I’ve been playing a bit the the RC version of the .net framework 4 and already found a new cool method.
Until now when I wanted to check for a valid string I had to use the following code:
if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(text) || string.IsNullOrEmpty(text.Trim()))
throw newArgumentNullException("text", "text is not valid");
And I had to do that because a string containing nothing but white spaces was not valid and if you called the Trim() method on a null string you’ll get a NullReferenceException, you know the message… (“Object reference not set to an instance of an object.”)
So, the new cool method I found is a static method from string called IsNullOrWhiteSpace. the name pretty much says it all, except that the real name should be IsNullOrEmptyOrWhiteSpaces ;)
Instead of writing the code shown above, where you could easily forget the second condition, now you can have the same behavior in one single sentence:
if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(text))
throw newArgumentNullException("text", "text is not valid");
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On the first version you could only manage blobs, upload, delete and download them. Now I added the same functionality for Queues and Tables.
I found a pretty cool way of showing unstructured data from the Azure tables from a gridview control. How? with my good old friends the DataSets :)
I also updated the source code so you can download the source files from the version that it’s right now running on the Azure platform.
Go to http://storageexplorer.cloudapp.net/ to see the application running and here to download the source code.
Feedback is always welcome!
Edit: url is now http://azurestorage.azurewebsites.net
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My twitter followers have probably realize by now that I’ve been playing around with the Twitter API. I’ve been trying out the API and I created a command line tool to update my twitter status.
I tried lots of clients but it is still a pain in the a*s to go to a different application or web browser to update my status.
I have a command line window open all the time so now I’ll be easier to update my status. In case you want to give it a try you can download it from here. The use is real simple, just type twit <your status> and that’s it. If it is the first time you run it it’ll ask you for your twitter credentials.
Edit: as of today (Jan 28th, 2010) twit has bit.ly integration. Just type your status with a url and twit will post the bit.ly short version of it. Yes! I like playing with web APIs.
As always, this bits have the “works on my machine” warranty :)
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We’ve been having a few issues with some users that cannot authenticate to Genexus Server. Logging the server side, thanks to SvcConfigEditor, I found that the probles had nothing to do with the user credentials themselves but with some WCF configuration that prevent packages “from the future” to reach the server.
How did that happen, and most important, how do I change it? It happened because of daylight saving (global warming is everywhere). WCF has a under the hood feature that prevents your server to be reached by packages with a timestamp away 5 minutes (default value) from the server’s time (taken to UTC). Apparently, not everybody has its computer set up correctly with the correct date/time setting, so when one of them changed (the client or the server) the server would not validate the client.
So, how do you change that with your existante basicHttpBinding? you can’t! :( What you have to do is creating a customBinding and modify the maxClockSkew attribute of the security tag. And how do you do that? Well, lucky us there’s a tool that does that for us. It’s called WcfBindingBox (hopefully will stay there for a while) and you simply paste your current binding configuration and when you click ‘Convert to CustomBinding!’ well… it does just that!
After using that new config on my dev server I had the following error while authenticating:
“A supporting token that satisfies parameters 'System.ServiceModel.Security.Tokens.UserNameSecurityTokenParameters:
InclusionMode: AlwaysToRecipient
ReferenceStyle: Internal
RequireDerivedKeys: False' and attachment mode 'SignedEncrypted' was not provided.”
And the problem was exactly what the message says (unbelievable). All I did to fix it was creating an instance of the UserNameSecurityTokenParameters class, configure the properties mentioned on the message and add it to my TransportSecurityBindingElement.
I lost a whole with this so I hope it will be useful to someone else.
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A few days ago I posted about my first useful Azure application, which is hosted on here http://storageexplorer.cloudapp.net http://azurestorage.azurewebsites.net. Today I just wanted to announce I just uploaded the code to a Google Code project called windowsazurewebstorageexplorer :)
It is a good (I think is good) example of both programming for the Windows Azure platform and programming against the Windows Azure Storage client API.
So feel free to download it and let me know what you think. (Make sure you download the Windows Azure tools for Visual Studio 2008 first)
As usual, this code is certified to apply every “works on my machine” standard :)
Note: Too bad the December 2009 Windows Azure-Related Developer Challenges are for US only :(
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