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Merry Christmas - Happy Newyear

Friday, December 31, 2004
Personal
No Comments

It's been a while ago since I posted something, it has been very busy over here, and now exams are coming up.

But after that I promise to post something usefull again :) Maybe sooner...

But for now, I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy Newyear.

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Different Actions - Same Result

Monday, November 29, 2004
Various
1 Comment

This post has moved to http://blog.cumps.be/different-actions-same-result/ trying to spark some feedback with additional question.

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BENUG Test Driven Development Session - TestDriven.NET

Thursday, September 9, 2004
Tools
1 Comment

Today I went to a BENUG session about test driven development, and I finally got NUnitAddin to work ;)

A small recap of today:
- Get TestDriven.NET-0.9.615d.msi, this includes MbUnit along with NUnitAddin already setup to work with MbUnit. No more need to edit that config file yourself. The future testing tool is TestDriven.NET ;)
- Reference Core, Framework and TestFu in your project.
- Add [TestFixture] as attribute to your class.
- Add [Test] as attribute to a method.
- Right click somewhere in the class and Run Tests, to run them all, or right click in one method to only run that one.
- Watch the Output window display success or failed, and display the report url at the end.
- CTRL+Click the url to see a detailed report (view example).
For all other news, I redirect you to Jonathan de Halleux his blog, where he talks about the Database Populator Framework and other nice testing stuff.

Note:
If you have installed csUnit, leave it installed! Do NOT uninstall it unless you are good enough informed about the uninstall possibly fucking up your VS.NET installation. I uninstalled it today, and poof, adding classes and everything else trough VS.NET was broken, solution, Repair VS.NET :(

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Add IE Features - New keywords (yeah, the ones Firefox users are so proud of)

Wednesday, September 8, 2004
Tweaks
5 Comments

Right, someone trying to convince me why Firefox is so much better than IE brought up the issue of being able to type "google searchterm" into his Adress bar and immediately being taken to the site.

Well, here's some news: IE can do that to, along with imdb, whois, vandale, php and everything else that uses parameters as query terms.

How? Look at this registry key and see the light:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\google]
@="http://www.google.com/search?q=%s"
" "="+"
"%"="%25"
"&"="%26"
"+"="%2B"

%s is where your search term comes, and the name of the key is the prefix.

Another example to get the hang of it:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\imdb]
@="http://us.imdb.com/Find?%s"
" "="+"
"%"="%25"
"&"="%26"
"+"="%2B"

Got it? Sweet, enjoy your new IE power! ;)

I have uploaded a .reg file which contains altavista, astalavista, cd, download, google, googlenl, imdb, php, sub, vandale, vcd, whois and lucky as search terms. Feel free to invent more :)

Update: Google feeling lucky keyword.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\lucky]
@="http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky"
" "="+"
"%"="%25"
"&"="%26"
"+"="%2B"

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The Invisible Administrator

Friday, September 3, 2004
IT Windows Specific
2 Comments

Today something very weird happened and I doubt something this weird will ever happen again.

I was working on a site at school when I browsed to a file-server to check some paths, and to my surprise I could suddenly access ALL shares, not only the ones for students, but all of them...

When I tried creating files they got made under BUILTIN\Administrators! But I was logged on with my own student account. So, being nice and all, I reported it...

Then we spent almost entire afternoon trying to determine why I was suddenly an admin.

And this is when the weird stuff started to happen:
On PC1 I was an admin on the server, but when I logged in to PC2 I couldn't access it.
We tried different student accounts on PC1 but they also couldn't access the shares.
Then we removed all groups from my account except Domain Users, and I still could get in.
We cleared the profiles from PC1 and 2 and also deleted my roaming profile.
Nothing changed...

First conclusion: It's tied to username X and PC1, examine PC1 later.

Then we go to another room and try it on different computers. And there it starts all over again.
PC3: I'm an admin, PC4: I'm not.

In the end we checked all groups I belonged to, and their membership, deleted my profile, checked all NTFS permissions (which I could change as well..), and nowhere there was a trace of me or any groups I belonged to. Nothing had admin rights.

We forced replication to make sure I was group-less but it still worked!

Conclusion: User X has the rights of an Admin, but does NOT show up in any group, NTFS permissions or anything else...

Solution: We disabled the account and created a new account.. (Which means I have to recreate my entire profile again...)

Has anyone else every encountered this, and found out why this was happening?

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Six Invites to the Most-Hyped-Mail-Service-Of-The-Year, aka GMail

Wednesday, September 1, 2004
IT
13 Comments

Ah, well, 11 blog posts on a day is fine as well :p

With all those people giving away GMail accounts, I got 6 as well.

I got one someday, never used GMail, but hey, I can give them away.

There's too much hype around it, and I'm really not into webbased mail when I just can read it from Outlook.

But anyway, if you want one, it seems I have to supply a First and Last name and an email adress, so, the first 6 people who supply them in the comments get an invite.

Update: I just got 5 more invites, will update post when they're all given out...

Update2: All gone, closing comments

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Fix Outlook Contacts Phone Number "+32" with C#

Wednesday, September 1, 2004
C# Tools
No Comments

I own a Sony Ericsson T630 and manage my contacts with Outlook trough Bluetooth.

This has the side side-effect that I finally started adding everyone I might need to contact to my Contacts, before that I just picked an email and used the Reply-To ;)

But there is one thing that bothers me, I store my numbers in international format (eg: +32 50 .....), but Outlook always removes the + in front of it, and I can't find how to change that. And my phone needs the +!

So I wrote a C# tool that would let me fix my contacts.

You can download it here and read the full article here.

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Fix Outlook Contacts Phone Number "+32" with C#

Wednesday, September 1, 2004

4 Comments

I own a Sony Ericsson T630 and manage my contacts with Outlook trough Bluetooth.

This has the side side-effect that I finally started adding everyone I might need to contact to my Contacts, before that I just picked an email and used the Reply-To ;)

But there is one thing that bothers me, I store my numbers in international format (eg: +32 50 .....), but Outlook always removes the + in front of it, and I can't find how to change that. And my phone needs the +!

So, let's write a tool to fix this.

First we need a reference to Outlook. So add a reference to 'Microsoft Outlook 11.0 Object Library' (or 10.0, if you use 10.0 leave a comment if this source worked for you!)

When you did this you'll have two new reference, just remove the Office Core... so that you have something like this:

Our application has a very simple logic, where the Main controls it all.

1using System; 
2using System.Text.RegularExpressions; 
3using System.Collections; 
4using System.IO; 
5using System.Diagnostics; 
6using Outlook = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook; 
7 
8namespace FixContacts { 
9 class FixContacts { 
10 static void Main(string[] args) { 
11 // TODO 
12 } 
13 } /* FixContacts */ 
14} /* FixContacts */

First we get the folder where our Contacts are stored.

1 //string contactFolder = @"Cumps David\Contacts"; 
2 Console.Write("Contact Folder: "); 
3 string contactFolder = Console.ReadLine();

Then we open Outlook and get the folder.

1 Outlook._Application appOutlook = new Outlook.Application(); 
2 
3 Outlook.NameSpace olNS = appOutlook.GetNamespace("MAPI"); 
4 olNS.Logon("", null, null, null); 
5 
6 Console.WriteLine("Searching Folder..."); 
7 Outlook.MAPIFolder olContactFolder = GetFolder(contactFolder); 
8 Outlook.Items olContactItems = olContactFolder.Items;

When we have the contact items, we loop over everyone of them, checking if there is a number to be fixed.

1 Console.WriteLine("Fixing Phone Numbers..."); 
2 foreach(Outlook.ContactItem olContact in olContactItems) { 
3 CheckNumbersToReplace(olContact); 
4 }

Finally, we clean everything up.

1 olNS.Logoff(); 
2 
3 olContactItems = null; 
4 olContactFolder = null; 
5 olNS = null; 
6 appOutlook = null; 
7 Console.WriteLine("Done"); 
8 Console.ReadLine();

First the GetFolder method. This will get us our folder we specified with a path.

Again we open Outlook. Then we split the path into the corresponding folders and we look for the root folder.

1Outlook._Application appOutlook = new Outlook.Application(); 
2Outlook.NameSpace olNS = appOutlook.GetNamespace("MAPI"); 
3olNS.Logon("", null, null, null); 
4 
5Outlook.MAPIFolder olFolder = null; 
6folderPath.Replace("/", @"\"); 
7string[] arrFolders = folderPath.Split('\\'); 
8 
9foreach (Outlook.MAPIFolder olTmpFolder in olNS.Folders) { 
10 if (olTmpFolder.Name == arrFolders[0]) { 
11 olFolder = olTmpFolder; 
12 break; 
13 } 
14}

When we have found our root folder, we will look for our first folder and when we find it, we replace our parent object by that folder and go looking for the next folder.

1if (olFolder != null) { 
2 for (int i = 1; i < arrFolders.Length; i++) { 
3 Outlook.Folders olFolders = olFolder.Folders; 
4 olFolder = null; 
5 
6 foreach (Outlook.MAPIFolder olTmpFolder in olFolders) { 
7 if (olTmpFolder.Name == arrFolders[i]) { 
8 olFolder = olTmpFolder; 
9 break; 
10 } 
11 } 
12 olFolders = null; 
13 } 
14}

And in the end we return our found folder after cleaning up.

1arrFolders = null; 
2olNS = null; 
3appOutlook = null; 
4return olFolder;

Now the CheckNumbersToReplace method, this is a simple one.

We create an ArrayList where we will add every phone number in the contact that starts with our contry prefix.

1 private static void CheckNumbersToReplace(Outlook.ContactItem vContact) { 
2 ArrayList phoneNumbers = new ArrayList(); 
3 string countryPrefix = "32";

Next we check every phone entry if it contains the prefix. (I only show one of them now)

1 if (vContact.HomeTelephoneNumber != null) { 
2 string phoneNumber = vContact.HomeTelephoneNumber; 
3 if (phoneNumber.Substring(0, 2) == countryPrefix) { phoneNumbers.Add(phoneNumber); } 
4 }

When we looked over all phonenumbers, we will build a new vCard with the correct information in it, that is, our numbers prefixed with a +.

1 if (phoneNumbers.Count > 0) { 
2 string vCardLocation = ""; 
3 Outlook.MailItem vCardMail = vContact.ForwardAsVcard(); 
4 Outlook.Attachments vCardArray = vCardMail.Attachments; 
5 foreach (Outlook.Attachment vCard in vCardArray) { 
6 vCardLocation = Environment.CurrentDirectory + @"\" + vCard.FileName; 
7 vCard.SaveAsFile(vCardLocation); 
8 foreach (string phoneNumber in phoneNumbers) { 
9 FixNumber(vCardLocation, phoneNumber); 
10 } 
11 } 
12 vContact.Delete(); 
13 Process launchvCard = new Process(); 
14 launchvCard.StartInfo = new ProcessStartInfo(vCardLocation); 
15 launchvCard.Start(); 
16 launchvCard.WaitForExit(); 
17 File.Delete(vCardLocation); 
18 }

As you can see, we create a temporary vcard for this, and then launch it, you only have to press Save on it, and it's saved. As this is just a personal tool I didn't have the time or requirement to look into automatically saving it. In the end we delete the temporary file.

The FixNumber method is a simple search and replace in the vCard file.

1 private static void FixNumber(string vCardPath, string phoneNumber) { 
2 if (File.Exists(vCardPath)) { 
3 StreamReader readvCard = File.OpenText(vCardPath); 
4 
5 string vCard = readvCard.ReadToEnd(); 
6 readvCard.Close(); 
7 vCard = vCard.Replace(phoneNumber, "+" + phoneNumber); 
8 
9 StreamWriter writevCard = File.CreateText(vCardPath); 
10 writevCard.WriteLine(vCard); 
11 writevCard.Close(); 
12 } 
13 } /* FixNumber */

And that is our FixContacts utility. It opens the contact dir, scans the contacts, check for phone numbers and fixes them if necessary and pops them up with the correct information, after which you only have to press Save.

Good enough for me, me phone and Outlook playing nicely together with this.

Full sources and executable are uploaded again. Enjoy.

Error Reporting To The EventLog - NUnit

Sunday, April 11, 2004

No Comments

For this article, we're going to write a class to write to the EventLog. To allow us for easy error logging.

I'm going to use NUnit as well to test our class. You can get NUnint at http://www.nunit.org/. Install it.

Start by creating a new project called 'EventLogTests', this is a class library. Add a reference to nunit.framework.dll located in the NUnit bin directory.

Throw out the constructor and add the attribute TestFixture to the class. This will tell NUnit about a new set of tests.

1namespace EventLogTests {

2 using System;

3 using NUnit.Framework;

4 using CumpsD.Tools;

5 using System.Diagnostics;

6 

7 [TestFixture()]

8 public class EventLogTests {

9

10 } /* EventLogTests */

11} /* EventLogTests */

Now we'll add a method called Initialise, which we mark with the SetUp attribute. This method will be run at the beginning of each test. In here we will create our EventLogger object (which doesn't exist yet).

1private EventLogger _ErrorLog;

2  

3[SetUp]

4public void Initialise() {

5 this._ErrorLog = new EventLogger("MyCatastrophicError");

6}

Next thing is setting up NUnit. You can find Visual Studio add-ins vor NUnit, but as I'm having some problems with getting them to work properly I'm using an alternate method. Go to the project properties, configuration properties, debugging. And set Debug Mode to Program, and Start Application to nunit-gui.exe, each time we'll press F5 NUnit will now launch.

The way of test driven development is to first write a test that fails and then add some code to make the test pass. We have already written a failing SetUp, because the EventLogger class doesn't exist yet, this counts as a failed test as well. So, let's make it pass.

Create a new class library called EventLogger and create the constructor.

1namespace CumpsD.Tools {

2 using System;

3 using System.Diagnostics;

4 using System.Runtime.Serialization;

5 using System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary;

6 using System.Security;

7 using System.Security.Permissions;

8 using System.Globalization;

9

10 public class EventLogger {

11  private string _ApplicationName;

12  private EventLog _Log;

13

14  public string ApplicationName {

15   get { return this._ApplicationName; }

16  } /* ApplicationName */

17  

18  private EventLog Log {

19   get { return this._Log; }

20  } /* Log */

21

22  public EventLogger(string applicationName) {

23   this._ApplicationName = applicationName;

24   this._Log = new EventLog();

25   this.Log.Source = this.ApplicationName;

26  } /* EventLogger */

27 } /* EventLogger */

28} /* CumpsD.Tools */

Let's create our first test. We want to read an EventLog.

1[Test]

2[ExpectedException(typeof(InvalidEventLogException))]

3public void ReadLog1() {

4 EventLogEntry[] EventLogs = this._ErrorLog.ReadLog(this._BadLog);

5}

We mark our method with the Test attribute, along with the ExcpectedException, because this._BadLog contains a non-existant logfile, and we want our class to throw an exception when trying that.

This test fails, because the ReadLog method doesn't exist yet. Let's create it, this requires some more coding, we'll have some private helper methods. SetLog to specify the EventLog we want to read from, and IsLog to check if the EventLog actually exists.

1private bool IsLog(string logName) {

2 return EventLog.Exists(logName);

3} /* IsLog */

4

5private void SetLog(string logName) {

6 if (this.IsLog(logName)) {

7  this._Log.Log = logName;

8 } else {

9  throw new InvalidEventLogException("Invalid Logfile.");

10 }

11} /* SetLog */

12

13public EventLogEntry[] ReadLog(string logName) {

14 this.SetLog(logName);

15 EventLogEntry[] EventLogs = new EventLogEntry[this.Log.Entries.Count];

16 this.Log.Entries.CopyTo(EventLogs, 0);

17 return EventLogs; 

18} /* ReadLog */

This code on it's own will still fail, because there is no InvalidEventLogException! Let's add a class in the same file defining the Exception.

1[Serializable()]

2public class InvalidEventLogException: Exception, ISerializable {

3 public InvalidEventLogException(): base() { }

4 

5 public InvalidEventLogException(string message): base(message) { }

6  

7 public InvalidEventLogException(string message, Exception innerException): base (message, innerException) { }

8

9 protected InvalidEventLogException(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context): base(info, context) { }

10

11 [SecurityPermissionAttribute(SecurityAction.Demand,SerializationFormatter=true)]

12 public new void GetObjectData(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context) {

13  base.GetObjectData(info, context);

14 }

15} /* InvalidEventLogException */

When we run our test now, the EventLogger will throw an Exception and our test will pass, because we were expecting an exception.

Write a test with a valid EventLog name as well, and make it pass, the code shown above will work.

We also want a WriteLog method, to actually log our errors, so let's make a test for that.

1[Test]

2[ExpectedException(typeof(InvalidEventLogException))]

3public void WriteLog1() {

4 this._ErrorLog.WriteLog(this._BadLog, "This is a test entry");

5}

6  

7[Test]

8public void WriteLog2() {

9 string ErrorMessage = this._ErrorLog.WriteLog(this._GoodLog, "I have encountered a catastrophic error!");

10 EventLogEntry[] EventLogs = this._ErrorLog.ReadLog(this._GoodLog);

11 Assert.AreEqual(ErrorMessage, EventLogs[EventLogs.Length-1].Message, "Wrong Error.");

12}

The WriteLog1 method is similar to the ReadLog1 method, it tries to write to an invalid EventLog and will fail. The WriteLog2 method however tries to write to a valid EventLog , and checks if the error is actually written afterwards.

Both tests will fail, because we'll write the methods now.

I have created an enum for the three types of EventLogEntries, Information , Warning and Error. Along with an overload for WriteLog so it would write an Error by default.

1public enum ErrorType { Information, Warning, Error }

2

3public string WriteLog(string logName, string errorMessage) {

4 return this.WriteLog(logName, errorMessage, ErrorType.Error);

5} /* WriteLog */

Our real WriteLog method will check for a valid EventLog and then write the Entry to the EventLog and return the error message it has written, so we can compare in our test.

1public string WriteLog(string logName, string errorMessage, ErrorType errorType) {

2 this.SetLog(logName);

3 EventLogEntryType LogType;

4 switch (errorType) {

5  case ErrorType.Information: LogType = EventLogEntryType.Information; break;

6  case ErrorType.Warning: LogType = EventLogEntryType.Warning; break;

7  case ErrorType.Error: LogType = EventLogEntryType.Error; break;

8  default: LogType = EventLogEntryType.Error; break;

9 }

10 this.Log.WriteEntry(String.Format(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, "{0} caused the following error:\n{1}", this.ApplicationName, errorMessage), LogType);

11 return String.Format(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, "{0} caused the following error:\n{1}", this.ApplicationName, errorMessage);

12} /* WriteLog */

If we run our tests now, we'll see they succeed. I have added some more tests to check if the Entry type was written correctly.

At the end you should have something like this:

And when you check eventvwr.msc you will see something like:

As always, I've uploaded the sources so you can check them on your own.