Fuslogvw.exe - assembly binding logger

How many time did you had problems with your references of a project in .NET? Not very often but when this occurs you can spend a lot of hours trying to find what is the problem. Invalid version of assembly, incorrect path to your assembly can cause these problems.

Errors like the following can have the same source:

• Could not load file or assembly 'xxx, Version=yyyy, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=zzz' or one of its dependencies. The located assembly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131040)
• This assembly is protected by an unregistered version …

In these cases a great tool can be used to see the loading stack of each assembly. The name of the tool is Assembly Binding Log Viewer (Fuslogvw.exe). It is preinstalled if you have Visual Studio already installed.

This tool will log all the assembly bindings from all the processes that are running on the given computer. Based on this information we can see the exact problem of the binding, the path from where the assembly is loading and much more.

You can start the program using “fuslogvw.exe” command from VS command prompt. Don’t forget to run it as an Administrator.

You should know that all the logs are written in Internet Explorer temporary file folder. Because of this if the temporary folder of the IE is corrupt that you may have problem running this application. In the case you don’t see any kind of information, that you should clear the temporary folder of IE.

Also, don’t forget to click on the “Refresh” button. The UI is not automatically updated when new logs are available.

In the end, for a developer this tool can be very useful and you should try it.

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CellCast App for BlackBerry 10

Oh what a difference a few years makes, eh?

Our team has been involved in mobile learning for enterprise customers for almost a decade now on devices spanning basic feature phones in the beginning (think old Nokia handsets with voice only service) through simple smartphone devices (remember Windows Mobile?) popular four or five years ago. The next few years of the enterprise mLearning landscape were focused on supporting mobile workers equipped with nearly ubiquitous BlackBerry smartphones from Research in Motion; sure, there were some new Apple iPhones out there and Google had just introduced Android into the market but real companies needed real devices with real security so most organizations sought to leverage those BlackBerry populations for their mobile learning needs.

What transpired next will become fodder for many future business case studies as the venerable RIM/BlackBerry began to lose market share to more sexy iOS and Android-based alternatives due to what the market perceived as a lack of innovation coming from the folks in Waterloo.  Enterprise IT organizations started thinking about devices that were fun to use, had more capable features and better web browsers, and provided extensive app ecosystems to meet address unique business requirements. Much of the pressure on these teams to start considering non-RIM hardware was driven at the grassroots level via the consumer-oriented adoption of Apple iPhones and iPads and Motorola Droids that began to sweep through the market. When the sales executive up in the corner office demands she needs her new personal handset or tablet working with corporate email server and connected to the office Wi-Fi network, yesterday’s mobile device risks were suddenly evaluated under different light thus driving a wedge into the restrictive mobile device policies enforced by many IT security teams.

None of these facts was lost on RIM, their ecosystem or their investors for that matter. Over the past year, RIM (now officially renamed BlackBerry in both name and core product) has transformed the company’s vision and strategy in the mobile computing market to dramatically transform both their product hardware and the underlying mobile device software with differentiated, next generation offerings that leverage past strengths as well as support future ones. All this culminated today with the official launch of the BlackBerry 10 operating system and announcement of the first two of six planned handsets – the touchscreen BlackBerry Z10 and the upcoming QWERTY-based BlackBerry Q10. These devices are launching globally in the coming weeks/months and are sure to not just energize the CrackBerry faithful with long-awaited features but also begin to rebuild their base with new customers who feel the current crop of mobile offerings leaves them wanting something different and more secure. 

Our team has had the good fortunate to work on project to bring our CellCast Solution platform for enterprise mobile learning to the BlackBerry 10 device platform and we officially launched our new offering in the BlackBerry App World earlier this month in support of today’s product introduction (along with 70K other applications). The core functionality of our new BB10 app is virtually identical feature-wise to all our other native smartphone, tablet and eBook reader apps in other popular App stores but what sets this new app apart from its siblings is the “wow factor” users gain from BlackBerry’s new Cascades-based development environment and interface. The level of what’s possible has easily changed by an order of magnitude from the current BlackBerry/BBOS7 operating environment versus this new realm.

As evidence, the picture above shows our current BlackBerry 7 CellCast app next to our new BlackBerry 10 CellCast app each configured with the same selection of features and options. The graphical interface is more engaging and simplified – hallmarks of the new “less is more” mobile design doctrine my friends like RJ Jacquez (@rjacquez) and Mayra Aixa Villar (@mayraAixaVillar) both espouse. Both apps allow users to access training content, complete surveys, interact within defined social networks, and actively participate in game-enabled learning environments and check their status on leader boards – the BB10 just makes all those formal and informal learning interactions more enjoyable.

Overall, the “look and feel” is truly wonderful as you’ll see in the short promo video included below that I produced using another excellent feature found on the BlackBerry 10 that’s not found on many other smartphone handsets – HDMI video output that can be recorded by an external video source. Add to that some other compelling BB10-only features like BlackBerry Hub, BlackBerry Balance and the new video-capable BlackBerry Messenger/BBM with cool screen sharing capabilities to amass even more reasons (beyond control and tight security) why enterprises are going include BlackBerry 10 solutions in their mobile computing universes. BlackBerry 10 will definitely improve the mobile learning experience for all who adopt and use one.

Finally, my thanks to our whole team who worked diligently to design, create, test and deploy our next generation app for all our BlackBerry 10 users, partners and customers – you make me proud! :)

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TSM Magazine - number 8 launch event - talking about cloud

For Today Software Magazine, today was an important day. The first number of 2013 was launched. In this month number we can have different subject about web, SEO, IT management and much more.
In this number of the magazine I decided to talk about scalability points on the cloud, using some example that Windows Azure offer to us.
If you know Romanian I invite you to read the full article here, if not you will need to wait 1-2 until I will have time to traduce it.

My presentation slides can be found here: http://www.slideshare.net/raduvunvulea/radu-vunvulea#

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Password/Token/PIN definition

Password, Token, PIN, Passcode… every day we use this items when we need to authenticate in different systems. I observed that there are times, during a discussions, when is not very clear what is the difference between this items and the terminology is used in a wrong way.
Let’s see what each item means:
Password: It is a set of characters used during authentication process and is known by the user. The user can also set the password.
Token: It is a temporary access key that is generated by a provider (server, hardware device …) and can be used by someone to have access to different resources. A token cannot be change manually by an end-user to a friendly-value
PIN: It is similar to a password and is used during the authentication process. Normally the PIN is used when the user is partial trusted (for example mobile phone). In general a PIN is not very long and after several attempts of using a wrong PIN the account/device is locked. 
Passcode: Is a combination between PIN and Token and is used to authenticate in secure environment. This Passcode is available only for a limit period of time. Because of this the system can request to the user after a specific period of time to enter the Passcode again.
 
Using the correct term is very important, because the way you implement the authentication process can be very different if you are using a token or a password for example.

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Windows Azure Storage Emulator and testing servers

When you start to work with Windows Azure Storage Services like blobs or table you will need to specify an account name and a secret key. Working with the Windows Azure Storage Emulator you ask yourself what credentials I should use.
The good part of the story is that Microsoft offers us a default account name and key that can be used to access the storage. This can be used with success whey you want to use the local storage emulator:

Account Name: devstoreaccount1
Account Key: Eby8vdM02xNOcqFlqUwJPLlmEtlCDXJ1OUzFT50uSRZ6IFsuFq2UVErCz4I6tq/K1SZFPTOtr/KBHBeksoGMGw==

Basically these are universal credentials that can be used on all the Windows Azure Emulator instances. The purpose of this is only for development and testing.
When you are staring development an application you should know that the path to the resources is a little bit different between the Windows Azure and your local machine. Your local resources are accessed using a path in the following format:

http(s)://127.0.0.1:10000/myAccount/myContainer/myContent.txt

When we are using a real blob, our path would be similar to this:

http(s)//myAccount.blob.core.windows.net/myConainer/myContent.txt

There is a little difference of the path. This small difference can make a big different when we want to start to isolate our testing machine 100%.
The first think that we can do is to set the connection string to “UseDevelopmentStorage=true”. This will solve your problem if you don’t have hardcoded file paths. Otherwise you should define different file path to blob storage if you are using an emulator or the storage from cloud.
If you are asking yourself – Where is the content of the blob stored where I’m using emulator? – the response would be in the following path:

C:\Users\myAccount\AppData\Local\dftmp\s0\...

This is the path to all your content.
Another solution for your problem is to map all your content from the blob on your servers IIS and play a little with the DNS. In this way you could “emulate” the real storage emulator without the need to have the Windows Azure Emulator installed on the server.
From my perspective the best solution to create a server where you test your application is to isolate all requests that use Windows Azure Storage and group them in a component. When you would test the application you would use a mock component that would use directories and files.
In this way your testing machine would be isolated 100%. Also testing that access to Windows Azure Storage works is an integration test of a component/resource and this is not your main goal.

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Code refactoring - NULL check (Part 3)

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
In my last two posts I wrote about “Null Object Pattern” in different scenarios. This post is related to this subject and we will discover how we can use this “pattern” when we are working with interfaces.
Let’s assume that we have the following interface and implementation of the interface:

public interface IFoo
{
  int A { get;set; }
  int B { get;set; }
  int C { get;set; }
}

public class Foo : IFoo
{
  public int A { get;set; }
  public int B { get;set; }
  public int C { get;set; }

}

In this case we would need a mechanism to implement a null object. We could create a static property to the Foo object that represents the null (default) value. This could be a solution but is not the best one.
Off topic: I really don’t like the NULL naming. I would prefer a name like “Default”.
What about creating a class that represents our null interface?
Creating a class that implement our interface that represent our null object will help us a lot when we need to check if the object represent the “null” object or an initialize object. Also, in this way we will not have our Foo class polluted with different fields/properties.

public class NullFoo : IFoo  
{
  private int _defaultA = 0;
  private int _defaultB = -1;
  private int _defaultC = -1000;
  
  public int A { get { return _defaultA } }
  public int B { get { return _defaultB } }
  public int C { get { return _defaultC } }
}

What we gain using this solution? We have a code that is clearer and easier to understand. On the other hand, we added complexity to our code. Also we still need to initialize the object with value and detect if an object represent the “null” object.
In conclusion even if this solution adds complexity to our code, the code will be easier to read and our intention is very clear to the reader.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

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[Post-event] Cloud and Windows Azure in 2013 - Codecamp la Cluj-Napoca, 17 ianuarie

This week we had the first Codecamp event in Cluj-Napoca - event link. We decided to start the New Year with cloud computing – Windows Azure.

Why we decided to do this? There are lots and lots of features that Windows Azure offer. People tend to see cloud as a place where you can scale up and down with instance – but is more than this.

We had 2 sessions and an open panel at the end.

• Scalability in Cloud Applications (Radu Vunvulea)
• Maintenance of Windows Azure applications (Mihai Tătăran)
• Open Panel

In total were around 55 people and a part of them stayed with us until 10 PM. We would like to thanks to the sponsors for the location and for the great eggplant :-) - Yonder and Small Footprint

My pressentation can be found bellow:

Scalability in cloud applications from Radu Vunvulea 

Mihai T. presentation:

Mihai Tataran - Maintenance of Windows Azure Apps from ITCamp Romania

Here are some photos from the event:

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