A Developer Perspective

The Journey continues

noreply@blogger.com (Roman Rozinov) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:30:00 +0000

It feels that every few seasons, I get the itch to blog again. With the new job that I started at Sogeti USA, I think this is a great time to restart. It did not take the company long to throw me into a rather complex development project. In fact, that complexity is mostly due to SharePoint 2010 platform on which we have to deliver our product. Therefore, I will ultimately have to rant or provide various workarounds over the next few months as I encounter.

So, the journey does continue …

Inserting Records with Identity column table

noreply@blogger.com (Roman Rozinov) — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 02:04:00 +0000

So, recently, I needed to insert some static data manually within the staging environment. I wanted to align the identity column values to be in ascending order but if there are any typos causing my inserts to be rolled back, then the identity values will have gaps because rollback operation does not preserve the next value for identity. Therefore, using DBCC CHECKIDENT ('<schema>.<tbl_name>', NORESEED), I can find the current value of the seed, while using DBCC CHECKIDENT ('<schema>.<tbl_name>', RESEED,<last_used_value>) sets the identity to the last value.

noreply@blogger.com (Roman Rozinov) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 23:20:00 +0000

I like to configure my VMWare Guests to manual startup/shutdown because I use the host for both as a management platform and a developer workstation.

To assist me with managing such environment, i use VI Tookit. Only 1.0 is compatible with VMWare Server 2.0, here. Install it on either x86 or amd64 box. Then, add a few lines of configuration to initialize the PSSnapin into your user’s PowerShell profile location:

Add-PSSnapin Vmware.VimAutomation.core
. "C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\VIToolkitForWindows\Scripts\Initialize-VIToolkitEnvironment.ps1"

Fire up PowerShell and you can do the following now

Connect-VIServer -Server "vmware_host" -Port 8333
get-vm sqldev2k8 | shutdown-vmguest

Keeping up with Microsoft

noreply@blogger.com (Roman Rozinov) — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:29:00 +0000

It seems that Microsoft releases new tools at an alarming rate. It feels like .Net 3.5 and Silverlight were just recently came to market, now Microsoft is at it again. Behold that .Net 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 are just around the corner. Here is Scott Guthrie’s entry to confirm that, here.

From playing with Beta2 of VS 2010, I am highly looking forward to this release. They’ve made great strides at giving state of the art debugging, and visual design capabilities to developers.

The Beta2 and RC can both be installed side-by-side, so it’s time to play more with new stuff!!!

Submitting Xml correctly into SOAP envelope

noreply@blogger.com (Roman Rozinov) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 07:35:00 +0000

Over time, I became a bit comfortable for web services frameworks to take care of the serialization details. A few days ago, I had to deal with consuming the web service manually and quickly realized that i have not been below trenches in awhile.

The SOAP service has a string parameter which is in fact and xml fragment. Initially, I wrote the soap request in the following format:

     <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>    <soap:Envelope xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">      <soap:Body>        <PersonalizedHelloWorld xmlns="http://tempuri.org/">          <nameParameter><name>Roman</name></nameParameter>        </PersonalizedHelloWorld>      </soap:Body>    </soap:Envelope

Obviously, there is an issue with doing that. Can you spot it?

Well, you must use <![CDATA[]]> escaping syntax in the nameParameter element text. So the it should look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>    <soap:Envelope xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">      <soap:Body>        <PersonalizedHelloWorld xmlns="http://tempuri.org/">          <nameParameter><![CDATA[<name>Roman</name>]]></nameParameter>        </PersonalizedHelloWorld>      </soap:Body>    </soap:Envelope

Asp.Net Intrinsic properties

noreply@blogger.com (Roman Rozinov) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 03:00:00 +0000

By default the System.Web.UI.Page exposes Session, Request, and Response properties. However often you may want to access these properties outside of the Page context. The easiest way to do it is to use HttpContext.Current static property to obtain the current request’s HttpContext. Thus, you can obtain a session variable like this:

     HttpContext.Current.Session[“userid”].

Vote for two important CodePlex features

noreply@blogger.com (Roman Rozinov) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 07:56:00 +0000

Eric Hexter, from MvcContrib project, has just asked the community to go and vote for a few issues with CodePlex. Here is his blog for reference, http://www.lostechies.com/blogs/hex/archive/2010/01/11/a-call-for-help-vote-for-my-codeplex-issues.aspx. Go Vote!

Windows Management Framework was released!

noreply@blogger.com (Roman Rozinov) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 06:53:00 +0000

I always like playing with management tools for windows since dos days. I think the release of Windows Management Framework at the end of October is truly the next step in Microsoft console/command-line tooling revolution. Thank you, Jeffrey Snover.

Web Goat – Interesting way to learn security on the Web.

noreply@blogger.com (Roman Rozinov) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 05:03:00 +0000

As I deal more and more with web in my daily life, I realized that web security is a very intricate subject and tough to learn as well. The next iteration of CodeCamp is in town in a week, so I will have a chance to check out Web Goat. Due to time constraints, I wont be able to research beforehand, so it’s exciting to learn about something completely new.

Viewing temp table structure

noreply@blogger.com (Roman Rozinov) — Tue, 26 May 2009 03:19:00 +0000

For some reason I can never remember to properly retrieve connection specific temporary table’s structure, i.e. #tempCustomers. Due to the fact that the table resides in tempdb, this is the format required:

use tempdb
exec sp_help #tempCustomers

Highlight these two lines in Management studio and press F5!

Virtual Function Calls from Constructors/Finalizers … Bad Idea!

noreply@blogger.com (Roman Rozinov) — Fri, 08 May 2009 07:52:00 +0000

So I am skimming over this book, Framework Design Guidelines by Krzysztof Cwalina and Brad Abrams, when authors note to “avoid calling virtual members on an object inside its constructor”. At first a developer might not think about the danger but it does make sense with a quick example that authors provide.

Here is another one i cooked up:

public class Trans {
    public abstract Log();
    public Trans() {
        Log(...);
    }
}

public class SomeTrans:Trans {
    private Logger logger;
    public SomeTrans() {
        logger = new Logger();
    }
    public override Log(...) {
        if (logger == null)
            Console.Write("Oops!");
        else
            logger.write(...);
    }
}

Using the base class to execute common code that all derived classes will might seem like a good idea but here the Trans constructor calls the derived type’s Log method before SomeTrans constructor is called. Compiler is unable to detect this danger because binding happens at run-time so be very aware.

The rule of thumb is to never do that!

Also note, C++ behaves differently as it does not allow a virtual traversal because at base construction time the object type is Trans.

Managing IIS7 SSL settings without SSL binding

noreply@blogger.com (Roman Rozinov) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 07:33:00 +0000

I was messing around with IIS7 site settings and ran into the error when I tried to disable SSL requirement for access.

It appears IIS does not allow you SSL settings modifications if HTTPS binding was already removed.

Make sure you have Binding like this:

TypeMock Isolator 2.5 w/ VB.Net support

noreply@blogger.com (Roman Rozinov) — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 01:38:00 +0000

Programming Visual Basic applications?

Typemock have released a new version of their unit testing tool, Typemock Isolator 5.2.
This version includes a new friendly VB.NET API which makes Isolator the best Isolation tool for unit testing A Visual Basic (VB) .NET application.

Isolator now allows unit testing in VB or C# for many ‘hard to test’ technologies such as SharePoint, ASP.NET MVC, partial support for Silverlight, WPF, LINQ, WF, Entity Framework, WCF unit testing and more.

Note that the first 25 bloggers who blog this text in their blog and tell us about it, will get a Free Full Isolator license (worth $139). If you post this in a VB.NET dedicated blog, you'll get a license automatically (even if more than 25 submit) during the first week of this announcement.

Go ahead, click the following link for more information on how to get your free license.

Converting Mail-Enabled recipient to Mailbox-Enabled recipient

noreply@blogger.com (Roman Rozinov) — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 01:31:00 +0000

Out of the box, MS Exchange 2003/2007 do not offer any kind of way converting a mail-enabled recipient (MEU) into a mailbox-enabled recpieint (MBXU). At first, you would think that scenario is least likely. Mail-enabled recipients forward to outside of exchange organization and why would you create a mailbox. Well, in complex environments where organization has multiple email systems and a user wants to migrate to exchange but already utilizes AD, or if your organization is going through a complex migration.

To convert an MEU into MBXU, we could just strip the AD object of exchange attributes and then ask exchange to create a mailbox. However, you will notice that there might be side effects. Any secondary emails that might be attached to the MEU are now gone. Secondly, a less trivial issue, is that repliability of emails which contain MEU address book entry is now broken. To fix these both, you’ll need to track secondary emails and legacyExchangeDn of the MEU and append them to proxyAddresses attribute when MBXU is created.

$userIdentity = 'testuser'
$mailboxDatabase = exserver\mbxdb'
$err = @()
$user = Get-MailUser -Identity $userIdentity `
         -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue -ErrorVariable +err
if ($err.count -ne 0)
{
    Write-Error 'The user is not a mail-enabled user.'
    return;
}
$mbxDB = Get-MailboxDatabase -Identity $mailboxDatabase `
        -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue -ErrorVariable +err
if ($err.count -ne 0)
{
    Write-Error "The database value is incorrect."
    return;
}
$extAddress = $user.ExternalEmailAddress
$currAddresses = $user.EmailAddresses
$legDn = $user.LegacyExchangeDn
Disable-MailUser $user -Confirm:$false | Out-Null
$mbxUser = Enable-Mailbox $user -Confirm:$false `
                       -Database $mailboxDatabase 
$addresses = $mbxUser.EmailAddresses
if ($mbxUser.LegacyExchangeDn -ne $legDn) {
    $addresses.add("X500:$legDn")
}
$currAddresses | ?{ $_ -ne $extAddress } | %{
    if ( -not $addresses.Contains($_)) {
        $addresses.Add($_) | Out-Null
    }
}
if ($addresses.Changed) {
    Set-mailbox $mbxUser `
                -EmailAddresses $addresses | Out-Null
}

C# Events and thread-safety

noreply@blogger.com (Roman Rozinov) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 23:10:00 +0000

After reading “C# Programming Language”, which is more or less a dictionary of C# language features, I noticed that the spec claims thread-safety in event default accessors.

So code defined like this:

public event SomeEvent;

compiled into something roughly as this:

   1:  private EventHandler __SomeEvent;

   2:  public event SomeEvent {

   3:      add { lock(this) { __SomeEvent += value; }}

   4:      remove { lock(this) { __SomeEvent -= value; }}

   5:  }

Actually, add and remove keywords are translated as add_SomeEvent and remove_SomeEvent methods with [MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.Synchronized)] attributes and thus equivalent to lock(this) shown above.

However, There is a problem here to achieve thread-safety. Using [MethodImpl(..)] is a bad practice b/c your code is trying to enter a monitor for this object instance. Thus, if another thread of execution obtains the monitor first, your subsequent call to “+=” or “-=” will block and will be hard to troubleshoot.

Instead consider this pattern where you implement custom accessors locking on a private object and give caller to invoke event safely through a method:

private object l_SomeEvent;
private EventHandler __SomeEvent;
public event SomeEvent {
 add { lock(l_SomeEvent) { __SomeEvent += value; }}
 remove { lock(l_SomeEvent) { __SomeEvent -= value; }}
}
public void OnSomeEvent(EventArgs e) {
 EventHandler temp;
 lock(l_SomeEvent) { temp = __SomeEvent; }
 if (temp != null) { __SomeEvent(this,e); }
}

Using Export-Mailbox CmdLet to export to PST file

noreply@blogger.com (Roman Rozinov) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 21:53:00 +0000

In order to export mail to a PST file, EMS requires an Outlook MAPI to be present. Otherwise,

That means you must use 32-bit version of the Exchange Management Tools on an Outlook-installed workstation because 64bit EMS process cannot load 32-bit MAPI subsystem.

Thus, I quickly ran through a Vista 32bit set up steps.

1. Install Outlook

2. Install IIS Requirements

3. Install 32bit Exchange Management Tools, here.

Done!

New Drop of Gallio 3.0.4 is out

noreply@blogger.com (Roman Rozinov) — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 21:55:00 +0000

New drop of Gallio is up and ready. It has a number of feature improvements, discussed at here. My main concern is R# 4.1 integration.
Download it now at here.

Working with Active Directory Dates

noreply@blogger.com (Roman Rozinov) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 18:08:00 +0000

Recently, my friend and colleague asked me about how to limit an ldap search to only return objects that were created after a certain date. 'whenCreated' should be a logical choice to solve that. However, this attribute has an interesting format, see this reference. So, i marked up a few functions to help us work with the date naturally within Powershell.

function ConvertToAdDate([DateTime]$date) {
   "{0:0000}{1:00}{2:00}{3:00}{4:00}{5:00}.0Z" -f $date.year,$date.month, `
           $date.day, $date.Hour, $date.Minute, $date.Second
}
function ConvertFromAdDate([String] $date) {
   $pattern = `
      '^(?<year>\d{4})(?<month>\d{2})(?<day>\d{2})(?<hrs>\d{2})`
              (?<min>\d{2})(?<sec>\d{2})\.0Z$'
   $match = [regex]::Match($date,$pattern)
   if ($match.success) {
       $result = New-Object System.DateTime($match.groups["year"].value,`
           $match.groups["month"].value,$match.groups["day"].value,`
           $match.groups["hrs"].value,$match.groups["min"].value, `
           $match.groups["sec"].value,[DateTimeKind]::Utc)
       $result.ToLocalTime()
   } else {
       $null
   }
}

Purging Mailboxes In Exchange 2003

noreply@blogger.com (Roman Rozinov) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 21:35:00 +0000

I have recently demonstrated how to Purge a mailbox in Exchange 2007 but did not show anything for Exchange 2003. Here is what I do to purge mailboxes on Exchange 2003 server.

$list = gwmi -ComputerName "ex2k3srv" -Class Exchange_Mailbox -Namespace Root\MicrosoftExchangeV2 | ?{ $_.DateDiscoveredAbsentInDS -ne $null }
$list | %{ $_.Purge() }

For IT admins and Sales guys!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Roman Rozinov) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 16:32:00 +0000

It's been all over the web. Still, I need to post this link b/c I'll be coming back to it for entertainment for awhile.

http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/salesguy.html

Purging Mailboxes in Exchange 2007

noreply@blogger.com (Roman Rozinov) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:35:00 +0000

We all know how vastly different Exchange 2007 Management Console (EMC) is from Exchange System Manager (ESM) in Exchange 2003. The other day I had to test a migration for work and realized that I no longer have an easy ability to purge mailboxes through EMC just like I used to in ESM:

Under the hood, selecting Purge in ESM calls Exchange_Mailbox.Purge method.
In Exchange 2007, WMI is gone. So Powershell comes to the rescue.
After reviewing "Remove-Mailbox" reference at TechNet, it sounds like "-Permanent" should be piped when removing the user and that's it. However, things are not that simple.
If mailbox is already disassociated, then I can query a list of disconnected mailboxes like this:

Get-MailboxStatistics | ?{ $_.DisconnectDate -ne $null}

Now, I need to pipe the "Remove-Mailbox", but which parameters do I choose?
It took me some mocking around but it turns out this is what you need:

Get-MailboxStatistics | ?{ $_.DisconnectDate -ne $null} | `
 %{ Remove-Mailbox -Database "Mailbox Database" `
    -StoreMailboxIdentity $_.MailboxGuid -WhatIf:$false}

PowerShell Team is working hard, and for a good reason

noreply@blogger.com (Roman Rozinov) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:18:00 +0000

So, I am involved lately in issues other than Exchange administration. However, I've always liked to keep tabs on what's new. Powershell team recently came out with their new CTP2 of Powershell V2. The hot buzz so far is Remoting features, but they do require understanding of WinRm. Anyone who wants to stay in the Exchange development scene for a few years to come would need to understand both platforms.

exchMasterAccountSid bytes again, and again.

noreply@blogger.com (Roman Rozinov) — Tue, 20 May 2008 02:00:00 +0000

I have recently spent a considerable amount of time supporting one of our customers who for some reason was unable to perform MAPILOGONEx command via MFCMAPI. We were issuing the OPENSTORE_USE_ADMIN_PRIVILEGE OPENSTORE_TAKE_OWNERSHIP which translate to using Administrative Previleges.

After much speculation about lack of permissions, it turned out that customer's environment was at Exchange 2003 SP2 but did not have a fix for msExchMasterAccountSid issue. That same issue that even had msexchange.org guys write a tool, NoMas. Apparently, Information Store disallows the administrative permission resolution as well. NoMas can help a lot with the short-term workaround, while applying KB916783 ensures the correct behavior.

Now, I need to actually look at some of our apps and review their functionality under this scenario.

Changing focus of the blog a bit

noreply@blogger.com (Roman Rozinov) — Sun, 04 May 2008 23:10:00 +0000

Ok,
so I went quiet a bit just as I planned to blog more. The reason is simple. I have swapped jobs . Now, entrached in development as opposed to IT support, my focus is still with MS Exchange and Messaging. However, my day-to-day tasks are now involve looking deeper at AD integration with Exchange (various versions) and with time MAPI.

Getting Export-Mailbox Cmdlet to work

noreply@blogger.com (Roman Rozinov) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 17:48:00 +0000

After installing Exchange 2007 SP1 Management Tools on Windows 2003 SP2 x86 and Outlook 2007 with SP1, the export-mailbox cmdlet was returning this error:

Export-Mailbox : Error was found for "Name" () because: Error occurred in the step: Approving object. An unknown error has occurred., error code: -2147221233

Running FixMapi.exe from the command prompt easily fixes the problem.