Entries for the '.NET Tools' Category

SAPIEN Technologies recently released a free tool to create GUIs for your PowerShell cmdlets. Here's a blog post with a screenshot. It's called PrimalForm.

It can be downloaded from here. (quick registration needed)

I've been using the free edition of the Krypton Toolkit from Component Factory. I spruced up v1.0 of PainlessSVN with it. It's what gave it the Office 2003 look.

I like to support smaller shops over larger ones, and that's why I'm going with them instead of somebody like Infragistics.

Here's the link to the criteria to qualify for a free license:

http://www.componentfactory.com/freecopy.php

I had a LOT of people ask me about how to recover/reset passwords in a damaged DotNetNuke (DNN) installation. I wrote a quick Winform app to do just this. It's fairly crude, but it get things done. I cleaned up the code a bit and wrote intructions in the read me file.

Here is the opening screen:

Here is the screen after you press the Get Users button

This is what it looks like when a password is ok. The password will show up in green.

This is what it looks like when the password is damaged and can't be recovered through the ASP.NET Membership APIs. The Reset Password will reset the password in the DotNetNuke database, then the UI will display the randomly generated password you can email to your user.

The zip file contains the source. It is a Visual Studio 2008 C# project.

Please read the "Read Me.txt" file, inside the zip file, for how to setup the config file. This program will not work if the config file is not setup correctly! I didn't want to spend time creating a wizard to create the configuration file.

Internet Explorer users - Please right-click on the links below and select "Save Target As"

DNNUserManager_source.zip

DNNUserManager_binaries.zip

Today, I had the opportunity to be the hero/savior of the day. The marketing department of my employer has been sending some data to be analyzed by a third party. One of the files was a monster 2.2 gig text file.

None of the text editors that we tried could cope with this titanic file. So at a conference call, we were going back and forth trying to find a solution to this dilemma. I suggested to split it up into more manageable chunks. I got Text File Splitter and let it work on this file.

So it took about 36 minutes to split this file into eleven (11) 200 meg chunks, and a remainder 68 meg file.

Nice!

Here are the binaries for the Subversion RSS Log post commit hook that I created in C#:

 SubversionRssLog.zip

This doesn't have a readme.txt yet, but I wanted to put up a download for those that wanted to play with it right away. This requires that you have .NET 2.0 installed in the machine that is running Subversion. So the instructions are:

1. Unzip this file into your repository's hooks directory
2. Edit the post-commit.exe.config file
3. Let it rip!

Enjoy!

PS. Feel free to give me feedback on this.

I finally nailed down the last bit of the wierd issue that I had with the custom Subversion post-commit hook that I wrote using C#. The cofiguration file was being read correctly in development, but that part of the code was failing on the Subversion server's hook directory. Here's actual exception from the Application Event Log:

Event Type:    Error
Event Source:    .NET Runtime 2.0 Error Reporting
Event Category:    None
Event ID:    5000
Date:        4/27/2008
Time:        12:06:29 AM
User:        N/A
Computer:    VULCAN
Description:
EventType clr20r3, P1 post-commit.exe, P2 1.0.0.0, P3 481409ae, P4 mscorlib, P5 2.0.0.0, P6 471ebc5b, P7 3404, P8 d8, P9 system.io.filenotfoundexception, P10 NIL.

I ended up removing all the code that used the System.Configuration namespace for native .NET 2.0 reading stuff, and using Nini instead.

This is now working correctly.

I just read that a Google Group was created for .NET Reactor. Here's the link to the blog where I read it: Agile Micro ISV Blog and here is the link to the .NET Reactor Support Group

"I heard from the chap who develops Reactor a few months ago, and it seems he has some health issues that mean he has to spend some time in hospital. As such, I'm sure I speak for all Reactor users when I wish him a speedy recovery. Being a micro ISV is tough, especially when you're ill."

I share those those feelings as well. I just wish that this information would have gotten out earlier. I know that there were a lot of us micro ISVs that had a few moments of fear wondering if this tool was going to disappear.

I had promised a potential customer that I would blog about Infralution Licensing System, a few days ago. Well, here it is.

I want to first talk about what is out there, and why I decided on Infralution. I had a 4 item list for my criteria:

1. The system/framework must work with my .NET tools and not get in my way. This also means that it needs to be designed specifically designed for .NET applications.
2. As a bootstrapper, I needed something inexpensive, at least in the current phase of my business. The system/framework must be $200 or less.
3. The system/framework must be designed with small companies in mind. This means that I want it to work with the least amount of hassle possible.
4. The system/framework must be easy to integrate with ecommerce/payment systems.

Here's a list of the frameworks that I looked at:

• Xheo
• Asprotect
• Armadillo
• .NET Reactor
• WinLicense
• SPExtreme
• Infralution Licensing System

Your needs will most likely be different than mine, so you still need to make an evaluation of these systems yourself. I'm only giving my opinion, within my own circumstances. I'm also sure that I missed several systems that I've never heard of.

The two finalist were .NET Reactor and Infralution. Reactor is actually more than just a licensing system, it also does obfuscation, anti-debugging, assembly merging, and other sleight of hand. The reasons I ended up with Infralution were:

• The company encourages you to copy their code into your application.
• It's easy to create custom generators for your licensing needs.
• It comes with a full blown licensing management application.
• It doesn't use the annoying activation scheme that most major vendors use now-a-days. I didn't want to subject my customers to activation either.

The framework was $90 with source. I opted for also buying the source of the licensing application. That set me back another $90, for a total of $180. To me that's well worth it, since I have no desire to roll my own system, and I rather let somebody else create improvements to this area that is not my core competency.

The licensing application runs on .NET and uses MS Access to store data. Fortunately, you can hook it up with SQL Server. I just downloaded version 3.7.1, and it looks like it the included starter database work with only SQL Server 2005. No problem, I just attached it to one of my SQL Server 2005 Express instances.

I posted a inquiry about why it wasn't attaching to SQL Server 2000 on their support forums. I was surprised that I got an answer in a couple hours. I actually posted around 1:30 AM. I didn't stick around to see the response, but I was happy to find that there was a reply when I went over there to their forums.

Here's what the initial screen for the License Tracker looks like:

The first thing that you need to do is setup a product.

Products need to be associated with a distributor, so that's the next step.

Next, I associated SystemWidgets with the product I created earlier, and here is the result:

Once you have these setup, you can then start with your putting licensing in your application. The gist of it is that you copy a couple of their classes into your solution. The framework has a bunch of samples, that even I can follow. Their forums have information readily available, and the company is involved heavily in them.

I've never done licensing before, even though I've been developing for around nine years. It took me about 3 hours of tinkering with their code to start feeling comfortable with how it integrates with my code. I've actually wanted to wait more than 30 days after I installed this, so that I can study several expired trial scenarios.

Doing licensing for MMC snapIns has been challenging. I think I'm the only ISV that has a snapIn as their main product. Diskeeper sells a snapIn, but it is part of their whole product hard drive defrag suite.

I have several things that I need to do to get PainlessSVN out the door. The first is to create a custom generator that incorporates all of the client and sale information into the registration keys. The second thing I need to do is to create a custom assembly that will run as a step in the sales funnel in the purchasing DotNetNuke module that I bought.

Fortunately for me, this module handles all of the purchasing integration with my DotNetNuke portal, so I don't have to mess with PayPal response codes. I'm adding automatic emailing of the registration keys as part of this custom assembly. The last step is to push back the new purchased keys and sale information into the Infralution License Tracker. This should be fairly easy, since databases are my bread and butter.

Feel free to contact me through comments to this post, or through private messages. You will need to create an account in this site to use private messages though.

I'm a big fan of the SQLite database. Mike Duncan just put up a blog post on how to get you up to speed quite quickly with .NET and SQLite. Brian Cook, a contributor to Mike's blog, created a spiffy graphic for SQLite:

Anyways, go read Mike's post:

SQLite on .NET - Get up and running in 3 minutes

I just noticed that Eziriz released a new version of .NET Reactor yesterday. I think I speak for all of the uISVs out there when I say "WHEW!" I depend heavily on .NET Reactor for obfuscation and assembly merging. I'm really happy that the company is still around.

I do wonder why they have been so silent and incommunicado...

Welcome back!