In the last month, two colleagues of mine have bought Windows Phone with Mango yet installed on it, and for some unknown reason, the same procedure I made to configure my phone doesn’t work at all, on both devices.

The problem is that device says that there is not a valid certificate, and seems impossible to understand why it doesn’t retrieve the certificate.

So firstly tried searching on the web for the solution, and at the end, after a lot of different tries, I got the right one.

Of course I cannot assure the solution that has worked for me may fit your issue, but it is the following, make a try.

First, navigate with IE (or another web browser) to your “owa” web page (i.e. https://owa.mydomain.com/) and log into your webmail.

So click on the “lock” icon (or similar) into the url field to view and manage the certificate.

So this is the most important action (in my case): export (or save) the certificate on your file system using .p7b extension (that is the PKCS#7 version).

Then send this certificate in attachhment to another email account you are able to receive on the phone (Gmail or Hotmail). Download and install the certificate on the phone.

Then return on your settings and try to sync the Exchange account you have. In my case worked on both devices.
Now my colleagues can receive company’s mail. But I’m not sure they are happy about this… 

It begins with a series of introductory chapters, using products and technologies characteristics, to introduce reader to most interesting concepts for the purpose of the book.

Successive chapters are focused on techniques to allow data access and consuming, and other interesting methods to understand how to implement applications and web parts using both components.

The examples inside the book represent a good entry point on the route to this kind of integration, and are explained so well through code and screenshots that guides the developer on his steps to follow to accomplish the objectives.

If I should define a defect for this book, then it is its brevity. I think that a deep understanding of this kind of integration is not possibile with this number of pages. So this could be a starting point but will not be exhaustive to define himself an “expert”.

At the end, I think this is a good reference to have always on own desk, the target reader is in my humble opinion should be a developer focused on SharePoint 2010 (better if senior developer but not mandatory) and must have known basic concepts about Azure and its platform. Also a basic skill on WCF could be useful for correct understanding of some paragraphs and examples.

You can buy the book here.

I tried to solve the problem creating and using an instance of the model able to be initialized with the existing connection string.

In this example, we will use a model named MyModel and, in the web.config file, there is a section like this:

<connectionStrings> 
 <add name="MyConnectionString" 
 connectionString="Server=mysrv\myinst;Database=mycatalog;Integrated Security=True" /> 
 <add name="MyModel" 
 connectionString="metadata=res://*/MyModel.csdl|res://*/MyModel.ssdl|res://*/MyModel.msl; 
 provider=System.Data.SqlClient; 
 provider connection string= 
 &quot;Data Source=mysrv\myinst;Initial Catalog=mycatalog; 
 Integrated Security=True;MultipleActiveResultSets=True&quot;" 
 providerName="System.Data.EntityClient" /> 
</connectionStrings> 

As you can see, the strings are similar but not exactly the same, even if they use same physical server and database, because the model requires additional information about data mapping (csdl, ssdl, msl).

To accomplish the requirement, we need to “extend” the model class, creating the same class as “partial”, giving in this mode additional members to the model itself.
The class will have the same name of the model, so it will be named MyModel.

public partial class MyModel
{ 
 // ...
} 

In this partial of the class we will put a singleton instance of the model itself, implemented as a static property:

// private static instance to create only once
private static MyModel context = null; 
// public static instance of the model
public static MyModel Context 
{ 
 get
    { 
        if (context == null) 
        { 
         context = CreateModelContext("MyConnectionString", "MyModel"); 
        } 
 return context; 
    } 
} 

The singleton instance returns the static private instance, having care to initialize it when null (so just in the first occurrence of the usage).

Initialization happens through a method that receives in input the connection string name and the model class name, and returns the instance of the model created with the existing connection string:

/// <summary> 
/// Returns an instance of the model created with an existing connection string from config file 
/// </summary> 
/// <param name="ConnStringName">Name of the connection string</param> 
/// <param name="ModelName">Name of the class that represents the model</param> 
/// <returns>Returns an instance of the model</returns> 
private static MyModel CreateModelContext(string ConnStringName, string ModelName) 
{ 
    // read connection string from config file   
    ConnectionStringSettings sqlconn = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings[ConnStringName]; 
    // use an instance of "EntityConnectionStringBuilder" that will help us to create connection 
 // for the model, using values from existing connection string 
    EntityConnectionStringBuilder ef = new EntityConnectionStringBuilder(); 
    ef.Provider = "System.Data.SqlClient"; 
    ef.ProviderConnectionString = sqlconn.ConnectionString; 
    ef.Metadata = string.Format(@"res://*/{0}.csdl|res://*/{0}.ssdl|res://*/{0}.msl", ModelName); 
    // then returns the instance of the model 
    return new MyModel(ef.ToString()); 
} 

N.B. Italian version of this post can be found here.

It is of course a fake mail, and I want to remember to anyone to avoid using strange links when receiveing this kind of message.

At this step of its life, Google+ is still in beta.

O’Reilly offers free e-books copy to people owning a blog that wants to review the copy received with a post on his blog. You can read the book and share your opinion to the world.

I asked to receive this book. For whom it may concern, this is the link to agree to the program.

Great job O’Reilly!

Prometric says “Passed” on 071-506. I’m MCTS on “Silverlight 4, Development”, and directly from Beta Exam!

Thank you all !

We’ll see again on Aspitalia.com

Silverlight 4

Beta Exam 71-506, TS: Silverlight 4, Development

Azure

Beta Exam 71-583, Pro: Designing and Developing Windows Azure Applications

Register immediately! But do it only if you’re sure to participate, else please leave room for other people!

Good luck!

After a detailed substitution of all the occurrence inside the project, all builds and everything seems ok. But really it isn’t.

When you start debugging, or simply launch your application, Silverlight page seems loading for a while, until a message like the following appear:

In that case the indication are really poor, and the message seems indicating a problem in the manifest file, that in my specific situation was almost empty.

The search on internet makes me verify a lot of things, and I was not able to resolve my issue.

So I decided to check again for incongruence or something strange in my settings, and finally… I got it!

The problem is here:

The compiler does not warn me about the startup project based on the old namespace, and the problems is raised only when silverlight engine try to use the application!

Sometimes a great tool like Visual Studio 2010, that I’ve used in this situation, seems still not completed. But it remains, in my humble opinion, the best development IDE of ever.