Victor Stodell

First gathering of LEAP Sweden 2012

2012-02-16T19:00:00.000+01:00

I am back home in the couch after the second day on the first gathering of Microsoft LEAP Sweden 2012.

It has been two days packed with lectures on architecture and cloud computing. Without giving away too much, here are some short notes from this first gathering:

In software arcitecture, knowing your patterns and practices is always a good thing. The same goes for best practices. SOLID is not a new concept, but it bears repeating!

The future is all about bring-you-own-device, the cloud in general and Azure in particular. Also, the future is now!

The Windows Azure HPC Scheduler is awesome for high performance computing scenarios where an extra boost is needed. You gotta love the elastic cloud!

I will start working on a Rock Paper Azure bot this weekend and try to conquer the world.

The speakers that shared this information with us were among others Patrik Löwendahl, Brian Prince and of course Björn Eriksen that is organizing all of this.

I am already looking forward to the next gathering in march when the topic will be Identity & Access Management.

Binding a HTML-formatted string to a WPF WebBrowser control

2012-02-07T10:19:00.000+01:00

Sometimes there is a need to display a HTML formatted string in a WPF application. There are a couple of ways to do this, but the most stright forward is to use a WebBrowser control and the NavigateToString method.

This approach has one big flaw, you cannot use binding to a string out of the box, but I found a great solution through Stack Overflow which adds a bindable property to the WebBrowser control using NavigateToString.

The following class is all that is needed to add that behavior. A new depencency property named Html is introduced to the WebBrowser and the proper change action is performed in the OnHtmlChanged method.

public class BrowserBehavior
{
    public static readonly DependencyProperty HtmlProperty = DependencyProperty.RegisterAttached(
        "Html", typeof(string), typeof(BrowserBehavior), new FrameworkPropertyMetadata(OnHtmlChanged));

    [AttachedPropertyBrowsableForType(typeof(WebBrowser))]
    public static string GetHtml(WebBrowser browser)
    {
        return (string)browser.GetValue(HtmlProperty);
    }

    public static void SetHtml(WebBrowser browser, string value)
    {
        browser.SetValue(HtmlProperty, value);
    }

    static void OnHtmlChanged(DependencyObject dependencyObject, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs e)
    {
        var browser = dependencyObject as WebBrowser;
        if (browser != null)
        {
            browser.NavigateToString(e.NewValue);
        }
    }
}

To bind this property the XAML looks like this:

<WebBrowser local:BrowserBehavior.Html="{Binding Path=HtmlText}"></WebBrowser>

Since we are printing some swedish characters the encoding got a little bit funky. This is nothing that the WebBrowser control itself affects, but it has to be set with an encoding meta tag in the HTML. So simply add the following meta tag to the head section of the HTML to be shown in the browser control:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />

Another thing that does not seem to be able to affect on the WebBrowser control is the context menu. The default context menu is the same as you would get in an Internet Explorer window. When using the NavigateToString method to add the content the navigation in the browser control will not work. Hence we would like to hide the context menu. The easiest way to do so is with a litte javascript in the rendered HTML:

<body oncontextmenu="return false;">

By adding these little hacks we have an easy way to show HTML content in a bindable fashion. Sure there are still some caveats to this solution, for instance an F5 keystroke will refresh the browser window. But we cannot use WebBrowserShortcutsEnabled since we want the users to be able to copy text from the browser using the Ctrl-C shortcut.

New Silverlight 5 features in The Cornball

2012-01-21T20:10:00.000+01:00

The release of Silverlight 5 is allegedly the last major release of Silverlight, but it brought some great stuff that I have now incorporated in the latest release of The Cornball.

There are a lot of good descriptions and even video samples of the new features in What's new in Silverlight 5. These are the two new features that I am using in The Cornball.

Mouse Button Double Click
Previously I have used a custom implementation with a timer to capture double clicks on the cards. But since this feature finally is included in the framework I decided to use that instead. The MouseButtonEventArgs now has a ClickCount property which simply indicates the number of times the mouse button was clicked. That leaves us with a much cleaner implementation of the single and double click scenario.

private void CardMouseLeftButtonDown(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e)
{
    switch (e.ClickCount)
    {
    case 1:
        // Handle single click
        break;
    case 2:
        // Handle double click
        break;
    }
}

Low-Latency Sound Effects
I have had plans to include sound effects before, but there haven't really been a good enough solution to do so. The MediaElement tag made it possible to play video and audio, but was never really meant to play sound effects in this matter. In Silverlight 5 a couple of classes from the XNA framework are included, SoundEffect and SoundEffectInstance.

Instead of showing any of my code I would like to recommend the video sample by Pete Brown that displays these new features in a very good way.

To see the results of what I accomplished, please visit The Cornball and try to beat the high score!

Microsoft LEAP Sweden 2012

2012-01-18T09:30:00.002+01:00

I have been privileged to participate in the Lead Enterprise Architect Program at Microsoft this spring.

The Lead Enterprise Architect Program (LEAP) is a program that aims to give understanding of the strategic core components of the Microsoft platform.

LEAP consists of five master class training sessions as well as three days of sessions at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Seattle.

The direction of the classes are extremely appealing and I really hope that they will live up to my expectations:

Application architecture on the Microsoft Platform
Cloud computing for Architects
Identity & Access Management
Integration on premises and in the cloud
Business Intelligence and Enterprise Search

The program starts in February and ends with the trip to Redmond in the end of May. During this time I will try to write as much as possible about this whole experience, which I hope will be amazing!

My experience with TFS Preview

2012-01-11T10:58:00.000+01:00

I have been using the Team Foundation Services preview for a while now, and the least I can say is that I am impressed! The web interface has a nice Metro style design and gives a high quality experience overall.

By installing the KB2581206 hotfix I can also access my TFS account from Visual Studio, which is absolutely fantastic. I might even sound a bit fanatic by saying that it is like a dream come true... The server appears as a traditional Team Foundation Server in Visual Studio apart from the logon process (a Windows Live popup window). Read more and try it out yourself!

Besides playing around with the user interface I have actually tried to work a little seriously with the service as well. Partly by uploading my project the Cornball and developing against the TFS in Visual Studio. So far this experience is very positive and I have not found any issues or oddities at all, except that the environment is kind of slow. This whole thing also takes me one step further out in the world of clouds. Particularly the Cornball, since hardly anything of that is left on my computer.

Here is a snapshot of the start page in my Cornball project, which is very empty at the time...

Google Search Appliance .NET solution

2012-01-03T18:02:00.000+01:00

I recently worked on a project to integrate the search results from a Google Search Appliance into a .NET application. Although it seems like a pretty straight forward task, there were some small issues that I thought I might share.

Background
The communication with the Google Search Appliance is made simply with a HTTP GET request, which returns an XML formatted response. As for the Suggest service, the request looks about the same but the result returned is JSON encoded. For more information, please see the Google Search Appliance documentation, which is very extensive.

Internationalization
Since this solution was to incorporate several languages, the .NET application had to support and differentiate the languages. The GSA has very good built-in language support but there were at least one thing that was not completely obvious.

The GSA uses either HTTP headers or query string parameters to determine in which language the request is made. If neither of these are supplied the GSA may not return a correct response. This was the issue in our case, where we got unpredictable results in the spelling suggestions.

Summary: Always send an appropriate Accept-Charset and Accept-Language HTTP header.

XPath or LINQ to Xml?
There is already a publicly available .NET library (GSALib) to communicate with the Google Search Appliance, but for several reasons I chose not to use that library and build our own customized library. Since all responses from the GSA is XML formatted a key element in the communication is the XML parsing.

In .NET today there are basically two different choices, XPath or LINQ to XML. In the decision making process there were two key features to consider, ease of use and performance. MSDN published an article on this subject, Comparison of XPath and LINQ to XML. The following blog even took their time to make a little performance test, XPath vs LINQ to XML.

Summary: I chose LINQ to XML mostly because of its composition, which produces code that is easier to read and modify since we practically always read all elements in the XML file.

Changes in my life, and on my blog

2011-12-01T20:20:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I did my last working day at my previous employer and the next week I will begin my employment as a Microsoft consultant at Connecta in Stockholm. Of course this means that things will change, but only for the better I hope. Leaving a position that you like on a workplace that you like is a tough decision. But in my case there are some amazing possibilities and challenges that I just cannot turn down.

The type of work I will be doing differs a bit from my previous position. I will be more focused on development, which also means that I will try to change the direction of this blog to be more development oriented. At the same time, I have come to realize that by blogging in Swedish I do not really contribute to the community as much as I could. Therefore I have chosen to translate my previous posts to English and continue to blog in English from now on.

Furthermore I have decided to focus more on my blog. I have some interesting projects ahead, both personal and professional, which mean that could I easily increase my blogging frequency. Because the more challenges I run into, the more I will have to write about. Hopefully this will all turn out well and if so, it will be a great 2012!

Google+ finally for everyone!

2011-11-03T17:50:00.003+01:00

There have been a lot of whining on Google from their Apps-users since the launch of Google+ for everyone with a regular Google-account. The Apps-users have not been able to use Google+, until now! (actually october 27)

As usual I am impressed with most of the things Google accomplishes, but now when all of their services have gotten a visual and functional touchup I am getting really impressed.

As someone at an early stage pointed out it is really sweet of Google to play naive and let me fill in my profile information when I create my profile (as if Google did not already know), but after a few clicks I am on the go. My albums from Picasa is automatically integrated and even the pictures I have uploaded to this blog is shown in Google+.

But what happens next? Practically no one of my friends are on Google+ so what do I use it for? I guess we will see. Hopefully there will be even more integration between the social networks in the future. I am anyhow very satified with the fact that you now can find me on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, this blog and now also Google+!

User.Identity returns old login name after name change

2011-08-19T11:23:00.002+02:00

When a person gets married or makes a name change for some other reason this usually means that the login name for the Active Directory-account changes as well. This is rarely a problem, but it turned out to cause some issues on our web server, where the User.Identity property was still returning the old login name.

The user logged on with the new login name, but was identified by the web application as the old login name. The reason this occurs is because the User.Identity property relies on the LsaLookupSids method to convert the user SID to a login name. The method first calls the local LSA-cache, which is not synchronized with the Active Directory.

For this purpose a simple reboot of the web server to clear the LSA-cache propably would have sufficed. But since we didn't want to take the application offline rebooting was not an option. Instead, it is possible to set the registry value LsaLookupCacheMaxSize in HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa. If this value is set to 0 the LSA-cache is cleared. It is recommended that the setting is reset after the cache is cleared, since the main purpose of the LSA-cache is to enhance performance.

Read more about this issue and the solution here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946358

Windows Server 2008 R2 DNS issues

2011-08-11T14:28:00.003+02:00

This week we stumbled upon some weirdness in our new 2008 R2 DNS servers. A couple of URLs, for example www.smhi.se and www.stockholm.se could not be resolved from a 2008 R2 server. The existing 2003 servers with the same configuration worked perfectly.

After thorough troubleshooting we found out that there is a new default setting in Windows Server 2008 R2 regarding the EDNS-protocol that caused the issues. Not all of the DNS servers around the internet are able to handle EDNS, but in 2008 R2 this protocol is enabled by default. Normally you would think there is a fallback mechanism to standard DNS protocol if an EDNS request fails, but Windows Server does not have that.

The solution was simply to disable EDNS by using the command: dnscmd /config /EnableEDNSProbes 0

Scott Forsyth has written more about this issue and how he found the solution:
http://weblogs.asp.net/owscott/archive/2009/09/15/windows-server-2008-r2-dns-issues.aspx

Configure static ports for Exchange

2011-08-03T11:28:00.000+02:00

In a firewalled Exchange environment it is always easier if Exchange communicates on static ports. Normally RPC on port 135 is used to initialize the communication. Any further communication is made through a port dynamically selected by each service on the Exchange-server.

I will not go deeper into how this is made, because it has been described very well in this blog:
http://www.proexchange.be/blogs/exchange2007/archive/2009/05/18/configuring-static-ports-for-exchange-2007.aspx

Except from the traditional bribes to the network guys, there were just a couple of registry settings on the Exchange-server and some of the clients to make everything work as a charm, even through the firewalls.

Moving to the cloud - part 4

2011-06-21T08:25:00.004+02:00

When e-mail, files and blog are already in the cloud the Cornball is the only application left on my hosting provider. It is now getting really exciting because there is no doubt that the Corball should move to the Microsoft cloud, Windows Azure.

The Cornball is a Silverlight application which communicates through a WCF service with a MySQL database, all on the same hosting provider. This is about to be converted into a Silverlight application which communicates through a WCF service on Windows Azure that in turn communicates with an SQL Azure database.

Microsoft have published a lot of information to get started with Windows Azure, but basically it is quite simple. After downloading the tools and SDK it is just to get on with the development. Through my MSDN subscription I have got some free Azure capacity so just by logging on to the Windows Azure portal I am ready to configure my cloud.

The Windows Azure Management Portal is a Silverlight based user interface which is very easy to use an intuitive. There is a wide variety of settings and possibilities, but the things I needed for my application was to create a Data Store, a database and also a Hosted Service. Once these components were created I could easily set up a connection in Visual Studion which enabled me to Deploy my application directly to the cloud.

SQL Azure has a Silverlight based user interface as well, and it works perfectly for my simple needs. I have only got two tables and a couple of stored procedures. There are some limitations in SQL Azure compared to SQL Server but since I was moving from a MySQL server that was nothing I really thought about.

So, now I have moved e-mail, files, web sites and databases to the cloud and I could not be more happy! Everything has been running as clockwork and I have saved some money each year as well. I have also gained a lot of experience and set myself free from some worries.

Moving to the cloud - part 3

2011-06-07T17:01:00.001+02:00

This blog was previously published using WordPress at a service provider. There were no problems at all with that setup, on the contrary WordPress is a great platform. But if I am going to the cloud, I am going to do it fully.

A quick solution would be to register an account on WordPress.com which offers free WordPress hosting. The only problem is that if you would like your own domain name it is not free anymore. Not that it is expensive, it is just not free. After investigating som other options i finally ended up using Google's Blogger. Maybe not bacause it is the best solution, but mainly because it covers my needs just fine.

As always it is very easy to get going, and the transfer of my existing posts from WordPress worked perfectly thanks to WordPress2Blogger. So after about an hour with configuring and converting this blog is now in the cloud.

Moving to the cloud - part 2

2011-05-20T16:42:00.000+02:00

I would really like to recommend Dropbox to store your files. The free version offers 2 GB of storage and the software can run on all my computers and my phone. There are of course several services that do almost the same thing, but so far I have not found anyone that does it as good as Dropbox.

Moving the files to the cloud was easy. I just created an account, installed the software and moved my files to the designated directory. Since then my free account have been upgraded to 3 GB because I made some friends join Dropbox.

The next step was to move my e-mail from my current service provider to Gmail. Wint Google Apps I get exactly the same functionality as a previously had, but also a better web user interface.

The challenge in this move was to move all existing e-mails to my new Google Apps account. It turned out to be pretty easy by activating POP-mail in Gmail and get all the e-mails from the existing mail server. When all e-mails were synchronized all that was left was to change the DNS pointers from the existing mail server to Google Apps.

These were the two first and easiest projects in my cloudification. The next step will be to move web sites and databases, which will require some more work.

Moving to the cloud - part 1

2011-04-26T13:36:00.008+02:00

I cannot with words describe the hype around the cloud today, and of course I had to join the croud. I have transferred all my applications, files and services to the cloud. I thought I would share some of the experiences and difficulties I have hit during my jourey.

These are the steps I have performed in order to complete my move to the cloud:

Most of my files are safely stored with Dropbox.
E-mail accounts for stodell.se were moved from service provider to Google Apps.
The Cornball was moved from service provider to Windows Azure och SQL Azure.
This blog was moved from Wordpress at a service provider to Google's Blogger.

Even though Loopia has been a great service provider during many years I have now been able to cancel all my services except the domain hosting with them. The replacement being free services and the Azure capacity that is included in the MSDN subscription.

Programming AD with C#.NET – part 4

2010-12-22T12:20:00.004+01:00

Our transition to the System.DirectoryServices.Protocols has in the whole gone very smooth, but there have been some issues with one environment that contains subdomains. Most things are working fine, but writing to a subdomain does not work in the same way as it did before.

What is generally bad with the System.DirectoryServices.Protocols is the documentation, which is practically non-existent. But most things can be figured out anyway since most classes just are wrappers for the wldap32.dll, which in turn is way better documented.

I would like to have as little bindings to a specific server as possible but still be able to access the domain. In the LdapConnection it is possible to set the identifier to null and use the executing computer as a starting point to find a domain controller. But sometimes I must know that I am using a Global Catalog, and with more and more RODC in the environment I sometimes must know that I am working against a writeable domain controller.

With the property SessionOptions.LocatorFlag I am able to set which type of domain controller that is selected when the connection is created. This beaviour is not very well documented in System.DirectoryServices.Protocols, but it builds on DsGetDcName which has a lot of documentation available.

NetworkCredential credential = new NetworkCredential("user@domain.local", "password");
using(LdapConnection connection = new LdapConnection(null, credential))
{
    connection.SessionOptions.LocatorFlag = LocatorFlags.GCRequired | LocatorFlags.WritableRequired;
    // Search request...
}

Programming AD with C#.NET – part 3

2010-12-16T15:19:00.001+01:00

So far we have managed to exclude System.DirectoryServices because of our original issues, and System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement because of performance issues. What is left for us now is System.DirectoryServices.Protocols, and that is the namespace of our choice.

Generally the System.DirectoryServices.Protocols is pretty similar to System.DirectoryServices, so it is not a big deal to rebuild our existing classes to a newer version. But there are always some small obsacles that need to be conquered. A very good guide to get started with these classes is written by Ethan Wilansky and published on MSDN, Introduction to System.DirectoryServices.Protocols.

An small issue is that you always have to know if an attribute exists before you try to remove it. The same thing applies when an attribute is saved, you must know if it is a new attribute to be created or an existing attribute that should be updated. If an incorrect action is taken a DirectoryOperationException will be thrown. A simple solution for this problem is to add a PermissiveModifyControl to the request. This will make sure that add, edit and remove events is handled nicely without throwing any exceptions.

Paging a search result is another thing that could be a little tricky. With System.DirectoryServices you only had to set the PageSize on a DirectorySearcher and the paging was automatically handled. With System.DirectoryServices.Protocols we have got to deal with the paging ourselves. There are a lot more information about this in the article mention above, Introduction to System.DirectoryServices.Protocols.

One third little quirk I had was when creating user accounts.We need to be able to set the password, and with System.DirectoryServices.Protocols it is possible to modify the value unicodePwd. However there are a couple of things to keep in mind.:

A 128 bit encrypted channel must be used.
The password must be a byte array containing the password surrounded by quotation marks.

Here is a simple code sample that meets both of these demands:

LdapDirectoryIdentifier identifier = new LdapDirectoryIdentifier("server");
NetworkCredential credential = new NetworkCredential("user", "password", "domain");
using(LdapConnection connection = new LdapConnection(identifier, credential))
{
    connection.SessionOptions.Signed = true;
    connection.SessionOptions.Sealed = true;
    DirectoryAttribute[] attributes = new DirectoryAttribute[] {
        new DirectoryAttribute("objectClass", "user"),
        new DirectoryAttribute("userPrincipalName", "newAdAccount@domain.com"),
        new DirectoryAttribute("samAccountName", "newAdAccount"),
        new DirectoryAttribute("unicodePwd", Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes("\"passw0rd\""))
    };
    AddRequest request = new AddRequest("CN=newAdAccount,OU=Test,DN=domain,DN=com", attributes);
    connection.SendRequest(request);
}

Programming AD with C#.NET – part 2

2010-12-02T20:44:00.003+01:00

To work around the memory leaking issues in the .NET classes is in theory quite simple, do not use those classes. That is the starting point we had. Instead what we want to do is, by minimizing the affection on all our projects, rebuild our AD classes to use a beter way to communicate with the Active Directory.

In .NET 2.0 the System.DirectoryServices.Protocols was introduced, which is a collection of general classes to communicate with practically any directory over LDAP. Unlike System.DirectoryServices which builds on ADSI, the System.DirectoryServices.Protocols builds on the newer and better wldap32.dll.

Heres an overview of the different namespaces and what teqniques they rely on, taken from Introduction to System.DirectoryServices.Protocols.

In .NET 3.5 yet another namespace arrived, namely System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement. This is excactly as it sounds a set of classes for account management. In theory this is exactly what we need. The classes are very easy to use and you do not have to do any LDAP programming at all.

Unfortunately there are some direct disadvantages with System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement. The classes build on a mix of System.DirectoryServices and System.DirectoryServices.Protocols, which means that we will still be stuck with the memory leak that we are trying to get away from. Another issue is performance, which is not really a problem when a user is changing the password, but is a big problem when making large searches.

Programming AD with C#.NET – part 1

2010-11-14T13:05:00.002+01:00

We have a pretty old class library to communicate with Active Directory, shich is built on System.DirectoryServices. It has worked very well during all these years, but since the size of the systems and the number of users have increased we have begun to see some performance related issues.

The environment that is least stable at the moment consists of a root domain and a subdomain. The problem is the following error that sometimes occur on a search in the subdomain:

System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryServicesCOMException (0x8007202B): A referral was returned from the server.

This is not an unusual issue, but we have taken some steps for these issues not to occur. What is also interesting is that they seem to occur at random. Once the problem occured once the subdomain is unreachable for the current application until the application or application pool is restarted.

Part of the problem is some poor memory management in SearchResultCollection, which never disposes of the COM-objects that is used. In the following few posts I will show some of the actions we have taken to get rid of our problems.

Clients cannot connect to Exchange

2010-10-22T12:19:00.001+02:00

I ran into a problem this week that caused a lot of headaches. In an existing Exchange environment everything seems to be working just fine for existing users. The problems occur when you try to configure an account on a new client. This scenario did not apply to all the mailboxes in the organization.

These are some of the messages that were presented during different stages in the configuration:

Outlook cannot log on. Verify you are connected to the network and are using the proper server and mailbox name. The connection to Microsoft Exchange is unavailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete this action.

The name cannot be resolved. The connection to Microsoft Exchange is unavailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete this action.

The action cannot be completed. The connection to Microsoft Exchange is unavailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete this action.

Your server or mailbox names cannot be resolved.

The environment is a pure Exchange 2007 and we removed the last traces of the earlier Exchange 2003 just a couple of months ago. The first theory was that this had something to do with the problems, but it seems like it did not. There has also been a lot of things happening in the Active Directory environment because we are preparing for a 2008 R2 upgrade.

Finally we to found that similar problems might occur if there are any issues with the System Attendant service. The Microsoft Exchange System Attendant is a service that runs on the Exchange server and works like a proxy to the Active Directory for some functions in Exchange.

The service seemed to be working as it should, but after I restarted it everything began to work. I still have not found any logs to identify the cause of the problems, but at least we got everything working.

Internet Explorer 9 beta

2010-09-15T23:47:00.000+02:00

Microsoft have released a beta version of Internet Explorer 9 and you cal tell that this is a true competitor in the browser war. For several reasons I have been running Google Chrome for a while but I always get curious when Microsoft makes a new release.

Among other things, IE 9 comes with HTML 5 support and an well thought through integration with Windows 7. Apart from that the browser is faster, more secure and the user interface is redisigned to give more focus to the web sites. I have not tested it enough to say if they have succeeded, but as always I think highly of Microsoft.

Read mor and download the beta version on http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/.

Get DNS-information using WMI

2010-08-18T11:36:00.003+02:00

With the purpose of automation DNS documentation I needed to get information programatically from the DNS servers. The answer to this, and many other similar tasks is spelled WMI. That is short for Windows Management Instrumentation, which is an infrastructure for getting information from Windows using a specific query language.

Here is a method to get the host names and IP addresses for each A-record on the specified domain.

public string Server = "192.168.0.1";
public string Domain = "domain.local";
public string Username = "DOMAIN\User";
public string Password = "Pa$$w0rd";

public Dictionary<string, string> GetHosts()
{
    Dictionary<string, string> hosts = new Dictionary<string, string>();
    ManagementScope scope = new ManagementScope(String.Format(@"\\{0}\Root\MicrosoftDNS", Server));
    scope.Options.Impersonation = ImpersonationLevel.Impersonate;
    scope.Options.Username = Username;
    scope.Options.Password = Password;
    ObjectQuery query = new ObjectQuery(String.Format("SELECT * FROM MicrosoftDNS_AType WHERE DomainName = '{0}'", Domain));
    using(ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = new ManagementObjectSearcher(scope, query))
    {
        foreach(ManagementObject host in searcher.Get())
        {
            if(!hosts.ContainsKey(host["OwnerName"].ToString()))
            {
                hosts.Add(host["OwnerName"].ToString(), host["RecordData"].ToString());
            }
        }
    }
    return hosts;
}

Windows Server 2008 R2 and AD for RADIUS-authentication for Cisco-routers

2010-08-11T15:42:00.001+02:00

Instead of investing in a TACACS server solution we wanted to build switch and router logon on Active Directory authentication. This is possible by installing a RADIUS server to handle the communication between the Cisco devices and Active Directory.

Windows Server 2008 R2 can be made into a RADIUS server by installing the role Network Policy Server.

Aaron Walrath has put together a guide with everything that needs to be done to get the RADIUS authentication in the Cisco devices and how to connect this to the Active Directory. This guide is divided into two blog posts.

MCTS: .NET Framework 3.5, Windows Forms Application Development

2010-06-22T20:38:00.000+02:00

I finally took the time to go through with a certification that I have been wanting to do for a while, MCTS: .NET Framework 3.5, Windows Forms Application Development. During my years as a .NET developer I have been working a lot with Windows Forms, so this was not a painful experience.

The next step will propably be to aim for MCPD in the same area before it is time to move on to the new Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 certifications.

BriForum 2010

2010-06-20T20:21:00.000+02:00

I just got home from BriForum 2010 in Chicago. It has been a really fun and exciting week and a very interesting conference. This years main focus was desktop virtualization, or VDI.

This is a truly interesting subject and instead of a practically oriented conference there were a lot of discussions about the role of the computers in the near future and how we as IT staff would keep up with the rapid development. IT organizations often tend to be very stiff and having a hard time adapting to the user requests. This is something that hopefully will change, but it will take time and there are a lot of obstacles on the way.

Technically we got to see a preview of Microsofts RemoteFX, which basically is GPU-support over remote desktop. The next BriForum will take place in London 2011. Form more information about the conference and what was presented, visit briforum.com or brianmadden.com.