d-fens GmbH
Audit and Consulting of Information Systems and Business Processes
I am a senior auditor, consultant and architect at d-fens for business processes and information systems.
When trying to add the current “Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi.OData” to a LightSwitch project I got the following error message: We are not using Silverlight in our application, only the HTML client – except when doing user and role administration … As a matter of fact we only need the package on the server layer anyway. So the solution to this is to […]
This will be a quick post about WebAPI and ODATA controllers, and a strange “bug” or behaviour I found. I was not aware of this, so maybe it is also of some interest for you. When you create an ODATA service via WebAPI and want to connect two or more entity sets via a relation the standard example will tell […]
Graylog2 comes with a very limited alerting feature where you can basically only create alerts based on a single field. However, and thus far I can follow the motivation of […]
LightSwitch can consume ODATA data source that you can use to gain more flexibility than using the internal data sources that also generate ODATA REST endpoints. Microsoft Web API provides an easy way on how to generate these endpoints. In this post I quickly describe the steps you need to take to actually create an endpoint that is actually usable […]
Finally I made it and found the time to upload the biz.dfch.PS.vCAC.Utilties PowerShell module! It is available for download at Github and NuGet (see below for links) and placed under the Apache 2.0 license. How to install: Copy the module along with the XML configuration file into a directory with the same name as the module under a path that […]
Here is a quick post as a reminder because I tend to forget myself and documentation on the Internet is not really pointing you to the solution right away … When using the ADSI provider in PowerShell (for example to use WinNT) and you want to perform the actual operation with different credentials than the currently logged on user you […]
Using the built-in RBAC feature of LightSwitch is really cool and easy to use until you have to assign all of your application defined permissions to roles and users. This is usually where the Administration DesktopClient does not scale too well… But of course there is help: and it is especially easy, when you utilize PowerShell to tackle that task. […]
As you might have already heard and tried out with .NET 4.5 (or so) Microsoft blessed us with a new and shiny HttpClient that should be easier to use, support async programming and (that’s best) finally allow the user to set any headers without reverting to some workaround code (cf. WebClient and its underlying classes). And it is actually true […]
Reading Paul’s article Being serious about the Command Table Pattern definitely helped me on a tricky problem I had to solve for a customer. However when you really make heavy use of that you will notice that you now have only reduced security features available. For example, when you want selected users to only read a specific “Verb” or command […]
When you have a vCAC stub (i.e. ‘BuildingMachine’ or any other stub) and invoke a script or process (like a PowerShell script) and from that script you start a new process as direct descendant of the original process it will be killed by vCAC when the stub exits. vCAC seems to search all processes and compares their Parent ProcessID against […]
The vCAC user interface is functional but has quite some limitations when you want to do selection based on different criteria the user enters. So for example, it is not possible to have cascading dropdown lists based on two parent lists or values. Furthermore you cannot select a physicl machine based on its location. And there are plenty more examples […]
Did you ever get the response from VMware support or anyone else ‘for this you need a CDK license to make it work’? As it turns out this is a costly thing to have and in most cases you will not need it anyway. In addition, if you really come across something the ‘CloudUtil.exe’ does not let you do, you […]
Some time back I showed a way on how one can change the placement while provisioning. The central problem is that the placement takes place in that moment when the user submits his machine request. So at any step during the provisioning the placement has already been determined and resources already have been allocated. During my research regarding the import […]
Besides the well used ManagementContext vCAC also has some SOAP services for basic infrastructure communication and provisioning. With the ProvisionService, VMPS for short, you get a wrapper around some basic vCAC workflows and helper functions that abstract data manipulation of the MangementContext and others. Using this service with PowerShell is pretty straightforward with the help of the ‘New-WebServiceProxy’ Cmdlet. For […]
When you play with vCAC workflow and scripts you will most certainly work with the ManagementModelEntitesClient or the MgmtContext for short. Have a look at my introduction to it in this blog post. But there is actually more in vCAC than just that. Out of the box vCAC ships with these models: And some of them are actually quite useful. […]
Calling PowerShell from vCAC is easy, right. But how about the other way round? Suppose you want to start the ‘ReclaimDestroyedStaticIPAddresses’ or the ‘WFStubMachineExpired’ workflow manually? As usual this can be done via the vCAC MetaModel ODATA REST service and of course with PowerShell. For a brief overview about the MetaModel you can have a look at Investigating vCAC 5.2 […]
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