Localizing SpecFlow

By Henning Eiben in Programming, Uncategorized 0 Comment

On a recent usergroup meeting I got introduced to SpecFlow. This opened a whole new world in formulating tests ans specifications. Although I’ve been trying to formulate my tests in a BDD manor, inspired by JP Boodhoo’s and Stefan Liesern’s BDD examples this feels much better.

So the next logical step would be to move to a natural german specification instead of having the original given-when-then syntax.

Turns out, that switching the language is actually really easy. Even though I didn’t seem to find anything on the web … You just have to adjust the app.config like this

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
  <configSections>
    <section name="specFlow"
      type="TechTalk.SpecFlow.Configuration.ConfigurationSectionHandler,
            TechTalk.SpecFlow"/>
  </configSections>
  <specFlow>
    <language feature="de-DE" tool="" />
  </specFlow>
</configuration>

And that’s all that’s to it.

Windows 7 Backup encountered a problem

By Henning Eiben in Uncategorized, Windows 2 Comments

I just recently started to backup my Windows 7 machine using the buildin backup capabilities of Windows 7.

However this doesn’t work as expected. Event though everything seemed to be backed up, I still got an error that a file was skipped during back.

Backup encountered a problem while backing up file C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\Podcasts. Error:(The system cannot find the file specified. (0x80070002))

This is strange. The file does not exists, but why does Windows want to backup that file if it doesn’t exist? There are just some mysteries still to be solved.

However, there seems to be a KB article for this problem. I suppose the problem has something to do with me uninstalling Zune from my system, which most likely created a podcasts folder for me (which I didn’t want in the first place).

So I searched in my profile and found a podcasts folder which I removed.

Batch Parameter

By Henning Eiben in Windows 0 Comment

Even though PowerShell is actually becoming the de-facto standard for scripting, there are still a whole lot of batch-scripts which are used for every day tasks and need to be maintained. And event there are always new things to discover.

To pass parameters to a batch-file isn’t really something new. With %1, %2 and so on you can access those parameters within the script. Noteworthy might be the fact, that %1 is the first parameter, while %0 is the name of the script itself.

What I didn’t know so far where some extra variables like %~f0, %~d0, %~p0 … as well as combinations like %~dp0; but then again, I’m not really so much into batch-scripting.

Here is a little overview about what I recently discovered, maybe it helps for someone else:

Description Example
%~f complete path inlc. filename C:\winnt\system32\x.cmd
%~d drive letter C
%~p path \winnt\system32
%~dp complete path C:\winnt\system32
%~sp short path C:\Progra~1\Intern~1 (for C:\Programme\Internet Explorer)
%~x file extension .cmd
%~nx filename incl. extension x.cmd
%~sx short file extension .doc (for .document)
%~a file attributes
%~t date and time of a file
%~z size of a file

Parameterized queries in MySQL

By Henning Eiben in Programming 0 Comment

In order to do SQL right in the .Net world, you just don’t concaternate a search-term with a static search-string, because this will open all gates to SQL-injection. So the following schould not be used: 

MySqlConnection connection = new MySqlConnection(_connectionString);
MySqlCommand command = connection.CreateCommand();
command.CommandText = "SELECT * FROM Forum where name = '" + forumName + "'";

Instead you should use a parameterized query. Easy, you might say. Just add a placeholder to the SQL-statement and off you go.

MySqlConnection connection = new MySqlConnection(_connectionString);
MySqlCommand command = connection.CreateCommand();
MySqlParameter forumNameParameter = new MySqlParameter("@forumName", forumName);
command.Parameters.Add(forumNameParameter);
command.CommandText = "SELECT * FROM Forum where name = @forumName";

Unfortunatly this doesn’t seem to work alright. At least I didn’t get any results, even though my search-term did exist.

Looking at the actual SQL that was being executed on the server something became obvious.

SELECT * FROM Forum where name = @forumName

That’s not the SQL I was expecting. Somehow the parameter was not being substitued by the actual value. But why?

Just a short test: the same code does work on a MS-SQL database!

Solution

@ is not a valid character for a placeholder in MySQL. Instead  ? should be used. The correct code should look like this:

MySqlConnection connection = new MySqlConnection(_connectionString);
MySqlCommand command = connection.CreateCommand();
MySqlParameter forumNameParameter = new MySqlParameter("?forumName", forumName);
command.Parameters.Add(forumNameParameter);
command.CommandText = "SELECT * FROM Forum where name = ?forumName";

So this finally worked.

Adding a linux server to a windows domain

By Henning Eiben in Linux 0 Comment

I already described in an earlier post how I added a linux server to a windows domain. Recently I added a new server to my domain, to replace my existing domain controller. As a consequence I had to update the krb5.conf file to point to the newly added server. Actually this hasn’t been to the first change in domain controllers, and usually users point out, that they cannot authenticate to subversion or apache based applications (which use kerberos authentication as well). OK, so I missed to update the krb5.conf again.

So there must be a more convenient way to configure kerberos. If only I had some way to pull the information of the current KDC from the domain-data. But wait – there is DNS. There are a couple of service-entries in DNS to point to all available kerberos servers in the domain! That sounds promising.

So I changed my krb5.conf file and added

dns_lookup_realm = yes
dns_lookup_kdc = yes

to the libdefaults section. Then I removed the realms and domain_realms section. Now all information about available KDC servers is directly pulled from DNS – sweet.

First look at Windows 8

By Henning Eiben in Windows 0 Comment

At //build Microsoft showed the next version of Windows: Windows 8. Just after the public presentation, a developer preview is actually available for download.

So after downloading 4.8 GB you finally have a ISO image to install. Since I don’t have a spare laptop or desktop around I tried to give Windows 8 a “virutal” spin.

So I fired up my favorite VMWare Workstation, just to discover, that Windows 8 is not (yet) supported on VMWare Workstation (as of this writing I’m running version 7.1.4). As it seems VMWare Workstation 8 is supposed to support Windows 8 (actually the APIC version required by Windows 8). OK, so this doesn’t seem to work out well.

So I though – what the heck, why not give this VirtualBox a turn? A lot of people seem to work with VirtualBox, so it must be worth the effort of taking a closer look. OK, downloaded the bits and installed it on my Windows 7 host.

So let’s see how I can install Windows 8 on VirtualBox. Just create a new virtual machine, specifying it as Windows 7 64-bit and off you go. Just a short while later I’m greeted with the new Windows 8 metro design – this is smooth. Works just like a charm I must say. Should I re-consider my virtual hosting strategy?

Well, anyway. It’s about time to get a first impression of Windows 8 … so some further impressions will follow.

IIS TimeOut while debugging a SharePoint application

By Henning Eiben in IIS, SharePoint 2 Comments

Who has not encounterd this problem: you’re just doing some debugging on your favorite SharePoint application and all over sudden – bam! The application pool gets recycled.

iis_app_timeout

Well, the problem is the timeout associated with each application pool. When IIS detects that an application pool is not responding anymore IIS just assumes something terrible happend and recycles the application pool. But all that really happend is some plain-old-debugging.

In order to circumvent this problem you have to disable the pinging of application pools by IIS. Just open up the advanced settings of the IIS application pool and set pinging to false.

iis_adv_setting

No ULS Logging in SharePoint 2010

By Henning Eiben in SharePoint 5 Comments

Sometimes you encounter errors, that seem to stick around forever. I recently noticed on my SharePoint 2010 dev-machine, that the ULS doesn’t seem to be working anymore. For some strange reason the ULS is complete empty. No logmessages whatsoever. Changing the loglevel doesn’t seem to have any impact at all.

Only messages while deploying solutions from Visual Studio 2010 where showing up in the log.

Can you spot the error?

After ignoring this problem for a couple of weeks – who needs logfiles anyway, when you’re doing everyhting the perfect way! – I actually did run into a problem with a custom component and I just couldn’t figure out what’s going wrong. Having SharePoint present me a correlation-id doesn’t help at all if you have no logmessages!

The Solution!

The solution is actually quite simple, and it’s always the same cause when working with SharePoint: permissions! I get the feeling, that 90% of all errors and problems are related to permissions and security. This kinda leads me to thinking, that no two SharePoint installations are the same. When I comes down to security and permission settings all installations differ. Even if it’s just a tiny bit – this is sometimes all it needs to take a system down.

Back to my originial problem, well actually to the solution of my problem. The solution was, to add the account for application pools to the “Performance Log Users” group. So far the accounts where just a member of the “Performance Monitor Users”.

Heaven knows why and how this happened. A quick comparision with another SharePoint installation revealed, that on that machine the application pool account was just a member of the local users group. The account was not a member of any other group (WTF?).

Delete SharePoint Application Pools

By Henning Eiben in SharePoint 0 Comment

Even though you deleted an application pool in IIS, sometimes SharePoint doesn’t seem to care. I recently had some trouble setting up the user profile service, and needed to delete the UPS because of some misconfiguration. When I wanted to recreate the application pool I got an error, stating the application already exists.

app_pool_1

But what when I can’t see this app-pool in IIS? Well PowerShell to the rescue:

Remove-SPServiceApplicationPool [AppPoolName]

This is almost to easy to be true.

BTW: when deleting the UPS (the service application), the application pool does not get deleted in IIS. This is extremely ugly, especially since the app-pool name is just some guid. When re-creating the service-application using the same settings as before (especially the same app pool name), this fails, because the name of the app-pool and the corresponding guid name for IIS seems to be stored in the configuration database.