Just code - Tamir Khason : soft, tools, source

New year – new blog or how to migrate Community Server to any other engine, supports XML-RPC

Tamir Khason — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 02:33:04 GMT

Please update your bookmarks, because the new url of this blog is http://khason.net/ (you have not update RSS feeds, it will be done automatically). Why I did it? Why I decided to go to “stand-alone”… Well. there are some reasons. Generally, I do not want to explain all those here, but trust me, there are some. The main reason is, that there is no responsible person in charge for this blog platform in Microsoft Israel. This why, if your blog is popular and you have a respect to your blog visitors, you cannot host it here… Take a look into new comments notifications in my inbox. Would you answer your readers with such “small amount” of SPAM and capcha, that cannot be fixed already for three years in this platform? This how my inbox looks like for last three years. So now, you should not ask me, why I not answered your email or comments. Aren’t you? :)

Currently, all comments in this blog are disabled, so if you want to comment, please use new url of posts (this will appear shortly in the beginning of each post). Also, this post will not be syndicated in RSS.

So, this post is the last. I loved this platform, and loved people started it. But, unfortunately, it seemed, that bloggers community is not important enough for new platform managers.

Also, If you want to learn how to use C# and XML-RCP to migrate from CS2007, used in this platform, visit my new home :)

Have a great year and, as always, be good people. This post marked with all possible tags automatically. Sorry.

Backup and restore your wireless networks settings by using WirelessMigrator

Tamir Khason — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 02:58:00 GMT

[This blog was migrated. You will not be able to comment here.
The new URL of this post is http://khason.net/blog/backup-and-restore-your-wireless-networks-settings-by-using-wirelessmigrator/]

I had to reinstall my working notebook, so I begun to backup all it’s settings. I almost finished, when recognize, that Windows Vista has no tool for backup and restore wireless networks settings (tnx to Daniel Petri). You can manually add or remove it. You can even change the priorities, but you cannot backup or restore it.

What to do? How to save all my passwords for networks and all certificates. Digging a bit deeper I found a way to do it, by using command line prompt.

“netsh wlan show profiles” will show you all wireless network profiles in your system
”netsh wlan export profile name=”name” folder=”folder”” will export each profile to xml file (you can also run netsh wlan export profile” to export them all as bunch
”netsh wlan add profile filename=”name”” will restore each one of profiles and returns them into the system

For some reason, I cannot see my mother doing it… More then this, I cannot see myself remember all those command and doing it manually for each one of saved profiles (and I have a lot of them)

What’s the solution? Build handy tool! I’m developer after all and know to solve my and other’s problems by code.

Let me introduce you WirelessMigrator

What is WirelessMigrator? Wireless Migrator is a handy small program, that knows to backup and restore all wireless networks setting from your computer by one click. For some reason, there is no way to do it by using regular Windows Vista tools.
This feature is extremely useful, when you have to reinstall your computer or use the same settings of wireless networks for different machines. In order to use the program, all you have to do is to run it once. The program generate small file, can be handled and transferred in diskette. Later if you'll run this generated file, all settings of wireless networks will be restored on target machine.

Run “BackupWireless.exe” to backup

And “RestoreWireless.wnb” to restore

That’s all, folks. Now you can save and restore your settings for wireless networks for migration easily.

Download Wireless Migrator >>

At first run, the program will request elevation on Windows Vista, to assign backup archive extension with the program and be able to restore with one click. To completely remove all registry nodes, wrote by program, from the registry, use BackupWireless.exe /remove option. To reinstall the program, just run it for the first time. That’s what I’m calling SmartClient. This is not “real” installation it also not very “web” application.

WirelessMigrator has very advanced and smart user interface

Now a little bit about the user interface of this program. I though a lot about it and decided not to make any user interface for it. Theoretically, it was possible to make kind of “Funky-Vista-Glow” list of all available networks and three buttons “Backup”, “Restore” and “Cancel”. I even done it with half an hour in WPF. But wait a moment. Is it really necessary to have user interface for such program? It wont be more functional by having it. All it have to do, done automatically and you have nothing to do if something going wrong.

So, I build text-only progress bar and key switches to show progress (with will not take more, then 3 seconds), but that’s all. ‘m really interested to know what do you think about it?

Download Wireless Migrator >>

Your feedback is really important for me. Please take a moment and tell me what’s good and what’s bad with this program in order me to be able to continue it’s development. Full source of the program is available under MS-PL from CodePlex.

My other open source projects, you may be interested with

Have a nice day and be good people.

How to test localized application?

Tamir Khason — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 17:37:00 GMT

[This blog was migrated. You will not be able to comment here.
The new URL of this post is http://khason.net/blog/how-to-test-localized-application/]

You finished writing World-Ready application. It detects current system culture, or possibly, UI culture, or, even Region and change it's layout language to language, detected with those methods. Now, you want to test it on different locales. What to do? You can go to test PC or, if you're advanced user, install virtual PC images and test the application, while changing Regional and Language Options for each of locale, you want to test. Pretty complicated, especially, when you want to change UI culture - MUI application requires restart. How to make it easier?

You can try tinny test application, I wrote to perform such task. All you have to do is open your target application via LocTester (or just drop the executable into it and play with cultures to test localization support. Here the screenshot of LocTester

And small video, that demonstrates the way you'll use it.

Now a little bit about localization in general. First of all, we have to decide what we want from localization. If all you want is locale-specific dates, currencies or formats, you, probably have to use CultureInfo.CurrentCulture class, if all you want is detect the geographical location of end users, use RegionInfo.CurrentRegion (it's derived from CurrentCulture). In case, you do not need to change formats, but you want to localize user interface for those users, who has Start button on other language, use CurrentCulture.CurrentUICulture class. How to use it? Simple

 
    
if (CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture.TwoLetterISOLanguageName.Equals("fr")) 
      
 { 

      
 this.ChangeUICulture("fr"); 
      
 } 

      
 else if (CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture.TwoLetterISOLanguageName.Equals("de")) 
      
 { 

      
 this.ChangeUICulture("de"); 
      
 } 

      
 else if (CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture.TwoLetterISOLanguageName.Equals("it")) 
      
 { 

      
 this.ChangeUICulture("it"); 
      
 }

Now test it with LocTester to see results. You can compare them later, by changing system locale :)

Download LocTester Binaries >>

Download LocTester Source >>