A few days ago, we upgraded the jdk we use for development. After this some developers experienced a special problem with our eclipse while debugging. When they set a breakpoint, eclipse did not stop. After a try and error phase we found a working solution. The problem disappeared when we set the vm parameter -Xms (define initial size of heap) to a higher value for the jvm inside eclipse. In our case we set -Xms to -Xms256m. We still do not know why this solution works. But we thought we’ll let you know.

Java, Software 1.6.0u14, breakpoint, debugging, eclipse, Java

In the first post of this serie I describe the problem which can be read here. In the second post of this serie I explained how the problem was analyzed using Live HTTP Headers which can be read here.

In this post I want to present you a possible solution how to achieve a succesful login on a sharepoint server which uses form based authorization. The WebDavSession from the ITHit component has unfortunately no public interface to set cookies from the outside (although I’m in contact with the developers there to see if they could provide some kind of access method to inject cookies). Therefore the internal cookie container of the WebDavSession must be extracted using System.Reflection.

.NET, Security Formbased Authentication, Sharepoint, WebDav

In the previous post I described the problem of accessing WebDav resources by using WebDav on a sharepoint server which has enabled form based authentication. The basic idea behind the solution is actually quite easy:

When accessing the sharepoint portal on the external zone with the ASP.NET membership accounts you have to fill out the login form with your credentials. When you click on the “Sign In” button a HTTP Post is sent to the server containing some uniquely generated IDs for your current browser session and your credentials with the name of the containing form component in plain text. If the authentication is successful the server returns a cookie containing the authorization state of the client. This cookie must be saved in the clients session and provided to the server every time the client communicates with it.

.NET, Security Formbased Authentication, Sharepoint, WebDav

In one of my projects I’m currently using WebDav to communicate to a sharepoint server. To minimize the developing costs regarding WebDav and to speed up the project I evaluated a nice library from ITHit which fully implements WebDAV RFC 2518 and DeltaV RFC 3253. The library is pretty straight forward to use and implemented in TDD manor. The cool thing also about this library is that resources and items from the remote location are returned as interfaces which really simplifies testing in your application basing on this library.

.NET, Security Formbased Authentication, Sharepoint, WebDav

Not surprisingly some geeks were able to extract the .NET Compact Framework 3.7 version which was contained in one of the latest Windows Mobile 6.5 ROMs. The .NET Compact Framework 3.7 is now available on some sites for download as CAB file. Unfortunately the extracted run-time environment is without a change log which let’s us developers in the dark what really was improved.

Mobile .NET CF 3.7, Compact Framework, Windows Mobile 6.5

Lucene offers great full text search capabilities. It is based on an index, which is maintained by Lucene. With Luke, the Lucene Index Toolbox (http://www.getopt.org/luke/) you can analyze your index and let explain queries.

After startup, you have to select your index. For this example, I created a test index with one file. It’s content is “this is a lucene test”. I used the StandardAnalyzer, which uses the WhitespaceTokenizer and filters out all tokens less than 3 characters and stop words. This will result in an index of the terms “lucene” and “test”.

Java Java, Lucene

Just a quick announcement that I’m going to have a speech at the Prio 2009 in Munich on October 28. or 29. 2009.

The main topic of the Prio conference this year is “User Interface”.

I’m going to talk about UI development the TDD way and show how to use the Passive-View-Command pattern for better testability, extendibility and changeability.

I’m touching a lot of topics in this session:

• MVVM – Model View ViewModel pattern
• WPF commands and “normal” command pattern
• Unity – Inversion of Control Container

Everything will be shown with the help of a sample application which is distilled from the open source project collaboration tool ProCollEE.

Information about all the sessions can be found here.

.NET, Announcement Conference, Model-View-ViewModel, MVVM, Passive View Command, Prio, ProCollEE, PVC, Unity, User Interface, WPF

Looking for new “brainfood” on programming topics on the internet I came across a really interesting article about immutable types in C# from Joe Duffy who happens to be the lead developer and architect for Parallel Extensions to .NET. If an object of a given types is immutable that means that the state of the object will never change after being constructed. Joe Duffy explains and shows by example how immutable types could be approached in .NET

.NET Immutable, Joe Duffy, Types

Not long ago the Windows Mobile 6.5 Developer Toolkits have been released to public. I want to briefly summarize what is currently available online and provide you some useful links and information about Windows Mobile 6.5 development.

Mobile Developer Toolkit, Development, DRK, DTK, Windows Mobile 6.5

Recently I installed Windows 7 RC1 at home to get a first glance at the new and exciting windows operating system. Shortly after installing Windows 7 I also downloaded Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 to have a quick overview about the .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1 and the development environment. Here’s a brief description how my setup and first look experience went like.

.NET .NET 4.0, Beta, Visual Studio 2010, Windows 7