Maybe when she grows up, she’ll be a nerd and work with her dad – like I grew up to work with mine…

Well I found it.  What you need to do is make a copy of the C:\Program Files (x86)\Electronic Arts\BioWare\Star Wars – The Old Republic folder.  Put it somewhere safe.  Also save a copy of the 37MB installer for SWTOR.   On your fresh Windows install run the SWTOR installer.   This will create all the needed folders and registry keys.  Finally copy the SWTOR program files folder from your backup overtop of the fresh install and you’re all set.  Fire up SWTOR and you didn’t have to download the monstrous pig of a download.  So glad I won’t have to be doing that download anymore!

<3 Visual Lisp

Even the quick routines need a little error handling and logging can make a huge difference in documenting the results or diagnosing problems.  Yes, Visual Lisp comes with file I/O calls and I’m sure most of you reading this have rolled your own logging code.  We had some at Kanotech that is still in use for DraftLogic.  Not for long though :=)  Today I’m here to show you how you could bring your Visual Lisp logging into the 21st century.  Not only will it give you insanely robust and configurable logging – it will let even complex systems that mix technologies (ie. Visual Lisp, ObjectARX .NET) to bring the logging together into a common set of log files.

Overview

There are two sides to this.  First, in .NET we setup Log4Net and expose it to Visual Lisp.  Over on the Lisp side, we’ll load the vlx, setup an error handler, and issue some logging calls.  As usual I’ve attached a Visual Studio solution with sample code.  I’ve also included a compiled dll that you can just go ahead and use.  The attached project is built using .NET 3.5 as this machine only has AutoCAD 2010 installed.  Log4Net itself is built targeting .NET 1.0 so you can modify the .NET runtimes and ObjectARX references used in the attached project and use this code for pretty much any .NET enabled version of AutoCAD/ObjectARX.

In .NET – Setup Log4Net and Lisp Bindings

The Lisp bindings are pretty straight forward.  Expose your call(s) to AutoCAD as a LispFunction.  I’ve built two exposed calls.  One takes two parameters, and uses the value of the first parameter to determine the log type.  The second parameter is the message to log.  The second call is a LogError call that could be used to just log error type messages.  This call could be duplicated for each type of logging state if desired.

   1: /// <summary>

   2: /// Lisp exported Log call.  Expects two parameters in lisp.  First the log type which may be either INFO, WARNING, DEBUG, or ERROR.  The second is a string containing the error / message.

   3: /// </summary>

   4: /// <param name="lispArgs"></param>

   5: /// <returns></returns>

   6: /// <remarks>Lisp syntax (Loggit </remarks>

   7: [LispFunction("Loggit")]

   8: public TypedValue Log(ResultBuffer lispArgs)

   9: {

  10:     //Check that we have the correct number of parameters

  11:     Editor ed = Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices.Application.DocumentManager.MdiActiveDocument.Editor;

  12:     if (lispArgs == null)

  13:     {

  14:         ed.WriteMessage("\nLoggit - Incorrect number of arguments.  Expected 2 parameters, received none\n");

  15:         return new TypedValue((int)LispDataType.Nil);

  16:     }

  17:     if (lispArgs.AsArray().Length != 2)

  18:     {

  19:         ed.WriteMessage("\nLoggit - Incorrect number of arguments.  Exepected 2 parameters, received " + Convert.ToString(lispArgs.AsArray().Length));

  20:         return new TypedValue((int)LispDataType.Nil);

  21:     }

  22:     

  23:     //params are good.  We expect two strings so rather than test type just convert to string

  24:     String logType = Convert.ToString(lispArgs.AsArray()[0].Value).ToUpper();

  25:     String logMessage = Convert.ToString(lispArgs.AsArray()[1].Value);

  26:  

  27:     switch(logType)

  28:     {

  29:         case "INFO":

  30:             Logger.Current.Info(logMessage);

  31:             break;

  32:         case "WARNING":

  33:         Logger.Current.Warning(logMessage);

  34:             break;

  35:         case "DEBUG":

  36:         Logger.Current.Debug(logMessage);

  37:             break;

  38:         case "ERROR":

  39:             Logger.Current.Error(logMessage);

  40:             break;

  41:     }

  42:     return new TypedValue((int)LispDataType.T_atom);

  43: }

  44:  

  45: //Alternately you could expose individual calls like LogError here.

  46:  

  47: /// <summary>

  48: /// Exposed Lisp function that logs an error directly. Expects a single lisp parameter of type string which is the message to log.

  49: /// </summary>

  50: /// <param name="lispArgs"></param>

  51: /// <returns></returns>

  52: [LispFunction("LogError")]

  53: public TypedValue LogError(ResultBuffer lispArgs)

  54: {

  55:     //Check that we have the correct number of parameters

  56:     Editor ed = Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices.Application.DocumentManager.MdiActiveDocument.Editor;

  57:     if (lispArgs == null)

  58:     {

  59:         ed.WriteMessage("\nLoggit - Incorrect number of arguments.  Expected 2 parameters, received none\n");

  60:         return new TypedValue((int)LispDataType.Nil);

  61:     }

  62:  

  63:     String logMessage = Convert.ToString(lispArgs.AsArray()[0].Value);

  64:     Logger.Current.Error(logMessage);

  65:  

  66:     return new TypedValue((int)LispDataType.T_atom);

  67: }

One awesome little bit of magic exists in the Logger.cs class.  When configuring the logger it loads the assemblies in question using System.Reflection.  Then it checks in the folder of each loaded dll for the log4net.config file.  This means that logging will only actually log if you have a log4net.config file exists in the same folder as the loaded ObjectARX.NET assembly.  With AutoCAD based extensions this is especially important.  I’ve never liked placing my assemblies (vlx, arx, dll) in the AutoCAD folders.  I’ve always been a huge proponent of extending the AutoCAD search path if needed and using my own directory structures.  This configuration searching technique also eliminates the need for hard coded “here is my log config file” stored in the registry or some other config location. 

Compile that dll and you should be able to run with that in Visual Lisp.

Configure the Logging

As mentioned previously we need to create the configuration file to place with our dll.  There are a couple of lines of code that are quite relevant to get the logging working.  First we have a hard coded configuration file name defined in Logger.cs.  You can customize this if you want.

   1: /// <summary>

   2: /// Name of the file name to search for when trying to configure logging.

   3: /// </summary>

   4: public const string ConfigFileName = "log4net.config";

Next is the name of the logger.  This is quite relevant when configuring your logging.  If this value does not match the value in the config file you will be very frustrated trying to get the logging to fire! If desired change the VisualLisp value to whatever you would like.

   1: /// <summary>

   2: /// This logger name is referenced in the log4net configuration

   3: /// </summary>

   4: private ILog _logImplementation = LogManager.GetLogger("VisualLisp");

Next we have a little bit of XML to slough through.

   1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

   2: <log4net xmlns="urn:log">

   3:   <appender name="GeneralLog" type="log4net.Appender.FileAppender">

   4:     <file value="VisualLisp.log" />

   5:     <appendToFile value="true" />

   6:     <layout type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout">

   7:         <conversionPattern value="%date [%thread] %-5level %logger [%property{NDC}] - %message%newline" />

   8:     </layout>

   9: </appender>

  10:   <logger name="VisualLisp">

  11:     <level value="ALL" />

  12:     <appender-ref ref="GeneralLog" />

  13:   </logger>

  14: </log4net>

This is where things can get crazy!  First the appender section.  This is where you define all the different settings for the actual logging.  I’m running with a standard log file appender, but there are so many choices.  Log to file, log to rolling file, log to database, log to e-mail, log to eventlog, log to almost whatever you want.  You can even write your own custom appenders to log to your toaster oven if you really wanted to.  This is one of the many reasons I <3 Log4Net soooo much.   The basics here are straight forward.  Set the file value=”” to the name and optionally path (either full or relative).  One important note., if you do not specify a full path or you use a relative path the logfile the base point used will be the AutoCAD program files folder.   If you are not running with administrative rights the Vista/Windows 7 file system virtualization will kick in and the log file location will be quite confusing.  It’s probably a good idea to specify a full path here.  More details on some Log4Net configurations can be found on the Log4Net site.

Next take a look at the logger element.  You can define multiple loggers, and each can log to multiple appenders.  Or a single logger can log to multiple appenders.   Note the important value of “Visual Lisp”.  This must match the GetLogger value defined in the private ILog above.  You can also specify which “level” of notice to log.  Though our code may log INFO, WARNING, DEBUG and ERROR calls – if your level is set to ERROR – only the actual error level messages will be logged.

In Visual Lisp – Setup an Error Handler and Issue Logging

So now we have an ObjectARX.NET assembly to load.  We have a handle on configuring our logging.  Here is the contents of the included Lisp file.

   1: ;only load the assembly if it has not been loaded once

   2: (if (not (car (atoms-family 1 '("loggit"))))

   3:     (command "netload" "C:/Users/dmaidlow/Documents/Visual Studio 2010/Projects/Log4Net.VisualLisp/bin/debug/Log4Net.VisualLisp.dll")

   4: )

   5:  

   6: (defun new_ErrorHandler (err)

   7:     (if (or (= (substr err 1 4) "quit")

   8:             (= err "Function cancelled")

   9:         )

  10:         (progn

  11:             ;put any function cancelled logic here

  12:             (princ)

  13:         )

  14:         (progn

  15:             ;an actual error happened here..

  16:             ;you could spew some stuff out to the console, or issue an alert..

  17:             ;(prompt (strcat "\nLisp Returned the following error: \"" st "\"\n"))

  18:             ;(alert (strcat "*ERROR*\nLisp returned the following error: \n\t" st))

  19:  

  20:             ;but we're here to log!

  21:             (Loggit "ERROR" (strcat "An error occurred\n" err))

  22:             

  23:         )

  24:     )

  25:     (gc)

  26:     (princ)

  27: )

  28:  

  29: (setq *error* new_ErrorHandler)

  30: (LogError "Oh No an Error!")

  31: (Loggit "INFO" "This is an informational message")

Not much to it.  To prevent some command line spewage if you load the assembly twice we check first to see if the function has already been exported to the environment.  Here we’ve setup a new error handler that differentiates between a function cancellation and an actual error.  At the bottom you can see a couple of examples of the logging.  If you’ve defined your log4net.config file in the same folder as the assembly if you load this lisp file you will see a log file get created.

Summary

So in review – we’ve exposed Log4Net to the Visual Lisp and command line environment inside of AutoCAD.  This will allow you to unify your logging (if you are already using Log4Net) and may even make you a Log4Net enthusiast as well.  As always I’m always interested in your feedback and constructive criticism!

HTTP Error 500.19 – Internal Server Error The requested page cannot be accessed because the related configuration data for the page is invalid

Odd – but I realized immediately this server felt different.  I added the Local Computer \ Users group to the folder permissions for the MapAgents folder and gave that group Read and Execute.  This resulted in the page at least rendering.  At this point the listener was active, but the Mapguide server could not be found.

MapGuide Server #1 [Local] Autodesk MapGuide Server could not be found. If you need more assistance, please contact your Autodesk MapGuide Server Administrator.

This looked similar to the old DCOM problem that occurred back on XP when you applied Windows XP service pack 2 – but the server service was running.  I checked the DCOM permissions and everything there was correct.  After a bit of messing around I realized that indeed this Windows server was hardened and the permissions has been restricted.  To resolve this problem I had to give the local Users group read and execute permissions to the Mapguide folder.  I had to give the local Users group write access to the logs folder.   After that the mapagent could talk to the server no problem!

Now I admit I screwed up troubleshooting 101 here.  I had a hard stop coming and really needed to get this resolved ASAP.  Instead of doing one thing at a time and testing I added both permissions.  When I tried to undo the permissions to see if I could replicate the problem I could not reproduce it.  It may be possible that I only needed to give the local Users group modify access to the logs folder.  If you encounter this problem and determine this to be the case please let me know!

If you’re having problems with Mapguide 6.5 and could use a little help – feel free to contact me via ChasmTech.

• The initial download brought down a roughly 1.8GB  video file.   Ohh this doesn’t look to bad! 
• Ok that file is done, Doh, now its downloading an 11GB file.  Ok time for bed.
• Oooh 6AM conference call.  Up super early.  Mad at guy that scheduled call at 8am EST.  Oh only 3GB left.  Sweet!
• Oh now we have a 60MB file.  Nice.
• Oh, shoot, 4GB file.  Great.  At least I’m getting 320KB/s.
• Oh okay half a dozen small files totaling a couple hundred megs.  Sweet its installed. Only what, 18GB downloaded?

Oh excellent.  Now it’s installed but my account has not yet been activated for pre-release play…Oh well back to work.  Maybe my account will be activated this afternoon? hmmmmm.

**Note – in the time it took me to write this post my buddy with Telus Optik downloaded the entire game.

Anyhow – very much looking forward to this game.  Here is a couple screen captures I took from the beta a month ago.  I know you wanted to see them

I’m in no way endorsing any particular bank or program here.  RBC’s Avion visa is the program I’m familiar with and I’ve been using for the past six years.  Please feel free to leave a comment describing your experiences with other banks and rewards programs.

Interest kills the entire thing

The very first thing you need to know is that you can NOT carry a balance on your card.  Ever.  These “premium” cards that give points always have a very high interest rate – 19% and up.  Carrying even a tiny balance will eat any potential benefits in no time.  Though I never encourage spending more than you can afford, if one month you over extend yourself, paying off your balance with a lower interest credit  might be your best option.  It’s important to note that if used properly, a credit card is a free loan.  Depending on the timing of your purchase(s) you can get up to a 45 day, interest free loan.  

Use Your Visa for EVERYTHING

The next key step to this process is to use your Visa card for EVERYTHING.  Even if you have cash in your wallet get used to using your Visa exclusively.  Save your cash to pay off your next Visa statement!  Setup as many of your automatic monthly expenses as possible to automatically deduct from your Visa:

• Cell Phone
• Home Phone
• Satellite / Cable TV
• Internet
• etc.

This also has the added benefit of making bills a little easier to pay each month as instead of having to pay them individually.   There are several other benefits to this including no debit card fees, better exchange rates than cash when travelling abroad, and you also get all the various benefits of the premium card like insurance and what not.  Sadly my power and gas companies refuse to accept Visa so I have to waste time each month to manually transfer money to each one of these accounts.  (Come on Epcor and Altagas.  Get with the times).

Big ticket items rack up the points quickly.  If you’re planning on buying a new TV or other large items– put it on the card.  We renovated our new home this year and I managed to get 75% of the expenses on my visa.  This significantly increased the points earned for the year.   A lot of times car dealerships will let you make a down payment on a new vehicle using your Visa.  It is unlikely they will let you buy the entire vehicle using your card, as there are costs to vendors when accepting credit cards.  

Let’s consider the new car scenario.  Assume for a minute you have negotiated a price of $10K for a new vehicle.  You have $10K in cash in the bank to pay for your new vehicle.   The dealership will allow you to pay for up to $5000 of your new vehicle using your credit card.   Instead of giving the dealership $10K in cash, you make one payment of $5000 with your Visa, and one payment of $5000 with your cash.  At the end of the month you use the other $5000 to pay off your credit card.  So at this point you’ve spend the same amount of money BUT you gained 5000 points.

Using a credit card this was does take some personal responsibility and care.  Spending on credit as opposed to spending cash can result in EASILY over spending.  Be mindful of this if you’re new to credit cards.   Learn your payment due dates and set calendar reminders for the day before as well as the week before to make sure you pay it on time!

Leverage your business

Companies spend a lot of money.  Especially technology companies!  Software, hardware, books, meals, travel etc – it all adds up.  Ask your bank if you can setup a corporate business card and have the points transfer into your personal card.  RBC let me setup a company Avion card and each month the points are transferred.  I run my business almost exclusively using this card.  With the exception of payroll and the odd strange expense that requires checks – 99% of my company spending happens through my corporate card.  This also makes my accounting significantly simpler and saves me money on bookkeeping and accounting come year end.

Profit from your employer

Years ago when I worked for a company where I was the head of IT in addition to being a software developer.  My boss was really cool back in the day when it came to expenses for the company.  He would let me make purchases (including very significant ones) for the company using my personal card and expense them back to the company.  Not only did this help me build up points – but it also helped me build up a great credit rating.  When I moved on to start my own business I had a personal credit card with a huge limit (tens of thousands) that I paid off every month.  This really helped my personal credit at a critical time in my life.

So if you can spend on behalf of your employer and be reimbursed each month go for it.  Free points == free money!

45 day interest free loan

What the heck I’ll share this little tidbit too.  Find your credit card cutoff date.  This is the date that charges for the current month are stopped and will start to count against the next month.  For example, both my cards (personal and corporate) are synchronized.  The cutoff is the 10th of each month.  So any charges made up to and including the 10th will need to be paid on the 27th of that month.  Anything charged on the 11th or later will need to be paid on the 27th of the following month.  This is significant.  There are not many other ways to get a 45 day interest free loan.

Redeem early.  Redeem often!

This is especially important for rewards going into investment accounts or that go towards paying down mortgages.  I used to wait until the end of the year to cash out my points and do one large deposit into my investment account.  I realized that this was silly.  Now I strive for quarterly deposits.  This lets me try and capitalize on market downturns – buying low!  Also if you’re going for other rewards like mortgage payments – why pay the extra interest with a single deposit?  Instead of depositing say 1000$ once a year, do 250$ quarterly.  This decreases the principle of your loan and in turn the interest paid.

With the RRSP rewards it costs 3000 points to redeem 25$ worth of credit.  There is a minimum purchase requirement of 12000 points  which results in a 100$ gift cert.  After that the amount increases in 3000 point increments.  Redeem 60K points, get 500$ gift certificate.

One last benefit to an RRSP contribution is that in addition to the 25$ going into your account – you SHOULD get a ~5$ tax refund on that amount at the end of the year.  This makes the 3000 points actually worth a little bit more.  The same can be said about paying down mortgage principle – you should save money in interest.

Nifty huh? 

So by changing the way you spend money you already spend in life you can gain a number of benefits – free 45 day loans, save money on accounting, save time paying bills and finally – free money!  I’d love to hear about other creative ways to use your credit card to earn reward points.  I’d also love to hear about other banks and credit card programs.  Please feel free to contact me by e-mail, Google+ or leave a comment here!

What were the differences?

The basic logic for insert was this (parts omitted because you probably just don’t care):

1. Get table metadata
2. Loop through fields in table
3. for each field retrieve the value from the UI
4. Add field to parameterized SQL statement with placeholder
5. Create new parameter with appropriate name and value.   Add parameter to collection
6. Loop through parameters in the collection and add to the DbCommand
7. Finally execute the parameterized SQL statement

As I mentioned this worked great.  Fields were inserted and there was much rejoicing.

The logic for an update was similar but there was one big difference:

1. Get Table
2. Loop through fields in table
3. for each field retrieve the value from the UI
4. If the field is a key add the placeholder to the where condition, otherwise add the field name and value to the update fields part of the SQL
5. Create new parameter with appropriate name and value.  Add parameter to collection
6. Loop through parameters in the collection and add to the DbCommand
7. Finally execute the parameterized SQL statement.

The branch in step 4 and the if statement ended up causing the problem.

The Problem

OracleCommand defaults to “bind by order” – making the order in which the parameters exist in the SQL statement match the order in which the parameters are added to the OracleCommand. This was happening during the insert because of the structure of an insert statement being so linear. However in the update statement I was building the SQL in a more dynamic way. I was maintaining a list field=value conditions and a separate where condition. In the ended up merging them :

   1: String parameterizedSQL = "UPDATE " + table.Name + " SET " + updateStatement + " WHERE " + whereStatement;

So unless my key field( s) all lined up at the end of the table metadata definitions,  appending that where condition at the end my parameter order got all out of whack in the DbCommand.  So my where condition was actually being set to the wrong value – which could have resulted in the wrong records being updated. Nasty.   Fortunately this can be resolved.

The Fix – BindByName=true

To correct this I had to set the Oracle specific BindByName property to true.  (btw this being the default behavior is just silly.  All the other big data providers default to bind by name and Oracle should too.  That’s a rant for another day though.)   My initial solution was to check if the command is an OracleCommand and if found do a little casting to set the BindByName property then recast it back to DbCommand before executing the query.  Constructive feedback is always welcome!

   1: /// <summary>

   2: /// Execute the parameterized query

   3: /// </summary>

   4: /// <param name="conn">open and active DbConnection</param>

   5: /// <param name="trans">Active DbTransaction</param>

   6: /// <param name="parameterizedSQL">the parameterized SQL</param>

   7: /// <param name="paramList">List of OledDbParameter</param>

   8: /// <returns>DataTable containing the results</returns>

   9: public static void RunParameterizedInsertUpdate(DbConnection conn, DbTransaction trans, String parameterizedSQL, List<DbParameter> paramList)

  10: {

  11:     //create the db command and set the parameterized SQL as a property

  12:     DbCommand command = conn.CreateCommand();

  13:     if(trans != null)

  14:     {

  15:         command.Transaction = trans;

  16:     }

  17:     //hack attack!  By default, Oracle requires its parameters to be placed into the command

  18:     //in the order the parameters appear in the parameterized SQL.  Little hackery here

  19:     //to set the Oracle Command to bind by name

  20:     if (command is Oracle.DataAccess.Client.OracleCommand)

  21:     {

  22:         OracleCommand oraCmd = (OracleCommand) command;

  23:         oraCmd.BindByName = true;

  24:         command = oraCmd;

  25:     }

  26:     command.CommandText = parameterizedSQL;

  27:     command.CommandType = CommandType.Text;

  28:  

  29:     //loop through the params and add them to the command

  30:     foreach (DbParameter parameter in paramList)

  31:     {

  32:         command.Parameters.Add(parameter);

  33:     }

  34:     try

  35:     {

  36:         command.Prepare();

  37:         command.ExecuteNonQuery();

  38:     }

  39:     catch (Exception ex)

  40:     {

  41:         command.Dispose();

  42:         throw;

  43:     }

  44: }

If you take a step back and look at AutoCAD and ObjectARX – its a huge body of work and it is a challenge to get experience in all the various parts of it.  The recent request I received on how to control the AutoCAD ribbon from Visual Lisp or the command line and the subsequent research, code and blog post I wrote made me think,  what if I solicited small problems from the AutoCAD community that could make fun little 4 hour research projects.  These would allow me to dig into various portions of ObjectARX.NET once a week, write some fun code, and give me things to write about.  Everybody wins!

I’m looking to spend about 4-6 hours on each question.  I’m hoping to do one question per week, assuming I get enough requests.  I’ll provide the full source and project with each post.  All code will be written in c#.  Some examples of valid requests would be:

• Submit a Visual Lisp routine to convert to ObjectARX.NET.
• Request a particular routine that does some sort of drawing clean up or modifies something.
• Identify some functionality that is missing in AutoCAD.
• Request a piece of sample code explaining how to use API x of ObjectARX.NET or Mapguide Enterprise/Open Source.

The Do’s

• Please keep your request realistic.   I’ve only got 4 to 6 hours and you’re not paying me =)
• Please submit specific functionality along with sample data.
• Please be available to answer any questions  I might have via e-mail, phone/skype or possibly gotomeeting.
• Please keep the underlying technology somewhat current.  Don’ t request AutoCAD/Mapguide 2007.
• Please review my code and comment if you see something wrong or that I could do more efficiently.  This is about me learning and I’m gonna make mistakes.

The Don’ts

• Don’t expect days worth of work, I just don’t have that much spare time.
• Don’t ask me to work on your project (unless of course you want to hire my team via ChasmTech).
• Please don’t get upset if I don’t pick your question.
• I did my ten odd years in the trenches writing Visual Lisp – I don’t really want to write any more, so please don’t ask for lisp code.
• Don’t be a ass.  I don’t have time for asses.

Let’s See What Happens

So I have no idea how this will play out.  I don’t know if 4-6 hours is a reasonable amount of time to allocate each week to do this right.   I don’t know if I will be able to make the time every week.  Maybe I’ll change it from “Question of the Week” to “Question of the Every Second Week”.  I’m going to put this out there and see what happens.   I reserve the right to change anything and everything! s  E-mail your requests to contact ~@~ geospecialling dot com.

Remotesoft Protector Runtime Error – yet to handle multiple .NET framework runtime

One other symptom of this was that .exe files would just blow chunks.  I’ve finally figured out what was causing this!  Most of our products are protected during the nightly builds.  This error however is specific to assemblies protected using the the Remotesoft .NET Explorer UI.  When using this application for the protect or obfuscate functionality it is really just a front end around the protector.exe/obfuscator.exe.  The UI is building the following command line string and tonight it finally dawned on me:

Command: C:\Program Files (x86)\Remotesoft\Protector\bin\protector.exe -neutral -resource -string -cctor -clrversion v2.0.50727 "C:\temp\SmartInk for Kahua\SmartInk.UI.exe"

The UI was forcing the clr version to .NET 2.0 – when my assemblies are all built against .NET 4.0.  Oops…

After a bit of digging I found that you can set the CLR version in .NET Explorer from the Action / CLR Version menu item.  Unfortunately it has not been updated to support .NET 4.0 – and so has been rendered pretty much useless as a front end for protector.

The Fix

The only solution is to use the command line to execute your protection.   The updated command line ended up looking pretty similar:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Remotesoft\Protector\bin\protector.exe" -neutral -resource -string  -clrversion v4.0.30319 "C:\temp\SmartInk for Kahua\SmartInk.UI.exe"

There you have it – I can’t believe I missed that…

How’s it work?

Attached is a zip file that contains the dll.  To use this simply netload the dll into your AutoCAD session and issue the all powerful RibbonNinja lisp call.  It takes a single string parameter that is the name of the tab you want to activate.  If it finds and activates the tab it will return T, if not it returns nil.  For example given the following AutoCAD ribbon:

Issuing the following lisp statement will change the active tab from “Map Setup” to “Analyze”.  Then it would switch to “Home"

   1: (RibbonNinja “Analyze”)

   2: (RibbonNinja “Home”)

This code is not case sensitive.  If its even possible to have multiple menus within AutoCAD with the same spelling but in different cases you’re probably S.O.L. and it will always choose the last one.  I’ve assumed unique tab names.

This dll has been compiled to work against AutoCAD 2012.  It will support both x86 and x64 versions.  It should also work on any AutoCAD vertical (i.e AutoCAD Map, Civil, ADT etc etc).  If you get the following  error when you try to netload the dll we have one last change to make:

Cannot load assembly. Error details: System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly ‘file:///C:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2012 – English\RibbonNinja.dll’ or one of its dependencies. Operation is not supported. (Exception from HRESULT: 0×80131515) File name: ‘file:/// C:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2012 – English\RibbonNinjadll ‘ —> System.NotSupportedException: An attempt was made to load an assembly from a network location which would have caused the assembly to be sandboxed in previous versions of the .NET Framework. This release of the .NET Framework does not enable CAS policy by default, so this load may be dangerous. If this load is not intended to sandbox the assembly, please enable the loadFromRemoteSources switch.

Please read and try the following posts.  .NET 4.0 is “protecting” us so we need to fix that.  First you can try and “unblock” the dll following the steps outlined on Scott Sheppard’s blog.  If that doesn’t work for you again shut down AutoCAD and edit your acad.exe.config file as explained by Kean Walmsley on Through the Interface.  Remember to run notepad or whatever editor you’re using as an administrator – or you will get permission errors when you try to save the config file.

Turn up the nerd

For those of you more technically inclined the source is pretty simple once you figure out the mess of  references that are needed:

   1: [LispFunction("RibbonNinja")]

   2: public TypedValue GoNinjaGoNinjaGo(ResultBuffer lispArgs)

   3: {

   4:     //check the params

   5:     Editor ed = Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices.Application.DocumentManager.MdiActiveDocument.Editor;

   6:     if (lispArgs == null)

   7:     {

   8:         ed.WriteMessage("\nIncorrect number of arguments.  Expected 1 parameter, received none\n");

   9:         return new TypedValue((int)LispDataType.Nil);

  10:     }

  11:  

  12:     if(lispArgs.AsArray().Length != 1)

  13:     {

  14:         ed.WriteMessage("\nRibbonNinja - Incorrect number of arguments.  Expected String - tab keyboard shortcut\n");

  15:         return new TypedValue((int)LispDataType.Nil);

  16:     }

  17:     //get the tab name

  18:     String tabKey = Convert.ToString(lispArgs.AsArray()[0].Value);

  19:  

  20:     //get the ribbon

  21:     Autodesk.Windows.RibbonControl ribCntrl = Autodesk.AutoCAD.Ribbon.RibbonServices.RibbonPaletteSet.RibbonControl;

  22:     

  23:     //find the custom tab using the Id

  24:     foreach (RibbonTab tab in ribCntrl.Tabs)

  25:     {

  26:         //is this the one we're looking for?

  27:         if(tab.AutomationName.ToUpper() == tabKey.ToUpper())

  28:         {

  29:             //yup - get it active and bail. weeeeee

  30:             tab.IsActive = true;

  31:             return new TypedValue((int)LispDataType.T_atom);

  32:         }

  33:     }

  34:     return new TypedValue((int)LispDataType.Nil);

  35: }

Thanks for the challenge Shawn!  Here is your shiny new

.  Feel free to use this commercially – I always appreciate links to my posts in exchange  =)

p.s. Two posts in two days.  that’s crazy talk I tell ya!

an “MDAC Not Detected” warning.  MDAC you may remember is the old tyme “Microsoft Data Access Component” and 2.8 was one of the last releases.  MDAC has since been superseded and is apparently not included with Windows 2008.  Nor can it be installed.   I didn’t even bother contact Autodesk – I knew their response was likely going to start off with a good laugh, followed by something to the effect of “yeah that’s really old, you should probably just find an equally old Windows server.”  This of course is not an option =)   The good news though is that we can hack the Mapguide Server 6.5 installer and once installed Mapguide Server seems to run just fine.  Big thanks to Microsoft for all the effort they put into maintaining backwards compatibility.  Note this process may well work for Windows Vista and will probably work for Windows 7 – but I have not tested that.  Also – I should add this is going to be completely unsupported by Autodesk and will definitely be completely unsupported by me.  Please do the appropriate amount of testing before you put this into production.  That said, I’ve not noticed any problems with Mapguide 6.5 running on Windows 2008.

Getting Started

So to get started.  You’ll need a piece of free software from Microsoft called Orca.  You’ll also need your Mapguide 6.5 Server install which can be downloaded from Autodesk.    Once Orca is installed start the Mapguide 6.5 server setup.  The required MSI file that we need to edit is stored inside a single self extracting exe.  You can extract these files by launching the installer on your Windows 2008 server and starting task manager once the “MDAC Not Detected” error is displayed.   Make sure the “Show processes from all users” is checked and find “ServerInstall.exe”  Right click on this process and choose “Open File Location”.  Take a copy of these files and place them somewhere, preferably on your Windows 2008 server’s local drive.

**Update– thanks to Krzysztof Skwarek for pointing out that Orca is a bit of a pain in the ass to get ahold of.  I have the Windows SDK installed already so I didn’t notice this pain point.   Given that the platform SDK is freely available, I’ve uploaded the here for your convenience. (If this is a problem Microsoft, please don’t get litigious…just send me an e-mail to let me know. I’ll gladly take it down and make the good people download the 250MB platform SDK =])

Hacking the Installer and Installing

Next, fire up Orca.   Choose File / Open and browse to your copy of the installation files.  Select ServerInstall.msi.  In the left hand window scroll down and find “InstallUISequence”  Select that.  In the right hand pane find and select “MDACNotDetected” .   Right click on this row and pick “Drop Row”.  You will be prompted that this will permanently remove 1 rows.  Click Ok and save the msi.

Your installation is now hacked and will get past that error message when you run ServerInstall.exe.  Make sure your run this from a local drive.  When I tried to run the install from a network share, Windows “protected” me and it wouldn’t work.

At this point you can run through the installation process.

So where were we, yes installing.  When you get to the “Select Components” screen make sure that “ISAPI MapAgent” is selected.  By default is not installed.  Don’t be alarmed on the next screen when the installer tells you it will not create the virtual directory.  Like with Vista, the installer is not capable of dealing with IIS7.  That’s no problem as configuring Mapguide 6.5 on IIS7+ is pretty simple and we’ll go over that in a minute.  You may need to reboot once the installation is complete but after that the “Autodesk Mapguide® Server 6.5” service should be up and running.   Start / Run / services.msc will bring up the services.

IIS 7 Configuration

You’ll need IIS 7 installed with support for ISAPIs.  If you do not have this installed, Google can probably help you out.  Next start the IIS manager (start / run / inetmgr) .  First let’s create a new application pool.  Expand the server and choose “Application Pools”.   Right click and choose “Add Application Pool”.   Name the app pool (Mapguide6.5 might be a good name).  Set the pipeline mode to classic.   If you’re on a 64 bit version of Windows you must set the app pool to 32bit mode as Mapguide 6.5 is a 32bit app.  Right click on the newly created application pool and choose “Advanced Settings”.  Set “Enable 32-Bit Applications” to true.  This setting will only be available on 64 bit systems.  If you don’t see it – you probably don’t need to worry about it.

Now expand Sites and choose the web site you want to create the application (formerly called virtual directory) in.  Right click the site and choose “Add Application”.  Name the application Mapguide6.5.  For the physical path browse to C:\Program Files\Autodesk\MapGuideServer6.5\MapAgents (or Program Files (x86) on x64 systems).  Select our newly created application pool.

Finally we need to enable the ISAPI agent.  One last round of dirty trickery and we’ll have Mapguide 6 running.  In windows explorer browse to C:\Program Files\Autodesk\MapGuideServer6.5\MapAgents\ and make a copy of MapAgent_isapi.isa.  Name it MapAgent_isapi.dll.   In the inetmgr tree select the virtual directory and double click Handler Mappings.   Next we’re going to “Add Module Mapping”.  Set the request path to be MapAgent_Isapi.isa.  For module choose “IsapiModule”.   For executable browse to the newly copied MapAgent_Isapi.dll.  Set the name to Mapguide 6.5.  Click on the Request Restrictions button and choose the Access tab.  Click the Execute radio button.

**Update – thanks to Krzysztof Skwarek for pointing out that you can choose “Script” here instead of “Execute”.

You will be prompted to “allow this ISAPI” extension.  Click Yes.

The Test

At this point you should be done!  You can fire up a browser and test the isapi using the following url (assuming you used my default virtual directory name):

http://localhost/mapguide6.5/mapagent_isapi.isa?item=test

If you get the following results you should be good to go!

I considered posting the modified installer but I’m not sure if that would have been poking “the sleeping dragon”.  As much as I would like to help – I don’t need any nasty letters from the Autodesk legal team =).  If this is something you need done but you’re not comfortable editing installers or delving into the guts of IIS7,  feel free to contact me.   We might be able to come to some sort of arrangement. =)

Have a feature request for this app or a comment?   We’d love to hear it.  Comment here or contact Arne via ChasmTech.

There are a couple of problems with Visual Lisp right now though.  One of my biggest complaints about the VLIDE is the default colors.  The high contrast white background is an eye killer.   The IDE is configurable though and we’re given full a 16 bit color palette – with which I was able to configure a color scheme that was more to my liking.   If you start Visual Lisp, go to the Tools menu and choose Window Attributes you are presented with the dialog that should let you configure your colors.   Before opening this configuration dialog select a code window in Visual Lisp to modify. Set the properties accordingly. If you are happy with the colors when you press Ok on the dialog you will be prompted to “Use current as EDITOR prototype?”. Clicking yes here will update you editor prototype, resulting in future windows using these defaults.

One key limitation here is that on x64 editions of AutoCAD this dialog is broken.  You may also see the following error when you attempt to close the dialog:

; warning: unwind skipped on exception
; error: Exception occurred: 0xC0000094

**Update May 11th 2012 – This appears to have been fixed in AutoCAD 2013 x64.  Hurray!

It seems that Autodesk has let this code go to some extent. I’ve seen a number of forum posts of  people mentioning the unwind error.  This is a shame and partly why I’m writing this post!  First off – if you have an x86 release of AutoCAD you are in luck.  You can configure your IDE no problem using the UI.  For you x64 users, all is not lost.  Lucky for us Visual Lisp saves all this configuration information to a text file named VLIDE.dsk.  On my Vista x64 machine its found in the following locations:

AutoCAD 2006 – C:\Users\dmaidlow\AppData\Roaming\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2006\R16.2\enu

AutoCAD 2009 – C:\Users\dmaidlow\AppData\Roaming\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2009\R17.2\enu

AutoCAD 2010 – C:\Users\dmaidlow\AppData\Roaming\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2010\R18.0\enu

AutoCAD 2011 – C:\Users\dmaidlow\AppData\Roaming\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2011\R18.1\enu

AutoCAD 2012 – C:\Users\dmaidlow\AppData\Roaming\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2012 – English\R18.2\enu

These paths should be the same or similar on Windows 7.

If you open up this file you’ll see a large list of dotted pair lists full of settings.  The one I’m most interested in here is the *editor-sample-window property.  This is the “default” configuration to use when opening a lisp file.

   1: (*editor-sample-window* (:AUTOLISP :FGC 16777215 :BGC 0 :LXC T :CLV #40(nil nil 16711935 nil nil nil 16776960 nil 32768 nil 32768 nil 8421376 nil 8388736 12632256 8388736 12632256 8388736 12632256 255 nil 128 nil 8388608 nil 128 nil 12632256 nil 16777215 0 16777215 16750899 16777215 255 nil 8388608 nil 16776960) :TW 4 :LM 10))

Two values of importance are FGC (foreground color) and BGC (background color).  I was having a hard time finding a color wheel that did integer based color codes – but you can convert your favorite hex color codes to decimal (helpful hex to decimal converter here).  The next bit is a little ugly.  Within the :CLV property we have a list.  This list is basically a list of 16 bit integers containing a color code of the foreground and background color of each window property.  If the color is set to nil – it is transparent.  This list appears to be in the order in which the properties are displayed within the UI:

• :LEX-SPACE
• :LEX-STR
• :LEX-SYM
• :LEX-NUM
• :LEX-INT
• :LEX-REAL
• :LEX-COMM
• :LEX-COMM1
• :LEX-COMM2
• :LEX-PAREN
• :LEX-SPEC
• :LEX-SPEC1
• :LEX-UNKN
• :WINDOW-TEXT
• :WINDOW-SELECTION
• :ERROR-HIGHLIGHT
• :INPUT-ZONE
• :CONSOLE-MESSAGE

TW and LM contain the tab width and left margin respectively.  So go wild editing these values and configure your new IDE!  Keep in mind when editing the Visual Lisp settings using the UI, the vlide.dsk file is not saved  until AutoCAD is shutdown cleanly.  If AutoCAD crashes, you will lose your configuration.  If you would like to try out my IDE settings – I’ve attached a zip file containing  a copy of my .DSK file.  I also recommend you make a backup of the .dsk file before you start tinkering.

Now, if only I could figure out some way to build a vlx file from the command line so as to integrate it into my automated build system..

Update!

For those of you who don’t read the comments – Dennis Hill was cool enough to share his digging into the DSK file and also his IDE colors which I’ve been running for a week or so now.  Take a minute to read the comments and check out his color scheme.  Thanks Dennis!

The other thing I have to add is ReSharper 6.0.  Every .NET developer should have this incredible toolset.   It really does enhance the Visual Studio IDE.  The javascript/ajax support is great with some syntax highlighting, the .NET refactoring and code generation tools are huge productivity enhancements once you get them figured out.   I couldn’t live without the navigation and  on-the-fly code analysis tools.  The built-in de-compiler can be incredibly handy too, and ties right in with the navigation tools.

If you are into Mapguide dev, I strongly encourage you to check out Jackie’s post – and become a regular reader of his blog.

It’s been an insane month.  Just wanted to take a moment to let my friends, colleagues and my loyal readers know that my wife popped out our first child the other day.  July 12th at 2:10 am Ms. Georgia Laine Pawliuk-Maidlow was born and let me tell you she is full of awesome!  Both Mom and Babby are doing great.  Both Mom and Dad are both pretty tired  =)  Here is a picture for your viewing enjoyment =P

well done!

Transferring US Dollar Funds out of PayPal.

Finally, he informed me that given the age of my PC we needed to “register my license with Microsoft to receive ongoing security assistance from Microsoft Certified Technicians”.   He told me that “Microsoft provides two kinds of secure warranty.  hardware and software! “ I needed to reactivate this protection…For the low low price of 109$ / year or 388 for 4 years I could get my computer protected from junk files, virii, trojans, and terrorists.

Next step was a LogmeInRescue session.  At this time, I told my helpful friend Karesh that my PC had blue screened!  Oh no!  This bought me a little time to fire up a test virtual machine and Camtasia .  Turns out now a Mr. Kevin Andersen would be helping me, with a trial LogMeIn account    I wonder if they noticed that my Windows Vista had now all of a sudden become Windows XP?  hmmm doesn’t look like it.

This is where it got a little scary.  Well not scary for you or I, but for your grandmother or other computer illiterate person.   They started digging trough Windows for negative looking things.  First they started the Windows certificate store and they highlight a number of revoked by Microsoft.  They were even so kind as to highlight these problems!

At this point they brought me to the Quick Resolve website (quickresolve.net) where they were ready to help me enter all my information to pay the fee.  At this point, I asked to get four years of coverage.  Karesh became quite excited!  First I needed to see the “Junk Files” on my PC.  Mr. Kevin Andersen started the “Junk Files Viewer” (which you may know as the event viewer).  He applied some tricky filters and then BAM.  Errors and warnings.  Now your grandmother is probably scrambling to find her credit card…

I let Karesh talk for a bit more, ready to stop my VM – finally I had another “Blue Screen” and hung up.  Oops ,look I restored a snapshot…  Unfortunately the joke is on me..they’ve been calling back over and over and over.  <sigh>

At first, I went along for the ride because I figured it might be fun.  Soon I started to realize that this will be very  convincing to a lot of people, and I started to think that maybe I should write this up in hopes of letting the geeky masses know.  So please let the people in your lives who could benefit by knowing about this type of scam know that no one will ever call you at home out of the blue to help you remove junk files…

Here is the video of the LogMeIn session:

A new breed of scam?

In this post, I’m working on a problem that is pertaining to a 64 bit version of AutoCAD loading a COM enabled .NET assembly – however this information should apply to any x64 executable calling any x64 COM assembly.   Replace AutoCAD with <YourApp.exe> and you should be good to go =)

The first thing I did was to ensure each of the projects had been set to build for  “ANY CPU”.   This got the ball of fun rolling.   We have a VLX which instantiates the COM class using vlax-get-or-create-object.  When called this would constantly return nil.   Of course this all works just peachy when running an x86 build of AutoCAD.   At this point my breakpoints would appear in Visual Studio as disabled and would happily inform me that “The breakpoint will not currently be hit”.

This usually results when the incorrect DLL is being loaded, or when the PDB file is missing.   Once Visual Studio is running in debug mode you can bring up the Modules window from the Debug/Windows/Modules menu.  This should show you all the assemblies involved in the current session as well a bunch of other information including their paths.  The assembly in question was not listed here – so at this point I’m assuming that Windows cannot find the dll.

Junk in the Registry

I am now thinking that I have orphaned and duplicated types and CLSIDs in the registry, likely pointing to other builds of the dlls.   If the GUIDs for the classes or types changed you end up with a lot of junk in the registry.   I don’t trust those registry “cleaner” apps and in the interest of keeping my OS working – I chose to manually search out and nuke all the registry references manually.  This can be done by searching both for your assembly’s type name, and COM exposed class names in regedit.  A lot of this was done in the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT root.  After all of that the problem still exists..

Wow6432Node Registry Keys

Registry keys were a two part problem. After dealing with the junk in the registry, I found I also had to deal with the x86 registry redirection.   DraftLogic has been until this point limited to x86 architecture as a result of  the VB6 code not being x64 friendly.   As a result of this, all of the needed keys had been placed in the WOW6432Node of the appropriate software registry sections.   This was the easiest wall to find and hop over.  Unfortunately, this also didn’t solve the problem.

Improperly Registered Assemblies-thanks for nothingVisual Studio

So the next and fortunately final problem turns out that Visual Studio 2005/2008 (unsure about 2010) does not properly register assemblies.  Turns out the last piece of the solution is pretty simple – couple changes to the project.  What’s happening is that Visual Studio is running the x86 build of regasm.exe to register the assemblies on run, probably because Visual Studio is an x86 app itself.  This results in all kinds of x64 hating… To solve this we have to change two things in the COM enabled projects.

First though, I created a new build configuration called x64 so these changes would not affect in my ANY CPU configuration – which will be used to build my shipping assemblies.  It is also important to note that this problem is MOSTLY only a problem when running code from the IDE.  Assemblies installed and registered using an installer should not have this problem if the installer takes into consideration the “bitness” of AutoCAD (or any application calling your COM enabled dll).  ie.  Installshield asks the user on install what “bitness” of AutoCAD they are using, and the assemblies are registered as needed.  It may also be possible to register an assembly using both the 32 and 64 bit versions of regasm – but I have not tried this.

So with the new x64 configuration created I edited the properties of each COM enabled project  I unchecked “Register for COM interop” and added a post-build event command line of:

%Windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\regasm $(TargetPath) /register /codebase /tlb

This would ensure that my COM enabled assemblies were properly registered for use by 64 bit  applications.

After all that, my breakpoints were finally hit, and I could actually start working out the x64 specific bugs. Too bad we couldn’t have moved this to ObjectARX.NET instead – then this would have been a non-issue =)  In retrospect, each of these problems were a contributing factor and each needed to be resolved. 

Hopefully if you are facing a similar issue this post helps you get over at least a couple of the walls!

The timing is perfect.  We’ve got a growing need to better understand how some of our code is interacting with some vendor provided 3rd party libraries and this is making a huge difference.   In true ReSharper form – this new functionality looks solid, and easy to use.  The ReSharper navigation tools we’ve all grown love (well maybe not just love, but also  to depend on) are available.   I’m not going to miss trying to navigate code only to be greeted with an Object Browser window. ..

Looks like a standalone decompiler/browser is also coming too…

And by saying “free”, we actually mean “free”.

Love it!  Keep up the great works JetBrains – looking forward to the release!

1 text message is capped at 140 characters (140 Byte) – Cost per text ~0.25$

Cost per byte (in dollars) of text message: (0.25/140) == 0.0017857142857142857142857142857143

Now some math around internet usage and UBB -assuming one of the proposed usage based billing rates of 1$/GB

1GB = 1,073,741,824bytes

Cost per byte (in dollars) at 1$/GB  = 0.000000000931322574615478515625

UBB cost for the equivalent of one text message= 140 x (1/1,073,741,824) = 0.0000001303851604461669921875

So I guess we should be thankful that the proposed UBB rates were lower than text message rates, 13695 times lower – (thanks for the maths there Arne])

One thing that I decided would help me would be to create a pre-printed notepad so I was not having to constantly print out new pages to write on.  I decided to build out a nice little Microsoft Word “template” that could be printed off en-mass in using SmartInk.  And well, sharing is caring.  So here it is!

Creating this template was pretty simple.  I fired up word and started a new blank.  I added a stock header and footer.  Slapped in the SmartInk logo and typed in a title.  Added a footer and that was it.  All you SmartInk users may to download this template and modify it to have your own corporate logo or company name – feel free to do so.  You could even go so far as to hire a designer or work with your corporate marketing department to build you out a custom design.   If your organization has an existing corporate letterhead template you can simply load this up in word and print off a blank page using the SmartInk print driver.

Last step is to bind the pages.  You can go as simply or as crazy as you like!  The easiest option here would be to use a 3 ring binder and simply use the standard hole punch.  Optionally you could also invest in a coil binding machine or some binding glue (rubber cement).  More details on DIY notepads here.  One last thing to look into, though this might be the most expensive would be to have a printing company bind the pages for you.  You could get some seriously cool notepads done with this method – hard cover, embossed corporate logos, etc.  Just remember though that the printing needs to be done on using the SmartInk printing driver.

I’ve attached a zip file to this post that contains a Microsoft Word docx file that can simply be printed out using the SmartInk printer driver.

If you have any suggestions on how to make this template better I’d love to hear from you.  Please comment here, or head over to the ChasmTech support forum and post a topic there  It’s funny – I’ve been using Microsoft word forever – at least since Office 95 – but I’ve barely scratched the surface of its functionality =)

Attempting managed execution inside OS Loader lock. Do not attempt to run managed code inside a DllMain or image initialization function since doing so can cause the application to hang.

This error would occur 95% of the time and pretty much took out AutoCAD each time it happened.  Fortunately this can be disabled pretty easily within Visual Studio (I’ve tried both VS 2008 and VS 2010).   In Visual Studio bring up the exceptions dialog from the Debug / Exceptions menu (or via the keyboard shortcut Cntrl D+E). 

Expand the “Managed Debugging Exceptions” section and uncheck “LoaderLock” in the “Thrown” column.  Next time you start AutoCAD from Visual Studio and load Visual Lisp you should no longer get this exception and you should be merrily debugging away.

   1: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Autodesk\AutoCAD\R18.1\ACAD-9002-409\InfoCenter\InfoCenterOn 

You may see a different version (R18.1) or product id (ACAD-9002-409)  depending on which AutoCAD flavor you have installed.  Tweak that key and you should be good to go!

Keep pushing the CRTC to stop the meter on Internet use. If 400,000 could turn their heads, then 1,000,000 ought to bowl them over.

So please spread the word and sign the petition.

   1: (if (== (db_checktrouble) 1)

   2:     (princ "db_Checktrouble returned correct value")

   3:     (alert "db_checktrouble returned wrong value")

   4: )

Writing lisp based unit tests for ObjectARX code written in C# and its all melting together into one….Could this be a new Super Language…..nah…..

Contact me with any questions you may have!

I needed to install AutoCAD Map 3D 2011  to debug some ObjectARX code I’ve been working on so I downloaded the 32 bit installer and fired it up only to be informed that my platform was unsupported and I would need to install the 64 bit version.  grrrr.

Google had very little to say on the topic.  More junk about hacking MSI files with Orca.  I took a look at setup.ini and there were far too many references to x64 – I don’t have time for this…Finally I came across the Longbow Software Converter.  The product claims to modify your setups to allow the 32 bit installers to work on x64 operating systems, 40$.  I couldn’t find any reviews or testimonials so I figured I’d give it a shot…

So here is your first testimonial Longbow Software =)

This actually worked great.  Bought the convert, installed it to a virtual machine.   The interface is dead simple – paste or browse to the location of the AutoCAD installation files and press Convert.  Keep in mind if you’re running from a DVD you’ll need to copy the contents of the DVD to your PC or a network share so the files can be edited.  I pointed the converter to an install on a network share.  It chugged away for about a minute (keeping in mind this was on an underpowered VM).  Within a matter of minutes I had AutoCAD Map 3D 2011 installing on my Vista x64 box with no problems.  Ran AutoCAD and it seems to fire up no problem. 

Bear in mind – for AutoCAD to work with anything Oracle – you need to have the 32 bit Oracle client running on your machine.

40$ well spent IMO.

This about sums up my experience with Netflix Canada…Too bad too, if we had the same selection as what is available in the US I would have been all over it…

"ERROR: Unable to update the dependencies of the project. The dependencies for the object ‘NHibernate.Validator.DLL’ cannot be determined."

One of my three Visual Studio 2010 installer projects started failing during the automated build process with this error on a dozen included assemblies.  When the project was built using the Visual Studio IDE the installer would build just fine.  With a little bit of digging and a great deal of screwing around, I found a Microsoft KB article and hotfix for this problem.

After installing the patch – my automated build system is happily compiling the installation project.

I worked on QA projects for Autodesk on AutoCAD Map 2, 2000 and 2000i yet they still made me take the silly tests to get  “certified” =).  Do you have some old tyme Autodesk certs?  Feel free to share a link in the comments.  Were you in one of the AutoCAD Map or Mapguide courses I taught way back in the day?  If so leave a comment to say hi =)

With 2010 and the Ajax viewer we had to get the selection from the MapFrame using the GetSelectionXML() method.  Then we had to encode, and send this value up to the web tier for processing.  I had all kinds of business logic that I was hoping to re-use with a minimal amount of modifications so I was trying to find how to recreate this functionality with Fusion.  I figured out how the selections worked on the client side using the new callback system and was getting the selection object – but I could not find anything definitively saying “There is no selection XML on the client side anymore”.    So…

There is no selection XML on the client side any more when using Fusion.

There I said it.  It makes sense too – first getting this large XML string and sending it up was a pain in the ass.  Encoding it, creating a form to submit it, etc.   I should have clued into this sooner – Fusion is updating the selection on the server side as needed. 

So in order to minimally impact the existing code – I added an additional check to some of the calls that looks a little something like this:

   1: if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(selectionXml))

   2: {

   3:     MgResourceService resSvc = (MgResourceService)siteConn.CreateService(MgServiceType.ResourceService);

   4:     sel.Open(resSvc, map.GetName());

   5:     selectionXml = sel.ToXml();

   6: }

Those four lines of code are a lot easier than all the screwing around needed in 2010 to get the selection XML.   With that small modification my existing code is working perfectly!

hope this helps someone =)

First, download the actual non-aplha release of LINQ to XSD and extract it.  You will need to have .NET 3.5 installed to run LINQ to XSD.  The project itself is a Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4.0 project.  You should be able to change it to .NET 3.5 with no problems.  I’m not sure about using .NET 2.0.   I still assume these steps should work with Mapguide Open Source 2.2 given its pretty much the same thing as MGE 2011.  Please let me know if you try it and that is not the case.

Building the classes

Last time around we had to mess around with Visual Studio projects, building temporary code, finding and extracting that code from temporary files.  This time around, we’re given a nice little executable that can be run in a batch file.   I’ve posted a copy of my batch file below but it was simply made using a dir /b > CreateMapguideNetObjects.cmd in the Mapguide server schema folder (which by default is to c:\Program Files\Autodesk\MapGuideEnterprise2011\Server\Schema) .  I then edited that file with a text editor that support macros and removed the following schema files:

• FdoProviderCapabilities-1.0.0.xsd
• LoadProcedure-1.0.0.xsd
• LoadProcedure-1.1.0.xsd
• LayerDefinition-1.0.0.xsd
• LayerDefinition-1.1.0.xsd
• LayerDefinition-1.2.0.xsd
• SiteInformation-1.0.0.xsd
• SiteVersion-1.0.0.xsd
• SymbolDefinition-1.0.0.xsd
• WebLayout-1.0.0.xsd

These files are deprecated object definitions from previous Mapguide releases.  In the end each line in the batch file looks a little like this:

LinqToXsd ApplicationDefinition-1.0.0.xsd /filename:ApplicationDefinition.cs

Executing the batch file will create a number of C# files containing appropriately named classes.

Setting up your project

At this point you should be able to fire up Visual Studio and create a new C# project.   If you have an existing project from a previous version of Mapguide its good to start fresh.  Also, don’t try this in an existing solution that is dependant on the project that contains the Mapguide objects.  This will just result in a bunch of extra screwing around to avoid compiler errors from missing code during the process.    This time around its a lot easier.  Create a new DLL project.  Add a reference to the Xml.Schema.Linq.dll file that was included with LinqToXsd.exe.   Add a reference to the following Mapguide dlls:

• OSGeo.Mapguide.Foundation
• OSGeo.Mapguide.Geometry
• OSGeo.Mapguide.MapguideCommon
• OSGeo.Mapguide.PlatformBase
• OSGeo.Mapguide.Web

You’ll also need to ensure that the appropriate unmanaged assemblies are available in the calling applications bin folder when you go to run this stuff. 

Next place all of the generated C# files in the new project.  Once you build you’re going to see a ton of errors.  We’ll clean those up.

To resolve a lot of these errors I did a global search and replace on “global::” and replaced it with nothing.  Also, I wrapped each class in a unique wrapper classes to prevent duplicate type errors.  Finally, the case issue with DataType was still an issue – and I resolved it by changing the case on DataType to be Datatype:

   1: public string DataType {

   2: public string Datatype {

For a complete view of the changes I made do a file compare between the code in the attached zip file and your newly generated code.

<insert 3 week gap here, wherein I had a hell of a time getting MGE 2011 installed and properly licensed so that I could actually test this newly created code, oh and I also went on vacation for a few days too =)/>

And back.  The best part about this is that it seems ALL my old RADE code just worked with upgraded basic layouts after changing it to look for the object definitions within the new wrapper classes.   Now I just need to add support for flexible layouts and we’ll be laughing.

The Code

Please note – I didn’t rebase the code.  It’s all in the RADE.MGE namespace.  If you would like to use it, feel free to re-base it – or just leave it as is.  Also, if you create any unit tests or enhancements and would like to share them – please feel free!  

As I update the project myself, or receive updates I will update this file.

. 

Finally, the example code I posted long ago will still work with this new project.  Perhaps one day, I’ll post some fancy new code in C# =)

Hope this comes in handy, I welcome your comments.

   1: Line: 2

   2: Char: 2498

   3: Error: 'OpenLayers.Lang' is null or not an object

   4: Code: 0

Loading the web tier on the Mapguide server worked fine.  Very odd.  I ended up doing a file comparison between the two web tiers and noticed the only significant difference was this in the web.config:

   1: <staticContent>

   2:     <mimeMap fileExtension=".json" mimeType="application/json" />

   3: </staticContent>

Adding this tag to IIS 7 on Vista resulted in an error, the tag must be something new in IIS 7.5.  However, after manually adding the mime type mapping to the server – my flexible layout now loads perfectly on the local Vista web tier.

This mime type mapping can be added on either the virtual directory, or the server level.  I chos to add it to the server.  Either way, to add it select the appropriate level in IIS manager.  In the right hand window double click “Mime Types”.  Click Add and you can enter the .json extension and the mime type.  Once this is added, Vista/IIS7 was now properly serving out flexible layers

Came across this blog post today detailing an awesome honey pot project by a UK ISP.  They’re turning the tides on phone spammers.   There are some hilarious mp3’s on the site where you can hear the “conversation” between the honey pot and one of the “moron” phone spammers.  They’re keeping some of these calls on the line for 4+ minutes.  Totally awesome.

I hope someone can take initiative and setup something similar in North America.  If I had the resources I would take this on in a heartbeat…

Hats off to you guys.. =)

Came across Automapper.   This is a perfect match for my needs:

AutoMapper uses a fluent configuration API to define an object-object mapping strategy.   AutoMapper uses a convention-based matching algorithm to match up source to destination values. Currently, AutoMapper is geared towards model projection scenarios to flatten complex object models to DTOs and other simple objects, whose design is better suited for serialization, communication, messaging, or simply an anti-corruption layer between the domain and application layer.

It was quick to setup, and painless to use.  First define your object to object mappings:

   1: Mapper.CreateMap<RADE.BO.Domain.Application, RADE.BO.Entity.Application>();

   1: /// <summary>

   2: /// Convert a DTOApplication to abnd 

   3: /// </summary>

   4: /// <param name="app"></param>

   5: /// <returns></returns>

   6: public static RADE.BO.Domain.Application Convert(Application app)

   7: {

   8:   if (app == null) return null;

   9:   LoadDtoMappings();

  10:   return AutoMapper.Mapper.Map<Application, RADE.BO.Domain.Application>(app);

  11: }

  12:  

  13: /// <summary>

  14: /// Convert a list of domain Application objects to DTO Application objects

  15: /// </summary>

  16: /// <param name="apps">List of domain Application objects</param>

  17: /// <returns>List of DTO Application objects</returns>

  18: public static List<Application> Convert(List<RADE.BO.Domain.Application> apps)

  19: {

  20:     LoadDtoMappings();

  21:     return apps.Select(AutoMapper.Mapper.Map<RADE.BO.Domain.Application, Application>).ToList();

  22: }

It’s important to note that if your source object contains nested objects – a mapping for each nested object must also be defined.  This goes on recursively through nested objects.  My domain Application object contains some numerous sub objects – Map, Layer etc.  In this case rather than establish mappings for these child objects – I removed these objects from my DTO as the client consuming these objects would never need that data.  This also keeps the size of any data possibly being serialized down.   Automapper dealt with this automatically.

I’ve only scratched the surface of what Automapper can do.  Next step is to define unit test coverage using the configuration validation, but it’s sleep time now… =)

   1: "<a href=”{0}” target=”_blank”>{0}</a>"

This format string of course when applied to the source data would result in a hyperlink being created with the URL in both the href property of the link as well as the  visible link text.  Lance called and asked if it would be possible to change the report so that it showed simply the word “View” instead of the url.  We already had a remote control session running so I opened up his RADE and changed the format string to:

   1: "<a href=”{0}” target=”_blank”>View</a>"

He saw this small change and I heard him slap his forehead, and he asked “Why didn’t you tell me this sooner, I’ve wanted to do this forever!”.  To this I responded “You never asked…”

So the moral of this story is directed to managers, sales types, or any other person who works with software developers.   We’re incredibly smart, and there is far too much good stuff inside our heads for us to just “tell you everything”.  If we were to try, you would either fall asleep or your head would pop.   So please, rather than expect us to tell you what you want to know – just ask. =)

Other honorable mentions include:

• Hand Grenades
• Molotov Cocktails
• Nitroglycerin (this is OK when in medication format)

If you’re planning some air travel in the near future – leave your catapult at home!  Maple Syrup and spread is completely OK though!

After much mucking around the best solution I could find was to disconnect the iPhone from the usb cable, start the windows Device Manager and un-install the Apple iPhone driver from the Portable Devices section of the devices.  Make sure you check the delete driver checkbox.  Finally, re-connect your iPhone and the driver should re-install allowing you to see your device in Windows Explorer again.

No images on device

So now I can see my phone in Vista – but when I browse to the device the internal storage folders are empty.  There are tons of images in the “Camera Roll” when looking at the phone.  After much more muckery – I found one image that was saved from the interwebs rather than taken with the phones’ camera.  Once I deleted this image, and reconnected the phone all the images showed up no problem.

I’ve upgraded the solution to 2010.  I’ve done all the refactoring and finished my work.  Everything tests out great in both unit tests and “developers computer” tests.  Just need to get the installer updated and get the pesky “other peoples computers” thing out of the way. 

I’ve updated the pre-requisites on my installer to include .NET 4.0 – rebuilt the installer and boom. 

Error 1001.  Exception occurred while initializing the installation.  System.BadImageFormatException: Could not load file or assembly ‘file:///C:\Program Files\Landor\ … \RADE.Connect.Service.exe’ or one of its dependencies.  This assembly is built by a runtime newer than the currently loaded runtime and cannot be loaded.

After much mucking around I found the hidden property that I needed to change.  I needed to change the .NET version of the .NET Launch Condition.  To find this gem right click on the deployment project in the solution explorer and choose View\Launch Conditions.  Next right click on the “.NET Framework” under “Launch Conditions” and choose “properties”.  In the properties dialog change the Version to be “.NET Framework 4”.

Update 4/20/2010

Don’t forget to edit the .NET version for both Release and Debug configurations.

http://msdn.microsoft.com

wooo!

In the meantime, The Register has a good write up on some of the new goodies coming in an hour or so.  That will learn me for getting up early.  Oh well, time for another cap!

System.InvalidCastException: Unable to cast object of type ‘Oracle.DataAccess.Client.OracleConnection’ to type ‘System.Data.Common.DbConnection’

This was one of those awesome “doesn’t happen on any of my machine” errors.  After some mucking around we determined that the client machine was using the Oracle 10g  R1 client.  The machines and VMs here we used for testing were all running either 11g, or 10g R2.  Doh!

The simple resolution to this was to modify the NHhibernate config and add the following property:

   1: <property name="hbm2ddl.keywords">none</property>

Depending on your underlying databases and mappings this could cause problems with your code project.  Hopefully you’re not using reserved words, or bad Oracle syntax =).

Under the hood, the problem seems to be that the Oracle10gDialect does not provide an implementation of IDataBaseSchema for 10gR1.   Fabio Maulo has provided some sample code and the steps on how to create the appropriate metadata for your database and submit it to the NHibernate project for inclusion.

The NUnit test engine is great.   I didn’t realize this was a ReSharper tool at first.  Now, I can’t live without it.

The localization plugin is going to save me days of effort on an upcoming action item. 

The class/code generating tools are indispensible – especially if you create a lot of classes (e.g NHibernate POCO’s).

The refactorings have been helping me slowly increase the legibility of my code – and also helping me build better coding habits.  Check out the comparison between version 5.0 and 4.5.

If you’ve never tried ReSharper – now is the time.  only I could make the time to properly learn all the different tools available…

NH used to assume Castle – but now it needs to be configured.  In addition to the Castly proxy, there is a new LinFu proxy available too.   Don’t bother with NHibernate the release notes! , Davy Brion has it all for you here =). 

I opted to go with the Castly Dynamic Proxy – I’m not in a position to do any performance tests between– Castle has been around a long time and has a pretty big user base.  Good post on stackoverflow on this subject.  However, LinFu would have won if I was basing my choice on name alone…

After a bit of fiddling, I’m back up and running with NH 2.1 and shiny new validation attributes.   

mmmm validation…

RADE and FullCircle and builds usually have the ODP.NET version in the web.confg set by the installer, but development builds usually come from my machine and are configured for use with the Oracle 11 ODP.NET.   If this is set incorrectly, you will get an error that looks a little something like this:

The IDbCommand and IDbConnection implementation in the assembly Oracle.DataAccess could not be found. Ensure that the assembly Oracle.DataAccess is located in the application directory or in the Global Assembly Cache. If the assembly is in the GAC, use <qualifyAssembly/> element in the application configuration file to specify the full name of the assembly.

To use an different version of the Oracle client, the web.config must be edited and the QualifyAssembly section must have its version property set appropriately.  This will also apply for an app.config too.

   1: <runtime>

   2:     <assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">

   3:         <qualifyAssembly partialName="Oracle.DataAccess" fullName="Oracle.DataAccess, Version=2.102.2.20, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89b483f429c47342"/>

   4:     </assemblyBinding>

   5: </runtime>

Possible values for this are:

• 11g: Version=2.102.2.20
• 10g R2: Version=1.102.3.0
• 10g: Version=10.2.0.100

Set your config appropriately and you’re good to go.

Thank you Google…

After installing Mapguide 2010 (both server and web tier) on a server running 2009 and updating the license manager appropriately, you’ll notice that the service is not running.  Attempts to start the service will result in an error message logged in the Windows Application Log that looks a little bit like this:

The description for Event ID ( 0 ) in Source ( MapGuide Enterprise 2010 Server ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: Port 2801 is not available, please try using a different port.

So we need to setup one of the Mapguide installations to use a different set of ports.  I’ve chosen to modify the behavior of Mapguide 2010, though these changes could be made for Mapguide 2009 instead.   For this process we’ll need three free ports.  For simplicity its nice to keep these ports sequential.  You will need to ensure that the ports you choose are available on your system.

First we need to edit the serverconfig.ini in the C:\Program Files\Autodesk\MapGuideEnterprise2010\Server\Bin folder.   First lets change the Port in the AdministrativeConnectionProperties section from 2800 to lets say 3800.   Next in the ClientConnectionProperties section change the port to 3801.  Finally change the port in SiteConnectionProperties to 3802.

Next we need to edit the webconfig.ini in the C:\Program Files\Autodesk\MapGuideEnterprise2010\WebServerExtensions folder.  We need to update the port numbers in this config to match the numbers in the server config.  Remember the web config is the client that will usually be consuming the server service.  Finally, as the configuration settings for the web tier may be cached you should restart IIS using iisreset.exe.  This will clear the cached port configurations and Mapguide Studio / Mapguide Administration will now work properly.

Once that is done, the 2009 repository can be migrated to 2010 by following the steps included in the Help/MGE2010UpgradingWindows.htm file on your installation disc/folder.

PHP Problems

Once MGE 2010 has been installed I had a problem with PHP.  Multiple PHPs can be bad news.  I’ve found that running both MGE 2009 and 2010 using the PHP provided with 2010 seems to do the trick.  First you will need to edit the Windows system path.  Update the path variable there to point to the 2010 PHP installation.  If a 2010 path variable exists already – remove the 2009 path.  Next open the IIS manager and ensure that both the MGE 2009 and MGE 2010 virtual directory trees are pointing to the MGE 2010 php extension in the Application Extension Mappings.

Once these changes have been made, do a quick IISreset and you should now be able to login to both the Mapguide admins, as well as have Mapguide Studio connect to the appropriate servers.  Again – this setup could have issues – so consider your environment and needs before configuring a server with both releases of Mapguide.

Remote Web Tiers

If you need to run a shared Mapguide server with web tiers installed on individual development machines don’t forget to set the ports on each development machine.   The Mapguide installer will prompt for the Mapguide server IP address – but the webconfig.ini will need to be updated with the appropriate ports manually.  Not doing do will result in your web tier talking to the 2009 server – and much confusion =)

Finally one note on IP addressees and remote web tiers.  If you plan to use a remote web tier – make sure your Mapguide server is setup using the actual IP address of the server and not 127.0.0.1.  If your Mapguide server is configured with 127.0.0.1, you will get a “Cannot establish connection.” error on the remote web tiers when attempting to create and use a session.  Using real IP addresses (either internal or external) will prevent this error from occurring.

I was getting some strange IO errors in SQL Server.   dbcc checkdb was telling me “OMG this is bad”, Checkdsk on the drive was saying things like “Windows cannot complete the scan”.  I wandered off to get some more coffee thinking this was going to be a fun night.  When I got back I saw a console message sent from a Rackspace support technician asking me if there was anything he could do to help.  I sent him back my phone number and asked him to give me a call.

After a bit of conversation on the server we agreed they would strip out the guts of the server and replace all the drives, controllers, and motherboard.  I went to bed, and the server was back up and ready for me the next morning.  So, 10:30pm Friday night, Rackspace support is proactively finding my problems and tracking me down.   I now understand what they mean when they call their support “fanatical”…

<3 Rackspace.

And I’m sure you’re sitting there thinking “can’t he find something better to do on a Friday night?”, well you now know the answer to that question…

The problem is this.   x64 Applications cannot use the x86 driver.  In my previous attempts to get basic Oracle/ODP connectivity on my x64 Vista machine I ended up running the 11g x86 Oracle client.  Today I was back to the Oracle download site – and lookie lookie.  They’ve released an Oracle Server 2008 x64 client!  2008 is basically Vista so, maybe, just maybe – I thought Oracle will give us some x64 love.  Here are some steps that will help you get running:

First thing is first.  Backup your TNSnames.ora.  Its found in the network\admin folder. 

Next I un-installed the x86 11.1.0.6 client.   Delete the leftovers with windows explorer.

Next download both the 11.1.0.7 client for both x86 and x64 (yes, we need to run with both…)

First I installed the x64 client.  I like to do full runtime installations. 

Next, I copy my backed up tnsnames.ora into the network\admin folder.

Now fire up Map 2010 x64 – connect to Oracle server – Success!  Happy Happy Days.  Unfortunately, fire up Toad for Oracle (which is still 32 bit) and it fails with an error of “Cannot find OCI.DLL”.  Doh.

So, I go ahead and install the Oracle 11.1.0.7  x86 client.  I install it to the client_2 folder.  Then copy my tnsnames backup into the network\admin folder in the client_2 folder.  Restart Toad, and success!

Now I want to check one last thing.  Last time I was dealing with this fun issue – I had to set my development projects to only run in x86 mode.  So, I fire up my FullCircle development project and try it out.  Running IIS in x86 mode works.   Running IIS in x64 mode failed..

The ‘MSDAORA’ provider is not registered on the local machine

It seems the Microsoft MSDAORA provider doesn’t exist in x64 – so change your connection to use the Oracle OraOLEDB.Oracle instead and x64 projects run no problem.  It would be perfect to one day get one install that does both x86 and x64 – but for now, I’m content with this setup.

1. 1. performance and memory usage improvements
2. 2. Solution-wide code inspections (tons of cool tools to find unused params, privates, etc)
3. 3. VB9 support (too bad I’ve been busy moving to C# =])
4. 4. Native MSTest Support (I much prefer NUnit though)

Check it out.  ReSharper is one of the tools I use every day and couldn’t live without…One more day and I’ll be done in Visual Lisp and can actually try out the new release a little more =)

   1: #header {width:100%; height:50px;    background: #7D7D7D url(images/header.gif) left top no-repeat;}

When the master page is used from a page deeper than the site root, the paths in the CSS become invalid.  To work around this I made my CSS dynamic!  I added a new page to my project in the CSS folder.  I called this page allcss.aspx.css.   Open up this new aspx file and remove all the html.  Leave only the page header definition:

   1: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="all.css.aspx.cs" Inherits="landorIS.com.css.allcss" ContentType="text/css" %>

Note that you may need to update your classnames and stuff depending on how you name the file.  I wanted my file name to reflect the fact that it was a CSS file – but it’s still needed to end with .aspx to ensure the file would be properly parsed by the ASP.NET engine without having to mess with the extension mapping on the web server.  This resulted in Visual Studio making some illegal class names.

Also be sure that you add the ContentType attribute to the @Page definition, and set it to “text/css”, or you will get an error in some browsers stating that the Mime Type “text/html” is not “text/css”.  Nice of Firefox to do a little validation on the content.

At this point you can add your CSS to the file and use <%%> tags or codebehind to manipulate the values.  Now the CSS that was causing problems with the images looks like this:

   1: background:url('<%=ResolveUrl("~/img/header-bg.png")%>') no-repeat 0 0;

Now when the CSS is requested by the browser and rendered out, the URL to the image file will be properly displayed as /RootFoolder/img/header-bg.png.  This is a very simple modification, but one could go a little more crazy and do something like  detect browser make/model and send out browser specific css in pre-defined literals, or possibly add authentication checks. 

I’ve been using Automated Build Studio (ABS) for some time now to ensure consistent, and fast builds of our products.  I’m incredibly pleased with it.   One of the key benefits to ABS is its versatility.  Yes, the primary goals of this product is to automate the software build process – and a lot of specific tools are provided in the product to accomplish this (e.g. working with source control, easy tools to automate compiling etc).  Build systems are really just a collection of tasks, usually very small tasks – but often there are dozens, hundreds or even thousands of these tasks.  Task as small as running a dos command line statement, copying files, making a zip file.  When I noticed that ABS gives you the ability to automate FTP operations, it got me thinking – this “build” tool could be used to automate so many of those little tasks I’ve always meant to ‘just write a small batch file’ for – but never got around to doing…

One of our most critical pieces of data is our Sourcegear Vault database for our source code version control.   No source code, no software company – don’t think I need to say much more.   Vault uses SQL server to store its bits.  Well would you look at that.  ABS has a “backup database” component.  The workflow of what I want to accomplish is quite simple:

1. 1. Backup and verify SQL server databases
2. 2. Zip up said backup files
3. 3. Upload the zip file to an FTP server that cannot burn down or blow up at the same time as our database server.

Pretty simple – and ABS will do everything we need – and then some.  So let’s get started.  First, I have to assume you have an SQL server running with databases in it.  I also assume you have an FTP server setup and running.  If you really wanna get fancy – get an FTP server that supports SSL running.  I recommend FileZilla server.

ABS Installed on same machine as SQL Server

If ABS is installed on the same machine as SQL server we can make use of the built in macro operations to backup SQL server.  Start up ABS and create a new macro.  We’re going to start off simple – and maybe we’ll add some cool later.  First we’ll add a database backup operation.  From the left hand Operations “toolbox” click on SQL to expand the operations available there.  Double click on “Back Up Database”.  This will add a database backup action to our macro.  On the right hand side of the screen in the “macro” section, double click on the new macro operation and fill in the needed information to connect to your SQL server.  Be sure to specify the database, destination path and that the type of output is File.  If you have more than one database you want to backup – add another backup operation and repeat the process.  To backup Vault – we need to backup the sgvault and the sgmaster databases.

If you run your macro at this point you will be prompted with a message that “The executable file of the “SQLMaint” tool is not specified.   The SQLMaint executable is installed with your SQL server instance and can be found in the Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Binn folder.  Setup your tools to point to this file.  Note, MSSQL.1 will change depending on the instance of SQL server you are running.

But, SQL Server is installed on another machine and that’s the way I like it!

Yup, me too.  The built in SQL Server backup operations depend on the SQLMaint executable to run backup process.  Again, this file is installed with SQL server and I could not get this file to run on machine that did not have SQL Server installed.

Instead what I did was created a batch file/SQL script combo on the machine running SQL server and scheduled a task to execute this batch file. The SQL script looks like this:

   1: BACKUP DATABASE [sgmaster] TO  DISK = N'C:\MSSQLData\backups\sgmaster.bak' WITH FORMAT, INIT,  NAME = N'Full Database Backup', SKIP, NOREWIND, NOUNLOAD,  STATS = 10

   2: GO

   3: BACKUP DATABASE [sgvault] TO  DISK = N'C:\MSSQLData\backups\sgvault.bak' WITH FORMAT, INIT,  NAME = N'Full Database Backup', SKIP, NOREWIND, NOUNLOAD,  STATS = 10

   4: GO

A batch file that executes this script is scheduled to run at a fixed interval and simply consists of this:

   1: "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Binn\SQLCMD.EXE" -S localhost -i "C:\AdminScripts\SQL Server\backup.sql"

This batch file on execution creates two files in c:\MSSQLData\backups.  These files will be processed by the next step in the macro.  Note that because no username or password information is being specified here, the user set to run this task must have the appropriate rights in SQL server.  This batch file is executed by adding a windows scheduler task.

Whichever path you chose for creating your backup file.  Go ahead and run the macro item for an SQL backup, or from the SQL server execute your batch file to get a backup made of the database(s).

Building the zip file

The next operation we need can be found in the “Archivers” section on the left.  I’m using Zip for this example.   Add a “Pack Files With zip” operation to the macro and setup the properties.  Define the archive name locally.  Next we’ll need to set the path to the files to zip.  We’ll use UNC paths to access a share on our SQL server.  Depending on the rights of the user executing the macro, the administrative shares on the SQL server can be used or a new share can be created with the appropriate permissions assigned.

I set the zip to use the “Best” compression for the “Pack Level” and told it to “Move to archive” which results in the files being zipped getting deleted.  I also set a password on the zip – but make sure you write that down somewhere =).

Select the new archive item and click the “Run the selected operation” button.  This should create a new zip file for you in the appropriate location.

Uploading the zip

In the toolbox expand FTP and we’re going to add a “Connect to FTP” operation.  Double click this operation in the macro section and setup the properties.  Add your hostname, user name, password.  Set the port if necessary.  If your FTP server is using SSL setup the SSL information.  You can now click the “Run the selected operation” button to test the FTP connection.  If needed add some “Create FTP Directory” and “Set Current FTP Directory” items as needed.  Finally we’ll upload the newly created zip.

Add a new “Upload File(s) to FTP” operation to your macro.   Browse to and select the newly create zip file.

Click the big Green Go button – and your backup should be created (for a local SQL server), a zip files made, and that zip file should be uploaded to your SSL enabled FTP server.

Scheduling the macro run

ABS comes with a nice little interface to add scheduled executions.  From the “Tasks” menu choose “Windows Scheduler”.  This will bring up the task scheduler window.  Click Add to add a new task.  Up will come a helpful wizard that will help you setup the task.  Set the various options like name, macro file, execution time and frequency and you’re done.   If your SQL server is on another machine, and you have scheduled that backup to run, you will need to ensure that this task is scheduled to execute after the backup is complete – otherwise your backup could be incomplete.

Summary

Building this macro let us cancel our LiveVault account, saving the company a decent amount of cash per month.  While making use of a tool we needed for our one click build system for RADE and FullCircle, and our dedicated Rackspace server, we were able to ensure we critical offsite backups being automatically taken care of.

This basic macro should help you get started with ABS to implement your own offsite backup solution – possibly making use of resources you already have in place.  Obviously this macro can be enhance significantly – other resources can be zipped up and backed up.  The ABS scripting and variables can be implemented to append a unique number or a date to the file name which would allow for a range of backups to be stored. 

Enjoy!

This complexity resulted in infrequent builds and as a result the code was not tested as well as it should have been.  Not to mention, I’d get really frustrated and even pissed off on build days.   It took me a while to find a system that really made me happy.  On a whim one night I downloaded Automated Build Studio (ABS) and gave it a shot.  After installing ABS on a new virtual machine that would become our dedicated build system I fired it up.  I was pretty impressed with the wide range of actions and  tools it supported.  In our environment we had several must have items:

• 1. SourceGear Vault
• 2. Visual Studio 2008
• 3. Oracle/SQL Server
• 4. Installshield 2009

ABS worked with all of them.  In addition to the key requirements I had – it supported a plethora of other operations.

First thing I did was sketch out a rough outline of what was involved in creating a build.  Get latest source code, compile, delete temporary files, etc etc etc.  I started selecting various options from the ABS and fleshing out my macro.  Within a couple of hours, I had a sweet macro in place.  My macro started to look like this:

• Getting the latest code from Vault
• Compile all assemblies
• Delete the temporary files
• Build the needed release folder structure
• Move the new files into the needed structure
• Execute Remotesoft Protector on all assemblies
• Increment the build version, and set the version on all assemblies
• Create a label of the build in Vault
• Build a zip of the release
• Build the Installshield installer
• Connect to the build FTP and upload the new build

The best part – all of this was occurring in a 100% reliable fashion, oh and it took minutes for a full build to occur.  Over time, this project was tweaked, and copied.  It evolved as I learned more about ABS – or thought up new requirements.  Take FullCircle for example, it has evolved into three editions, sharing a similar yet different set of source files.  ABS lets me rebuild all three editions with the click of a button – in minutes.   Long long ago, in the before times something like this would have taken days, and years off my life.

I’ve only scratched the surface of what I’ve been able to do with ABS – some other cool features worth mentioning is that builds can be scheduled to run, there is a web application for viewing build history as well as kicking off builds.  It has a scripting language, and the support I’ve received is fantastic.  The price of the product makes the decision to buy ABS a non issue.

Man, now I’m starting to sound like a sales guy. =)  Seriously though, check out Automated Build Studio if you develop boxed, or even custom software.

Every time I build a contact form/database I hit this problem.  I need a set of tables for Country, State/Province lookup.  “But, that’s like 60 records and I don’t wanna type out every state and province!”.

Every time, I hit the Google looking for SQL scripts – and I can’t seem to find anything, or I find that one script for mySQL.  The last time I did this, I created a set of SQL scripts and I saved them.  I forgot that I saved them – and made another SQL script.  Doh. 

This time when I was working on the new contact form for this site, I decided to write this blog post in hopes that the next time I need to do this – when I search Google my blog might come up and remind me not to re-invent the wheel.  So I’ve included a zip with the SQL script here.  This script is for SQL server 2005 – but will translate over to Oracle very easily.

If you find any problems with the script, or feel like adding more countries, feel free to pass those changes along to me!

It’s been a crazy couple of months (since Autodesk University 2008), and we are getting closer to the end of the craziness.  Let me sum things up, and hopefully gain your forgiveness for the lack of posts for two months. =)  At AU we unveiled FullCircle, and the reception has been phenomenal.  FullCircle is our newest product built made with RADE.   So after returning from AU, and getting all that feedback from partners and customers we set to work finishin, testing, and polishing the first release of FullCircle – Standard Edition.

FullCircle has two main functions.  First, it allows users to login and query data from their Oracle, SQL Server, and Access databases.  The tabular information is then sent down as an Excel spreadsheet where users may edit or append data.  This spreadsheet can then uploaded to FullCircle and processed.  The updates/inserts are applied to the appropriate database table.

The second key function of FullCircle is for Adapx Capturx for Excel users.   FullCircle allows Excel forms to be defined and saved.  Users can then download the form templates from the repository, print the forms with Capturx, and fill them out.  When the digital pen is docked, and the hand writing is processed back into Excel – these Excel files can then be processed with FullCircle.  The inserts (or updates if needed) are processed and put into the appropriate database table(s).  No temporary tables are used that require processing after the fact (unless of course, this is what you want to do), no custom coding.

On top of that we’ve been hard at work building this new site, setting up the new blogs, doing all that good stuff.  I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel…

More soon!

I’ve heard people talking about Topobase for quite some time.  I’ve heard good, and I’ve heard bad.  Today I got my first look at the product.  Topobase is a server product that works with Oracle spatial to facilitate the creation, editing and sharing of spatial data in Oracle.  A client is provided with a full API and users can access data using AutoCAD Map or a web client based on Mapguide Enterprise.

The design of Topobase looks to be well tiered.  Using ADO.NET and OraDirect.net it also supports connection pooling.  They provide a neat VB.NET scripting interface that helps build simple workflows, and data validation rules.

All in all, everything they are putting forward looks quite cool.  Visual studio templates to build Topobase plugins that can be loaded right into the Topobase UI.  It could become a very cool starting point for developers/consultants to start building tools to work on data. But there are a few problems…

Topobase is by no means a new product.  It’s several revisions in since Autodesk aquired it – but it still seems to have some performance problem.  During the presentation this morning, Topobase took over a minute to load.  Once loaded, it took over a minute to load and render a small dataset.  Now, Oracle/Topobase and AutoCAD Map were running within a virtual machine, running on a notebook.  Even still – that’s slow.

Now, I’m no Autodesk insider.  I’m also not a business expert (but I have been learning a thing or two about it over the years).  History does tend to repeat itself.  I look back at GIS Design Server and Vision.  Like Topobase, both of these products were acquired by Autodesk.  Like Topobase, these products were ‘Enterprise Data Store’ type things.  Both these products are now "not actively promoted", and customers are encouraged to migrate to Topobase.  With the Autodesk stock price down – they are going to trim fat.  The Autodesk reseller channel for the most part does not have the skills to use, support, or sell this tool – and it really is a developer/consultant tool.   My fear about Topobase is that if I were to invest the time in learning and developing for Topobase, Autodesk will "retire" the product.  Then that invested time is wasted, but more importantly the relationship with my customers is damaged by leaving them stranded up s**t creek with yet another dead ‘Enterprise Data Store’ thing.

It’s a catch 22.  So its not unreasonable to think that Autodesk needs developers like us to adopt, promote, and sell Topobase to help keep it alive.  I’m interested in hearing your opinions on this subject…

This morning I attended the SQL Server 2008 with AutoCAD Map 3D and Autodesk MapGuide (GS100-3) presented by Orest Halustchak (Technical Architect at Autodesk) and Isaac Kunen (Senior Program Manager at Microsoft).   First it was really nice to bring in the brains from Microsoft for a presentation on SQL server.

This class was especially interesting to me, as I have not yet made time to look at SQL server 2008 in great depths.  It looks like Microsoft done a pretty good job at their first spatial offering.  I’m always hesitant to jump in heads first to a first release.  Hey I waited until Mapguide Enterprise 2009 before I even really considered writing any code for it.  If you are new to spatial databases, or you have a more basic need (no need for more advanced Linear Referencing System or network tracing functionality) SQL server might be right for you.  If you already have SQL server experience, the learning curve going to SQL 2008 spatial is going to be a lot less nasty than starting with Oracle Spatial.

The spatial functionality is available all versions of SQL server, except for the compact edition.  Yes, even the free Express version contains the spatial engine.  This is good news.  Often times when Oracle comes up (even the express edition), people get scared.  Oracle has a scary, difficult stigma associated with.  Spatial abilities with SQL server Express could be very helpful in getting a spatial engine into smaller shops.

Microsoft is pretty good with the small details.  One of the cool features of SQL 2008 is the ability to view the spatial data right in SQL Management Studio.  Note this doesn’t seem to be available in the Express edition of Management Studio. 

AutoCAD Map and Mapguide seem to work pretty well with SQL 2008.  I plan to load some larger data sets into SQL 2008 in the coming weeks to see how it performs in comparison to Oracle spatial.

Here is a tip for planning for AU.  Consider budgeting to eat outside of the Autodesk provided buffets.  =)

I also have to add that bringing small children on airplanes is cruel, the US Airways coffee sucks, but the orange juice is great =)

In long – for a number of reasons there was not a strait line between upgrading my machine to SP1 and noticing the problem.  This made diagnosing the problem significantly more complicated because I had no idea when it actually started.  At the time, I was dealing with x64 and Oracle clients.  This had prompted me to start doing all my dev in an XP virtual machine.  Eventually, the slowless of developing in a VM drove me insane and I just had to get my machine working again.  So I got Oracle dealt with – but that left this annoying error.

It was a complete fluke that I noticed this.  The stars aligned, and I manually compiled some assemblies, instead of pushing the big green button on my build system.  This resulted in my assemblies not being run through the Remotesoft Protector.  All of a sudden the problem went away.  At the time I had been using Protector 2.x which would not support .NET 3.5 SP1 fully. So, either stop using Protector, or upgrade to the latest version which resolves this problem =)

The correct path to Oracle happiness in my case was the 11g client.  It works great with my 10.2 server.  The important bit in was to use the 32 bit install rather than the 64 bit install.  One of my primary tools for accessing Oracle is Toad for Oracle 9.x.  Quest Software states that Toad for Oracle 9.6 is the first version to really support the 11g client.  However, it does NOT support the x64 client.

So the last time I tried to solve this, after a long day, and a fun night of head banging with a wall – when I tried the 11g client, I used x64 cbuild – and saw that Toad wouldn’t work, I threw a little hissyfit and went to bed.  Long story short, installing both the 32bit 11g client and 11g ODAC/ODP seems to have done the trick.  Now – there is one important little piece o’ information that you will need to know.  Though I have not confirmed this, I suspect that x64 applications will not be able to use the driver. 

That said, from a development point of view you will need to set IIS to run at 32 bit.  On IIS 5.x/6.x this is a server wide setting from a dos window:

   1: cscript %SYSTEMDRIVE%\inetpub\adminscripts\adsutil.vbs SET W3SVC/AppPools/Enable32bitAppOnWin64 1

   2: %SYSTEMROOT%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis.exe -i

If you’re running Vista or Server 2008 with IIS7, you have things a little better.  You can configure each application pool to run as 32 or 64 bit.  For winform development, change the compile properties of the project to set the target platform to be x86.

I’m really glad that’s over…but I still want a proper x64 ODAC.  Come on Oracle .. =)

Update February 2009 – I have made a happy ending post on my new blog.  Got Oracle client working in both 32 and 64 bit mode.  Check it out.

Thanks Autodesk! =)

I hate this error.  Someone would give me a new Oracle dump file.  I’d try to view the spatial data and boom – ORA-13226.  If I was lucky, there was only a couple of tables in it.  Chances are, there were hundreds of tables in it.  Sometimes I’d need to add the reference to the USER_SDO_GEOM_METADATA view, sometimes I wouldn’t.   Sometimes the index would already exist and just need to be rebuilt.

Regardless of the scenario, it would often involve a lot of SQL – or messing around to try and remember the SQL.  Every time this would pop up I would think to myself, “I really should write an app…”.  Well I finally did.

So, here is my announcement.  The RADE Spatial Indexer is just about ready for beta.  Initially this app does three things.

• It will list tables and views with geometry columns that are not part of the USER_SDO_GEOM_META data view and help you add them.
• It will list spatial tables without indexes and help you create them.
• It will list spatial tables with indexes and help you re-index them.

No more exporting queries to text files and using a macro to edit them to build your SQL for rebuilding those indexes.  I’ve tried to add some nice friendly helpers, such as a button that will suggest the spatial metadata settings for a table based on the existing meta data records.  The ability to mass create or rebuild indexes is also been a fantastic helper.

I’m recruiting brave individuals for a small closed beta program that will begin in about two weeks.  If you are interested in being a tester please e-mail indexer (at) landorIS.com and let me know.  Remember, this is a beta – so I really do not suggest you run this on a production, or important server.  That said, I have been using it in various states on my own ‘production’ development Oracle server.

As an incentive for helping me out.  If you submit feedback (be it a bug report or feature request) – I will set you up with a free license once we release 1.0.  I know you’re hooked and want to sign up.  I know it.  Just in case you need a little more, here is a few screen caps..

Look at how easy it could be to define metadata.  Click the suggest button and it will iterate through the metadata settings for other spatial tables in the schema.  Once you have one row defined, use the sync button to set all rows to the same values.  Click process and its done.

Within seconds, have hundreds of spatial indexes being re-created…Creating new indexes is almost as easy.

So instead I have centralized my server resources into a nice VM setup running on my beefy Dell server.  Now, regardless of which machine I use to develop I can still access the same data sets.  This is especially nice when traveling.  Specifically Mapguide Server and web tier are installed on my development web server.  When coding, I will either use my local IIS or the built in Visual Studio web server.  This poses one problem when working with Mapguide.  Referencing the web tier on the shared server from another web server will result in cross site scripting (XSS) errors.  Basically, javascript on one web server cannot access javascript code on another web server, which under most circumstances is a good thing.  When trying to develop using the Mapguide Web API on a central Mapguide server this poses a problem as the web tier API is wholly contained within the virtual directory on another server.  Gotta love when ‘security’ jumps up bites us in the behind.

The simple solution to this problem is to install the Mapguide web tier on every development machine.  This will require that each development machine have a web server installed, but chances are that is already the case.  When installing the web tier be sure to have the IP address of the Mapguide server handy as it will needed during the install.  Once the web tier is running locally, reference the local web tier in your URLs and the cross site scripting vulnerabilities go away!  If you’re running the 64 Bit version of Vista on your development machine, check out my post installing the web tier on Vista x64

In a nutshell this is a result of installing Mapguide server before the Oracle client is installed on the server.  The solution is to do a repair install of Mapguide Server (or a re-install if you prefer) once the Oracle client is installed.  Hopefully next year when this comes up again – writing this down will help me remember.  Worst case Google might pick this up and I’ll find my own post when I search for it…

So I’m going to add one more search result on this error message.  After much muckery – I’ve resolved my instance of the problem.  The background is simple.  I have an ASP.NET web application with a few DLL projects and a deployment project.  As stated, I’ve created a new install of Windows XP.  First ensure that you have the 2008 Web Deployment Project add-on installed.  That can also cause this error (in some cases).

The key thing in this case was the lack of IIS on the machine.  On my primary development machine (the one where Oracle is a massive pain) I do have IIS installed, and the last time I ran this project from that machine – Oracle was working OK with the data access hack.  But apparently something has changed on that box and now I’m getting the evil "Oracle client and networking components were not found." error.  So I gave up.

First obvious work around is to install IIS.  I’m sick of messing around today, and just want to work.  So the quicker solution is to enable the built in development web server.  This can be accomplished by right clicking the unloaded project in the Visual Studio solution explorer and choosing "Edit <projectname.whateverlanguateyouuseproj>".  This will bring up the XML view of the project.  Find the ProjectExtensions section of the config and change UseIIS to be False.  Setting this up could also prevent problems when you have a larger, or more dynamic team accessing the project.

   1: <ProjectExtensions>

   2:     <VisualStudio>

   3:       <FlavorProperties GUID="{349c5851-65df-11da-9384-00065b846f21}">

   4:         <WebProjectProperties>

   5:           <UseIIS>False</UseIIS>

   6:           <AutoAssignPort>False</AutoAssignPort>

   7:           <DevelopmentServerPort>4088</DevelopmentServerPort>

   8:           <DevelopmentServerVPath>/webrade</DevelopmentServerVPath>

   9:           <IISUrl>http://localhost/WebRADE32</IISUrl>

  10:           <NTLMAuthentication>False</NTLMAuthentication>

  11:           <UseCustomServer>False</UseCustomServer>

  12:           <CustomServerUrl>

  13:           </CustomServerUrl>

  14:           <SaveServerSettingsInUserFile>False</SaveServerSettingsInUserFile>

  15:         </WebProjectProperties>

  16:       </FlavorProperties>

  17:     </VisualStudio>

  18:   </ProjectExtensions>

Reload the project, and it should load now.

P.S. Oracle, please please please release something for Vista x64 and ODAC/ODP.  Even an alpha.  I promise I will test on an x86 machine before I release..

I did some brief looking around and word on the internets is that the YUI compressor is one of the better compressors out there.  The YUI compressor is an open source java applet.   This *should* work with Mapguide Open, heck this might even be done already in MGOS – but I am only using Enterprise so I cannot confirm, deny, or test this.  

Some of the key things the compressor will do:

1. remove all comments
2. remove all white space and line breaks
3. rename all local variables and parameters to single characters

The YUI compressor should not alter variable values or your logic in any way.

To use the YUI compressor you will need to have Java installed.  Note that if you have the Oracle client installed, you probably have Java already  Once you have Java, you can download a copy of the YUI compressor (I’m going to start referring to it as the YC now…).  If you don’t feel like downloading Java and the YC – I’ve attached the processed files at the bottom of this post.

Lets first look at the javascript shipped with Mapguide Enterprise.  If you browse to your web server extension viewer files (the default location is C:\Program Files\Autodesk\MapGuideEnterprise2009\WebServerExtensions\www\viewerfiles I believe) you will see ten javascript files.  If you choose to process these files on your own please back them up first.  Don’t blame me if you don’t backup your files and something goes wrong =).

Before YC:

Using the YC is simple:

   1: c:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdk\bin\java.exe -jar f:\utils\YUICompress\yuicompressor-2.3.6\build\yuicompressor-2.3.6.jar -o comp\browserdetect.js browserdetect.js

Update the paths to Java and the YC as per your environment.  Using the handy dir /B *.js > go.bat I created a batch file of all the javascript files in the viewerfiles folder.  Be sure to run this from a dos window in the viewerfiles folder, or update the paths.  You will also need to create the comp folder in viewerfiles.   Quick cut and pasting created the following batch file:

   1: c:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdk\bin\java.exe -jar f:\utils\YUICompress\yuicompressor-2.3.6\build\yuicompressor-2.3.6.jar -o comp\browserdetect.js browserdetect.js

   2: c:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdk\bin\java.exe -jar f:\utils\YUICompress\yuicompressor-2.3.6\build\yuicompressor-2.3.6.jar -o comp\contextmenu.js contextmenu.js

   3: c:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdk\bin\java.exe -jar f:\utils\YUICompress\yuicompressor-2.3.6\build\yuicompressor-2.3.6.jar -o comp\digitize.js digitize.js

   4: c:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdk\bin\java.exe -jar f:\utils\YUICompress\yuicompressor-2.3.6\build\yuicompressor-2.3.6.jar -o comp\hashtable.js hashtable.js

   5: c:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdk\bin\java.exe -jar f:\utils\YUICompress\yuicompressor-2.3.6\build\yuicompressor-2.3.6.jar -o comp\initdwfctrl.js initdwfctrl.js

   6: c:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdk\bin\java.exe -jar f:\utils\YUICompress\yuicompressor-2.3.6\build\yuicompressor-2.3.6.jar -o comp\legend.js legend.js

   7: c:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdk\bin\java.exe -jar f:\utils\YUICompress\yuicompressor-2.3.6\build\yuicompressor-2.3.6.jar -o comp\numfmt.js numfmt.js

   8: c:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdk\bin\java.exe -jar f:\utils\YUICompress\yuicompressor-2.3.6\build\yuicompressor-2.3.6.jar -o comp\pngfix_map.js pngfix_map.js

   9: c:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdk\bin\java.exe -jar f:\utils\YUICompress\yuicompressor-2.3.6\build\yuicompressor-2.3.6.jar -o comp\sarissa.js sarissa.js

  10: c:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdk\bin\java.exe -jar f:\utils\YUICompress\yuicompressor-2.3.6\build\yuicompressor-2.3.6.jar -o comp\wz_jsgraphics.js wz_jsgraphics.js

(*Sorry about the overlap.  I’m working on a new layout and am addressing that in there)

Running that output all of the compressed of the files down somewhat, to pretty significantly.

A quick comparison of one of the function calls:

   1: function MenuData(menuName, arrowHeight, scrollInc, scrollDelay, minSize, iconScrollUp, iconScrollUpDisabled, iconScrollDown, iconScrollDownDisabled, owner, withIFrame, bkColor)

   2: function MenuData(F,H,I,K,E,G,D,J,A,C,B,L)

As you can see – the savings can be significant.

I’m not using the Fusion viewer yet so I did not process those files, but I did check some of the JS in there and each script file had a huge header comment.  It looks like Fusion could also benefit from some compression action.  Please note, I’ve been running my web tier using this script for a day or two.  I’ve not run any serious testing on this code – so try this at your own risk.  You did make that backup I suggested, right?  That said, I have not personally experienced any problems yet.  Also, should you compress your viewerfiles and have problems be sure to try your backups.  Especially before calling your dealer or Autodesk for help. (sorry product support and ADN guys.  Please don’t hate me =] ).

if you would rather not run the YC yourself.

Enjoy!

Long ago (it seems like a lifetime) I worked for a company called Kanotech.  One of my first real development projects of scale was on the @MAppDR product.  @MApp was a powerful AutoCAD Map extension built for AT&T/Comcast cable.  My first task was to head to Seattle and learn how field technicians would walk the existing RF Plant (fancy word for cabling and RF equipment) and map the existing assets, on paper.  The first task was devise a way to run @MApp on one of the early rugged Hammerhead pen computers.  I walked the streets of the greater Seattle area with some of the field technicians and got my first introduction into the world of cable TV networks.  At the end of this trip I had a collection of notes and enough information to design and implement the pen based version of @MApp.  This was the beginning of my life with @MApp.

With the bigger picture in mind, there were many underlying goals for @MAppDR, one of the key needs was standards enforcement (and creation -  Evan created the first solid standard which, though very much evolved is still in use today).  Like many organizations back in the day (and likely even today) the mapping data being generated was garbage.  Each division, each consultant, sometimes each drafter had their own set of "Standards".  As Evan put it, the mapping data was "Only good for printing" – and even that was a stretch in some of the sample data we saw.  Our top priority was to create a set of tools which facilitated drafting standards compliant drawings – as well as a method to test each drawing to ensure the drawing was truly compliant.

Under the hood, @MAppDR was all database driven.  Layers, cable types and properties, even symbols and block attributes could be configured in the database.  Generic lisp calls were defined to allow simple wrapper functions to be created to add new entities to the application.  The application had been created using an extensive amount of AutoLisp, VB6, C++/ObjectARX, Python, and SQL Server/Access databases.  Let me tell you, I still have nightmares about parentheses =).

The drafting tools, in retrospect were good.  Damn good.  Obvious elements were there, select a cable, or equipment type using standard AutoCAD toolbar buttons.  @MAppDR went a step further.  It would create/set the layer, set the desired object snaps, draft the cable.  Network connected equipment would snap to the cable, rotate, trim and physically connect itself to the model.  In some circumstances, inserting a block/cable of a certain type also required an accompanying block.  If required, the user would be prompted to insert these as well.  In some cases – these blocks were placed automatically.  Using @MAppDR – a user could draft very clean RF drawings without having to really know  AutoCAD.  Every piece of possible equipment was available from a comprehensive set of toolbars – and only one click away. 

On insertion of blocks, the user was presented with a form powered by the attribute information stored in the databases.  Some attributes were required, some were populated programmatically based on nearby objects or other conditions, and some were selected from lookups or manually entered by the user. 

@MAppDR had a really cool connectivity process.  This process would perform physical connectivity on the network, following rules defined for equipment inputs and outputs.  In addition to this, rules were also defined to dictate what equipment could connect to other equipment.  This connectivity, in my opinion was one of the most powerful components of @MAppDR.  Connectivity information was stored on the entities.  When a trace was done, we could follow the network and do all kinds of great reporting.  I recall one situation where we knew that in situations where a specific combination of equipment was setup – it would cause service problems.  Within a few hours, I had a batch process created that would process hundreds of drawings and spit out a report of nodes, and locations where this combination existed.  The problems in the field were fixed even before customer complaints came in. 

One of the key requirements for @MAppDR was a quality assurance process.  We defined several "levels" of QA.  Each level of QA required a password to execute.  The first two levels of QA were for contractors doing mapping redraft, or drafting.  These levels would let the consultants know that the required data had been entered and would "stamp" the drawing.  The drawings were then submitted, and Comcast staff would run their password protected version of the QA routines – which would verify that indeed the contractor had done the required work.  If not, the drawing was rejected and the contractor had to fix it.  I can say with a great deal of certainty that Comcast, using @MAppDR is one of the few organizations with near perfect data.  And the things they do with that data are incredible.

The final version of @MApp, @MappRF could have dominated the cable industry.  Sadly, it was never completed.  This release added RF design to the drafting.  A library of equipment was created, as well as design parameters which were sub-selection of the equipment that let the RF designer know what equipment was available to be used.  All of the equipment’s operating parameters were captured.  As the user drafted equipment, the actual equipment model would be selected on the attributes.  This allowed us to increase the efficiency of populating attributes during the drafting phase all the while making the stored data even more accurate and complete.   

One of the coolest bits of @MAppRF was what came to be known as the TRID.  The TRID was a  multi-threaded C++ control was created that contained a tree-grid hybrid.  This form could be docked within AutoCAD or floating on a separate monitor.  As the user drafted, the RF signal and power calculations were performed in real-time, without interfering with the drafting process.  I recall being told, this project would be simple.  RF design is just table math.  And it is, but, mix in a multi-threaded C++ form running per entity calculations on a potentially infinite number of frequencies both going forward, and backwards – oh and sprinkle in a little bit of power draw calculations.  Then tell me its simple.  =)

If I could do it over again.  Wow, what a difference the current technology would make.  By far the single largest flaw @MApp has is its dependence on drawing based storage.  Given the timeline, we didn’t have a choice.  Oracle Spatial was available, but immature.  Going with Oracle at that time would have likely been more grief than it was worth.   Seamless map access would be a must.  Given the times we used a special piece of ObjectARX code called the SPE.  This gave us spatial analysis abilities that rival even Oracle Spatial.  One of the major downfalls here is that it required AutoCAD to run.  Therefore – most of the calculations had to occur within AutoCAD itself.  This became a problem as other applications could benefit from these operations – but couldn’t take advantage of them without also being AutoCAD based. 

Leveraging a multi-tiered architecture, a lot of the common functions could be moved to a more SOA like architecture.  Now, though the TRID could still be a multi-threaded form in AutoCAD – the calculations could be done on the server side – thereby making the AutoCAD portion a presentation layer – instead of a business logic layer.  Now the RF design calculations could be done in any user interface – instead of having to opening a drawing in AutoCAD. 

And that my dear reader, concludes my epic tale on @MApp.  Even this large novel like piece only scratched the surface of this project.  It was my life for many years.  I slept under my desk a number of times – but it was a great project.  It was fun to think about it again and put together something to share with you. =)

However, in most cases you’re better off using a form and posting your data up to the server side that way, as the limitations on data are so large you will likely not need to worry about them.  Sometimes, query strings can also show your users just a little too much information – though I’m by no means a proponent of "security through obscurity" hiding a little bit more from your users will keep the curious ones a little more in check =).

When working with Mapguide Enterprise/Mapguide Open Source we need to grab some potentially massive XML strings from the MgMap object and pass these along to the server side for processing.  Take the selection XML from the MgMap object, even a single entity selection can use a significant portion of the characters available in the query string.  On top of that, passing this data via query string requires that the data be URL encoded, using even more of our precious query string characters.

Depending on the design of your application it may not always be feasible to define a hard coded form, or even a form defined server side using ASP.NET.  In some cases (you guessed it – my case) you may want to use javascript and do all the work on the client side to define a form and pass the data long that way.

Well you’re in luck, I found a pretty nice solution (WELL, at least I’m liking it  =]).   I’m kicking myself for not realizing this long ago, but oh well.  So the following javascript function demonstrates how to build, add, populate, and submit a form on the fly using some information from the MgMap object.

   1: function postData()   

   2: {   3: //get the map   

   3: mapObj = GetMap();   

   4:  

   5: //define the new form   

   6: var newForm = document.createElement("form");   

   7: //set the method to POST - the opposite of query strings..   

   8: newForm.method="POST";  

   9:  //add the new form to the current document  

  10:  document.body.appendChild(newForm);  

  11:  

  12:  //lets get some data and add it to the form  

  13:  AddFormElement(newForm, "MapName", oMap.GetMapName());  

  14:  AddFormElement(newForm, "SID", oMap.GetSessionId());  

  15:  //be sure you escape the selection XML - or you will get an error on post about a   

  16:  //"potentially dangerous form value".  Remember on the server side to Server.UrlDecode() it  

  17:  AddFormElement(newForm, "sel", escape(oMap.GetSelectionXML()));  

  18:  

  19:  //lets create our new window  

  20:  var szTarget = "targetWin"  

  21:  newForm.target = szTarget;  

  22:  //set the name/path of the ASPX file you want to process your form with  

  23:  newForm.action = "/url_to_open/file.aspx"  

  24:  

  25:  //open a new window to submit the form to.  Its a good idea to have a blank.htm so you don't get a file not found error  

  26:  var oWin = window.open("blank.htm",szTarget,'menubar=yes, resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes, status=no,toolbar=no,width=300, height=300');  

  27:  

  28:  //give the window focus.  Users like this  

  29:  oWin.focus();  

  30:  

  31:  //submit the form - it will now open in the new window  

  32:  newForm.submit();  

  33:  //remove the form from the document, we're done with it  

  34:  document.body.removeChild(newForm);  

  35:  }  

  36:  

  37:  function AddFormElement(form, elementName, elementVal)  

  38:  {  

  39:      var newElement = document.createElement("<input name='" + elementName + "' type='hidden'/>");  

  40:      newElement.value = elementVal;  

  41:      form.appendChild(newElement);  

  42:      return form;  

  43:  }

On the server side, you can now access this data from ASP.NET using Request.Form, for example Request.Form("MapName") would give you the map name.  Don’t forget when retrieving the selection XML to run that through Server.UrlDecode, or HttpUtility.UrlDecode.

As usual, any comments, bugs, or rotten fruit – send em my way.  Enjoy!

Report looked good.  The results were sorting, checkboxes working.   Wait a minute, I selected the entire map.  There should be more than twenty items returned.  So a quick search of my twelve thousand saved e-mails from the Mapguide Users mailing list turned up what needed to be done.  Fortunately Autodesk added a GenerateFilters call to MgSelection.  This call returns an MgStringCollection of filters.

Basically the solution to this problem is to use GenerateFilters instead of GenerateFilter, and loop through the results.  Each time, appending the returned keys to the complete list.  For example:

   1: Public Shared Function GetSelectedKeysString(ByRef siteConn As MgSiteConnection, _

   2:     ByRef resSvc As MgResourceService, ByVal oMap As MgMap, ByVal SessionId As String, _

   3:     ByVal SelectionXML As String, ByVal layerResID As MgResourceIdentifier, _

   4:     ByVal keyFieldName As String) As String

   5:  

   6:     Dim szKeys As String = ""

   7:     Dim oSel As New MgSelection(oMap)

   8:     oSel.FromXml(SelectionXML)

   9:     Dim curLay As MgLayerBase

  10:     'isolate the layer

  11:     For Each layerItem As MgLayerBase In oSel.GetLayers

  12:         If layerItem.Name = layerResID.Name Then

  13:             curLay = layerItem

  14:         End If

  15:     Next

  16:  

  17:     Dim featSvc As MgFeatureService = siteConn.CreateService(MgServiceType.FeatureService)

  18:     Dim queryOptions As New MgFeatureQueryOptions

  19:     Dim featureClassName As String = curLay.GetFeatureClassName

  20:     'workaround using GenerateFilters and looping through the results as needed

  21:     Dim featureReader As MgFeatureReader

  22:     Dim filters As MgStringCollection = oSel.GenerateFilters(curLay, featureClassName, 20)

  23:     Dim filterCnt As Integer = 0

  24:     While filterCnt < filters.GetCount

  25:         queryOptions.SetFilter(filters.GetItem(filterCnt))

  26:         featureReader = featSvc.SelectFeatures(New MgResourceIdentifier(curLay.GetFeatureSourceId), featureClassName, queryOptions)

  27:         While featureReader.ReadNext

  28:             If szKeys = "" Then

  29:                 szKeys = ConvertPropertyToString(featureReader, keyFieldName)

  30:             Else

  31:                 szKeys &= "," & ConvertPropertyToString(featureReader, keyFieldName)

  32:             End If

  33:         End While

  34:         featureReader.Close()

  35:         featureReader.Dispose()

  36:         filterCnt += 1

  37:     End While

  38:     Return szKeys

  39: End Function

In this code, we get the selection from the MgMap object and then isolate the layer in question.  Then we generate the collection of filters and loop through them.  Each time, adding the appropriate value to the list of keys.  Note the use of ConverPropertyToString, this needs to be used to ensure that the various data types are converted over to string.

.  If you’re looking for a C# example of how to use GenerateFilters one is provided in the source for buffers.aspx.

After making these changes my reports now look all proper! hurray.  Maybe I can hit the sack now?  nahh.

NHibernate was a tough curve for me.  Initially, I started testing code generators.  After spending a significant amount of time reading, testing, and pulling out hair I came to the conclusion that NHibernate code generation is still not there.  From my experiences Genwise is probably the best code generator out there right now – but its still lacking in some areas.  More importantly however, I learned that code generation is not a good place to start when implementing NHibernate for the first time.  There is so much going on under the hood – in my opinion you need to start off doing a reasonable size project by hand.  Code generation has significant benefits, because the generated code is so similar with simple replacements it just makes a lot of sense once you wrap your head around what’s going on with NHibernate.

As per my previous post on ReSharper when implementing nHibernate by hand, ReSharper is a must have.  Just the other day I found a *great* ReSharper NHibernate Plugin.  When editing NHibernate HBM XML files, it does a bunch of validation right in the editor.  Saves you a lot of time finding problems without having to actually run a unit test and debug sometimes cryptic error messages.

I bought a copy of NHibernate In Action.  I would recommend this book to you only if you have no experience, or understanding of Object Relational Mappers.  As the book stands right now, it’s not really a good developer reference and only covers really basic examples.  The documents that helped me the most to get everything up and running was The NHibernate FAQ.  The NHibernate documentation is pretty cryptic.  Don’t read this stuff 12 hours into your day.  No amount of RedBull will give you the focus needed to make sense of it.  In the first 8 hours of the day, its quite helpful.

I primarily work in VB.NET.  For this project however, I switched to C#.  Maybe now, the my colleagues at Bear Mountain will stop giving me a hard time =).  Seriously though.  Examples are a LOT easier to come by in C#, probably 10:1.

Finally, get NUnit running.  I had a lot of problems using the built in Microsoft Test projects with NHibernate – so I’ll be sticking with NUnit. If you’ve never done unit testing (you know who you are) do it.  Particularly in this case – its crucial.  You (Again you know who you are =]) used to write simple winform apps, and put a bunch of buttons on them.  Don’t do that. 

So, if you are one of the RADE non-developer users and you read on this far.  Congrats.  This milestone will not directly help you with your use of RADE.  However, it’s a large step forward for the underlying architecture – and you will benefit from that. 

Well back to Visual Studio I go..

Press enter and you are prompted for the class name.  So Visual Studio has this of course, but this is a small example of some of the time savings you can achieve.  Enter the class name and you start off with an empty class.  Next, lets define a couple of private members.   Let’s run with the following example.

   1: namespace RADE.BO.Domain

   2: {

   3:     public class SampleClass

   4:     {

   5:         private Int32 _ID;

   6:         private String _Description;

   7:         private Int64 _BiggerInt;

   8:     }

   9: }

Simple class.  Three member variables.  Here is where the big time savers come in.  Next, click Alt+Insert again and you will be prompted with the following options:

Choose Properties.  You will now be given the option to select one or many fields, set the access rights, read only and virtual properties as well a bunch of others. 

Execute that and all of your get/sets are defined.  My one complaint is that ReSharper is not maintaining the type on the properties.  My Int32′s become int, and Int64′s become long’s.  Apparently this is slated to be fixed.  

So yes, this sample class is tiny, but the time savings on larger classes, or projects full of classes are significant.  The last feature I’ve been using extensively in this project is the generate constructor tool.  Again, a form is displayed with the defined properties, select the ones you want and boom.  You can create half a dozen different constructors in seconds.  I’ve created a full object model on, roughly 20 different mildly complex objects in less than an hour, around midnight on a Sunday =)

Some of the other things ReSharper does is suggest code cleanup ideas by removing unused directives, easy execution of NUnit tests, improved code completion.  I encourage you to check it out, download a ReSharper trial.

First, download and install Oracle 11g ODAC and Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio. (Link requires registration)   This should get the 32bit stuff installed.   I’m still using an Oracle 10g R2 server.  You will likely need to grab a copy of the TNSnames.ora for your existing client folder and place it in the appropriate tree of the 11g product home.

This however is not enough to get .NET working with ODP.  Go to the folder where you extracted the zip.  We need to find the Oracle.DataAccess.dll.  This can be found in the file named filegroup4.jar, in the stage\components\oracle.ntoledb.odp_net_2.  Winrar will open .jar files if needed.  Extract the Oracle.DataAscess.dll file.

For now, I’ve put a copy of this file in my projects lib folder.  I then added a reference directly to this file from all projects that need ODP access. 

Keep in mind – before you ship you may want to remove this reference and ensure that the .DLL file doesn’t get included in your build.  This should get your Vista x64 box developing with ODP.

To Oracle – come on guys.  Give us some Vista x64 love!

So a data connection was created pointing to the Oracle 10g schema.  This database contained a number of tables containing Lat/Long point geometry entities.  I created a layer pointing to the table in question.  I created a layer pointing to that data connection.  At this point the entities showed up as expected in the both the DWF and the AJAX viewers.  Once again, I could not select any of the entities.  I checked the server logs, no errors were reported.

In troubleshoot mode, I tried just about everything I could think of but nothing would work.  I simplified the theme, created new layers, removed all other layers from them map.  Eventually I created a new layer from another table.  Luckily, the entities on this layer could be selected.  It must be a problem with the underlying data.  On a hunch, I checked the table definitions – specifically looking at primary keys.  The selectable layer had a primary key defined, the problem layer did not.  (Good thing I cannot take credit for creating this source data =))

So, I created a primary key on the problem table, did a touch on the layer definition (opening the definition in Studio and saving it without any changes) and then left for twenty minutes.  I’m thinking there is some sort of caching going within the server, and I’m not sure how it works.  Immediately reloading the map after adding the primary key did not work – the entities were still not selectable.  When I came back – the items in the viewers were now selectable.

So long story short, if again you cannot select map entities using the Autodesk FDO Provider for Oracle ensure that the source table has a primary key defined.  Hopefully this saves someone some grief =)

RADE includes a configurable web mapping interface that incorporates queries, reports, charts and basic editing tools. These “components” work with the data you have stored in one or more databases (Oracle, SQL Server, Access) and can be used by any application made with RADE. Right now RADE supports MapGuide 6.x, we are in the process however of extending the mapping interface to allow RADE applications to use multiple web mapping engines including MapGuide 6.x, MapGuide Enterprise 2009 / Mapguide Open Source 2.0 and Google Maps. Other mapping engines may be implemented in the future.  

An application made with RADE is a collection of queries, reports, charts, and of course users/groups managed by the integrated RADE security model. They are your custom solutions founded upon the bedrock that RADE provides.

A user with basic knowledge of their underlying database structure can design customized queries, reports, and charts in a matter of hours. Solutions can be as broad or as narrow as needed depending on the requirements of the organization. All of this work is done using RADE’s web-based administration tools.  

Before RADE, I worked for a provider of customizable desktop GIS, automated map standardization, and facilities management solutions for both government and industry. GIS/Geospatial implementations involved a lot of customized work, specific to particular clients, and could seldom be easily reused. This is when and where I came to realize that there had to be a better way to develop solutions.  

As RADE developed, we put it to the test and have been developing a series of standalone applications build on its framework. With RADE, we are saving time on projects which results in significant cost savings and rapid delivery for our clients.  

Out of curiosity one day, I connected RADE to my accounting and bug-tracking databases just to see what would happen. With a little research into the underlying databases — I was able to create both queries and reports on both data sources. No map required.  

As a developer I have projects that require me to extend RADE with more proprietary code. Take FloorView for example. FloorView is a complete vertical application built on top of RADE. It uses the RADE security/authentication system in addition to the RADE queries and reports — but is in itself a full application. This allowed us to leverage the existing functionality saving time, and money. In addition to this, FloorView appears as a RADE application when authorized users login to the site keeping all of the RADE based applications in one convenient location.  

In addition to FloorView a number of other vertical applications have been developed on top of, or using RADE. They include solutions for address management, disaster planning and recovery, sexual predator and offender tracking, crime mapping and analysis, oil and gas lease management and service request tracking and management.  

The best analogy I have for RADE is “Developer in a Box”.  Much of the work is already done for you…

With Mapguide Enterprise – I may have found a solution.  Recently I created a themed layer for municipalities.  There were twenty five municipalities in a single spatial table.  Each municipality had a unique code.   In an effort to bang these off quickly I added the twenty five municipalities and the filter condition.   Next I entered the twenty five legend labels.

Here is the developer friendly method I came up with creating a somewhat visually appealing color range.  In the first condition I set first set the transparency to 50%.  The transparency affects the resulting color.  Select the color combo and choose "More Colors".  This should bring up the custom color dialog.  First, select one of the "Custom Color" boxes and set the Hue to 0. Next I created a color I wanted to use as my starting shade.

At this point, I saved the color using the "Add to Custom Colors" button.  Your form should look something like this:

Click OK a couple of times and your first condition should be set.  Next I selected my next condition, and clicked the color combo again choosing "More Colors" once again.  This time, select the saved custom color and it should reset the form with the previously saved shade.  At this point I incremented the Hue by 20 to 20.  Click ok a couple of times and repeat.  I was not re-saving my shade, though I suppose that might have made sense.  Each time you repeat this process increase the hue by 20 until you hit the max of 239.

If needed, and you do hit the max hue start the process over starting with another complimentary base shade with a hue of 0. Using a hue increment of 40 might have resulted in more distinct colorations and may be a good idea.

I think it turned out OK, but then again as I stated earlier – I’m color stupid. 

Anyhow, I wanted to share the Pima County Mapguide Color Chart.  I can’t believe I hadn’t found this page sooner.  A fantastic, and crucial reference.   Tons of useful settings for the chart generator.  Show the hex codes for using the colors in HTML, Decimal RGB values for Mapguide Enterprise \ Autocad.  The colors under the Decimal heading are the RGB values – ordered in Red, Green, Blue.  I’ve been using the chart in this config.

Thanks Pima County.  Hopefully, you guys were able to come up with a programmatic method of creating this chart.  I’d hate to be the guy tasked with ‘eyedropping’ all these colors using Photoshop or something.

The decimal values by the way should work with AutoCAD too.

First off, my server was running IIS in 32 bit mode.  This was required to run the previous releases of Vault.  Once the install was complete, I started a dos window and set IIS back to 64 bit:

cscript.exe C:\Inetpub\AdminScripts\adsutil.vbs set W3SVC/AppPools/Enable32BitAppOnWin64 0

Then I ran an iisreset.

When I fired up my browser to check the vault service, there was a problem.  All it would display was "Service Unavailable".  At this point, even html files were not being served out.  Did a search on the Sourcegear forums and couldn’t find anything.  It’s been a long week and I was not firing on all cylinders – so I called up the support team.  (Good thing I renewed my maintenance, oh, this morning =D).  At this point Beth from SourceGear and I brainstormed through the situation and came to the following conclusions:

I was the first customer to call with x64 problems.  Yay for being first!

In IIS Manager, the application pool was disabled.  A check of the event logs showed the following information:

Source: W3SVC-WP

Event ID: 2268

Could not load all ISAPI filters for site/service.  Therefore startup aborted.

This prompted a check the web service extensions.  Sure enough, there was a web service extension there configured for ASP.NET pointing to the 32 Bit assemblies.  I prohibited this extension, and added a new one pointing to the 64 bit aspnet_isapi.dll.  Re-enable the application pool and load a page in the browser – still nothing.

Finally – the last step needed to get everything serving properly was to run the following from the x64 framework folder:

c:\windows\microsoft.net\framework64\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis -I -enable

So in summary the following steps should get your Vault server upgraded and running in native x64.  Bear in mind, my server is ONLY running Vault and these steps will break ASP.NET 1.1 applications (and lower) and possibly other code you might have running on the server.

   1: Backup SGVault and SGMaster databases (did I even need to include this?)

   2: Un-install the 32 bit Vault server

   3: Install the 64 bit Vault server

   4: Run cscript.exe C:\Inetpub\AdminScripts\adsutil.vbs set W3SVC/AppPools/Enable32BitAppOnWin64 0

   5: Run c:\windows\microsoft.net\framework64\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis -I -enable

   6: Start IIS Manager. 

   7: Double check the vault virtual directories to ensure the ASP.NET version is set to v2.0

   8: Prohibit the ASP.Net 32 bit isapi web service extension

   9: Add the ASP.Net 64 bit isapi web service extension

  10: run IISReset.exe

mmmm x64 goodness.  Thanks again to Beth for helping me work through this =)

It’s come to the point where I need to get to a one step build.  The first move in here was to implement Remotesoft Protector in my build process as protecting the assemblies ended up being one of the bigger pains in the butt when building.

So to kick things off, we need to work with MSBuild a little bit.  Originally, I tried using the <exec> call from MSBuild.  This didn’t give me the flexibility to loop through the files being generated.  So I started writing a custom build task.  Please read this great article on building custom tasks if you are new to this.

In summary, I defined a number of get/set methods for the globals I wanted the build engine to set, and in the Execute function I set it up to loop through the passed .DLL files, and execute Protector on each.  After the dlls were processed, they were moved out of the protected folder and the protected folder was removed.  If you are having problems getting your task running, check out this article on debugging  custom MSBuild tasks.

RADE uses a Visual Studio 2008 Web Deployment Project to deploy all of the files on build, so to implement the new task we need to do some editing in the project.  Open the project either with a text editor, or in Visual Studio by a right click on the project and choosing "Open Project File".  This part is quite simple.  First ensure that the assembly generated by building your task is in the same folder as the web deployment .wdproj file.  Next we need to add a line near the top of the web deployment project:

   1: <Project DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003" ToolsVersion="3.5">

   2:     <UsingTask TaskName="Landor.Deploy.BuildTasks.RemoteSoftProtector" AssemblyFile="Landor.Deploy.Buildtasks.dll"/>

   3:     <PropertyGroup>...

Here we point the UsingTask call to both the namespace and class of our protector code, as well assembly.  One more change to make.  Scroll to the end of the project and you should see a number of empty <Target> tags.  We need to add some code to the Name="Afterbuild" tag.

   1: <Target Name="AfterBuild">

   2:         <ItemGroup>

   3:             <DLLFiles Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\Release\Bin\*.dll"/>

   4:         </ItemGroup>

   5:         <RemoteSoftProtector

   6:             Files="@(DLLFiles)"

   7:             ProtectorEXEPath="C:\Program Files (x86)\Remotesoft\Protector\bin\protector.exe"

   8:             ProtectorParams="-neutral -string -cctor -clrversion v2.0.50727"

   9:             BinFolder="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\Release\Bin\"

  10:             Exclusions="AjaxControlToolkit.dll;Microsoft.Xml.Schema.Linq.dll;ZedGraph.Web.dll"

  11:         />

  12: </Target>

Two things occur here.  First, in the <Itemgroup> tag we are initializing a variable called DLLFiles, and it’s getting all the .DLL files in the project’s Release\Bin build folder.   Note that this process creates a semi-colon delimited list of full paths and files.

The next thing that occurs is actually calling the build task using the <RemoteSoftProtector> tag.  The tag name should/must match the name of the build tasks’ class.  Within this tag, we are setting all of the defined public properties, using the same name as those defined with our build task class.

This concludes a day of fun learning how MSBuild and custom tasks work.  Hopefully it helps you out a bit.  Bugs or comments, let me know.

Obfuscation was one of my first answers to this problem.  An obfuscator ships with Visual Studio Pro, free and there are many available on the market.  Obfuscation just didn’t do it for me.  I once helped a customer troubleshoot problems with one of their software solutions from an unnamed vendor using Reflector and walking through the obfuscated code.  This was really a painful experience, it does make it harder to figure out what is going on – but a friend of mine suggested a product that takes code protection one step further.

Hello Remotesoft Protector.  This product is pretty cool.  If you purchase the protector product you will receive three components.  Salamander .NET Decompiler, .NET Obfuscator, and .NET Protector.  Initially I was processing my assemblies with both the obfuscator and the protector.   Now a days, I pretty much only run my assemblies through the protector.

Once you’ve processed an assembly with the protector and you open it up in reflector things are going to look a little different.  Here is a little before and after action for you:

Now lets take a look at the same code, but after being protected:

That’s it.  Protector has made all your code go bye bye =)  What’s happened here?  As I understand it, Protector compiles all your managed .NET code into native code.  So, yes, is it possible to disassemble native binaries.  The difference here is the height of the bar – with plain .NET assemblies even my grand mother could get my code.  Reverse engineering a native assembly is a different story.  If someone with the skill to do that wants your code – well you must be writing some damn fine code.  It would probably be easier for that kind of person to write it from scratch =)

I’ve been working on increasing my Joel Test score lately.  One of my biggies is the one step build for RADE.  That sentence really doesn’t do the task justice.  The first step I’m tackling in the one step build is automating the process of protecting my .NET assemblies.  I could not find any resources on doing with with MSBuild.  Once I get it working, I’ll post some code.

All that said, I highly recommend you check out Protector if code protection is your thing.  The price is a little bit steep at 1899$ for 1-5 developers – but how much money have you invested in that one little DLL or EXE file?

One of my first tasks with Mapguide Enterprise was to build a map on the fly.  There were examples for adding layers to the map programmatically after the viewer had loaded, but this didn’t match the desired flow of my application.  Also, having come from years of Mapguide 6.5 and lower -  I was trying to avoid as much client side automation as possible.  The new Web Tier API was one of the things that excited me the most about Mapguide Enterprise / Mapguide Open Source

I’ve pasted the full, commented code here, as well as attached a solution containing the two projects needed.  Note these projects are Visual Studio 2008 projects.  Please feel free to use this code for learning purposes.  If it helps you out, link back to this article =)

If you choose instead to create a new project, be sure to add a project or DLL reference to the OSGeo.Mapguide.Objects.dll file we created previously .  The project I’ve included here contains both the sample Web Application project, as well as a copy of the .NET objects for Mapguide project.  It should be almost ready for the running.  Also ensure there is a reference to the Microsoft.XML.Schema.Linq namespace added to the project.  Also copy the required .DLL files from the Autodesk provided .NET viewer\bin folder to the web projects bin folder.  I did not include these here as I was not sure of the legality of doing so.

First load up the Sheboygan package into your Mapguide repository.  For the purposes of this example, open the Map definition in Mapguide Studio (or equivalent) and remove all the layers and layer groups from the map.  If you forget to do this you will get a Duplicate Object error when you load up the map.  Once that is done, you are ready to try out the code.

You should be able top unzip the zip and open the MGEDynamicAuthoringSample.sln file with Visual Studio.  Pretty much the only thing you may need to change are the constants to match your machine specific items:

   1: 'set some contants up - webconfig.ini, map viewer url, Map, Layout and Layer locatinos

   2: Private Const gszWebConfig As String = "C:\inetpub\MapGuideEnterprise2009\WebServerExtensions\www\webconfig.ini"

   3: Private Const gszViewerUrl As String = "http://localhost/mapguide2009/mapviewerdwf"

   4: Private Const gszMapResID As String = "Library://Samples/Sheboygan/Maps/Sheboygan.MapDefinition"

   5: Private Const gszLayerFolderResID As String = "Library://Samples/Sheboygan/Layers.Folder"

   6: Private Const gszLayoutResID As String = "Library://Samples/Sheboygan/Layouts/SheboyganAsp.WebLayout"

   7: 'lets run with Administrator for noew to eliminate permission problems.  Update your password as needed, or specify your

   8: 'own credentials if you are comfortable with setting up repository permissions.

   9: Private Const gszMGUser As String = "Administrator"

  10: Private Const gszMGPass As String = "admin"

Once you’ve changed all the needed settings, you should be good to go.  Run the code in Visual Studio and you should now see a map similar to the default Sheboygan map.  The key difference is that all of the layers will exist within the layer group we created programmatically.

Commented Codebehind:

   1: Imports OSGeo.MapGuide

   2: 'we still need to import and use system.xml, but don't really need to use many parts of the XML

   3: 'functionality =)

   4: Imports System.Xml

   5: Partial Public Class _Default

   6:     '' 'So for this example, we're going to use the sheboygan sample package available from 

   7:     '' ' http://mapguide.osgeo.org/download/releases/2.0.x-samples.  Be sure to grab both the 

   8:     '' ' dotnetviewstample.zip as well as the sheboygan.mgp.  Import the package using

   9:     '' ' the mapguide site administrator.  I've tried to use the default resource paths

  10:     '' ' but some tweaking of map will be needed

  11:     '' ' 

  12:     '' ' Open the map definition in Studio, and remove all the layers from Samples/Sheboygan/Maps/Sheboygan.MapDefinition 

  13:     '' ' we're going to add them dynamically    

  14:  

  15:     Inherits System.Web.UI.Page

  16:  

  17:     'set some contants up - webconfig.ini, map viewer url, Map, Layout and Layer locatinos

  18:     Private Const gszWebConfig As String = "C:\inetpub\MapGuideEnterprise2009\WebServerExtensions\www\webconfig.ini"

  19:     Private Const gszViewerUrl As String = "http://localhost/mapguide2009/mapviewerdwf"

  20:     Private Const gszMapResID As String = "Library://Samples/Sheboygan/Maps/Sheboygan.MapDefinition"

  21:     Private Const gszLayerFolderResID As String = "Library://Samples/Sheboygan/Layers.Folder"

  22:     Private Const gszLayoutResID As String = "Library://Samples/Sheboygan/Layouts/SheboyganAsp.WebLayout"

  23:     Private Const gszMGUser As String = "Administrator"

  24:     Private Const gszMGPass As String = "admin"

  25:  

  26:     ''' <summary>

  27:     ''' Page_Load does everything =)  Be sure to copy the dll files from your mapviewernet\bin folder to this projects bin folder.

  28:     ''' I did not include them as that might have violated some autodesk license.    

  29:     ''' </summary>

  30:     ''' <param name="sender"></param>

  31:     ''' <param name="e"></param>

  32:     ''' <remarks></remarks>

  33:     Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load

  34:  

  35:         'setup our siteconnection

  36:         Dim siteConnection As New MgSiteConnection

  37:         siteConnection = CreateMGSession(gszMGUser, gszMGPass, gszWebConfig)

  38:         Dim szSessionId As String = siteConnection.GetSite.CreateSession()

  39:  

  40:         'create our connection to the resource service

  41:         Dim resSvc As MgResourceService

  42:         resSvc = siteConnection.CreateService(MgServiceType.ResourceService)

  43:  

  44:         'get or set the resourceid of the map to load - in this case i'm just going to hard code it

  45:         Dim mapResourceID As New MgResourceIdentifier(gszMapResID)

  46:  

  47:         'load the existing map from the libary into an XML document

  48:         Dim mapXML As XmlDocument = GetResourceXML(resSvc, mapResourceID)

  49:  

  50:         'so at this point we have an XML document.  Let's try using our new OSGeo.Mapguide.Object classes

  51:         Dim newMapDefinition As New OSGeo.MapGuide.Objects.MapDefinition

  52:  

  53:         'to load the xml - call the shared/static method of MapDefinition.Parse on the OuterXML of the XMLDocument

  54:         newMapDefinition = OSGeo.MapGuide.Objects.MapDefinition.Parse(mapXML.OuterXml)

  55:  

  56:         'at this point we have a loaded .NET Object containing the map.  Try using Intellisense to see the different methods

  57:         'Lets add a layer group now

  58:  

  59:         'add any needed layer groups to the map.  In this example we're only going to add one.

  60:         Dim szLayerGroupName As String = "NewLayerGroup"

  61:         Dim szLayerGroupAlias As String = "My Layer Group Alias"

  62:         newMapDefinition = AddMapLayerGroup(newMapDefinition, szLayerGroupName, szLayerGroupAlias)

  63:  

  64:         'get or set the resourceid of the folder that contains our layers to add

  65:         Dim layerPath As New MgResourceIdentifier(gszLayerFolderResID)

  66:  

  67:         'so we now have a layer group in our map.  Lets add the layers

  68:         AddFolderOfLayers(resSvc, newMapDefinition, layerPath, szLayerGroupName)

  69:  

  70:         'at this point our map definition is loaded.  Lets convert it back to XML and save it to the session

  71:         Dim newMapDoc As New XmlDocument

  72:         newMapDoc.PreserveWhitespace = True

  73:  

  74:         Dim szXML As String = newMapDefinition.Untyped.ToString

  75:         newMapDoc.LoadXml(szXML)

  76:  

  77:         'create our 'new' resourceID in the session repository

  78:         Dim newMapResourceID As New MgResourceIdentifier("Session:" & szSessionId & "//" & mapResourceID.GetName() & "." & MgResourceType.MapDefinition)

  79:  

  80:         'save the newly created map in the session repository

  81:         CreateSessionResource(resSvc, newMapDoc, szSessionId, newMapResourceID.GetName, MgResourceType.MapDefinition)

  82:  

  83:         'now lets deal with the layout - we need to load up the library layout, update the map definition, and save it to the repository

  84:         Dim layoutResourceID As New MgResourceIdentifier(gszLayoutResID)

  85:         Dim newLayoutResourceID As New MgResourceIdentifier("Session:" & szSessionId & "//" & layoutResourceID.GetName() & "." & MgResourceType.WebLayout)

  86:  

  87:         'same process here, load the XML, parse the XML into the new .net Object

  88:         Dim layoutXML As XmlDocument = GetResourceXML(resSvc, layoutResourceID)

  89:  

  90:         Dim newLayout As New OSGeo.MapGuide.Objects.WebLayout

  91:         newLayout = OSGeo.MapGuide.Objects.WebLayout.Parse(layoutXML.OuterXml)

  92:  

  93:         'update the map resource ID in the layout to point to our newly created map in the session

  94:         newLayout.Map.ResourceId = newMapResourceID.ToString

  95:  

  96:         'finally go through the motinos to save the layout to the session

  97:         Dim newLayoutXML As New XmlDocument

  98:         newLayoutXML.PreserveWhitespace = True

  99:         newLayoutXML.LoadXml(newLayout.Untyped.ToString())

 100:  

 101:         CreateSessionResource(resSvc, newLayoutXML, szSessionId, newLayoutResourceID.GetName, MgResourceType.WebLayout)

 102:  

 103:         'our last step is to update the src attribute of the iframe with the information needed to load the newly created layout

 104:         SetupIFrame(newLayoutResourceID, szSessionId)

 105:     End Sub

 106:     Private Sub SetupIFrame(ByVal layoutResId As MgResourceIdentifier, ByVal szSessionID As String)

 107:         'build the URL based on our constants, and the layout + session info

 108:         Dim szUrl As String = gszViewerUrl & "?WEBLAYOUT=" & layoutResId.ToString & "&SESSION=" & szSessionID

 109:  

 110:         'update the iframe

 111:         ifrmViewer.Attributes.Add("src", szUrl)

 112:     End Sub

 113:     ''' <summary>

 114:     ''' Adds a layer group to the passed MapDefinition, and returns the updated MapDefinition Object.

 115:     ''' If desired, additional parameters could be added to this to customize the various other properties

 116:     ''' like ShowInLegend etc        

 117:     ''' </summary>

 118:     ''' <param name="mapDef">The loaded MapDefinition obect</param>

 119:     ''' <param name="szLayerGroupName">The Layer Name of the new layer group</param>

 120:     ''' <param name="szLayerGroupAlias">The Layer Alias of the new layer group</param>

 121:     ''' <returns>the passed MapDefinition, with the new layer group added</returns>

 122:     ''' <remarks></remarks>

 123:     Public Shared Function AddMapLayerGroup(ByVal mapDef As OSGeo.MapGuide.Objects.MapDefinition, ByVal szLayerGroupName As String, ByVal szLayerGroupAlias As String) As OSGeo.MapGuide.Objects.MapDefinition

 124:         Dim newLayGRoup As New OSGeo.MapGuide.Objects.MapLayerGroupType

 125:         newLayGRoup.Name = szLayerGroupName

 126:         newLayGRoup.LegendLabel = szLayerGroupAlias

 127:         newLayGRoup.ShowInLegend = "True"

 128:         newLayGRoup.ExpandInLegend = "True"

 129:         newLayGRoup.Visible = "True"

 130:         newLayGRoup.Group = ""

 131:         mapDef.MapLayerGroup.Add(newLayGRoup)

 132:         Return mapDef

 133:     End Function

 134:  

 135:     ''' <summary>

 136:     ''' Adds all layer definitions within the specified repository folder to the specified map

 137:     ''' </summary>

 138:     ''' <param name="resSvc">An open resource service connection</param>

 139:     ''' <param name="newMap">the MapDefinition object to modify</param>

 140:     ''' <param name="resLocation">The folder in the repository to search for layer objects</param>

 141:     ''' <returns>Update MapDefinition object</returns>

 142:     ''' <remarks></remarks>

 143:     Public Shared Function AddFolderOfLayers(ByRef resSvc As MgResourceService, ByVal newMap As OSGeo.MapGuide.Objects.MapDefinition, ByVal resLocation As MgResourceIdentifier, ByVal szLayerGroupName As String) As OSGeo.MapGuide.Objects.MapDefinition

 144:         'get the list of layers in the folder

 145:         Dim resList As OSGeo.MapGuide.Objects.ResourceList

 146:         'use GetAllResources to get a new resList

 147:         resList = GetAllResources(resSvc, resLocation, 1, MgResourceType.LayerDefinition)

 148:  

 149:         'resList items are pretty much a collection of resrouceDocumentLocalTypes so define one of these to use in the for loop

 150:         Dim resItem As OSGeo.MapGuide.Objects.ResourceList.ResourceDocumentLocalType

 151:  

 152:         'define a new layerResID to use in the loop

 153:         Dim layerResID As MgResourceIdentifier

 154:  

 155:         'for each layer - process it and add it to the map

 156:         Dim newLayerType As New OSGeo.MapGuide.Objects.MapLayerType

 157:         For Each resItem In resList.ResourceDocument

 158:             layerResID = New MgResourceIdentifier(resItem.ResourceId)

 159:             'for adding a layer to the map - we must use the MapLayerType object 

 160:             newLayerType = New OSGeo.MapGuide.Objects.MapLayerType

 161:             newLayerType.ResourceId = layerResID.ToString

 162:             'Be sure to specify the name of the 

 163:             newLayerType.Group = szLayerGroupName

 164:             newLayerType.Name = layerResID.GetName

 165:             newLayerType.Selectable = "false"

 166:             newLayerType.ShowInLegend = "true"

 167:             newLayerType.LegendLabel = layerResID.GetName

 168:             newLayerType.ExpandInLegend = "true"

 169:             newLayerType.Visible = "true"

 170:  

 171:             newMap.MapLayer.Insert(0, newLayerType)

 172:         Next

 173:         'return the updated MapDefinition

 174:         Return newMap

 175:     End Function

 176:  

 177:     'Some handy functions

 178:  

 179:     ''' <summary>

 180:     ''' Saves the specified XMLDocument to the session respository

 181:     ''' </summary>

 182:     ''' <param name="resSvc">The open resource service connection</param>

 183:     ''' <param name="xmlDoc">the XMLDocument to save to the session repository</param>

 184:     ''' <param name="szSessionId">String containing the session ID</param>

 185:     ''' <param name="szName">The name of the newly created object in the repository</param>

 186:     ''' <param name="szResourceType">the object type</param>

 187:     ''' <returns></returns>

 188:     ''' <remarks></remarks>

 189:     Public Shared Function CreateSessionResource(ByRef resSvc As MgResourceService, ByVal xmlDoc As XmlDocument, ByVal szSessionId As String, ByVal szName As String, ByVal szResourceType As String) As MgResourceIdentifier

 190:         Dim byteSource As MgByteSource = getByteSource(xmlDoc)

 191:         Dim resID As New MgResourceIdentifier("Session:" & szSessionId & "//" & szName & "." & szResourceType)

 192:         resSvc.SetResource(resID, byteSource.GetReader, Nothing)

 193:         Return resID

 194:     End Function

 195:  

 196:     ''' <summary>

 197:     ''' Returns an MgByteSource for the passed XMLDocument

 198:     ''' </summary>

 199:     ''' <param name="xmlDoc">The XMLDocument to convert</param>

 200:     ''' <returns>MgByteSource of the XMLDocumnet</returns>

 201:     ''' <remarks></remarks>

 202:     Public Shared Function getByteSource(ByVal xmlDoc As XmlDocument) As MgByteSource

 203:         Dim xmlStream As New IO.MemoryStream

 204:         xmlDoc.Save(xmlStream)

 205:         Dim arrBytes() As Byte = xmlStream.ToArray()

 206:         Dim Enc As Encoding = Encoding.UTF8

 207:         Dim docString As String = New String(Enc.GetChars(arrBytes))

 208:         arrBytes = Nothing

 209:  

 210:         Dim arrOutput(docString.Length - 1) As Byte

 211:         Dim nByteCount As Integer = Enc.GetBytes(docString, 0, docString.Length, arrOutput, 0)

 212:  

 213:         Dim byteSource As New MgByteSource(arrOutput, arrOutput.Length)

 214:         byteSource.SetMimeType(MgMimeType.Xml)

 215:  

 216:         Return byteSource

 217:     End Function

 218:  

 219:     ''' <summary>

 220:     ''' returns a loaded XML document of the specified resourceID

 221:     ''' </summary>

 222:     ''' <param name="resSvc">An open connection to the Mapguide Resource Service</param>

 223:     ''' <param name="resId">The MgResourceID of the entity in question</param>

 224:     ''' <returns>A loaded XMLDocument of the specified resource</returns>

 225:     ''' <remarks></remarks>

 226:     Public Shared Function GetResourceXML(ByRef resSvc As MgResourceService, ByVal resId As MgResourceIdentifier) As XmlDocument

 227:         Dim retDoc As New XmlDocument

 228:         retDoc.PreserveWhitespace = True

 229:  

 230:         Dim szXML As String = resSvc.GetResourceContent(resId).ToString()

 231:         Dim nByteCount As Integer

 232:         Dim arrByte(szXML.Length) As Byte

 233:         nByteCount = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(szXML, 0, szXML.Length, arrByte, 0)

 234:  

 235:         Dim memStream As New IO.MemoryStream(arrByte)

 236:         retDoc.Load(memStream)

 237:         Return retDoc

 238:     End Function

 239:  

 240:  

 241:     ''' <summary>

 242:     ''' Create a new mapguide session and return the resulting session ID

 243:     ''' </summary>

 244:     ''' <param name="szMGUser">Valid mapguide user name</param>

 245:     ''' <param name="szMGPass">Valid password for the specified mapguide user name</param>

 246:     ''' <param name="szMGWebTier">The path to the Mapguide web tier (valid on the mapguide web server</param>

 247:     ''' <returns>MgSiteConnection - the newly created mapguide site connection</returns>

 248:     ''' <remarks></remarks>

 249:     Public Shared Function CreateMGSession(ByVal szMGUser As String, ByVal szMGPass As String, ByVal szMGWebTier As String) As MgSiteConnection

 250:         MapGuideApi.MgInitializeWebTier(szMGWebTier)

 251:         Dim siteConnection As New MgSiteConnection()

 252:         siteConnection.Open(New MgUserInformation(szMGUser, szMGPass))

 253:         Return siteConnection

 254:     End Function

 255:  

 256:     ''' <summary>

 257:     ''' Converts MgReader to XMLDocument

 258:     ''' </summary>

 259:     ''' <param name="byteReader">Loaded MgByteReader</param>

 260:     ''' <returns>Loaded XMLDocument</returns>

 261:     ''' <remarks></remarks>

 262:     Public Shared Function ConvertMgReaderXml(ByVal byteReader As MgByteReader) As XmlDocument

 263:         Dim szXML As String

 264:         Try

 265:             szXML = byteReader.ToString

 266:         Catch ex As Exception

 267:             Throw ex

 268:         End Try

 269:         Dim nByteCount As Integer

 270:         Dim arrByte(szXML.Length) As Byte

 271:         Try

 272:             nByteCount = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(szXML, 0, szXML.Length, arrByte, 0)

 273:         Catch ex As Exception

 274:             Throw ex

 275:         End Try

 276:  

 277:         Dim memStream As New IO.MemoryStream(arrByte)

 278:         Dim retDoc As New XmlDocument

 279:         retDoc.PreserveWhitespace = True

 280:         Try

 281:             retDoc.Load(memStream)

 282:         Catch ex As Exception

 283:             memStream.Close()

 284:             memStream.Dispose()

 285:             Throw ex

 286:         End Try

 287:         memStream.Close()

 288:         memStream.Dispose()

 289:         Return retDoc

 290:     End Function

 291:  

 292:     ''' <summary>

 293:     ''' Gets a ResourceList for each item in the specified repository folder.

 294:     ''' </summary>

 295:     ''' <param name="resSvc">The opened resource server connection</param>

 296:     ''' <param name="resId">The MgResourceId of the folder we want to enumerate</param>

 297:     ''' <param name="nDepth">The folder depth to enumerate.  From the Mapguide Web API Reference:

 298:     ''' (int) Recursion depth, relative to the specified resource.

 299:     '''* If the resource is a document, depth must be set to 0.

 300:     '''* If the resource is a folder:

 301:     '''      o If the depth is equal to 0, only information about the specified folder is returned.

 302:     '''      o If the depth is greater than 0, information about the folder and its descendants up to the specified depth are returned.

 303:     '''* If the depth is -1, information about the folder and all its descendants is returned.

 304:     ''' </param>

 305:     ''' <param name="szType">Again from the Mapguide Web API Reference:

 306:     '''     (String/string) Type of the resource to be enumerated. (Case sensitive.) See MgResourceType  for valid types. If the type is a folder, 

 307:     '''     you must include the trailing slash.

 308:     '''     Or, this can be set to null, in which case information about all resource types is returned

 309:     ''' </param>

 310:     ''' <returns>OSGeo.Mapguide.Objects.ResourceList of resource entities</returns>

 311:     ''' <remarks></remarks>

 312:     Public Shared Function GetAllResources(ByRef resSvc As MgResourceService, ByVal resId As MgResourceIdentifier, ByVal nDepth As Integer, ByVal szType As String) As OSGeo.MapGuide.Objects.ResourceList

 313:         Dim retDoc As XmlDocument

 314:         retDoc = ConvertMgReaderXml(resSvc.EnumerateResources(resId, nDepth, szType))

 315:  

 316:         Dim resourceList As New OSGeo.MapGuide.Objects.ResourceList

 317:         resourceList = OSGeo.MapGuide.Objects.ResourceList.Parse(retDoc.OuterXml)

 318:         Return resourceList

 319:     End Function

 320: End Class

If you have any questions or comments – feel free to let me know.

One of my first tasks with Mapguide was to add some layers to the map, before the viewer had loaded up, save that map in the session repository and then build a layout for the map – again in the session repository.  I tried various ways of working with the XML provided by the resource  service, and read through many of the e-mails on the topic from the Osgeo list, but I just couldn’t get it to work.  So I set out on my mission to get an object based method of getting things done.  First, as per the developer documentation I tried out xsd.exe.  XSD allowed me to get a class skeleton created, but there was a lot of work needed to a rounded API running.   I had been recently investigating the new functionality Microsoft was exposing with LINQ – and I came across LINQ to XSD.  For more information on Linq to XSD the Microsoft XML team blog is a good place to start. 

So download LINQ to XSD Alpha 0.2 and install it.  You will need to have .NET 3.5 installed first.  In addition to that I’m using Visual Studio 2008 Pro.  I have tried these steps with both Mapguide Enterprise 2008 and  2009.  I have to assume the resulting code will work with Mapguide Open Source as well.

Setting up your project

At this point you should be able to fire up Visual Studio and create a new project.  If you are a VB developer, I’m afraid you’re going to have to dive into a bit of C#, as its the only support language right now.  It’s not that bad.

The new project window should look a little like this:

Choose LINQ to XSD Library and give the project a name.  Once the new project is loaded, create a new folder called XSD.  Browse to your Mapguide 2009/OS 2.0 server Schema folder (on a default installation its c:\Program Files\Autodesk\MapGuideEnterprise2009\Server\Schema).  Take a these files and drag them into the new XSD folder.

Back in Visual Studio, select all of the XSD files.  Look in the property window and change the "Build Action" to be "LinqToXsdSchema".

Building the project

At this point, right click on the project in Visual Studio, and choose build.  You should have 173 errors.  This is caused by having multiple, similar versions of some of the XSDs.  Let’s exclude the following files:

• FdoProviderCapabilities-1.0.0.xsd
• LayerDefinition-1.0.0.xsd
• LayerDefinition-1.1.0.xsd
• LoadProcedure-1.0.0.xsd
• SymbolDefinition-1.0.0.xsd

Rebuild the project and we should be down to five errors.  I have found that by excluding the following files I was able to get the code to generate:

• ApplicationDefinition-1.0.0.xsd
• ApplicationDefinitionInfo-1.0.0.xsd
• SymbolLibrary-1.0.0.xsd

For my purposes, I was not too concerned about being able to work with these entity types programmatically (at least at this time).  If anyone is able to work around and would like to share it, please let me know.

Build the project again, and we will see three new errors.  This time we will need to dig into the generated code to correct them.  For each of the three errors we will want to change the public string name.  For example:

   1: public string DataType {

We would change to:

   1: public string Datatype {

Change the case of the property name in each of the three errors and we are just about there.  At this point you should have around 42904 lines of code in this file.  Good thing I didn’t try to do this manually.   Take a copy of all these wonderful lines o’ code, and we’re going to paste them into a new class. For the sake of this example, I renamed class1.cs to be OSGeo.Mapguide.Objects.cs and pasted the code in there.  I also wrapped all the code in a namespace to match the file name.

If you need to find the generated code, take a look in the obj folder within your project.  You should find a file named LinqToXsdSource.cs in the appropriate build folder.

Next we need to prevent the XSDs from rebuilding each time.  Select all of your XSD files again, and change the "Build Action" to "None".    Building the project at this point will generate fifty some odd errors.  We can eliminate these by doing a search and replace on global:: and replacing it with an empty string.  Build the project again, and you will find one error.  Simply remove the "global." from the line in question and the project will now build.

At this point, you should have a nice .dll file which you can reference from your projects and access many of the Mapguide entity types using objects.  Be sure to grab a copy of Microsoft.XmlSchema.Linq.dll and distribute that with your new DLL.

This project maybe have some issues.  I have worked with LayerDefinitions, MapDefinitions, and WebLayouts – but not tested many of the classes here yet.  If you have any feedback or enhancements you want to share – please let me know!

In the next week I will post some examples on how to build maps and layouts – before the viewer has loaded.

I saved a copy of the dynamically generated maps and layers to the library repository.  Everything checked out.  The layers were marked as selectable.

Next step was to check out the server logs on my Mapguide server.    We have a nice error occurring a lot: Error: An exception occurred in FDO component. String does not represent a valid filter.

So into the code I go.  I ripped out all my dynamic authoring calls, and the map loads and selects no problem.  As I was starting to suspect, my code was to blame – and there is something specific to my filters on the layers:

   1: newLayer.VectorLayerDefinition.Filter = "BLDG_ID = """ & szBldgID & """ AND BLDG_FLOOR "" IN(0," & nFloorNumber.ToString & ")"""

I had assumed that FDO had an IN clause, did a quick check in Mapguide Studio’s condition builder and didn’t see one.  Fair enough, in this case I can get by with two equals conditions in my select as the list of conditions will only ever consist of two values.

   1: newLayer.VectorLayerDefinition.Filter = "BLDG_ID = " & szBldgID & " AND (BLDG_FLOOR = 0 OR BLDG_FLOOR = " & nFloorNumber.ToString & ")"

   2: 'newLayer.VectorLayerDefinition.Filter = "BLDG_ID = " & szBldgID & " AND BLDG_FLOOR  IN(0," & nFloorNumber.ToString & ")"""

Long story short, if you are selecting items in the map viewer that are supposed to be selectable, check your server logs.

First off, you need to ensure that IIS 7 is installed on the Vista machine, you also need to specify ASP.NET and the ISAPI components be installed. To start off, run the web tier installation and choose a manual installation. I did a custom install, and did not install the php, site admin, or java components. I installed my web tier to C:\inetpub\MapGuideEnterprise2009. It is critical that you do not install it to the default location in program files (x86), or the Vista permissions will break everything. You will know this has occurred because your map will show all question marks in the layer legend, and no map data.  In the server log you will see session timeout errors.  If you do install it to the default location, just move the entire folder structure out of program files (x86).

Finish the installer, this should deploy the needed Mapguide files. I noticed a bit of a delay in the copying new files portion of the installer. Seemed to be hung for several minutes, but it did complete.

Now start up IIS manager (start / run / inetmgr)

This is the ‘hard’ part. It looks nothing like what I was expecting.  IIS Internet Manager has been pretty static for the past, oh ten years…

A default web site should be configured – double click on the computer in the left pane to expand the tree.

First off – we’re going to create a new application pool specifically for Mapguide. This will save us some problems down the road. If you are not familiar with them, application pools are a newer concept introduced in IIS 6. Each application in IIS requires an application pool. Only one version of the .NET framework can be used by a single application pool. We’re going to set this pool to use .NET 2.0 (which also includes 3.0 and 3.5)

The most important reason for a new application pool is to set this pool/worker process to run in 32 bit mode. Select the new application pool and choose Advanced Settings. Change Enable 32-Bit Applications to true.

If you do not set the pool to run as 32 bit, you will get an error message that says:

"The page you are requesting cannot be served because of the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) map policy that is configured on the Web server. The page you requested has a file name extension that is not recognized, and is not allowed."

A new behavior in IIS7 is a change between virtual directories and applications. In IIS6 and below, we would create a virtual directory, and then add an application to the properties of that virtual directory. With IIS7, we right click and instead of choosing Add Virtual Directory we choose Add Application. So let’s add a new application to the Default Web Site.

For simplicity, I’m re-creating the structure exactly as defined on my Windows 2003 server. Once the application is created, right click on it and choose Add Application. So right click on the default web site and choose add application. Call it Mapguide2009 and choose the newly created mapguide2009 application pool.

Next we need to right click on the Mapguide2009 application and create two new applications. One called mapviewerdwf, and mapviewerajax. Each of these apps must point to the same location – the mapviewernet folder. (by default its location is C:\Program Files (x86)\Autodesk\MapGuideEnterprise2009\WebServerExtensions\www\mapviewernet – but we need to use c:\inetpub\wwwroot\ MapGuideEnterprise2009\WebServerExtensions\www\mapviewernet) The other difference is that for each application, we must set the default document to be dwfviewer.aspx and ajaxviewer.aspx respectively. To set the default document select the new application in the tree and double click Default Document in the central pane. Enter the appropriate default document.

Next we need to setup a script mapping for the FCGI. Select the Mapguide2009 application and we are going to create yet another application. Call this application mapagent. This should act like adding an application to an existing folder in IIS6. Next, double click on Handler Mappings. In the top right, select Add Script Map. On the script mapping form, enter MapAgent.fcgi (or *.fcgi) for the request path. Browse to and select the isapi_MapAgent.dll from the www\mapagent folder. Under request restrictions, you can also set the verbs to GET,POST.

Click Ok and you will be prompted to enable the ISAPI extension. Click on yes.

At this point – the Mapguide 2009 web tier should be installed and running. Try it out by starting up a browser and hitting http://localhost/mapguide2009/mapagent/index.html. Next you can access maps using http://localhost/mapguide2009/mapviewerdwf or mapviewerajax.

I found this problem when trying to programmatically retrieve a feature set of  the current selection.  When the SetFilter method on the MgFeatureQueryOptions call was issued I was receiving a  "Not Implemented" error.  After a bit of back and forth with Steve Dang at Autodesk he gave me a list of valid  database property types for the SetFilter call:

   1: //The problem is from the web tier.  Note that the  MgSelectionBase::GenerateFilter method

   2: //will throw an  MgNotImplementedException if the property type of the filtered data

   3: //is not one of the following types: 

   4:  

   5: MgPropertyType::Int16

   6: MgPropertyType::Int32

   7: MgPropertyType::Int64

   8: MgPropertyType::String

   9: MgPropertyType::Single

  10: MgPropertyType::Double

This got me looking at my underlying fields, and eventually I noticed in the ODBC data connection the key fields for the table in question contained a  number of columns that just should not have been there.  The problem field was a date column – which would explain why the SetFilter call was throwing and error.  Upon closer inspection I realized that these columns were constrained with "Not Null" constraints. 

So I changed my source database and removed the not null constraints.  Went back to studio to refresh the table – but the columns were still there.  Long story short – there is possibly another defect somewhere in Mapguide around data connections.  They seem to not fully update when you make changes to them.  However, creating a new data connection and pointing to the same SQL server database now shows keys without the null columns.

Moving forward in my code now generated the selection filter and things were good.

I proposed to Autodesk that they auto populate the key fields but then allow the user to modify this list, in addition to correcting the not null constraint issue.   It seems as though all primary and foreign keys are being found for the table/view and added to the list.  Fair enough, however in the view I was working with I had something like 10+ keys (due to the joins of data tables, as well as the needed lookup tables).   In reality – I only was interested in one of those fields.  Filtering based on that one field was enough to uniquely identify the data in question.  I’m not really familiar with the way FDO does things so this might not be possible.