Piers's Blog

'Office Developer Webcast Series'

2006-07-28T12:50:00Z

The Office Platforms Team has begun a new series of webcasts for Microsoft Office System 2007
hosted by the experts themselves.These webcasts provide great depth on the massive amount
of new features in Microsoft Office System and the great tools support built in and available
through Visual Studio and the new VSTO tools.

7/11/2006	Overview of Developer Technologies for Windows SharePoint Services	Mike Ammerlaan
7/12/2006	ARCast: Hey Architects! Meet the 2007 Office System	Ron Jacob
7/18/2006	Developing SharePoint Workflows Using Visual Studio 2005	Eilene Hao
7/19/2006	Designing Collaborative Business Processes with the 2007 Microsoft Office System	Atanu Banerjee
8/8/2006	Introduction to Visual Studio Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System	Eric Carter
8/9/2006	Integrating Your Solutions with the 2007 Microsoft Office System User Interface	Savraj Dhanjal
8/15/2006	Developing, Deploying, and Hosting Rich Office InfoPath 2007 Client and Browser Forms	Pradeep Rasam
8/22/2006	Building Collaborative Applications Without Code Using Office SharePoint Designer 2007	Rob Mauceri
9/5/2006	Extending the Web Content Management Features of Office SharePoint Server 2007	Jim Masson

“Live from Redmond”

2006-07-20T05:07:00Z

The .NET Framework groups are offering another series of Live Meeting presentations called “Live from Redmond”. These talks are given by product team members so it’s content directly from the program managers and developers on the team. The previous set was very popular.

Here are the links, if you have the bandwidth, enjoy -Piers

List of client talks:

Date	Title	Speaker	Registration URL
16-Aug	Smart Client: Offline Data Synchronization and Caching for Smart Clients	Steve Lasker	Click here
23-Aug	Windows Forms: An Overview of Windows Forms in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005	Saurabh Pant	Click here
30-Aug	Visual Studio: Developing Local and Mobile Data Solutions with SQL Server Everywhere	Steve Lasker	Click here
13-Sep	(WinFX) Windows Forms: How to Leverage Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation in a Single Hybrid Application	Scott Morrison	Click here
20-Sep	Windows Forms: Solutions to the Most Common Windows Forms Development Challenges	Scott Morrison	Click here

List of web talks:

Date	Title	Speaker	Registration URL
25-Jul	ASP.NET: An Overview of ASP.NET and Windows Workflow Foundation Integration	Kashif Alam	Click here
3-Aug	ASP.NET: Building Real-World Web Application UI with Master Pages, Themes and Site Navigation	Pete LePage	Click here
10-Aug	ASP.NET: Creating Web Applications Using Visual Studio 2005 Team System	Jeff King	Click here
17-Aug	ASP.NET Atlas: A Developers Introduction to Microsoft Atlas	Joe Stagner	Click here
22-Aug	Best Practices and Techniques for Migration Visual Studio 2003 Web Projects to Visual Studio 2005	Omar Khan	Click here
24-Aug	ASP.NET: An ASP.NET Developer’s Look at Using RSS	Joe Stagner	Click here
7-Sep	ASP.NET: Under the Covers - Creating High-Availability, Scalable Web Applications	Stefan Schackow	Click here
14-Sep	ASP.NET: Using User, Roles, and Profile in ASP.NET 2.0	Joe Stagner	Click here
21-Sep	ASP.NET: Comparing PHP and ASP.net	Joe Stagner	Click here
28-Sep	ASP.NET: Security Tips & Tricks for ASP.NET Developers	Joe Stagner	Click here

List of Commerce Server talks:

Date	Title	Speaker	Registration URL
1-Aug	Multi-Channel, Connected Commerce (BTS/CS integration)	Caesar Samsi	Click here
15-Aug	Commerce Server 2007 Overview	Mark Townsend	Click here
12-Sep	Commerce Server 2007 Architectural Deep-Dive	David Messner	Click here

List of .NET Compact Framework talks:

Date	Title	Speaker	Registration URL
29-Aug	.NET Compact Framework 2.0: Optimizing for Performance	Ryan Chapman	Click here

Mutex and Terminal Services

2006-05-22T14:20:00Z

Not been here in a while just thought this might be of some use.

Right so am working on a solution that requires the use of a system Mutex, problem is the solution is going to be run through Citrix due to constraints in the client environment.

Terminal services does wonderful things to a Mutex. Seems a mutex is not (by default) a 'Global' mutex.So the solution ? MARK the Mutex as global by pref like this :

"Global\"

But this doesnt solve all my issues next I have to get around the security on a Mutex. Normally this is not an issue as Mutex's are mostly used within a service which runs as a specfic user, however in this case integrated security will be used so the first user to create the Mutex will own it. So to allow anyone to access the mutex i have to open it up with a nice little API call.

c# Assuming i had already created the Mutex, I could just pass it through to my method to clear out the security in the System objects DACL.

[DllImport("advapi32.dll", SetLastError=true)]
private static extern bool SetKernelObjectSecurity(int Handle, int SecurityInformation, ref SECURITY_DESCRIPTOR SecurityDescriptor) ;

[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)]
struct SECURITY_DESCRIPTOR
{
   public byte revision;
   public byte size;
   public short control;
   public IntPtr owner;
   public IntPtr group;
   public IntPtr sacl;
   public IntPtr dacl;
}

private const int DACL_SECURITY_INFORMATION = 4;

private void SetNoSecurityOnMutex (Mutex mutex)
{
   //Create the security descriptor.
   SECURITY_DESCRIPTOR securityDescriptor = new SECURITY_DESCRIPTOR();
   //The only thing required is to set the revision to one and the DACL to IntPtr.Zero
   securityDescriptor.revision = 1;
   securityDescriptor.dacl = IntPtr.Zero;
   //Apply the DACL to the mutex
   if(SetKernelObjectSecurity((int)mutex.Handle,
      DACL_SECURITY_INFORMATION,    ref securityDescriptor) == false)
   {
      throw new SynchronizationLockException("Unable to set security on the mutex, error "
      + Marshal.GetLastWin32Error());
    }

}

In retrospect i should have conjourd up a better solution then using Mutex's but unfortunatly the Mutex use was already all in. Alas the benifit of hindsight.

-PM

Having to run IIS Reset when remoting through IIS

2005-03-24T05:27:00Z

Oi my second post in like lank long sorry i been buzzzy :o)

Working on a solution where we are hosting our server side components in iis (remoting). We are using our local dev machines IIS installations during dev.

Came across an issue when recompiling...

The components don't refresh properly in the cache after making a server side change and no matter what we did flushing etc still didn't work. Of course this results in client (proxy) and server being out of sync.

I cant believe my solution to this is the best way there has to be some dumb ass setting somewhere however i couldnt find it ?

Anyway...
Did some reserch into this on the net, there are a number of solutions to this problem

1. Post build event on client application calls iisreset - issue resets iis takes lank time
2. Create separate build configurations to build server and client individually fine a bit trickey to get right also, doing a full build it fails anyway.
3. Updating the web config or machine config and setting the following in compilation tag

numRecompilesBeforeAppRestart="2">

Problem is you have to build then run twice to get it to work and you cant set the value to 0 or 1 btw: Default is 15 in Asp.Net.

Couldnt find any more quick fix solutions to this on the net so i came up with this one and it seems to work oki dokie.. I used the attrib part to take care of our source control system. All i had to do was add this as a post build event on my client application.

attrib -r C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\RemotingHost\Web.Config & type C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\RemotingHost\Web.Config > C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\RemotingHost\Web_TMP.Config & type C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\RemotingHost\Web_TMP.Config > C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\RemotingHost\Web.Config & del C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\RemotingHost\Web_TMP.Config & attrib +r C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\RemotingHost\Web.Config

Basically this forces a restart of the application because the web.config changes default behavior is to restart the application, not the whole of iis.

Perhaps another solution is to restart an iis application programmatically ? It appears that it can be done with the httpApplicationClass ? Any idears ? , I suppose you could get the IIS application to restart on an event in the Global.Asax, But the issue there is, the client build would probably die.

You can make the above cmd into a batch file or whatever, this only works because the MODIFIED Date changes.

BTW This opend up another issue for me... How does one change the modified date of a file with out making some nasty api call My above command works because im basically recreating the file.

a. VBScript cannot change the modified date of a file.
b. Command line cant either (however there is a little program in the windows resource kits that can, it is called "touch"),
c. .Net doesn’t seem to be able to with out making an api call, here the VB...

            Public Declare Function SetFileTime Lib "kernel32" _
                        (ByVal hFile As Long, _
                         lpCreationTime As FILETIME, _
                         lpLastAccessTime As FILETIME, _
                         lpLastWriteTime As FILETIME) As Long

the link http://vbnet.mvps.org/index.html?code/fileapi/filedatetime.htm

Any other Idears on how to Restart an IIS application simply

OBJECT Cleaner

2004-11-15T06:26:00Z

http://www.dvxp.com/en/ObjCleaner.aspx

Cleans out your object directories

Pretty useful. How often have you had to “find all” on the soln. folder to wipe the obj folders ? I guess you could use a batch file as well ..…

del /ad "BIN" or "OBJ" /s

in a .cmd in the soln's root.
if you like, but this tool allows you to select the folder if you wish.