It’s one of those things you need to do once and forget about it. Sometimes it’s necessary to develop something which required talking to a webservice. A lot of the times, the webservice is secured with an SSL certificate in the real world.

As most companies don’t want to spend good money to real SSL certificates for development workstations/servers, we have to create our own. You can of course develop the functionality with a non-secured environment, but for testing purposes it’s probably useful to have the test environment match the QA or production servers.

A while back I had an issue in some production software. We discovered something was malfunctioning I was needed to figure out what was wrong. As the code hadn’t changed in quite some time and it appeared the code was good (enough), I started looking at the infrastructure and discovered it might have something to do with the webservice (in SSL) it was talking to. As I couldn’t connect to the production environment, I had to connect to a local service which was running in SSL, so I did.

If you want to do this, you need to take quite some steps if you are running on IIS 6.0. This feature has improved a lot IIS 7.0/7.5. ScotGu has written a nice walkthough about this. Just hit the Create Self-Signed Certificate link and you are done. Too bad I was still developing in an IIS 6.0 environment (Windows 2003R2). I’ll describe the needed steps below.

In the past couple of years I’ve written quite a lot of documentation, be it functional, technical, help files for end-users, flyers, proposals and much more. Most developers I know try to avoid writing these kind of things as much as they can, but let’s face it, it is part of our job.

At the moment I’m working in a team with pretty smart and experienced developers, but as it goes, one of our team members has been placed on an other team at a different customer and I was asked to replace him. The leaving developer had created an awesome framework, the code looks good, unit test coverage was (and still is) near 100% and it’s quite understandable if you step through the code. The only thing missing was technical and functional documentation. He and I tried to write some of documentation on the framework, but what do you need write in such documents?

Then it struck me, we developers are always trying to improve our coding and design skills and trying out new things and new languages, but we hardly try to improve ourselves in writing documentation. I’ve never had a class at school on how to write functional or technical documents. Also, I’ve never seen any specifications at a company on how such documents should look like or what you should describe. Most of the time you have to figure it out yourself, think of some stuff you would like to see in it yourself and create some UML-diagrams to keep managers happy (a lot of developers don’t understand UML, so they skip it). Another thing is where do you save these documents. Do you want them in a project repository (TFS), on a file share, in a CMS, etc.? In the past, most documents I’ve written were saved on some file share with a version number in the filename. A bit old-fashioned, but it works (for 1 editor at a time). At the current customer we’ve created a Wiki site in SharePoint in which we describe all the functional and technical specs. This is a bit better as to saving a Word document on a file share as everyone can change the contents and it’s available through the web. Also, it’s easier to maintain and SharePoint has it’s own versioning system for checking the changes.

As of two weeks ago I’ve had the privilege to start doing some development work in a project where a lot of expression trees are used and most classes have at least one implementation of a Func delegate. There’s nothing wrong with that, as it’s something which dates from the .NET 3.0 era if I’m not mistaken, so every .NET 3.5 certified/professional developer should know the existence of them. Downside is, if your only real experience with the matter is reading them up in a text book, there’s a big chance you have forgotten on how and why to use it. Most importantly, what it does.

Lucky for me I’ve done a WP7 project in the recent past where I became a bit more familiar with the Func and Action delegates. Still, I got the feeling I don’t know half of the stuff you can use it for. This became even more clear 2 weeks ago when I started on this project. I could read the code and visualize what the code was doing, but couldn’t implement new features in a reasonable amount of time. Lucky for me I’m working in a team with several other developers who have (a lot) more experience on the subject explained what I needed to do. While listening to them I thought “Hey, this is easy, why didn’t I think of it!” and started implementing the new code.

Another SharePoint farm installation, another problem.

I had to install SharePoint 2007 (don’t ask..) on a Windows Server 2008R2 development machine. This is quite doable, as long as you install Service pack 2 of SharePoint. I figured it would be no problem and just another install, like I’ve done a gazillion times before.

Everything went quite well and because of the SSD disk, the installation didn’t take as long as I was used to. After the full installation was done I checked the Event Log to see if I maybe forgot something. Most of the time there’s something wrong with the Search services or something else which is easily forgotten. This time I saw a familiar message of some COM object not being able to start because of a permission error. A message similar as this one:

The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID {61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1} to the user [account and SID]. This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.`

I’ve seen this a few times before and knew how to fix it. Start up the Component Services on the machine:

Expand the treeview of the Component Services on My Computer:

A few weeks ago I had to create an application which would download files from several SharePoint libraries. I had just done a similar thing for a Windows Phone 7 application, so I could reuse most of the code.

After running the application I received an awkward exception message which said: “This stream does not support seek operations”. This exception was triggered by the following code snippet:https://

HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(filelocationUrl);
HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse) request.GetResponse();
var stream = response.GetResponseStream();

I though this probably had something to do with it being a stream from a web so it can’t really check the size of a file. Lucky for me I wasn’t the first developer who had stumbled upon this issue. This blog post describes the same issue.

The code I was supposed to use is this:

Stream respStream = myResponse.GetResponseStream();
MemoryStream memStream = new MemoryStream();
byte[] buffer = new byte[2048];
int bytesRead = 0;
do
{
	bytesRead = respStream.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
	memStream.Write(buffer, 0, bytesRead);
} while (bytesRead != 0);
respStream.Close();
buffer = memStream.ToArray();
string html = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetString(buffer);

Using this I’m specifying the size of the chunks which need to be downloaded. This code is something I had used in the past also, but after I saw how easy it was in an asynchronous environment (WP7 / Silverlight) I had hoped it would work in ASP.NET / SharePoint also.

It’s been about 8 or 9 years since I’ve bought a new desktop system for myself. You can imagine the desktop I had was pretty antique and didn’t run the newest software quite well. Running Windows 7 on the Pentium 4 @ 3.2GHz and a ATI Radeon 9800XT was a pain. Even running Windows XP SP3 was a starting to be a bit too much for the system. Most of the time I’m buying a system I don’t need to upgrade too much in the future, perhaps some extra memory, but that’s about it. That’s why I needed to configure some high-end system which would be able to load a developer environment without much delay. Also running multiple VM’s is a requirement. Visual Studio requires quite some disk I/O, so an SSD is needed. VM’s can grow quite large, which means a second bulk storage disk has to be bought also. The more cores, the merrier. Lucky for me Intel had just released the Sandy Bridge architecture processors, which have 4 cores and Hyper Threading, resulting in 8 ‘cores’. An SB system should be compatible with 32GB of memory. At the moment RAM isn’t that expensive, but getting 32GB right from the start might be a bit overkill. I needed to save a bit of money for other parts, so I decided to go for 8GB for now. This means I can run 1 or 2 VM’s at the same time (depending on what’s running on them), which is good enough for now.

This is something which has been available in the .NET Framework since, well, forever. I’m talking about encrypting data in the config file of your (web)application. Every time I studied for the Microsoft developer exams I was reminded on this feature and thought “Hey, I really should use this in the next project”. Up until now I’ve never used this feature though.

The project I’m currently working on has some setup which encrypts the the config file when it’s deployed. A great feature, but this means I can’t read and edit the config file anymore. Manually editing the file shouldn’t be done anyway, but reading it would be nice though.

I knew this data could be decrypted also, but not how to do it exactly. Lucky for me this is a really old feature and there are dozens of people who have written something about it. This article on MSDN helped me out the most. I also read the feature had became available in the .NET Framework 2.0, apparently this wasn’t available in version 1.1.

As with most encrypting algorithms you need some kind of seed to create a stronger (and safer) encryption. If I’m not mistaken this method used the machine key of the computer it’s encrypted on. That’s not all too bad, but this means you can’t decrypt the encrypted data on a system with a different machine key.

Al een aantal jaar drinken we thuis koffie uit de Philips Senseo die we hebben gekregen. Een ideaal apparaat om en snel kopje koffie mee te zetten. Toch vonden we de smaak al sinds de eerste keer niet echt super (understatement)

Bij een klant waar ik nu zit hebben ze sinds kort een redelijk luxe espresso appraat staan en de koffie die daar uit komt is enorm lekker. Nu wilde ik dit thuis ook wel graag hebben, dus was ik op zoek gegaan naar die apparaten. Behalve dat ze behoorlijk prijzig zijn, is er ook nog heel veel keus.

Uiteindelijk heb ik maar een 2e hands gekocht, zodat het toch nog betaalbaar is voor een software ontwikkelaar. Het is de Saeco Talea Touch geworden, inclusief een melk eiland.

Enkele maanden terug heb ik WHS afgeschaft en vervangen voor een eenvoudige fileserver. Nu wilde ik toch weer wat meer redundantie en vond ik de Drive Extender van WHS toch wel handig (van meerdere schijven 1 grote maken), dus heb ik het toch maar weer geïnstalleerd op een virtuele machine. Uiteraard ook enkele extra schrijven er aan gehangen, waardoor ik nu ongeveer 6TB aan data opslag heb. Klinkt als veel, maar als je enkele VM’s draait, backups maakt en alle DVD’s die je hebt er opslaat ben je er toch snel doorheen.

Na een reboot van de WHS kreeg ik continu een melding dat een of meerdere services niet geladen konden worden. Meestal een voorteken dat er iets niet aan de haak is. Even later zag ik ook de melding voorbij komen dat de Windows Home Server Storage Manager Service niet opgestart kon worden. Dit klink al redelijk serieus. Ook bij het rebooten kreeg ik continu foutmeldingen dat een bestand in de map DE niet kon worden weggeschreven. Ik ben er maar vanuit gegaan dat DE voor Drive Extender staat en een Storage Manager Service ook belangrijk is voor een veilige opslag van de data.

Aangezien al m’n foto’s en documenten ook op de WHS staan moet dat wel een beetje veilig zijn. Na wat zoeken kwam ik al vrij snel op een KB artikel (940349). Dit gaat dan wel over Windows 2003 en VSS, maar dit zou dus een oplossing kunnen bieden.

Zoals is te lezen ben ik onlangs overgestapt naar Orchard als blogging platform. Qua interface en beleving bevalt het me tot nu toe prima. Het is een redelijk snel platform en laat zich eenvoudig installeren, mede dankzij het WebMatrix platform van Microsoft.

Hoewel de installatie redelijk goed ging, waren er toch enkele haken en ogen die ik tegen kwam. Om deze reden beschrijf ik de genomen stappen even stuk voor stuk.

Ten eerste moet WeMatrix worden opgestart. Op het startscherm kan dan worden gekozen voor de optie Site From Web Gallery, we willen immers een Orchard site maken en dat is een type site dat door WebMatrix wordt ondersteund. Uiteraard kan er ook voor een Joomla, WordPress, Umbraco of ander systeem worden gekozen.

Zodra het vervolgscherm is geladen zoeken we naar het Orchard template.

Na het invullen van de site naam kan er op Next worden gedrukt. Door in het vervolgscherm op I Accept te drukken zal het template worden gedownload en de site worden aangemaakt. Dit wordt bevestigd in nog een vervolgscherm.

Uiteindelijk zul je in een WebMatrix scherm verschijnen waar eigenlijk alles in kan worden beheerd. De interface biedt (nog) niet enorm veel opties, maar op zich voldoende om mee uit de voeten te kunnen.