SuperOffice 7 making my head hurt

Updated 23-09-2011: I moderated my comment about superoffice. That was childish of me
Updated 24-09-2011: New version updated with a ton of bug fixes .. read more here

My original approach to handling users in superoffice didn't work as expected. I don’t know why I didn’t catch this while testing ( I apparently don’t test well enough )

The whole point of this powershell add on was to make a simple way of managing users in multiple SuperOffice databases. Turns out the SuperOffice NetServer API is hardcoded to declare everything as internal static’s ( that’s private shared for us VB nuts ). They don’t expose a function to clear them, and pretty much everything inside the API is handled though static’s. And they don’t offer you a way to change configuration. Even SuperOffice.Configuration.ConfigFile.SetConfigFile fails. ( they check internal static variable superoffice.socontext._currentPrincipal . That means you can “sign-out” but you’re a “stuck” with the database you connected to the first time. If you change the configuration file (like I did in my old code) SuperOffice will now throw
Authentication failed
Failed to create Identity from tokens
If you (but you wont, its not nice to spy at others bad coding habit's ) look inside SOCore.dll with reflection you can easily see that, SuperOffice is talking with the database ( so DSN link, database and database username/password is correct ) but the identity token it created with your windows principal or CRM username/password doesn’t match anything in database. Since its still looking in the old database

I tried messing a bit around with reflection and overwrite the variables. But didn’t really get me anyway (but I learned a lot of new trick while trying ) so I decided to go down the path I read about on devnet.superoffice.com .

AppDomain … Now there is something I don’t know anything about. I know what it is, but I have never, ever tried coding with/against it.I created a ton of small test applications going down different paths, but nothing really seemed to work. *IF* I managed to get different things loaded, superoffice would go nuts and not work. Then after several hours of getting more and more desperate i found a very simple example (sorry lost the link) and that got me kicked in to gear.

So here is the updated version of my powershell add-on to manage users in SuperOffice. Its pretty much the same but

• I renamed all functions to start with so7.
• I’ve added a Type Formatting file ( .ps1xml ) so output looks better.
• I fixed a small bug in the configuration files. SuperOffice client goes nuts when it see <security> tag, so removed that unless you specifically set the Symmetric keys.
• And best of all. Now it works against multiple SuperOffice instances.

Enjoy ….