When developing a document level Add-In in visual studio, you may have a need to pass the current document to another function. This is tricky, because ThisDocument cannot be cast to a document object.

Turns out, ThisDocument inherits DocumentBase, and has a property called InnerObject. This is the Document.

Here is a VERY basic SortedSet wrapper for .NET 3.5
The SortedSet is one of the few new features of the .NET Framework 4.0 that I hate to go without. I recently had to drop a Class Library from 4.0 to 3.5, and the SortedSet was the only thing missing. So, I just created my own SortedSet that is build on the SortedList where TValue is a byte,

Here is my implementation – if you need any of the really fancy features, you will need to implement them yourself.

    public class SortedSet<T> : SortedList<T,byte>
    {
        public SortedSet() : base()
        {
        }

        public T Min
        {
            get
            {
                if ((base.Count) >= 1)
                {
                    return base.Keys[0];
                }
                else
                {
                    return default(T);
                }
            }
        }

        public T Max
        {
            get
            {
                if ((base.Count) >= 1)
                {
                    return base.Keys[base.Keys.Count - 1];
                }
                else
                {
                    return default(T);
                }
            }
        }


        public bool Contains(T value)
        {
            return base.ContainsKey(value);
        }

        public void Add(T value)
        {
            base.Add(value, 0);
        }
    }

The SonicWall SSL-VPN 2000 is an impressive and feature-packed appliance. For the most part, I have no complaints (well, it would be nice if it worked on the iPhone or iPad, but this is a bigger issue…), but recently we ran into a rather annoying problem.

The SSL-VPN allows you to configure “bookmarks” that are links to your internal resources. Bookmarks can be Remote Desktop, FTP, VNC, and (among others) http and https. For intranet sites that support basic authentication, it will even push credentials.

All urls accessed through the vpn are rewritten something like: https://sslvpn/go/http://intranetsite/index.html. All URLs referenced within are rewritten as well. This works great until it doesn’t.

Say your intranet page has a link to google.com. The SSL-VPN will happily proxy all traffic through itself, rewriting the link to https://sslvpn/go/http://www.google.com.
Now say you had a link to some cloud-based application that doesn’t tolerate being proxied, and you have a problem.

As far as I can tell, SonicWall provides no option to disable rewriting for a specific bookmark. If you have purchased the Web Application Firewall addon, I believe you can setup exceptions, but I’m not even so sure about that. So… I had to try to figure it out myself.

Well after experimenting and digging, I found a workaround involving javascript redirection, obscuring strings, and overriding functions. While I typically would post my solution, I fear that SonicWall might consider it a security hole and simply patch things up without providing a viable solution. So, if you are pulling your hair out over your SSL-VPN rewriting all your external links – there is hope! Shoot me a comment / email and I’ll see if I can’t help you out.

UPDATE 10/18/2011

One of the people who requested my workaround found that in his case there was a much simpler solution: If you simply need to create a bookmark to an external website, you can just configure the bookmark on the SSL-VPN as an “external website”. My workaround is for the case where you need the SSL-VPN to proxy an internal page, but that page has a link (or redirect) to an external page that gets mangled.

Thanks!
-Jason

I discovered a couple things today. First, VirtualBox 4 appears to be less resource intensive than Vmware Player for the same workload.

Second, while VirtualBox provides the ability to run in a headless manner (aka hidden, or in the background), the command line tool to do so must be left open (on windows at least)
…

Yeah… kinda defeats the purpose of being headless.

If you close the cmd window, it kills your VM.

The solution: well here, I’ll just attach it:
VBoxHeadlessSilent.exe
(Requires .NET Framework 4 Client Profile)

Just drop it in your c:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox folder (or wherever you installed it to) and invoke it the same as you would VBoxHeadless.exe. Instead of staying open, it will print out the response from VBoxHeadless.exe and return, leaving it running in the background.

All this app does is create a process with a hidden window and passes through the parameters.

Update 9/13/2011: If you are having problems with this not working or otherwise erroring out, it might be because of spaces in the VM Name. Try renaming the VM without spaces and see if that fixes it.
(Thanks David!)

Here is the source code if you are curious.

using System;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;
using System.Diagnostics;

namespace VBoxHeadlessSilent
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string headlessPath = "";
            string argString = "";

            for (int i = 0; i < args.Length; i++)
            {
                argString += args[i] + " ";
            }

            headlessPath = Path.Combine(Environment.CurrentDirectory, "VBoxHeadless.exe");
            if (!File.Exists(headlessPath)) headlessPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.ProgramFiles), "Oracle", "VirtualBox", "VBoxHeadless.exe");
            if (!File.Exists(headlessPath)) headlessPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.ProgramFilesX86), "Oracle", "VirtualBox", "VBoxHeadless.exe");

            if (File.Exists(headlessPath))
            {
                Process p = new Process();
                p.StartInfo.FileName = headlessPath;
                p.StartInfo.Arguments = argString;
                p.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = false;
                p.StartInfo.CreateNoWindow = true;
                p.StartInfo.WindowStyle = ProcessWindowStyle.Hidden;
                p.StartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = true;
                p.Start();
                Console.Write(p.StandardOutput.ReadToEnd());
                Environment.Exit(0);
            }
            else
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Could not find VBoxHeadless.exe!");
                Environment.Exit(1);
            }
        }
    }
}

If you try to install CRM 2011 RTM on a machine with Internet Explorer 9, when you click on any of the options in the initial splash window you will get “microsoft crm splash screen has stopped working” crash.

To workaround it, run server/amd64/setupserver.exe directly.

I needed to launch an Internet Explorer window to a particular URL in a near “chromeless” fashion – no toolbar, no address bar, no scrollbars, from a C# .NET application. At first I used thread.start(url), but you cannot specify how Internet Explorer should open – there are no command line options to customize the window.

The internet failed me – I was supposed to reference some web COM dll, that I didn’t even have.

The solution is painfully simple. Make sure you have a reference to System.Windows.Forms, create a WebBrowser object in code (no need to add it to a form), give it an about:blank url, then use Document.Window.OpenNew() to launch a new IE window with parameters.

Examples speak louder than words: this snippet will open google in a new browser window

using (WebBrowser wb = new WebBrowser())
{
    wb.Url = new System.Uri("about:blank");
    wb.Document.Window.OpenNew("http://google.com", "location=no,menubar=no,scrollbars=no,status=yes,toolbar=no,resizable=yes");
}

If you will be opening a lot of windows, maybe you should keep the WebBrowser object in a class variable.

Maybe this one was out there somewhere, but I couldn’t find it…