The problems we encountered and the solutions that we have found
We’ve embarked on yet another project recently, one that poses our biggest challenge to date.
We have a long-standing client for whom we developed a web-based portfolio management system over 20 years ago. Since then, we’ve continuously improved and expanded its functionality by incorporating new modules, ETL processes to import data from external sources, and various types of reports and exports.
We recently took on a new and exciting challenge from a startup client that expanded our portfolio into the realms of Laravel (a PHP framework), MySQL, and the Guesty Open API.
Continue reading “Connecting Property Asset Management with Guesty: A Successful Collaboration”We have a customer who is using SharePoint Online and they recently asked us to find a solution for the following situation in the Documents library.
Continue reading “Automatically set unique permissions in SharePoint with Microsoft Flow”Recently we had to build a mobile application and one of the requirements was to implement a corporate authentication for managing the user accounts. We think the approach that we used could be interesting and helpful in similar scenarios that is why we would like the share our experience.
Continue reading “Mobile App with Corporate Authentication (Ionic + ASP.NET Web API + OAuth 2.0 tokens + Okta)”TinyMCE is a great HTML editor and it is pretty easy to install and configure the editor on a web page. You should just call the init() function while loading the web page at the client’s browser and the target text-area will be transformed into a nice looking HTML editor.
However, we run into some troubles when we tried to use the TinyMCE editor on an ASP.NET page containing server inputs that are handled by the Microsoft’s UpdatePanel control.
Recently, we were asked to implement an online technical documentation solution by one of clients. We had to move the existing offline documents (mainly MS Word and PDF files) to an online accessible format that would also allow the users to modify the documents by themselves. We thought about the following options for implementing this:
We did not choose the custom implementation because it was the most time consuming option. We also did not choose the Wiki software because we found it a bit outdated and too restrictive and finally we focused on the CMS solution.
One of the projects on which we are working is a long-lived ASP.NET Web Forms system that is customized for a specific client. It is hosted by another company on a server which is external to the client’s environment and it does not have an access to the client’s internal network. The system is built by using the Form Authentication mechanism to authenticate and authorize the users. The list of users and their hashed passwords is stored into the database and the login functionality works in a classic manner – the credentials provided by the user on the login page are validated against the list of users in the database. If the provided credentials are valid then a new Forms Authentication session is established by calling the standard method FormsAuthentication.SetAuthCookie().
Recently, we had to extend that authentication mechanism by adding a single sign-on (SSO) capability which allows the client to integrate the ASP.NET web application with their internal Active Directory (AD) infrastructure. The requirement was to allow some internal employees to access the ASP.NET web application through SSO, but also keep the exiting database login functionality for the rest of the users who are external and they do not have internal AD accounts.
The ASP.NET web application is hosted on an external server and it does not have a direct access to the secured AD infrastructure. After doing some research, we found that in order to connect the external ASP.NET web application to the internal AD environment we can use a middle service called Security Token Service (STS).
Continue reading “WIF SSO and Forms Authentication in ASP.NET”HTML 5 – The Offline Challenge
I. Introduction
Some time ago our team had to add a new feature to one of our web projects. There was a request to add a capability to allow the users to use the application in “offline” mode. It was a great opportunity to dive into HTML 5 and more specifically the “offline” part of it. The new features of HTML5 are pretty interesting, but also “tricky” and this is why I would like to share some of the challenges we met.
First, I would like to say a few words about the technology on which the project is build. That is ASP.NET application which is storing data in SQL Server database. This is not a public application and only authorized users can access it. The system allows the users to go through their business process by entering the information in some structured web forms and at the end it allows them to generate a Word document, which is their final product. The web application is completely client-orientated and there is a huge usage of jQuery and AJAX. The AJAX calls are handled by WCF services. Frankly, this architecture made the implementation of the “offline mode” pretty straightforward.
Sending Email Messages with Embedded Images
Usually, when we implement email notification from various applications we send emails containing HTML body. And when there should be an image within the email body we put the image on a web server and use a reference to that image in the HTML code. Following as an example of this:
Hello world
<img alt="sample image" src="http://webserveraddress/Images/sample_image.png" />The drawback with this scenario is the need for connection to the web server when reading the email. This is causing issues, for example, when the server is part of an intranet network that is not always accessible by the clients.
Continue reading “Sending Email Messages with Embedded Images”