XAML Formatter

I’ve been doing a lot of XAML work lately on a WPF project, and the client is really concerned about sloppy / ugly XAML.  The one problem I found was that Visual Studio 2010 is not really all that great at formatting XAML and it certainly does not format it the way I want it formatted.  So I decided to write something that would do the formatting for me, I started with a PowerShell script that I used via PowerConsole.  Worked great, but with some free time I decided why not write a proper VS2010 extension.

The key principle behind the formatter is that it only concerns itself with indentation, not what should be on any given line.  Visual Studio does offer some options in this regard but the closest thing I could get to what I wanted meant that when I formatted, a typical style Setter was 2 or 3 lines.  Multiplying the size of a style by 2 or 3 times makes for a rather large XAML file, not ideal.  So you worry about what goes on what line, and I’ll take care of making it all nicely aligned. 

Comment indentation is not perfect yet, but it usable, maybe v1.1 will have some improvements.

I’m looking into V2 which will simply intercept the Format Code command.  I didn’t go this way in V1 because of the complexity around formatting a selection.  Currently I format the entire document.  When I finish V2 I’ll post both code samples.

NOTE: I originally wrote this extension back in early October 2010, so there might be a similar tool available now.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Feedback: I’d love to hear some feedback, if you have something that does not format correctly and feel comfortable sending me the XAML snippet, please do.   Any questions, comments, or concerns can be sent to XamlFormatter@danno.ca

^{Download: You can download the latest version of the XamlFormatter from the Visual Studio Gallery}

WCF RIA Services - “Not Found” Error Message

The dreaded “The remote server returned an error: NotFound” error message in RIA Services can be frustrating if you are not aware of what it really means, and more importantly how to diagnose it.

This generic error message is due to network stack limitation in your browser, basically the browser is intercepting the error and not giving it all to Silverlight.  That does not mean there isn’t good information to be found.  Your friend here is Fiddler and/or WCF Service Tracing. 

NotFound vs OnError:  A NotFound generally means that something in the WCF side blew up, OnError will handle errors in your model (or custom code in your DomainService).  So when you see NotFound, overriding OnError will not be much help, break points placed inside of it will most likely not be reached during debugging, but its an easy place to start.

The first tool we are going to us is Fiddler, a web debugging proxy with a WCF Binary Inspector. This will show you all the requests are being made and will show you what error code, and possibly what error is being returned by your service. (Using Fiddler with ASP.Net Development Server / Casini)

If there is no good information in Fiddler then the next step is to hit your service url, which you can find in Fiddler.   In the picture above you can see that my service is at /ClientBin/HockeyStatsService-Web-HockeyStatsDomainService.svc (ProjectName-Web-DomainServiceName.svc).  Remember that RIA Services does not actually generate a .svc file for you, it is handled dynamically by the DomainServiceHttpModule, so don’t go looking for a physical file.

Actual 404:  If you hit your service in the browser and you still get a 404, then something is wrong with your deployment. 

Check out Saurabh Pant’s Blog or Tim Heuer for good articles on deploying WCF Ria Services to IIS.

If you are using Casini (ASP.NET development server) then make sure your web.config is correct (Has proper references to DomainServiceHttpModule), and that you have a reference in your ASP.NET project to your service library (if you are using RIA Class Libraries, otherwise you should be fine on this point).

Now if you can hit your service url without a 404, but still get a NotFound, and the Fiddler response tab didn’t give you anymore insight we will move on to some other steps.

SvcTraceViewer: Visual Studio has a tool to help you configure WCF, it can be found under TOOLS | WCF Service Configuration Editor.  Use this tool to open your Web.Config and then on the ‘Diagnostics’ folder, turn on Message Logging and Tracing.  On the ‘Message Logging’ node, LogMessagesAtServiceLevel=true and LogMessagesAtTransportLevel=false.

You can view the generated svclog files with C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bin\SvcTraceViewer.exe

In my example DomainService I am loading a large amount of hockey stats data.  When I open my svclog file and find the error generated I can see that the actual exception being thrown by my service says:

'Maximum number of items that can be serialized or deserialized in an object graph is '65536'. Change the object graph or increase the MaxItemsInObjectGraph quota. '.

Your message obviously might be different, but with that information you should be able to find a solution or at least provide the right information to the WCF RIA Services Forums so they can help find a solution

Another good debugging tip is to turn off custom errors in your Web.Config.  <customErrors mode="Off"/>  This will provide more informative exceptions to silverlight, however it also exposes information to the user that you may not intend, so do not leave this set to ‘off’ on a publicly available site.

If your error is the same as mine, take a look at Fixing the MaxItemsInObjectGraph.

MaxItemsInObjectGraph – WCF RIA Services Exception

The MaxItemsInObjectGraph error message comes up fairly often in the WCF RIA Services forums and I just ran into it on a personal project so I thought I’d write a quick blog on how to fix this error.

The exact error message from WCF Trace is:

'Maximum number of items that can be serialized or deserialized in an object graph is '65536'. Change the object graph or increase the MaxItemsInObjectGraph quota. '.

You need to add the following code to your web.config, and replace the following:

HockeyStatsService-Web-HockeyStatsDomainService with YourRiaProjectName-Web-YourDomainServiceName

HockeyStatsService.Web.HockeyStatsDomainService with YourRiaProjectName.Web.YourDomainServiceName

<services>

  <service name="HockeyStatsService.Web.HockeyStatsDomainService"

          behaviorConfiguration="HockeyStatsService-Web-HockeyStatsDomainService">

  </service>

</services>

<behaviors>

  <serviceBehaviors>

    <behavior name="HockeyStatsService-Web-HockeyStatsDomainService">

      <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true" />

      <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="true" />

      <dataContractSerializer maxItemsInObjectGraph="655360"/>

    </behavior>

  </serviceBehaviors>

</behaviors>

Changing timeouts in WCF RIA Services

This article is valid for the RC version and above

In previous versions of WCF RIA Services, it was extremely difficult to change the service timeouts for your DomainService, you were pretty much stuck with the defaults.  The RC release has made it fairly easy, though not all that discoverable.

The single line of code you need is:

((WebDomainClient<LibraryDomainContext.ILibraryDomainServiceContract>)this.DomainClient).ChannelFactory.Endpoint.Binding.SendTimeout = new TimeSpan(0, 5, 0);

There are two options on where to put this line of code.  First is anywhere after you construct a DomainContext, in which case change ‘this’ to the name of your context object. 

The second choice is to create a partial class for your DomainContext and use the partial method OnCreated, which would look like this:

public partial class LibraryDomainContext

{

   partial void OnCreated()

   {

      if(DesignerProperties.GetIsInDesignMode(App.Current.RootVisual))

         ((WebDomainClient<LibraryDomainContext.ILibraryDomainServiceContract>)this.DomainClient).ChannelFactory.Endpoint.Binding.SendTimeout = new TimeSpan(0, 5, 0);

   }

}

If you are not sure of the interface you should be using on WebDomainClient, take a look at the constructor of your DomainContext, it is calling the base constructor with the proper WebDomainClient that you should be using above.

EDIT: March 31st 2010

I added a Designer check to the code, this will stop exceptions from being thrown during design time.  If you found this post for some other reason than WCF RIA Services RC (or higher) be aware that the above designer check has issues with older versions of Visual Studio.  Read this post from Delay's Blog for info

Silverlight Binding Lesson

I learned a very important lesson about binding in Silverlight that I thought I would share. 

Here is what I was trying to do:

<TextBlock Text=”{Binding Path=MyPeople, Converter={StaticResource OldestPersonNameConverter}}” />

MyPeople is a collection of People and the converter is going to take that collection, find the oldest person and return their name.  I thought this would just work and it does the first time.  However in this case, adding a new person to MyPeople will NOT trigger the binding to update, your converter will never run again.

Right? Wrong?  I’ve been debating the point with a few people at Objectsharp, and I didn’t expect this to fail (some did).  I was under the assumption that binding was binding, the magic behind the covers would look for INotifyPropertyChanged or INotifyCollectionChanged regardless of the property you are trying to bind.

This doesn’t work for my example, but in my actual code I was able to bind to myCollection.Count which will fire a PropertyChanged event when you add or remove an item from the collection.  In the actual example above, I don’t have a good answer, they all have drawbacks.

WCF Ria Services vs Entity Framework

This is a quick tip for anyone using WCF RIA Services with Entity Framework.  The WCF RIA Services team has fixed what I consider a fairly annoying ‘bug’ with Entity Framework.  In Entity Framework the EntityCollection class does not implement INotifyCollectionChanged, however the client side EntityCollection class that RIA uses is part of the RIA framework and they have fixed this issue.  They have explicitly implemented the interface however so you will need to cast the EntityCollection to a INotifyCollectionChanged before you see the CollectionChanged event.

RIA Services XMLMetaDataProvider and Dynamic Assemblies

If you are using the XMLMetaDataProvider and have a dynamic assembly reference your service might fail with the following error:

           The invoked member is not supported in a dynamic assembly

There are two fixes for this problem, one is to use the full attribute names.  So ‘DisplayAttribute’ instead of just ‘Display’.  Second option is to fix the code in MetadataSet.cs.  The problem is with the TryGetType method around line 421.  You should be able to find the code below, the GetExportedTypes needs to be changed to GetTypes. 

   1: // TODO : the metadata file might need a way to specify the set

   2: // of source assemblies to load from - for now search all loaded assemblies

   3: foreach (Assembly assembly in AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies())

   4: {

   5:     foreach (Type t in assembly.GetTypes())

   6:     {

   7:         if (t.Name == typeName || t.FullName == typeName)

   8:         {

   9:             typeMap[typeName] = t;

  10:             return t;

  11:         }

  12:     }

  13: }

Thanks to Manfred Lange for the tip on the error message.

WCF RIA Services XMLMetaDataProvider Problem

The current RIA Services project I’m working on has been using the XMLMetaDataProvider due to the fact that our model and DomainService are in different projects.  This rules out defining your metadata in a partial class for each entity.   As the project got bigger we noticed that randomly our metadata was not being created at build time.  Turns out there is a race condition with loading the XML file and the requests for metadata.  Here is the new XmlMetadataProvider.cs file where we now load the dataset in the constructor, not the first time it is requested.  After all that, I think we’ll try using Nikhil Kothari’s fluent API style, I like the look of it over the mass amount of XML.

   1: internal class XmlMetadataProvider : TypeDescriptionProvider

   2:     {

   3:         private Type domainServiceType;

   4:         private MetadataSet metadataSet;

   5:  

   6:         /// <summary>

   7:         /// Constructor that accepts a metadata context to use when generating custom type descriptors

   8:         /// </summary>

   9:         /// <param name="existingProvider">The parent TDP instance</param>

  10:         /// <param name="domainServiceType">The DomainService Type exposing the entity Types this provider will be registered for</param>

  11:         public XmlMetadataProvider(TypeDescriptionProvider existingProvider, Type domainServiceType)

  12:             : base(existingProvider)

  13:         {

  14:             this.domainServiceType = domainServiceType;

  15:             LoadMetadataSet();

  16:         }

  17:  

  18:         public override ICustomTypeDescriptor GetTypeDescriptor(Type objectType, object instance)

  19:         {

  20:             return new XmlMetadataTypeDescriptor(this.MetadataSet, objectType, base.GetTypeDescriptor(objectType, instance));

  21:         }

  22:  

  23:         private MetadataSet MetadataSet

  24:         {

  25:             get

  26:             {

  27:                 if (metadataSet == null)

  28:                 {

  29:                     LoadMetadataSet();

  30:                 }

  31:                 return metadataSet;

  32:             }

  33:         }

  34:  

  35:         private void LoadMetadataSet()

  36:         {

  37:             metadataSet = new MetadataSet();

  38:  

  39:             // load all the metadata files found

  40:             IEnumerable<string> metadataFiles = domainServiceType.Assembly.GetManifestResourceNames().Where(p => p.EndsWith(".metadata.xml", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase));

  41:             foreach (string metadataFile in metadataFiles)

  42:             {

  43:                 Stream stream = domainServiceType.Assembly.GetManifestResourceStream(metadataFile);

  44:                 StreamReader streamReader = new StreamReader(stream);

  45:                 String metadata = streamReader.ReadToEnd();

  46:  

  47:                 try

  48:                 {

  49:                     metadataSet.Load(metadata);

  50:                 }

  51:                 catch (Exception e)

  52:                 {

  53:                     string msg = string.Format(CultureInfo.CurrentCulture, Resource.MetadataLoadError, metadataFile) + " : " + e.Message;

  54:                     throw new InvalidOperationException(msg, e);

  55:                 }

  56:  

  57:             }

  58:         }

  59:     }

  60: }

Windows 7 RC1 and VMWare Workstation

I just finished upgrading Vista to win7 RC1 on my work laptop.  Everything went smoothly right up until I got to work this morning and tried to use VMWare Workstation, which booted up without issue, but the network wasn’t working.

“The network bridge on device VMnet0 is not running”  and “VMNet0: Overlapped I/O operation is in progress  which failed to connect” were the messages I was getting.   The problem was that thewin7 upgrade failed to add the VMWare Bridge Protocol back to my network card.  You could probably add this manually, but I just did a repair from my original msi and a reboot later I was up and running.

What you might have missed at Mix09

The first and foremost thing that you missed if you didn’t attend Mix09 was the opportunity to hang out with Barry, Bruce and myself.  If you were at Mix09 and didn’t come over and say hello, I can only assume it had something to do with the unnatural resemblance Barry shares with Dr. Evil.

For me, the two big things at Mix were Expression Blend improvements (preview) and Silverlight 3 beta.  If you are interested in something other than those two products check out both keynotes and all of the session videos on the Mix09 site.  For a nice non-technical change of pace I strongly recommend watching the Day 2 keynote around minute 32 for a great example of UX design.  Deborah Adler explains how she set out to change the design of prescription bottles after her grandmother mistakenly took her husbands medication instead of her own.

Expression Blend 3 Preview

Expression Blend took some really big steps to become a more mature product for both developers and designers.  For a good overview of what’s new in blend check out Douglas Olsen and Christian Schormann in their ‘The Future of Expression Blend’ session.

SketchFlow

Not actually available in the preview. Sketchflow is an amazingly simple way to sketch out some rough UI designs and publish them in a manner that allows you to actually navigate around your app (no code required, but XAML is actually produced) and also provides a mechanism for stakeholders to leave feedback on each of your designs.  Hard to do this functionality justice, so be sure to checkout Christian Schormann’s blog, his presentation at Mix09 or the Day 1 keynote presentation (About minute 97), this had a lot of buzz during the week.

A Better IDE

Blend 3 also went a long way to make the integration of developers and designers much smoother.  Developers get Code-Behind Support and TFS Functionality (designers should find this helpful as well hopefully).  Designers get SketchFlow and the ability to import files from Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.  Blend can parse these files and replicate the gradients, shapes, layers, etc and create Xaml.  A demo of the Adobe support can be found in the Keynote Day 1 (again around the 97 minute mark) and the ‘Integrating Microsoft Expression Blend with Adobe Creative Suite‘ session.  Designers (and those of us that pretend to be) will also enjoy the new simple Sample Data panel to generate sample data, or read it from an xml file.  This gives you a very simple way to see your Xaml in the designer exactly how you would see in the actual application.  There is a sample in the Keynote Day 1 (minute 97, it was an exciting point of the keynote).

Silverlight 3

There was a beta release of Silverlight 3 made available at Mix this year as well as a new drop of the Silverlight Toolkit. Shawn Burke has a great breakdown of the Toolkit drop and the work they did to make it work with Silverlight 2 and 3.  Silverlight 3 has made many changes that will make working in Silverlight a lot less painful, bringing it more in line with WPF.  Checkout the ‘What’s New In Microsoft Silverlight 3’ session video for a great overview of all the features.  The big features that I found interesting were Out Of Browser Support (video), which Bruce explains isn’t really out out of browser, but is still a great feature for giving your Silverlight app that WPF application feel.  You can couple out of browser with the new Offline support (video) and really turn your Silverlight application into an almost fully fledged desktop application that can run across several different operating systems. 

Application Navigation Framework is great way to get some built-in navigation between pages, I’m really loving this feature.  Tim Heuer shows you how to do some URI routing with the deep-linking that is available with this framework as well.  There doesn’t seem to be a lot of info out on the internet about this feature, but you can create a new Silverlight Navigation Project and the stubs it creates will explain everything you need to know.

The other features that will probably be of interest to you include Perspective 3D for easy, yet stunning, 3D transforms, the Blur Effect, Element-to-Element Binding (yay! It’s about time), Merged Resource Dictionaries, and Style Inheritance.

Mix09 showed us that in the next few months as Silverlight 3 and Expression Blend 3 get released, the designer-developer workflow gets easier, and you no longer have any excuses to avoid using Silverlight in your personal or business applications.  If you haven’t even looked at Silverlight yet, get cracking.  If you want to try SL3 and still deploy SL2 apps, check out this article by Jeff Wilcox.

UI Safe BindingSource

It caught me off guard that the BindingSource is not really UI thread safe.  The situation we had was a model running on a background thread that was updating a dataset.  My view contained a grid, that was bound to a BindingSource which was bound to a table in that dataset.    The result was cross-threading exceptions being thrown as soon as we opened our view.  The thread that updates the dataset is the same thread that fires off the events that tell the BindingSource the underlying data has changed, which in turn tells the UI piece that data has changed, all the while still on that background thread.

My first pass at fixing the issue was to override OnListChanged in the BindingSource and marshal the thread back on to the UI thread.  This seemed to solve the problem until we bound to the entire dataset instead of just a table.  Internally the BindingSource creates a BindingSource for every list inside the collection of lists.  In this case, for every table in the dataset. 

Thanks to Reflector and the ability to debug into the source code, I found a way to get around the creation of more BindingSources, and instead created my own ObjectsharpBindingSource internally. 

This solution is probably only happy path, but that is the only path my code was following so that’s the only code I looked into.

Comments?  Questions?  Concerns?  Don’t like my code?  Better idea? Let me know, feedback is always welcome.

The idea behind UIThreadMarshal can be found at this great article by

New MS (Dundas) Chart Controls

The client I’m currently working with needed a charting control that would allow us to create something similar to a Gantt chart.  Unfortunately the control suite we were using wasn’t quite up to the task.  Fortunately a fellow Objectsharpee (and former Dundas employee) told me that Microsoft was going to be putting the Dundas controls they had purchased into the framework, even better was that it had been released just the week previous.  I’ve never used Dundas controls previous to this, so I’m not 100% clear what the feature set differences are, or if there are any.  The MS Chart control did everything we needed and it was dead simple to do. 

All you need to do is download and install the small installer and have .Net 3.5 SP1 already installed.

Chart Docs
Chart Controls
Chart Forums – Note: Not a lot of information in the forums as of this posting, but the Dundas support forums are filled with great, applicable, information.
Chart Samples

TFS Powershell PSSnapin

The October Team Foundation Power Tools drop includes three new features:

• TFS Power Shell Extensions
• TFS Windows Shell Extensions
• Team Members Tool

The only one I care about is the Powershell extensions. Keith Hill has a great post with some examples.  I already had a script that made some .NET assembly calls to get me the latest good build off of TFS.  I converted that script to use the new snapin, and posted it below.  I’m sure some of this is not best practices, feel free to let me know if you have a cleaner implementation.

(Get-TfsServer -Name myTfsServer).GetService(Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client
.IBuildServer]).QueryBuilds("myProjectName", "myBuildName") | 

where { $_.BuildDefinition.LastGoodBuildUri -eq $_.Uri } | select DropLocation

Two lines in my profile.ps1:

[void][System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client")
[void][System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client")

SQL Server – Dropped my default database

Today I learned an important lesson about Sql Server 2005, don’t change your default database unless you absolutely have to.  I set mine to DatabaseX and then I promptly dropped DatabaseX.  When I tried to log in I got a nice error message

            Cannot Open User Default Database, Login Failed

I didn’t setup the VM that I was using, so I didn’t know the SA password.  I basically had no way to get back into the server.  So if you ever find yourself in this predicament, execute the following from the command line:

C:\> sqlcmd -E -d master 
1> ALTER LOGIN [YOUR USER NAME HERE] WITH DEFAULT_DATABASE=master 
2> GO

That will reset your default database back to master and you can login again. 

Infragistics Tips and Tricks - Part 1 of N

The current project I'm on is using Infragistics controls exclusively.  Infragistics can do some wonderful things, but damn, sometimes it does it horribly.  So here are a couple little hints and tips that might save someone a couple of frustrating moments of despair.  Find something in my list that I did wrong?  Found something I could have done better / cleaner / quicker? Please let me know.

Binding to a List<>

If you are binding your Grid to a BindingSource that in turn is bound to a Generic List, the key of your band needs to be the name of the class your list contains.

List<Message> myList = new List<Message>();
myBindingSource.DataSource = myList;
myUltraGrid.DataSource = myBindingSource;

Band key in your schema is 'Message'.  If your class contains another collection there will be bands for those collections which will add 'plus' signs beside all your rows even if that collection is empty.  Create another band in your schema with a key equal to your child collection and then set Hidden = true.  (See below about the Hidden property...)

The other note for binding to a generic list is that if it isn't an ObservableCollection or BindingList  (or anything that doesn't implement IBindingList or IBindingListVIew) then you are not going to get an update when you add or remove and item from the list.  If you know these things are happening you can call myBindingsource.ResetBindings(false) when they happen to update your grid with the new bindings.

Good article on what interfaces have what binding functionality.

Can't Find the .Visible property?

This one baffles me, and I'd love to know why some infragistics controls do not have a .Visible property, instead they have a .Hidden.  Watch out for that.  Apparently this is some sort of VB throw back blah blah blah.

CreationFilter's To Change GroupBy Headers

CreationFilters are a really cool concept that let you change the layout of a lot of Infragistic controls and add new functionality.  I used this to add some status lights to the GroupByRows of my grid. 

Create a Creation Filter class that implements IUIElementCreationFilter.  My AfterCreateChildElements(UIElement parent) does nothing but here is my  BeforeCreateChildElements method.  This will create 3 icons and some text in the group by row.  I create my own text element but if you want to grab the existing text element: 

DependentTextUIElement dependentTextUIElement =
       parent.GetDescendant(typeof(DependentTextUIElement)) as DependentTextUIElement;

public bool BeforeCreateChildElements(UIElement parent)
{
    bool value = false;
    if (parent is GroupByRowDescriptionUIElement)
    {
        int X = 17;
        int Y = parent.Rect.Y + 1;
        int Width = 516;
        int Height = 17;
        UltraGridGroupByRow groupByRow = (UltraGridGroupByRow)parent.GetAncestor(typeof(GroupByRowUIElement)).GetContext(typeof(UltraGridGroupByRow));
        DeviceStatusInfo deviceInfo = groupByRow.Tag as DeviceStatusInfo;

        if (deviceInfo == null)
        {
            deviceInfo = new DeviceStatusInfo("", DeviceState.Offline, DeviceOnlineState.NotOnline, "", FoundationHelper.GetImage(typeof(string)));
            groupByRow.Tag = deviceInfo;
        }
        string text = deviceInfo.DeviceName;
        if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(deviceInfo.DeviceCurrentOperationsText))
            text += " - " + deviceInfo.DeviceCurrentOperationsText;
        TextUIElement textElement;
        ImageUIElement firstIndicator;
        ImageUIElement secondIndicator;
        ImageUIElement deviceIcon;
        parent.ChildElements.Clear();
        deviceIcon = new ImageUIElement(parent, deviceInfo.DeviceImage);
        textElement = new TextUIElement(parent, text);
        firstIndicator = new ImageUIElement(parent, deviceInfo.DeviceStatusImage);
        secondIndicator = new ImageUIElement(parent, deviceInfo.DeviceOnlineImage);
        deviceIcon.Rect = new Rectangle(X, Y - 1, deviceInfo.DeviceImage.Width, deviceInfo.DeviceImage.Height);
        firstIndicator.Rect = new Rectangle(deviceIcon.Rect.X + deviceIcon.Rect.Width + 2, Y, deviceInfo.DeviceStatusImage.Width, deviceInfo.DeviceStatusImage.Height);
        secondIndicator.Rect = new Rectangle(firstIndicator.Rect.X + firstIndicator.Rect.Width + 2, Y, deviceInfo.DeviceOnlineImage.Width, deviceInfo.DeviceOnlineImage.Height);
        textElement.Rect = new Rectangle(secondIndicator.Rect.X + secondIndicator.Rect.Width + 2, Y, Width, Height);
        parent.ChildElements.Add(deviceIcon);
        parent.ChildElements.Add(textElement);
        parent.ChildElements.Add(firstIndicator);
        if (deviceInfo.DeviceStatus == DeviceState.Online)
        {
            parent.ChildElements.Add(secondIndicator);
        }
        firstIndicator.ToolTipItem = deviceInfo.GetDeviceStatusToolTip();
        secondIndicator.ToolTipItem = deviceInfo.GetDeviceOnlineStatusToolTip();


        value = true;
    }
    return value;
}

Set the creation filter:

this.ultraGrid.CreationFilter = new GroupRowIndicatorsCreationFilter();

TabClosing Event Order

This tip is kind of specific, but thought I'd post it here anyway.  If you are using the Mdi Tabbed Workspace (and I assume the Mdi Tab Control) then a little gotcha is that when the user closes a form, either by clicking the 'X' or by you firing the form.Close() method the Mdi_Tab_Closing method is fired BEFORE the Form_Closing event.  If you think about it, it makes sense, however it is a pain in the butt if you want to handle someone closing a tab, and someone closing the whole app differently.  In our app we have functionality similar to visual studio, if you caused it to fire?!? Short answer is you can't.  So here is a little method that will fire before either Mdi_Tab_Closing and Form_Closing.

protected override void DefWndProc(ref System.Windows.Forms.Message m)
{
      if (m.Msg == WM_SYSCOMMAND && m.WParam.ToInt32() == SC_CLOSE)
     {
          applicationClosing = true;
     }
     base.DefWndProc(ref m);
}

The applicationClosing bool allows me to check if the user hit the X button when I'm in my Mdi_Tab_Closing.  If you have an 'Exit' option from a file menu then in that code you will want to set applicationClosing = true in there as well.

Reset permissions for existing folders on a new Vista Install

I just did a fresh install of Vista Ultimate on my home desktop PC.  The install all went fairly smooth except for 2 things:

1) IIS was not installed, and I missed the little checkbox to install ASP support.

2) I had a lot of problems accessing my existing Documents And Settings folders and could not access (only read access) my other partitions.  Even as Administrator I could not seem to set permissions on these folders and drives so I could write to them.  Thankfully Tim Sneath came to the rescue with a posting about 'Deleting the Undeletable' in which he explains how to reset the permissions on files to give yourself access to them. 

it's not unusual to find some folders that can't be accessed, even by an administrator, because their ACLs were set for accounts with SIDs that applied to an old partition

Tim provides a quick batch command that will allow you to reset the proper permissions for the Administrators group. 

takeown /f %1 /r /d y
icacls %1 /grant administrators:F /t

Just pass it a directory to start at (it is recursive).

Big thanks to Tim.

IIS 7, ASP, and Vista

When I did a fresh install of Vista on my home desktop machine it did not install IIS by default which is to be expected.  But the real problems started when I could not find out how to install ASP support.  Anytime I would try and load an aspx file it would say it didn't know how to handle .aspx as a static file.  Very frustrating.

Barry Gervin provided a link that shows the step by step instructions on how to properly install IIS 7 on vista, including the slightly hidden ASP.NET support.  Is anyone really installing IIS7 and not installing ASP.NET support?

Vista DreamScene

While I was out at the Vista Ice House in Toronto last week they were demo'ing 'DreamScene', which is movies as desktop wallpapers.  The basic idea is that you take a small subtle looping video and apply it as your background.  Obviously this is eye candy only, but it is pretty impressive eye candy when done properly.  There is a video here that shows a couple of examples.

DreamScene is one of those annoying Ultimate Extras which must really drive anyone without Ultimate absolutely nuts.  Thankfully I have Ultimate, and managed to get my hands on a beta (the official release is apparently some vague time in the future), only problem is that the beta does not seem to support dual-monitors, something that hopefully will be addressed in time for the final release.  WinCustomize has started a page where you can get some DreamScene movies, apparently both in-house created, and user submitted.  It doesn't appear that the page is ready for primetime, but you can check it out none the less.

How Smart Are You?

Is Google Taking Over My Computer?

Clipboard Copying Problem

I recently ran into a problem with the clipboard that is apparently a fairly common problem without a common answer.
The problem occurs while making a temporary copy of the clipboard.

I needed to put something into the clipboard, but I didn't want the user to lose what they already had in there, the easy way that I assumed would work looked like this:

IDataObject oldClipboard = Clipboard.GetDataObject();

//random clipboard manipulation here

Clipboard.SetDataObject(oldClipboard,true);

The true ensures that the data is held in the clipboard even after the program closes.  This solution meets with a "The requested clipboard operation failed" message if there is ever anything actually in the clipboard originally.

So here is the proper way of making a copy of the clipboard data, assuming of course that you have no idea what is in the clipboard before you arrived.  An important note if you aren't aware of how the clipboard is structured.  When you copy text out a richtextbox it is actually stored in several different ways:
Rich Text Format
Rich Text Format Without Objects
RTF As Text
System.String
UnicodeText
Text

The solution:

IDataObject oldClipboard = Clipboard.GetDataObject();

DataObject newClipboard = new DataObject();

string[] s;

s = oldClipboard.GetFormats(); //gets all the possible formats for that data

foreach(string ns in s)

{

newClipboard.SetData(ns,oldClipboard.GetData(ns)); //re-associate the old data with the proper types

}

//this is where your clipboard manipulation goes.

Clipboard.SetDataObject(newClipboard,true); //true makes sure the data persists

 

 

Web MSN plus SP2 and BitTorrent

Well MSN has knocked one of its shortfalls of the list (it's pretty long).

I heard last week that Microsoft had openned up a web-based version of its popular MSN client, but everytime I tried it the site seemed to be down. However it seems to be up and pretty stable, and it's pretty nice too. Microsoft seems to be doing some pretty great things with WebGUI's, WebOutlook looks almost identical to normal Outlook, and now web MSN looks amazingly like MSN as well.

So everyone give it a try at http://webmessenger.msn.com/

Also a note on SP2, anyone installed it yet? I heard a lot of bad things during the beta stages, I assume that Microsoft fixed all these problems before they turned it Gold, but I'm still a little hesitant. IBM has apparently asked its users to hold off with the install. Apparently this is routine, but I now have a mounting list of 'apparents and hopes'. The list of improvements does sound nice though, maybe not for myself (but the new WiFi improvements should be interesting to see) but more for the family that I have become the unofficial tech-support for. There is a good article at NeoWin about the improvements and beefed up security.

My last note is that at http://sp2torrent.com/index.php you can get a Torrent for the new SP2 (which is a pretty big file). I'm glad to see that there are people trying to show a legal use for P2P before the US Government ups and makes it illegal. My car has illegal uses too, but I haven't heard of any bills before the US Congress to ban cars for any use...

Canada Lost The Stanley Cup?

Monad, it isn't just danom backwards anymore.

VS.NET Inherited Forms Bug