Developer Solutions for Web and Other

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Transactions are used to add the Rollback functionality to calls, Rollback meaning the if an exception or something is thrown your call will not be executed (Commited is the term used for this). Another benefit of using Transactions is that you can group calls together, if somethign happens to one call then all of calls in that group can also be rolled back. This type of feature is particularly useful when taking user input and saving to DB, you may not want anything to get written to the DB is some error occurs on the client. .NET provides us with the System.Transaction assembly, it's not completly straight forward to use but it does hide alot of the underlying complexities. A couple of things I've learned about using System.Transactions or more specifically the System.Transactions.TransactionScope class: The safest way to use it is with the using clause. Always call Commit() before the end of the using. The optional TransactionScopeOptions enum parameter in the constructor de...

I always find this topic a great source of confusion each time I get back to it. I've just across various Exceptions being thrown in my application, FileNotFoundException and AccessViolationException. The first caused because the application cannot location a Type that one of my assemblies references and lives in another assembly. The second is caused by that same file being found but it's locked by another process i.e. something else is reading or has read and not released the assembly. Both of the above were caused by messy code which used a simple Assembly.LoadFile(...). Looks to me like you should never use this method, I'll explain more below. There are many ways to create an Assembly instance. Assembly.Load(assemblyName); Assembly.LoadFile(assemblyName); Assembly.LoadFrom(assemblyName); or even AppDomain.Load(assemblyName); There are some subtelties however, some consequences which may later cause issues e.g. the assembly you've loaded is locked. Assembly.LoadFile...

Custom Action The Custom Action is added to the Setup Project, select the Project node and hit the Custom Action button. This allows you add an Action to a particular phase in the Installation. But first you must create the Custom Action. To Add a Custom Action you must first have a Custom Action created, this is usually in the form of a Installer Class, this should be created in a seperate project, the Installer Class is actually one of the File Templates in the C# Projects. So it's File->New Project and select Visual C# Projects. Then add a Class Library, this will prompt you for the Class Library Types , select "Installer Class". Walkthrough - Creating Custom Action (msdn). Also here's a more comprehensive document on Setup/Installer implementations, it delves into the Registry etc Getting Started with Setup Projects (SimpleTalk). Visual Studio Setup Projects and Custom Actions (Simple Talk). Create your Installer Class and then add it as a Custom Action to the ...

Transactions are used to prevent your application from getting into an unknown state. Transactions work on services which register with the Transaction service such as Database calls. It's useful where you cannot be sure that the resource (DB) will remain available while some data is changing and if the resource for some reason is made unavailable during a call then what happens to the data, well the Transaction should Rollback your Data so the app remains in the state it was before the data was sent. Transactions in .NET are implemented with System.Transaction.TransactionScope class. In the background this uses COM+. Wrap your DB call in a new TransactionScope instance, when the functionality is finished call TransactionScope.Complete(), then TransactionScope.Dispose(). If the execution makes it to these calls then your changes will be applied, if not your changes will be Rolled-back by the Transaction and you app will remain the same as before the call started. MSDN Video http://...

With installer issues it's always difficult debug problems. If it's the Installer itself i.e. work done in the setup.vdprj itself then you maybe in a spot of bother. There are some logging options which are available to you.The other problem you may have is with your Custom Action if you have one. This maybe easier to diagnose, asyou can use the Visual Studio Debugger to attach but this in itself is not always easy todo. If you have problems with your installer itself and not the Custom Action then try this: You can also Log installer actions by activating the installer logging, this is done through a registry entry, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223300 . All your doing is adding a "String Value" named "Logging" and a value "voicewarmupx" to the registry entry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer I've done this and found some useful info but it's not that easy to read, at least it tells you the command that was...

The ProjectAggregator is a dll that is required in order to use Packages developed with Visual Studio's 2005 Extensibility SDK. The projectaggregator.dll must be dropped into the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE directory, if it doesn't exist then the end user will not be able to open projects in Visual Studio 2005 that are associated with your Package. Microsoft provide an installer ProjectAggregator.msi which does this work for you. The problem with this is you either tell all your clients to run the projectaggregator.msi themselves after or before installing your Package or else you include the installation of it in your own installer. The second option is of course the right one, as who would expect customers to run more than one installer. To include this in your installer however you need to create what is known as a BootStrapper project. The Bootstrapper is another installer that wraps the installer you actually wish to run. The idea is you include ...

The IIS Metabase is XML representation of the IIS instance, it's actually an XML file stored in IIS. It can be access using apps like  MetaEdit   or programmatically using the Active Directory through a class  System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry. using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; using System; using System.Data; using System.Configuration; using System.DirectoryServices; using System.Web.Configuration; namespace IISMetabase { class IISMetabase { private string _machineName = "localhost"; private System.Collections.IDictionary _applications;//collection of websites private Configuration _config; public IISMetabase() { _applications = new System.Collections.Hashtable(); } public System.Collections.IDictionary GetApplications() { DirectoryEntry webentry = new DirectoryEntry(); String path = "IIS://" + _machineName + "/W3SVC/1/ROOT"; webentry.Path = path; Boolean exists = false; try { exists = DirectoryEntry.Exists(path); } catch (Sy...

Here's an example of a StopWatch control implemented in Csharp and used as a control on a web client. The control needs to be register on the clients machine then added to the clients web application (in html) and then called from Javascript. <OBJECT id="activeXTimerControl" name="activeXTimerControl"  classid="clsid:4F3B57CE-D9CA-41c3-ACBD-EBB2380990E7"  style="width: 504px; height: 182px"  codebase="Bin/ActiveXTimerControl.dll" class="ActiveXTimerControl.TimerControl"> </OBJECT> To start the Stopwatch call Start() and to end call End() then call Time() to return the result as a string or use the AddTimeToGrid to add the time to a DataGrid Control (supplied by the StopWatch control) or call AddTimeToLabel which adds the time to a textbox. activeXTimerControl.Start(); ///do someting activeXTimerControl.Stop(); var time = activeXTimerControl....

One way to get a .NET object to run in a browser is to create a User Control in .NET. You can then call this User Control from Javascript in your client. There's nothing magical about this except, it only works on IE and there are a few small bits that you must implement in order for your User Control to be picked up, the errors you get aren't very helpful so I recommend following these steps (Some of these I'm not sure if they're required but they've worked for me). Create a Class Project in Visual Studio 2005. Add a User Control to the project. In the User Control Designer add a TextBox Control Add a Property to your class to set the Text of the TextBox you've just added. public void AddText(string time) { if (_timerTextBox == null) { _timerTextBox = new System.Windows.Forms.TextBox(); _timerTextBox.Text = " Time (msec)"; } _timerTextBox.Text += ("\r\n" ...

Using Localization from Code ASP.NET provides all the Localization you need by just adding .RESX files to your Web App in the right location but sometimes you want to invoke the Localization yourself. To do this you'll use the System.Resources.ResourceManager class. This allows you to get resources by simply supplying the name of the resource and the Culture but to setup the resource itself is a bit trickier (in Visual Studio 2005) as some of the files required have been removed from Visual Studio's Templates. Because of this you'll need to use some tools to create the Resource (and optionally the Assembly to store it know as Resource Assemblies or Satellite Assemblies). There are 3 steps to creating resources for use with ResourceManager: 1. Write a text file or .RESX file to hold your resources. 2. Compile the resources in step 1 into a .RESOURCES file. 3. Compile the .RESOURCES file in step 2 into a Satellite Assembly. 4. Locate the Satellite Assembly from step 3 ...

Some tips when moving your VS Package assembly out of the GAC. First of all in order for Visual Studio to find the Package in it's new location you need to tell it where to find it, this is done in the Registry with the CodeBase key. This is done in the Registry at [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Packages\{1237c0fa-4f6e-43c5-9ee4-a5938847c54a}] "Codebase"="C:\\Program Files\\MyCompany\\MyProduct\\MyPackageAssembly.dll" This is also the case for other classes which have GUIDs in your package. Use regasm with the /codebase switch to tell you which classes may need an additional registry entry.

Like so many others I wanted to update the Version of all of my assemblies with one version value but I could not find the solution I wanted, hence I've written my own, see the source code below. This implementation fits my own problem, a build script which gets all our codebase sourcecode from SourceSafe, builds all the projects and then labels all the sourecode with a single label passed in by the builder at command-line. This implementation takes either 1 or 2 arguments. If only 1 is supplied it will do a check for a valid Version value i.e. the version must be of the format 1.0.0.0 and the third value must be less than 65535 (This is a .NET requirement, the assembly would not build if the number is above 65535, see here for more ). If 2 arguments are supplied it will do all that step 1 does and also will set the version to AssemblyVersion and AssemblyFileVersion in all AssemblyInfo.cs files under the directory specified (and it's subdirectories). e.g. here's how I cal...

This one always catches me out. There are a few different ways to read settings in from a .config file. The confusion for me occurs when reading from certain sections and from config files other than ones for the currently running application. The easiest example is reading settings from the currently running application, from within it's own code. You can access the AppSettings Section <configuration><appSettings> <add key="hostname1" value="localhost"/><add key="hostname2" value="othername"/></appSettings></configuration> using: NameValueCollection appSettings = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings; foreach(string key in appSettings.AllKeys) Console.WriteLine(key + " " + appSettings[key]); So now you've all the keys in the AppSettings section i.e. "hostname1" and "hostname" and all their values accessed with appSettings[key] . Note: First you must add a reference to 'Sys...