Hope we’re all well!  Been a while since I blogged anything as life has been pretty hectic.  Anyway, I’m working on a fairly intense little project at the moment centred around building a complete system infrastucture around the AdventureWorks demo database from Microsoft.

The demo system may well end up being another Code Project article as it’s covering a LOT of terriroty.  WPF, PRISM, WCF, WIF, SQL but mainly focussing on security aspect of the implementation using the Windows Identity Foundation.

In order to make the implementation as real world as possible the idea behind WIF makes use of SSL certificates for authentication purposes.  Whilst not wanting to go buying commercial certificates and seeing this is only development we need to use the makecert tool that is part of the Windows SDK.

To make a test CA (Certificate Authority) you can use the following command:

makecert -r -pe -n “CN=AdventureWorksTestCA” -sr CurrentUser -a sha1 -sky signature -cy authority -sv AdventureWorksTestCA.pvk AdventureWorksTestCA.cer

To make a test server authentication certificate:

makecert -pe -n “CN=AdventureWorksTestServer” -a sha1 -sky exchange -eku 1.3.6.1.5.5.7.3.1 -ic AdventureWorksTestCA.cer -iv AdventureWorksTestCA.pvk -sv AdventureWorksTestServer.pvk AdventureWorksTestServer.cer

To make a test client authentication certificate:

makecert -pe -n “CN=AdventureWorksTestClient” -a sha1 -sky exchange -eku 1.3.6.1.5.5.7.3.2 -ic AdventureWorksTestCA.cer -iv AdventureWorksTestCA.pvk -sv AdventureWorksTestClient.pvk AdventureWorksTestClient.cer

Then to export the PFX files for both certificates:

pvk2pfx -pvk AdventureWorksTestServer.pvk -spc AdventureWorksTestServer.cer -pfx AdventureWorksTestServer.pfx

pvk2pfx -pvk AdventureWorksTestClient.pvk -spc AdventureWorksTestClient.cer -pfx AdventureWorksTestClient.pfx

Now once you have your certificates created you need to import them into your certificate store.  Start with the CA certificate, double click the .cer file and click on the [install certificate] button.  Once the dialog box opens make sure you import this certificate into the “Trusted Root Certification Authorities” store.  This is critical to ensure the other certificates are correctly chained up to trusted root.

Once this CA is installed you can simply go through the same process with the client and server certificates and allow them to simply import into their default location (don’t manually specify the store during import).  The client/server certs will import themselves into the Current User - Personal certificate store.

Now you should be all set-up with a CA/Server/Client certs ready for dev work.

Download them from here

I would dearly love to splash the case on a copy of Komplete from Native Instruments but I just don’t have that kind of cash free at the moment.  So, which samplers are we talking about?

Short Circuit

First up is this really neat, lightweight tool from Vember Audio, unfortunately this isn’t actually supported anymore as it has been moved to freeware status.  Having said that I’ve loaded it up into SONAR and imported some NI Battery kits (created with SampleSort) and haven’t any *any* issues whatsoever.  As far as I can tell Short Circuit is rock solid.  It has a great feature set to boot, granted it’s not Kontakt but if you’re looking for a very lightweight solid sampler this is fantastic.

Independence Free

When I found this I was genuinely amazed.  Yello Tools are giving you their main sampler software for free along with a massive 2+Gb sample set.  This is quite a tool and to be honest as far as I can tell (limited use so far) it’s comparable to Kontakt.  Well worth checking out.  The only limitation this has is that it will only load 25 samples so loading up a nice Grand Piano multisample is out of the question … oh well … it is free!!

Now, go forth and sample …

Getting this installed on Windows 7 by double clicking the MSI doesn’t appear to work.  No, we have to run cmd.exe as Administrator then use MSIEXEC …

C:\>msiexec /i F:\VS2008Stuff\SQL\SQLServer2005_SSMSEE_x64.msi

Hmm …

Anyway, the last problem I’ve encountered that took a question to the WiX mailing list to answer was regarding showing messages conditionally in the UI based on custom property values changing.  What was confusing was that the log file showed all the custom actions and properties being correctly processed but the UI never actually updated.  Sound familiar?  If you’r having this problem, simply try hitting the back or next button and then go back to the dialog that should have updated?  I bet you now see the updated value in the UI (provided all your WiX source is correct of course!).

This issue is that dialogs are never redrawn.  This is actually a limitation in the MSI UI implementation.  Whilst I haven’t looked into alternatives like replacing the MSI UI (lots of work apparently) there is a hacky solution to this.  Making twin dialogs … basically you create an exact copy of the dialog that should be updated and then once the property changes you simply show this twin dialog and it will appear as though the UI has updated when in fact it’s showing an entirely new dialog.

In the snippet below you can see that the last published event is the call to the current dialogs twin. You will need to give the twin dialog a new Id but all the others can remain the same. Not a nice solution as you now have two dialogs to maintain with any changes but it is a solution none-the-less.

Changing any part of this made the build process fail so it was finding the dll and adding it to the MSI package correctly.  The first line of the custom action being called was a call to launch a debugger so that I could then step through the method and see it in action, this was never being called so it wasn’t even getting this far.

Anyway, I have now cracked this particular problem.  As it happens the library containing the custom action was compiled for .NET 4.0 … as soon as I switched this to either .NET 2.0 or .NET 3.5 all is happy.  All I can assume is that since WiX itself is .NET 3.5 that is the version that is loaded into the process by default.  So when the MSI tried to access my custom action in a .NET 4.0 library it simply bombed the whole process.

Msiexec /x {your-product-guid-code} IGNORE_PRE_CHECK=1

I’ve not needed this yet but no doubt it’s worth blogging about as it will rear it’s ugly head at some point!

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms751565.aspx

It hasn’t been completely painless but all in all it has been a real pleasure.  All my hardware is working as desired and the machine is blisteringly quick.

Absolute thumbs up from here.

The Desktop had switched back to classic mode and no matter how I tried I could not find anything related to getting it back.  Even selected one of the preinstalled Aero themes didn’t switch correctly.  After a long slog around the internet I had found a few things to try.

The first was the obvious system reboot.  Nothing changed.  I then checked that the two services that manage this in the background were running correctly.  The two services are:

• Desktop Window Manager Session Manager
• Themes

These were both correctly running and setup to start Automatically when the OS boots.  The next thing I tried was to run System File Checker,  to run this open a command prompt and execute this command:

Sfc /scannow

This performed a file system check on the machine but didn’t find any problems.  I then ran the Aero Troubleshooter and the online diagnostic tool both of which didn’t find any issues.  Still no Aero theme on my machine.

I then simple restarted the Desktop Window Manager Session Manager service and low and behold Aero returned!  That is very puzzling since I performed a reboot on the machine which would have obviously restarted this service when the OS rebooted.

Basically, I had installed an older application (pre-Vista) called Starry Night Pro 4.5, now when I launch this app Windows 7 turns off Aero as the application loads using OpenGL but now when I close this application Windows 7 correctly re-enables Aero.  Happy Days!

The first two apps to be installed were Firefox and Thunderbird. Both of these apps installed in less than a second!! The speed is literally staggering in comparison to my old single core 2.4Ghz Athlon 64 machine.

The new tweaks to the Windows UI are really nice, the jump menus are a really nice addition as are all the window docking options. I always disliked the way XP handled arranging multiple windows, feels much tighter and ‘thought through’ in Windows 7.

With all that said I have seen a few BSODs!! However, it is totally unfair to blame either than PC hardware or Windows 7 for this as it appears that my MOTU Travelers 64bit drivers are the source of these blue screens. I have just installed a newer set of drivers which were released on the 10th March so I’m about to give these a try and see it the systems behaves better.

All in all this is a very big thumbs up from here.

So, once you have this in your solution you can start to do things like this in code:

Pretty neat things these fluent ideas …

• Add “.xap” as a MIME type to IIS (Properties -> HTTP Headers -> MIME Map)
• Attach to firefox.exe not aspnet_wp.exe …

I’ve been looking forward to this as the Visual Studio team have build the new UI using WPF. This I think is a bit of a milestone in the life of WPF. For a long time there were many naysayers in reference to WPF. The first applications to really show WPF in action were Expression Blend (Sparkle) and Expression Design. Both really great apps from their respective v1’s in my opinion. Having said that I think the requirements for a UI like Visual Studio is stepping it all up a gear.  It feels very conservative in comparison to the flashy WPF ‘experiences’ we’ve become accustomed to seeing and rightly so.  This isn’t a design playground, it should be function over form imho.  (I hope that doesn’t start a flame war!).  All in all as you would expect it’s all very familiar ground.

The XAML code window and preview actually feel faster than in VS2008 which is really great news.  Over the course of the last couple of years I’ve moved from using Blend in most XAML editing tasks (it’s still king for some things), to using just the VS2008 designer.  It did the job OK but needed work, the work on the designer is most welcome!

This is completely unscientific and possibly a bit unfair on the app but it does feel less snappy on my dev machine, admittedly an old 2.2Ghz Athlon. It’s always a bit unfair to compare versions of applications like this as they have almost invariably increased in complexity at the same time.

The initial colour scheme is actually really nice, all the icons are the same, but there are just those little hints, that the underlying tech is WPF.  The UI feels and looks a lot more modular if that makes sense, the grid splitters are more discreet in appearance and there is a nice absence of millions of right-angles

One thing I can’t help but mention is the intellisense. I initially thought it wasn’t working but then realised that it’s just working in different space-time. Inordinately slow on this box and I mean slow to the point of having to ignore it as it’s immediately annoying. At a class level when accessing a control from the code-behind it takes about 25 seconds to load the intellisense menu. There seem to be a lot of enhancements to the intellisense so it’s doing a lot more work in 2010, however that’s not much help if its this slow. I can’t imagine what it would be like if I also had ReSharper in use.

Despite that, within in 10 mins of first opening VS2010 I had made a functioning baby web browser using the WebBrowser control without a single hitch. All I can say is that it gets a thumbs up from me but I’m glad that I have a new dev machine on order!! Great to see WPF in action on a scale like this but I do hope some optimising goes on between now and 2010 RTM.

In the current version you can also configure DMon to produce a log file containing all the different actions that were performed on the directories being monitored.  Below is a screen shot of the app and links to more information and the download links.

Read More & Download

Now if you are using source control it is useful to have the version number of the source incorporated into the overall application version.

Using TeamCity I have manually set the Major and Minor so that I have some control over it but the build number comes from TeamCity and the revision is taken from my Subversion repository.  To do this you need to use a pattern like this in the ‘Build Number Format’ setting on the General Settings page of your build configuration:

0.6.{0}.{build.vcs.number}

The 0.6 section is the portion I retain control over, the {0} is filled in by TeamCity an the {build.vcs.number} is the Subversion repository number.

Now to make use of this in the build process you need to access this information and update the AssemblyInfo.cs files BEFORE the build system performs the Release build. I looked at the community tasks for the AssemblyInfoTask but was a little put off.  For one thing it creates the file rather than edits the existing one, which is a 20+ project scenario would result in a fairly hefty build script.  All I wanted to so was update the existing AssemblyInfo files.  So, my MSBuild target is as follows:

So here we are using RegEx to perform a find and replace on the AssemblyVersion and AssemblyFileVersion attributes within the AssemblyInfo.cs files. Nice!

Open up Visual Studio and go to the Tools -> Options and go to the Text Editor options then you can associate file extensions to text editors. For MSBuild files we need to associate things like “proj” to “XML Editor with Encoding”. Now we also have intellisense to help write the script.

Now Visual Studio will be able to load the .proj MSBuild script into the correct editor and you can obviously associate *.proj files with Visual Studio to launch into them from Windows Explorer.

One thing I would say is that after installation I’d recommending switching to SQL as the database back end immediately.  I started off using the internal database and found the migration tool very awkward so I’m now missing some data from the initial build runs but I can live with that.

I have configured two build configurations for my SampleSort project.  The first build configuration works in Debug mode and runs the following reports:

• xUnit (via Gallio) Test Report
• NCover Report
• NCoverExplorer Report
• NDepend

This debug build configuration is triggered after a Subversion source code commit and is set-up to fail the entire build if there are any tests that do not pass.

The second build configuration works in Release mode and performs a simple Release build of the same source code on the event of a successful Debug build.  The last step in this Release build configuration is to then run an Inno Setup compiler script to package the release mode application into the final application installer.

At the moment this last task is simply an MSBuild Exec command so it all happens outside of the TeamCity scope if you will, this just means that any reporting isn’t included in the TeamCity results.

So far getting this all set-up and configured has actually been a very time consuming task.  There have been many points of confusion along the way so I’m  going to add another blog item soon that goes into a bit more detail of how I went about getting each of these build tasks set-up.  I still have a few niggles that need to be ironed out of my script that relate to MSBuild batching, basically during the test phase there are actually multiple passes of the tests in order to produce the test reports.  This does have a knock on effect of making each build pass a little more time consuming than it need be but also in the great scheme of things this isn’t a huge problem.

I have to say that to have all of this (TeamCity, xUnit, NCover, NCoverExplorer) for free really is inspiring in many ways.  A lot of blood, sweat and tears went into making all of these tools and I’m now benefitting (and my users) with zero financial outlay, I tip my hat to the developers!  I also have to thank Patrick for the free NDepend licence!!