accessrichard.blogspot.com

I see a lot of people putting key-value pairs in web.config/app.config files and then using them in their applications via var someConfigKey = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["someConfigKey"]; int count; if (int.TryParse(someConfigKey, out count)) { //// Do Something } However I rarely see people using application settings. I won't go into depth on what application settings are as the Microsoft website has a pretty good explanation of them here however Settings are strongly typed and so the above lines of code can all be replaced with: var count = Properties.Settings.Default.Count; I might be missing something here but it seems like the latter is much more convenient to use if you are simply using the appSettings section of the .config file. Of course it is a different story if you are using .config sections which are serialized into objects but for the most part what I can figure is that many people don't know about .net Settings. Take this or this s...

VB.NET is a very user friendly language however I find its user friendliness to be quite confusing and error prone, especially when switching back and forth between C# and VB. Simple things like VB's handling of null or concatenation can lead to bugs if your not careful. For example: Sub Main() Console.WriteLine("The value of Nothing is also the value of the default type: " & (Nothing = False)) Console.WriteLine("The value of Nothing is also the value of the default type: " & (Nothing = 0)) Console.WriteLine("The value of Nothing is also the value of the default type: " & (Nothing = String.Empty)) Console.WriteLine("The & operator with two integers concats both: " & (3 & 4)) Console.WriteLine("The + operator with two integers adds both: " & (3 + 4)) Console.WriteLine(...

I use a BackgroundWorker a lot when working with WinForms in order to perform database or webservice calls without freezing the UI thread. Of course web services can be called using their built in asynchronously methods however when you have a separate data access or model layer, these asynchronous methods are not readily available.  On a new project I was working on, I was looking for a basic example online for quick reference but there wasn't one amongst the top search results so I thought I'd post one. using System.ComponentModel; using System.Threading; using System.Windows.Forms; public partial class MainForm : Form { private readonly BackgroundWorker backgroundWorker = new BackgroundWorker(); public MainForm() { this.InitializeComponent(); this.backgroundWorker.DoWork += this.BackgroundWorkerDoWork; this.backgroundWorker.RunWorkerCompleted += this.BackgroundWorkerCompleted; t...

Active Directory based authorization in .NET is fairly easy. Just throw an attribute on a controller as follows: [Authorize (Roles="MyAdGroup")] public class SettingsController : Controller Sometimes though you do not want to hard code a role in an attribute as you may want to add or remove roles at will. You may also want to change the roles based on whether you are in production or not. I like to keep my Active Directory roles either in a database or a web.config file so that others can change authorization on the fly. In order to have greater control over your authorization roles you need to extend the AuthorizeAttribute and override AuthorizationCore. You also need to override HandleUnauthorizedRequest in order to have a custom redirect page. /// <summary> /// Redirects to the unauthorized page. /// </summary> public class AuthorizeSiteRedirect : AuthorizeAttribute { /// <summary> /// Authorization based on roles in...

Finding the groups a user belongs to in active directory along with the members of that group is something that comes up a lot when .Net apps use Active Directory for authentication. Here are some common library methods to find members of a group or groups a member belongs to. This code requires a reference to System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement; using System.Linq; public class ActiveDirectoryGateway { private readonly string domain; private readonly ContextType contextType; public ActiveDirectoryGateway(ContextType contextType, string domain) { this.contextType = contextType; this.domain = domain; } /// <summary> /// Retrieves a list of AD groups belonging to an AD User. /// </summary> /// <param name="user">The active directory ...

Serializing XML to an object of a given type and back has been very common in a lot of my projects. It may not be allowable when you are working on multiple projects in different groups to import a common class library so I thought I'd post some basic serialization code generic to most projects that I have had to use a lot lately. /// <summary> /// Deserializes an XML document into a given type. /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="T">The type to deserialize.</typeparam> /// <param name="xml"> The xml. </param> /// <returns> An object representative of the XML document. </returns> public T Deserialize<T>(string xml) { var xmlSerializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T)); using (var reader = XmlReader.Create(new StringReader(xml))) { if (xmlSerializer.CanDeserialize(reader)) { ...

To troubleshoot a contract filter mismatch or other WCF fault message being thrown from  third party consumers, here is the web.config settings that will show the raw soap requests to inspect if the caller is using a malformed request. Please be aware that the first thing to do when troubleshooting a contract filter mismatch is to ensure the web reference is up to date and running. This message can be very deceiving such as if you are calling a web service from a web service, and the latter web service is not running or running on a different virtual etc. Make sure the first section is contained within System.Servicemodel. As you can see I do not show the opening tag tag. <!-------- within the system.servicemodel element --------&gt <diagnostics> <messageLogging logEntireMessage="true" logMalformedMessages="true" logMessagesAtServiceLevel="false" logMessagesAtTranspo...