Codebureau - Matt Simner

NDepend - Visual Studio Addin: takes you as far as you want to go

Matt Simner — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 02:47:37 GMT

First of all I'd like to point out that I was kindly given a license by the folks at NDepend (not very often that sort of thing happens I can assure you!) and I'm under absolutely no obligation to write anything about it.

In the beginning...

The funny thing is that it was probably over a year ago when I first installed the product without any specific requirement or expectation. I had a little play with it (on Visual Studio 2008 as I recall), then the work I 'had' to do overtook my will to learn this new product and it lay gathering dust on my hard drive. This probably explains why I haven't posted in all that time!

But then...

Recently, I picked up an existing project (on visual Studio 2010), and wanted to have a good look inside to see what I was getting myself into. I dusted off NDepend and told myself I'd give it a good go this time...

First Impressions

The first thing I learned is that this is one significant addin, and you realistically need to 'know you need it' before you get it (see 'laying dormant comment above'). This also means you need to know what it can do for you - which is plenty!

If you're reading this and thinking of trialling NDepend, then you either have problems to solve or you're wanting to invest in ongoing improvement to your code. Both are very good reasons as it happens.

NDepend has few limitations in what it can do, as it has your entire codebase, Visual Studio extensibility and its own powerful rules engine at its disposal. It also employs its own CQL (code query language), to allow you to find all sorts of patterns and complexity problems with your code.

The biggest problem is knowing where to start, or discovering that first task you want to achieve with it. It's easy to get overwhelmed by the information it bombards you with when you spin it up).

To be fair, there's plenty of links trying to lead you to 'what you're looking at is...'

Reasons to try/buy

If you're interested in the quality of your code I believe there really is no equal. This is the tool you need. You may already be using FX Cop in your build process to check for certain snytactical rules, and ReSharper for sorting out your code as you go, but NDepend can do all sorts of 'different' funky stuff (through CQL) that goes in depth to your code to enforce things that would be otherwise difficult to do

It can obviously do all the simple stuff like show you where your dependencies are between methods, classes and projects, and redundant code etc.

Some highlights I quite like - made possible through CQL:

Enforcing of layering constraints - i.e. 'this UI project cannot directly reference 'that' 'DAL' project
Simple spot check stuff like queries on a 'lines of code' threshold - indicating complexity
Code not meeting an acceptable test coverage
For all the possibilities you'll need to look here.

Things to be aware of

It's a technical tool, and it's easy to get a little overwhelmed with what it can do and where to start.
Time is needed to understand some of the concepts and power of the product.
You'll need a beefy machine to avoid things slowing down with the addin loaded (I had to disable it for a while when I was using a solution with 60 projects as I was starting to experience memory issues). If you don't want to run it in Visual Studio, you can run it in the standalone 'Visual NDepend' application.
I'll admit I haven't spent a lot of time with the interactive reports, and I don't find some of the graphical representations of the metrics that easy to use.
I think like most products, you get comfortable with what you see as valuable, and tend to only try other things when you have time.

Summary

Clearly NDepend's a very impressive tool for any serious development team to be using. It will help you to learn about reducing complexity, dependencies and generally designing your code in an efficient way. It's basically all about improving quality.

It's also a big product that's not for the faint hearted. You basically get out what you put in as far as effort in understanding what it's trying to achieve for you.

I think the key is finding the right balance between all the technical information it presents, the time you have available, and the business benefit you'll get from code improvements.

As I said at the start. It can basically take you as far as 'you' want to go.

Worth taking a look at: http://www.ndepend.com/

LINQ Group by MAX Date Query

Matt Simner — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 05:02:18 GMT

I've found some weird, wonderful and ridiculously complicated LINQ queries for getting the row with MAX(DATE) based on a key. Most unnecessarily use lambda expressions, and some just had several interim steps. I knew there had to be a better way, and found an unassuming post at the bottom of a StackOverflow page.

Here's my non-lambda'd, contrived example... assuming you've got an EntityFramework model (i.e. context)

//Get
Client Order with (max) order date  var maxclientOrder = (from
clientOrder in context.ClientOrders
where clientOrder.OrderDate == (from clientOrder2 in context.ClientOrders
where clientOrder2.ClientID == clientOrder.ClientID select clientOrder2.OrderDate).Max()
select clientOrder).ToList();

Simple WPF Page Navigation From an MVVM ViewModel

Matt Simner — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 05:00:20 GMT

Navigation in WPF is easy - unless of course you're trying to apply an MVVM pattern. Most examples tell you about all the great things you can do with MVVM/WPF whilst brushing such things as navigation under the carpet. I've not found one person who's adequately explained an MVVM example with 'all' of the facets you'll need when writing a real application.

I'm not going to tell you how to implement full-scale configurable multi-context navigation using MVVM, but I'll briefly discuss one approach to a nagging issue - that of triggering and controlling navigation from the ViewModel. I'm also talking specifically about 'pages' here too, as I'm targeting a browser with this application.

WPF 'Page' objects expose a NavigationService property, which hooks into the WPF navigation framework. This is very convenient and powerful. MVVM effectively steers you away from doing anything behind your 'views', and tries to substitute the traditional coupling between view/controller/viewmodel (depending on the flavour) with reliance on data binding to give the viewmodel everything it needs to perform all the UI logic.

Your ViewModel isn't supposed to have any reference to (or knowledge of) your view. This means you won't have a reference to the Page to be able to access its NavigationService. There's other ways to navigate, like using more of a frame appropach (most of the examples so this), but if you want to navigate 'web-style' from Page1 to Page2 to Page3 etc - controlling this from your ViewModel, what do you do?

After messing around with quite a number of approaches I've currently settled for a very simple technique that doesn't feel 'too' dirty. It became clear (in my case) that loading the ViewModel from the View is actually more appropriate and practical than loading the view from the ViewModel (through a DataTemplate mapping as others would suggest). I found starting everything from the ViewModel paints you into something of a technical corner, as some core WPF functionality only exists at the view level. You can of course write your own implementations, but I've always thought patterns are meant to 'help', and when they cease to help, you stop.

In our example, the Application object effectively sets things up by being the all-seeing eye on the navigation framework.

The code below simply sets the startup uri (from another library), and subscribes to the 'navigated' event, which will fire after every page movement.

public partial class App
: Application { privatestatic NavigationService
navigator; protectedoverridevoid OnStartup(StartupEventArgs
e) { base.OnStartup(e); this.StartupUri =

new Uri("pack://application:,,,/MyPageLibrary;component/MyStartupPage.xaml");
} void App_Navigated(object sender,
NavigationEventArgs e) { Page page = e.Content as Page; if (page
!=null)
ApplicationHelper.NavigationService = page.NavigationService;
} }

The ApplicationHelper class is a simple static implementation to provide the whole application with what is in effect a 'bus' service - the means to navigate, using the NavigationService injected from the Application. I said this was simple.

publicstaticclass ApplicationHelper
{ privatestatic NavigationService
navigator; publicstatic NavigationService
NavigationService { set { navigator = value;
} get { return navigator;
} } }

The ViewModel is then free to navigate whereever it likes (I'm constructing the pages as objects here with parameters to use in constructing the viewmodel, rather than using a uri).

//Now
navigate to the detail view
//Datacontext
used to construct the ViewModel
 MyNextPage
nextPage =new MyNextPage(SomeDataContext); 


ApplicationHelper.NavigationService.Navigate(nextPage);

I'm sure this will evolve again (like everything I'm finding with WPF), but for now this seems to perform my basic requirements

Generate SQL Server Inserts from existing data - with Identity Inserts

Matt Simner — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 00:03:29 GMT

A good while ago I posted a stored proc that would generate insert statements for table data, along with simple filtering capability.

I broke this out again today, as I needed to recreate part of a database on a local machine. I didn't have knowledge of the schema so I just went about fixing each constraint error and adding the reference tables as required to my script. After manually adding 'SET IDENTITY_INSERT xx' about a dozen times I added the functionality to the Stored Proc - so if your table has an identity column it will now wrap the results in IDENTITY_INSERT statements, saving you a bit more time, and headaches.

An interesing side effect if you're explicitly inserting identity values is that the order of your inserts may become pertinent - especially if you've got foreign keys referencing the same table. I then just added the capability to 'order by'.

There's no automatic way to switch off column headers, so you'll need to configure that in the Resutls Output options in Query Analyzer (or management studio).

If you run the proc into 'Northwind' and run:

usp_insertgenerator Employees, @order='EmployeeID'

You'll get...

SET IDENTITY_INSERT Employees ON

INSERT Employees(EmployeeID,LastName,FirstName,Title,TitleOfCourtesy,BirthDate,HireDate,
Address,City,Region,PostalCode,Country,HomePhone,Extension,Photo,Notes,ReportsTo,PhotoPath)
VALUES('1','Davolio','Nancy','Sales Representative','Ms.',convert(dateti
INSERT Employees(EmployeeID,LastName,FirstName,Title,TitleOfCourtesy,BirthDate,HireDate,
Address,City,Region,PostalCode,Country,HomePhone,Extension,Photo,Notes,ReportsTo,PhotoPath)
VALUES('2','Fuller','Andrew','Vice President, Sales','Dr.',convert(datet
INSERT Employees(EmployeeID,LastName,FirstName,Title,TitleOfCourtesy,BirthDate,HireDate,
Address,City,Region,PostalCode,Country,HomePhone,Extension,Photo,Notes,ReportsTo,PhotoPath)
VALUES('3','Leverling','Janet','Sales Representative','Ms.',convert(date
INSERT Employees(EmployeeID,LastName,FirstName,Title,TitleOfCourtesy,BirthDate,HireDate,
Address,City,Region,PostalCode,Country,HomePhone,Extension,Photo,Notes,ReportsTo,PhotoPath)
VALUES('4','Peacock','Margaret','Sales Representative','Mrs.',convert(da
INSERT Employees(EmployeeID,LastName,FirstName,Title,TitleOfCourtesy,BirthDate,HireDate,
Address,City,Region,PostalCode,Country,HomePhone,Extension,Photo,Notes,ReportsTo,PhotoPath)
VALUES('5','Buchanan','Steven','Sales Manager','Mr.',convert(datetime,'1
INSERT Employees(EmployeeID,LastName,FirstName,Title,TitleOfCourtesy,BirthDate,HireDate,
Address,City,Region,PostalCode,Country,HomePhone,Extension,Photo,Notes,ReportsTo,PhotoPath)
VALUES('6','Suyama','Michael','Sales Representative','Mr.',convert(datet
INSERT Employees(EmployeeID,LastName,FirstName,Title,TitleOfCourtesy,BirthDate,HireDate,
Address,City,Region,PostalCode,Country,HomePhone,Extension,Photo,Notes,ReportsTo,PhotoPath)
VALUES('7','King','Robert','Sales Representative','Mr.',convert(datetime
INSERT Employees(EmployeeID,LastName,FirstName,Title,TitleOfCourtesy,BirthDate,HireDate,
Address,City,Region,PostalCode,Country,HomePhone,Extension,Photo,Notes,ReportsTo,PhotoPath)
VALUES('8','Callahan','Laura','Inside Sales Coordinator','Ms.',convert(d
INSERT Employees(EmployeeID,LastName,FirstName,Title,TitleOfCourtesy,BirthDate,HireDate,
Address,City,Region,PostalCode,Country,HomePhone,Extension,Photo,Notes,ReportsTo,PhotoPath)
VALUES('9','Dodsworth','Anne','Sales Representative','Ms.',convert(datet

SET IDENTITY_INSERT Employees OFF

Here's the script.

ifexists (select * from dbo.sysobjectswhere id
= object_id(N'[dbo].[usp_InsertGenerator]') andOBJECTPROPERTY(id,
N'IsProcedure')
= 1) dropprocedure [dbo].[usp_InsertGenerator]
GO CREATEPROC dbo.usp_InsertGenerator
(@tableName varchar(100),
@wherevarchar(1000)
= NULL,
@ordervarchar(1000)
= NULL) asSETNOCOUNTON--Check
whether the table has an identity columnDECLARE @TableHasIdentityColumn BITSELECT @TableHasIdentityColumn
= 1 from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS where TABLE_SCHEMA
= 'dbo'andCOLUMNPROPERTY(object_id(TABLE_NAME),
COLUMN_NAME, 'IsIdentity')
= 1 AND TABLE_NAME
= @tableName IFISNULL(@TableHasIdentityColumn,
0) = 1 PRINT'SET
IDENTITY_INSERT ' + @tableName + '
ON'--Declare
a cursor to retrieve column specific information for the specified tableDECLARE cursCol CURSOR FAST_FORWARD FORSELECT column_name,data_type FROM information_schema.columns WHERE table_name
= @tableName OPEN cursCol DECLARE @string nvarchar(3000) --for
storing the first half of INSERT statementDECLARE @stringData nvarchar(3000) --for
storing the data (VALUES) related statementDECLARE @dataType nvarchar(1000) --data
types returned for respective columnsSET @string='INSERT
'+@tableName+'('SET @stringData=''DECLARE @colName nvarchar(50) FETCH NEXT FROM cursCol INTO @colName,@dataType IF@@fetch_status<>0 beginprint'Table
'+@tableName+'
not found, processing skipped.'close curscol deallocate curscol returnENDWHILE@@FETCH_STATUS=0 BEGINIF @dataType in ('varchar','char','nchar','nvarchar') BEGINSET @stringData=@stringData+''''+'''+isnull('''''+'''''+'+
@colName+'+'''''+''''',''NULL'')+'',''+'ENDELSEif @dataType in ('text','ntext') --if
the datatype is text or something else BEGINSET @stringData=@stringData+'''''''''+isnull(cast('+
@colName+'
as varchar(2000)),'''')+'''''',''+'ENDELSEIF @dataType
= 'money'--because
money doesn't get converted from varchar implicitlyBEGINSET @stringData=@stringData+'''convert(money,''''''+isnull(cast('+
@colName+'
as varchar(200)),''0.0000'')+''''''),''+'ENDELSEIF @dataType='datetime'BEGINSET @stringData=@stringData+'''convert(datetime,'+'''+isnull('''''+'''''+convert(varchar(200),'+
@colName+',121)+'''''+''''',''NULL'')+'',121),''+'ENDELSEIF @dataType='image'BEGINSET @stringData=@stringData+'''''''''+isnull(cast(convert(varbinary,'+
@colName+')
as varchar(6)),''0'')+'''''',''+'ENDELSE--presuming
the data type is int,bit,numeric,decimal BEGINSET @stringData=@stringData+''''+'''+isnull('''''+'''''+convert(varchar(200),'+
@colName+')+'''''+''''',''NULL'')+'',''+'ENDSET @string=@string+@colName+','FETCH NEXT FROM cursCol INTO @colName,@dataType ENDDECLARE @Query nvarchar(4000) SET @query
='SELECT
'''+substring(@string,0,len(@string))
+ ')
VALUES(''+ ' + substring(@stringData,0,len(@stringData)-2)+'''+'')''
FROM '+@tableName IF @whereISNOTNULLSET @query
= @query + '
where ' + @whereIF @orderISNOTNULLSET @query
= @query + '
order by ' + @orderexecsp_executesql @query CLOSE cursCol DEALLOCATE cursCol IFISNULL(@TableHasIdentityColumn,
0) = 1 PRINT'SET
IDENTITY_INSERT ' + @tableName + '
OFF' GO

Use SQL Server Trusted Connections with ASP.NET on Windows 2003 without impersonation

Matt Simner — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 01:15:53 GMT

Access control and troubleshooting 401 errors must be one of the most annoying and recurring issues with configuring IIS. One of the problems is that it's often quite a long time between issues, and you simply forget how you solved something last time. This time I decided to write it all down as I set things up.

Target Scenario
My target scenario is a local intranet, where you want to use a 'service account' to access SQL Server, directly from your 'trusted' web application, removing the need for impersonation.

The benefits of this are of course that you can take advantage of connection pooling, but also removing the need to configure passwords in web.config for SQL users (or specific, impersonated domain users). This also removed the overhead of configuring specific domain users and their SQL Server permissions. It may also be that you just want to simplify your security model to work only on Windows authentication across the stack.

SQL Server

Create a new role in the database you're accessing, for the purposes of your application
Add your service domain user account to the role in SQL Server
Assign permissions to objects, stored procedures etc to the role (not directly to the user)

IIS/Web Site

Set up your web site/application as you would normally - one way to do things....

Create your web application root folder on the web server
Copy your files (or use your deployment tools/scripts to do this)
Create a new application pool to house your new web application (probably model this from the default web site). This is important as this is where the credentials will be set
Create the new IIS web application against the root folder (if not already done as part of step 2)
Associate the new IIS application with the new application pool
Set the ASP.NET version of your IIS application appropriate (may need to restart IIS here)

Ensure 'Integrated Security' is set ON in the Directory Security tab, and 'Anonymous' access is switched OFF

Set the application pool's 'identity' to the domain user you want to run the application (and connect to SQL Server) as

Open a command window and Go to the windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\vXXXXX folder

run aspnet_regiis -ga <domain>\<user> to grant necessary access to the metabase etc for the service account (as per http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff647396.aspx#paght000008_step3 )
In the command window go to the inetpub\adminscripts folder, and set NTAuthenticationHeaders metabase property as per instructions at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/326985. you can also use MetaEdit from the IIS Resource Kit to change this. If you're fully configured to use Kerberos then you can potentially skip this step, as it's all about making IIS use NTLM authentication.

Navigate to 'Web Service Extensions' in IIS Manager, and ensure that the ASP.NET version you're targeting is 'allowed'. e.g. ASP.NET 4.0 is 'prohibited' by default.

Summary
So here we've circumvented the need to use impersonation by running the ASP.NET application as a specific domain user that is configured as a SQL Server Login, and granted the right access by means of a SQL Server role. The main work is the plumbing to get IIS to work happily with that user in standard NTLM authentication (you may be able to use Kerberos depending on your network configuration).

Other background on creating service accounts can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998297.aspx

Run SharePoint Designer 2007 Workflows as System User

Matt Simner — Thu, 20 May 2010 23:40:54 GMT

There's quite a bit of documentation and confusion around SharePoint Designer workflows and the context under which they run. I'd naively assumed that Workflows would run in the context of the user that initiated the workflow, but with system user permissions.

The following offers some insight and an approach for certain people to follow in the case they have email-enabled libraries:
http://blogs.technet.com/victorbutuza/archive/2009/03/14/workflows-do-not-start.aspx

This didn't help me, as I'd got some 'working' workflows that, once tested with a non-privileged user simply didn't complete, as they hit permissions issues.

The specific issue was that these users have the ability to add into a list, but not edit, delete or approve, as the entry into the list is via a complex InfoPath form. Workflow actions occur on addition to the list to route the request to an appropriate approver, and kick of an escalation process.

It appears that SharePoint 2010 has a new Impersonate feature in Workflow, but hey - I'm still using 2007, and am 'specifically' using SharePoint Designer (for business compatibility purposes). I've used a lot of third-party SPD Workflow actions from Nick Grattan, I Love SharePoint, and wasn't about to be beaten, as I can currently do everything I need from SPD Workflows.

I finally found a solution that did exactly what I needed).

Though vigorous googling, I found in the comments of the Useful SharePoint Workflow Activities, that people were complaining that the 'Start a Workflow' action was running the new workflow as the system user. Not me! - that's exactly what I need.

I downloaded and installed the activities, but had to apply another update to get them to work properly in SharePoint Designer.

I now have a new 'wrapper' workflow, which is automatically called on 'new item' to the list, and this calls the 2 existing workflows (now manually started), that were previously set to be automatic.

This has had an added benefit, in that the ordering of these workflows is now consistent as one is called after the other. The only thing to bear in mind of course is whether this behaviour is what you want, based on your situation.

Fixing SharePoint error: No item exists at [url]?ID=n. It may have been deleted or renamed by another user

Matt Simner — Wed, 05 May 2010 23:10:51 GMT

Yesterday I was creating a page in SharePoint Designer and on testing got a server error:

No item exists at http://sharepointsite/WebPages/My-Page?ID=56. It may have been deleted or renamed by another user.

I'd got code in the page that examined the 'ID' QueryString parameter and tried to load that item from a particular list. This same code was working on another page.

This MSDN article described the problem,

This problem happens because Sharepoint has its own variable named ID which
it uses to identify documents/pages on the server. Our solution should not be using
a variable named ID.

I changed my QueryString parameter to RequestID instead and all was good, apart from the thought of why the other page still worked fine.

I then realised that if it didn't know what list it was trying to target, then the 'List' querystring parameter needs to be there too - as per other 'application page' requests in the _layouts folder, like approve/reject.

It then became obvious that I was doing too much work anyway:

Passing in the List as well as the ID allows you to then just get straight to the list item with the following code...

 SPListItem
item = (SPListItem)SPContext.Current.Item;

as the List and ID are already taken care of. A little neater than what I 'was' doing....

 SPListItem
currentItem =null;
        //Get
ID and List Item information         requestList = SPContext.Current.Web.Lists["My
List"];                 if (requestList
!=null &&
Request.QueryString["ID"]
!=null)
        {             if (int.TryParse(Request.QueryString["ID"].ToString(), out requestID))
            {                 //Get
Item                 currentItem = requestList.GetItemById(requestID);
            }             
        }

This code's still fine (apart from the querystring 'ID' name) if you need to load an item from a list that you don't know the guid for at the time.

Pass in any parameter to an InfoPath form with one piece of code

Matt Simner — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 00:18:22 GMT

One thing that's lacking in Microsoft InfoPath 2007 is the ability to simply map input parameters to the main data source (which is most likely where you want them to go).

Unfortunately there's no getting around the need to write code to 'receive' your input parameters, but with a thought you'll be able to pass in parameters with the same name as the fields in your form and have one block of code to paste into the code behind all forms - that will work for all.

This includes a couple of utility functions that make life a bit easier when coding around fields in the form.
The 'DeleteSelf' line around the nil attribute is something that apparently gets around data type errors if you've got fields that aren't just 'string' - e.g. 'number' etc. I found this worked in the InfoPath client, but not in a browser (and had to change my field data type back to string, and add some regexp validation).

publicvoid FormEvents_Loading(object sender,
LoadingEventArgs e) { //Try
and identify any input parameters and put them into their requisite places in the
main data sourceforeach (string parameter in e.InputParameters.Keys)
{ //Try
and find in the main data source, then set the value XPathNavigator formNode = SelectSingleNode(String.Format("//my:{0}",
parameter)); if (formNode
!=null)
{ if (formNode.MoveToAttribute("nil", "http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"))
formNode.DeleteSelf(); formNode = SelectSingleNode(String.Format("//my:{0}",
parameter)); formNode.SetValue(e.InputParameters[parameter]); } } } ///
<summary>///
Select a single node from the Main data Source///
</summary>///
<param name="xpath"></param>///
<returns></returns>private XPathNavigator
SelectSingleNode(string xpath)
{ string ns = LookupNamespace("my");
XPathNavigator navigator = MainDataSource.CreateNavigator(); return navigator.SelectSingleNode(xpath,
NamespaceManager); } privatestring LookupNamespace(string ns)
{ return NamespaceManager.LookupNamespace(ns);
}

Embedding InfoPath forms in SharePoint WebPart pages using the XmlFormView control

Matt Simner — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:57:12 GMT

I recently needed to take a simple InfoPath form and surface that through a 'themed' SharePoint page. It's possible to load the form in a browser without needing a specific page, but this effectively eliminates your master page from the equation.

Nick Grattan wrote an excellent paper on using the XmlFormView control to contain InfoPath forms on SharePoint webpart pages.

This is all great until you then need to send in input parameters to the form. I looked around for quite a while before I found the (rather obvious) Initialize event allows you to set the Input parameters of the form. All other methods of loading the form (InfoPath client, FormServer.aspx) use a querystring-style format.

The following code should do the trick in the case where you're passing information from a current 'list item' to the form:

    private SPList
requestList =null;
    privateint requestID;
    private SPListItem
currentItem =null;
    protectedvoid Page_Load(object sender,
EventArgs e)     {         XmlformView1.Initialize    +=
XmlformView1_Initialize;         //Get
ID and List Item information (passed into this page)         requestList = SPContext.Current.Web.Lists["My
List"];                 if (requestList
!=null &&
Request.QueryString["ID"]
!=null)
        {             if (int.TryParse(Request.QueryString["ID"].ToString(), out requestID))
            {                 //Get
Item                 currentItem = requestList.GetItemById(requestID);
                if (currentItem
== null)
                    thrownew ArgumentException("The
specified ID does not exist");             }
                     }
             }     protectedvoid XmlformView1_Initialize(object sender,
InitializeEventArgs e)     {         //Set
input parameters for embedded Form      e.InputParameters["foo"] = currentItem["foo"].ToString();
     e.InputParameters["bar"] = currentItem["bar"].ToString();
    }

I discovered that in order to write code in a WebPart page (using SharePoint Designer) you'll need to add a PageParserPath to the web.config as follows - otherwise you'll get an error saying something like 'code not allowed in this page'. I've got a folder called 'WebPages' that houses the page. The standard web.config already has the PageParserPaths element:

 <SafeMode
MaxControls="200" CallStack="true" DirectFileDependencies="10"

TotalFileDependencies="50" AllowPageLevelTrace="false">

<PageParserPaths>

    <PageParserPath VirtualPath="/WebPages/*" CompilationMode="Always"

AllowServerSideScript="true" IncludeSubFolders="true" />

</PageParserPaths>

</SafeMode>

NOTE: If you're showing/hiding the form based on a flag/checkbox etc in the page (I'm doing this), then make sure you wrap the XmlFormView in a container Panel/div that you show/hide server-side, rather than showing/hiding the XmlFormView itself. For some reason this doesn't seem to work properly (at least in FireFox).

LINQ to SQL Connection Strings with Class Library and Web.Config

Matt Simner — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 22:27:54 GMT

Most Microsoft technologies that you can operate with a GUI come with some tradeoffs. Things have certainly improved over the years and now something like the LINQ to SQL designer is pretty trouble free - unless of course you have something like this fairly common scenario:

I had a class library (Data Access), and decided to add LINQ to SQL classes for a new database that was being introduced.
This class library is also ultimately being consumed by WCF web services. I have dev, test, prod environments, so I use ASP.NET Web Deployment projects to change configuration per environment for things like appSettings and connectionStrings.

It therefore followed that I wanted to configure the LINQ DataContext connection properties in web.config. Out of the box you'll find your connection properties go into your Settings properties class, which gets a little bit in the way.

If you start playing around with the generated classes to change where you're getting the connection info from then any changes in the designer will wipe them out, so a (relatively) pain free approach to setting your connection safely is the following:

Go to your LINQ to SQL designer and remove the Connection String, and set Application Settings to False

Create a new partial class to mirror your DataContext, and set the constructor to retrieve from your alternative source...

using System; using System.Linq; using System.Configuration; using System.Data.Linq; namespace CodeBureau.Services.DataAccess
{ public partial class MyDataContext
: DataContext { public MyDataContext()
: base(ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["MyConnectionString"].ConnectionString, 


mappingSource) { OnCreated(); } } }

This will leave all your generated code intact, but will sort out your configuration woes.