Dev Blog - Johan Danforth

To learn some WPF I wrote this full screen editor called Writespace, which is now open source on Codeplex. I wanted to add some bling to the editor when it was loaded up, so I created a simple animated "screen glint" effect which is totally useless but looks kind of nice (IMHO). Basically it's a semi-transparent gradient, in a rectangle, on a canvas, the size of the screen, which animates over the screen from left to right.

I had a question about the best way to do this over at Stackoverflow, so check it out if you want some sample code which produces the test-output you see above (which is in mid-animation :)

I'm almost always using C# in my .NET projects, unless I'm doing Office automation where the VB-way of dealing with optional parameters helps out making the code a bit cleaner.

The last week we've been upgrading ASMX-clients to become WCF-clients for a number of old .NET 1.1 and 2.0 projects, and we ended up with a bunch of app.config files with loads and loads of WCF client endpoint sections, each of them pointing at their own binding configuration. To manually clean this up would take hours and hours of tedious work which would probably result in more than a few errors.

So I thought maybe I could do search/replace with a regexp-capable editor... or try out XML Literals in VB.NET. I wanted to remove old behaviors, extensions and bindings, then add my own behaviors and extensions and finally change some attributes on each client endpoint. Doing this with XML Literals and XDocument/XElement in VB.NET was quite straight forward and didn't result in too many lines of code:

Imports System
Imports System.Xml.Linq
Imports System.IO
Imports System.Linq

    Sub FixupConfig(ByVal infile As String, ByVal outfile As String)
        Dim defaultBindingConfigurationXml = <binding name="defaultBindingConfiguration"
                                              maxBufferSize="1065536"
                                              maxBufferPoolSize="524288"
                                              maxReceivedMessageSize="1065536"/>

        Dim behaviorsXml = <behaviors>
                               <endpointBehaviors>
                                   <behavior name="FacadeSoapEndpointBehavior">
                                       <SetMaxFaultSizeBehavior size="100000"/>
                                       <ClientExceptionHandlerBehavior/>
                                   </behavior>
                               </endpointBehaviors>
                           </behaviors>

        Dim extensionsXml = <extensions>
                                <behaviorExtensions>
                                    <add name="SetMaxFaultSizeBehavior" 
type="SomeType.SetMaxFaultSizeBehavior, SomeAssembly, Version=1.0.0.0, 
Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null"/>
                                    <add name="ClientExceptionHandlerBehavior" 
type="SomeType.ClientExceptionHandler, SomeAssembly, Version=1.0.0.0, 
Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null"/>
                                </behaviorExtensions>
                            </extensions>


        Dim xdoc = XDocument.Load(infile)

        xdoc...<system.serviceModel>.<behaviors>.Remove()
        xdoc...<system.serviceModel>.<extensions>.Remove()

        xdoc...<system.serviceModel>.Single().AddFirst(extensionsXml)
        xdoc...<system.serviceModel>.Single().AddFirst(behaviorsXml)

        xdoc...<system.serviceModel>.<bindings>.<basicHttpBinding>.Descendants.Remove()
        xdoc...<system.serviceModel>.<bindings>.<basicHttpBinding>.Single().Add(defaultBindingConfigurationXml)

        Dim elems = xdoc...<client>.<endpoint>
        For Each element In elems
            element.@bindingConfiguration = "defaultBindingConfiguration"
            element.@behaviorConfiguration = "FacadeSoapEndpointBehavior"
        Next

        xdoc.Save(outfile)

    End Sub

I've heard people recommend to use VB.NET when dealing with XML and I agree - use the right language for the job. When doing this - remember to import System.Linq or you'll miss some vital extensions like the .Add() and .Single() methods ;)

This is a general warning to Windows Home Server owners in general and HP Media Smart Server owners in particular. The "Power Pack 1" update to WHS comes with 2 add-ons:

But unless you've gone through the hard work to actually upgrade the memory from 521MB to 2GB, don't install these add-ons because you may end up with a totally unusable home server. The hardware just isn't up to it! PVC alone requires 512 MB.

I actually tried to installed PVConnect and the first thing I noticed was that the WHS Console was quite non-responsive and sluggish it it's behavior. Then I clicked the PVConnect "tab" and got this, in spanish!?!

After a while I got tired of it and went to install it, which wasn't easy because of the non-responsive console. Eventually I got rid of it, but not without blood shed:

Like the missing/transparent/black features? :) Anyway, I clicked the white (that I presume said "OK") button and the Console got reset. Now I was soon greated by the "Your WHS Network is at Risk" notification:

What risk? I log on to the WHS and to see what's wrong:

This health warning thingy in WHS is not making sense to me. What is there to warn about? Will this list be a mile long in a year? I need to clean this list up... does anyone know how to do it? BTW. The AV software on my mediacenter server IS NOT out of date...

There's a good story about this on Rafael's Within Windows blog.

I just published this open source project on Codeplex, and this information is available on the Writespace Codeplex home page as well.

Writespace is a fullscreen writing environment, developed with WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) as a ClickOnce installed add-in for Word 2007 . Unfortunately Codeplex cannot host ClickOnce applications, so to install the add-in you will have to download and run the installer locally until I've found a site to host it.

Writespace is inspired by Dark Room (http://they.misled.us/dark-room) for Windows and Write Room (http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/product/writeroom) for OS X. One advantage of Writespace is the built in spellcheck support (English, French, Spanish and German).

The program is quite simple, but I've been missing a plug-in for Word like this one. I've been using the excellent Dark Room editor, but unfortunately it doesn't have support for spell checking or Word integration.

IMPORTANT NOTE

System Requirements

NOTE: I need help with specifying the requirements to run this, but personally I'm on Vista, .NET 3.5 SP1 and Word 2007.

Downloads and Installation

Shortcuts

Word Integration

Text Formatting

Spell Check

Drag/drop Margin

Find

Goto Line

Status Bar

Mousewheel Zoom

Options

It's possible to set color, font, size and margin from the options dialog. It's also possible to enable/disable spellchecking by specifying the language. 
 

(image is shrinked down to fit in the blog)

Writespace Re-use

I'm looking at ClickOnce and ran into several blog posts where people were worried about expiring certificates when using a temporary PFX file created by VisualStudio. Appearently the certs issued by VS expire after a year and you will probably start running into problems with new deployments after that.

There is a KB article on MSDN that describes this problem but doesn't offer any good solutions (IMHO). Instead, if you have the Windows SDK installed you can create a certificte with much longer expiration, then create a PFX file from the cert and use with your ClickOnce application:

makecert.exe -r -pe -a sha1 -n "CN=MyClickOnceApp" -b 01/01/2000 
-e 01/01/2036 -eku 1.3.6.1.5.5.7.3.3 -sv MyClickOnceApp.pvk MyClickOnceApp.cer

pvk2pfx.exe -pvk MyClickOnceApp.pvk -spc MyClickOnceApp.cer -pfx MyClickOnceApp.pfx

This has been described in several places out there and my initial tests with makecert/pvk2pfx seems to work well so I'm storing the steps here for later use. I'm going to use it for a Codeplex project I'm opening up soon, so stay tuned...

Just wanted to share this tool with you.

I needed to search/replace text strings in some 600 files, and I've been downloading a bunch of crappy utilties that doesn't deliver. TextCrawler does this one thing and it does it good. A few features listed from their homepage:

• Find and Replace across files
• Fast searching, even on large files.
• Simple to use interface
• Flexible search parameters
• Text Extractor - rip text into a new file
• Search and replace using Regular Expressions.
• Regular Expression test tool
• Regular Expression library - Save your searches.
• Create backup files
• Highlighted search results
• Export Results
• Batch find and replace operations

Also, it's freeware :)

Yeah sure :)

Is it just me or has the Messenger service been kind of flunky the last couple of days? I keep getting these 81000314 error codes all the time. Not even WebMessenger is working.

This is just a blog post to bump the topic on search engines to help people using MSBuild and CruiseControl.NET to get to the right place. I personally recommend to use the "Improved MSBuild Integration" logging option by Christian Rodemyer. If you follow the instructions on this page, you'll get it right.

You may also have to change the dashboard stylesheet somewhat if you want to add or remove smileys or other GUI-related things depending on the results from unit testing etc, but the output in the CruiseControl dashboard is nice and clean.