.NET General

Stickout - .NET 2.0, Outlook, Word, Excel, Remoting everything in one article

Omar AL Zabir [MVP] — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 23:50:00 GMT

StickOut is a desktop sticky note application with multi-user support and Outlook integration. It is a .NET Framework 2.0 Windows Forms application that uses .NET Remoting to communicate with other StickOut users and exchange sticky notes with them. It uses the new .NET Framework 2.0 IPC Channel for communicating between Microsoft Outlook and the StickOut process. The Outlook Add-in allows you to stick anything out to the desktop from Outlook including e-mails, notes, tasks, appointments, etc., as sticky notes. Care has been taken to reduce the memory footprint of a .NET application significantly and to make a fast and smooth user experience. This article chronicles my first day of planning the application, through subsequent design, development, testing, and deployment days, revealing the evolution of the application, and the complications I dealt with at each step. You will read about lots of .NET tricks, deployment and versioning problems, Visual Studio tricks, and some other non-development–related tricks that might help you to boost your daily development work.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnwinforms/html/stickout.asp

Hope you enjoy it!

Simulate Windows Service using ASP.NET

Omar AL Zabir — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 14:11:00 GMT

How to run scheduled jobs from ASP.NET without requiring a Windows Service to be installed on the server? Very often we need to run some maintenance tasks or scheduled tasks like sending reminder emails to users from our websites. This can only be achieved using a windows service. ASP.NET being stateless provides no support to run some code continuously or to run code at scheduled time. As a result, we have to make our own Windows Services in order to run scheduled jobs or cron jobs. But in a shared hosted environment, we do not always have the luxury to deploy our own windows service to our hosting provider’s web server. We either have to buy a dedicated server which is very costly, or sacrifice such features in our web solution. However, running scheduled task is a very handy feature especially for sending reminder emails to users, maintenance reports to administrator, run cleanup operations etc. So, I will show you a tricky way to run scheduled jobs using pure ASP.NET without requiring any windows service. This solution runs on any hosting service providing just ASP.NET hosting:

http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/ASPNETService.asp

If you find this article useful, please vote for me.

.NET 2.0 Process Impersonation feature not working in Windows App

Omar AL Zabir — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 20:18:00 GMT

.NET 2.0 introduced an interesting feature in the "Process" class where you can specify UserName, Password and it runs the process as the specified user. However, it only works inside Console Application. It does not run if the application is a Windows Application. It throws "Win32Exception Access Denied" when the Start() is called. Is it as designed? I really need this feature in a windows service.

Try the following code in a console app, it will run perfectly. But change the application type to "Windows Application" and run, it will throw exception. IF you do not set the UserName, Password, it will run then. I am using VS 2005 Release Candidate.

Here's the code:

ProcessStartInfo startInfo = new

ProcessStartInfo(@"SampleEXE.exe");

startInfo.Domain = ".";

startInfo.UserName = "test";

// create a secure string from the password we have

SecureString securePassword = new SecureString();

foreach (char c in "test")

securePassword.AppendChar(c);

securePassword.MakeReadOnly();

startInfo.Password = securePassword;

startInfo.UseShellExecute = false;

startInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = true;

startInfo.RedirectStandardError = true;

startInfo.RedirectStandardInput = false;

startInfo.CreateNoWindow = true;

startInfo.WindowStyle = ProcessWindowStyle.Hidden;

startInfo.WorkingDirectory =

Path.GetDirectoryName(startInfo.FileName);

//if( info.Properties.ContainsKey(ARGUMENTS_ATTRIBUTE) )

// startInfo.Arguments =

info.Properties[ARGUMENTS_ATTRIBUTE];

startInfo.Arguments = "Hi Hello How are you?";

using (Process p = new Process())

{

p.StartInfo = startInfo;

p.Start();

string fileName = @"output.txt";

using (StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(fileName))

{

writer.Write(p.StandardOutput.ReadToEnd());

writer.Close();

}

p.WaitForExit();

p.Close();

}

Get the location of .NET Framework

Omar AL Zabir — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 17:24:00 GMT

Here's an easy way to know the folder where all the .NET framework files are installed:

Debug.WriteLine( Path.GetDirectoryName( typeof(object).Assembly.Location ) );

Conditional Install of Desktop and Quick Launch Shortcuts

Omar AL Zabir — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 18:30:00 GMT

At the end of .NET setup program, we sometimes need to show whether user wants to create desktop and quick launch shortcuts. This is a common requirement but not present in default installer project.

Here's how to do this: