Photoshop? No thanks.

Have you ever wanted to do a small image manipulation like putting two images together, creating an icon or simply drawing mustaches on the picture of a colleague? An operation that should be easy and fast, but it takes you more time than expected?
For almost all these operations MS Paint appears not enough. What means, that you should "jump" to a software like Photoshop, Gimp, Irfan View etc. to mention few. The drawback is, that they are too complicated for beginners and you lose time and nerve cells to just figure out  how to work with the software. Another issue is, that some of these are payed (like Photoshop). If you don't like installing software that will be used only occasionally then you'll find that as a disadvantage too. Why not go online? Because the online photo editors are crippled? Well think again!

Here is a link to an article I read a couple of days ago with a list of 20 online photo editors that could pass to everyone's needs. Some of them are complete free and others offer base features and operations free and also payed premium features. Some work with layers, offer animations, numerous effects, tight integration with social networks as Facebook, Picasa and Flickr. If you are already an experienced Photoshop user, there is even an online version of Photoshop, available on www.photoshop.com. Open stays the question how the images, which were uploaded are handled. Can't say anything about that, but there should be explained in some kind of Terms of usage document.

So, happy cropping, drawing and designing.

Migrating from one google account to another

Some years ago, when Google's e-mail service was not available for everyone, but for those, who had an invitation to join, I was stuck with an Yahoo e-mail account. No, I don't like Yahoo, and no I don't know what the hell made me have an account by Yahoo. The most shaming fact is however, that I still use my two Yahoo accounts for registering to forums, sites etc. that I suppose will spam me.
Last words about Yahoo, because they don't deserve more attention: First of all, it's 2012 and they still have their POP3/IMAP payed. And second of all...they still make you pay them to get your e-mails!!!

Back to the main topic. Because Google allows non-google e-mail addresses for acquiring a google account, I had my first google account tied to an Yahoo e-mail address. So, how can one migrate things to another Google account, before deleting the old one.

First I wanted to have my RSS subscriptions from google reader transferred to the other account. It turns out, that this is very very easy. Settings button (upper right corner)->Reader settings->Import/Export tab. It works like a charm.

What about Google Drive (known as Google Docs before)? To be honest I didn't need to transfer anything but I see that one has the option to download the whole "drive". That should do the trick :)

Next is Google Calendar. As one could suppose, there is an Import/Export option. Right from "My calendars" there is a small dropdown menu. Just select "Settings" and you'll see the Import calendar and Export calendars options.

If you've made the mistake to run a blog from the old account, then you have a slight problem. Long story made short, yes, you can keep your blog with all the posts/comments etc. after deleting the old account, BUT the posts will still appear as written from your old account. If that is no problem, then ok. For me such a thing will be a problem, because it would annoy me. I just like everything to be perfect. Here is the article, where all the steps for the blog transfer are good explained. Click

After dealing with all this, it is a huge pleasure to get rid of the old account. Especially, when it's associated with an Yahoo e-mail.

Despite being straightforward, here is a video I found on YouTube, explaining how to change the e-mail address, associated with your Windows Live Id.

 

Well, that was all. I doubt it, but I hope that that was helpful for someone.

Back after more than 2 years

Wow, more than 2 years have passed without a new post on my blog. Well, actually no excuse could be made for such a long period but I'll try my best in the following lines.
The truth is, that my life has changed drastically. Two years ago I was working as a software developer in Sofia, Bulgaria, married without children. Now, two years after that, I'm a second year master student in Bochum, Germany. I'm studying applied computer sciences at the Ruhr university. And I'm still married to my lovely wife with that difference, that I have a sweet daughter now :)

But how did all this happen?
Well, it's a long story, but I'll try to tell it as short as possible. I was not happy with my life in Sofia and the professional and personal perspectives that were for me and my family there. After 5 years as a software developer at OmegaSoft I didn't see what I could learn more and I was not so happy with how our project was going in general. Nevertheless I was loyal to my company until the end, despite some job offers for no less than 150% of what I was payed at my company. However the main reason for the "all-in" Germany move was not related with my job, but with the personal and social aspect of such a change. We decided to have a child and Sofia was not the place where we wanted to raise a one. So we started to learn german and we wanted to start a "new" life in Germany. I hope I will soon have my family here by me.

That whole change and the activity going with that, I mean the learning of german and the university were the reasons to not write for such a long time. Now I will try to write regularly, not only technical stuff but everything I find worth sharing and reading.

Can't debug Silverlight in Firefox - the solution!

Some months ago I was actively developing a Silverlight designer,about which I posted here.
Lately I found a small irritating bug in the designer and started debugging it. The strange thing was that I was practically unable to do that. The debugger was telling me that no debug symbols had been loaded for my silverlight application. For me this is one of the most annoying errors.
However, I spent some time trying to enable silverlight debugging with no success. I debugged it with MessageBox.Show(); and then forgot about the problem.
Today I found myself another bug and decided that it is time to get deeper into the debugging problem.
So to be sure that you will be able to debug silverlight applications:
1) Be sure to check the option for debugging Silverlight in the hosting Web project.
Web project -> Properties -> Web -> under Debuggers
2) There is a tab Silverlight Applications in web project's properties. You should add your project there.
3) Be sure that your ClientBin (or the folder where your web application expects your silverlight xap-s to reside) folder has the latest .xap packages. If not make sure that after building the silverlight project the result .xap goes there. That can be done with postbuild events.

If nothing of these helps, as it happened with me, read further:
This is a solution for debugging with Firefox:

Here’s how to ensure the VS debugger attaches to the Silverlight app for debugging:

* In Firefox address bar type about:config
* Read the warning, choose your preference to always remind you or not and accept
* In the search bar of the config options now type: npctrl
* You should then see the entry: dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.npctrl.dll
* Change the value from true to false (simply double-clicking will change this for you)
* Restart Firefox

Firefox solution source

BTW there is also some valuable comments under this guy's post.

Extending the US keyboard layout with some German symbols

Have you ever missed some symbol on your keyboard layout? I have.
I learn now german and I miss the symbols that are not part of the english alphabet.
They are as follows:
ä - U+00e4
Ä - U+00c4
ö - U+00f6
Ö - U+00d6
ü - U+00fc
Ü - U+00dc
ß - U+00df

For generating a keyboard layout you need to download the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator.

Start the application and open an existing keyboard that you want to inherit, or create one from scratch. Don't be worry, there is no chance that you screw some of the existing layouts. When you double click on a particular key from the keyboard preview, a form for editing will appear. There you should make the changes.
For the german symbols you should use the codes above. I guess these codes are the Unicode representation of the symbols.
The software gives you the ability to simulate that some of the special (ctrl,shift,caps lock) keys or a combination of them is pressed. Also you can test the keyboard layout that you've just created(Project->Test keyboard layout) by manually writing some of the "new" symbols. Then it is a good thing to Validate the layout(Project->Validate layout). After the validation make sure to fill the properties of your layout(Project->Properties). Finally again from the 'Project' menu build the new layout. A setup will be generated. I've tested a layout on W7, Vista and Windows XP. It works just fine. Except the fact that on Windows XP the combination Left Ctrl + Left Alt + symbol worked only for ä. But this may be due to the specific PC, I don't know. However instead of Left Ctrl + Left Alt you can use AltGr that worked perfect even on XP.

Just to mention: If you don't have a well-grounded reason for checking the last 2 checkboxes on the properties form, my advice is DON'T!

I hope this will be useful for somebody except me.
Enjoy.

Here are some screenshots:

Using the Microsoft .NET CodeDom Framework

Recently I learned some CodeDom stuff that I consider worth sharing.

CodeDom is an API,included in .NET Framework, that gives us an object oriented way of dealing with the csc.exe (The C# compiler). Visual studio uses this console application for compiling your projects. CSC.exe accepts a whole bunch of parameters. For instance parameters for the path to output to,path for looking for referenced assemblies, parameter that tells the compiler whether to create a library or an executable and so on. The list is really long. Good thing is that you don't actually need all of the parameters. HERE is a reference for the compiler options. I will mention and explain below just the ones I needed in my case.

My task consisted in creating an API for parsing source code that the user of the system creates and compiling that source code in a separate assembly. After that these assemblies are executed on some events in the system.
Example:Lets say your system logs to the windows event log on error. However some of you clients want to send e-mail on every error in the system. So with the "custom code" approach you can just raise event on error in the system. Then for every client wish you can create separate implementation... you know one for writing to the windows event log, another for sending an e-mail to the system administrator etc. And the last step is hooking these implementations to the event. This is a good way for code injection.
To be honest I didn't came to this architecture alone. My project manager gave me this idea and after I developed it and saw it in action, I should admit that it really rocks.

So lets get down to the nitty gritty.

First of all lets see what kind of input I expect for the source code that is going to be compiled.

1: assemblyName:Test.dll
2: className:TestClass
3: include:System.dll
4: include:System.Core.dll
5: include:System.Xml.dll
6: include:NotFrameworkAssembly1.dll
7: include:NotFrameworkAssembly2.dll
8: include:NotFrameworkAssembly3.dll

9: using System;
10: using NamespaceFrom.NotFrameworkAssembly1;
11: using NamespaceFrom.NotFrameworkAssembly2;
12: using NamespaceFrom.NotFrameworkAssembly3;

13: public class TestClass : SomeBaseClass
14: {
15: public override void Method1FromTheBaseClass()
16: {
17: //TODO Add some code that you can execute later
18: }

19: public override void AnotherMethodFromTheBaseClass()
20: {
21: //TODO: Send e-mail
22: }
23: }

Between lines 1 and 8 is the needed information apart from the actual code. There are:
1 - The name of the assembly to be created;
2 - The name of the class ,which name will be used later to create an instance of.
3..8 - List of the assemblies that will be included as referenced assemblies
9..23 - The actual code.

I created a class that represents the raw data above. The class has some properties that I need and I initialize them by passing the raw data to the 'ParseRawSource' method.

public class AssemblyGenerationInfo
{
public List ReferencedAssemblies { get; set; }
public string SourceCode { get; set; }
public string ClassName { get; set; }
public string AssemblyName { get; set; }

public void ParseRawSource(string inputStr)
{
}
//THE MAJORITY OF THE CODE IS OMITTED

Here is finally the actual code for compiling the assembly. There are some key things that are worth of mentioning:
1) Adding a 'lib' param that points to thePathWhereTheReferencedAssembliesReside;
2) Setting the 'CompilerVersion' to 'v3.5';
3) Assigning 'buildOutput' out parameter so that whoever calls the method will get eventual build errors.

public bool CompileAssembly(AssemblyGenerationInfo agi, out string buildOutput)
{
string outputDirectoryPath = "some path";
string thePathWhereTheReferencedAssembliesReside = "some path";
if (agi == null)
{
buildOutput = string.Format("Code to compile was not provided!");
return false;
}

CompilerParameters parameters = new CompilerParameters(agi.ReferencedAssemblies.ToArray());
parameters.IncludeDebugInformation = false;

parameters.CompilerOptions = string.Format(@"/lib:""{0}""", thePathWhereTheReferencedAssembliesReside);
string fullPathToTheCompiledAssembly = Path.Combine(outputDirectoryPath, agi.AssemblyName);

if (!Directory.Exists(outputDirectoryPath))
{
Directory.CreateDirectory(outputDirectoryPath);
}
parameters.OutputAssembly = fullPathToTheCompiledAssembly;


CSharpCodeProvider csc = new CSharpCodeProvider(new Dictionary() { { "CompilerVersion", "v3.5" } });

CompilerResults results = csc.CompileAssemblyFromSource(parameters, agi.SourceCode);
if (results.Errors.Count == 0)
{
buildOutput = null;
return true;
}
else
{
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
foreach (CompilerError error in results.Errors)
{
sb.Append(error.ToString() + Environment.NewLine);
}
buildOutput = sb.ToString().TrimEnd();
return false;
}
}

I hope this post was interesting and helpful.
Enjoy.

Blend 2 and Blend 3

Before starting this post I promise myself to make it short. If you take a look at my last 2 ones you will understand why. So Blend. What can I say? Not much of course. Blend is a designer tool and I pretend to be a developer. However for some reasons I had to use it, because I had no other option. VS2008 has no designer for silverlight. And I think it is a very good product. You can make animations (storyboards in terms of xaml), to move things around, to edit properties and I'm sure many many other things.
Let me first write something about Blend 2. It is not so good. It supports only silverlight 1.1 projects. To open and edit SL 2.0 projects you need to install Blend 2 sp1. But that brings you just the ability to edit SL 2.0 projects. The same problems Blend 2 has are still present in sp1. It can't show inherited forms. Also you can't select a control by clicking it in the designer. Instead you need to find it in the control tree and then select it. And I'm sure Blend 2 has some other bugs too.

Blend 3 is something different. Again I can give a good review because I use maybe less than 10% of its features, but I think it is much better than Blend 2. The problems mentioned above are solved here. Also Blend 3 is in my opinion faster. It loads the projects faster and also working with it is easier.

However both versions of Blend share a huge disadvantage. They can't work with Visual SourceSafe. So the designer we have at the office needs to install Visual Studio just to check out the files she needs to edit. And then to check them in.
That is not right. Microsoft should do something about this.

And to keep the promise I gave myself I stop here.

What I hate about Silverlight

Don't get me wrong, I like silverlight. It is great. It is fast. It is different.
However some things really drive me crazy.
Silverlight 1.0 was just an advertising campaign. Its purpose was only to make developers anxious for the upcoming versions. I understand that.
I haven't used much of silverlight 1.1 but I know it was a huge leap forward.
Then came 2.0 that was announced as the first version that can be used to write sensible and powerful solutions.
Then came 3.0 which was expected to be also a major release.
I started to use silverlight just after version 2.0 was released. There were some things that were irritating me in 2.0. Those things still irritate me in 3.0. Actually I thing the difference between 2.0 and 3.0 is not so big that I expected.
I read somewhere that 3.0 introduces support for using the 3D power of your video card and also support of using the wheel of the mouse. Hello! Is this the most important.
But what really drove me crazy was that just a few months after releasing SL 3.0 Microsoft announced 4.0 beta. What to expect from this new version?! Maybe voice recognition, which will totally smash the Adobe rival.

So let me point some features I miss in Silverlight.

1) The designer. I miss a designer for silverlight in VS2008. How to create my GUI without designer. Hot to compute the margins? I heard that a powerful XAML designer will be available in VS2010. I'm waiting for it. As designer I use MS Expression Blend, which is very very good tool and even I can work with it. About Blend I will write a separate post.

2) Can reference only silverlight library projects. What about the whole bunch of code that you have. In my case we have some code dll-s that all the other projects use.I have some clues about this restrictions, but they are not worth sharing. However you can always link a file if you need. That btw, I mean the restriction of referencing dll-s != silverlight, has also a good side. Because it is vital to reference as less as possible dll-s. Because every single referenced assembly is then added to the package that every single user of you silverlight control downloads. Also I think there might be some performance penalty when having many assemblies, but I haven't tested that. Also I think here's the place to mention that you must be very careful with memory usage. Try not to hold references to huge collections and objects. Make sure you don't prevent the garbage collector to dispose them.

3) The most annoying one. The design time exceptions. You write some code, compile.Everything seems good. And then when you run it you get AG_E_UNKNOWN_ERROR or G_E_PARSER_BAD_PROPERTY_VALUE. Then you see some line and some position. It took me quite a time to start getting some hints on where the problem is. Was it so hard to make exceptions more detailed? Btw the majority of the exceptions I get are because I omit to implement a event handler in the .xaml.cs file. And I have declared it in the markup. This is a design time exception. Was it so hard to catch it design time? So to sum up I think Silverlight exceptions suck and Microsoft should do something about it instead of dealing with the mouse wheel.

4) Inheritance (of silverlight controls)- there is a workaround to do this. I admit that. But it is not as straightforward as it has to be. To inherit from other "form" you need to mark this in the codebehind file and also in the markup file. There are some other details that are however not relevant. Lets say, yes inheritance is possible. But, as "forms" are not meant to support inheritance there a lots of bugs in the whole thing. I needed all my forms to have some common behavior. For this I needed to handle 3 events. I wanted to hook for the events and write the handlers in the base form. And then all other forms to inherit from the base and to share the base behavior. But I failed. That was not supported. I got exceptions. And yes they were "AG_E_UNKNOWN_ERROR" like :). So I needed to hook in every single form and also needed event handlers for all the 3 events. In those handlers I called the three methods that I had written in the base class. What a mess. So to sum up: Microsoft guys, please do some work on inheritance.

5)And last. Some framework classes omit some of their methods. For example I will point the Enum.GetNames and the Color structure. And you can't use System.Drawing.Color, because System.Drawing is not a silverlight library.

Below is a workaround I use to get the names of all members of particular enum and also a method to get a color from its hex representation. To be honest the second one is not available in System.Drawing.Color too.

public static List GetEnumNames(Type enumType)
{
List enumMemberNamesFuckSilverlight = new List();
System.Reflection.FieldInfo[] fiArray = enumType.GetFields(
System.Reflection.BindingFlags.Public |
System.Reflection.BindingFlags.Static);
foreach (System.Reflection.FieldInfo fi in fiArray)
{
enumMemberNamesFuckSilverlight.Add(fi.Name);
}
return enumMemberNamesFuckSilverlight;
}

public static Color ConvertStringToColor(string source)
{
Color blackDefaultColor = Color.FromArgb(255, 0, 0, 0);

try
{
if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(source))
{
return blackDefaultColor;
}
else
{
source = source.Trim(new char[] { '#' });
if (source.Length != 8)
{
if (source.Length == 6)
{
//Correct color representation, omitting the alpha.
source = "FF" + source;
}
else
{
//Incorrect color...Sorry!
return blackDefaultColor;
}
}

byte a = (byte)Int32.Parse(source.Substring(0, 2), System.Globalization.NumberStyles.HexNumber);
byte r = (byte)Int32.Parse(source.Substring(2, 2), System.Globalization.NumberStyles.HexNumber);
byte g = (byte)Int32.Parse(source.Substring(4, 2), System.Globalization.NumberStyles.HexNumber);
byte b = (byte)Int32.Parse(source.Substring(6, 2), System.Globalization.NumberStyles.HexNumber);

return Color.FromArgb(a, r, g, b);
}
}
catch (Exception exc)
{
return blackDefaultColor;
}
}

Some experience with Silverlight

So as I promised here is the article about what I learned about Silverlight from my first serious touch with it.
As I mentioned before, from some time I'm working on a Silverlight project, that is some kind of workflow designer. Briefly said I have nodes and routes between them and nodes plus routes make a task.I will not deepen on the purpose of this architecture, because it is related to our specific needs. So actually this WF designer is not a general purpose one, but it is specifically designed to serve us. However it was a good experience for me, because you know, the best way to understand some new technology is to start using it. Then comes Google :).

I had some challenges before I start to write.

First of all was the data model.The objects I described above(tasks, nodes and routes) were represented as database tables. To spice the things up, the node object had some bunch of dependent objects, that were not presented as database tables but serialized as XML and stuck in a text column of the node table. So there was a serialize/deserialize process when dealing with the nodes. However this part was already done for an old windows forms application with the same purpose as the silverlight designer. Btw the silverlight designer was meant to replace the old windows forms one. I had the XML <-> objects conversion done. However I couldn't use those objects, because they were not marked as Data contracts. But for that I will write below.
So enough for the issues regarding the data and its representation.

The second challenge was how to get this data from the server and serve it to the client and vice versa. Here the solution was straightforward.

The last major problem was how the hell to implement a GUI for editing the whole bunch of objects. The problem was that I needed to mitigate the complication of the data model and to do the GUI as simple as possible for the user.

So let me start with the decisions I made.
About the data model, I decided to create a mirror object to every object I needed to transfer across the wire. So lets say as example that I had three objects - NodeSettings, NodeCoordinates, NodeSomethingElse. Remember, all these objects are serialized to XML and the result XML is saved in a text column of the node table. Also I had an API to work with these objects. Lets name the "mirror" objects for these three ones respectively NodeSettingsTransfObj, NodeCoordinatesTransfObj and NodeSomethingElseTransfObj. They were marked as data contracts. To work easily with both the framework ones and the transfer ones I created for each of the objects an extension method. Did I mentioned that extensions rule! So for example the pair NodeSettings <-> NodeSettingsTransfObj. I created on NodeSettings an extension method named ToTransfObj and on the NodeSettingsTransfObj an extension method named ToFrameworkObj. All the extension methods I put in a single class. The name of the class can be whatever you want, but the class needs to be static. After this really hard and boring work you will be using the extensions on a single line.

Here is the whole picture:


About the second challenge - the actual transport between the server and the client:
Here as I said the choice was clear. WCF is the only way to transfer information when we talk about silverlight. So there was no other option for me but WCF. And I don't complain. WCF is marvelous. It is bullet fast, extremely stable, reliable and very flexible and easy to configure. But not everything is so pink with WCF services called from silverlight. The key thing here is that you can call operations of the service only in Asynchronous manner. This is a little bit tricky. In some scenarios you will need the synchronous calls desperately but sorry - you just can't do this. I spent a whole day to dig for a workaround in the Internet with no success. I don't exclude the chance that a workaround exists, I simply say that I didn't manage to find a real good one. One of the workarounds was actually helpful. It was using a separate thread for the call to the service operation and also it was using the BeginXXX and EndXXX methods of the service operation. However to assure the thread has finished its work and the call to the operation has returned a result I needed to block the main thread and join the service calling one. This is important: never block the main thread. The main thread appears responsible for handling the communication with the service API. So actually when blocking the main thread you get yourself in deadlock situation. The main thread is needed to handle the response from the service and as it is blocked it can't do that. Also the supporting thread can't finish its job while the call is in progress. Well I hope you got the picture, cause I can't explain it better. It is already blur for me, because it's a month since I fought that problem. But the picture was something like that. So I had to stick to the natural design, because the whole "thread using solution" didn't seem to be stable and reliable. The last thing related to the WCF part and its asynchronous calls is actually more like an advice. Whenever possible do call the service operations before they are actually needed. For example you have a form (or window if you like) that you use to edit object of type NodeSettings. This object lets say has a property that is collection of type SomeType. This collection you edit on a separate form that is shown when you click a button on the first form (a button saying for example "Edit Members"). So the best practice in my opinion is to call the operation that will return all the "members" of type SomeType before the user clicks the button. So to sum up: Call the operations ASAP! These calls are not expensive. WCF is very very fast.

The last one is the GUI. GUI has always been a pain in my ass. My designer abilities are are enough good to realize that my GUI sucks :). However with this project I had to face some issues. I will just mark them briefly, because this article became bigger than planned. First of all I consider a good practice to use a single instance of each form rather than creating and disposing one every time. So I have lots of hidden forms on the visible area of the silverlight application and I show/hide them according my needs. To pass data between forms I use events and stick the data in the args.
Also data can be shared between forms across the whole application by using Application.Current.Resources dictionary.

I hope you can get something valuable from this long and boring article :)

Back again...

Hello there,
it's been a while since I last posted on my blog. The reasons of course are many. First of all I didn't knew that somebody's actually reading my posts. So I was quite surprised when I read some comments on my older posts. Also I was glad, yes you got me right, glad when I saw the typical russian spam. That was to tell me that my blog is already indexed by Google. Hooray!

From now on I promise myself to write much more. Not that I'm some kind of software GURU and my post have a tremendous influence to the community, but I find it good to share some of my modest experience with the software technologies I work with and also some of the thoughts that my head gives birth of, before they are irretrievably gone.

So, I thought that now is the time to put some lines of text on my latest work experience. Also I'm now stuck for a week at home, sick, sniveling and quite bored. Sometimes I ask myself whether I prefer to be busy or to relax. And I always hate the answer, cause sadly resting I take now as wasting my precious time.

I'm working lately on a silverlight project and that gave me the opportunity to understand silverlight more deeply. Also I use Blend for a designer tool cause Visual Studio lacks a silverlight designer. I'm planning 2 post on that, one on silverlight and another one on Blend 2 and Blend 3.
Also I'm planning to write a substantial article about my opinion on what is going on in my home country Bulgaria. Of course it will be "hater like" one, cause things are getting worse and worse.

Добре е да си знаеш родата :)

Нещо, което отдавна исках да споделя, един уникално як пост от блога на Георги Кременлиев.
Enjoy

My first paragliding experience

This Sunday me and my wife went to a village near Sopot to see an ex-colleague of mine named Christo. He is keen on paragliding and along with other people like him get together almost every weekend to conquer the clouds. This time I used the chance to join him and take a ride with him. It was great to feel the wind and also to see the land with a hawk eye. Thank you Christo for the wonderful ride.
Here is some multimedia from the event:

Do not buy yourself a Renault...really don't.

I've heard lots of stories about how awful Renault cars are. And I believe those stories. So I'm proud with my "Made in Germany" car which is a crap too, but at least is a German crap :) So enough for my ride and lets go back on the Renaults. Not so far ago while driving to work I managed to take the following photos. They are Photoshop free and absolutely genuine.



Can't see anything strange??? Look closer :)

Loading a custom config file instead of app.config

Today happily I found a solution for the problem explained in a yesterday post in my blog.
The solution is to implement a class that changes the configuration file, associated with the project. Here is some working code doing that:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Reflection;

namespace OmeksOfficeTools
{
public class ConfigurationFileChanger : IDisposable
{
private string currentConfigFilePath;
private string newConfigFilePath = @"YourLibraryPathHere";

public ConfigurationFileChanger()
{
currentConfigFilePath = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetData("APP_CONFIG_FILE").ToString();
ChangeConfigFile(newConfigFilePath);
}
protected void ChangeConfigFile(string newConfigFilePath)
{
AppDomain.CurrentDomain.SetData("APP_CONFIG_FILE", newConfigFilePath);
FieldInfo[] fiStateValues = null;

Type initStateType = typeof(System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager).GetNestedType("InitState", BindingFlags.NonPublic);
if (initStateType != null)
{
fiStateValues = initStateType.GetFields();
}
FieldInfo fiInit = typeof(System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager).GetField("s_initState", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Static);
FieldInfo fiSystem = typeof(System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager).GetField("s_configSystem", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Static);
if (fiInit != null && fiSystem != null && null != fiStateValues)
{
fiInit.SetValue(null, fiStateValues[1].GetValue(null));
fiSystem.SetValue(null, null);
}
}

public void Dispose()
{
ChangeConfigFile(currentConfigFilePath);
}
}
}

This really worked for me. I use .Net Framework 3.5 sp1 but I think this will work for .Net Framework 2.0 and above.
The idea is that this code sets the value for app.config path that the framework is going to use and then forces it to reload its configuration by setting 's_initState' to false and 's_configSystem' to null.
The class implements IDisposable to be able to revert to the old configuration file.
So it is good to use the using pattern as follows:

using (ConfigurationFileChanger cfch = new ConfigurationFileChanger())
{
SecurityServiceClient client = new SecurityServiceClient();
//Do your service operation calls here...
}

Where SecurityServiceClient is my service client proxy.

Enjoy :)

P.S. I of course didn't came to that solution while dreaming tonight, so I should give my thanks to the author of THIS article (see also comments under the article).

Consuming WCF Service in a library

To be able to consume a WCF service you have to create a service proxy client that is used to call service operations. It is not something different than consuming an ASP.NET web service.
You can get a proxy client using 4 different approaches:
1) Generate it using Visual Studio
2) Generate it using the command line tool svcutil.exe
3) Manually defining a proxy class
4) Using ChannelFactory class

However only 1) and 2) are good for me because in 3) and 4) you need to know the type of the service contract prior to creation.
In 1) and 2) the service metadata is used instead for generating the service contract, datacontract and so on on the client side. Btw 1) and 2) are practically equivalent because Visual Studio is using svcutil.exe to create the service reference. Svcutil just gives us some other options.

So let me step in a problem I ran into today.
Because I like the approach with configuring a service client in a configuration file rather than doing this in code, I was surprised to find today that there is no straightforward way of consuming a WCF service from a project that compiles in a dll.
That is very strange. The reason is that when creating an instance of the proxy client class without passing a Binding and EndpointAddress in the constructor (using the parameterless ctor) these are read from the app.config file. And in a library project this is impossible for the WCF framework.
You will get error like :

"Could not find default endpoint element that references contract ...

I should say that I didn't have any problems creating a service reference in the library project and also service client configuration was added to my app.config file. But what for if this configuration can not be read.
Some will probably say why not creating a Binding and EndpointAddress objects in code and then pass them to the ctor for the proxy client. Answer is that I don't want to change my code every time I change something in my service configuration. I just want to update the reference and have all the necessary configuration generated for me in the configuration file.
This problem is important when you design VSTO MS Office Add-ins, because these add-ins compile to a dll, not executable. So I'm curious how can I consume WCF services in a VSTO Add-in with still configuring my service client in a configuration file.

I read lots of forum threads today trying to find the solution and found out that there are other developers experiencing the same problem. The only solution I consider good is to create a parser for a custom configuration file and to load the library configuration and extract it.

HERE is a example of this approach, but the posted class needs to be extended to parse at least binding customizations in the configuration file that it opens.

However I think Microsoft should have thought about this more when designing WCF.

Important when using MessageContract as parameter in an operation

Today, while trying to create a reference to a WCF service I got the following exception:

The operation 'xxxxxxxx' could not be loaded because it has a parameter or return type of type System.ServiceModel.Channels.Message or a type that has MessageContractAttribute and other parameters of different types. When using System.ServiceModel.Channels.Message or types with MessageContractAttribute, the method must not use any other types of parameters.

It is quite obvious from the exception message what was wrong in my service, that was the obstacle in the creation of a service proxy.
In WCF there is a limitation that if you use a type that is marked with a MessageContract attribute as a return value or operation parameter, it is obligatory that all the parameters and return value(if present) should be types marked with that attribute too.

Also it is recommended as a good practice to encapsulate all operator parameters in a single message contract.

In my case the mistake was that I had an operation with a return type of 'bool' and taking a parameter that was tagged with a MessageContractAttribute attribute.

VSTO - Where to start?

You know it is quite usual for a developer to spend many many hard hours on a problem or a new technology and research everything on himself losing much of his nerves on that. And after getting some painful know-how on the problem, he/she comes across a post somewhere that explains everything he/she understood by himself with great details and also adding many other things.

So that was my case too. After coding 2 Microsoft Office Add-ins for Excel and Outlook, today I came across this interesting thread:
It includes many things you should consider when starting to deal with VSTO and developing Add-ins for MS Office products.

I myself have still much to learn, especially for the deployment part and some other hacks so this FAQ will be my priority for these days too.

Have fun :)

Configuring a wireless router for dummies ... like me :)

Not so far ago (one week) I purchased a wireless router for home usage, because I wanted to make my wife stop using my notebook, but her own PC. Her excuse till now was that her PC is not connected to the Internet. So for me the decision was clear. Before the introduction of the router I had a static IP address set on my notebook's ethernet adapter. With the router, this static IP address should be given to the router itself, and all other members of the network should be given dynamic IP addresses by router's DHCP server.



But first... the hardware. Except the router, some cables are needed too. You need a cable for each PC that doesn't have a wireless network adapter. This cable should not be a cross-over but a straight one. (see the scheme below)



After done that it is time to configure the router. You should do that from a computer that is wired to the router. Routers are accessed by their IP address. Different manufacturers give their routers different default IP address and you should contact check this before you start configuring. The main IP addresses that are used are as follows:
-192.168.0.1
-192.168.1.1
-192.168.2.1

After successfully accessing your router you will probably see its GUI configuration.
Configuration is straightforward even for a dummy like me :).
Let me divide configuration in 4 sections: LAN configuration, WAN configuration, Wireless configuration and Security configuration.

1) LAN configuration

You should give your router IP address, Gateway and Mask. This IP address is not the static one, but the one the router will use in our home network. For example 192.168.0.100.

There should be a section for configuring DHCP server settings.
First of all you should enable DHCP server. Then you should set the start IP address and the end IP address, Mask and Gateway. Gateway should be the IP of the router. DHCP server will now give other members of the network (wired or wireless) IP addresses in the range between start and end IP.

Reservations - This section is for reserving an IP address to a particular network adapter in the LAN. For example if you want your notebook to be known always as 192.168.0.23 in your private network you should reserve this IP address to your notebook's network adapter by associating it with network adapter's MAC address.
Reserving an IP for a MAC is vital for configuring port forwarding.

Port forwarding - this is a very helpful feature of most of the routers. By configuring a port forwarding you expose some LAN member port to the WAN. For me it is helpful because doing this I can still use a remote desktop connection to my PC, which doesn't need a static IP address.

EDIT: For using a remote desktop you need to forward 1723 and 3389 ports.

2) WAN configuration

If you want your private network to access Internet through the router you should enable WAN connection. Then you should choose the WAN connection type: Dynamic, Static IP, PPPoE, PPTP. First two doesn't need an explanation and for the other 2 you can read those:
PPPoE
PPTP
Choose Static IP and fill in the static IP, Mask and Gateway provided for you by your ISP.

3) Wireless configuration

Here you can give your wireless network a meaningful name, known as SSID. My advice is don't give your network name like Simsons (if your family name is Simson) cause if you do so everyone will know this network belongs to you. In my opinion it is a potential vulnerability. Also you should choose to broadcast your SSID.

4) Security configuration.

Firewall - enable it.
Router access password - you should have a default password for your router. Something like 'admin' or 'password'. My advice is to change this password.

Wireless Security Settings - this is the main part. Your main choices here are WEP or WPA.

I chose WEP for me even though WPA is newer and more secure.
Here important are the encryption strength and the pass phrase. You don't need to memorize your Pass phrase. It is needed just for generating the WEP key.
You should carefully write down your WEP key. It is used to connect to your wireless network.
Other important setting before generating the key is the encryption strength. If present you should choose 128 bits.

If you want your wireless network to be safer you may want to configure an Access control list (ACL) too. This list gives you the ability to allow wireless connections only from specific wireless network adapters, presented in the list by their MAC addresses.

That's all I managed to describe from my experience with my router's configuration.
Now I can use my notebook under the shower in my bathroom yoooohoooo :)

Now it is so easy to chose a password :)

I just came across of that interesting article about the top 100 most popular password used across the world. Enjoy :)

Worst password choice - top 100

To all hot women in the world: Sorry, I got married :(

Yes it is true. I got married to my lovely girlfriend Tania and it was a great party.
So if you are above 18 and under 25 years old, woman, hot and you have at least 2 of these: big tits, long legs, tough ass and still want to go out with me, please don't tell me, cause I'm married now ;).

Here is the proof:

Wedding photos:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8

Honey weekend photos:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3