Codebureau - Matt Simner

I thought I was being a bit clever some time back when I wrote a little .NET wrapper for performance counters, largely for the reason of allowing clients to happily work with counters that weren't installed on their machine.  The default behaviour is an exception when you attempt to use a non-existant counter.

This was all good until deployment to servers and clients with 'real' non-admin users.  I then read that only administrators and power users could increment counters (awww!).

I just found this MS article that explains how to get around this as the 'permissions' are simply based on registry permissions for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Perflib.

To set the permissions,

1. Open Regedit to that key
2. Right-click, select 'Permissions...'
3. Add your user's groups or specific name with 'Full Control'

I can now actually implement the solution (1 year on!)

This is obviously what happens when you get really serious about technology like Mr Hanselman and want to work remotely...

There's a fairly major annoyance about VS2005 and the fact that when you create 'New Class' it effectively creates the class as private.  This article explains how to change it...

http://mark.michaelis.net/Blog/ChangingTheDefaultItemTemplatesInVisualStudio2005.aspx

I've been told and have read many times that it's not possible to run Microsoft CRM 3.0 under .NET 2.0.  Well, I guess 'not possible' could just mean 'not supported'.  All of our code base is now .NET 2.0 and I was loathed to maintain .NET 1.1 versions of our framework libraries jsut for a couple of calls out of CRM. 

I had previously found this article on extending CRM with ASP.NET 2.0 apps, but needed to create a Workflow component to call into our internal systems and found that this obviously didn't work because (all of) CRM runs under .NET 1.1.

A bit of 'give it a try' later and I can reveal that it is indeed possible to successfully run CRM 3.0 in a .NET 2.0 process, and also use .NET 2.0 assemblies with Workflow.  I'll leave it up to the reader to decide whether this is a good idea that they'd actually want to implement!  The process isn't too onerous so wouldn't take long to roll back if you encountered problems.

If you're still up for giving it a try then you'll need to alter the ASP.NET properties for the CRM Web Site and Service ...

Make sure you've set up separate app pools (see below), as one will run all your ASP.NET 1.1 apps, and the other will run the .NET 2.0 apps.  You can't run a mixture of runtimes within the same app pool.

Change the Microsoft CRM v3.0 site's root folder, AND the MSCRMServices virtual folder as below to use .NET 2.0 (and make sure they're configured to be in your .NET 2.0 app pool).

Now to ensure Workflow can use .NET 2.0 you'll need to add a .NET config file to force the Workflow Service to run in the .NET 2.0 runtime.

Stop the "Microsoft CRM Workflow Service", then Add a file as below in the CRM Workflow binary folder.

The contents of the file should be as follows:

<configuration>
  <startup>
    <supportedRuntime version="v2.0.50727" />
  </startup>
</configuration>

Restart the Workflow Service (and probably do another IISReset for good measure), and you should find everything comes up fine, and you'll be able to configure Workflow as per normal but now with .NET 2.0 assemblies.  I'm not too familiar with 'where' callouts run, but I'd presume that the same principles should apply and .NET 2 assemblies should work OK.

This procedure is obviously not supported by Microsoft so you use at your own risk, but I've had no problems so far....

What next - COBOLUnit?  Haven't tried this yet, but this could be a good tool for 'self-diagnostic' tests on Servers...

http://www.codeplex.com/psexpect/Wiki/View.aspx?title=User%20Guide&referringTitle=Home

Like many people I'd mistakenly thought that xxx.Parse was the only way to validate types like ints and DateTimes.  This kindof 'was' the case in .NET 1.1, but numeric data could be validated with Double.TryParse then converted to the correct type.

In .NET 2.0 you can happily use the TryParse method on pretty much all the types you'd want to validate - without the nasty overhead of catching an exception.  This post goes into a bit more detail, and links to a tool to benchmark the results for yourself.

I'll be on the lookout to convert whereever I find int.Parse, as it's pretty rare you 'actually' want an exception to be thrown...

This excellent post from Jake Lawlor's a great practical guide to applying agile processes in the real world. 

This isn't new thinking by any means, but when trying to coach others and improve your own processes you find surprisingly few practical reference points for applying agile processes into actual organisations.

Just found a useful post that helped in resolving why Custom Attributes weren't being copied from Leads to Contacts when 'Converting' a lead.  It's all in the mappings...

http://blogs.inetium.com/blogs/rtoenies/archive/2006/07/31/272.aspx

Just downloading a few .NET 3.0 bits and pieces from MS and happened across some 'you might like to download this' links.  Once of which was Windows PowerShell.  Haven't tried it yet, but will certainly give it a go in my next 'scripting' escapade.

Microsoft have obviously developed this quite a lot based on the amount of documentation I've not had chance to look at yet!