Pozdravljeni,

objavljam prezentacijo, ki sem jo uporabil na SloWUG srečanju o namestitvi in konfiguraciji SharePoint 2010 Serverja.

SLOWUG-SharePoint 2010 install_Config.pptx (2,30 mb)

Hi,

I received a question how to easily create a print form for a SharePoint list item.

This is the easiest way I can think of.

1. Open SharePoint Designer and open your list files. Create new aspx page.

2. Edit your newly created aspx page in Advanced mode.

3.Open you aspx page in split mode and click in to the design window. From the ribbon, choose Insert/SharePoint and select Custom List Form.

4.Select the list you want to create new list form for and select Display Form.

5. Insert HTML button and insert on click event handler to "window.print()"

6. Go to Allitems.aspx and open it in Advanced mode. Add column to the right and just type "Print Preview".

7. Add hyperlink to your text.

8.Browse to your custom list form and add "?ID={@ID}.

9. Try it out...

Hope it helps!!

Due to numerous bugs, the 'hotfix' for SDK was released recently.
I havent tried it yet but sure hope that some annoying things will go away. "The communication object, System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannel, cannot be used for communication because it is in the Faulted state" really is a mood killer. Hope for the best and upgrade here. (32 bit version also available here)

Windows Azure uses 64 bit architecture so all dlls deployed to it must also be 64 bit. This poses significat development problem since 'Visual Studio Development Server'  and IIS Express run in 32 bit process. You can always use complete IIS, but it would be better if there was something more lightweight. It turns out there is. There is a nice project on codeplex called "CassiniDev - Cassini 3.5/4.0 Developers Edition" available here. Its binaries are also 32 bit so be sure to get the source and change Build platform target to either 'Any CPU' or 'x64'

and rebuild solution. After that just replace contents of 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\microsoft shared\DevServer\10.0' folder with your new freshly build 64 bit capable dev server

I tried to publish a sandbox solution on SharePoint Server and was getting error that Sandbox Code service server was not found. I checked in Central Administration and found out, that Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Sandboxed Code Service was running and that SharePoint 2010 User Code Host Service was set to automatic but not running.

In the event logs, I found out, that I have errors in system logs:

• Event Id: 7031, 7034;
• source: Service Control Manager;
• details: The SharePoint 2010 User Code Host service terminated unexpectedly.

I found out, that service account that was running Sandbox code service needs to have access to performance counters on the server. So what you need to do is pretty simple, you need to grant service account access to counters and you can do it by adding service account as a member of local group Performace Monitor Users in Server Manger.

Voila, after adding user to Performace Monitor Users everything works as expected.

For RTM version of MVC 3 make sure the deployment contains following dlls:

• Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure
• System.Web.Helpers
• System.Web.Mvc
• System.Web.Razor
• System.Web.WebPages
• System.Web.WebPages.Deployment
• System.Web.WebPages.Razor

Some time ago I wrote how to deploy multitenant application to the Cloud. The process was tricky at best. With new Windows Azure SDK 1.3 things just got a lot simpler and I absolutely love it. The feature is called Full IIS and allows your web roles to access the full range of web server features that are available in on-premise IIS installations. However if you choose to use them, there are a few differences from the classic Azure Hosted Web Core (HWC) model.

First you need to tell Windows Azure SDK to use Full IIS instead of HWC and you do this by adding a valid <Sites> section to your ServiceDefinition.csdef  file.  By default Visual Studio will create HWC model definition like this:

    <Sites>
      <Site name="Web">
        <Bindings>
          <Binding name="Endpoint1" endpointName="Endpoint1" />
        </Bindings>
      </Site>
    </Sites>

You can easily customize it to define multiple web sites, or virtual apps (virtual directories are also supported now):

<Sites>
  <Site name="MainSite">
    <VirtualApplication name="WebApp1" physicalDirectory="D:\Delo\Projects\WebApp1\" />
    <Bindings>
      <Binding name="HttpIn" endpointName="HttpIn" />
    </Bindings>
  </Site>
  <Site name="AnotherSiteOrSubDomain" physicalDirectory="D:\Delo\Projects\ AnotherSiteOrSubDomain ">
    <Bindings>
      <Binding hostHeader="anothersiteorsubdomain.myall.si" name="HttpIn" endpointName="HttpIn"/>
    </Bindings>
  </Site>
</Sites>

Things are much more similar to on-premises application then in HWC model. While RoleEntryPoint  runs under different process (WaIISHost.exe) than your web roles  (w3wp.exe), OnStart method still gets called but configuration settings work a bit differently. You cannot register or store some static values to be available to all websites. Remember its running in a different process... so you wont be able to access its data. What I mean by this is, probably everyone dealing with Azure Development has something similar to this in their role onstart method:

CloudStorageAccount.SetConfigurationSettingPublisher((configName, configSetter) =>{
    configSetter(RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue(configName));
});

While code is still perfectly sound, it wont do any good to our web roles, so the proper place to register it would by global.asax on ApplicationStart event. It all kind of makes sense, since different websites need different resources anyway.

Ninject.Extensions.Conventions provides convention based binding for Ninject modeled after the StructureMap 2.5 AssemblyScanner by Jeremy Miller.

When StructureMap users can use something like:

Scan(scanner =>
                {
                    scanner.AssembliesFromApplicationBaseDirectory(assembly => assembly.FullName.StartsWith("Ntk.Infrastructure."));
                    scanner.ConnectImplementationsToTypesClosing(typeof (IMessageHandler <,>));
                    scanner.ConnectImplementationsToTypesClosing(typeof (IMessageHandler <>));
                });

Ninject.Extensions.Conventions using GenericBindingGenerator can not:

            kernel.Scan(scanner =>
            {
                scanner.FromAssembliesMatching( "Ntk.Infrastructure.*.dll" );  
                scanner.BindWith(new GenericBindingGenerator(typeof(IMessageHandler<>)));
                scanner.BindWith(new GenericBindingGenerator(typeof(IMessageHandler<,>)));
                scanner.InTransientScope();
            });

So slightly modified version of GenericBindingGenerator called MultipleGenericBindingGenerator comes to the rescue:

            kernel.Scan(scanner =>
            {
                scanner.FromAssembliesMatching("Ntk.Infrastructure.*.dll");
                scanner.BindWith(new MultipleGenericBindingGenerator(typeof(IMessageHandler<>),typeof(IMessageHandler<,>)));
                scanner.InTransientScope();
            });

If anyone needs anything like this, here is the code:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using Ninject;
using Ninject.Activation;
using Ninject.Extensions.Conventions;

namespace TestProj{
    public class MultipleGenericBindingGenerator  : IBindingGenerator
    {
        private static readonly Type TypeOfObject = typeof (object);
        private readonly Type[] _contractTypes;

        /// <summary>
        /// Initializes a new instance of the <see cref="MultipleGenericBindingGenerator"/> class.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="contractTypes">Types of the contract.</param>
        public MultipleGenericBindingGenerator(params Type[] contractTypes)
        {
            foreach (var type in contractTypes)
            {
                if (!(type.IsGenericType || type.ContainsGenericParameters))
                {
                    throw new ArgumentException(String.Format("The contract must be an open generic type ({0}).",type.Name), "contractTypes");
                } 
            }
            _contractTypes = contractTypes;
        }

        #region Implementation of IBindingGenerator

        /// <summary>
        /// Processes the specified type creating kernel bindings.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="type">The type to process.</param>
        /// <param name="scopeCallback">the scope callback.</param>
        /// <param name="kernel">The kernel to configure.</param>
        public void Process( Type type, Func<IContext, object> scopeCallback, IKernel kernel )
        {
            Type interfaceType = ResolveClosingInterface( type );
            if ( interfaceType != null )
            {
                kernel.Bind( interfaceType ).To( type ).InScope( scopeCallback );
            }
        }

        #endregion

        /// <summary>
        /// Resolves the closing interface.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="targetType">Type of the target.</param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public Type ResolveClosingInterface( Type targetType )
        {
            if ( targetType.IsInterface || targetType.IsAbstract )
            {
                return null;
            }

            do
            {
                Type[] interfaces = targetType.GetInterfaces();
                foreach ( Type @interface in interfaces )
                {
                    if ( !@interface.IsGenericType )
                    {
                        continue;
                    }

                    if (_contractTypes.Contains(@interface.GetGenericTypeDefinition()))
                    {
                        return @interface;
                    }
                }
                targetType = targetType.BaseType;
            } while ( targetType != TypeOfObject );

            return null;
        }
    }
}

T4 templates for strongly typed ASP.MVC

MVC is a software pattern, that has been first introduced 1979 by Norwegian scientist Trygve Reenskaug.  The idea was to decouple the tight knot between views and models, to have a much more control over the software.

For example, very known ASP.NET 2.0 technology had the implementation of views, but controllers and models were combined in the code behind, which has the impact on the testing and other features, which is needed to build a easy proficient sustainable web solution.

Year ago Microsoft has launched a framework ASP.NET MVC for supporting software pattern and add additional value with different view engines , such as Razor, to eliminate this requirement. Since then, developers are having  few consideration about choosing between ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.NET MVC, but that is topic for another blog post.

MVC grew very quickly and alot of developers are using the new .NET framework to write efficient, light weight, powerfull web apps. Even though we do have a great enviroment for writing, testing, debugging  .NET apps, there is still a lack of string and mis-machted typos.

Consider following example:

<%:Html.ActionLink(»My link«,«Indeks«,«Home«) %>

This is a link to the Home controller, with a method Indeks. But wait, there is no indeks method there. It is a typo. Since we forgot to write x, instead of ks, we got a runtime error. We have to run the site, click of the link, read the error message, ask ourself, what did we do, use the debugger, run the site, check again, go through bunch of step, just because we made a typo.

This is the reason, why expert developers, such as david Ebbo, created a helper (T4 templates), that goes through the code and created a strongly typed strings for controllers, views, even a content.

Fixed upper example:

<%:Html.ActionLink(»My link«, MVC.Home.Index)%>

Its so easy. No more runtime checking, no repro bugs, even intellisense helps us understand, which name and even parameters we will use. 

You can use the following strongly typed helpers in the whole app, not only the views ( also in controllers, etc.)

It is quite simple to use it:

1.       Download the zip file on the codeplex site

2.       Required watching the David Ebbo intro with examples

3.       Unzip the file

4.       Add the 2 files in the root of your MVC app (T4MVC.tt and T4MVC.setting.t4)

5.       Build it

6.       Use it J

You can change the setting for t4 in the settings file to bend it to you will J

Happy no-typo coding.

Recently I had to create .NET project that was based on legacy php application. The problem was thet old applications data needed to be preserved and that included hashed passwords for substential current user base. Old application used two hashing mechanisms, md5 (no problem) and oldpassword mysql function. Since data model has been optimized and moved from MySql to MSSql (and later to Sql Azure) that was a bit of a problem.

If anyone encounter something similar, this could help a lot:

        public static string MySqlOldPassword(string sPassword)
        {
            UInt32[] result = new UInt32[2];
            UInt32 nr = (UInt32)1345345333, add = (UInt32)7, nr2 = (UInt32)0x12345671;
            UInt32 tmp;
            char[] password = sPassword.ToCharArray();
            int i;
            for (i = 0; i < sPassword.Length; i++)
            {
                if (password[i] == ' ' || password[i] == '\t')
                    continue;
                tmp = (UInt32)password[i];
                nr ^= (((nr & 63) + add) * tmp) + (nr << 8);
                nr2 += (nr2 << 8) ^ nr;
                add += tmp;
            }
            result[0] = nr & (((UInt32)1 << 31) - (UInt32)1);
            UInt32 val = (((UInt32)1 << 31) - (UInt32)1);
            result[1] = nr2 & val;
            string hash = String.Format("{0:X}{1:X}", result[0], result[1]);
            return hash.ToLower();
        }

        public static string GetMD5Hash(string input)
        {
            System.Security.Cryptography.MD5CryptoServiceProvider x = new System.Security.Cryptography.MD5CryptoServiceProvider();
            byte[] bs = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(input);
            bs = x.ComputeHash(bs);
            System.Text.StringBuilder s = new System.Text.StringBuilder();
            foreach (byte b in bs)
            {
                s.Append(b.ToString("x2").ToLower());
            }
            string password = s.ToString();
            return password;
        }