velodocaddin Forum Rss Feed

New Post: Unable to install this application because an application with the same identity is already installed

ghanshyamsonara — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:28:10 GMT

Thanks a lot

Hi i am working on outlook add-in. I face the same problem while re-installing the add-in after make update in code and rebuild the setup.

I have just completed my project with the help of your post

New Post: File not found.

jwang — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 21:40:35 GMT

Hi,

I sent a file with AddIn to myself, it looks everything is ok. But when I click the download link, it always get error: "File not found". There is no error under the Transfer Controller's screen.

New Post: The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a receive

jlchereau — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 15:10:23 GMT

After further tests, the error above seems to be related to the configuration of wcfTransferServiceBinding in web.config. In Velodoc XP Edition build 081107, the configuration is:
<binding name="wcfTransferServiceBinding" messageEncoding="Mtom" transferMode="Streamed" maxBufferSize="65536" maxReceivedMessageSize="67108864" receiveTimeout="00:05:00" sendTimeout="00:05:00">
which actually means that the server should close the connection should transfer be more than 64 MB or take more than 5 minutes.

This configuration will be changed to the following in a future build to allow up to 100MB transfers that may take up to 1 hour :
<binding name="wcfTransferServiceBinding" messageEncoding="Mtom" transferMode="Streamed" maxBufferSize="65536" maxReceivedMessageSize="104857600" receiveTimeout="01:00:00" sendTimeout="00:10:00">

maxReceivedMessageSize should be lower than maxRequestLength on IIS6 and maxAllowedContentLength on IIS 7 (see above).

New Post: Communication Exception: Error when transfering 80 MB DWG file

jlchereau — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 17:09:30 GMT

This discussion has been copied to a work item. Click here to go to the work item and continue the discussion.

New Post: IIS 412 error

jlchereau — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 12:23:09 GMT

This error is reported by the DownloadHandler, which provides resumable downloads, in particular when it gets unexpected values in the Http header fields "If-Modified-Since" and/or "If-Unmodified-Since". I have experienced this error a couple of times but it is almost impossible to reproduce because it depends on the status of the browser cache. See what other users say : http://forum.ie7pro.com/viewtopic.php?id=1223.

The workaround which has always worked for me is to refresh the page or click the download link while pressing Ctrl + Shift to ensure that you bypass the browser cache (Note that you should normally use the Ctrl key in IE and the Shift key in Firefox, but the combination of both always works).

New Post: Polling on the server

jlchereau — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 11:49:43 GMT

Hello,

On one hand, I would be more than happy to solve this issue but your IT technicians are not giving me much to work with.

On the other hand, I know the following for facts:

I have spent quite some time trying to reproduce what your IT technicians say without success, as shown in the logs I have posted here above;
I cannot see in our code anything that would trigger a user windows authentication when opening an Outlook email (and doing nothing else as they say). This can easily be verified considering our code is open-source. Besides they say "if you run an addin within office (and i have developed one or two addins in my life) the traffic will show up as the user that the addin is being executed by (pretty standard stuff) . when the message opens if i am getting logs for successful login guess what-- the addin is what is doing it" but the add-in is a DLL running in the Outlook process, so it inherits user rights from Outlook without requiring authenticating again, especially considering that Windows user credentials are not used to communicate with Velodoc XP Edition. Besides each "User Name" scope can only authenticate to a resource a single time. It can be authenticated to the local computer once and to each network resource a single time. This single authentication will generally prohibit a user from authenticating a second time to an individual server in a Windows Domain if the user is already authenticated to the Domain or Tree. See http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/14914.html.

If they want to progress this, your IT technicians need to do their home work and post useful logs here:

We do not know which security events they are recording (security audit policies) and we have performed our tests with the Windows defaults, so there may be events which they get and which did not show up in our logs. Publishing a relevant portion of their security event log here cannot hurt;
It is easy to install Microsoft Network Monitor on a client computer running Outlook with the add-in and record authentication traffic when opening an Outlook message (and nothing else to start with). Again, publishing a relevant portion of these logs can only help understand the issue.
Also publishing the corresponding DebugView trace is very useful to keep track of the test case performed.

I am willing to consider that the Velodoc add-in is responsible for this authentication traffic and make any correction required in our code, but only with the evidence to support it and allow me to reproduce it.

New Post: IIS 412 error

mytestingsoftware — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 21:16:08 GMT

Hi

We have a user who uploaded a series of files totally 20.2 MB (9 files) to the server. The user received an email and clicked one of the files and the velodoc xp page presented the user with an error message "precondition not found"

We then sent the download urls to several employees to see if they could access the files - many users were able to successfully download the files and 2 other employees received the precondition not found error.

We traced down the 412 error
http://www.checkupdown.com/status/E412.html

The IIS logs do not tell us anything other than the time when the problem occurred.

Any ideas / suggestions?

cheers

New Post: Polling on the server

mytestingsoftware — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 18:47:37 GMT

Hi

I sent you response to our server guy and below is his response

---

they are saying it is the vsto, the wcf and .net framework that would be causing it but lets entertain it for a moment. so every time i open an outlook message every server i have in the domain should then be getting these entries in the logs... they are not.

only the server where velodoc lives gets the auth traffic everytime i open an outlook message with the velodoc plug in ? yes, but it is the vsto etc etc not velodoc in anyway......

So here is the bottom line - i open an outlook message without the addin installed and i receive no traffic to the server, i open a message up WITH the velodoc addin installed and i get traffic.

As for enterprise it uses bits, which would be much better in our environment.

in its simplest form however, if you run an addin within office (and i have developed one or two addins in my life) the traffic will show up as the user that the addin is being executed by (pretty standard stuff) . when the message opens if i am getting logs for successful login guess what-- the addin is what is doing it.

New Post: Dragging direcotry crashes on transfer

jlchereau — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 14:28:03 GMT

Hello,

This error has nothing to do with the use case you are describing: dragging and dropping files and renaming the zip file. The serveur has closed the connection which is in 99% of the cases a server configuration issue. IIS and ASP.NET include several settings which you may have to configure in order to upload/post large files.

First let's cover what the Velodoc XP Edition setup does for you:

On IIS5 and IIS6, in the httpRuntime section of the application web.config file, the setup sets a large value for executionTimeout and maxRequestLength. To understand and modify these settings please refer to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/e1f13641.aspx.
On IIS7, in the requestLimits section of the application web.config file, the setup sets a large value maxAllowedContentLength.To understand and modify these settings please refer to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms689460.aspx.

Second, let's cover what the Velodoc XP Edition setup is not doing for you, essentially because it affects all applications running on IIS and we like to play in our own back yard:

In the IIS metabase, you may have to consider increasing the values of MaxRequestEntityAllowed, AspMaxRequestEntityAllowed and UploadReadAheadSize. Although these properties essentially relate to ASP applications, they apparently also affect ASP.NET applications as explained here.
In the processModel section of machine.config, you may have to consider increasing the values of responseDeadlockInterval and responseRestartDeadlockInterval. To understand and modify these settings, please refer to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/7w2sway1(VS.71).aspx .

In order to diagnose your specific problem, you need to look at the logs, especially the event log, the IIS log and the Http Error logs as described in http://support.microsoft.com/?id=820729.

New Post: Outlook slows once addin installed

mytestingsoftware — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 22:19:06 GMT

Hi

okay thanks

New Post: Dragging direcotry crashes on transfer

mytestingsoftware — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 22:18:23 GMT

Hi,

I dragged and dropped an 90 MB directory (33 files) into the Package Editor and i changed the zip file name and it crashed during the transfer with the following staack trace

System.ServiceModel.CommunicationException: An error occurred while receiving the HTTP response to http://files.projects.eba.ca/Transfer/wcfTransferService.svc. This could be due to the service endpoint binding not using the HTTP protocol. This could also be due to an HTTP request context being aborted by the server (possibly due to the service shutting down). See server logs for more details. ---> System.Net.WebException: The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a receive. ---> System.IO.IOException: Unable to read data from the transport connection: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host. ---> System.Net.Sockets.SocketException: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host
   at System.Net.Sockets.Socket.Receive(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 size, SocketFlags socketFlags)
   at System.Net.Sockets.NetworkStream.Read(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 size)
   --- End of inner exception stack trace ---
   at System.Net.Sockets.NetworkStream.Read(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 size)
   at System.Net.PooledStream.Read(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 size)
   at System.Net.Connection.SyncRead(HttpWebRequest request, Boolean userRetrievedStream, Boolean probeRead)
   --- End of inner exception stack trace ---
   at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.GetResponse()
   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.HttpChannelFactory.HttpRequestChannel.HttpChannelRequest.WaitForReply(TimeSpan timeout)
   --- End of inner exception stack trace ---

Server stack trace:
   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.HttpChannelUtilities.ProcessGetResponseWebException(WebException webException, HttpWebRequest request, HttpAbortReason abortReason)
   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.HttpChannelFactory.HttpRequestChannel.HttpChannelRequest.WaitForReply(TimeSpan timeout)
   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.RequestChannel.Request(Message message, TimeSpan timeout)
   at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.RequestChannelBinder.Send(Message message, TimeSpan timeout)
   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannel.Call(String action, Boolean oneway, ProxyOperationRuntime operation, Object[] ins, Object[] outs, TimeSpan timeout)
   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannel.Call(String action, Boolean oneway, ProxyOperationRuntime operation, Object[] ins, Object[] outs)
   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannelProxy.InvokeService(IMethodCallMessage methodCall, ProxyOperationRuntime operation)
   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannelProxy.Invoke(IMessage message)

Exception rethrown at [0]:
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Proxies.RealProxy.HandleReturnMessage(IMessage reqMsg, IMessage retMsg)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Proxies.RealProxy.PrivateInvoke(MessageData& msgData, Int32 type)
   at ITransferService.Upload(RemoteFileDescriptor request)
   at TransferServiceClient.ITransferService.Upload(RemoteFileDescriptor request)
   at TransferServiceClient.Upload(String ContentType, String Email, Guid FileGuid, String FileName, String HashCode, Int64 Length, String SecurityCode, Stream Stream)
   at Memba.Transfer.PlugIns.WCFPlugIn.Upload(Object state)

New Post: Outlook slows once addin installed

jlchereau — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 16:32:37 GMT

First the Add-In relies on a Microsoft layer called VSTO - Visual Studio Tool for Office, which loads into Outlook and provides a host for .NET add-ins. This layer may have an impact but we can assume it is well optimized by Microsoft.

Second, the Velodoc Add-In implements a design which you can download from Microsoft web site with wrappers for Outllook Inspectors and MailItems. These wrappers are lean and should have little impact. Then the Add-in subscribes to a very limited number of Outlook events, principally NewInpector, AttachmentAdd and Send:

NewInspector is used to keep track of opened inspectors and load the toolbar in each inpector window. There is a little delay before the toolbar displays in Outlook 2003 which gives an impression of slowness, but there is almost no code executed during this delay and Outlook is responsive in the meantime. In other words, your not prevented from writing email addresses, a subject and a body. Also this delay does not occur in Outlook 2007, so I think it is a VSTO 2005 SE thing;
AttachmentAdd is used to hook large attachments to inlude them in a package. This can be slow with very large attachments but only occurs when adding an attachment.
Send processes the package which is serialized and passed to the transfer controller for transfer. This can be slow when there is a large number of files to process in a package.

In theory, the add-in only significantly impacts the attachment of files and the sending of mails embedding a Velodoc package. As a consequence, one cannot notice a significant difference (with/without add-in) when sending regular emails (no package attached).

If you are not convinced, you can use Systernals' Process Monitor to get a better understanding of the impact with a trace which you can post here.

Concerning the Velodoc Add-In not closing on PC shutdown, there are two processes to consider:

The VSTO Add-In runs in the Outlook process, and VSTO has really been designed to shutdown add-ins gracefully with the Outlook process. We have never experienced a case where the VSTO Add-In would delay or prevent Outlook from closing including on a PC shutdown;
The Transfer Controller is a separate process which is closed separately. On closure, the Transfer Controller persists the list of transfers including pausing transfers in progress. The End Task dialog is displayed if a process does not close within a windows timout. I can imagine that if the list of transfers displayed in the transfer controller is very long (hundreds of items) , this can occur. I have never experienced the End Task dialog with a few dozen items in the transfer controller list. I would consider best practice to purge the list from time to time using the Refresh button (red+green arrows). Note that transfers older than 14 days are automatically removed from the list.

New Post: Polling on the server

jlchereau — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 16:08:28 GMT

Hello,

Unless I have misunderstood your point, I do not see how this can be related in any way to Velodoc Outlook Add-In and/or Velodoc XP Edition, which I assume you are using considering your other questions in this forum.

Contrary to Velodoc Enterprise Edition, there is no user authentication in Velodoc XP Edition. Velodoc XP Edition only runs under the identity of the ASPNET (Wndows XP) or NETWORK SERVICE (Windows Server 2003, Vista and Windows Server 2008) windows account. So when executing Velodoc XP Edition on a server, the only security logs you might record shall relate to ASPNET or NETWORK SERVICE.

Velodoc Outllook Add-In is consituted of a Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) Add-In which runs in the Outlook process and the transfer controller which runs as a separate process. The VSTO Add-in only communicates with the transfer controller through .NET remoting, i.e. there is no possible communication between the VSTO Add-In and a file server (FTP or Velodoc XP). The transfer controller loads plug-ins which implement transfer protocols. We have a plug-in for FTP and another one for Velodoc XP Edition (actually using WCF streaming) among others. Only the plug-ins know how to communicate with a file server.

You say "everytime a user opens a new email it polls the server". When opening an email, the VSTO Add-In does not communicate with the Transfer Controller, which does not communicate with the server either (via the designated plug-in). The communication with the server only occurs when the user actually transfers a package.
You also say "Our server guy asked if their was any way that the addin could cache its credentials", but there are no credentials to cache. When the Velodoc XP plug-in calls http://<yourdomain>/VelodocXP/wcfTransferService.svc to execute a transfer (when a user sends an email with a Velodoc package), the user is not authenticated by Windows. Only the web service checks that the email and key passed are correct but this is done under the credentials of ASPNET or NETWORK SERVICE. If you need to be convinced, note that Windows Authentication does not work over the Internet and you can use the Velodoc Outlook Add-In from home to send files using a remote Velodoc XP Edition server.

To confirm everything I have said, please find below the four logs that I get when opening a new Outlook message, adding a package and sending this package with Velodoc Outlook Add-In and Velodoc XP Edition, considering we are only logging the default security events:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Client Security Log (Vista SP1 + Office 2007 + Velodoc Outlook AddIn)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Audit Success    22/11/2008 15:56:40    Eventlog    1102    Log clear

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Server Security Log (Windows Server 2008 + IIS 7 + Velodoc XP Edition)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Audit Success    22/11/2008 15:51:25    Eventlog    1102    Log clear

----------------------------------------------
IIS 7 Log (on the server)
----------------------------------------------
#Software: Microsoft Internet Information Services 7.0
#Version: 1.0
#Date: 2008-11-22 15:57:43
#Fields: date time s-ip cs-method cs-uri-stem cs-uri-query s-port cs-username c-ip cs(User-Agent) sc-status sc-substatus sc-win32-status time-taken
2008-11-22 15:57:43 10.0.0.67 POST /VelodocXP/wcfTransferService.svc - 80 - 10.0.0.65 - 202 0 0 11310

----------------------------------------------
Network Monitor Log (on the server)
----------------------------------------------
3    295.994920        {HTTP:5, TCP:4, IPv4:3}    NB-VISTA-01      10.0.0.67    HTTP    HTTP:Request, POST /VelodocXP/wcfTransferService.svc
4    297.539323        {HTTP:5, TCP:4, IPv4:3}    NB-VISTA-01      10.0.0.67    HTTP    HTTP:HTTP Payload, URL: /VelodocXP/wcfTransferService.svc
5    297.601723        {HTTP:5, TCP:4, IPv4:3}    NB-VISTA-01      10.0.0.67    HTTP    HTTP:HTTP Payload, URL: /VelodocXP/wcfTransferService.svc
6    297.601723        {HTTP:5, TCP:4, IPv4:3}    NB-VISTA-01      10.0.0.67    HTTP    HTTP:HTTP Payload, URL: /VelodocXP/wcfTransferService.svc
7    297.601723        {HTTP:5, TCP:4, IPv4:3}    NB-VISTA-01      10.0.0.67    HTTP    HTTP:HTTP Payload, URL: /VelodocXP/wcfTransferService.svc
8    307.117740        {HTTP:5, TCP:4, IPv4:3}    10.0.0.67    NB-VISTA-01      HTTP    HTTP:Response, HTTP/1.1, Status Code = 202, URL: /VelodocXP/wcfTransferService.svc

New Post: Outlook slows once addin installed

mytestingsoftware — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 19:35:05 GMT

Hi

Several of our users are making comments that Outlook (2003) seems more sluggish sicne the addin was installed. Any ideas why? How can we provide you with details?

Also several users have report that the Velodoc addin does not close on PC shutdown, they need to hit the end task button as windows is closing

cheers

New Post: Polling on the server

mytestingsoftware — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 19:32:06 GMT

Hi

Our server guy is banging on us because everytime a user opens a new email it polls the server and right now our small pilot is generating a lot of activty on the server as users send out emails. The polling is showing up in the security logs of the server as activities and it has increased the load on the server.

Our server guy asked if their was any way that the addin could cache its credentials to basically say yes you are secure for todays sessions with the server and it would reduce the polling.

cheers

New Post: Error handling - long file names

jlchereau — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:15:17 GMT

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New Post: Improve folder structure in zip files

jlchereau — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:09:46 GMT

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New Post: Provide option to start the transfer controller with Windows

jlchereau — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:55:13 GMT

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New Post: Provide option to start the transfer controller with Windows

jlchereau — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:53:24 GMT

Hello,

When we have discussed the architecture with prospective customers they have made clear that although they wanted transfers to execute separately from Outlook to free Outlook as soon as possible, they did not want any resident process (windows service or process started with windows). So apparently not everyone agrees with you on this. To make everyone happy we will provide a checkbox in the Options dialog that offers to start the controller with Windows when it is checked, provided this work item gets a few votes.

Nevertheless, I am very surprised that the controller takes so long to initialize. Initializing consists in:

Starting the process;
Launching the .NET virtual machine;
Compiling the code against the .NET virtual machine;
Initializing .NET remoting to listen on port 48888 (hard coded in the current build, dynamically allocated in the next build).

This takes 2 to 5 seconds to complete on my laptop (DELL Precision M65 with 2.4 GHz Intel Centrino Duo processor) depending on the workload at the time the controller is launched. Note that the VSTO add-in pings port 48888 after starting the transfer controller process and displays an error message if the ping does not respond within a timeout which is currently set to 10 seconds.

There is probably something else...

New Post: folder structure for zip files

jlchereau — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 11:55:48 GMT

Again, thank you for this very relevant feedback.

Probably like you, I am not very found of adding the full path of files especially when you send a couple of files, but we could not come up with a better SIMPLE option for good reasons.

We use the add-in a lot to send Visual Studio sources between developers. A Visual Studio solution is a directory structure where you have a directory per project and each project has an Assembly.cs and a Resources.resx file. So in a Visual Studio solution you may have a dozen Assembly.cs and Resources.resx files. In this case like in many other cases, you really need to keep the directory structure.

Things can get even more complicated when you add several directory structures from various locations on your computer.

In version 1.0, we have decided that the simple way to allow all these scenarios and avoid any collision consisted in adding the full path into the archive. This is not the first time we get this feedback and we will work on better options for future versions. See also: http://www.codeplex.com/velodocaddin/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=28298. Any suggestion regarding a good algorithm are welcome.