Johan Danforth's Blog

Expiring Temp ClickOnce Certificates - Create Your Own With Long Expiration

jdanforth — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:06:57 GMT

I'm looking at ClickOnce and ran into several blog posts where people were worried about expiring certificates when using a temporary PFX file created by VisualStudio. Appearently the certs issued by VS expire after a year and you will probably start running into problems with new deployments after that.

There is a KB article on MSDN that describes this problem but doesn't offer any good solutions (IMHO). Instead, if you have the Windows SDK installed you can create a certificte with much longer expiration, then create a PFX file from the cert and use with your ClickOnce application:

makecert.exe -r -pe -a sha1 -n "CN=MyClickOnceApp" -b 01/01/2000 
-e 01/01/2036 -eku 1.3.6.1.5.5.7.3.3 -sv MyClickOnceApp.pvk MyClickOnceApp.cer

pvk2pfx.exe -pvk MyClickOnceApp.pvk -spc MyClickOnceApp.cer -pfx MyClickOnceApp.pfx

This has been described in several places out there and my initial tests with makecert/pvk2pfx seems to work well so I'm storing the steps here for later use. I'm going to use it for a Codeplex project I'm opening up soon, so stay tuned...

A Decent Search Replace In Multiple Files Tool

jdanforth — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:28:02 GMT

Just wanted to share this tool with you.

I needed to search/replace text strings in some 600 files, and I've been downloading a bunch of crappy utilties that doesn't deliver. TextCrawler does this one thing and it does it good. A few features listed from their homepage:

Find and Replace across files
Fast searching, even on large files.
Simple to use interface
Flexible search parameters
Text Extractor - rip text into a new file
Search and replace using Regular Expressions.
Regular Expression test tool
Regular Expression library - Save your searches.
Create backup files
Highlighted search results
Export Results
Batch find and replace operations

Also, it's freeware :)

Status of Messenger Services

jdanforth — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 12:52:38 GMT

Yeah sure :)

Is it just me or has the Messenger service been kind of flunky the last couple of days? I keep getting these 81000314 error codes all the time. Not even WebMessenger is working.

Better Log Formatting for CruiseControl.NET and MSBuild

jdanforth — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:41:01 GMT

This is just a blog post to bump the topic on search engines to help people using MSBuild and CruiseControl.NET to get to the right place. I personally recommend to use the "Improved MSBuild Integration" logging option by Christian Rodemyer. If you follow the instructions on this page, you'll get it right.

You may also have to change the dashboard stylesheet somewhat if you want to add or remove smileys or other GUI-related things depending on the results from unit testing etc, but the output in the CruiseControl dashboard is nice and clean.

How to Update Google Chrome

jdanforth — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 07:55:17 GMT

So you've downloaded and installed the beta of Google Chrome and found that that Ajax story of Chrome isn't the best? You're thinking that the Google guys must have fixed it by now and you start looking for news related to Chrome on *.google.com but finds nothing... a bit frustrating to me at least.

Then you find out there's no obvious way to "Check for update..." in the Chrome app itself - unless there's actually a new version available! The trick is to click the "Customize and Control Google Chrome" button and look at the "About Google Chrome..." dialog, which will check to see if there's a new version available. If there is, it'll look something like this down at the bottom of said dialog:

Dave Taylor has written a nice detailed blog post about it, that's how I found out. Thanks Dave!

If anyone knows of an RSS feed, or official site to get news about Chrome updates, I'd love to get that URL.

UPDATE: It seems that the best URL is "The Official Google Blog" on http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ which unfortunately doesn't seem to use categories or tags unless I'm not blind. Would have been nice to have a Chrome category/tag as I'm not that interested in Picasa and the Democratic National Convention... :/

Now I just hope the introduction of Google Chrome doesn't lead into another browser war with website-breaking features like those we've had so many problems with before.

Google Chrome and Facebook...

jdanforth — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 09:44:00 GMT

...is just not working as it should. There are major Ajax problems in that browser. I know, it came out like this week, but they talk much about the rigorous testing they go through and how Chrome should work well on popular sites. Well Facebook should count as quite popular I guess.

I'm sure it'll be fixed very quick, and other than that - the browser seems to work pretty well. The UI feels clean and bare-bone, and occationally it feels somewhat faster.

I like the Google Chrome story they made, very cool.

Sorry, Deleting Your Account Can Not be Done Easily at the Moment

jdanforth — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 09:59:22 GMT

That's the message I got from the people at a free wiki hosting site when I asked them to terminate my account. I'm thinking their wiki-system is either a mad hack with database dependencies all over the place, or they just want to keep their member count up...

They told me to "go to Account settings and disable everything you can find there"...

Sigh... what to say? I was invited by a friend for a project of his. I know this situation is not unusual, and sometimes it can be hard (like removing yourself from Facebook before they made it much easier due to the massive preassure from the users), but things like this upsets me.

I guess I have to blame myself for registering there in the first place and I guess it's more or less a fact that if you register yourself at a (most often free) site on the Internet, expect to get a number of newsletters and stuff from that site eventually and don't expect it to be easy to terminate your account.

Hug a Developer

jdanforth — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 18:34:00 GMT

This video gave me a few laughs :)

ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 Released

jdanforth — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 14:18:42 GMT

Hey, I'm just helping to spread the word! A sampled a few links and quotes that has already been posted to blogosphere for your pleasure and knowledge. :)

Download it here -> http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=16775

Phil Haack said:

We didn’t originally plan to have another preview. However, we implemented a few significant chunks of functionality and were dying to get feedback so that we could incorporate it into the product before Beta. It helps that with five or so of these interim releases, we’ve become pretty efficient producing these releases.

We plan to have our next release be our official Beta, which means we’ll have a lot more test passes to produce and run before we release the next one.

Some preview 5 related blog posts:

Brad Wilson wrote about changes to partial rendering and view engine in preview 5.

Maarten Balliauw wrote about easier form validation with preview 5.

Nick Berardi has a list of news and changes and also a few issues he's found and submitted bug reports for:

Derik Whittaker had a few comments regarding sealed classes in preview 5:

It looks like that they removed the sealed keyword from many of the Attributes such as HandleErrorAttribute, AuthorizeAttribute and various other existing Attributes.

However, looks like many of the other attributes (some new, some not) such as AcceptVerbsAttribute, ModelBinderAttribute and NonActionAttribute are still marked as sealed. Guys, please unseal all your stuff. If you have a very, very, very valid reason then fine seal them. But if not, let developers loose and unseal them.

Auto Postback with Javascript in ASP.NET MVC

jdanforth — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:20:53 GMT

I've looked this up twice now so I'm posting it to my blog for future reference and as a quick-tip for others. Say you got a web page with a dropdown/select listbox and you want to reload/auto postback the page when the selection changes.

One way to do this without involving a Javascript or Ajax library like jQuery (which probably is a good idea anyway :) is to use the "htmlAttributes" parameter of the Html.DropDownList() helper method and add a "onchange" attribute through an anonymous type. Something like this:

    Select a name: <%=Html.DropDownList("Name", ViewData.Model, 
new { onchange = "doSomeJavascript()" })%>

To submit a form, for example:

    <% using (Html.Form<HomeController>(p => p.DropDown(), 
        FormMethod.Post, new { id = "myform" }))
       {%>
    Select a name: <%=Html.DropDownList("Name", ViewData.Model, 
        new { onchange = "document.getElementById('myform').submit()" })%>
    <%  } %>

The minimal DropDown() method of the HomeController class to support this sample looks like this:

public object DropDown()
{
    var list = new List<string> { "Adam", "Bob", "Charlie" };
    return View(new SelectList(list, Request["Name"] ?? list.First()));
}

As you can see, the htmlAttributes parameter is available on many of the Html-helper methods and I'm using ot to add a name attribute to the HTML form as well.

End Note About Basic Knowledge of Javascript and Html

Heh, ASP.NET MVC sure forces you to dust off that old, basic knowledge of HTML and Javascript that I think every web developer should have but the ASP.NET programming model has made us forgot... One could argue that it's niggy gritty stuff that we shouldn't have to worry about, but for me it feels good to know I'm in full control of the generated HTML and I'm not sending one byte more on the wire than what's needed. Yes, it's possible to have the same control with standard ASP.NET applications and controls, but I've seen experienced developers make mistakes around this more than once. ViewState anyone? :D

Returning Json from RESTful Interface with WCF

jdanforth — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 14:18:00 GMT

Someone commented on an earlier blog post I did on REST, POX/POJO and WCF and the comment read:

How about REST WCF bits from .NET 3.5 SP1? Is it possible now to let the user decide in which format he wants the response (xml or json) like MySpace API for example?

The convention is to use a file like extension at the end of the resource to specify data return type (.xml or .json)

api.myspace.com/.../details.xml

api.myspace.com/.../details.json

UPDATE/EDIT: Turns out I was doing this the hard way as there is support for json serialization right from the ServiceContract which makes this extremely easy. Just make sure to specify the ResponseFormat to be json. In a previous "version" of this blog post, I used the JavaScriptSerializer class, which is... dumb :)

First go take a look at the sample that Kirk Evans had on his blog.

Note that it may be easier to create a RESTful interface with ASP.NET MVC if you're into that tech, but that's another blog post.

So, first I'm modifying the REST interface somewhat, adding support for /details.xml and /details.json URI:

[ServiceContract]
public interface IService
{
    [OperationContract]
    [WebGet(UriTemplate="customers/{id}/details.xml")]
    Customer GetCustomer(string id);

    [OperationContract]
    [WebGet(UriTemplate = "customers/{id}/details.json", 
            ResponseFormat=WebMessageFormat.Json)]
    Customer GetJsonCustomer(string id);
}

As you can see, on the GetJsonCustomer() method, I'm specifying the ResponseFormat to be json. That's it :)

A sample implementation for this interface looks like this:

public Customer GetCustomer(string id)
{
    return new Customer { ID = id, Name = "Demo User" };
}

public Customer GetJsonCustomer(string id)
{
    return GetCustomer(id);

Using Fiddler to simulate client request and see what comes out of our RESTful service, we get this result from the /customers/123/details.xml request:

...and this from the /customers/123/details.json request:

{"ID":"123","Name":"Demo User"}

Why Developers Are Interested in REST

jdanforth — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 11:00:50 GMT

I had a laugh when I saw James Kovacs' blog post abot Why Developers are Interested in REST:

I'm doing some WCF work for a client, specifically around WS-Security. I stumbled upon the System.ServiceModel.MessageSecurityVersion class today. Its static properties alone should explain why developers are craving simpler technologies like REST...

WSSecurity10WSTrust13WSSecureConversation13WSSecurityPolicy12BasicSecurityProfile10

WSSecurity10WSTrustFebruary2005WSSecureConversationFebruary2005WSSecurityPolicy11BasicSecurityProfile10

WSSecurity11WSTrust13WSSecureConversation13WSSecurityPolicy12

WSSecurity11WSTrust13WSSecureConversation13WSSecurityPolicy12BasicSecurityProfile10

WSSecurity11WSTrustFebruary2005WSSecureConversationFebruary2005WSSecurityPolicy11

WSSecurity11WSTrustFebruary2005WSSecureConversationFebruary2005WSSecurityPolicy11BasicSecurityProfile10

I think he's got a point there actually. Web services with WCF can be very easy to use, and it can be so very complex it'll get your head to spin. The REST and POX/POCO style of services is definitely getting more attention, even from within Microsoft. WCF now supports RESTful interfaces, and we've seen REST-related demos by well known Microsoft presenters several times now, especially around WCF, EF and Astoria/ADO.NET Data Service. Also, it's very easy to create a RESTful service with ASP.NET MVC. We saw several REST-related presentations at Mix07 and Mix08 and I'm sure there will be a lot of REST/POCO/POX/Atom demos at PDC later this year.

Ofcourse there will be a number of situations and type of applications which require a more complex protocol than what REST can offer, but as a developer and software architect who prefers simple solutions, I just love the simplicity of it all. Or maybe I'm just old and smilingly recognize old techniques coming back again - we did XML on (S)HTTP with ASP years and years ago, didn't we? And it worked pretty darn well I can tell you ;)

The "REST effect" is perhaps the result of the WS-* race, which in my opinion exceeded the speed limit a long time ago. It's just impossible for an average human beings to keep up with it unless you want to become a WCF/WS expert and do nothing much else, which is not an option for me. I know, there are people out there, like my colleague Eric, who groks it all, but he's not human ;)

SyncToy 2.0 Released

jdanforth — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 08:49:27 GMT

Version 2.0 of SyncToy has been released on MSDN Downloads. SyncToy does not replace FolderShare for syncing files between different computers, but is a more effective way to copy/move/sync files on your computer. The dev-team uses the tool primarily to move pictures and music from devices (cameras, mp3 players etc) to folders on their computers or network shares in a more effective way. It's not a service/system tray kind of thing, just a utility that remembers a number of different "syncs" you've setup so that you can run them again and again when you need to.

The download page says:

SyncToy, a free PowerToy for Microsoft Windows, is an easy to use, highly customizable program that helps users to do the heavy lifting involved with the copying, moving, and synchronization of different directories. Most common operations can be performed with just a few clicks of the mouse, and additional customization is available without additional complexity. SyncToy can manage multiple sets of folders at the same time; it can combine files from two folders in one case, and mimic renames and deletes in another case. Unlike other applications, SyncToy actually keeps track of renames to files and will make sure those changes get carried over to the synchronized folder.

The tool has got a number of new features added from version 1.0, and I'm listing a few interesting ones:

Dynamic Drive Letter Assignment
True Folder Sync
Exclusion Filtering Based on Name
Filtering Based on File Attributes
Command line enhancements: Added the ability to manage folder pairs via the command line interface.
Sync Encrypted Files
64-Bit Support

SyncToy is built upon the Microsoft Sync Framework, which seems to get better and better all the time. Worth keeping an eye on for everyone involved in developing applications which requires replication or off-line modes.

The Touch Wall Demonstration by Bill Gates

jdanforth — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 08:41:34 GMT

This video has been around for a few months now, but it's still cool. It's not one of Bill's better demos as he's kind of standing in the way of the screen all the time, but it still shows off the Touch Wall/Surface capabilities pretty well. I'm sure we'll see something like this in class rooms and larger meeting rooms in the future. It's easy to learn to use, but the presenter will have to learn how move on the podium as well as work with the presentation and give the talk. Interesting... what do you think?

The video sequence is from the Microsoft CEO Summit 2008.

Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS Add-in for Office 2007

jdanforth — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 08:10:00 GMT

I must be daft, I completely missed this free add-in from Microsoft to be able to save as PDF (and XPS) for Office 2007. It's been around for years... duh.

This download allows you to export and save to the PDF and XPS formats in eight 2007 Microsoft Office programs. It also allows you to send as e-mail attachment in the PDF and XPS formats in a subset of these programs.