Laurent Kempé

Going live in 1 hour

Speaker at "Rencontres Solutions Métiers sur Office" with Microsoft France in Strasbourg

Tuesday, 26 April I will be with Microsoft France in Strasbourg as a speaker for the "Rencontres Solutions Métiers sur Office".  I will demonstrate the tool I developed for Tech Head Brothers website based on VSTO 2003, Word 2003, XML Schema, XML, XSLT, Web Services secured with WS-Security and WS-Policy.

You might have a look at the planning here. And register here.

Surfing the site I realized that Tech Head Brothers was listed as a Partner, nice :-).

[ Currently Playing : Pause - IAM - Revoir Un Printemps (04:20) ]

VSTO 2003 with .NET Framework Beta 2

I finally managed to have a first beta going to the Tech Head Brothers authors of my publishing tool based on Word 2003, XML, Web Services... Read more and a bit more.

So I have a cool setup for the tool that works for me on two machines, but when you start to distribute your software you face other challenges. On three authors computer it was not working, a VSTO security problem, for sure what else. After some discussions with them I realized they had the .NET Framework Beta 2 installed. And so ?

Here is the explanation from Misha Shneerson I had on the newsgroup:

VSTO loader (aka OTKLoader) that shipped with Office 2003 RTM would always load the latest runtime installed on the machine. Once you install .NET Fx 2.0 this runtime will be loaded. Each version of CLR runtime has its own CAS policy settings. Note also that installinng .NET Fx 2.0 would not migrate security policies from .NET Fx 1.1. So, the real problem is that your code simply does not have permission to load once .NET Fx 2.0 is installed.

The brute force solution is of course to force loading v1.1 version of CLR through the config file. But this will rule out the usage of VSTO 2005 since VSTO 2005 runtime requires CLR 2.0 to run and you can not have both versions of CLR running at the same process. Unfortunately, I should add.

So, I would suggest to manually migrate Fx 1.1 security policies to Fx 2.2. I know this is painful, but this is the least bad solution for now.

I am not sure I can disclose the full details but before VS 2005 ships we will see an Office 2003 SP2 coming out. The SP will contain a patch for OTKLoader that would not require migrating security policies from 1.1 to 2.0 even though the 2.0 version of CLR will be loaded on the machine.

The brute force solution is one I already used. You have to force Word 2003 to load the .NET Framework you are interested in by creating a winword.exe.config and saving it in the folder of winword.exe. Thanks to Chuck Hartman to remind me that method:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
 <startup>
  <supportedRuntime version="v1.1.4322" />
 </startup>
</configuration>

My first trial to migrate the security policies from 1.1 to 2.2 was not sucessful, so I first sent the brute force solution to the different authors. Then I thought of a solution I saw some times ago on the blog of Peter Torr : A useful regfile for VSTO.
So I took his regfile and modified to run with .NET Framework 2.0:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\dllfile\shell\FullTrust] 
@="Trust assembly Beta 2" 

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\dllfile\shell\FullTrust\command] 
@="C:\\WINDOWS\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework\\v2.0.50215\\caspol.exe -q -u -ag 1 -url \"%1\" FullTrust -n \"%1\"" 

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\dllfile\shell\UnTrust] 
@="Remove assembly trust Beta 2" 

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\dllfile\shell\UnTrust\command] 
@="C:\\WINDOWS\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework\\v2.0.50215\\caspol.exe -q -u -rg \"%1\"" 
  
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\exefile\shell\FullTrust] 
@="Trust assembly Beta 2" 
  
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\exefile\shell\FullTrust\command] 
@="C:\\WINDOWS\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework\\v2.0.50215\\caspol.exe -q -u -ag 1 -url \"%1\" FullTrust -n \"%1\"" 

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\exefile\shell\UnTrust] 
@="Remove assembly trust Beta 2" 

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\exefile\shell\UnTrust\command] 
@="C:\\WINDOWS\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework\\v2.0.50215\\caspol.exe -q -u -rg \"%1\"" 

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\FullTrust] 
@="Trust folder Beta 2" 

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\FullTrust\command] 
@="C:\\WINDOWS\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework\\v2.0.50215\\caspol.exe -q -u -ag 1 -url \"%1\"\\* FullTrust -n \"%1\"" 

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\UnTrust] 
@="Remove folder trust Beta 2" 

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\UnTrust\command] 
@="C:\\WINDOWS\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework\\v2.0.50215\\caspol.exe -q -u -rg \"%1\"" 

Now it is running without the brute force solution, so it is much cleaner.

[ Currently Playing : Strategie D'un Pion - Iam - Revoir Un Printemps (04:36) ]

X-develop Professional 1.0 released

Direct From TheServerSide.net "Omnicore has released X-develop Professional 1.0. X-develop is a new multi-language IDE for professional coders. X-develop Professional 1.0 supports the .NET, Mono and Java platforms as well as the C#, VB.net, Java, JavaServer Pages and J# programming languages. X-develop includes features such as on-the-fly error checking,
refactoring and smart code templates." Read more...

I quickly installed it to have a look to it. I can load Tech Head Brothers portal, except the ASP.NET part.... But it has some good ideas. Wait and see, but first go to bed. Tomorrow it is a BEA day :-)

VMware Workstation 5 available

The long awaited virtualization product is finally available on VMware site: VMware Workstation 5. I have succesfully updated my license form 4.5 to 5 for free and I am currently downloading it. I tried the beta of the 5 version with the possibility to import Microsoft Virtual PC and was surprised that it worked so well. Now to say which one is faster... I would say that it is difficult to see differences in speed, at least with my Visual Studio 2005 tests.

Visual Studio 2005, Team Foundation (aka Whidbey) Beta 2 will be here on the 25 of April

What can you expect from the Beta Experience?

• Visual Studio 2005 Team System Beta 2
• Team Foundation Server Beta 2
• WeFly247 training DVD
• SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition Community Technology Preview
• The Beta Experience newsletter (6-weekly, terminated with the launch of the final version of Visual Studio 2005)

I hope that this time Team Foundation can be installed on one VPC.

Updated: The information is comming from this page: The Beta Experience (Thanks Alex).

Groove Networks news

Microsoft completes Groove Networks acquisition. "Ozzie, the creator of IBM's Lotus Notes software, becomes a chief technical officer (CTO) of Microsoft, reporting to Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates." You also might read an interesting Garner interview of Ray Ozzie.

Windows 2003 Server up and running again but...

Without SP1. I had an Issue with my W2k3 server after SP1 installation, I could not fix it, so I went back with booting on the installation DVD, choosing to install Windows 2003 than repair the existing installation, and then finally I had to install the 35 patches. And now it is working again :-).

Issue with my W2k3 server after SP1 installation

The server is booting till the w2k3 boot screen then it resets and reboot
in a loop.
Booting in safe mode ends with the same effect. When I boot in safe mode
I can see that the last thing that is loaded is acpitabl.dat
So I went to the BIOS and configured the BIOS with setting saying that the
OS is not ACPI. Now when I reboot I get the DOS progress bar before the W2K3
booting logo and it locks at the end of the progress bar.

I would really appreciate some help. Thanks.

Renominated Microsoft MVP Visual Developer - ASP/ASP.NET :-)

I've got an email this morning saying that I'm renominated as an Microsoft MVP Visual Developer - ASP/ASP.NET for the current year. This is now the 4th year that I am awarded. Great news !!!

But what are Microsoft MVP

"The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Program recognizes and thanks outstanding members of technical communities for their community participation and willingness to help others. The program celebrates the most active community members from around the world who provide invaluable online and offline expertise that enriches the community experience and makes a difference in technical communities featuring Microsoft products.

MVPs are credible, technology experts from around the world who inspire others to learn and grow through active technical community participation. While MVPs come from many backgrounds and a wide range of technical communities, they share a passion for technology and a demonstrated willingness to help others. MVPs do this through the books and articles they author; the Web sites they manage; the blogs they maintain; the user groups they participate in; the chats they host or contribute to; the events and training sessions where they present, as well as through the questions they answer in technical newsgroups or message boards."