Prolific Notion » Simon Dingley

Console2 – My new and improved command prompt for Windows

Simon Dingley — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 08:04:01 +0000

I am a sucker for a good looking GUI so when an opportunity presents itself to try and improve my workspace to make it more easy on the eye I will generally take it up. Recently I read a post by Scott Hanselman ‘Console2 – A Better Windows Command Prompt‘ and I immediately got myself over to SourceForge to download a copy of Console2 for myself. The project describes itself as “a Windows console window enhancement. Console features include: multiple tabs, text editor-like text selection, different background types, alpha and color-key transparency, configurable font, different window styles“.

I’m not going to cover how to configure your instance of the Console because Scott’s post already does a very good job of this, however, what I do want to share with you is my own configuration and how I have made it a bit more useful for me.

First of all I have installed Console2 into my Dropbox Tools folder so I essentially have access to it wherever I need it and with the configuration I am now used to. This is easy enough to do since Console2 has no installer you just extract the files to a location of your choice so no further detail needed here. My Console 2 Settings File is attached to this post for anyone that is interested or wants to use it as a basis for configuring your own.

The next thing I did was create a new right-click menu option in Windows to “Open Console here” which basically allows me to open a prompt at any folder location in my file system and saves a bit of time since you no longer have to navigate your folder hierarchy to get the prompt to where you want. To do this you need to create a couple of entries in your registry, simply copy and paste the below into a text file, tweak accordingly and save as a .reg file. Once saved you can double click the .reg file to insert the keys into your registry. Alternatively you can just create the keys manually through regedit. It goes without saying that if you are going to fiddle with your registry please be wise and make a backup first!

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\OpenConsole2Here]
@="&Open Console 2 Here..."

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\OpenConsole2Here\command]
@="D:\\Dropbox\\Tools\\Console2\\Console.exe -d \"%L\""

It should be noted that these keys relate to my Windows 7 Professional installation and are untested on other versions of Windows!

Credit to Scott Hanselman for the icons and the image used in this post

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DataType Support in uSiteBuilder for Umbraco

Simon Dingley — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 15:41:16 +0000

When I first discovered uSiteBuilder for Umbraco I knew right away that it was a game changer in the world of Umbraco development (for me at least!). I always felt a little uncomfortable about having to leave the relative safety of my IDE (Visual Studio 2010) and source control (Mercurial) to work in the browser when creating document types, wiring up templates and datatypes. uSiteBuilder is great because it allows you to take a code-first approach to your development allowing you to develop all of your document types, document type properties and templates with strongly typed code and take advantage of the benefits of any source/version control system you work within.

I guess I have been working with uSiteBuilder since earlier this year, shortly after it was released and it is the first dependency I now add to any new Umbraco project. The only show stopper I’ve encountered rears it’s ugly head when working on a project with multiple developers and occurs when uSiteBuilder runs its synchronisation process and then throws an exception when it encounters a datatype on one of your document types that doesn’t exist in the target environment. The only real way around this is to comment out the offending document type property as recommended by Barry Fogarty, rebuild and deploy your solution, create the missing datatype and then uncomment, rebuild and deploy again which is a pain and slows down development.

Those kind people over at Vega IT Sourcing have released the source code for uSiteBuilder which is great for people like me who like to have a go at plugging the gaps myself. So I pulled down the source code and made a custom build in an attempt to support at least the default datatypes for Umbraco. I have tried to follow the same logic as the rest of the project so you don’t really need to think too much about it and can quickly familiarise yourself with the process for creating your datatypes in code. Here is an example of a custom datatype based on the TinyMCE Richtexteditor datatype in Umbraco:

// --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// 
//   (c) Copyright 2011 Prolific Notion, http://prolificnotion.co.uk
// 
// 
//   Defines the StandardContentEditor type.
// 
// --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

namespace MyUmbracoProject.Web.DataTypes
{
    using umbraco.cms.businesslogic.datatype;

    using Vega.USiteBuilder;

    /// 
    /// Defines the Standard Content Editor Datatype
    /// 
    [DataType(
        UniqueId = "{8AB81EFB-35F5-4EF0-9300-04A3AC8A2D21}",
        Name = "Standard Content Editor",
        DatabaseDataType = DBTypes.Ntext,
        RenderControlGuid = "5e9b75ae-face-41c8-b47e-5f4b0fd82f83")]
    public class StandardContentEditor : DataTypeBase
    {
    }
}
}

Most of the attributes used here should be self explanatory however…

UniqueId – A unique Guid for your datatype
Name – The name of your datatype. This is displayed in the Umbraco UI.
DatabaseDataType – This maps to the umbraco.cms.businesslogic.datatype.DBTypes Enum and defines the type of field to store data in the database.
RenderControlGuid – Defines the Guid of the control you would like to render for this datatype. In the example above ’5e9b75ae-face-41c8-b47e-5f4b0fd82f83′ is the Guid for the TinyMCE control.

There is one other attribute not in the example above called ‘RenderControlName‘ which I am in two minds whether to keep or not. Essentially its purpose would be to try and find the control by name and therefore grab it’s Guid if the Guid attribute was not provided, any thoughts or comments on this appreciated however I think it may be subject to clashes or getting the wrong control because names do not have to be unique.

The only other thing you need to remember is to inherit from DataTypeBase.

I am very happy to have been accepted as a contributor on the uSiteBuilder project this week and hope that I can contribute some of my work into the next release. For now, if you are interested in trying out the build for my initial proof of concept you can grab it on CodePlex, changset 84163. I welcome any feedback and comments.

Where do we go from here?

At this stage it’s really just a means of overcoming the exceptions I was previously encountering however I would ideally like to extend this to allow you to also configure your datatype settings in code so watch this space…!

Umbraco : Locate nearest node with specific property

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UCommerce for Umbraco Extension Method – ISO 3166 Numeric Country Codes

Simon Dingley — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 09:54:59 +0000

Once again my recent work has brought me back around to messing around with Globalisation issues again. This time it is with regards to writing a customer payment provider for UCommerce implementing the HSBC XML API. Certain fraud rules were being flagged on all transactions during testing due to an incorrect or missing country code, checking the documentation again it reads “The 3 digit ISO country code for the customer’s country”, this is in fact not the alpha but numeric country representation as defined by ISO 3166 Country Codes. Unfortunately this cannot be obtained through the .Net Framework alone as I have done with similar issues previously so I needed to write an extension method as advised by Søren Spelling Lund in this forum post.

In case this is of use to anyone else I am posting up my extension method as this will also have uses outside of UCommerce for Umbraco.

        /// 
        /// Gets the ISO3166 Numeric Country Code
        /// 
        /// The country.
        /// The ISO3166 NUmeric Country Code
        public static int GetIsoNumericCode(this EntitiesV2.Country country)
        {
            var countryCodesInEu = new Dictionary
                                       {
                                           { "AND", 20 },
                                           { "ARE", 784 },
                                           { "AFG", 4 },
                                           { "ATG", 28 },
                                           { "AIA", 660 },
                                           { "ALB", 8 },
                                           { "ARM", 51 },
                                           { "ANT", 530 },
                                           { "AGO", 24 },
                                           { "ATA", 10 },
                                           { "ARG", 32 },
                                           { "ASM", 16 },
                                           { "AUT", 40 },
                                           { "AUS", 36 },
                                           { "ABW", 533 },
                                           { "ALA", 248 },
                                           { "AZE", 31 },
                                           { "BIH", 70 },
                                           { "BRB", 52 },
                                           { "BGD", 50 },
                                           { "BEL", 56 },
                                           { "BFA", 854 },
                                           { "BGR", 100 },
                                           { "BHR", 48 },
                                           { "BDI", 108 },
                                           { "BEN", 204 },
                                           { "BMU", 60 },
                                           { "BRN", 96 },
                                           { "BOL", 68 },
                                           { "BRA", 76 },
                                           { "BHS", 44 },
                                           { "BTN", 64 },
                                           { "BVT", 74 },
                                           { "BWA", 72 },
                                           { "BLR", 112 },
                                           { "BLZ", 84 },
                                           { "CAN", 124 },
                                           { "CCK", 166 },
                                           { "COD", 180 },
                                           { "CAF", 140 },
                                           { "COG", 178 },
                                           { "CHE", 756 },
                                           { "CIV", 384 },
                                           { "COK", 184 },
                                           { "CHL", 152 },
                                           { "CMR", 120 },
                                           { "CHN", 156 },
                                           { "COL", 170 },
                                           { "CRI", 188 },
                                           { "SCG", 891 },
                                           { "CUB", 192 },
                                           { "CPV", 132 },
                                           { "CXR", 162 },
                                           { "CYP", 196 },
                                           { "CZE", 203 },
                                           { "DEU", 276 },
                                           { "DJI", 262 },
                                           { "DNK", 208 },
                                           { "DMA", 212 },
                                           { "DOM", 214 },
                                           { "DZA", 12 },
                                           { "ECU", 218 },
                                           { "EST", 233 },
                                           { "EGY", 818 },
                                           { "ESH", 732 },
                                           { "ERI", 232 },
                                           { "ESP", 724 },
                                           { "ETH", 231 },
                                           { "FIN", 246 },
                                           { "FJI", 242 },
                                           { "FLK", 238 },
                                           { "FSM", 583 },
                                           { "FRO", 234 },
                                           { "FRA", 250 },
                                           { "GAB", 266 },
                                           { "GBR", 826 },
                                           { "GRD", 308 },
                                           { "GEO", 268 },
                                           { "GUF", 254 },
                                           { "GHA", 288 },
                                           { "GIB", 292 },
                                           { "GRL", 304 },
                                           { "GMB", 270 },
                                           { "GIN", 324 },
                                           { "GLP", 312 },
                                           { "GNQ", 226 },
                                           { "GRC", 300 },
                                           { "SGS", 239 },
                                           { "GTM", 320 },
                                           { "GUM", 316 },
                                           { "GNB", 624 },
                                           { "GUY", 328 },
                                           { "HKG", 344 },
                                           { "HMD", 334 },
                                           { "HND", 340 },
                                           { "HRV", 191 },
                                           { "HTI", 332 },
                                           { "HUN", 348 },
                                           { "IDN", 360 },
                                           { "IRL", 372 },
                                           { "ISR", 376 },
                                           { "IND", 356 },
                                           { "IOT", 86 },
                                           { "IRQ", 368 },
                                           { "IRN", 364 },
                                           { "ISL", 352 },
                                           { "ITA", 380 },
                                           { "JAM", 388 },
                                           { "JOR", 400 },
                                           { "JPN", 392 },
                                           { "KEN", 404 },
                                           { "KGZ", 417 },
                                           { "KHM", 116 },
                                           { "KIR", 296 },
                                           { "COM", 174 },
                                           { "KNA", 659 },
                                           { "PRK", 408 },
                                           { "KOR", 410 },
                                           { "KWT", 414 },
                                           { "CYM", 136 },
                                           { "KAZ", 398 },
                                           { "LAO", 418 },
                                           { "LBN", 422 },
                                           { "LCA", 662 },
                                           { "LIE", 438 },
                                           { "LKA", 144 },
                                           { "LBR", 430 },
                                           { "LSO", 426 },
                                           { "LTU", 440 },
                                           { "LUX", 442 },
                                           { "LVA", 428 },
                                           { "LBY", 434 },
                                           { "MAR", 504 },
                                           { "MCO", 492 },
                                           { "MDA", 498 },
                                           { "MDG", 450 },
                                           { "MHL", 584 },
                                           { "MKD", 807 },
                                           { "MLI", 466 },
                                           { "MMR", 104 },
                                           { "MNG", 496 },
                                           { "MAC", 446 },
                                           { "MNP", 580 },
                                           { "MTQ", 474 },
                                           { "MRT", 478 },
                                           { "MSR", 500 },
                                           { "MLT", 470 },
                                           { "MUS", 480 },
                                           { "MDV", 462 },
                                           { "MWI", 454 },
                                           { "MEX", 484 },
                                           { "MYS", 458 },
                                           { "MOZ", 508 },
                                           { "NAM", 516 },
                                           { "NCL", 540 },
                                           { "NER", 562 },
                                           { "NFK", 574 },
                                           { "NGA", 566 },
                                           { "NIC", 558 },
                                           { "NLD", 528 },
                                           { "NOR", 578 },
                                           { "NPL", 524 },
                                           { "NRU", 520 },
                                           { "NIU", 570 },
                                           { "NZL", 554 },
                                           { "OMN", 512 },
                                           { "PAN", 591 },
                                           { "PER", 604 },
                                           { "PYF", 258 },
                                           { "PNG", 598 },
                                           { "PHL", 608 },
                                           { "PAK", 586 },
                                           { "POL", 616 },
                                           { "SPM", 666 },
                                           { "PCN", 612 },
                                           { "PRI", 630 },
                                           { "PSE", 275 },
                                           { "PRT", 620 },
                                           { "PLW", 585 },
                                           { "PRY", 600 },
                                           { "QAT", 634 },
                                           { "REU", 638 },
                                           { "ROU", 642 },
                                           { "RUS", 643 },
                                           { "RWA", 646 },
                                           { "SAU", 682 },
                                           { "SLB", 90 },
                                           { "SYC", 690 },
                                           { "SDN", 736 },
                                           { "SWE", 752 },
                                           { "SGP", 702 },
                                           { "SHN", 654 },
                                           { "SVN", 705 },
                                           { "SJM", 744 },
                                           { "SVK", 703 },
                                           { "SLE", 694 },
                                           { "SMR", 674 },
                                           { "SEN", 686 },
                                           { "SOM", 706 },
                                           { "SUR", 740 },
                                           { "STP", 678 },
                                           { "SLV", 222 },
                                           { "SYR", 760 },
                                           { "SWZ", 748 },
                                           { "TCA", 796 },
                                           { "TCD", 148 },
                                           { "ATF", 260 },
                                           { "TGO", 768 },
                                           { "THA", 764 },
                                           { "TJK", 762 },
                                           { "TKL", 772 },
                                           { "TLS", 626 },
                                           { "TKM", 795 },
                                           { "TUN", 788 },
                                           { "TON", 776 },
                                           { "TUR", 792 },
                                           { "TTO", 780 },
                                           { "TUV", 798 },
                                           { "TWN", 158 },
                                           { "TZA", 834 },
                                           { "UKR", 804 },
                                           { "UGA", 800 },
                                           { "UMI", 581 },
                                           { "USA", 840 },
                                           { "URY", 858 },
                                           { "UZB", 860 },
                                           { "VAT", 336 },
                                           { "VCT", 670 },
                                           { "VEN", 862 },
                                           { "VGB", 92 },
                                           { "VIR", 850 },
                                           { "VNM", 704 },
                                           { "VUT", 548 },
                                           { "WLF", 876 },
                                           { "WSM", 882 },
                                           { "YEM", 887 },
                                           { "MYT", 175 },
                                           { "ZAF", 710 },
                                           { "ZMB", 894 },
                                           { "ZWE", 716 },
                                       };

            var regionInfo = new RegionInfo(country.Culture);

            if (countryCodesInEu.Keys.Contains(regionInfo.ThreeLetterISORegionName))
                return countryCodesInEu[country.Name];

            return -1;
        }

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The create dialog for “Media” does not match anything defined in the “~/umbraco/config/create/UI.xml”.

Simon Dingley — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 19:51:59 +0000

When upgrading sites from an earlier version of Umbraco prior to v4.7.0 you may encounter the following exception when trying to create new media items:

The create dialog for “Media” does not match anything defined in the “~/umbraco/config/create/UI.xml”. This could mean an incorrectly installed package or a corrupt UI file

There is an easy fix for this and sadly is due simply to the incorrect casing of the ‘Media’ nodeType defined in the UI.xml configuration file. To fix simply open the ~/umbraco/config/create/UI.xml file in your preferred text editor and locate the following line:

Simply change the word media to have an uppercase ‘m’ and save the file and your problems will go away!

Update: As per the comment by Petr Snobelt, for future compatibility it is possibly best to change the case in the database rather than the UI.xml file

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Loopback Connection Problem with Router

Simon Dingley — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 06:53:46 +0000

My router recently died on me and so I had to revert to using a crappy little router supplied to me by Virgin Media my internet provider. I do a fair amount of integration work with the SagePay payment service provider and so I need to configure my router to forward ports to my local instance of IIS in order to accept callbacks from the service. I’ve never had a problem with this before except now with this router I was getting the router admin page even though it was configured not to allow administration from outside of the network, I tried using my DynDns hostname and eventually got it hitting my local instance of IIS but the page would just never complete loading and hang indefinitely.

The solution it seems was actually quite straight forward and requires an entry in your host file which you can find in one of the following locations:

Windows 9x - (x):\Windows\Hosts
Windows 2000 - (x):\WinNT\System32\Drivers\etc\Hosts
Windows XP, Vista and 7 - (x):\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\Hosts

The entry to be added is your local IP address and the hostname to be used to connect to your local web server e.g.

127.0.0.1    www.example.com

For further help and information see Port Forward and Loopback Connections.

Page.User is null on IIS7 in Integrated Mode with UrlRewriting.Net

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Using Umbraco and Razor Syntax to add attributes to body tag for CSS targetting

Simon Dingley — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 17:33:35 +0000

I never found a solution that I was happy with for adding unique id’s to a page body tag that didn’t feel like a hack. I often need to do it for very specific CSS targeting so I introduce to you my current solution using the new Razor syntax inside of a master template in Umbraco.

UPDATED: The example above has now been updated to simplify it and require just a single piece of code inside of the inline-macro “@Model.Id” to output the current page id.

Essentially all this is doing is appending the current node id to a string (in my case just the letter ‘p’) and adding it to the id attribute of the html body tag.

I tend to also need to take this one step further and include the id of a parent page in case styling is applied to a section of the content tree, I do this by adding a class to the body tag which contains the section id. The solution for this that I have used successfully on a current project is as follows:



@{
	var node = Model;
	var sid = "s" + Model.Id;
	var level = 2;

	while(node.Level > 1)
	{
		if (node.Level == level)
		{
		  // Add any logic in here then create your class
		  sid = "s" + node.Id;
		}
		node = node.Parent;
	}
}

As in the previous example I am appending the current page id to a string and adding it to the id attribute of the body tag. I am also using a while loop to walk up the content tree to a specific level in the content tree, which in this case is level 2 and I am getting the id of the page at the specified level and appending it to a string(which in this case is ‘s’) and adding it to the class attribute of the body tag.

So what have I gained by doing this? I can now apply specifically targeted CSS styling to individual pages or to an entire section of the content tree.

I would welcome any comments from those more familiar with Razor in Umbraco on the performance overhead of doing this on each page load since I am including this in my master page.

* Credit goes to Jonas Eriksson for his tip on the Razor syntax for accessing parent nodes and to Aaron Powell for his introduction to “Using Razor in Umbraco 4” blog post.

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Check jQuery Plugin is loaded before use

Simon Dingley — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 12:08:33 +0000

It is good practice to check that a plugin is loaded before trying to use it, thankfully this is very simple as plug-ins are basically namespaces inside of jQuey so you can do the following:

if($().pluginName) {
     // Add any plugin specific code here
 }

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Level 2 Certified Umbraco Developer Status

Simon Dingley — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 21:27:53 +0000

I am proud to announce that I gained Level 2 Certified Umbraco Developer Status at the start of the month!

After investing the last 4 years or so into developing solutions with the Umbraco Content Management System I was given the opportunity to take level 2 certification in London at the start of December. I decided that the time was right to now get certified in order to qualify the skills I have learnt throughout my journey and to hopefully attract more Umbraco related work my way.

Umbraco has grown dramatically over the last few years both in terms of it’s popularity but at the same time it has matured into a very user-friendly and flexible content management solution that is now being adopted by some very large companies including Microsoft who are now really getting behind Umbraco and even think highly enough of it to use it on sites of their own such as ASP.Net. Umbraco has the most helpful and friendly community I have experienced on-line in my 13 or so years of web development and also running communities of my own.

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ELMAH – An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format.

Simon Dingley — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 11:36:45 +0000

Following the recent series of posts on issues I have had migrating client sites from IIS6 to IIS7, one common problem I had was on sites that use the ELMAH exception handler. The full exception message is “Could not load file or assembly ‘System.Data.SQLite’ or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format. “.

Another easy fix for this one but rather than it being a config issue relating to the IIS version I believe this is more related to the move from a 32-Bit server to a 64-Bit Windows Server. To correct the issue you need to modify the advanced settings for your app pool to “Enable 32-Bit Applications”.

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Use AppCmd to Migrate web.config from IIS6 to IIS7

Simon Dingley — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 19:21:44 +0000

Further to my earlier post I encountered another issue migrating sites for a client from IIS6 to IIS7. If your site uses any httpHandlers or httpModules you will need to perform these steps to migrate your web.config to include the missing configuration sections required by IIS7.

First of all I would suggest listing out all sites using AppCmd and the following command:

%systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\APPCMD list sites

Your output should be similar with the following:

SITE "Default Web Site" (id:1,bindings:HTTP/*:80:,state:Started)

SITE "Site1" (id:2,bindings:http/*:81:,state:Started)

SITE "Site2" (id:3,bindings:http/*:82:,state:Stopped)

Make a note of the object specific identifier in quotes as you will need this to specify the website/app whose web.config you wish to migrate.

Next you will need to run another command to perform the migration as follows:

%systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\APPCMD.EXE migrate config "object-specific-identifier/"

There is a very important point worth noting here as it caught me out for quite a while, be sure to include a trailing slash after your object specific identifier or the command will fail.

All being well your should get a message similar to this confirming the web.config has been migrated.

Successfully migrated section "system.web/httpModules".
Successfully migrated section "system.web/httpHandlers".

That’s it, for me the app was back up and running again after these steps.

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