BlogEngine.net and Active Directory membership provider woes

We wanted our blog to use the user credentials found in our company's Active Directory, so after a little bit of web surfing we found a great little extension here. After going through the steps needed to install this extension we launched our webbrowser to test our updated blog...

Error: 'Unable to cast object of type 'System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier' to type 'System.Security.Principal.NTAccount'

After some debugging we found out it had something to do with the GetRolesForUser() function found in the file ADRoleProvider.cs. Apperently something goes wrong when translating the token groups to the NTAccount-type. Knowing the cause of the problem, the solution was easy. Replace the foreach loop in the GetRolesForUser() function with:

foreach (IdentityReference group in groupCollection)
{
    if (group.Value.IndexOf(@"\") == -1)
    {
        // Skip groups not containing backslash
        continue;
    }

    String roleName = RGConfig.getRole(group.Value.Substring(group.Value.IndexOf(@"\") + 1));

    if (roleName != String.Empty)
    {
        roles.Add(roleName);
    }
}

After this little tweak the extension from rafekemmis worked!

Download: ActiveDirectoryRoleProvider.zip (5.39 kb)

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SCOM 2007 Heartbeat Monitoring Tool

With the release of Microsoft System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) 2007 Microsoft has created a powerful monitoring tool. The amount of information that is gathered and alerted on, is staggering. With all this information being gathered it can be hard to quickly see certain events that require immediate attention. The events that you want to be alerted on immediately are Heartbeat failures. Seven Winds has seen once too often that support teams miss these heartbeat failures. We created a tool to assist the monitoring team to easily catch these events and create an audio and visual alert to grab their attention.

The Seven Winds Heartbeat Monitoring Tool is freeware. We encourage you to use this tool in your environment.

Download: HeartBeatMonitor.zip (5,94 mb)

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Outlook Categories Migration Tool

Many users use categories to organize email messages in Microsoft Outlook. We often get the request from our customers to save these (custom) categories from Microsoft Outlook 2003, so they can use them after updating to Microsoft Outlook 2007.

 

Microsoft does not provide a solution for this problem. That's why we developed a little application which makes it possible to import your Microsoft Outlook 2003 master categories list in Microsoft Outlook 2007.

 

You can download this program from the CodePlex project website.

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