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Some of my (Dutch!) Avanade colleagues recently released ‘Entlib Extensions To WSSF’ to CodePlex. Quite a cool addition to the already rich Enterprise Library.

Entlib Extensions to WSSF (Web Service Software Factory) is an extension that enables WSSF to easily integrate with Enterprise Library. This extension allows you to very easily handle cross cutting concerns in WCF services like Validation, Exception Handling and Logging without much programming. The extension accomplishes this by using the policy injection application block of enterprise library.

I’m not entirely sure about the article on Digitimes. One of the reasons is because it was posted on April first. Another reason is the way it is written. But if it turns out to be true, I’m going to have to get a Blu-Ray player for my Xbox 360… 😉

Getting the ModalPopupExtender from the Ajax Control Toolkit to work (decently) in SharePoint was not exactly a walk in the park. With a default SharePoint installation, the modal popup is partly positioned ‘outside’ of the page (you only see the bottom right part of the popup in the top left corner of the browser). Postbacks are not executed or executed poorly and the page gets garbled up. A possible solution for the positioning of the popup is to set the X and Y property of the ModalPopupExtender. Downside is you never know (for sure) if the popup is positioned inside the visible part of the browser because of things like non-maximized browser, different resolutions and so on.
Today we seem to have solved our issues with the ModalPopupExtender in SharePoint. We haven’t tested it in all scenario’s yet, but we’ll get to that. At this point everything looks the way it is supposed to. And it seems to work, too… ;).

It is now possible to get updates from this blog through e-mail (nice feature, feedburner{.}). Updates will be sent once a day, but only when new items are available.

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One of my colleagues pointed out the new Fine-grained password policy feature in Windows Server 2008. As you can see in this post at The Sean Blog, some values have to be entered in the I8 format, which isn’t very user friendly. Because of that, he asked me if I could whip up a tool that converts days, hours, minutes and seconds to the I8 format. I quickly put together this small tool for him. It hasn’t been tested extensively, but I think it might be of some use to some of you.
For example, I used longs to store the info. When wanting to calculate huge values, this won’t work of course. This could be improved by using the multipliers divided by for instance 10,000,000 and add the appropriate amount of zeros (7) to the string after calculation, so the numerical value stays a lot smaller. Still, I think it does what it should do at this point. You can find the sourcecode [over here][2], or if you would like te change anything: be my guest. Let me know if you find bugs or add cool features: I would like to know.

As a reaction to this article at Peter Ritchie’s MVP Blog, I thought I’d give my two cents on having a single exit point for methods. Here we go…

When writing code, I always create only one exit point except for the occasional throwing of an exception. Most important for me is to always know where your code (really) stops. In case of long and complex methods there’s a chance you’re going to miss a return statement when scanning through a method. That way you could end up studying code not even applicable to the situation, while missing the real point. I do think there is no real reason to hold on to creating methods with a single exit point other than personal favoritism. This feels the same like using curly brackets with an if-statement that is followed by only one statement. I always use curly brackets, but there are lots of developers who don’t.

One of the most annoying things in Visual Studio (to me) was the fact that complete solutions (solution folders, projects, regulare folder)  would be expanded upon opening. And with big solutions, that isn’t too much fun. There are macros available online, but the ones i found were pretty slow. This is only one of the things that the PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 solves for you. But there is more. Much more!

Just a quick post: Windows Live SkyDrive is now available. It left the beta stage yesterday. You can now store 5Gb of data online, choose who has access to each folder you create and more. There is a maximum filesize of 50Mb.

There are several steps to creating a custom web service to be hosted in SharePoint. The MSDN library{.} has a walkthrough on creating a custom web service{.}. After having followed this walkthrough thoroughly, I though my web service was good to go. Unfortunately all I saw was an error: “Could not load type ‘ThisAndThat’ from assembly ‘SoAndSo’”. Just as I was about to search for an answer somewhere online, I remembered that the MSDN library features the Community content for little over a year now{.} (hooray!).

So that’s part 1: www.rickvandenbosch.net is now online. There’s nothing to be found over there yet, but the domain has been delivered. Oh, and there’s an easy redirect to my blog, so that goes back here ;). From now on, you can also use rickvandenbosch.net/blog as the url to find my blog. I’m currently talking to the bloggingabout.net admin to mirror my content over there, for now it’s just a redirect. Keep posted for more updates on the new domain.

As stated on ScottGu’s blog{.} in his latest post{.}, the .NET Framework Library Source Code is now available. A detailed blog post about the steps to follow to enable .NET Framework source access in Visual Studio 2008 can be found at Shawn Burke’s blog in this post{.}.

Have a look at this article at Worse Than Failure. That’s pretty funny. Or actually, pretty scary… 😐

Oh and, by the way, the Rick in the article is not me ;).