Blogger Code Formatting

I like blogger in general but it's probably not the standard geek's first choice; I suggest this simply because the editor has no UI functionality to preserve the formatting of the code samples most geeks want to paste in. HTML, God bless it, is HTML and Blogger doesn't help you write anything more than basic HTML. Moreover, Blogger's line break "helper" apparently interferes with the old standby tricks like pre, code, and blockquote. I say apparently because either there are a lot of untested myths out there or Blogger has changed how it deals with these tags over time.

So, to get my code samples to paste in effortlessly and to set the story straight, I present below the way I learned to beat the blogger editor and it's as simple, as--wait for it--the trusty pre tag. To paste in the sample below, I simply dropped into HTML mode, pasted in the class definition, wrapped it in a pre tag and fixed up a few line breaks. In my case, I've got the Convert line breaks option (Settings --> Formatting) set to to Yes.

Definitely better than before but pre does not preserve HTML and XML fragments and Blogger simply removes them from the post. The problem here lies mainly with the HTML and XML bits that look like HTML--I'm talking mainly about less than and greater than brackets. To get around this, I simply use an HTML encoder to drop in my markup, encode it, and then copy the output into Blogger. It's a pain but what can you do...

    class Base
    {
        public virtual void DoWork ()
        {
            Console.WriteLine ("Base.DoWork");
        }
    }

Visual Studio Spell Checker

Brilliant! As an English Lit major this is the sort of thing I believe every dev should have installed!

http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2007/12/13/spell-checker-for-html-asp-net-jscript-vb-c-css-and-c-for-visual-studio-2005-and-2008.aspx

Senior Developer Interview Questions

We had a couple of senior developer tenders go out at work recently and when it came time to interview the applicants I was asked to put together a test to flush out the wannabes. I've been on the receiving end of these tests in the past and considering this test would be written in the twenty to thirty minutes before a three-panellist interview, I thought I wouldn't be too hard. I'd say most of these questions are analyst programmer questions, if not junior dev questions, although I did through in a few tricks to gauge experience and I also left some questions fairly open in an attempt to understand the applicant's though process. If the applicant couldn't complete the test in the time period given, that would be okay too.

I've included the job criteria headers to help you figure out what I was looking for in each answer; not every question fits within a specific heading. The headings were printed on the test sheet.

The Perth .NET developer market has been on fire since I arrived two years ago and SharePoint work is going through the roof; as a result, we only had a single applicant put forward for the two or three tenders that went out. When and if we have more people across this test I'll attempt to generalise the results and post an update to this post on the effectiveness of this test.

I haven't included the answer here because like I said, some of them are fairly open and a lot of them should be fairly obvious if you've done an undergraduate CS course.

At least 5 year of software development experience and at least 2 year experience developing MS .NET applications

1. Describe the difference between the execution environments for C++, C#, and Javascript
2. Is C# a weakly-typed language? Why or why not?
3. When should performance optimisation occur?
4. List three problems with this code. Bonus: how could it be improved if you were using .NET 3.5?
   
   private string someVar = 1234;
   
   public string SomeVar
   {
   get
   {
   if (string.IsNullOrEmpty (someVar))
   {
   someVar = “5678”;
   }
   
   return SomeVar;
   }
   set
   {
   someVar = val;
   }
   }
   
5. When would you mark a class with the internal visibility modifier?
6. What’s the difference between a struct and a class? Are structs allocated on the heap?
7. The property invocation below may return a null result. Rewrite the code to prevent the second line from throwing.
   
   object result = Employee.Address;
   result.ToString ();

Working knowledge of full lifecycle development methodologies, process and standards and project management; sound knowledge of object oriented system design and development...

1. List one section heading you might expect to find in each of the following documents:
   
   · A functional specification
   · A technical specification
   · A UAT test case
   
2. List three tasks you would complete before checking in a new class to the Tourism WA source control system.Name each component in the following diagram and briefly explain the relationship between Vehicle and Door:
3. What is a use case?
4. Briefly describe the difference between a class, an interface, and a type
5. Briefly describe a software design pattern you’ve used on a past project and indicate how it helped or hindered code maintenance. Alternatively, describe a design pattern employed by ASP.NET.
6. After designing a new system, your project manager asks you to estimate construction time for yourself and a junior developer. This is the first time the department has built this type of system and you haven’t previously worked with the junior developer. List three techniques you would consider to ensure your estimate is as accurate as possible

Solid understanding of internet protocols, web development mark-up languages and web standards...

1. Draw a simple diagram showing the location of a reverse proxy in relation to a database server, a web server, the internet, and a client
2. Using only inline CSS and DIV tags, write the HTML to produce a three-column, one row table (don’t worry about borders). Don't use tables.
3. Will the Hello World! text be rendered green, red, or blue by the browser?
   
   <style>
   span { color: green }
   #makeItRed { color: red; }
   .makeItBlue { color: blue; }
   </style>
   <span id="makeItRed" class="makeItBlue">Hello World!</span>
   
4. List three key components of this schema fragment. How many ReservationRequest elements are allowed in an XML document validated against this schema?

<xs:element name="Control">
<xs:complexType>
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element name="ControlID" type="xs:int" minOccurs="0" />
<xs:sequence minOccurs="0">
<xs:element name="ReservationRequest">
<xs:complexType>
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element name="InDate" type="xs:dateTime" />
<xs:element name="Period" type="xs:int" />
<xs:element name="Adults" type="xs:int" />
<xs:element name="Children" type="xs:int" />
<xs:element name="Infants" type="xs:int" /> </xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
</xs:sequence>
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>

Sound knowledge of the Microsoft .NET framework class libraries, ASP.NET and Web Services

1. What improvements does the .NET 2.0 System.Collections.Generic namespace offer over the System.Collections namespace from previous versions of the framework?
2. List two key differences between a user control and a web control
3. Compare the .NET application cache and the ASP.NET output cache
4. Write a call to the Format ( ) method of the String class to return the string “Sam is 38 years old.” Assume you have a variable declared and initialised as follows:
   
   int age = 38;
   
   Give an example of a situation when you would use a StringBuilder instead
   
5. Describe the difference between application state, session state, and view state. Discuss session state in relation to scalability and suggest an alternative.
6. List two techniques to secure web service communication on the internet

Ability to perform unit and integration testing...

1. What purpose do the following serve when debugging a section of code:
   
   · The F11 key on your keyboard
   · The Immediate window
   
2. Briefly describe the concept of “regression testing”

Dirty Words (Michael Hanes) - blog.mediawhole.com mailto:info@mediawole.com

 

Copying a SharePoint Document Library Programmatically

Based on the number of posts out there about copying the content of a list or document library, I'm willing to suggest SharePoint hasn't made this particular task easy. Whether it's through the various UIs or programmatically, this task seems like it's more difficult than it should be. As I recently found out, even clearing the content in an existing list is a hassle.

Before I go on, a bit of background. We were initially using the in-built variation tools to copy content from a source language site to a number of target English sites--in other words, www.westernaustralia.com/en was being copied to the /uk, /au, /nz, and /sg sites. I won't bore you with the details but the variation tool was deemed too blunt for our requirements and one of the developers on my team wrote a custom variation tool to do exactly what we want. The custom variation tool copies sub sites and pages but unfortunately it doesn't copy documents in document libraries; we don't make extensive use of the Documents library you get when you create a new publishing site but a few speicific sites do contain PDFs that need to be pulled over.

Since a document library is a list at heart, I started by examining the SPList API, assuming it would provide me with everything I need to manage the list items. I also looked into the SPListItemCollection returned by the Items property of SPList, and the SPListItem class. SPList was pretty hopeless. SPListItemCollection was somewhat more helpful, exposing the standard Add, Delete, and Count methods, and SPListItem was really enticing with its CopyFrom and CopyTo methods. Of course this was nearly a complete waste of time as few of these methods and properties really helped out at all. CopyFrom and CopyTo failed at runtime, Delete works as advertised but SPListItemCollection does not overload the Delete method or provide a sister method to delete everything in the list, and Add only adds a new list item if you get the very confusing url parameter pointing at the right location (a quick hint: it's expecting the URL of the destination file in the case of a document library...).

When it was all said and done, I'd written my own ClearList helper method, cast my destination list to a SPDocumentLibrary, accessed the Files collection via the RootFolder property of said document library, and passed in the byte array representing the uploaded file.

Here's the code I ended up with to copy the contents of the Documents list in one sub site to the Documents list in another sub site within the same web application:

using (SPSite site = new SPSite ("http://dev-moss-mh:101/"))
{
using (SPWeb sourceWeb = site.AllWebs ["Source_Site"])
{
using (SPWeb destinationWeb = site.AllWebs ["Destination_Site"])
{

SPList sourceDocuments = sourceWeb.Lists ["Documents"];
SPList destinationDocuments = destinationWeb.Lists ["Documents"];

if (sourceDocuments.ItemCount > 0)
{
ClearList (destinationDocuments);

foreach (SPListItem currentSourceDocument in sourceDocuments.Items)
{
Console.WriteLine ("Adding: {0}", currentSourceDocument.Name);

byte [] fileBytes = currentSourceDocument.File.OpenBinary ();

const bool OverwriteDestinationFile = true;
string relativeDestinationUrl =
destinationDocuments.RootFolder.Url +
"/" +
currentSourceDocument.File.Name;

SPFile destinationFile =
((SPDocumentLibrary) destinationDocuments).RootFolder.Files.Add (
relativeDestinationUrl,
fileBytes,
OverwriteDestinationFile);
}
} } } }

As you can tell by the variable name, the Add method requires a relative URL pointing within the context of the destination site. This seems odd to me since Add ( ) is called on the destination list itself--why it can't figure out the destination URL is beyond me.

My ClearList implementation is also mildly interesting: deleting items within a foreach loop is obviously a no-no since the foreach syntax in C# is interacting with an IEnumerator object so my first attempt was to iterate over the list using a for loop and deleting list items from the zero index through to the final item in the list. This worked but only sporadically, occasionally leaving items behind. Calling ClearList a second time did the trick with a small list but that's just weird programming.

The solution I arrived at is detailed below and essentially comes down to the fact that the SharePoint list API must maintain a real-time (or part-time) connection with the database; in other words, deleting an item at index zero could mean SharePoint re-fetches the list content so by the time my for loop moves on to the next index, the list has effectively shuffled itself down so index zero is still populated. As you can see, I'm now simply iterating over the list and always deleting the item at index zero. I could have possibly used a while loop and the listToClear.Items.Count property directly but it's difficult to know whether SharePoint can be trusted in a case like this. I'll leave that up to you to try out...

private static void ClearList (SPList listToClear)
{
int initialItemCount = listToClear.Items.Count;

for (int counter = 0; counter < initialItemCount; counter++)
{
// Always delete the list item at index 0
SPListItem listItemToClear = listToClear.Items [0];
listItemToClear.Delete ();
}
listToClear.Update ();
}   

LastModifiedIndicator Kind of Works

SharePoint includes a useful out-of-the box control that can be used to display the date and time a page was last modified. It's not without its hiccups, as I'll describe in a moment, but it's quick and simple to use.

The control in question can be dropped into a page layout or master page using the following syntax:

&lt;PublishingWebControls:LastModifiedIndicator runat="server" />

When the page is served, my local dev server displayed the text below (I'm guessing this display format is relevant to the regional configuration of the server):

12/14/2007 2:24 AM

The LastModifiedIndicator class is derived from WebControl and exposes no additional properties or methods to configure the format decoratively. This would obviously be quite handy because the next best "quality" alternative is probably to implement your own LastModified webpart. The format displayed above will be unsuitable in many cases; although I haven't played with the control's output at any length, a quick and easy hack might be to access the last modified string on the client side and use a bit of JavaScript to reformat its contents using the JavaScript date functions. Definitely not pretty but a little less heavy-handed than building your control or getting in there with some server side code.

You may have noticed a time of 2:24AM in the sample output I listed above; no, I'm not a late night hacker! I actually modified the test page I was working on at 11:24AM on 13 December 2007 but my dev server was telling me I modified it at the unwholesome hour of 2:24, one day in the future. I wish I could do that... or SharePoint would allow me to do that but no luck there so far. Anyway, I haven't tested this solution yet but the legendary Tania down the road from Tourism indicated she got the control to behave by "changing the regional settings of the site and all subsites to Australia and then changing to GMT." I'm not sure exactly what that means but I'm assuming she fiddled with the site settings.

stsadm restore Results in Access Denied 0x80070005

Restoring a content database using stsadm -o restore usually works pretty well. We use this command to restore content backups from our authoring environment to our local development environments.

Because our authoring environment is administered by one of the operations guys, however, I frequently receive an Access Denied error from stsadm that reads like this:

Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))

The 12 Hive log file offers up the full stack trace but reveals nothing of any real interest. Bear in mind, I'm logged in to my development server (W2k3) using my AD credentials and I'm a local administrator. An earlier log entry tells me stsadm.exe is dealing with a request from me so I know everything is pretty much okay. Of course it's not and I'm getting the above error.

The solution lies with the fact I'm not listed as a site collection administrator for the old site collection that's being replaced.

Luckily, I can change this quite easily. Fire up the the Central Administration console and browse to the Application Management tab. Select the Site collection administrators link in the SharePoint Site Management section and configure yourself (or the relevant account name) as the Secondary Site Collection Administrator. Unfortunately you can't specify a group as either primary or secondary administrator. As a result I'll also have to do this again before the next restore since I'm not a site collection admin in authoring.

Update: Poolio (see comments) and I have both run into this problem all over again after the source site collection is locked before the backup is kicked off. To work around this, remove the lock:

stsadm -o setsitelock -url [url] -lock none  

Visual Studio 2008 Pros

Our team recently started development on a new MOSS-based shell for the five regional tourism operators in Western Australia. As per westernaustralia.com, the sites use custom branding and a number of custom web parts. Although we set out using Visual Studio 2005, a number of us in the development team are keen to move to Visual Studio 2008 now that it and .NET 3.5 have been officially released. We’re all excited about 2008 and it makes sense to migrate while the new sites are under development rather than post-release.

What follows is a list of ‘pros’ for moving forward with VS 2008.

Pricing

• MSDN licenses with Visual Studio 2008 Professional are cheap ($2000USD retail and that gives you a lot more than just Visual Studio...)

Product Maturity and Future Migration

• Visual Studio is a mature product and moving from one mature release (2005) to another mature release (2008) is expected to be low-risk. .NET 3.5 is also an "additive" release that builds on top of the .NET 2.0 Framework so the risk to an existing code base is very low.
• The migration path from .NET 2.0 to .NET 3.5 is clear and involves none of the issues encountered migrating an ASP.NET 1.0/1.1 project to .NET 2.0.
• As Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 moved from a minimum requirement for .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0 between service packs, there is a small risk MOSS 2007 will take the same approach in a future release
• Visual Studio 2003, 2005, and 2008 can be installed side-by-side if necessary

Developer Productivity, Maintenance, and Operations

• Visual Studio 2008 and new C# language features offer productivity increases like Javascript Intellisense and debugging, enhanced CSS and master page support, automatic properties, object and collection initialisers, and extension methods. The new language features have the potential to reduce the amount of code to be written and maintained, thereby simplifying debugging, reducing the learning curve for new developers, and lowering maintenance costs
• AJAX and .NET 3.0 SP1 are built-in to .NET 3.5, minimising installation requirements on servers and local development environments
• .NET 3.5 includes cumulative .NET Framework patches and service packs to ensure the operating environment is up-to-date and secure
• Visual Studio 2008 will allow us to compile existing NET 2.0 projects in the Visual Studio 2008 IDE if necessary
  

Clear Your Compiler Warnings

There’s a minor problem with this code—at least as far as the compiler’s concerned. Can you spot it?

...
catch (Exception ex)
{
   // Don’t do anything
}

The problem is this: the ex variable is declared but never used and the C# compiler will warn you of the fact.

warning CS0168: The variable 'ex' is declared but never used

Does this matter in terms of how the code runs? Of course not but what if everyone always did this and the explosion of compiler warnings masked a more important warning relating to something else? Building the wa.com solution spits out 56 warnings—42 of which have to do with variables never being used—and the entire warning mechanism provided by the compiler is therefore of very little use to us. If it weren’t for this mess, someone might have noticed this fairly useful warning before now:

warning CS0162: Unreachable code detected

There’s an easy way to get around this problem when it comes to exceptions... just don’t declare the exception variable. This example does exactly the same thing at runtime but compiles without the warning. If you need to inspect the exception while debugging, use $exception in a watch.

...
catch (Exception)
{
   // Don’t do anything
}

For all other warnings to do with undeclared or unassigned variables, delete the offending declarations!

As for the example catch statement above, you all know this is bad, bad, bad (in all but the most extreme circumstances), right? Bugs disappear into black holes like this and a more specific exception, at the very least, should be caught instead. A better way would be to remove the try/catch statement, test thoroughly to flush out the defects in your code, and reserve exceptions for truly exceptional circumstances.

How to enable anonymous access for an existing SharePoint web application

It can be a little daunting if you're new to SharePoint and tasked with doing something you've never done before. Can it be done in SharePoint? Will doing it break your site or the entire installation? Is doing it so difficult it's not worth doing? Configuring anonymous access is one of those tasks because you're dealing with SharePoint (and ASP.NET indirectly), your site collection (and potentially your database indirectly), IIS, and occasionally the file system.

At the time of writing there are a number of sites and blog posts out there offering instructions on how to configure anonymous access. Some are extremely detailed--and depending on what you're trying to accomplish, unnecessarily so. Others are a bit vague. For my own sake I therefore thought it might be useful to file this under Things to Remember but I hope it helps you too...

What you'll find below is a detailed step-by-step set of instructions for setting up anonymous access for a fully branded web site like http://www.westernaustralia.com/. The anonymous access site gives internet users the ability to browse the site without having to log in and another site allows content editors to post content updates using their domain accounts.

A bit of background information

In brief, the steps below involve 'extending an existing web application' (that's a SharePoint concept) by creating a sister web app from an existing web app. The extended web app will use the same content database as the original and will be configured to support anonymous access. The top-level site of the database will also be configured to support anonymous access. As a final option, I'll show you how to disable all other types of non-anonymous access.

The following tasks should be completed by a server administrator and assume you have already created a web application the normal way (it might be a good idea to ensure it's working before you begin...)

1. Extend an existing web application

• Open the Central Administration console and select the Application Management tab.
• Select Create or extend Web application from the SharePoint Web Application Management section.
• Select Extend an existing Web application on the next screen.
• Select an existing web application to extend.
• Modify the description and configure the port and, optionally, the host header.
• Set Allow Anonymous to Yes.
• Set the Load Balanced URL Zone to Internet (you may choose another zone here if you like but Internet generally means anonymous so it's the best option).

Once you've extended a web application, the new (i.e. extended) application seems to disapper from the Central Administration screens: it won't be listed as a web application and it doesn't appear as an option when selecting a web app. You will, however, get a new directory for the extended web app under inetpub\wwwroot\wss\virtualdirectories\ and a new IIS site; you can also remove the extended site from SharePoint if required.

2. Enable anonymous access on the site's corresponding site collection

Although the site collection will be shared by the existing web application and the anonymous web application, the following steps must be completed via the anonymous web application.

• Browse to the home page of the extended web application
• Select Site Settings --> Modify All Site Settings from the Site Actions drop-down menu.
• Under Users and Permissions, select the Advanced permissions link.
• Select Anonymous Access from the Settings menu.
• Set Anonymous Access to Entire Web site.

Sites inherit the permissions of their parent by default so if you have any problems with a specific site you can ensure it's set to inherit permission from here as well (browse to the site settings screen for the relevant site first).

If you can’t see the Anonymous Access menu item, either the web app hasn’t been configured for anonymous access (see above or below) or you’re accessing the site via the default zone instead of the internet zone—you must access the site via the internet zone (at the extended URL).

3. Test

• Browse to the anonymous site in Firefox (or turn off integrated windows authentication if you're using IE); the site should be rendered without the Site Actions menu and other SharePoint controls.
• Browse to a SharePoint administration screen (eg. /_layouts/settings.aspx) and you should be prompted to supply login credentials.

At this point your site is set up to allow anonymous access but will also prompt you to log in as an administrator if you hit any of the SharePoint screens. This may be desirable but alternatively you may want to lock down external access to your public site; if that's the case, read on...

4. Remove integrated authentication from the anonymous web application (optional)

• Open the Central Administration console and select the Application Management tab.
• Select Authentication providers from the Application Security section.
• Select the Internet zone (this is the zone specified when the anonymous application was extended).
• Deselect Integrated Windows authentication.
• Set Enable Client Integration to No.

5. Test

• Browse to the anonymous site in Firefox (restart any open browser windows if you receive a 401 error immediately after completing step 4). The home page should appear as it did previously.
• Browse to a SharePoint administration screen (eg. /_layouts/settings.aspx); you should receive a 401 UNAUTHORIZED HTTP error (which, in this case, is appropriate).

6. Troubleshooting

If you run into difficulties (mainly with 401s and 403s popping up where they shouldn't), these ideas may help.

• Make sure the page you're trying to access is published. It's easy to forget this simple step in all the excitement but if a page (or image, etc) doesn't have at least one published version MOSS won't serve it up
• Reset IIS--it's quick an easy ;-)
• Grant the Read & Execute permission to the Authenticated Users group on the anonymous site's web.config and /bin directory (both can be found below Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories); do the same again for the authenticated site. Permissions on these files are reset every time the authentication method is changed in SharePoint.
• Recognise extending a web app creates a new site in IIS and corresponding directory under wwwroot with its own web.config. Ensure the newly-created web.config in the extended site contains everything it needs to; ensure any virtual directories and applications are properly configured
• Redeploy any solutions, features, etc to make sure everything’s where it needs to be (custom private assemblies in particular)
• It's possible your custom code is doing something that requires elevated permissions. The Visual Studio debugger will help you locate the culprit. If you can't remove the offending code, you can wrap it using a delegate:

SPSecurity.CodeToRunElevated elevatedAction =
new SPSecurity.CodeToRunElevated(delegate() { /* dodgy stuff */ });
SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(elevatedAction);

• If necessary, remove the extended web application using the Central Administration console (also remove the IIS site) and start again.

Dirty Words (Michael Hanes) - blog.mediawhole.com mailto:info@mediawole.com

Potluck 'Round the Hearth

While discussing the issues of public space for resources in Peopleware, the authors quote from Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language:

"Without communal eating, no human group can hold together. Give each [working group] a place where people can eat together. Make the common meal a regular event."

The authors go on to highlight the relationship between shared space in broader societal terms (the home, in particular) and the office workspace.

As so many of us spend a great deal of time and a large portion of our lives at work, I believe strongly in extending my definition of "family" to include the people I work with. This fits naturally with the hierarchical structure found so often in work places: my immediate circle of co-workers becomes my brothers and sisters; my managers becomes parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts; other colleagues in the organisation become cousins and second cousins.

From this mindset (and, admittedly from a mindset that includes fun and enjoyment!), I introduced my team to the potluck lunch about a year and a half ago. The potluck concept was not my idea: I attended a party held outside work by a colleague from my previous employer and the party was themed around the potluck; the people and layout of the workspace of my new employer simply allowed me to suggest we bring the team together on a regular basis and everyone bring a single dish of food.

Although we don't measure many things at Tourism--let alone productivity increases, the potluck lunch concept has proven successful in general. At the very least, it's a great opportunity to sit back with my work family, indulge in new and interesting food, and have a chat... a scheduled group downtime. It's also been an interesting way to introduce new team members to others in the office and give them a sense of how we work and what it feels like to be a part of our team.


We aim for a monthly potluck lunch and usually go in for some kind of theme. When our first potluck was held, we had a very diverse team and everyone brought food representative of their home culture. We'll also hold a goodbye potluck when someone leaves the team.

The rules of potluck are few and simple:

1. Each person only brings enough food to feed one to two people (or a single dish);
2. Each person tries their utmost to make something at home the night before--food purchased the day of the potluck is usually a rush job and tends to be deep-fried;
3. Alcohol is a suitable food substitute (but this works at Tourism).

We don't usually plan who's bringing what--it usually just works out. As we do have a few vegetarians about we try to cater for them and generally try to arrive at a balance of savoury vs sweet (dessert is always nice!).