t show up at all.

To get around that I needed to get rid of the width and height settings from the Silverlight object. So I needed to change from using width=100% height=100% to style=”width: 700px; height: 700px”

After making that change, the only thing left was to move my connection string settings into the web.config file for SharePoint. After that was done, my Silverlight Navigation project loaded just fine in SharePoint and was able to use RIA Data Services.

I hope these two posts help anyone else looking to do this. Let me know if you run into any other problems or have any suggestions.

Adventures with Silverlight 3.0 and SharePoint – Part 1

Tom — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 19:33:41 GMT

I have been working on getting Silverlight 3.0 to work with SharePoint 2007 and I wanted to share with you the progress I have made and some of the challenges I have remaining.

Project

This project uses Silverlight 3.0, the Silverlight Toolkit for 3.0, and RIA Data Services. So it is basically using as much as it can that is new. This means we have a Entity Model and a ASP.NET web application that the Silverlight application will use. It also uses authentication using the new Domain Service for authentication.

What I did

So the first thing I did was to follow the steps in this blog post about Silverlight 2. I just changed it to be the System.Web.Silverlight from 3.0. The suggestion for upgrading the web.config for Silverlight worked great for bringing most of the stuff I needed.

I then did the following steps:

Copied my project under the _layouts folder
Copied the bin folder for my project to the VirtualDirectories\80\bin folder of SharePoint
Ran gacutil on system.web.silverlight
Ran gacutil on system.web.ria
Ran gacutil on system.web.domainservices.webcontrols

I then made some changes to the web.config of my project, namely removing everything that was already in the web.config for SharePoint. The last change I did was to make the bin folder have FullTrust. I did this by adding the following to the wss_minimaltrust.config file:

        1: <CodeGroup class="UnionCodeGroup" version="1"

       2:     PermissionSetName="FullTrust">

       3:     <IMembershipCondition

       4:         class="UrlMembershipCondition"

       5:         version="1" Url="$AppDirUrl$/bin/*"

       6:     />

       7: </CodeGroup>

After making these changes, the next problem I ran into was around RIA. It makes calls using a DataService.axd. So that needed to be added to the web.config file. In <system.web>:

       1: <httpHandlers>

       2:     ...

       3:     <add path="DataService.axd" verb="GET,POST" type="System.Web.Ria.DataServiceFactory, System.Web.Ria, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"

       4:       validate="false" />

       5: </httpHandlers>

And <system.Webservers>:

       1: <handlers>

       2:     ...

       3:     <add name="DataService" verb="GET,POST" path="DataService.axd"

       4:             type="System.Web.Ria.DataServiceFactory, System.Web.Ria, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" />

       5: </handlers>

That information is talked about in the Silverlight forum for getting it to work with Azure here.

I then tried to get my application to load the SharePoint master page but I ran into a problem where it tells me:

       1: The referenced file '<path to master>' is not allowed on this page.

I am currently investigating that error and will post more as I progress. If anyone else is trying to get this to work with SharePoint or has any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

ASP.NET MVC and SharePoint

Tom — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 17:16:12 GMT

If you have tried to get these two to work together, then you are probably had to deal with a lot of the same issues that I had. A big help for getting these two to work with each other is the SharePointMVC project on CodePlex.

After downloading this sample, you have some steps that will allow you to get MVC to run underneath SharePoint.

Here is how it is setup:

A SharePoint Master Page contains all SharePoint styles and theme

A custom ASP.net page (MVCHostingPage) is based upon the SharePoint Master Page

MVCHostingPage contains a web control called RenderControl

RenderControl (and other internal classes) interrogates the current request and forwards it onto the ASP.NET MVC rendering engine.

A HttpHandler takes all requests to *.mvc and redirects them to the MvcHostingPage.aspx page.

A few things to keep in mind, the deployment instructions tell you to create a Virtual Directory for the project, if you make it an Application, you will get an error in SharePoint when you try to use the SharePoint master page because it is a cross Domain call.

I extended the HtmlHelper class to add a Pager and after doing these steps, the Pager didn’t work correctly. So watch out for that if you are doing this, like following the Create a Pager HTML Helper post.

There are some other ways to get this to work so if you have had success doing this, please let me know about it. There is also a question on stackoverflow around this with some other thoughts and suggestions.