Gunnar Peipman's ASP.NET blog : Live

Bookmarks2LiveWriter: Live Writer plug-in for serious bloggers

DigiMortal — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:56:00 GMT

Bookmarks2LiveWriter is Windows Live Writer plug-in that is targeted to serious bloggers who also publish bookmarks postings. Bookmarks2LiveWriter lets you download bookmarks for given date range from Delicious and inserts them to current posting. Users can remove unwanted bookmarks and format bookmarks list before inserting it. Bookmarks2LiveWriter is released under GPL. Installer and source code are freely available to everybody.

For live example check out my previous blog entry Links 2009-08-19.

Features

Click on images to enlarge them.

Current release, versioned as v0.2.0.0 beta, has following features:

Download bookmarks from Delicious.
Filter bookmarks by date range.
Before publishing remove bookmarks you don't want to show in bookmarks list.
Group bookmarks by first tag or publishing date.
Create new group for tags and dates which have a single bookmark and give a custom title to this group.
Show bookmark descriptions in list.
Show bookmarks as unformatted linked list.
Show bookmarks as bulleted list.
Show bookmarks as numbered list.
Capitalize first letter of bookmark title.
Create uppercase titles for bookmark titles shorter than four characters.
Show tag name or date after groups with single bookmark.

I have already planned some powerful features for future releases. Current version is out there to let users start using Bookmarks2LiveWriter and to get some feedback from community. Next release will have nice bookmarks organizer, data caching (yes, you can work offline too) and some other nice things.

Bookmarks2LiveWriter links

Bookmarks2LiveWriter homepage
Feature list
Screenshots
Development log (information about current, past and future releases)

If you find bugs then please report them to issue tracker. If you want to give some other feedback, ask questions, share your ideas or request features then please use our discussion board. All your feedback is very welcome and I try to help you as much as I can.

Happy bookmarking!

Links 2009-08-19

DigiMortal — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 12:34:36 GMT

JQuery and web development

Mobile

Sharepoint

Social Networks

Software

Programming

Other stuff

How to reset regional language to English in Windows Live Writer (Live Writer)
Nhibernate and the Null object pattern (programming)
Preparing Today for SharePoint 2010 Q&A (SharePoint 2010)
What is a Smart Client anyway? (varia)
WER Services : The Three Cs of Response Satisfaction (Windows)
Download details: Virtual Hard Disk Getting Started Guide (virtual-pc)
Creating Visual Guidelines inside Visual Studio (Visual Studio)
Google’s Decision to Launch the Chrome Operating System Reflects the Growing Importance of Web Applications (Google)
Google Services for Websites Adds New Tools (Google)

SharePoint: how to fix CKS Live ID logout

DigiMortal — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 10:22:53 GMT

Last month I wrote about how to add SharePoint users for Live ID accounts on Community Kit for SharePoint. Another problem we found was that logout didn’t worked as expected. When logging out form Live ID we can see error on Live ID site stating that logout from our system failed.

I found a solution for this problem and it is very easy fix to apply.

Open liveauth-handler.aspx.cs.
Move to Render method.
Paste the following code after first if.

else if (Request.QueryString["action"] == "clearcookie")

{

    Response.Cookies.Remove(FormsAuthentication.FormsCookieName);

    var gif = "R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBTAA7";

    Page.Response.Clear();

    Page.Response.ClearHeaders();

    Page.Response.ContentType = "image/gif";

    Page.Response.BinaryWrite(Convert.FromBase64String(gif));

    Page.Response.Flush();

    Page.Response.End();

}
Save handler file, compile the project and deploy compiled DLL to GAC.

I hope it helps somebody.

SharePoint: creating SharePoint accounts for Live ID users

DigiMortal — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 16:23:00 GMT

Couple of weeks ago I started adding Windows Live ID authentication support to SharePoint. I used Community Kit for SharePoint and I also made here some notes about it. There was one problem – although user is authenticated there is no SharePoint user and it is not possible assign it to any roles. Here is some advices how to create SharePoint user account when new user is registered after logging in using Live ID.

Open Windows Live ID Authentication project with Visual Studio.
Open file Code/liveinfo.cs.
Move to Submit_Click() method and find the following line:

bup.Update();
Add the following code after line mentioned above. This code runs method AddNewSPUser then creates user account also to SharePoint. This way you achieve link between LiveID authenticated user account and SharePoint user account.

var sec = new SPSecurity.CodeToRunElevated(

    delegate()

    {

        AddNewSPUser(User.Identity.Name, tbDisplayName.Text);

    });

SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(sec);
Add the following method to the end of the class:

private static void AddNewSPUser(string userName, string name)

{

    using (SPSite site = new SPSite(SPContext.Current.Web.Url))

    {

        using (SPWeb web = site.RootWeb)

        {

            site.AllowUnsafeUpdates = true;

            web.AllowUnsafeUpdates = true;

            SPUser user = web.EnsureUser(userName);

            user.Name = name;

            user.Update();

            web.SiteGroups["MySite visitor"].AddUser(user);

            web.Update();

            web.AllowUnsafeUpdates = false;

        }

        site.AllowUnsafeUpdates = false;

    }

}
Compile the code and deploy it to server. Also don’t forget to recycle application bool of web application to where you deployed the solution.

Now, after new user joins your site, the new user account is also created to SharePoint. By default the new user account is assigned to “MySite visitor” group. Make sure you have this group created or change the name of default group before compiling the code.

SharePoint and Windows Live Authentication

DigiMortal — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 13:04:39 GMT

In one of my SharePoint projects I had to implement authentication using Windows Live ID. I’m too lazy to code all this stuff from zero if it is possible to find already working solutions. I found out that Community Kit for SharePoint has something for me – Windows Live Authentication 1.0. After some hacking everything started to work.

Some notes about problems I faced.

There are some problems with hardcoded names. Instead of names that are always same regardless of language these hardcoded names are the ones that have translations in different languages. Custom list template and title field were the problematic ones. You can fix those names in WindowsLiveAuthStsAdmCommand.cs file.
After installing and restarting IIS I got still redirected to usual FBA login form. You can find solution from Click Mice, Unclick Mice blog entry Known Issues: Prompted with SharePoint Forms login.
There is one problem – instead of user display name SharePoint shows user ID given my Live ID service. This far I haven no solution to this problem. I hope I can solve this issue during next days.
There is one missing feature – after joining there is no SharePoint user created. I’m not sure what the problem is but it seems to me that it is some additional coding work that has to be done. If I find solution to these problems I will update this blog entry.

You can find pretty cool setup guide from Rolf Eleveld’s blog entry Using Windows Live ID as Membership Provider. While I am making things work like expected all tips about this topic are welcome here.