I like to handle my .cst(CodeSmith templates files) files with my VS.NET for it's integration with Visual Source Safe.
Well, no need for VSTweaks in this version of Visual Studio, The trick is quite simple:

1. Open you Visual Studio .Net 2005.
2. Tools -> Options -> Text Editor -> File Extension
3. In the "Extension" text-box write ".cst" and in the "Editor" drop-down-list select "Html Editor".

Wow, it's been a long time since I've published my latest post hasn't it ?
Ok, no time for lame "I was busy" excuses so let me fill the gaps -

1. New position:
   I got a promotion at work and now I'm a team leader at our R&D department. I've come across, in my 6 years at the business, several great people; Some of them were good because of their technical knowledge, some for their leadership capabilities, some for their good nature and some for combining all the above. I'm working my ass of to affect my teammates and the rest of the people in my company as much as the latter ones affected me in the previous six years.
2. Interviewing candidates:
   We are hiring; Myself and Roee(our technical manager) were interviewing about 50(some of them didn't pass my "phone exam") people in the previous 2 months. It required me to think about "what developers should know" and even more important "what developers should know how to find". In addition, it gave me a great look at the people in "my world" (not a perfect one, but still...)
3. New co-workers:
   We hired a team leader named Ken Egozi and a programmer named Tamir Kanhe – GOOD LUCK folks!
4. New challenges:
   I'm now figuring out the "Smart Client" architecture which we want to use in our application, this includes understanding:
   1. Composite UI Application Block
   2. ClickOnce
   3. Windows Forms 2.0 best practices(data binding, Async work, web services & WSE 3.0 etc).
      The world of windows forms is new to me so I have a lot to catch up.

Reading Dror's post, I had to give it a shot so -

If you want to see your extension - look here.

Well, Richard explains it better than me, so just read his post.

update: for some reason the link doesn't work well, so here is the full address:

http://blog.hundhausen.com/Database+Concordance+Generator+CodeSmith+Style.aspx

Just copy it and put it in the address bar, sorry for the inconvenience.

I've sold my laptop(Compaq EVO N800V) today. After almost 3 years with me I had to let him go (tears are dropping on my keyboard). I'm kidding(!), I'm planing to buy a new (monster-one)laptop next week so I had to get rid of my old one somehow. Dror advised me to publish a message at Homeless and his tip was gold (worth 2000 NIS, in this case).

I really recommend this site, I got more than 10 calls today, just an hour after I've published to post there. Let me see, I've published the post around 11:00 and I've sold it at 15:00 (someone came to see it and took it away).

AMAZING!

The title got me your attention right? good, because this task - unit testing our WebService in one of our project - seemed to be a frazzled mission at first, but it's amazing how good tools and healthy thinking able you to think about new ways to "assign" the redundant work to the one(and only) dude that never complains (though it makes noises here and there) - the computer !

Let me take a step back and explain a little bit about our WebService and the unit tests it was required:
We currently finished develop another application in our department and this application was required to expose an interface for "CRUD"ing(Create,Read,Update,Delete) several "System Tables"("cities","countries","languages" etc) in the application. Eran(my teammate) was assigned for the job and he did a great job by well designing a general (XML)protocols for "talking" with the WS and by implementing the WS itself. After building the WebService and manually testing it he told me that his work was done and he's ready for his code review. I still have the image burned in my mind about how happy he was thinking about the required protocols, learning about WSE 2.0 (for WS security), implementing the WS itself to be extendable and maintainable, that it was almost tragic to see his face after I've told him that we should write an extensive unit tests for this WS due to his importance and it's extensive usage by our 3rd party softwares. The WebService had 5 methods and it handled 18 tables in our application so I thought about testing 3 different cases for each method, for each table:

1. 1 valid xml which should return the expected valid data from the WS.
2. 1 invalid structure xml which should return an error from the WS.
3. 1 invalid data xml which should return an error from the WS.

The math was simple:

3 xml files * 5 methods * 18 tables = 270 unit tests !

Eran started to plan the following 2 months for this taks but I had something else in mind - let's generate those unit test and hack, while we're in the middle of it, let's generate the XMLs as well !

I started writing the templates(while Eran was looking and learning the required basics) via CodeSmith (did I mentioned that this tool rocks? I'm sure I did, but again - Eric, great job) and after 2 hours we had all the xml files generated. Eran continued the job and written the classes (which holds the unit test methods) and checked that everything integrated properly. After a total of about 6 hours we had 270 unit tests, but more important, we managed to avoid a lot of dirty work and in case we need to support a new table, the unit tests for it will be only 2 clicks job; This is quite extendable, doesn't it ?

Pasha sent me a great presentation about Identity 2.0, presented by Dick Hardt, which all of you presenters out there ought to see !

Even if you don't understand what's the presentation is all about, you must listen to the presenter and check his style - he's amazing speaker and a great performer.

Here it is:

http://www.identity20.com/media/OSCON2005/

Like every good Jew, I like to listen\read what other's has to say about me; So, a few days ago I've got a referrer and I went to see who's mentioning me and why ? After reading the all post there I've seen this paragraph:

"After my PC got fixed, I found this:

http://www.lnbogen.com/ChangingMicrosoftsTabStripDisabledPropertyViaJavascript.aspx

One step closer to salvation. However, it didn't work either:

Oren Ellenbogen (?!!?!? is this a real name!? To my native Dutch ears this sounds like "Ears Elbows".) " ... [the rest is irrelevant]

Man, I laughed about it (with myself) for about an hour ! I know, "Ellenbogen" in Dutch is "Elbow" but "Oren" is "Ear" ?!

Well, I guess there is no such thing as bad publicity...

I've worked on a new post for about an hour and by simply clicking the Ctrl+R instead of Windows+R my entire post has been thrown to garbage ! I can't express how frustrated I am right now about the "Add Entry" in dasBlog, It's not the first time I lost a post (sometimes my Avant stuck and this also makes me rewrite the entire post).

Anyone have good (FREE) suggestions ?

p.s - I'll write the original post (again) tomorrow.

Yesterday the Israeli .NET architect group met at HP(Raanana) for a lecture about GAT and LINQ which was presented by Roy Osherove.

If you haven't heard about GAT & LINQ before, here is a (really) terse summary about them and my comments about the presentations:

1. Guidance Automation Toolkit (aka GAT): this is Microsoft way to take a piece from the "automation" utilities cake. See, MS finally got the idea that there are too many folks out there using CodeSmith, O/R Mappers, RapTier etc; Now they're integrating a tool in the Visual Studio which will able us to automate everything directly through the studio itself. With GAT, you can build packages, or as I like to call them - "well defined and well presented(GUI) processes", to automate for example a build of an entity(\data) class based on a given table in the DB, just like you can do it today with 3rd party softwares. But you can do much more with this tool basically because it's so well integrated with the studio. Now, creating full controlled wizards straight out from the VS.NET which will able you to automate creating VS.NET solutions\projects\items is even easier than developing an Add-in for the VS.NET 2005. The main reason I don't think this will take off immediately is the GAT lack of easy configuration, but this will be fixed in the following year, and then, man, I think that the current Code Generators and O\R Mappers softwares will have to really take the next step and start running after MS (like we used to). Roy's presentation was nice, but I think he made a mistake by given us some general info & demos without really pointing the real deal - integration, integration, integration and Microsoft money & time = something we'll use later on, one way or another.
   Presentation TIP: IMHO, the first slide in every technical presentation should contain the phrase:
   "At the end of my presentation you will all know ____" or something like it.
   I would start with something like: "hey folks, we're going to talk about GAT, and before I'll begin, let me assure you, each and every one of you will use this tool one way or another, not tomorrow, but in the next 6-10 months so pay attention to MS new baby; Good, now that I have your attention, this tool is not quite ready for immediate use, and that's why I've told you 6-10 months, BUT, let me give you some general info about the new product and some demos, (after all, every presenter must challenge the "god of demos") and at the end of my presentation I promise you'll all understand the big step Microsoft did to ease our life's as architects. Please keep in mind that this is only a 1 hour presentation so I rather show you the big picture and the why-you-should-use-it instead of getting deeper into the code, does it sound right to you ? (everybody will node anyway)"
   After that said, I would concentrate more on the amazing integration with the VS.NET, the ability to use wizards to build wizards, the ability to control everything you need in the studio while using the studio itself rather than talking about the recipes\actions and "deep level" demos. If In 1 hour presentation you can't really teach me how to create a working Guidance Automation wizard, don't start to and stop in the middle after you see the material is to complex for such a short time limit, concentrate on the big picture and give me a list of links to read later on. The most important thing is to let the audience know the main goal of your lecture and what will they gain from it straight from the beginning, so at the end of it, they'll be really able to tell you if you did a good job.
   
2. Language Integrated Query (aka LINQ): This is one of the coolest shit you'll ever see, I promise you that, but it will be released only with C# 3.0 so I won't elaborate much on it now and just say that this technology ables you to run queries on collection. I won't even give samples, there are plenty right here. This presentation by Roy was much better because it was clearly understood that the presentation will be focused on the new abilities LINQ will give us - pure "introduction" presentation (and to extract some "wowwww","aaahh", "hhooo" comments which is great to have in any presentation ).

So, it was a nice meeting and I even got the chance to see some folks from the army I haven't seen for a lot of time (Effie, Gabi and the rest of the team) so I'm glad I went.

Oh, Two things before I'm out of here -

1. I've registered to Microsoft Sql Server 2005 convention in November, will I see you there ?
2. A very good friend of mine, Amir Markowitz, has turned 32 yesterday (sorry for the late post Markowitz!) so happy birthday dude !

Hey folks,

You can now receive my new posts directly to your email via FeedBlitz service!

All you have to do is click here and insert your email.

This task can be a little tricky, so after messing with it's HTC (TabStrip.htc) here is how you do it:

To enable tab:

Back to code...

Our team use Microsoft's Membership Management Component Prototype for our users management in our application. We've wanted to add "forgot my password" screen, and our new member in our team, Dror(pay his blog a visit) was assigned for the mission. While trying to configure the MemberRoles component (in the web.config) to allow password retrieval, we've got a strange "bug"(\behavior); When we've tried to write this code:

<add name="AspNetSqlProvider" type="Microsoft.ScalableHosting.Security.SqlMembershipProvider, MemberRole, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b7c773fb104e7562" connectionStringName="wsha" enablePasswordRetrieval="true" enablePasswordReset="true" requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false" requiresUniqueEmail="false" minRequiredPasswordLength="1" minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0" passwordFormat="Hashed" applicationName="test" description="Stores and retrieves membership data from the local Microsoft SQL Server database" />

We've got a strange error "Configuration Error" (with unknown exception and other "helpful" details), and to make it even stranger, if you set the enablePasswordRetrieval to false, everything works well. So, like always, the first thing I do after I smack the keyboard (It works on my TV at home, why not here ?), I googled for solution (and publish it here, for higher PR ) BUT this time - NO LUCK, I didn't manage to find something helpful. I couldn't thought about a better solution than to look at the source via Lutz Reflector so I've opened the dll there and checked MemberShipConfigHandler.Create(..) method; There I saw that this method creates an instance of SqlMembershipProvider and call it's Initialize method with all the data from the web.config. There I found the answer:

So, the error was that we've used passwordFormat="Hashed" instead of "Clear" or "Encrypted". Well, That's making a lot of sense because the "Hashed" algorithm is implemented via SHA1, which is one-way encryption so obviously I can't retrieve the user's original password.

The real problem(and that's why I've called this behavior a "bug") is that somewhere in the way, the original helpful exception was caught and replaced with a really bad exception which doesn't allow the programmer to understand what have he done wrong. This is a very good example of why it's so important to keep the exception stack with you all the way up.

Back to code...