I want to highlight a comment (see below) from Marco van de Voort and congratulate the Free Pascal team on their recent 2.2.2 release. Marco originally commented on a post I wrote nearly a year ago regarding potential copyright issues and the source code of the project. It sounds like a lot of time an effort was put in to clear up any issues and further sounds like the project is on a good footing with tools in place to help prevent future issues. The comment from Marco is as follows:

The new release 2.2.2 has the disputed code removed, and the cut was made fairly wide (using a tool to identify candidates), and this has been merged to all currently live branches. This is also why it took so long.

We have retired the old releases from our site. (rather than relicense, which could have been since all the disputed code was available under GPL via FreeCLX. This was deemed to confusing)

Since nearly all public releases were affected by these disputed routines (most disputed routines arrived in one batch in 1998-1999, which was pre 1.0), this is particularly sad for some of the more odd ball platforms (like Atari) that are not supported anymore.

I’m a fan of the Open Source project SubSonic, spearheaded by Rob Conery of Microsoft, which describes itself thusly:

A Super High-fidelity Batman Utility Belt. SubSonic works up your DAL for you, throws in some much-needed utility functions, and generally speeds along your dev cycle.

I’ve seen a few questions on the Internet about setting the SubSonic connectionstring at runtime and thought I’d post what I’ve done. SubSonic includes a tool to generate a DAL for you which picks up settings from your .config file which provides the connectionstring among other things. I’m using SubSonic in a plugin to CruiseControl.NET for EDI processing and here the portion of my ccservice.exe.config file related to SubSonic:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
    <configSections>
        <section name="SubSonicService" type="SubSonic.SubSonicSection, SubSonic" 
        requirePermission="false"/>
    </configSections>
  <connectionStrings>
    <add name="Velocity2" 
    connectionString="Data Source=db;Initial Catalog=db;Persist Security Info=True;"
    providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />
  </connectionStrings>
  <SubSonicService defaultProvider="Velocity">
    <providers>
      <clear/>
      <add name="Velocity" 
           type="Subsonic.SqlDataProvider, SubSonic" 
           connectionStringName="Velocity2" 
           generatedNamespace="VelocitySubSonic"
           includeTableList="AR_*,CORE_*,EDI_*,II_*,IN_*,SA_*"
           excludeProcedureList="WMS_InsertImportQueue"
            />
    </providers>
  </SubSonicService>
...

One of the things I wanted to do is override the connectionstring using a property on my CCNET plugin. To do that I implemented a property like this:

[ReflectorProperty("connectionString")]
public string ConnectionString
{
    get { return m_connectionstring; }
    set
    {
        m_connectionstring = value;
        SubSonic.DataService.GetInstance("Velocity").SetDefaultConnectionString(value);
    }
}

The other day I blogged about potentially switching to blogengine.net but one of the major issues is ensuring the URL’s I have in dasBlog either continue to work or redirect accordingly. To that end, I started investigating URL rewriters for ASP.NET and found this post of ScottGu’s very helpful. He mentioned two different Open Source rewriters and I opted for UrlRewriter.net which describes itself as:

UrlRewriter.NET is an open-source, light-weight, highly configurable URL rewriting component for ASP.NET 1.1 and 2.0. UrlRewriter.NET provides similar IIS Rewrite capabilities that the Apache web server provides with mod_rewrite and .htaccess. You don’t need to install an ISAPI Rewrite filter to use the component. Best of all, UrlRewriter.NET is free and licensed with a very permissive MIT-style licence.

I found it to be all of the above and the install/configuration to be very straightforward not to mention it has good online help and a support forum.

One caveat that I ran into though was that once installed at the root I started seeing this error in my other ASP.NET applications:

Server Error in '/blog' Application.

---

Configuration Error

Description: An error occurred during the processing of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review the specific error details below and modify your configuration file appropriately.

Parser Error Message: Could not load file or assembly 'Intelligencia.UrlRewriter' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. (E:\web\xxxxxxx\htdocs\web.config line 11)

Source Error:

Line 9:    <system.web>
Line 10:     <httpModules>
Line 11:       <add name="UrlRewriter" type="Intelligencia.UrlRewriter.RewriterHttpModule, 
                     Intelligencia.UrlRewriter" />
Line 12:     </httpModules>
Line 13:   </system.web>

Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.1433; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.1433

The Fix

To fix this I added the following to the web.config files of my other ASP.NET applications removing the new assembly dependency:

1 <system.web>
2     <httpModules>
3         <remove name="UrlRewriter" />
4     </httpModules>
5 </system.web>

If you’re aware of other options that don’t require changes to every web.config I’d love to hear about them. At any rate, while I haven’t decided to switch blog engines yet I now have the pieces in place to do just that.

Over the past six months I’ve been working on a system to automate invoicing using EDI. The system is built on CruiseControl.NET and a collection of custom written source control providers and CCNET tasks. Back in December, I blogged about this project which integrates with a custom ERP system built from scratch by Falafel that processes half a billion dollars worth of transactions a year so it’s nice to finally see my small part come online.

There are several Open Source projects used in the implementation including:

• CruiseControl.NET - the heart of the system
• FileHelpers - for CSV file processing
• edtFTP - for an FTP source control provider and CCNET Tasks
• ScrewTurn wiki - for documentation
• SubSonic - for mapping SQL Server data to XML
  

Here’s a diagram of the system with CCNET at the heart:

One of the many benefits of using CruiseControl.NET is the visibility the system can provide to the people in Accounts Receivable. Not only can they see what’s going on via the CCNET web dashboard but they can even install CCTray and monitor from their desktop as invoices are processed throughout the day. On the web dashboard clicking through to a specific "build" log for a given EDI 810 "build" provides invoice details including invoice number, customer name, date and dollar amount.

As you can see I still need to customize the dashboard to fit into the web-based ERP system’s look and feel.

CCNET’s plug-in architecture made it perfect for this situation as it has numerous features that can be leveraged to create this, perhaps unusual, usage of a Continuous Integration server. I suppose CI could just as easily stand for Continuous Invoicing.

EDI 850 Up Next

My next task will be to re-work on an existing, read old, EDI 850 Purchase Order set of processes and integrate them into CCNET. Anyway, this has been a fun project to work on and I’ve learned a lot along the way and I’d like to give a tip 'O the hat to John Waters, Falafel’s CTO, for all his help. If you’re looking for an ERP guru, I think you’d be hard pressed to top John plus he’s got a great sense of humor. One afternoon while driving back through the farm land of Watsonville from our client’s site, one of the largest organic food companies in the world, he quipped:

Here we go driving through our business objects...

Something only another geek could really appreciate!

Lastly, I have to admit after 15 years of doing product development feels very satisfying to design and implement a system that solves a real world business problem. There’s just no substitute for hands on experience!

Related posts:

• Using CruiseControl.NET to manage EDI Invoice processing
• Processing fixed length or delimited files quickly and easily in .NET
• More Continuous Integration posts

Why?

• It’s free (licensed under GPL)
• It’s super easy to setup and has a variety of setup options
• Is actively developed
• Has a thriving online forum
• Is easy to administer
• Has a plugin architecture
• Doesn’t require a SQL server (defaults to file based storage)
• Is easy to theme
• Supports commercial licensing
• Easy to upgrade
• Is hosted by my ISP of choice discountASP.net
• Supports an easy to learn wiki syntax
• And more...

I think this wiki engine can easily serve as a starting point for a flexible small business web site.

I’m personally using this wiki engine on my own web site not to mention Falafel Software is using it as an internal company wiki. I’ve also installed it at a client location and it’s been well received and used daily.