Date Formatting in GridView BoundField

Quick note on this – spent a few minutes on getting this to work. 

Formatting a date field value on a ASP:GridView did not work initially. I had a function that returns a bound field as given below. But No matter what I did, I could not get the formatting of the field to work.

 Say for instance I set the format string as {0:mm-dd-yyyy}. It would still display the field in the default long format. Until I set the "HtmlEncode" to False, which saved me some time:

 

    Public Function GetBoundField( _

              ByVal dataField As String _

            , ByVal headerText As String _

            , ByVal headerStyle As String _

            , ByVal itemStyle As String _

            , ByVal dataFormatString As String _

            ) As BoundField

 

        Dim bf As BoundField = Nothing

 

        bf = New BoundField

        With bf

            .DataField = dataField

            .HeaderText = headerText

            .HeaderStyle.CssClass = headerStyle

            .ItemStyle.CssClass = itemStyle

            .HtmlEncode = False

            .DataFormatString = dataFormatString

        End With

        Return bf

    End Function

Search for files containing Text - Windows XP

Have you ever tried to search for files containing certain text? The search criteria where you can enter some text into the textbox labelled - "A word or phrase in the file:"

I had found it very useful before but then I was searching text files maybe. 

When I search the folders where I have my code (.vb, .aspx files etc.), there will be no results. Even when you search for words which you are very sure is present in almost all files. 

(I had an alternative though, I use my Visual Studio find and would specify a folder path to search for, but then in Production and some restricted environments, this functionality would be lost - No Visual Studio to help you see.)

By default the Windows XP search does not consider many file extensions. One common reply you would see on googling this is to add some registry entry for each of these file extensions you have a problem with. But before you try that, check this out:

This method was a lot quicker and easier:

Start-Run-> Type mmc %windir%\system32\ciadv.msc

This is the indexing service console - Select Action-Properties. In the Generation Tab, Inheritable Settings Group - Check the Index files with unknown extensions.(if not already checked.)

Now give it another shot - No restart required.

iTunes Music Stuttering Issue

Very recently I encountered this problem with iTunes. I was running iTunes v 7.6.0.29. I was syncing my iPod classic 80 Gig fine for almost 6 months, after which I connected my new iPod Shuffle – that is when I noticed the problem. All the songs in my iPod shuffle played like a bad CD with garbled noises and kept skipping all the songs after trying to play it for a couple of seconds.

I then realized that even while playing the songs right from iTunes had the same problem. ALL my songs, which were earlier working fine, now did not, EXCEPT one particular album, which I had ripped myself from the audio CD.

I tried to remember what could have possibly caused this to happen. Maybe it was connecting another iPod device? Maybe not, I have seen people do that before without a problem.

I then remembered that I had installed Winamp just a couple of days before, after which I opened iTunes only to connect my shuffle. Maybe that installation messed up things?

I was unsure. So here are the steps I took.

1. Tried uninstalling Winamp, did not help.
2. Pounded the internet for fixes, looked almost everywhere and every post spoke about changing the Quick Time Player properties – tried that but nothing worked. I desperately tried setting different combinations of output rate, sample rate etc. but nothing worked.
3. People had suggested it could be because of insufficient RAM, since iTunes has a reputation for hogging CPU for its “CoverFlow” view – but that was impossible, Mine had 3 gigs of RAM, besides, the CPU usage when running iTunes was, on an average, only about 3-4%.
4. I then resorted to System Restore as it was driving me crazy. I tried restoring my system to as early as 3 months back – still NO DIFFERENCE!
5. Luckily it was a Friday and I had the weekend and I decided to devote as much time to it as it takes. I backed up my songs and fully formatted my disks and got my OS reinstalled.
6. I then installed all my onboard device drivers and then iTunes and tried playing the songs – STILL DID NOT WORK. I was totally stumped!
7. With absolutely no other ideas in hand, I aimlessly surfed the net for some clue and stumbled upon one link where the user mentioned that sound card drivers could be a possible issue.
8. I then searched if any sound card upgrades were available for my Intel motherboard – there was one and I downloaded and upgraded to it.
9. This time when I tested, I loaded music from a different collection as I childishly felt that the other songs were probably jinxed. But to my surprise it WORKED! All newly added songs played smooth! And when I tried to play the old files, they stuttered. So they were jinxed in some form indeed!

My conclusion was this – the music files that initially played bad in iTunes – is damaged forever. So if you are testing any of the fixes, remember to use new music files each time.

Also I noticed yet another thing – When I tried to play music in the default windows Media Player on my newly installed Windows XP system – almost all of them caused Media Player to raise this warning – The file you are attempting to play has an extension (.MP3) that does not match the file format. That explained a few things. Plenty of my files were badly encoded mp3 files, which regular players like Winamp plays without even a warning.

Some files played fine when I clicked Yes, but some played bad even in WMP! I then took aside the files that played fine in WMP and renamed the extension to .wma and tried playing it in WMP and this time the warning went off and it played fine. So a bunch of files I had were actually .wma files with just their extensions changed to .mp3. No wonder iTunes struggled.

I am glad it works for me now, but I am still inconclusive on what exactly could have caused this problem in the first place. Anyways, I am just posting this for people who might want some ideas to try out. Trust me, I know how frustrating the problem is!

Online Groups/Discussion board ethics

I recently joined this http://groups.google.com/group/DotNetDevelopment Google groups hoping to share my knowledge and also to get some of my own doubts clarified. I posted a technical question with my piece of code showing where I was badly stuck and I got a decent and exact answer from the moderator himself. I thanked him and posted the new code. FWIW, someone else following it up might find it useful. But then as I browsed through the questions posted and the replies made to them, I could glaringly notice the tone of the people who were replying. It clearly appeared to me as totally UNETHICAL and a lot of comments were inappropriate.

 Some of them were too demeaning that it made me think they were mere racial slurs camouflaged as outbursts of a bunch of impatient self-proclaimed “Tech Wizards”. There was one too many instances where these guys refer to its subscribers as “Silly”, “Stupid”, “Idiots”, “Incompetent” etc… This is certainly not the way to go. It makes me believe that it is run by a bunch of red necks! 

I do understand that it gets really frustrating when you see a question repeated or naïve questions asked; questions which have answers all over the internet. But then, no one is under any obligation to reply to those posts. If you think you have an answer – go ahead answer it or else JUST SHUT UP! Do not make sarcastic comments. Don’t make fun of some guy’s ignorance or idiocy for that matter. Or if you want to discuss about someone, do it personally within a private distribution list of people who would fall off their chair laughing at your stupid dirty jokes (maybe you could call it “RedNeckSuckers”? it would be a good name to start with!)

The more professional way of handling these things would be to put points like these on the rules and regulations, terms and conditions section of the group:

1. Avoid posting questions which have already been asked. Please search the group for similar questions, before you post yours
2. Post your questions with some example code wherever possible. Arbitrary questions will not be entertained.
3. Users repeatedly violating these terms will be automatically unsubscribed from the list.

Unless something like this is done, it would be hard for me to believe the group is run by professionals.

ASP.Net Impersonation Issue

A month ago a colleague came with a strange problem. They had deployed their website into production environment and was using a newly created user account for impersonation. The problem was the site would not authenticate the user and impersonation fails. However, if the user is made as an administrator, it works fine.

Apparently, the company policy does not permit such user accounts to be given admin rights.

No one from the dev team has access to the production environment and the deployment is done by onsite support guys. That is how things work here. The support people report issues and we give them different solutions to try out until the issue is fixed.

So when it came to me I did exactly the following:
I created myself a sample page to host on my local IIS
Created a test user account to play with
Pound the MSDN for some clue

I started by revoking all rights and permissions from the user account and went up stone by stone. Incidentally I stumbled upon this link: 
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998351.aspx which saved my day.

You need not make the user an Administrator, but just need to enable the “Log on locally” right.After enabling the Logon Locally right to the user, the impersonation worked like a charm.


Quoted from the link:

"You can impersonate with the returned token and check which Windows groups the user is a member of. Whether you can access local resources or network resources depends on the logon session type that you request (you specify the logon session type in the third argument of LogonUser). The most commonly used logon session types when calling this API are the following:

Interactive logon: If you need to access remote resources, request an interactive logon session. This results in a logon session that has network credentials. The user account passed to logon user must be granted the Log on locally user right.
Network logon: This establishes a logon session with no network credentials. This means you can impersonate the token and access local resources only. The user account passed to logon user must be granted the Access this computer from the network user right. By default, all accounts have this right because it is granted to the Everyone group."

Connecting using Socket vs WebRequest.GetResponse

A web team in the company where I work, had deployed a web service on two different locations to, sort of, balance the load - but in reality it was actually only making one box function as a backup for the other. They had written one common Function which retrieves the web service from either of these two locations after confirming that they are up and alive.

The function was a bit slow in its response and when it was monitored during the fine tuning phase, we were looking for alternatives to the GetResponse. I did a simple page that calls a function that loops the GetResponse to the web server and noticed that it kept failing intermittently at times for no reason and it was awfully slow.

So much for just knowing if the box is up seemed a bit too much to leave it as it is. So the failover logic was made to be based on Sockets rather than the GetResponse. What I changed it to, was to just check if the web server box was up and active in the specific given port where we have the web service running. It seemed to be a better bargain for the given situation. Here is the sample function I asked them to use:

Partial Class ServerConnectivity

Private Shared Function TryConnectingSocket(ByVal serverName As String, ByVal port As Integer) As Boolean

Dim hostEntry As IPHostEntry = Nothing
Dim result As Boolean = False
Dim ipep As IPEndPoint = Nothing
Dim dummySocket As Socket = Nothing

' Get hostEntry from server IP passed
hostEntry = Dns.GetHostEntry(serverName)

' Loop through all the IP Addresses (would be just one if you passed in the IP Address itself)
For Each ip As IPAddress In hostEntry.AddressList

ipep = New IPEndPoint(ip, port)

' Create a dummy Socket object to ping and specify the timeouts and NoDelay properties
dummySocket = New Socket(ipep.AddressFamily, SocketType.Stream, Sockets.ProtocolType.Tcp)

With dummySocket
.NoDelay = True
.SendTimeout = 1000
.ReceiveTimeout = 1000
End With

Try

' Try connecting using the endpoint which maps the port
dummySocket.Connect(ipep)

If dummySocket.Connected Then

result = True

Else

Continue For

End If

Catch ex As Exception
result = False

Finally
dummySocket = Nothing

End Try

Next

Return result
End Function

End Class

Validating File Type

A few weeks back, a colleague of mine - who had built a .Net web page to upload documents, asked me for a good technique to validate the uploaded documents.

I asked him how much he has already covered and he explained that he was using the ASP.Net Fileupload control and is validating for file extensions to be only .doc and the file size to not exceed 2MB.

Though this would work fine, there is still one loop hole. Someone could change the extension of a malicious file to .doc and upload it and bring it into the system. The users have a different module to access the uploaded documents and the uploader can then rename it to whatever file extension it originally was. We just did not want that to happen. At least the system newly built should not provide that loop hole.

The options were to check for Content-Type - which failed miserably because the Content-Type is again driven by the mere extension of the file uploaded.

Since security was the important issue and also since it did not matter whether the validation is made on the server side or client side - I suggested to check for the MIME Type and gave the following code snippet to help:


Public Function GetMimeDataOfFile(ByVal strFileName As String) As String

' Declare and Initialize variables
Dim mimeOut As IntPtr
Dim returnStr As String = ""
Dim fstream As FileStream = Nothing
Dim buffer() As Byte = Nothing
Dim urlmonResult As Integer = -1
Dim maxContentSize As Integer = 0
Dim fileInfo As FileInfo = Nothing


' Short circuit out if file not found

If Not File.Exists(strFileName) Then

Return returnStr

Else

fileInfo = New FileInfo(strFileName)


' Read the file in buffer - Initial 1024 bytes is enough to determine the mime type
maxContentSize = fileInfo.Length

If maxContentSize > 1024 Then
maxContentSize = 1024
End If


' Initialize buffer
ReDim buffer(maxContentSize)


' Open file in stream read mode - read it into buffer
fstream = fileInfo.OpenRead()
With fstream
.Read(buffer, 0, maxContentSize)
.Close()
End With

' Call our pinvoke method
urlmonResult = DllImports.FindMimeFromData(IntPtr.Zero, strFileName, buffer, maxContentSize _

, Nothing, 0, mimeOut, 0)


If urlmonResult = 0 Then

' Convert the pointer data to Unicode text
returnStr = System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.PtrToStringUni(mimeOut)

End If


' Free up the pointer references
System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.FreeCoTaskMem(mimeOut)


End If

Return returnStr
End Function


You can easily get the following pinvoke signatures code from http://pinvoke.net


_

Public Shared Function FindMimeFromData( _
ByVal pBC As IntPtr, _
_
ByVal pwzUrl As String, _
ByVal _
pBuffer As Byte(), _
ByVal cbSize As Integer, _
_
ByVal pwzMimeProposed As String, _
ByVal dwMimeFlags As Integer, _
_
ByRef ppwzMimeOut As Integer, _
ByVal dwReserved As Integer) As Integer
End Function

End Class


Now even if a .jpg file is renamed as .doc and uploaded, this function would see through it and will help to notify that the content does not match the file extension.

Typed Functions with Parameterized Constructors

Recently I encountered this scenario where a method began to become a perfect candidate to be parameterized as I was using it for more and more newly created objects.

Private Shared Function AssembleData( _
ByVal dataList As List(Of PermissionInfoData) _
) As List(Of PermissionInfo)

Dim permissions As New List(Of PermissionInfo)

For Each data As PermissionInfoData In dataList
permissions.Add(New PermissionInfo(data))
Next

Return permissions
End Function

It is basically an Assembler method that takes a list of a "data" class and converts it into a list of "Info" Class.
As I was building more and more such Info-Data pairs of objects where required and I had to create more and more overloads for the AssembleData function.

So I quickly started writing a Typed function only to get stuck real bad in the next few seconds:

Private Shared Function AssembleData(Of TInfo As {Class, New}, TData)( _
ByVal dataList As List(Of TData) _
) As List(Of TInfo)

'Return permissions
Dim infoList As New List(Of TInfo)
Dim info As New TInfo(TData)

For Each data As TData In dataList
infoList.Add(info)
Next

Return infoList
End Function


The problem was the Info class Constructor takes the data as a parameter and would instantiate itself based on that.
I tried implementing an interface but was going in all directions without focus.

I then took help from one of the google groups and here is the solution.
.Net does not support parameterized constructors but there is this workaround which worked like charm:

Private Shared Function AssembleData(Of TInfo, TData, TAssemblerFactory As {Class, IAssemblerFactory(Of TInfo, TData), New})( _
ByVal dataList As List(Of TData) _
) As List(Of TInfo)

Dim infoList As New List(Of TInfo)
Dim info As TInfo
Dim factory As TAssemblerFactory

For Each data As TData In dataList
factory = New TAssemblerFactory
info = factory.CreateNew(data)
infoList.Add(info)
Next

Return infoList
End Function

Interface IAssemblerFactory(Of TInfo, TData)
Function CreateNew(ByVal data As TData) As TInfo
End Interface


Public Class UserInfoAssemblerFactory
Implements IAssemblerFactory(Of UserInfo, UserInfoData)


Public Function CreateNew( _
ByVal data As UserInfoData _
) As UserInfo Implements IAssemblerFactory(Of UserInfo, UserInfoData).CreateNew

Return New UserInfo(data)
End Function

End Class


The annoying security warning

A web development team in my company that was deploying a newly developed website faced the annoying security warning issue. When any page was accessed over a secure layer the browser would cause a security warning –

“This page contains both secure and nonsecure items”

When they asked me to help out, I sat down with the developer and found out where they were so far in analyzing the issue. He had his own suspicion on a menu (that they recently used downloading it free from some website) and was hitting hard on reading through the script.

Of course there was a complete possibility of the script causing the issue, we just cannot rule out the rest of the website as totally safe. So we started with a simple .htm page which caused the security warning to pop up.

First step – we saw the html source if it contained any direct http:// links. There were a couple which we promptly removed.

Secondly – we looked for any JavaScript “document.write” writing any http:// link. We also checked the CSS styles for any image URL reference or any such. – Things looked clean

Third step – enter fiddler. Trace the requests and the response. There was this one setting in the Advanced tab we had to enable for tracing the https requests and responses.
Now we found that the warning arose at the point of loading the suspicious menu.js but that was not the problem, there was a problem a few entries before – a 404 error for some stylesheet file. Apparently there was a link made to a style sheet which was moved to a different location.

Next step – fixed that error and redeployed and ran the trace again. This time the trace stopped at a different location. But yet again there was another 404 error. This one was strange since it just says the file was https://www.website.com/home/white
The actual problem was the page had defined the background attribute of the body element as white. Like this:

<body background="'white'">

What should have been bgcolor or could have been done with styles. White was interpreted as a file and the browser was expecting one.

We fixed that one too and it is now resent for yet another re-deploy. One lesson learnt is to always have a SSL enabled QA environment to test for such SSL specific issues – which could have saved loads of time.

Sybase patIndex string/column validation

Recently one of my colleagues asked me if there is any way we can validate a given string or a column in a Sybase table for containing only alphanumeric characters. Asking what exactly she wanted, I came to know that she wanted a string to just contain a-z,A-Z,0-9 and no more.

There was no IsAlpha function in Sybase AFAIK. So the suggestion was to go the other way – use “patIndex” to cancel out all the special characters.

Declare @variable1 varchar(20)
Set @variable1 = "S12345[67D"
Select patindex('%[~!@#$%^&*()_+{}"?<>:/.,'';[]\`=-]%',@variable1)

Result would be 7 (the string assigned to @variable1 has a ‘[’ at position 7)

patIndex would return a value greater than 0 if any of the special characters specified is present in the passed variable or a column value. There could be a better/simpler way of doing this, but this one quickly served the current purpose of hers.

However, a better way of doing it would be:
Declare @variable1 varchar(20)
Set @variable1 = "S12345[67D"
Select patindex('%[^a-z,A-Z,0-9]%',@variable1)

Result would be greater than zero if any character other than the one specified in the range is in the variable, in our case again 7.