Personal Raves

Moving to my personal website

2004-10-17T17:56:00.000-04:00

I have decided to move everything to my person domain name, http://www.farhan-ahmad.net. I will be posting new content there, so head on to that URL...

SharePoint Errors

2004-09-14T09:53:00.000-04:00

Ok, I am finding this out the hard way, but I am telling this to everyone so you don’t have to go through the same frustration. The errors that SharePoint gives can be very misleading!

Since yesterday I have been trying to figure out why SharePoint keeps complaining that my web part is not marked as safe even though I have setup the whole site as part of WSS_Medium security and marked the assembly as safe (I have made sure 100s of times that the web.config is correct). Below is the actual error that I was getting:

A Web Part or Web Form Control on this Web Part Page cannot be displayed or imported because it is not registered on this site as safe.

Logically you would think that there is something wrong with how the web part is configured, or maybe there is something wrong with the web.config, or wait it could even be something with the Virtual PC running SharePoint. But… that’s not the case :-/

After spending a long time and after creating several different web parts with several different approaches hoping it would like one (including some with the default names like WebPart1, WebPartLibrary, etc.) I figured out that it was the class constructor!! I mistakenly did not put the scope classifier for the constructor and SharePoint wasn’t able to construct the class, but for some reason it decided that the web part was not marked as safe!

Lesson: be very careful when SharePoint complains, some times the actual problem isn't what it is says it is!

GMail Annoyance

2004-09-03T09:15:00.000-04:00

Everyone knows about GMail and most of the people already have GMail accounts. I haven't used my account for quite some time but lately I have noticed that almost everyday somebody is offering a GMail account because they have invitations left.

Do a quick Google search on "GMail invitations" and you will be surprised. All of all, check out this website dedicated to GMail invitations!

I guess this is dedication... but it just annoys me.

2004-08-23T04:07:00.000-04:00

The Gixxer, again!

The Gixxer!

2004-08-23T04:03:00.000-04:00

Here are few pictures of the motorcycle.

The Gixxer in the garage

Installing SharePoint Web Part Templates

2004-08-23T03:10:00.000-04:00

Well, its been a while since I posted something, I have just been busy with all the things that I am working on. For some reason I couldn't sleep tonight so I took on the challenge of learning development of SharePoint Web Parts.

The MSDN web site for SharePoint technologies is probably a good point for starting. So I downloaded the Web Part templates for Visual Studio .Net and ran the file which extracted the setup files to a folder. Now, when I would run the 'setup.exe' it would say that I needed Visual Studio .Net before I could install the web part templates, duh!

Well, it wasn't that simple; the problem was that I already had Visual Studio .Net 2003 installed. After restarting the setup several times I decided it was time to find out what was going on.

Searching on google I found this post at TalkAboutSoftware.com, according to which the installer was checking the following two registry keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\Registration\PIDKEY
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\Registration\ProductID

My computer's registry had both of these keys but they were blank. The reply to that post suggests restoring the registry, but I didn't want to do that because of it's consequences (who knows what else has been changed since the last backup?).

Still not sure what to set those to, I kept searching. After a few minutes I ended up at this post at EggHeadCafe.com. Before I move on, I must point out one thing, EggHeadCafe looks more like a graphics website than a .Net portal, just an observation :). Anyways, according to that post the solution was to reinstall (a.k.a. repair) Visual Studio .Net, which I didn't want to do either! =(

Finally I got fed up and set the above two keys to "PIDKEY" and "Visual Studio .Net" respectively and ran the setup. Guess what?!?! It actually worked!!!

According to the first post those keys might have been removed by some add-in, since thats the case I am assuming those weren't really important. So this is my solution for now, hopefully that will work if you are having the same problem. I will post an update if the registry change screws anything else up.

Now on with the SharePoint development... Oh wait, I need to get some sleep it's already 3:29am! 'night!

Microsoft Certified Professional

2004-08-17T22:07:00.000-04:00

I just became a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP)! I had to take the 70-229 exam, Designing and Implementing Databases with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition.

My goal is to become a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD) for which I still need to take four more exams (Web apps, desktop apps, XML web services, and the solution architect exams).

You can find out more about MCP at http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/mcp/default.asp.

MS DTC Issue Solved

2004-08-05T23:01:00.000-04:00

Well, after spending quite some time playing around with the firewall and ipconfig I figured out what the problem was.

DTC for some reason requires both the machines to be able to communicate with each other using their hostnames. The problem in my case was that even though my machine could connect to the server through the specified hostname (in the connectiong string), the server couldn't talk back to my machine with the given hostname (that was probably sent by the underlying DTC classes when it made the call).

So to remedy this situation I had to manually add the IP mapping to my machine in the hosts file. The mapping file is called 'hosts' and is at '%WINDIR%\system32\drivers\etc\'.

Lets see what the next challenge is going to be!

MS DTC Issues

2004-08-05T18:39:00.000-04:00

Well, everywhere you go there is some problem. Once eConnect was installed now it can't connect to the SQL Server on the server. I created a desktop application in C# that I am planning on using throughout the development helping me speed things up (compared to the whole other realm of going through Web Services/perl).

Anyways, I get the following error when I run it:

Version=7.0.5.0
Unique MessageId = Customer
Error Number = -2147168246 Error Description = New transaction cannot enlist in the specified transaction coordinator. Error Source = Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server
Line Number=2540

First Google search returned a good a result set but after trying a few of the suggestions I am still getting the same error. I will update once I have the figured out.

Update & E-Connect Setup Issues

2004-07-25T15:19:00.000-04:00

Something went wrong and my computer started screwing up. IE stopped recognizing some commands like CTRL+ENTER, stopped doing autocomplete, task manager would stop showing the usernames, the date was moved back a few years. I have been using the same installation of Windows XP for about a year and a half now and have been wanting to do a fresh install. This was a perfect time so instead of figuring out what the problem was (one of my brother must have installed something weird on my computer) I decided to just do a clean install of everything on my computer.

Anyways, everything was going good except when I got to the eConnect installation part. When installing eConnect it asked me for the connection string so I went ahead and created it. I specified DYNAMICS as the initial catalog. Once the connection string was built I clicked 'Next' and got the following error:

Error -2147217865 Invalid object name 'dbo.Shield'.

Now, I am working on figuring out whats the deal with that. Oh and by the way I am also planning on trying out SQL Server 2005 Express Beta :).

First Steps

2004-07-18T17:21:00.000-04:00

I surfed the web before getting started and found a tool called TcpTrace which prooved to be really useful when it comes to web services. I would advise that you should check it out too.

I started out with the simple Hello World web service that is created when you create a new web service in Visual Studio. After running the web service, I ran the following perl script.

#!/data/Perl/bin/perl -w
##!/usr/bin/perl -w

use SOAP::Lite;

my $webserviceURL = "http://localhost:8989/eConnectWebService/eConnectService.asmx";

print SOAP::Lite
-> uri("http://xxxx.com/webservices")
-> proxy($webserviceURL)
-> HelloWorld()
-> result;

Guess what? The above didn't print anything... Looking at the data returned to TcpTrace by IIS I saw "System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException: Server did not recognize the value of HTTP Header SOAPAction: http://tempuri.org/webservices#HelloWorld."

Doing some reasearch on the web I found out that I Microsoft prefers "URI/HelloWorld" instead of "URI#HelloWorld" in the request that is sent. The solution was to tell SOAP::Lite to replace the / with #, this can be accomplished by:

use SOAP::Lite
on_action => sub { return '"' . join('/', @_) . '"'}
;

The above solved this problem, and now I was able to print "Hello World" to the console!

Zone Alarm and Visual Studio .Net

2004-07-18T16:09:00.000-04:00

I spent a few hours trying to figure out why I can't create a web service in Visual Studio .Net 2k3. I even reinstalled Visual Studio but that didn't solve the problem. Everytime Visual Studio would give the following error:

"Contacting server to create visual studio web project 'WebService1'"

I was about to reinstall windows because I saw a post on expert exchange that said that the person just ended up reinstall windows. I did one last search on google thinking that maybe someone would have figured out the issue and guess what? Someone actually had a solution. It turns out that the problem was caused by the Zone Alarm firewall (which I just happened to be using also). So I shutdown Zone Alarm, fired up VS.Net, and created a project. This time it worked fine!

Looking on Zone Alarm's support website I ended up on this thread according to which they have acknowledge the issue and are working on a solution. According to that thread there will be a fix release in mid July, so I am planning on not using Zone Alarm till then (mostly because lately I have been using my computer at home, which is behind a firewall anyways).

Just a heads up to anyone who might face this problem. I think this problem is only with the latest version of Zone Alarm, 5.0. The exact version of Zone Alarm that I am running is 5.0.590.043.

The Goal and Approach

2004-07-17T00:38:00.000-04:00

The Goal
My goal is to interface a perl based service with GP. I have to build classes in perl that will support browsing of customers, their transactions, and all the other good stuff.

The Approach
As far as I know the only option that I have is to use SOAP. For this I will need to create a web service that will run on Windows and then make the perl pieces talk to this web service. I have decided to use C# .Net to create the web service.

According to the eConnect manual there is a .Net dll (eConnect_API.dll) in the eConnect directory (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Great Plains\eConnect7\MBS eConnect EAI Incoming Service) but I couldn't find it there or anywhere else. Instead of spending anymore time looking for this dll I decided to use the COM dll.

Introduction to Everything

2004-07-17T00:12:00.000-04:00

This is where I start. Ideally I would like to give an overview of Great Plains before diving into the details but again, I don't have too much time and most of the information in available on Microsoft's Great Plain website (or so you would think :)). Anyways, here just a brief overview of Great Plains...

Great Plains
Great Plains (GP) was an accounting software offered by a company called Great Plains Software, Inc. I say 'was' because it was bought out by Microsoft in April 2001 and is now part of Microsoft. I haven't had to deal with any of the previous versions of GP but my latest interaction with GP 7.5 hasn't been the best one. I admit that this is a humungous application and probably requires a lot of upfront training but I still took on the challenge!

eConnect
eConnect is the API provided by Microsoft for GP. This provides several different ways that can be used to connect to GP (including MSMQ, Biztalk, SOAP).

Starting Out

2004-07-16T19:50:00.000-04:00

Introduction
I have always tried to keep a website where I can share what I have learned. Also, I have been told that we remember only 20% what we learn everyday. So, this is my attempt at increasing that percentage.

What you will find here
Most of the stuff will be technical (computer related) but sometimes I might talk about odd things (like life). Starting out I will probably explain my Great Plains integration experience since thats one thing that I have spent some time on and will probably be spending more time on.

Make sure you comment about what I say, good or bad... don't care... I am always up for a learning lesson.

Cheers!