An Avanade Blogging Community

I have not seen anyone else on the web do this, and I spent a couple days trying to figure this out.
Given an out of box Sharepoint Approval workflow, I wanted to be able to update the Approval task programmatically, and have the status update to Approved or Rejected as appropriate.
Simple, right? Not so much. You can't update the task directly, and there is no documentation to speak of on the workflow.
I compared the extended properties of an approved & rejected task and found out that the internals of the workflow use the following symbols to represent the Approved and Rejected state:
Approved = "#"
Rejected = "@"

Makes perfect sense!!!! Good grief...

Anyway, here's what you really want: the code.

SPListItem task = pendingItem.Tasks[1]; // Modify this code to get the most recent task in case an item is edited

Hashtable data = new Hashtable();

            data["Comments"] = "whoop de do";

            data["PercentComplete"] = 1.0f;

            data["Completed"] = "TRUE";

            data["Status"] = "Completed";

// Use one or the other

            data["TaskStatus"] = "@";   // Rejected

            data["TaskStatus"] = "#";   // Approved

SPWorkflowTask.AlterTask(task, data, true);

I haven't used standalone blogging software before, but wanted to try to consolidate my blog posting, manage posts, and have a nice UI to generate new posts.

The first software I've tried out is Microsoft's LiveWriter

Has a nice interface, picked up my Community Server blog and my Blogspot blog with no problems...

Try it out, it's free!

Buck Hodges posted a very useful CHM for those of us developing against the new TFS 2008 object model. I was looking for a way to get test data out of the object model, and it is much improved over 2005!

To get data you need to do the following process:
1) get an instance of team foundation server
2) get an instance of the IBuildServer service
3) retrieve an instance of IBuildDetail associated with the build uri
4) retrieve an instance of the IConfigurationSummary for the specific platform and flavor desired
5) iterate over the list of ITestSummary objects in the IConfigurationSummary!

Here's some sample code to get your test data out of your build, I learned about the 'Information' nodes via the chm, and am very happy with the ability to pull out different types of data without having to perform the check manually myself.

Happy coding!

using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Common;
...
TeamFoundationServer tfs = new TeamFoundationServer(  TFS_URL, TFS_CREDENTIALS );
tfs.Authenticate();

IBuildServer buildSvr = tfs.GetService(typeof(IBuildServer));
Uri myBuildURI = new Uri("vstfs:///Build/Build/YOURBUILDURI");
IBuildDetail buildDetail = buildSvr.GetAllBuildDetails( buildURI );
 IConfigurationSummary cfgSum = InformationNodeConverters.GetConfigurationSummary( buildDetail, FLAVOR, PLATFORM);
foreach( ITestSummary testSum in cfgSum.TestSummaries)
{
...
}

We will be walking through some code from the Video.Show folks. Additionally, Mike Jablonski will be demoing some of the cool WiiMote applications from Johnny Lee

We will be giving away a couple free WiiMote/Bluetooth development starter kits!

The demo is at 6:30 pm at USC, Kaprelian Hall #140

Free food & drink!

Hosted by UPE Honor Society and Avanade

For students! Free download of Microsoft VS2008, Server 2003, Expression Studio, and XNA Game Studio

A great getting started on Silverlight Streaming on MSDN:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb851621.aspx

Thanks to everyone who attended the Avanade Technology Presentation hosted by the UPE Computer Science Honor Society at the University of Southern California.

Attached, please find the code and presentation slide deck used at the event

The code was originally created by Jesse Hsia, Greg Ferguson and Amber Israelsen of Avanade, and used in a technology presentation at UCI as well.

Win an Ipod Nano (Silver 4GB) - open for current USC students only.

Download the code from the presentation and improve it, or create a new Facebook application using .Net. Submit your code to me by 12/31/07. Winner will be announced by 1/7/07

Requirements:

Be a current USC student
Make a Facebook application you would want to use!
Use the Facebook Toolkit
Use .Net (C# or VB) as the main programming language
Application can be either hosted in Facebook or standalone-- using Silverlight and/or WPF will definitely give you an edge

Good luck!

I ran into a situation recently where I had a Windows service running under a domain service account, e.g., MyDomain\SvcUser. As part of its operation, the service needed to clear the Event Log after reading its contents. By default, non-administrative accounts cannot clear an event log.
Granting 'clear' access on an event log to a service account is not as simple as it might sound.
After reading this post by Rory McCaw, I learned that the permissions are controlled by a custom security descriptor stored in the registry.
The key is stored here:
MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\EventLog\[CustomLognName]\CustomSD

This applies to Window Server 2003, apparently the security on the event log has changed from the prior version.

In the CustomSD key, you will find some long string like this:
O:BAG:SYD:(D;;0xf0007;;;AN)(D;;0xf0007;;;BG)(A;;0xf0007;;;SY)(A;;0x7;;;BA)(A;;0x7;;;SO)(A;;0x3;;;IU)(A;;0x3;;;SU)(A;;0x3;;;S-1-5-3)
(from Rory's blog)

The first part is the 'Owner' ACL [ O:BA ], which tells you the Owner is the Builtin Administrators
The next part is the 'Group' ACL [G:SY], the primary group is the Local System account
The last, long group is the Discretionary ACL (or DACL) D:(...)(...) which grants discretionary access on a user-by-user basis.
Each DACL entry is in the form (A;;0x7;;;S-1-5-21-467819145....)
which is Allow or Deny; then the permissions (for the event log, 0x7 is full control); followed by the SID of the user to be granted/denied the permission.

To put this information to use, I have created a command line utility that allows one to easily update the permissions on an event log. I will post some code here when I have time to rewrite it. Here are some of the highlights:


So now your service accounts can have full control over an event log without having administrative rights on the computer.

My unanswered question is this: what class will allow me to manipulate the security descriptor directly? When I attempt to instantiate one of the security descriptor classes like this:


Trying to convert the security descriptor back to a SDDL string results in some extra stuff in the string:
Input:
O:BAG:SYD:(D;;0xf0007;;;AN)(D;;0xf0007;;;BG)(A;;0xf0007;;;SY)(A;;0x7;;;BA)(A;;0x7;;;SO)(A;;0x3;;;IU)(A;;0x3;;;SU)(A;;0x3;;;S-1-5-3)
Outputs:
O:BAG:SYD:(D;;CCDCLCSDRCWDWO;;;AN)(D;;CCDCLCSDRCWDWO;;;BG)(A;;CCDC;;;S-1-5-3)(A;;CCDC;;;IU)(A;;CCDC;;;SU)(A;;CCDCLCSDRCWDWO;;;SY)(A;;CCDCLC;;;BA)(A;;CCDCLC;;;SO)

Does anyone know how to manipulate the SDDL correctly via .Net?

It took me a little while to figure out how to share the data connection on the Dash with my laptop. It's not blazing (EDGE ~128k) but it's better than nothing!

It's very simple, (i'm using Window Mobile 6, but steps should be the same for WM5); go to Start->Accessories->Internet Sharing

Click connect! That's it! I'm using the USB cable connection for a more reliable connection than Bluetooth, but you can use Bluetooth too.

Yes, it's simple, but it took a little bit of digging for someone new to Windows Mobile; hopefully this saves someone else a few minutes to figure out.

The second time was a charm. On Friday 4/27/07, I passed the 70-554, part two of two in the MCSD.NET upgrade to MCPD EA series. This was my second time taking it as I narrowly missed passing it two weeks ago by about 3 questions.

The first part of the exam was fairly straight forward for me: 28 questions on "Distributed Applications Development" (70-529) - a lot of questions about WSE 3.0, SOAP headers, and the difference between SoapRPC and SoapDocument encoding. Transcender exam prep worked very well for those questions.

My trouble came with the second half of the test, "Designing and Developing Enterprise Applications by Using the Microsoft.NET Framework." (70-549) One question described a process and required a flowchart to be filled in for that process. Questions around performance testing require one to determine which performance indicators are relevant, and to infer importance from any subtleties in the problem statement. For example, a question about which methods should be unit-tested on a third party component might mention that "new methods were added, and overall performance has been improved." The developer should infer that this means the components internals must have changed and thus one should unit test all the methods, not just the new ones.
It is important to read the questions in this second half thoroughly and to consider your answers carefully. There is plenty of time (about 90 minutes for 28 questions), so make use of it and good luck.