Set ADFS timeout for Ms Dynamics CRM 2011

I always seem to forget how to this, so I thought I would write myself a reminder here, in script form:

param ($RelyingParty)
{
 Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.Adfs.PowerShell

 Set-ADFSRelyingPartyTrust -TargetName $RelyingParty -TokenLifetime 480
}

If you are not sure what your relying party is called, you can list them with this command:

Get-ADFSRelyingPartyTrust | format-list -Property Name 

or from the ADFS MMC ;)

Create AD Users from PowerShell

We had to rebuild our test environment and the chap that had created all the test accounts in AD no longer works for the company, so after a bit of digging I came with this script:

Import-Module ActiveDirectory

for($i = 1; $i -le 100; $i++){

$accountname=[string]::format("crmtest{0}",$i)
$principal=[string]::format("{0}@dev.com",$accountname)
$password="P@ssw0rd"


New-ADUser -SamAccountName $accountname -Name $accountname -UserPrincipalName $principal -AccountPassword (ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText $password -Force) -Enabled $true -PasswordNeverExpires $true -Path 'CN=Users,DC=dev,DC=com'

}

How to convert webpage to .mobi or .epub file

The standard advice when anybody answers this question seems to be: Use Calibre, the e-book management software. If you have a Kindle you can also use Amazon's conversion service, which is accessed by sending the webpage as an attachment to your kindle's email address (you do need to white list the email address from which you're sending the email from).

The problem is that neither of them works 100% of the time. There are online alternatives, such as instapaper, which is really handy as it allows you to combine multiple webpages into a single mobi file among other things, but I've never seen an image on any of the instapaper mobi files that I have downloaded, never.

I wrote a little console app that gets rid of the nasty stuff that makes Calibre go pop, it might work with Amazon too, but I've only tried it with Calibre as it's quicker to test.

Please bear in mind that I've only done limited testing, by the time I've done the app, done the tests and so on, I probably could have read all the "problematic" articles online, but there you go.

Also note that you will need the HtmlAgilityPack.

using HtmlAgilityPack;              
using System;              
using System.Collections.Generic;              
using System.IO;              
using System.Linq;              
using System.Text;              
using System.Threading.Tasks;              
              
namespace HTMLCleaner              
{              
 class Program              
 {              
     static void Main(string[] args)              
     {              
       if (args.Length >= 1 && args.Length <= 2)              
       {              
        try              
        {              
            string sourceFile = args[0];              
            string destFile = args.Length > 1 ? args[1] : args[0];              
                            
            HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlDocument();              
                            
            doc.Load(sourceFile);              
                            
            doc.DocumentNode.Descendants()              
                .Where(x => x.Name == "script" || x.Name == "iframe" || x.Name == "noscript").ToList()              
                .ForEach(x => x.Remove());              
                            
            using (StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter(destFile))              
            {              
                doc.Save(sw);              
            }              
                            
            Console.WriteLine("Successfully cleaned HTML");              
        }              
        catch (Exception ex)              
        {              
            Console.WriteLine("Error: {0} - Type {1}.", ex.Message, ex.GetType());              
        }              
       }      
       else      
       {      
        Console.WriteLine("Please Invoke like this:");              
        Console.WriteLine("HTMLCleaner.exe sourcefile destinationfile");              
        Console.WriteLine("Destination file can be omitted, in which case the source file will also be the destination file");              
       }              
 
     }              
 }              
}              

Retrieve OptionSet Label value in MS Dynamics CRM 2011

A method I used to retrieve the label, i.e. text of an option set (I would say more but I honestly can't remember what on Earth we use it for, if we still do use it).

string GetOptionSetLabel(IOrganizationService service, string entityName, string attributeName, int attributeValue)
{
  string result = string.Empty;

  try
  {
      RetrieveAttributeRequest request = new RetrieveAttributeRequest()
      {
        EntityLogicalName = entityName,
        LogicalName = attributeName,
        RetrieveAsIfPublished = true
      };

      RetrieveAttributeResponse resp = (RetrieveAttributeResponse)service.Execute(request);

      if (resp.AttributeMetadata.AttributeType != null && resp.AttributeMetadata.AttributeType == AttributeTypeCode.Picklist)
      {

        result = (from x in ((OptionSetMetadata)((PicklistAttributeMetadata)resp.AttributeMetadata).OptionSet).Options
                  where x.Value == attributeValue
                  select x.Label.UserLocalizedLabel.Label).FirstOrDefault();
      }
      else
      {
          result = "Attribute is not picklist";
      }
  }
  catch (Exception ex)
  {
      result = string.Format("Exception of type {0} occurred: {1}", ex.GetType(), ex.Message);
  }

  return result;
}

Introducing the best remote connection manager: mRemoteNG

I had to reimage my laptop again this week and I thought I had backed everything I needed up before I reimaged it, alas I hadn't. I forgot to backup the connections file for mRemoteNG.

I really like mRemoteNG, it is my one stop shop for remote connections, as it does pretty much every time of connection I might wish to use: RDP, SSH, VNC and more.

The key feature(s), for me, of mRemoteNG is in how it allows to classify connections in many ways to avoid working in the wrong server:

1. Servers can be grouped in directories, which allows the separation of applications in directories, so that for instance you could put all the connections to your servers for a CRM application in one directory called CRM inside the production directory.
2. Servers can appear in different tabs (Panels in mRemoteNG parlance). This feature is really useful as it allows to separate environments into different tabs, so that I'm not accidentally working in Prod when I think I'm working in dev or test.
3. Connections are named. Prepending all your connection names with a suitable prefix will help to ensure that you are working where you think you are.

An example of how things might look like in mRemoteNG, I just created a few at random server connections for the purposes of this post. 

The production servers are on their own tab, Prod, which is separated from the Dev tab, which contains the Dev servers.

The Connections and Config windows can be unpinned so that the full screen is devoted to the remote connection, which is really useful for graphical connections and it also allows Full screen if needed.

Another good feature is that the connections can be exported with or without password, which means that it is really easy to give a new employee an export of all the servers they need to use by simply exporting the connections file without passwords.

If you need to connect to many different servers and you want to be able to quickly change between them, mRemoteNG is a really good solution. The only downside I see is that it has been coded in VB.NET and I don't like VB.NET :).

Windows has detected that your computer's performance is slow

It's always reassuring to know that Windows is on the ball. Unfortunately, by the time I took this screenshot and saved it to file, the problem had seemingly gone away, laptop was still as slow as cold treacle, so I could not see what suggestions Microsoft would have for me.

Add more RAM you blithering idiot, perhaps?

Amazon EC2 Micro instance Linpack (HPL) performance

Amazon allows users to test their cloud for free for the first year, there are of course quite a few limitations, perhaps the most important of which is that you can only use the micro instance, which has 613 MB of RAM, I guess the hypervisor memory footprint must account for the ~150 MB that would make it up to 768 MB of memory usage.

At any rate, I wanted to find out how well these machines would perform on Linpack, so I created a very small, 4 node, cluster using my own instructions and set it to work.

All I can say is that the performance is appalling, the best test was 0.72 Gflops, see below.

It took over an hour to run a problem size of 15000, but unfortunately it crashed before it finished, even so I can't image the performance improving by much. These instances are unlikely to have even a single core all to themselves and network traffic was within Amazon's network rather than dedicated networks.

This is hardly surprising as Amazon has cluster specific instances available, still I'm pretty disappointed at the results.

I might try again with MKL to see if the performance improves somewhat.


================================================================================
T/V                N    NB     P     Q               Time                 Gflops
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WR11C2R4        1000   128     2     2               0.93              7.223e-01
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
||Ax-b||_oo/(eps*(||A||_oo*||x||_oo+||b||_oo)*N)=        0.0064465 ...... PASSED
================================================================================
T/V                N    NB     P     Q               Time                 Gflops
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WR11C2R4        5000   128     2     2             254.06              3.282e-01
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
||Ax-b||_oo/(eps*(||A||_oo*||x||_oo+||b||_oo)*N)=        0.0061108 ...... PASSED
================================================================================
T/V                N    NB     P     Q               Time                 Gflops
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WR11C2R4       10000   128     2     2             965.92              6.903e-01
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
||Ax-b||_oo/(eps*(||A||_oo*||x||_oo+||b||_oo)*N)=        0.0060791 ...... PASSED
================================================================================

Finished      3 tests with the following results:
              3 tests completed and passed residual checks,
              0 tests completed and failed residual checks,
              0 tests skipped because of illegal input values.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------