Get .NET assembly version for aspx file - asp.net

I want to make a "properties style web form" that shows the application version for various .NET applications.
If I know the URL e.g. /someapp/default.aspx is it possible via reflection to execute that page and figure out the assembly version?
It's quite easy to find the executing assembly version, but without modifying the other application, is it possible?
Both the property page and the other application is running on the same server and in the same application pool.
Update: I've had some luck with
var url = "~/SomeApp/default.aspx";
var appType = System.Web.Compilation.BuildManager.GetCompiledType(url);
But navigating appType to find the assembly file version is not the same everytime.

Without modifying the web application to expose the version number through some URL-based retrieval (a simple page GET being the easy, obvious one), you're going to need to find a way to figure out where the DLL for the web application is from the URL.
If you can know the DLL's location, either by some convention (e.g. /appX/ is always at D:\Sites\appX\bin\appX.dll) or some configuration (you manually enter where each URL base's DLL is in a database), then you can retrieve that DLL's assembly version using the following code:
Assembly assembly = Assembly.LoadFrom("MyAssembly.dll");
Version ver = assembly.GetName().Version;
Code taken from this question.
Edit:
I've had a little look around, and there are some APIs to inspect the IIS configuration, so this is certainly a route to explore if you're trying to get from the URL to the assembly location. This question has an example of getting the physical path from the application/site name, for example. Microsoft.Web.Administration is the assembly to explore.

The ASP.NET engine streams nothing but HTML, javascript, etc.. to the client. There is nothing left of the assembly that gets passed in the response that can show what version of .net/asp.net that the application is running unless the developer on the server side adds it.
That said, you can gather some information from a utility at http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph that will give you some server information. Not down to the assembly version, but this is as close as I believe you are going to get.

You may implement custom HttpModule, put it to the bin folder of each application that you wish to monitor and append register this module in web.config files. In this module for example you should handle request, retrieve all required information and put it to response cookie.

Related

how to deploy flex app using different web service urls?

Is there some sort of configuration settings in FlashBuilder 4.5 where you can easily switch between webservice urls? Right now I have to delete and recreate the web service every time I switch from local to production and vice versa.
The need/requirement is this – Since I work in a startup, we keep changing servers, and their IP addresses. And being a service oriented application – I need to be able to edit the webservice endpoints in my Flex application in a easy manner every time this happens.
My Solution for this -
Assumption is that my webservice endpoint looks like this -
http:////ListAllServices/
1) Create a file config.xml in a folder named “settings” that sits in the root folder of your Flex application – outside the “src” folder. And the config.xml will be a simple xml file of the following format -
localhostTestFlexApp
At the end of this exercise the directory structure of your flex source code will look like this -
flex_src(root of the source code)
-com(some source folder)
–testapp
—view
—
-images
-settings
–config.xml
-appName.mxml
2) Now in your application code, setup a HTTPService object either in mxml or action script. Set the url of that object to this value- “settings/config.xml” – And the above xml fiel containing the current settings will be loaded into memory .
Now you can store these values in a singleton object and construct your Webservice call at runtime.
And whenever you want to move this to a new server in production, edit the tag of your config.xml and you should be good to go.
And this can be automated as well via the EnvGen ant task.
This is not the best way but yes it is very helpful while switching among servers.
Alrighty... The way I was doing it before in fact worked. The problem was browser caching.
For the benefit of others I modified the subsclass for the generated service and replace the wsdl variable with whatever endpoint I need.

Satellite assembly is not picked up by ASP.NET app

I have a web project called "TestResourceApp" with Labels.resx in App_GlobalResources folder. I want to add another language by creating a satellite assembly.
Here are the steps I took to create the satellite assembly. The default text always get displayed. What did I do wrong ?
1) Create Labels.fr.resx in a different folder.
2) Generate resource file:
Resgen Labels.fr.resx TestResourceApp.App_GlobalResources.Labels.fr.resources
3) Generate satellite assembly:
AL /t:lib /embed:TestResourceApp.App_GlobalResources.Labels.fr.resources /out:french.dll /c:fr
4) Copy french.dll to TestResourceApp/bin/fr
I have uiculture set to auto in web.config and I have change the language on the browser.
I was able to use this page to solve some satellite assembly issues I was having. I'll throw in a few more things to check.
It's helpful to decompile the "neutral" assembly and see how it's put together. A tool like ILDASM.exe is helpful for this purpose. Once you get it decompiled, look through the text output for ".mresource", and you should see one with your naming. For example, if you add a resource to a Visual Studio project, they're named MyAssemblyName + ".Properties.Resources" + a language (if any) + ".resources" Examples:
MyAssembly.Properties.Resources.resources (neutral language)
MyAssembly.Properties.Resources.en-US.resources (English (US))
In my case, I had the file named properly, and in the appropriate folder (such as Bin\en-US). I was able to verify that much by using ProcMon.exe (by the SysInternals guys) and could see the worker process finding and reading in my DLL file (instead of just saying "PATH NOT FOUND"). However, it was not finding the resource by the name that it expected it to. That's when some disassembly helped to get to the bottom of the naming problem.
So, use ProcMon.exe to narrow down the kind of problem you might have. Hopefully that's helpful to someone.
It's complicated but here are a few tips for those who run into this problem:
Try to include the resx in the web project and let VS do the job for you.
Reflector is your friend. Compare satellite assemblies you created and those created by VS.
If you web app is targetting ASP.NET 2.0, you should use Resgex and AL that come with .net 2.0. Open the assemblies in Reflector and check the "references". It should reference mscorlib version 2.0.
If you deploy your web app using web deployment project, make sure the namespace for the resources in your satellite assemblies is correct. Again, compare with what VS creates. In my case, I used the wrong tool to generate the designer.cs file because I wanted them to be accessible from a different assembly. Make sure you are using GlobalResourceProxyGenerator. Otherwise, the namespaces won't match and the deployment code will not be able to find your resource. The namespace in the designer.cs should simply be "Resources", not "XXXX.App_GlobalResources"
Did you have set enableClientBasedCulture to true in globalization ?

Updating DotNetNuke module from another app

I have several DNN modules that I wish to update silently, using the portal's built-in module upgrade facilities called from a separate application, in this case a Windows service. I was able to make it all work with version 4.3 of the portal by modifying the DNN source in key areas to allow DotNetNuke.dll to function outside of a web application. I'm now trying to do the same thing with the 4.9.0 source code and I'm having problems.
Everything works fine until DNN tries to read from the database. I have my Windows service project, the DNN library project, and several other related projects loaded in one VS solution (the additional projects are the same ones that are in the main solution file provided with the DNN source). I call PaInstaller.Install in my service to update each module. Execution gets to reflection.vb and then it tries to create a DotNetNuke.Data.SqlDataProvider object based on the type name. It raises an exception when calling System.Web.Compilation.BuildManager.GetType. The exception says:
Could not load type 'DotNetNuke.Data.SqlDataProvider' from assembly 'System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a'
I read this to mean it simply couldn't locate the DotNetNuke.SqlDataProvider.dll assembly. What's strange is that assembly is in the Bin folder for the DNN library project, and I also have it in the folder where my Windows service is running. The actual SqlDataProvider project is also loaded in the solution. I can't for the life of me understand why the runtime environment can't locate the assembly.
Has anyone tried something like this before, or know what could cause an assembly not to be found while stepping through the DNN source? Am I better off using something other than BuildManager.GetType to get an instance of the SQL provider type?
Chris,
Honestly depending on your needs, I would look at doing this a different way, as this is going to be very fragile with each DNN upgrade that happens in the future.
I'd look more towards using the "bulk install" option that DNN already has. Have your service upload the module zips to the /install/modules folder, then from there, call /install/install.aspx?mode=installresources and you are done!
If you need a third party solution to parse the results, have your windows service go through and pull the HTML response and parse it to validate success.

Weird MethodNotFound exception when renaming a property - related to asp.net / web forms / fluentnhibernate and visual studio

I have a local website which I run through Visual Studio 2008's internal development web server (through the run / compile button).
I have an external library which is referenced on a page of that website and resides inside the web site's "bin" folder.
I've recently changed a class' property name inside that library (renaming it, from "ValidFrom" to "VisibleFrom"), recompiled its dll and have overwritten the original dll inside the bin folder.
This class is mapped with FluentNHibernate, I've also changed the mappings and recompiled / redeployed the library.
When I try to run the site and navigate to the page where the library is used, I'm getting a MethodNotFound exception for the method get_ValidFrom, related to FluentNHibernate's configuration call. This should be get_VisibleFrom now!
Now I've reconfigured my NHibernate SessionProvider so that it generates a new Configuration for NHibernate on each call, and does not retrieve it from the Http Session entity like it did before, because I figured there might lie the problem.
I'm still getting the exception however. I've then deleted the Temporary ASP.NET folder's content... but I'm still getting the error.
Where is the generated schema for NHibernate stored, when using FluentNHibernate?
Anyone knows where else this could somehow be cached?
Thanks
FNH does not cache the schema, it is generated on-the-fly when you make a call to Fluently.Configure() and the schema is passed directly into an NHibernate Configuration object which is used to build an ISessionFactory.
Try clearing out all compiled objects/libraries/executables, removing the reference to your library from all projects that use it, add it back in, and then re-compile everything. Also check your all your code for "magic strings" that may be referencing this property or causing it to be referenced by the old name.
If that doesn't work, it might be helpful to see a stack trace to get an idea of what is being called from where.

System.IO.FileNotFoundException when loading web service

I've a simple, if not primitive, C++/CLI .NET 2.0 class library. It is used in order to wrap some C++ legacy code for the Web Service. The following facts appear to be true:
Primitive C# test program calls class library and it works.
If class library does not refer to any modules of our code base, it works as well as part of the web service. That is, I load the web service and invoke the methods and receive proper response.
The same moment I replace the copied and pasted code by the calls from our code base libraries, the Web Service stops to load. I get System.IO.FileNotFoundException message.
The problem: I cannot find any place where the file name that couldn't be found is written.
I googled it and gave some permissions to some ASP.NET user on my computer. I copied all the DLLs of our libraries into the same directory where web service is installed. I searched in IIS logs, event logs, etc - no where could I find the name of the module that prevents the web service from coming up.
Any help on the matter would be greatly appreciated.
Boris
Make sure all the dependent DLLs are in the path (Path meaning not the directory where your assembly is, because ASP.net copies your assembly away into a temporary folder, but rather a directory that's included in the System path environment variable).
What calls are you replacing? Could it be the original code gracefully handles missing files (which may not even be important) and yours does not?
Add same rights to the iusr-account that you did to the asp.net-account.

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