Tech Talk

Upcoming IASA Architect Talk at the WPB Developers Group - 1/24 - 7:00 PM

Sam Abraham — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 16:44:35 GMT

The West Palm Beach Developer Group is off to a good start in 2012 with our special IASA Architecture event on January 24^th, 7:00 PM.

Microsoft’s Architect Wayne Filin-Matthews will be our speaker on Enterprise Software and Infrastructure Architecture Best Practices. This topic is unique in value as most content will be a reflection of Wayne’s personal experience having successfully helped a multitude of customers with his acquired tacit knowledge of Architecture.

To register for this FREE event please visit: http://www.fladotnet.com/Reg.aspx?EventID=537

Read full blog post at: http://content.iasahome.org/blog/?p=242

WPB .Net User Group 11/29 Meeting - Kinect SDK with Joe Healy - New Meeting Location

Sam Abraham — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 18:04:17 GMT

We are excited to share great news and updates regarding the West Palm Beach .Net User Group. Our upcoming meeting will feature Joe Healy from Microsoft as speaker for the November 29^th, 2011 6:30 PM meeting.

He will be covering the Kinect SDK and answering all our questions regarding the latest Windows Phone 7 Release. We will be also raffling many valuable items as part of our usual free raffle and hope each of our members leaves with a freebie.

We are also honored to share that we will be hosting our special meeting at a new location:

PC Professor

6080 Okeechobee Blvd.,

#200 West Palm Beach, FL 33417
Phone: 561-684-3333.

This is right by the Florida Turnpike entrance on Okeechobee Blvd.

PC Professor will be also providing our free pizza/soda and some additional surprise items for this meeting to mark the debut of our meetings at their location!

We would like to use this opportunity to thank our current host, CompTec, for its generous support and for hosting us for the past 2 years and look forward to their continued support and sponsorship.

A lot of work and effort is put into hosting a meeting that we hope translates into added value and benefit for our membership. We always welcome your feedback and participation as we strive to continuously improve the group.

Special thanks to our group member, Zack Weiner, for helping us find this new location.

For more details and to register please visit: http://www.fladotnet.com/Reg.aspx?EventID=536

Hope to see you all there.

--Sam Abraham & Venkat Subramanian

Site Directors – West Palm Beach .Net User Group

All in a Day's Work: Unblocking Multiple Downloaded Files with a Single Command

Sam Abraham — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 22:02:18 GMT

Files downloaded using Internet Explorer retain Internet Zone permission level and hence are “Blocked” by default on Windows 7 machines. Honestly, while an added overhead for developers; I really appreciate this feature as it provides a good protection layer for casual web users.

My workaround is to simply unblock the downloaded zip file (if download was a zip file) which, in turn, unblocks the files stored within.

Today however, I was left with a situation where I had to “Open” and “Copy” the content rather than “Save” a zip file. That of course left me with a few dozen files I have to manually unblock.

A few minutes of internet search lead me to the link below which worked like a charm:

1-Download streams.exe from SystInternals - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897440.aspx

2-Go to command prompt (cmd.exe)

3-Navigate to where you have streams.exe installed

4-Use command line switches: streams.exe –s –d “<folder path>”

This removed the Internet Zone restrictions from all files under “<folder path>” and its subfolders as well. [Deleted :Zone.Identifier:$DATA]

References:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/itproxpsp/thread/806f0104-1caa-4a66-b504-7a681d1ccb33/

West Palm Beach .Net User Group July 2011 Meeting Recap

Sam Abraham — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 14:55:00 GMT

Shervin Shakibi, Microsoft Regional Director, was our speaker at the West Palm Beach .Net User Group July 2011 meeting. Shervin’s talk was demo-centric where he showcased the power of HTML 5 by example. Issues discussed at the meeting included suggestions on mitigating security concerns with HTML 5 source code accessibility as well as the status and timeline for HTML 5 readiness. Shervin’s much anticipated talk brought us over 25 members who filled our CompTec meeting room.

We appreciate Shervin’s commitment to sharing his knowledge with the technical community and we look forward to him visiting us again in the near future.

Our next meeting will be taking place on Tuesday August 23^rd, 2011 at 6:30 PM. Ritesh Pahwa, PMP, will be covering Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010: new features, implementation concerns and upgrade considerations. We will continue with our tradition of providing free food brought to us by Sherlock Technology as well as holding our free raffle with every member leaving with some gift item. Hope you can make it!

Below are some photos of our July meeting with Shervin.

--Sam Abraham

Site Director – West Palm Beach .Net User Group

http://www.fladotnet.com

Partial view of our meeting room. Event attracted more than 25 attendees.

Shervin wearing his HTML 5 shirt.

Joe Homnick, Microsoft Regional Director was in attendance at the event.

Dave Noderer, Microsoft MVP and fladotnet.com founder was also in attendance at the event.

West Palm Beach .Net User Group 2011 Update

Sam Abraham — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 14:06:30 GMT

In the past few months, we at the West Palm Beach .Net User Group have been busy soliciting your feedback on topics you would like covered at our upcoming meetings. We have also been encouraging our members to step up and share on the projects they work on and the technologies they use. The result is the schedule below which we hope brings a good variety of today’s hottest topics. We look forward to seeing you at our meetings and to receiving your feedback as we continuously strive to improve the group.

Our upcoming July 26^th meeting features Shervin Shakibi on HTML 5. This meeting presents a good opportunity to get heads up on this new technology which is quickly capturing developers’ interest and market share.

For August, Ritesh Pahwa covers TFS 2010. There have been multiple questions on the new features introduced in TFS 2010 as well as on the upgrade process from older TFS editions. Ritesh, who managed the successful upgrade to TFS 2010 for Palm Beach County earlier this year, will be answering all our questions and sharing tips on leveraging the latest features in TFS 2010.

September brings our own Amir Liberman to share on his CodePlex LINQ Extensions Library and answer all our tough LINQ questions.

Other topics generating a big buzz today are Windows Phone 7 and the Kinect SDK. We are very privileged to have our esteemed Microsoft Developer Evangelist, Joe Healy, traveling all the way from Tampa to share with us the latest on Windows Phone 7 in October and Kinect in November. Joe’s back-to-back appearance at our group is bound to finish our year on a strong technical note.

Plans are already underway for 2012. Our focus continues on bringing you the latest technologies presented by a diverse group of speakers, but we also hope to kick it up a bit to increase your participation in “YOUR” group. We are recruiting new volunteers with the goal of bringing you value-added services and special events in addition to the regular FREE monthly meetings. Stay tuned for more announcements as plans get finalized.

Look forward to meeting and chatting with you at our upcoming meetings. Should you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact me via my blog, www.geekswithblogs.net/wildturtle

Sam Abraham

Site Director - West Palm Beach .Net User Group

http://www.fladotnet.com/

All in a Day's Work: The Silverlight Navigation Framework

Sam Abraham — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 18:47:49 GMT

The Silverlight Navigation Framework offers great value when looking to map longer XAML page URLs to much shorter, friendlier and memorable ones. This feature is similar in nature to the ASP.NET MVC Routing engine. For instance, the following is a quick sample on how to leverage the Navigation Framework. For this to work, I had to:

1-Add reference to System.Windows.Controls.Navigation.dll in my Silverlight project

2-Add the following declaration in my App.xaml page:
xmlns:nav="clr-namespace:System.Windows.Navigation;assembly=System.Windows.Controls.Navigation"

I was then able to leverage URI mapping in App.xaml as following:

<Application.Resources>
    <nav:UriMapper x:Key="uriMapper">
	<nav:UriMapping Uri="/{ParamVal}"
		MappedUri="/Site1/TestPage.xaml?Param={ParamVal}" />
   </nav:UriMapper>
</Application.Resources>

The above example will be mapping the base URL of a site to the path /Site1/TestPage.xaml and will pass the parameter value supplied in the simplified URL to the more complex mapped URL.

That simple! J

WPB .Net User Group May 2011 Meeting With Scott Klein

Sam Abraham — Wed, 25 May 2011 15:25:42 GMT

Scott Klein, co-founder of Blue Syntax Consulting and SQL MVP, was our speaker at the West Palm Beach .Net User Group May meeting. Scott spoke and demonstrated code on Azure’s AppFabric. We would like to thank Scott for making time to share with us despite his busy schedule.

We would also like to thank our sponsors: CompTec for hosting our meeting and Sherlock Technology for the free pizza/soda. Below please find a few photos of the event.

Debugging Install Functions in Visual Studio 2010

Sam Abraham — Tue, 24 May 2011 15:24:14 GMT

Most of us have probably used or know of the System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break(). For more information on Debugger.Break checkout this link http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.diagnostics.debugger.break.aspx

Online documentation states that if no debugger is already attached, user would be prompted to attach one to executing program when the break is hit. For some reason however, this didn’t work for us when our desired breakpoint was in an OnInstall() function of an installer class.

Further digging revealed that the comments decorating the Break() call differ a bit from the online documentation:

// Summary:

// Signals a breakpoint to an attached debugger.

// Exceptions:

// System.Security.SecurityException:

// The System.Security.Permissions.UIPermission is not set to break into the

// debugger.

[SecuritySafeCritical]

public static void Break();

Apparently, Break() only signals a breakpoint to an attached debugger as per the summary above.

In looking at other calls within the Debugger class, we found the Launch() function which is documented as following:

// Summary:

// Launches and attaches a debugger to the process.

// Returns:

// true if the startup is successful or if the debugger is already attached;

// otherwise, false.

// Exceptions:

// System.Security.SecurityException:

// The System.Security.Permissions.UIPermission is not set to start the debugger.

[SecuritySafeCritical]

public static bool Launch();

This call forces the launch of debugger selection prompt where we can select Visual Studio 2010 as our JIT debugger. Once selected code execution breaks allowing us to step through the code. The Deubbger.Launch() call worked perfectly when called inside our OnInstall() function and allowed us to conveniently debug installer code.

Upgrading VSCommands2010

Sam Abraham — Mon, 23 May 2011 13:36:51 GMT

VSCommands2010 adds multiple convenient features to Visual Studio 2010. For instance, one feature of VSCommands2010 I use frequently is the ability to visually "Group" partial classes in Solution Explorer. This comes in handy especially with the relatively large number of files in our .Net 4.0 solutions.

I did however run into an interesting problem as I attempted to upgrade VSCommands to the latest version. Updates to the tool were successfully downloaded to disk as evidenced by the progress bar, but as I acknowledged the terms and conditions and attempted installation, I got an error: “Cannot create a file when that file already exists”. Attempting to uninstall VSCommands2010 from the Extensions Manager screen also failed.

Figure 1 - Updating VSCommands2010

Figure 2- VSCommands2010 Update Failure

The resolution was to first go under C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions and delete the DPStudio folder. This led Visual Studio 2010 to flag VSCommands2010 as disabled which allowed me to successfully uninstall it. I then went ahead and did a clean install of the latest VSCommands2010 version which succeeded.

Figure 3 - Path to DPStudio folder. Delete folder to disable VSCommands2010 in Extension Manager.

Figure 4 - With VSCommands2010 flagged as disabled, we are now able to uninstall it.

Figure 5 - Successfully installed latest VSCommands2010 version.

Authenticating Domain Users

Sam Abraham — Fri, 06 May 2011 14:38:09 GMT

One of my recent projects involved creating an authentication module compatible with both .Net 3.5 and 4.0 and supporting platforms as early as Windows 2000. In the next few lines, I will highlight our progressive thinking and the various implementations we experimented with along with a summary of shortfalls we found with each. For those reading this post, please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section as I am looking forward to reading and learning from your ideas and input.

Principal Context Class

We found the PrincipalContext class in the System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement very easy and intuitive to use. The following is the code snippet it took to validate user credentials with that paradigm:

using (PrincipalContext pc = new PrincipalContext(ContextType.Domain, "domain"))

{

bool isValid = pc.ValidateCredentials("userName", "password");

if (!isValid)

{

Console.WriteLine("Invalid User name/password");

}

When testing this approach however, we found an issue when a user changes their password. Once a password is changed, both old and new user passwords were accepted as valid. This becomes an issue if, for instance, the password was changed due to it being compromised, etc.

In researching this issue, we found the following forum post which advised us to force our active directory authentication over Kerberos in order to solve the password reset issue.

Existing customer infrastructure however varied and some did not support Kerberos authentication, hence we were not able to go ahead with this solution either.

LogonUser() and Security Service Provider Interface (SSPI)

Next, we went with an Interop call to LogonUser() as outlined in this article.

Our final solution however leveraged SSPI similar to the model outlined in this link.

Now, my question to all of you who stumble upon this blog post, know of a better way to implement this? Note that this is not for a web application, otherwise the ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider would have conveniently done the job.