WCF Community Bloggers

Twitterfone V2 is live

Paul Fallon's Blog — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 14:32:33 GMT

Congrats to all of the folks behind the latest version of Twitterfone and its backers, Pat Phelan of MAXroam, Florian Seroussi of Global Roaming, David Marcus of Echovox (Zong) and Sean O Sullivan/Ivan MacDonald of Dial2Do. For coverage of the new features, see the TechCrunch coverage or the this post from Pat Phelan. Enjoy! /Paul For more information, go to http://www.paulfallon.com . Read More......(read more)

Irish Microsoft Developer Community Leaders and some guy called Steve :)

Paul Fallon's Blog — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 23:54:06 GMT

I spotted this old photo on my Social stream and I cannot recall if it ever got posted when it was originally taken (about 2 yrs ago or so, if i recall correctly). So I thought I would repost as these are a great bunch of guys, not so sure about the steve guy though ;) Thanks to Simon Philips of NIMTUG for the photo, and my cheeky title ;) Ciao, Paul For more information, go to http://www.paulfallon.com . Read More......(read more)

SQL Server 2008 RTMs

Shut-Up and Smile — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Wahoo! Congrats from South Africa. As of now it's not on MSDN subscirber downloads. And as of now the eval is not on Microsoft.com. But soon baby, soon. Read More......(read more)

Cheezburger in Popfly

Paul Fallon's Blog — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:38:57 GMT

:D Via Johnmont For more information, go to http://www.paulfallon.com . Read More......(read more)

Where to get Password Minder

Security Briefs — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:00:00 GMT

We recently updated our website and some links have broken as a result. Here's the place you should go to get the latest version of Password Minder: http://mercury.pluralsight.com/tools.aspx Sorry for any inconvenience! Read More......(read more)

Independent Web2.0? - The top 20 Web2.0 Sites in the US

Paul Fallon's Blog — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:43:21 GMT

Interesting post by Hitwise. /P For more information, go to http://www.paulfallon.com . Read More......(read more)

Better exception reporting in ASP.NET part 2

Security Briefs — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 14:11:14 GMT

This is the third post in a series. The first post described the problem: ASP.NET wasn't reporting inner exception stack traces. The second post described my solution. This post shows the code I used to solve the problem: a custom email provider for the Health Monitoring system in ASP.NET. Enjoy! Here's the provider. Note that I opted *not* to build a buffering provider to keep things simple: public class MyMailWebEventProvider : WebEventProvider { string to; string from; string subjectPrefix; public override void Initialize( string name, NameValueCollection config) { base .Initialize(name, config); to = GetAndRemoveStringAttribute(config, "to" , true ); from = GetAndRemoveStringAttribute(config, "from" , true ); subjectPrefix = GetAndRemoveStringAttribute(config, "subjectPrefix" , false ); } public override void ProcessEvent(WebBaseEvent raisedEvent) { SendMail(raisedEvent); } private void SendMail(WebBaseEvent raisedEvent) { string subject = ComputeEmailSubject(raisedEvent); string body = ComputeEmailBody(raisedEvent); MailMessage msg = new MailMessage(from, to, subject, body); new SmtpClient().Send(msg); } private string ComputeEmailBody(WebBaseEvent raisedEvent) { WebRequestErrorEvent errorEvent = raisedEvent as WebRequestErrorEvent; if ( null != errorEvent) return ErrorEventFormattingHelper.FormatRequestErrorEvent(errorEvent); else return raisedEvent.ToString(); } private string ComputeEmailSubject(WebBaseEvent raisedEvent) { StringBuilder subjectBuilder = new StringBuilder(); // surface some details in subject about error events WebBaseErrorEvent errorEvent = raisedEvent as WebBaseErrorEvent; if ( null != errorEvent) { Exception unhandledException = errorEvent.ErrorException; // drill through reflection exceptions to show the root cause TargetInvocationException invocationException = unhandledException as TargetInvocationException; if ( null != invocationException) { Exception innerException = DrillIntoTargetInvocationException(invocationException); subjectBuilder.AppendFormat( "{0}" , (innerException ?? invocationException).GetType().Name); if ( null != innerException) subjectBuilder.Append( " (via reflection)" ); } else subjectBuilder.Append(unhandledException.GetType().Name); } // if we've not got anything better // just show the event type in the subject if (0 == subjectBuilder.Length) subjectBuilder.AppendFormat( "Event type: {0}" , raisedEvent.GetType().Name); if (! string .IsNullOrEmpty(subjectPrefix))...(read more)

CSLA Light Prerelease 2 available

Rockford Lhotka — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 04:47:53 GMT

I've put another prerelease of CSLA Light (CSLA for Silverlight) and CSLA .NET 3.6 online at www.lhotka.net/cslalight/download.aspx . Check out the new identity base classes in Csla.Security and Csla.Silverlight.Security - they are pretty darn cool! Check out the new Validator UI control - I think that is really cool!! It won't keep that name, because we're merging the Authorizer functionality directly into that control, so the result will be a consolidated control that does both things - we don't have a name for it yet... I'm pretty sure the ClientContext and GlobalContext work right, but the unit tests don't show that - so I'd recommend viewing that functionality with suspicion. I know some of the security tests don't work. Authentication is still evolving and some of the test apps are lagging a bit behind. Please remember, these are very early preview builds. They are not stable. They are not complete. They may or may not work for you. They are not supported. We have found, in testing, that Silverlight Beta 2 is not entirely stable. And that WCF in Silverlight is particularly unstable . If you run the unit tests in Silverlight you'll probably find what we find - that they randomly fail sometimes. They'll run. They'll fail. Then they'll run again. With no discernable pattern. Quite frustrating, but I guess this is the nature of working on a beta platform. I have also put the sample app I've been blogging about at http://www.lhotka.net/files/cslalight/SimpleCslaLightAppvb-080803.zip . This sample app shows all the things I've talked about in my Part 1 and Part 2 posts, and I'll be coming out with more posts in the series in the next few days. Read More......(read more)

CSLA .NET 3.5.1 released

Rockford Lhotka — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 03:49:43 GMT

CSLA .NET version 3.5.1 has been released and is now available at www.lhotka.net/cslanet/download.aspx . This is a bug-fix release, and includes a number of very important bug fixes in the following areas: Windows Forms data binding LINQ to CSLA SmartDate type conversion Please see the change log for a full list of changes and fixes. If you are using version 3.5.0, I strongly recommend upgrading to 3.5.1. Read More......(read more)

Twisted Coronas

Security Briefs — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 17:33:51 GMT

Okay it's Saturday, so let me share something completely nontechnical and fun. What you need to make these cocktails: Six pack of Corona Extra Bottle of Bacardi Limon Lime Coctail stirrer (a chopstick works fine) Pop a slice of lime into a Corona and hand to a friend. Have them drink the neck, then refill with Bacardi Limon (putting the lime in first seems to reduce fizzing). Stir and hand back to them so they can drink it down as it fizzes up a bit. Mixing rum and beer may sound nasty, but this actually results in a very smooth, tasty drink. It's our favorite accompaniment when we are playing Rock Band . We took this recipe and applied it to one of our other favorite beers as well: Honey Moon Summer Ale (also works with Blue Moon , or any other typically orange-flavored beer). Just use Barcardi O instead of Limon. Enjoy! Read More......(read more)

Comments

Security Briefs — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 21:38:00 GMT

We recently switched our blog engine out, and I'm still getting the hang of the new system. Looks like due to a misconfiguration, several comments have been waiting for moderation for days or weeks. If yours was one of them, please accept my apology - I didn't have email notifications turned on, so I wasn't being notified that comments were coming in. I've since fixed the problem, so your comments should show up sooner. Sorry for any confusion! Read More......(read more)

Better exception reporting in ASP.NET

Security Briefs — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 20:30:05 GMT

In my last post , I commented on how ASP.NET health monitoring doesn't output stack traces for inner exceptions, which can be problematic due to its heavy reliance on reflection. I spent the morning doing some further spelunking with reflector , and my first solution was to implement a custom WebEvent that overrides ToString() to format itself with all of the data I care about. I then overrode the Error event via global.asax and raised my custom event, instead of letting ASP.NET raise its default event. This worked reasonably well with the SimpleMailWebEventProvider, but didn't seem to change anything at all with the event log provider. What I found is that the two providers were using entirely different means to format the events! The email provider calls ToString(bool, bool) on the event to ask it to format itself. But the EventLogWebEventProvider does its own formatting of individual fields of the event. Indeed, its ProcessEvent method has a big list of checks: if (eventRaised is WebBaseErrorEvent) AddErrorStuff(); if (eventRaised is WebAuthenticationSuccessAuditEvent) AddLogonStuff(); So it seemed like a better approach would be to write my own provider. I left the event log provider alone, and I wrote a custom email provider to display errors in a more useful way. This also allowed me to drop some fields from the event report that aren't useful for us. And I was able to construct a much more concise and useful subject line (the subject line that SimpleMailWebEventProvider uses is rather clunky since it assumes it might be spitting out a whole bunch of buffered events in one go). Not only does my provider include the stack traces for all of the exceptions in the chain, but in the subject line, I display the type of error that is at the root of the problem. So if I am formatting a TargetInvocationException, I drill into its InnerException chain until I find a different exception type, and display that exception type instead. Oh, one other benefit of building the custom provider instead of using a custom WebEvent was that I was then able to remove the Error handler from global.asax. All I had to do was replace the SimpleMailWebEventProvider with my own provider, and I got the behavior I wanted. Now my email notifications include detailed stack traces. I'll post the code for this provider once it's run for a little while in production and I'm satisfied that it works reasonably well. Read More......(read more)

Play games, help children, everyone wins!

Rockford Lhotka — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 19:05:59 GMT

The Twin Cities XNA User Group is hosting a very special event next month... They're hosting a huge Halo 3 Tournament at Microsoft to raise money for Children's Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota . They will also have Rock Band 2 and a few standalone machines for people to check out XNA Community Games. Even if you aren't a gamer, you probably know one. You might even have one in your family. This is an excellent cause worth donating to, and best of all: Magenic is matching funds raised by the event (up to the first $3000)!! For more information, and to register (or just donate), please visit http://www.charityfragathon.com Read More......(read more)

ASP.NET Health Monitoring doesn't log inner exception stack trace

Security Briefs — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:21:00 GMT

This can be a problem, especially when an ObjectDataSource starts throwing exceptions. The stack trace looks the same because of the way the methods are invoked (via reflection) - you end up with a stack trace for a TargetInvocationException, which basically says, "I used reflection to invoke some method, and it threw an exception. See the inner exception for details." ASP.NET's health monitoring system does list the inner exceptions (apparently up to a maximum depth of two, from spelunking the code with reflector ), but it does not emit the stack traces for these exceptions, which would be really helpful . I've spent some time this morning trying to figure out how I'd customize things to emit this, and it looks like what I'd have to do is catch the exception and generate a custom WebEvent that overrides ToString(bool, bool) and does everything that WebRequestErrorEvent does, but also generate the inner stack trace. That seems a bit ugly. A search for "ASP.NET web event inner exception stack trace" yielded no interesting results, so if you've dealt with this and have a cleaner solution, let me know. I'll post my solution once I get it worked out. Read More......(read more)

Simulating Email in .NET

Security Briefs — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 13:59:01 GMT

I use email as a notification mechanism a lot, and often in class I'll demo sending email via a technique that I use frequently when developing code. It allows you to simulate sending an email message. The trick to doing this is not to hardcode things like host, port, etc. for your SMTP server when you use System.Net.Mail to send mail. Instead, use the default ctor for SmtpClient as I've done in the code below. static void Main( string [] args) { // note the use of the MailAddress class // this allows me to specify display names as well as email addresses MailAddress from = new MailAddress( "admin@fabrikam.com" , "Fabrikam Website" ); MailAddress to = new MailAddress( "mari@fabrikam.com" , "Mari Joyce" ); MailMessage msg = new MailMessage(from, to); msg.Subject = "Testing 123" ; msg.Body = "This is only a test!" ; // note use of default ctor // this looks in config to figure out how to send mail new SmtpClient().Send(msg); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } What you're telling .NET by using the default ctor for SmtpClient is, "please use my config file to figure out how to send mail". Now you can use the system.net/mailSettings/smtp section in config to specify the details of your mail server, and all of the code in your app that is written to use the default SmtpClient ctor will inherit these settings. Here's an example of what the config on a production server might look like (if you put passwords in your config files, be sure to encrypt those sections ): < configuration > < system.net > < mailSettings > < smtp deliveryMethod ="Network" > < network host ="mail.fabrikam.com" port ="25" userName ="WebsiteMailAccount" password ="whatever" /> </ smtp > </ mailSettings > </ system.net >...(read more)