Hernan de Lahitte's blog

EntLib 4.0 Policy Extensions for WSSF (Web Service Software Factory)

2008-09-19T17:40:00Z

If you are using WSSF along with EntLib, then you might what to check this out in the WSSF Contrib Project site.

As you will find on the documentation provided, along with some walkthroughs and samples, here are the brief description:

The goal of these extensions is to simplify the task of integrating PIAB and WCF by providing the following features:

Design time support for applying policies to services.
Generating a host config file pointing to an external EntLib configuration file.
Implementing a WCF behavior that abstracts you from wrapping or creating objects using the PIAB factory (read: MSDN article).

You can also download the latest version from here.

Web Service Sofware Factory Contrib project is live

2008-07-24T14:05:00Z

The new contrib project for WSSF is out and with some of the two most wanted contributions, Import WSDL Add-on (for generating models from existing WSDL documents) and VB.NET support (where Edward Bakker extended the official February 2008 release to include VB.NET code generation templates and project types, very nice work indeed).

Take a look at the Service Factory Contrib project and feel free to send new contributions.

Import WSDL for WSSF (Web Service Software Factory 2008)

2008-06-27T10:19:00Z

Updated (24-jul-2008)

We've just finished this new recipe for WSSF 2008 project which ~~will be published any time soon~~ is in the WSSF Contribution site.

If you are eager to try this new feature, I uploaded the bits and installation doc here. ~~Note that I may also update this post with the final location of this bits once we get done the landing page~~.

Enjoy it!

Update TFS (Team Foundation Server) cached credentials in VS2008

2008-06-26T22:46:00Z

Recently I came across this “issue” or at least something not so straightforward when I needed to use different credentials from a TFS client in Visual Studio 2008.

I found out that you have to remove the cached credentials from your network password cache. In order to do that, you need to follow these steps:

1) (Windows Vista) Navigate to: Control Panel\User Accounts\User Accounts (Classic View)

2) Select on the left menu, “Manage your Network passwords”

3) Look for an item named like “<dialup session>” in the “Stored User names and passwords” dialog

4) Remove that entry with the “remove” button on the right.

5) Close all dialogs, open VS and try to connect to TFS. The credentials dialog will show up asking for credentials.

Hopefully we may expect something more “friendly” in the future for managing TFS access.

Extending WSSF.ME - Part 1

2008-03-28T07:18:59Z

One of the interesting aspects of having worked in the Web Service Software Factory: Modeling Edition For Visual Studio 2008 project is the extensibility options that allows an organization or end developer to customize the tool to each needs. However, there some areas that were left open for customization or in some cases for further enhancements. I would like to start a series of post intended to cover these extensibility points or “missing” areas left for the user exercise like custom type pickers, VB support for code generation and importing existing contracts into the models (from WSDL or managed code).

Notice that most of the typical extensibility scenarios that are already addressed by WSSF:ME can be found in the Extensibility Hands-on labs located in the Web Service Software Factory Community Workspace or in Ade’s blog regarding validation or extending it.

I Want My Types!

Let’s start with a simple example that will show how to let the type piker that shows up when you select the type property of a Data Contract or Service Contract Primitive Data or Message type like you see on the figure below.

Now let’s say you want to select a custom type or a non primitive type that is not included in the picker list. First let’s say that this behavior is by design and as you might have guessed by the element names prefixed with “Primitive” they may only reference primitive types as the suggested guidance. However if for some reason you need to reference other type, you can simply follow the steps below and include any public type in the type picker dialog.

1. Open the DataContractDsl project and replace all the occurrences of “PublicPrimitiveTypeFilter” with “PublicTypeFilter”. This way we use the base class of PublicPrimitiveTypeFilter that will simply let all public types show up in the list. Notice that you can create your own filter class following the same structure used in these classes.

2. Repeat the same with ServiceContractvDsl project.

3. Rebuild the solution.

4. Test the result selecting a type and you should see the dialog below:

Now you may add any public type regardless if it’s a platform type or a custom one.

Stay tuned for Part 2.

Web Service Sofware Factory v2 (WCF+ASMX) is out

2007-01-12T19:51:00Z

Check out the latest version of the WSSF for Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and ASMX here.

In this version you will find plenty of new features along with other enhacements form previous versions like:

Designing ASMX and WCF messages and service interfaces (Tooling, WCF Guidance Package).
Applying exception shielding and exception handling (Reference Implementation and How To's along with sample libraries).
Designing business entities in the domain model (Guidance).
Translating messages to and from business entities (Tooling, WCF Guidance Package).
Designing, building, and invoking the data access layer (Tooling, WCF Data Access Guidance Package)..
Validating the conformance of service implementation, configuration, and security using code analysis (FxCop rules assembly for WCF).
Planning for the migration to WCF (Guidance).
Applying security to WCF services according to Web Service Security (Tooling, WCF Security Guidance Package).
Applying message validation (Refenrece Implementation, How To's and sample library).

Enjoy it!

Web Service Sofware Factory in MSDN Magazine

2006-11-17T21:22:34Z

Check out the December 2006 issue and read the article that Aaron Skonnard wrote about the ASMX version of this project.

Quoting the Summary section at the end,

The Web Service Software Factory provides valuable guidance assets that help increase speed, quality, and consistency when developing Web service solutions. It includes useful written guidance and a complete reference application that illustrates the prescribed architecture, patterns, and practices in action. In addition, the Service Factory provides several guidance packages that automate many common development tasks.

And I was told that an upcoming follow up article regarding the WCF version for next month or so. That will be great, assuming that we are about to deliver this version (WCF) by mid december. If you are working with Web Services and WCF/ASMX you can't miss this tool. :-)

FxCop rules for securing WCF services

2006-10-04T05:46:00Z

One of the coolest features (IMHO) that you will find in the september CTP version of the Web Service Software Factory project, in particular related to the WCF Security Guidance Package, is the new WCF Security Code Analysis feature. This new feature is basically a set of custom FxCop rules that are plugged into Visual Studio Static Analysis feature and have a couple of interesting things....(read more)

WCF Security Guidance Package

2006-05-13T18:47:00Z

After quit a long time of blogging silence and several months working in the redmondians “trenches”, I finally find some time to share my insights of this exciting project I’m currently collaborating.

The May CTP of the Web Service Software Factory (as described by Jason) is out and ready for download in this workspace.

So if you are planning a Web Service solution using WCF (aka Indigo) and you (of course you should) need to be secure your services and have your clients talk with them using all the WCF infrastructure, then a very easy way to do this (hopefully) will be installing the Web Service Software Factory (WCF) Security Guidance Package and after a few wizard pages get your solution secured with the specified security pattern for WCF.

I’ll get into further details on next posts.

Patterns and Practices Security guru is blogging

2005-12-12T02:17:00Z

J.D. Meier is the Patterns & Practices security guru and is now blogging. You may have read some of his many articles and how to’s on Security Guidance for .NET 2.0.

You will find that every of his posts follows the same level of insight and high quality of his articles.

Very interesting the posts on Security Approaches that don’t work that describes a list of the typical ways that developers take on security in a project, and What makes a good thread model, that complements the article Template for a Web Application Thread Model.

Subscribed.

Start a new Process as another user

2005-12-02T15:46:00Z

On my last post User Credentials CommandDialog with SecureString password I showed an example on how to get the user credentials using a standard windows dialog and spawn a new process with those credentials.

Now let’s assume that you want to get the output/input/errors of that process from the standard streams (that is an interprocess communication channel) and therefore you set the required redirects property. Let’s say that you want to get the output result from a process that executes a command line tool, so you will do something like this:

ProcessStartInfo info = new ProcessStartInfo("notepad.exe");

info.UseShellExecute = false;

info.RedirectStandardOutput = true;

The problem with the above code is that you need to redirect the three streams; otherwise you’ll receive an exception like this:

System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception: The handle is invalid.

So the code to start a new process with user credentials and standard stream redirection may look like this:

ProcessStartInfo info = new ProcessStartInfo("cmd.exe");

info.UseShellExecute = false;

info.RedirectStandardInput = true;

info.RedirectStandardError = true;

info.RedirectStandardOutput = true;

info.UserName = dialog.User; // see the link mentioned at the top

info.Password = dialog.Password;

using (Process install = Process.Start(info))

{

string output = install.StandardOutput.ReadToEnd();

install.WaitForExit();

// Do something with you output data

Console.WriteLine(output);

}

Note: The Three-Redirect requirement is valid whenever these two conditions are met:

1) Starting a new process with a different account than the parent process.

2) Your parent process is running inside a VS add-in or VS Test project.

If you want further information about these scenarios, you may find it here and here.

This is the technical explanation given in one of these reported bugs.

Specifying any one of
RedirectStandardOutput=true,
RedirectStandardError=true, or
RedirectStandardInput=true
causes the process to be launched with STARTF_USESTDHANDLES (See the Win32 API CreateProcessWithLogon). This flag applies to all three handles, whether they are specified or not. If your process does not have any of these handles, then CreateProcessWithLogon will fail with "Invalid Handle".

Console applications have StandardInput connected to the console keyboard by default. GUI processes do not have StandardInput handles by default, so you MUST redirect it (even if you don't intend to write anything to it).

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

User Credentials CommandDialog with SecureString password

2005-11-21T13:08:00Z

Now that VS2005 and .NET 2.0 is on the street, I started to port some of my tools and projects from .NET 1.1. Since I was working on authentication in a Winform client application, one of the common scenarios is “credential gathering”. This is typically a dialog that asks the user credentials when logging on to the application or accessing some restricted area of it.So I went back to get my UICredentialsHelper class in NCrypto project and not only ported to v2.0 but redesign it and added dome goodies as well. You can download the code from here. Let’s summarize its features:

Shows up the standard Windows dialog for credential gathering (see CredUIPromptForCredentials API).
Inherits from CommonDialog so it has a base standard API and IDE integration.
Return the sensitive information like the user password in a SecureString type.
Flexible to configure according to the features exposed by the CredUIPromptForCredentials API.

Sample Usage

Let’s see the basic usage of this dialog:

using (CredentialsDialog dialog = new CredentialsDialog()){ if (dialog.ShowDialog() == DialogResult.OK) { // validate credentials against an authentication authority // ... // If credentials are valid // and the user checked the "remember my password" option if (dialog.SaveChecked) { dialog.ConfirmCredentials(true); } }}

The “dialog.ShowDialog()” function call will show up the following dialog:

An interesting sample that you have included in the downloaded solution is the one that can run a process under the credentials account supplied.Let’s see the sample:

using (CredentialsDialog dialog = new CredentialsDialog()){ if (dialog.ShowDialog() == DialogResult.OK) { ProcessStartInfo info = new ProcessStartInfo("notepad.exe"); info.UseShellExecute = false; info.UserName = dialog.User; info.Password = dialog.Password; info.Domain = dialog.Domain; using (Process install = Process.Start(info)) { install.WaitForExit(); Console.WriteLine(install.ExitCode); }

}

As you can see, is pretty straightforward to use this dialog and you even can customize its appearance like changing its caption, text message, banner bitmat or event setting the user textbox as read only. Enjoy it!

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Permcalc tool and FullTrust issues

2005-11-21T12:15:00Z

When I was performing a CAS analysis with the PermCalc tool on some assemblies that I expected to run under a zone with constrained permissions like “Intranet”, I came across a couple of interesting issues with this very helpful tool.

There are two especially useful switches that have this command line tool. One is the “-sandbox” switch, that reports the minimum permissions an application requires to run (so you can build a sandboxed environment, typically for ClickOnce applications). The other switch that helps to diagnose where permissions demands originated from is the “-stack” switch.

So far so good, but let’s say that you run the tool with “-sandbox” and the result is (in my words) “Your assembly requires FullTrust permission”. Well that may imply that your assembly is calling some API or some BCL function that is demanding FullTrust or… you may‘ve got one or both of these two scenarios in your call stack.

Calling Assemblies without APTCA

You code may be calling an external referenced assembly that does not have the APTCA (Allow Partially Trusted Code Attribute) so any caller to this assembly should be a FullTrust caller. Assuming you want your application to run in a partially trusted environment, you first need to identify which is the non-APTC assembly that your application is calling, and then devise a strategy to circumvent this (redesign your app or use a sandbox pattern).

The point is that PermCalc could not get the “offending” non-APTCA assembly with the stacks switch, so a more manual analisys was required (run the tool with a modified assembly with a subset of classes and keep on adding more classes until you get the FullTrust requirement).

I already reported this in the PFC if you want further details.

Classes with InheritanceDemand Permission

Another non reported cause of FullTrust requirement for a sandbox analysis was the scenario where you have a base class decorated with the “InheritanceDemand” attribute. More details on this here.

WS-BAT or Project Batman

2005-09-07T14:15:00Z

Note: this entry has moved.

Now working on the next “Baseline Architecture” wave of projects that will start launching on the next months, the WS-BAT or the codenamed “Batman” project is one of the commented projects.

Let’s review some of these “acronyms”:

WS-BAT: (As defined by Jason Hogg)

Web Services Baseline Architecture Toolkit.

Baseline Architecture: (As defined by Wojtek Kozaczynski)

Baseline architecture is a collection of patterns, software elements and service, and practices that embody the architect's key design decisions.

To baseline (a verb) application architecture is to decide on the structural and behavioral foundation of the application and provide clear guidance for how to develop the application on that foundation.

And the project’s codename “BATMAN”: (As defined by Jason Hogg)

Baseline Architecture Toolkit for Managing Architectural Nuances of Web Services.

In summary, the BAT will provide these assets along with the current (Tools/Technologies)

- A suggested VS solution structure for implementing a service application (based on Contract First Development – see WSCF)

- A set of guidance on how to develop a service with the above structure. (Expect to see different WS endpoints sample implementations like, asmx, Indigo, etc.)

- A set of guidance tools (see GAT) for helping developers to build the suggested solution.

As an added benefit, this solution will be aligned with the Web Services Security Patterns as well as the guidance automation tools for implementing these security patterns (I love this part J).

The first glimpse of this project will be at the PDC in the Patterns & Practices Agenda sessions.

Expect to read more on this project on some the team member’s blogs.

Bookmark these Security links from Patterns & Practices

2005-08-17T02:06:00Z

Note: this entry has moved.

This is an awesome collection of security links for your toolbox.

If you already know the theory about engineering for security, then you may go straight to the meat and check it out these cool How Tos (for .NET v1.1 and .NET v2.0).

And if you are working with Service Orientation and still wondering how to nail down the right security pattern, do not miss this workspace.

So summarizing;

Theory:

Security Guidance For Applications

Practice:

Security How Tos

Service Orientation:

Service Orientation Patterns