Category Archives: .NET

Attaching Visual Studio 2010 to Outlook 2010 plugin for Debugging

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I was trying to attach a debugger to an Outlook plugin I was working on. It was originally written for Outlook 2003, but has been progressively upgraded to 2010. However, I couldn’t breakpoint my code, or rather, the breakpoints weren’t being hit.

Found the answer on Stack Overflow:

So it turns out that Outlook doesn’t load the CLR on startup (it must be loaded shortly thereafter when it becomes necessary), which apparently confuses the VS debugger and causes it to only debug native code. To force it to load the CLR immediately, create an OUTLOOK.EXE.config file in the same folder with:

<configuration> <startup> <supportedRuntime version="v2.0.50727"/>  </startup></configuration>

which is from this blog post. Then, even when VS starts attached, it will debug CLR code

Editing a XAML build process

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So, we’ve been working on putting our SharePoint solutions through a proper build process in Team Foundation Server 2010 (TFS), and I hit a bit of a snag.

I had been given a build definition that had a build process – a Workflow Foundation workflow – that I wanted to alter. The problem was that while I had the XAML file for that workflow, and the DLL that defined some custom code activities that the process used, I didn’t have a full Visual Studio project for it. No problem, I thought, I’ll just open the XAML up in Visual Studio and edit it.

Wrong.

Continue reading →

Further notes on SmartAssembly Obfuscation

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Some further notes on things I’ve learnt using SmartAssembly on some of our products.

  • Constants do not get obfuscated. Use static readonly variables in their place if the constant contains sensitive information.
  • Run Reflector (or reflection tool of your choice) against your assembly after obfuscation, to check what is visible. Then go back and make the bits you accidentally left public internal or private.
  • Make as many classes and methods as you can Internal
  • Do read the instructions on the attributes you can apply to control obfuscation.
  • Do use Pruning if you want to remove parameter names for methods. That can leak a lot of information about what a class is doing.

 

 

Converting Enumerations

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I love Enums – but I always have to look up how to convert them to one thing or another – so a reminder for myself:

Here’s my enumeration:

    public enum MyEnum
    {
        Alpha,
        Beta,
        Gamma
    }

And the conversions (each enumeration item has a value (e.g. 1) and a string (e.g. “Beta”):

MyEnum someEnum = MyEnum.Beta;

//Convert to String
string someEnumString = someEnum.ToString();

//Convert to MyEnum again
MyEnum someEnum2 = (MyEnum)Enum.Parse(typeof(MyEnum), someEnumString);

//Convert to int value
int someEnumInt = (int)someEnum;

//Convert int to My Enum again
MyEnum someEnum3 = (MyEnum)someEnumInt;

C# Code to send an email

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I’ve been doing some testing of email enabled lists, and I needed to send quite a lot of emails, so I wrote a little console app to do it. Here’s the core of the code I used, in case I need it again, or it’s useful to someone. It uses System.Net.Mail:

SmtpClient smtp = new SmtpClient(@"vm-moss2007.virtual.local");
for (int i = 1; i <= 100; i++)
{
    MailMessage message = new MailMessage("administrator@virtual.local", <a href="mailto:testlist@sharepoint.virtual.local">testlist@sharepoint.virtual.local</a>);
    message.Subject = string.Format("Message {0}", i);
    message.Body = string.Format("This is message '{0}'", i);
    Console.WriteLine("Sending {0}", i);
    smtp.Send(message);
}

Notes on the Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.DateTimeControl

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It’s quite nice that this control is available to use in my own pages/web parts, but there  are issues:

Here we have in microcosm my problems with Microsoft and date/times – an assumption of the local region, and date time controls that would never be empty, right? I had exactly these same problems when writing an Outlook 2003 to SharePoint 2007 integration too. Makes me a bit annoyed! Especially as we have nullable types! Quit screwing around with DateTimes being structs, make them objects and just return me a bloody null if nothing has been selected!

ASP.NET CustomErrors can’t capture HTTP 401s…

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It’s been a mad few weeks, so sorry for the posts tailing off a bit. Anyway, let’s get back into it with an interesting (and fairly short) problem.

ASP.NET applications can have custom error pages for the different HTTP responses. For example, you can have a custom “404 – Page not found”. Now, this can be a good idea, particularly for errors that produce stack traces or provide potentially sensitive information about the workings of your code. Or, heck, maybe you just want to present a nice looking error page. Continue reading →