Visual Studio Office Tools and Word 2003 using deserialization, nightmare end

I finally fixed the issue I reported in the post "New milestone reached in the development of the authoring tool for Tech Head Brothers French portal ". I am still waiting some feedback from Peter (he might be in holidays).

I am getting an exception when I try to deserialize an object. This exception is due to a security problem.

What I did is to use SGen tool from Daniel Cazzulino described in this post: "Strongly-typed, event-rising, design-time generated custom XmlSerializers (even more than Whidbey sgen!) ". I also used Mike Woodring code described in the post: "The Last Configuration Section Handler I'll Ever Need". I mixed all and modified XmlSerializerSectionHandler from Mike so that it doesn't return a fixed IDictionary but an object. With reflection I can determine which Handler to instantiate, then from this handler I call it method Create and I get something like that to deserialize an object from the configuration file:

So the good point at the end is that I have a configuration file looking like a normal one, that I can get configuration settings from even deserialize object from it. Nice.

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An article by Laurent Kempé 1 Comment

What Didier forgot to say !

Thats right that we had some great time yesterday!!! But before that we worked like hell. Thursday , Friday, Monday for a total of more then 50 hours of workwith Philippe. Lorenz joined us on Monday. And today it was the same (9AM to 11PM). So I think we deserved that free half a day an dwe enjoyed it.

NEWS: working session in Zurich :-)

We had a very hard working session yesterday (actually half a day off, with some wakeboard on the lake, more pictures to come!) in Zurich. We began with one of our special "brainstorming"...in the McDo ;-) And yes we know "supersize me". And no, we don't really care ;-)

left: philippe, middle: laurent, right: lorenz (i'm behind the camera, the "big tasty" belongs to me)

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An article by Laurent Kempé 3 Comments

Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 refresh with the Team System

It seems that we will be updated on Whidbey :-) Nice. I will add to my development an evoluation of the Team System tools.

Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 refresh with Team System

Rick LaPlante announced an upcoming refresh to the Visual Studio Community Technology Preview:

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New milestone reached in the development of the authoring tool for Tech Head Brothers French portal

In this version we now have:

• a toolbar hosting Preview, Zip, Post plugin
• a dropdown connecting to a web service at first click to get back the articles categories, used before posting
• a web service to post the article using DIME

Internal changes:

• everything is configured in a config file now
• XML Schema is associated with Word at runtime, read from config file
• All source code colorization is done through configured properties

Here is a picture of Word 2003 with the toolbar:

I am still facing an issue. I am able to read configuration files from the assembly, but when I want to deserialize one part of my configuration file I get an exception saying: "There is an error in XML document" and the inner exception is "Security error". It seems to be a French problem cause I could find someone having the same issue in the newsgroup, here. I emailed Peter Torr that replied to this newsgroup message, I hope ot get an answer and a solution ;)

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Wireless IntelliMouse Explorer with Fingerprint Reader Windows USB

I worked in the fingerprint biometric business for almost 4 years and I am happy to see that Microsoft will deliver fingerprint readers. I am curious to see which company is providing the hardware, the algorithm and the software. Maybe the result of the acquisition of the BAPI technology from I/OSoftware. I am also curious to see if the reader is an optical one or a silicon one. I would really like them to provide us with the SDK based on BAPI so that I can develop a new version of the Windows login i developed in the past.

ActiveWin.com Exclusive: New Microsoft Hardware Fall 2004 Lineup Photos

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An article by Laurent Kempé 3 Comments

O/R frameworks

This evening, I mean morning, it is already almost 1 AM, I read the article about NHibernate from Justin Gehtland on TheServerSide.NET. Btw it is a good introduction. I am playing now for some time with O/R frameworks. And i must say that I appreciate tools like NHibernate but also tools like Data Tier Modeler. This tool is great to use for new projects, but what about projects that already have a database? In this case you might use tools like NHibernate. What I really like in DTM is that you use a UML tool to model your domain. Then the tool consume this model and generate all the plumbing needed to store your objects states. So you really deal with your domain objects and do not need to create mapping files or things out of your domain. There is another project that Ikeep an eye on is Neo, it is really similar to DTM. If you look at the ppt presentations of both you will see the idea are the same.

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Webpart portal personalization

In some portal scenarios you might want to have only webmaster(s) manage the layout of the site. So your goal is  to avoid that a registered user change it.

With Webparts you might build portal that match this scenario like this:

Add to you web.config:

<system.web>
    ...

    <webParts>
        <personalization>
            <authorization>
                <allow roles="webmasters" verbs="enterSharedScope"/>
            </authorization>
        </personalization>
    </webParts>
    ...

</system.web>

This configuration set that only users with the role webmaster might change the layout.

Then you might place a WebPartPageMenu control on your site. This control is listing all the personalisation to the webpart system you might do as a logged in user. In the case of a user in the role of webmasters, the WebPartPageMenu will have one of it entries set to: Show Share view.
You can select this entry and then Design Page Layout to be able to design the layout of the page for the user the anonymous users.

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Free software

I am reading through the different blog I subscribed to and saw that interesting entry. I have so many discussions at work concerning Free Software compared to Microsoft way of doing business with Not Free Software. Thats Life, real Life. Another way of seeing the real life is pointed by an opened letter from Clemens Vasters, here. So true.

About FREE software ...

An excerpt from the download page of MandrakeLinux:

"Since Mandrakelinux is an Open Source product, it needs your financial contribution. Developing a Linux distribution is very costly, so it's up to the community of users to ensure its health."

They even add: "Before downloading our products, we ask for your support by joining the Mandrakelinux Users Club. The Club was created to fund the development of the Mandrakelinux distribution and to pay the salaries of employees who are dedicated to "external" Free Software projects ... "

They conclude: "Free Software can only remain healthy with your financial support"

Hhhhmmm, ... "free" they say!!!

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An article by Laurent Kempé 7 Comments

Development process

I am currently working on our whole development process and I found this article really interesting. Thanks Dirk for the pointer to the article.

The development process of Windows Server 2003

Found on Channel 9 a link to a very interesting article:
http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winserver2k3_gold2.asp
Great stuff!

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