The art of simplicity

If you get bored, during the Christmas holidays, have a look at the Channel 9 series: What’s new in Visual Studio 2013 . Developers, are you trying to figure out what Visual Studio 2013 has to offer you? Whether you develop for the web, Windows, or Windows Phone, and whether you are using C#, XAML, HTML, or Visual Basic, this course is for you. It focuses on some of the key new features, addressed individually in sessions throughout the day, so that you can tune in to the specific tools that will help you develop more quickly and easily. Start by learning about the integrated development environment (IDE), and then attend sessions including improved IntelliSense, easier debugging, and better tools for application lifecycle management (ALM).

Just as a quick reference for myself, here are the required statements to create your own certificate using OpenSSL: Create the ADFS certificate: openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 3650 -newkey rsa:1024 -keyout adfs01.pem -out adfs01.pem-extensions v3_ca Pack the certificate and the key into a pfx file so we can easily import it into the Windows Certificate store: openssl pkcs12 -export -out adfs01.pfx -in adfs01.pem -name "adfs01"

When trying to create a new certificate using OpenSSL, it failed with the following error message: “unable to load config info from /usr/local/ssl/openssl.cnf” This error was an easy one to solve. Just restarting the computer fixed it. Jippie!

When creating an application with Angular.js, I was using the $index variable inside an ng-repeat to track the index of the current item. The problem was that the moment I start combining this with an orderBy filter, the $index value was no longer correct. I worked around the issue by passing the item itself around instead of the index.  In my function I used the indexOf method of an array. Anyone with a better solution?

A colleague asked me for help with a complex NHibernate query. He had written a query using the NHibernate Linq support but when he tried to execute the query, NHibernate complained with the following error message: ‘'Unrecognised method call: System.Int64:Boolean Contains(Int64)” Let’s have a look at his query first: It seems that NHibernate cannot translate the Contains() call in a related NHibernate query. To fix this, we switched from the Linq syntax to the QueryOver syntax:

In the Angular.js documentation you can find a sample of how to use the orderby filter. The problem is that this sample is already quite complex and allows you to specify a custom filter based on a predicate value. Here is a simple sample that applies the order filter based on a specific column:

If you are looking for a way to integrate oData and custom authentication, I can recommend the following article: Securing OData services using Basic Authentication . There is one thing that you should notice: The moment you start using a custom authentication module, it’s important that you configure IIS for Anonymous Access. Otherwise the built-in authentication modules will kick in even when your own custom authentication module is called. We forgot to change this and it took us some time to figure out why we always got a login dialog although the authentication module authenticated us successfully.