Ahmadreza's Notes

First week at number one consulting company in Australia

Ahmadreza Atighechi — Tue, 04 Nov 2014 12:22:54 +0000

I have been in IT industry for fifteen years and for last three and half years I been in consulting firm. I really like the type of work I usually do as a consultant. Issues that we have to deal with are usually different and more challenging. Systems we have to build requires more focus and special architecture and extra care. In this industry I do meet new people and a really like to pair with others, teach and of-course learn new things.

Last week, I started working for a new company called Readify. Programmers in Australia, specially Microsoft stack programmers, would probably know Readify. But for those who don’t know, Readify is the best Microsoft Consulting company in Australia which has offices across major states in Australia (NSW, VIC, QLD, Perth and SA). I’ve been interested to work for Reaidfy since I came to Australia. But it happened for me after four and half years. Many thanks to my good friend Hadi Eskandari who mentored me during last year when I was studying so hard to get through.

Anyway, If you want a challenging workplace, pairing with smart and knowledgeable developers and using bleeding edge technologies, probably Readify is one of places you might want to consider to work in Australia. During past few years great developers have been working for Readify. To name a couple of them, Damien Edwards who is currently program manager at Microsoft at ASP.net team and Paul Stovell creator of famous deployment tool called Octopus Deploy. And many others who still work for Readify.

Its an opportunity to work in challenging environment with high quality expectation. When a client choose Readify, most likely there is a challenging issue or project. I as a consultant have the opportunity to work with highly skilled and smart people in different project.

Now, let me tell you about first impressions I’ve got since I’ve started with them. I signed the contract nearly six weeks ago and immediately a couple of days after, I got access to my corporate email and other documents so I got myself familiarized with the processes and introduced myself to the team before actually starting new job. Everything was surprisingly well organised and open.

I got my allowance to buy gears and get ready for my new position at Readify. The allowance is enough to buy a decent ultrabook or mac book pro which gets renewed every two years. I decided to buy a Surface pro 3 which I will blog about that later. Anyway, I had a chance to get everything ready before the very first day.

Day one when I went to Readify’s nice office in the city everybody were welcoming to me and helping me to get started. There is is buddy system at Readify which helps new Readifarian get through all induction stuff faster. My buddy Jorge helped me to get through all the stuff quickly. I had a chance to have a chat with one of the principal consultants (Richard Banks). Although principal consultants are busy but they are available to help developers and other consultants. Basically we can reach them quite easily. During past week I had a change to meet other principal consultants and senior consultant and catch up with them.

At Readify everybody gets number of days annually to work on professional development, we can self study new technologies, prepare for exam, write an article or get ready for presentation. First few days I had a chance to look at new interesting changes in mobile area with Xamarin products. Xamarin has gained a lot of attention recently especially in enterprise. I will write more about them later.

So far it has been great experience working at Readify and I have just started my first gig this week which is going to be awesome.

Stay tuned I’ll blog more to share technical and non-technical stuff.

AutoMapper and mapping Expressions

Ahmadreza Atighechi — Sat, 20 Sep 2014 00:19:45 +0000

AutoMapper is a great library helps developer to almost get rid of left hand right hand assignment between different types. In real world C# .net applications there are lots of scenarios developer wants to map different types of objects to each other. Normally it happens in system boundaries, like between UI and services or between ViewModel and Model. Without AutoMapper you have to do it for all properties every time you want to map to objects. This task is cumbersome, hard to test and bug prone. Automapper with does this for you with minimum cost. It has its own conventiones to facilitate type mapping. On top of built in defaults you as developer can teach Automapper new tricks.

You can find lots of blogs and articles of how to use AutoMapper. In fact this, this and this can help you.

Following is also an example of rather complex mapping between Source and Destination types.

	public class Source
	{
	public string FullName { get; set; }
	public int NumberOfYears { get; set; }
	}
	public class Destination
	{
	[Key]
	public int UserId { get; set; }
	public string Name { get; set; }
	public int Age { get; set; }
	}

	public class AutomapperQueriableTest
	{
	public AutomapperQueriableTest()
	{
	Mapper.CreateMap()
	.ForMember(d => d.Name, opt => opt.MapFrom(s => s.FullName))
	.ForMember(d => d.Age, opt => opt.MapFrom(s => s.NumberOfYears));

	Mapper.CreateMap()
	.ForMember(d => d.FullName, opt => opt.MapFrom(s => s.Name))
	.ForMember(d => d.NumberOfYears, opt => opt.MapFrom(s => s.Age));
	}

	[Fact]
	public void SimpleMappingTest()
	{
	var fixture = new Fixture();
	var source = fixture.Create();

	var destination = Mapper.Map(source);

	Assert.Equal(source.FullName, destination.Name);
	Assert.Equal(source.NumberOfYears, destination.Age);

	}
	}

view raw blog_AutomapperExpression_1.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

In this example I’ve used xUnit to test and AutoFixture to generate random data. Then in constructor of test class I have created mapping by using static method Mapper.CreateMap. this creates mapping at application domain context and you just need to set this up once and will be available across your application. After that in our test we created a source type and then mapped that to destination type finally checked the destination properties.

This post is not about normal scenario of using Automapper. When you are working with database you’d normally use repositories (arguably you might not need repository). in simple case of repository you would have following code

	public interface IRepository
	{
	void Add(T obj);
	IQueryable Find(Expression> predicate);
	}

view raw blog_AutomapperExpression_2.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

This is a simple interface for repository. Implementation of this doesn’t even need mapping (you might do the mapping in other layers, though). However if we want to separate domain model from persistence model we could introduce another interface like following:

	public interface IRepository
	{
	void Add(T obj);
	IQueryable Find(Expression> predicate);
	}

view raw blog_AutomapperExpression_2.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

In this interface we have to generic types TI and TO. TI is our domain model and TO is our persistence model. For example we pass Source object to Add method but repository implementation would save that in Destination model (See bellow example as Add implementation)

	public void Add(Source source)
	{
	_context.Users.Add(Mapper.Map(source));
	}

view raw Blog_automapperExpression_2.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

This is possible if we map Source object to Destination object. Automapper does that for us.

Now, the real issue is when we want to implement Find method which accepts Expression main author of Automapper stated in this mailing list. Anyway, with a quick search I’ve found this question where somebody asked in stackoverflow about AutoMapper for Func’s between selector types. Person how answered this question updated the answer later with answer to Expression mapping with Automapper. The first class which does this magic is an implementation of ExpressionVisitor. This class can traverese an expression tree and replace a single parameter with an arbitrary expression

	class ParameterReplacer : ExpressionVisitor
	{
	private readonly ParameterExpression _parameter;
	private readonly Expression _replacement;

	private ParameterReplacer(ParameterExpression parameter, Expression replacement)
	{
	_parameter = parameter;
	_replacement = replacement;
	}

	public static Expression Replace(Expression expression, ParameterExpression parameter, Expression replacement)
	{
	return new ParameterReplacer(parameter, replacement).Visit(expression);
	}

	protected override Expression VisitParameter(ParameterExpression parameter)
	{
	if (parameter == _parameter)
	{
	return _replacement;
	}
	return base.VisitParameter(parameter);
	}
	}

view raw Blog_automapperexpression_4.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The second piece that comes into play is an extension method for Expression> called “Compose” and it returns a new Expression>.

	public static class FunctionCompositionExtensions
	{
	public static Expression> Compose(this Expression> outer, Expression> inner)
	{
	return Expression.Lambda>(
	ParameterReplacer.Replace(outer.Body, outer.Parameters[0], inner.Body),
	inner.Parameters[0]);
	}
	}

view raw Blog_automapperexttesions_5.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

With this extension method and ExpressionVisitor Class I can complete the repository class for. This repository class is implementing SQL Serve implementation. Later on we will implement another repository class for MongoDB as well.

	public class SourceRepositorySql : IRepository, IDisposable
	{
	private readonly MyContext _context;

	public SourceRepositorySql(MyContext context)
	{
	_context = context;
	}

	public void Add(Source source)
	{
	_context.Users.Add(Mapper.Map(source));
	}

	public IQueryable Find(Expression predicate)
	{
	Expression> mapper = Mapper.Engine.CreateMapExpression();

	Expression> mappedSelector = predicate.Compose(mapper);

	return _context.Users.Where(mappedSelector);
	}

	private bool _disposed;

	protected virtual void Dispose(bool disposing)
	{
	if (!_disposed)
	{
	if (disposing)
	{
	_context.Dispose();
	}
	}
	_disposed = true;
	}

	public void Dispose()
	{
	Dispose(true);
	GC.SuppressFinalize(this);
	}
	}

view raw Blog_Automapper_expression_6.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

This is the Entity Framework implementation of our repository. Interesting point is “Find” Method which is taking advantage of Mapper.Engine.CreateMapExpression and Compose extension method. CreateMapExpression in AutoMapper creates an expression for mapping between Source to Destination. In the next line we use the mapper expression and pass this to Compose extension method to build a new expression. And finally we call Where method on Users DBSet and it returns IQueriable of type Destination. I have written a Unit Test to test this.

	[Fact]
	[UseDatabase]
	public void ShouldConvertPredicates()
	{
	var connStr = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["SQLExpressConnection"].ConnectionString;

	var myContext = new MyContext(connStr);
	using (var repository = new SourceRepositorySql(myContext))
	{
	AddRecords(repository);
	myContext.SaveChanges();

	const string name = "Ahmadreza";
	var query = repository.Find(s => s.FullName == name && s.NumberOfYears > 10);

	var result = query.Project().To().ToList();

	Assert.Equal(1, result.Count);
	Assert.Equal(name, result.First().FullName);
	}
	}
	private static void AddRecords(IRepository repository)
	{
	repository.Add(new Source { FullName = "Ahmadreza", NumberOfYears = 35 });
	repository.Add(new Source { FullName = "Ahmadreza", NumberOfYears = 9 });
	repository.Add(new Source { FullName = "Jon", NumberOfYears = 20 });
	}

view raw blog_automapperextension_7.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

This test successfully passes. As you see I used Source type to add records and query the records. The repository maps the add part to destination and also map predicates expression.

When I debug the code I can see entity framework successfully constructed the query. This is using Destination type.

	SELECT
	[Extent1].[UserId] AS [UserId],
	[Extent1].[Name] AS [Name],
	[Extent1].[Age] AS [Age]
	FROM [dbo].[Destinations] AS [Extent1]
	WHERE (N'Ahmadreza' = [Extent1].[Name]) AND ([Extent1].[Age] > 10)

view raw Blog_automapperextension_07.sql hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Well this is really good, although there is a down side to this approach. This is good and pretty mych abstracted the Destination class and I just work with Source type. However, if I want to join results of two different IQueriables I have to mention the property name of the Model.

Anyway it worked reasonably good with SQL server and EntityFramework. Let see if it works with MongoDB.
In order to connect to MongoDB I use mongo csharp driver and on top of that I’m using MongoRepository. Now let see if the same scenario works for Repository Implemented for MongoDb.

In following code I have implemented the IRepository for MongoDB.

	public class SourceRepositoryMongo : IRepository
	{
	private readonly MongoRepository _mongoRepository;

	public SourceRepositoryMongo()
	{
	_mongoRepository = new MongoRepository();
	}

	public void Add(Source obj)
	{
	_mongoRepository.Add(Mapper.Map(obj));
	}

	public IQueryable Find(Expression predicate)
	{
	Expression> mapper = Mapper.Engine.CreateMapExpression();

	Expression> mappedSelector = predicate.Compose(mapper);

	return _mongoRepository.Where(mappedSelector);
	}
	public IQueryable Find(Expression> predicate)
	{
	return _mongoRepository.Where(predicate);
	}
	}

view raw Blog_AutomapperExtension_8.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The target is to test Find(Expression predicate) and see if it works, however, I have added another Find with Find(Expression> predicate) signature and I will describe why I added that method.

Now the unit test to test this implementation.

	[Fact]
	[UseMongo]
	public void MongoTest()
	{
	var repositoryMongo = new SourceRepositoryMongo();
	AddRecords(repositoryMongo);

	var name = "Ahmadreza";
	//var query = repositoryMongo.Find(s => s.Name == name && s.Age > 10);
	var query = repositoryMongo.Find(s => s.FullName == name && s.NumberOfYears > 10);

	var result = query.Project().To();

	Assert.Equal(1, result.Count());
	Assert.Equal(name, result.First().FullName);
	}

view raw Blog_Automapperextension_9.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

This test fails!. This complains about full name not having serialization information

Additional information: Unable to determine the serialization information for the expression: <MemberInitExpression>.FullName.

This approach doesn’t work for MongoDB (probably Mongo CSharp driver could not handle that). I have written another method that accepts Expression> predicate, If you uncomment this method call and comment the other in unit test it’ll work.

Having looked at transformed expression shows that this approach does not completely re-write the expression.

	.Lambda #Lambda1(AutomapperQuesriableTest.Destination $dto)
	{
	(.New AutomapperQuesriableTest.Source(){
	FullName = $dto.Name,
	NumberOfYears = $dto.Age
	}).FullName == "ahmadreza" && (.New AutomapperQuesriableTest.Source(){
	FullName = $dto.Name,
	NumberOfYears = $dto.Age
	}).NumberOfYears > 10
	}

view raw Blog_AutomapperExtension10.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

This is just wrapper around another lambda that does the mapping. Interestingly EntityFramework handles that very well but MongoDB CSharp Driver not.

On option it to find a way to rewrite the whole expression based on the mapping configuration. But as Jimmy mentioned it could be quite hard to implement.

You can find the full implementation and tests here

Value type field members are in heap

Ahmadreza Atighechi — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 13:15:44 +0000

I think developers are a bit confused about the concept of ValueTypes and Reference Type. Often I hear that all primitive data types and value types are in stack. First of all it is thread’s stack and it is not a single stack for application. Secondly, when we say value types are in stack it doesn’t include field members of the class. Only method parameters and local variable which are value type will be in the thread’s stat. Field members, even if they are value type, will be in heap. Consider following example:


using System;

namespace ClassLibrary
{
    public class Foo
    {
	public int number = 0;
        public int Bar(int x, int y)
        {
         	int sum = x + y + number
	 	return sum;
        }
    }
}

In this example, only x, y, sum and return value are in thread’s stack and number variable will be held in heap as part of object instance and is accessible using this keyword (which compiler let you omit that).
In other word when we say object instance is created in the heap, what does really stored there? Field members are object state that needs to be stored in object instance.

IL superset of all .net languages

Ahmadreza Atighechi — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 12:14:53 +0000

In .net world you can choose your language and write your application with best language which matches your requirements. Different languages has different paradigm. For example C# started with static/strongly type paragoge but over years it has been evolved and now it does support functional programming as well as dynamic. There are many other languages like F#, Visual Basic and fortran.

It is compiler responsibility to generate assembly with proper intermediate language so that CLR (Common Language Runtime) would be able to generate native code (using JIT) and run at run time. Each compilers support subset if intermediate language and provide its flavour using syntactic sugars in the language.

CLR allows language integration as long as written code comply with Common Language Specification. It means because of differences between languages, if you want to use types generated by other languages, you need to use certain feature of language that are guaranteed to be available in other languages. CLS is the lowest common denominator of language features provided by Microsoft.

However, today I don’t want to highlight CLS, instead I want to mentions that Intermediate Language in some cases has more features which languages like C# didn’t bother to implement.

For example we all know about access modifiers in C#. There is public, private, internal and protected

Access Modifiers	Description
public	public access is the most permissive access level. There is no restrictions on accessing public members
private	private access is the least permissive access level, private members are accessible only within the body of the class or the struct in which they are declared
internal	internal types or members are accessible only within files in the same assembly
protected	A protected member is accessible within its class and by derived class instances
protected internal	visible to derived classes and those of the same assembly

OK, now lets have a look on access modifiers in IL

IL Access Modifier	Description	C# equivalent
Private	The member is accessible only by other members in the same class or struct	private
Family	The member is accessible by derived types.	protected
famandassem	The member is accessible by derived types, but only if the derived type is defined in the same assembly.	N/A
Assembly	The member is accessible by any code in the same assembly	internal
famorassem	The member is accessible by derived types in any assembly and also by any types within same assembly	protected internal
Public	The member is accessible by any code in any assembly	public

As you might have noticed there is no C# equivalent for family or assembly although IL has this keyword. there is not such a thing in VB.Net as well. Now lets have a closer look on a simple sample and generated IL code.

Assume we have two simple project in a solution. A Console Application and a Class Library which console application referenced that. In the Class Library we have a simple class called Super and in console application, beside Program class we have a class derived from Super class called Sub. Lets have a look on their codes.

Super class source code



using System;

namespace ClassLibrary
{
    public class Super
    {
        protected internal void Foo()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Foo");
        }

        internal void Method()
        {
            
        }
    }
}

Other class in ClassLibrary Project


namespace ClassLibrary
{
    public class Other
    {
        public void Test()
        {
            var super = new Super();
            super.Foo();
        }
        
    }
}

Sub class in ConsoleApplication


using System;
using ClassLibrary;

namespace ConsoleApplication
{
    public class Sub : Super
    {
        public void Bar()
        {
            Foo();
            Console.WriteLine("Bar");
        }
    }
}

Program.cs class in ConsoleApplication


using System;

namespace ConsoleApplication
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main()
        {
            var sub = new Sub();
            sub.Bar();
            Console.ReadLine();
            
        }
    }
}

Sub class simply calls Foo method which is defined as “protected internal” which in C# means family or assembly in IL. If you build and run application you’ll see that Sub class successfully accesses because although it is not in the same assembly but But sub is actually derived from Super class. the output will be

Foo 
Bar

Cool, now let mess around with the IL and see that would happen if we change that.

If you want to dump the IL of an assembly you can simply open a Visual Studio Command and then go to the folder your assembly exist and run ildasm with following parameters


ildasm ConsoleApplication.exe /out:ConsoleApplication.il

ildasm ClassLibrary.dll /out:ClassLibrary.il

Now, you can open ClassLibrary.il and have a look into generated code. Actually it is a bit long so I just copied part that I’m interested in which is Foo method


  .method famandassem hidebysig instance void 
          Foo() cil managed
  {
    // Code size       13 (0xd)
    .maxstack  8
    IL_0000:  nop
    IL_0001:  ldstr      "Foo"
    IL_0006:  call       void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string)
    IL_000b:  nop
    IL_000c:  ret
  } // end of method Super::Foo

You see that protected internal compiled to famorassem. What would happen if we change this to famandassem and assemble this IL again? Answer is CLR will prevent calling this method and will raise MethodAccessException exception when we call this from console application. But let put this into action and actually test this. So, change the famorassem to famandassem and save the file and use ilasm.exe from Visual Studio Command to assemble this code again. Before assembling this you can delete current ClassLibrary.Dll. To assemble use following command parameters:

ilasm ClassLibrary.il /out:ClassLibrary.dll /dll

If you get Operation completed successfully at the end new class library is generated. If you run ConsoleApplication.exe you’ll get following exception because of violating the access level defined in the IL

Unhandled Exception: System.MethodAccessException: Attempt by method 'ConsoleApp
lication.Sub.Bar()' to access method 'ClassLibrary.Super.Foo()' failed.
   at ConsoleApplication.Sub.Bar() in f:\Users\ara\Documents\Visual Studio 2013\
Projects\ConsoleApplication3\ConsoleApplication3\Sub.cs:line 10
   at ConsoleApplication.Program.Main() in f:\Users\ara\Documents\Visual Studio
2013\Projects\ConsoleApplication3\ConsoleApplication3\Program.cs:line 10

famandassem means that only derived class within same assembly will have access to that member. Just for the sake of testing lets Super to the ConsoleApplication and see if it works.

Open ClassLIbrary.il in a text editor. Copy following IL code which is Super class il code


// =============== CLASS MEMBERS DECLARATION ===================

.class public auto ansi beforefieldinit ClassLibrary.Other
       extends [mscorlib]System.Object
{
  .method public hidebysig instance void 
          Test() cil managed
  {
    // Code size       15 (0xf)
    .maxstack  1
    .locals init ([0] class ClassLibrary.Super super)
    IL_0000:  nop
    IL_0001:  newobj     instance void ClassLibrary.Super::.ctor()
    IL_0006:  stloc.0
    IL_0007:  ldloc.0
    IL_0008:  callvirt   instance void ClassLibrary.Super::Foo()
    IL_000d:  nop
    IL_000e:  ret
  } // end of method Other::Test

  .method public hidebysig specialname rtspecialname 
          instance void  .ctor() cil managed
  {
    // Code size       7 (0x7)
    .maxstack  8
    IL_0000:  ldarg.0
    IL_0001:  call       instance void [mscorlib]System.Object::.ctor()
    IL_0006:  ret
  } // end of method Other::.ctor

} // end of class ClassLibrary.Other

.class public auto ansi beforefieldinit ClassLibrary.Super
       extends [mscorlib]System.Object
{
  .method famandassem hidebysig instance void 
          Foo() cil managed
  {
    // Code size       13 (0xd)
    .maxstack  8
    IL_0000:  nop
    IL_0001:  ldstr      "Foo"
    IL_0006:  call       void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string)
    IL_000b:  nop
    IL_000c:  ret
  } // end of method Super::Foo

  .method assembly hidebysig instance void 
          Method() cil managed
  {
    // Code size       2 (0x2)
    .maxstack  8
    IL_0000:  nop
    IL_0001:  ret
  } // end of method Super::Method

  .method public hidebysig specialname rtspecialname 
          instance void  .ctor() cil managed
  {
    // Code size       7 (0x7)
    .maxstack  8
    IL_0000:  ldarg.0
    IL_0001:  call       instance void [mscorlib]System.Object::.ctor()
    IL_0006:  ret
  } // end of method Super::.ctor

} // end of class ClassLibrary.Super


// =============================================================

Now open ConsoleApplication.il and paste this code at the end after end of Class ConsoleApplication.Sub.

We need to do one more thing and get rid off reference to ClassLibrary.il which we don’t need anymore. So right in the beginning there is some code for that. Delete that piece of code and save the file.


.assembly extern ClassLibrary
{
  .ver 1:0:0:0
}

One more thing to do and it is replacing all [ClassLibrary] with empty string.

Delete console application and assemble the il to make new ConsoleApplication.exe using following command

ilasm ConsoleApplication.il /exe /out:ConsoleApplication.exe

Now we have new ConsoleApplication which doesn’t have reference to ClassLibrary. Run ConsoleApplication.exe you see it runs successfully.

Quick Note: Memory Leak Or Missing Configuration

Ahmadreza Atighechi — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 06:24:01 +0000

Imagine you have multiple instances of SQL server on your server and one of them is using almost all of available memory and second one is facing memory shortage. What are possible Cause for this symptom. Does one of application have memory leak?

The answer is NO, When you install multiple instances of SQL server on a single server you have to consider memory allocation for each instances because windows does not balance memory across applications with the memory notification.

The first instance with a work load will used huge portion of memory (Especially when you have actual data – not testing – on that instance).

Three approaches are available for Server Memory Option documented in the section “Sunning Multiple Instances of SQL server” and if you have selected third one which is “Do nothing”, you might have same problem.

Do nothing (not recommended). The first instances presented with a workload will tend to allocate all of memory. Idle instances or instances started later may end up running with only a minimal amount of memory available. SQL Server makes no attempt to balance memory usage across instances. All instances will, however, respond to Windows Memory Notification signals to adjust the size of their buffer pools. As of Windows Server 2003 SP1, Windows does not balance memory across applications with the Memory Notification API. It merely provides global feedback as to the availability of memory on the system.

How to sign the XBAP with your own certificate

Ahmadreza Atighechi — Thu, 19 May 2011 23:30:39 +0000

I am writing a series of posts about WPF Browser Application, XBAP and configuration tips. I’m going to host this application in IIS 5.1 and I developed them in .Net 3.5. The reason I have chosen IIS5.1 and .Net 3.5 is because of challenges I had in one of my recent projects. Configuring this type of projects is different in other versions of IIS and .Net frameworks and they are not is subject of this post series.

How to create a simple Browser Enables WPF application
How to host a windows form application inside XBAP
How to sign the XBAP with your own certificate

Note: Making a browser enabled application as full trust according to this method is not completely secured. This can be used for testing purposes in testing environments. Please select proper certificates and known trusted root certification authorities.

Before starting I think its better to have same understanding of file extension that we are going to talk about.

.cer file: Apublic key which is given by Certificate Authority

.pvk file: This file is your private key and should keep it confidential

.pfx file: This is a Personal Information Exchange file and again you should keep it confidential because it contains

We have created a simple WPF Browser application and a simple windows application which is hosted inside the XBAP application. When we created WPF application Visual Studio automatically create a .pfx (Which is used for signing ClickOnce manifest).

To create your own certificate you need to follow these steps:

Step 1: Creating your key pairs (Public and Private)

open Visual Studio Command Prompt (2010) and then goto your application path and type following command


makecert -n "CN=Your Company Name" -r -sv Key.pvk Key.cer

A password dialog box will be displayed and you set your own password. This command creates two files one private key and one certificate.

Step2: Then you need to create PFX file which is used for signing ClickOnce manifest and contains both private and public key.


pvk2pfx.exe -pvk Key.pvk -spc Key.cer -pfx KeyPFX.pfx -po [password]

Put your own password as [password] and this command will create a PFX file

Step 3: Back to the solution explorer delete “SimpleBrowserApplication_TemporaryKey.pfx” and goto Application property page and select signing tab. Click on “Select from file” and select the PFX file you have just created.

Step 4: Just like before publish it to you server.

Step 5: Give certificate to the client and register the certificate on the client machine. To do this double-clicking on .cer file. You will see following window. Click on Install Certificate button.

Follow installation wizard and click Next on the first window.

In this window select “Place all certificates in the following store” and then select “Browse…” button.

In this window select “Trusted Publishers” and then click Ok. Select “Next” previous windows and then select finish.

Step 6: Redo the step 5 but this time select “Trusted Root Certification Authorities” as the certificate store.

Now you have enabled your client to accept this XBAP application as full-trust application.

How to host a windows form application inside XBAP

Ahmadreza Atighechi — Mon, 16 May 2011 23:29:02 +0000

How to create a simple Browser Enables WPF application
How to host a windows form application inside XBAP
How to sign the XBAP with your own certificate

Imagine we have an existing windows form application or you are developing a windows form application. The question is how you can make your windows application browser enabled. The answer is Browser Enabled WPF application. But usually when we create a WPF application we have to use WPF elements inside Xaml. “WindowsFormsIntegration” will help you to host your windows form application inside your WPF.

For rest of this post I consider you already have previous post sample, because I’m going to update the same project. Lets open the SimpleBrowserApplication and add a reference to “WindowsFormsIntegration”. As the second step I want to add new project to our solution of type “Windows Form Application” and I call it “WinFormSample”.

Note: Make sure when you are creating windows form application you selected .Net 3.5 because we are going to reference this project inside WPF project and they should be compatible.

That is how our solution looks like after adding windows form application and couple of simple controls on it. Next step we have to reference WinFormSample in SimpleBrowser application. Now our WPF application has got two more references which are “WindowsFormsIntegrations” and “WinFormSample”. Now we have to change Page1.xaml and put the following StackPanel instead of previous

Actually this is a place holder for WindowsFormsHost that we are going to place in main form. For next step we need add System.Windows.Froms reference to WBP project. Then we have to change page1.xaml code as follow.

public partial class Page1 : Page
{
	private readonly Form1 mainForm = new Form1();
	WindowsFormsHost windowsFormsHost;

	public Page1()
	{
		InitializeComponent();
		AddWindowsForm();
	}
	private void AddWindowsForm()
	{
		windowsFormsHost = new WindowsFormsHost();

		stackPanel.Children.Add(windowsFormsHost);

		// If you don't write this line you'll get "The child control cannot be a top-level form" exception
		mainForm.TopLevel = false;
		windowsFormsHost.Child = mainForm;
	}

}

We created a WindowsFormHost and added this control into stackPanel Child list and set the child property of windowsFormsMost to mainForm which is already instantiated of Form1.

One of important thing is setting mainForm.TopLevel to false. Because if you don’t do that you will get an exception and if you dive into innerexeptions you will find out that main reason is System.ArgumentException: The child control cannot be a top-level form.

If you run this application you’ll see following browser window which hosts Form1.

The point is when you run this application from visual studio it runs in My Computer Zone so there is no problem for security. According Microsoft document “WPF Partial Trust Security” section “Partial Trust Programming” when you run WPF application which requires full trust and current zone is “My Computer” behavior is “Automatic full trust” and for getting full trust no action is required.

But if you publish this project and try to browse this application you will get Trust Not Granted error. Because application will request for full trust and it fails with “Trust Not Granted”. In order to get full trust is signing XBAP with certificate.

In the next post we will see how to sign XBAP with your own certificate and make it work.

The source code of this application is also available you can download it here

How to create a simple Browser Enabled WPF application

Ahmadreza Atighechi — Thu, 12 May 2011 04:59:38 +0000

How to create a simple Browser Enables WPF application
How to host a windows form application inside XBAP
How to sign the XBAP with your own certificate

Firstly run Visual Studio 2010 and select new project from file menu

To create simple WPF browser application you need to select “WPF Browser Application” template from project templates. Once project template is created open Page1.xaml Xaml code and change Grid into following code

This Xaml code will create a simple rectangle with border and if you run this application, It will show following shape inside your browser.

Deploying a WPF application

There are multiple ways to do that. Simply you can publish your application using visual studio. Right-click on project and select publish menu. Publish wizard is displayed. Follow the steps until the end of publish steps.

You must follow Microsoft instruction for How to: Configure IIS 5.0 and IIS 6.0 to Deploy WPF Applications to configure your server and client requires Internet Explorer plus .Net Framework to run this application.

Basically internet application which runs inside the browsers should have restricted access to critical resources. It means WPF browser application -By default- should respect to these restrictions so that client can make sure there is no harm to execute this application. Browser Enabled application by default is marked as partially trusted and ClickOnce security setting is set to Internet Zone so that your application will be running on the client browser without any problem.

As you see “Enable ClickOnce security settings” and “This is a partial trust application” are ticked by default and and ClickOnce manifests is signed by a temporary key. Which means on one your application will be restricted to security permission which is fully described in this document. On the other hand your application will be executed on client browser without any other additional configuration.

Above picture shows that you can run This simple WPF Browser Enabled application in “Internet Zone”.

The main reason of writing this post series for me is hosting windows form application inside XBAP application and running inside browser. In next post we will see how to host an existing windows form application within a WPF Browser application.

Sample project is also available you can download it here

HOW TO propagate WCF Impersonation to COM objects

Ahmadreza Atighechi — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 17:19:00 +0000

I was working on a project to write a wrapper on a COM component in WCF. The COM object needs impersonation in some levels to provide certain functionalities to impersonated user. Basically impersonation in .Net application doesn’t propagate COM calls. I’ve seen following sentence in How To: Use Impersonation and Delegation in ASP.NET 2.0

The impersonation token does not propagate across threads if you use COM interop with components that have incompatible threading models, or if you use unmanaged techniques to create new threads

Actually I have a COM component and I want to use this component in my WCF Services. One of classes in COM object has got a property which returns current user. I wrote a console application to test impersonation and see if impersonation does propagate to COM object or not. I wrote a class for impersonation and it has a method called “ImpersonateUser” that impersonates to passed username and password. Following code returns different username for .net and COM object. It means it doesn’t propagate to COM object.

static void Main(string[] args)
{
	DoWork();
	Console.ReadLine();
}

private static void DoWork()
{
	ImpersonateClass impersonate = new ImpersonateClass();
	using (impersonate.ImpersonateUser("AnotherUser",
					"Domain",
					"passw0rd"))
	{
		COMTESTLib.TestClass obj = new COMTESTLib.TestClass();
		Console.WriteLine(string.Format("COM:{0} .Net:{1}", obj.CurrentUserName,
			System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent().Name));
	}
}
//Returns:COM:DOMAIN\CurrentUser .Net:DOMAIN\AnotherUser

But I used CoInitializeSecurity to initialize security with impersonation and cloaking. CoInitializeSecurity should be called before any marshalling so I called CoInitializeSecurity as first function call.

[DllImport("ole32.dll")]
public static extern int CoInitializeSecurity(IntPtr pVoid, int
cAuthSvc, IntPtr asAuthSvc, IntPtr pReserved1, RpcAuthnLevel level,
RpcImpLevel impers, IntPtr pAuthList, int dwCapabilities, IntPtr
pReserved3);

static void Main(string[] args)
{
	int result = CoInitializeSecurity(IntPtr.Zero, -1,
	IntPtr.Zero, IntPtr.Zero,
	RpcAuthnLevel.Connect, RpcImpLevel.Impersonate,
	IntPtr.Zero, Convert.ToInt32(EoAuthnCap.DynamicCloaking), IntPtr.Zero);

	DoWork();
	Console.ReadLine();
}

private static void DoWork()
{
	ImpersonateClass impersonate = new ImpersonateClass();
	using (impersonate.ImpersonateUser("AnotherUser",
					"domain",
					"passw0rd"))
	{
		COMTESTLib.TestClass obj = new COMTESTLib.TestClass();
		Console.WriteLine(string.Format("COM:{0} .Net:{1}", obj.CurrentUserName,
			System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent().Name));
	}
}
//Returns:COM:DOMAIN\AnotherUser .Net:DOMAIN\AnotherUser

Somebody suggested using built-in impersonation method for WCF so I changed my service to following code by setting [OperationBehavior(Impersonation = ImpersonationOption.Required)] and some changes in Web.Congif to make it work.

[OperationBehavior(Impersonation = ImpersonationOption.Required)]
public string GetUserNames()
{
	return DoWork();
}

private string DoWork()
{
	string result;

	COMTESTLib.TestClass obj = new COMTESTLib.TestClass();
	result = string.Format("COM:{0} .Net:{1}", obj.CurrentUserName,
		System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent().Name);

	return result;
}

I passed user credentials from client for impersonation.

static void Main(string[] args)
{
	ServiceReference.ServiceImpersonateClient client = new ServiceReference.ServiceImpersonateClient();
	client.ClientCredentials.Windows.AllowedImpersonationLevel = System.Security.Principal.TokenImpersonationLevel.Delegation;
	client.ClientCredentials.Windows.ClientCredential.Domain = "Domain";
	client.ClientCredentials.Windows.ClientCredential.UserName = "AnotherUser";
	client.ClientCredentials.Windows.ClientCredential.Password = "Passw0rd";

	string str = client.GetUserNames();
	Console.WriteLine(str);
	Console.ReadLine();
	client.Close();
}
// Returns COM:DOMAIN\CurrentUser .Net:DOMAIN\AnotherUser

But it returns different usernames which means impersonation of WCF does not propagate to COM object.

Ok I posted this issue in WCF Forum and I’ve got a simple response but it gave me a good clue. Allen Chen (The moderator) suggested me to use self-hosting for WCF instead of IIS hosting.

Self-hosted WCF was great idea! Actually it works on self-hosted. But my WCF service should be unattended so that I created a managed service for WCF hosting. To make it work I’ve created three projects. One WCF service library which is used in managed service application. And the third one is a console application for testing. I’ve called CoInitializeSecurity on constructor of my service class as following

private ServiceHost serviceHost;
 public WCFServiceHost()
 {
  int result = CoInitializeSecurity(IntPtr.Zero, -1,
  IntPtr.Zero, IntPtr.Zero,
  RpcAuthnLevel.Connect, RpcImpLevel.Impersonate,
  IntPtr.Zero, Convert.ToInt32(EoAuthnCap.DynamicCloaking), IntPtr.Zero);
  //EventLog.WriteEntry(result.ToString());
  InitializeComponent();
 }

 protected override void OnStart(string[] args)
 {
  if (serviceHost != null)
  {
  serviceHost.Close();
  }

  // Create a ServiceHost for the CalculatorService type and
  // provide the base address.
  serviceHost = new ServiceHost(typeof(ServiceImpersonate));

  // Open the ServiceHostBase to create listeners and start
  // listening for messages.

  serviceHost.Open();

 }

 protected override void OnStop()
 {
  if (serviceHost != null)
  {
  serviceHost.Close();
  serviceHost = null;
  }
 }

It doesn’t work with built in WCF impersonation. But I used my impersonation class inside the service class to impersonate to desired user and it works.

public string GetUserNames()
 {
  ImpersonateClass impersonate = new ImpersonateClass();

  using (impersonate.ImpersonateUser("AnotherUser",
         "Domain",
          "passw0rd"))
  {
   return DoWork();
  }
 }

 private string DoWork()
 {
  string result;

   COMTESTLib.TestClass obj = new COMTESTLib.TestClass();
   result = string.Format("COM:{0} .Net:{1}", obj.CurrentUserName,
       System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent().Name);
  return result;
 }

In the console application I simply called my service like following code:

ServiceReference.ServiceImpersonateClient client = new ServiceReference.ServiceImpersonateClient();
  string str = client.GetUserNames();
  Console.WriteLine(str);
  client.Close();
  Console.ReadLine();
// Returns COM:DOMAIN\ AnotherUser .Net:DOMAIN\AnotherUser

When you host WCF in IIS the process is spawned by IIS and before your code running code managed by IIS will be run in the process, which is almost out of your control. CoInitializeSecurity thus might be called before you calling it.

Updating my using with Windows Live Writer

Ahmadreza Atighechi — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 19:46:00 +0000

I didn’t know about this sophisticated application so called “Windows Live Writer”. Actually quiet frequently I was looking for an HTML editor to write my blog post and then update my blog. Because HTML edit which comes with BlogEngine.Net is not easy to use – and its the same problem with all web based HTML editor-. To be honest windows live writer is something more than what I expected.

I was reading an article about AtomPub Using WCF Data, I came across Windows Live Writer which surprisingly supports BlogEngine.Net (Its better to say that BlogEnine.Net supports AtomPub which is protocol for publishing content).

Windows Live Writer easily installed on my machine. After installation completed you will be asked about your blog information and if your blog supports AtomPub then you can continue to enter login information of your blog. With a quick search I found in WiKithat Windows Live Writer supports BlogEngine.Net so I selected “other blog service” option in this form.

In next step you’ll be asked about your blog address and username and password.

For me as a developer it was surprising that Windows Live Writer supports plug-ins. first thing I looked for was SyntaxHighlighter. Yes! . I’s already been developed. there is a project in CodePlex named “SyntaxHighlighter for Windows Live Writer” you can easily download and set it up.