How to Programmatically Impersonate Users in SharePoint

There are times when developing custom web parts and other SharePoint solutions, you need to impersonate a user and view SharePoint from within their context.

Impersonating a user in SharePoint requires a few things:

  • the account that the web or console application users that has privileges to impersonate other users (typically this would be the system account)
  • specific users' user tokens

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Testing LINQ Statements Using LINQPad

The other day I was needing a way to test some LINQ statements from an application which rebuilds a database while performing some calculations.  The rebuilding process is just shy of 24 hours.

Besides, there have been numerous other times in which I needed to test LINQ statements.

Troubleshooting LINQ can be difficult at times due to it deferred execution - the statement is executed as the last possible moment.  I wanted a tool similar to SQL Management Studio in which I could run LINQ queries against a database.  Thus, I stumbled upon (actually, it wasn't very hard to find) LINQPad.

Since, finding it, LINQPad has allowed me to test my queries prior to implementation in the application.  Therefore, I can better predict the result instead of waiting through a long process and/or waiting for QA to troubleshoot.

LINQPad allows the user to run C#, VB.NET, F# and SQL statements/expressions against the database - very flexible and extremely helpful.  LINQPad's flexibility allows the connection's data context to be LINQ to SQL, Entity Framework and WCF (OData).

Take a look at LINQPad at www.linqpad.net.


Granting Users Access to TFS Analysis Cube

I was asked to take over a TFS installation.  Apparently, there was no one, previously, knowledgeable in administering Team Foundation Server because there were many installation and configuration issues - it was a mess.

tfs-administrators-consoleOne such issue was misassignment of user permissions.  For instance, the business needed multiple users to have access to the TFS analysis cube in order to generate reports and pivot tables in Excel. The business's solution to granting users "read" access to the cube was to grant them TFS Administrator privileges. In fact, there were over 20 users who were authorized as Team Foundation Administration Console Users.

By doing this, not only does the user have incredibly insane permissions around TFS, but they have administrative privileges (Read/Write) to the analysis cube - they would be added as a member of theTfsWarehouseAdministrator role group on the analysis server.
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Atalasoft Image Viewer with Silverlight in SharePoint

I was working on a Silverlight-based BI Dashboard in SharePoint for Pfizer.  Pfizer allows the consumers of its animal products to upload receipts and Proof of Purchases in order to qualify for rebates.  The business required the ability for Silverlight to process an array of image types, including PDFs, that the consumer may upload.  Processing included not only viewing the image, but also zoom, crop and rotate.

Since Silverlight can only process JPGs or PNGs natively, I needed a third-party provider to satisfy the business requirements.  There are many libraries that render different image formats and PDFs, but I needed a single solution to handle as many formats, again, including PDFs, as possible and accomplish the image manipulation requirements.  Therefore, we decided on Atalasoft DotImage.

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