Wake on Lan in C# and Windows 8

About 8 years ago I was writing scripts to run on a network with over 130.000 computers (of which 5000 I administered).
The scripts ran 24/7, parsing computer's inventory log files, which they sent to a central server. It was  possible to detect and fix a whole bunch of issues, most of the time even before a user would notice something was wrong.

Note that most of those computers were running Windows NT 4, including the domain controllers. The task to install application in all those computers and keep their anti-virus signature up-to-date was not as trivial as it is today. There were times we needed to perform tasks on computers that weren't even switched on. And I must admit, back then I was quite proud of the solution I came up with for this particular case. Although it's not my goal to go into details on how I managed to get any of those 5000 computers, spread in 130 different offices, powered-on at any time; I want to write a little about the core of the solution: Wake on Lan

Whether to be able to power on your computer at home when you are away, or to manage a corporate network, the ability to switch a computer on out of sending a magic packet is at least quite interesting. It does require basic knowledge of computer networks and hardware to understand it, but to make it work, all you need is to know how to find your computer's MAC address. That's all you need to use WoL on a local network. However if you are willing to use it over the Internet, you'll need the IP address of the gateway of which the target computer belongs to, and have that gateway configured to forward the magic packet to the private network. The Port number is used in this case (if you use NAT, you'll need it), so that you can forward incoming UDP datagram on that predefined port of your router to an internal network IP address, or even the broadcast address if you'd like.

If the computer is switched off, it's likely the network switch's CAM table won't have an entry to your target computer's MAC address, and once your router forwards the datagram received from the external interface to your internal network, to the specific IP address you defined on the forwarding rule, the network switch will broadcast that to all ports.

You'll find many over architectured implementations of Wake on Lan out there, even in C#. But the fact is that it's really simple thing.

Let's see some C# code:

using System;
using System.Net;
using System.Net.NetworkInformation;
using System.Net.Sockets;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

namespace BrunoGarcia.Net
{
    public sealed class WolManager
    {
        const int _payloadSize = 102;

        public static void SendMagicPacket(string mac, IPEndPoint ipEndPoint)
        {
            var macBytes = PhysicalAddress.Parse(mac).GetAddressBytes();

            var payload = new byte[_payloadSize];
            Buffer.BlockCopy(new byte[] { 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF }, 0, payload, 0, 6);
            
            for (int i = 1; i < 17; i++)
                Buffer.BlockCopy(macBytes, 0, payload, 6 * i, 6);

            using (var udp = new UdpClient())
                udp.Send(payload, _payloadSize, ipEndPoint);
        }
    }
}

As you can see, it's a fire-and-forget operation, a single UDP datagram. The MAC address of the target machine goes in the payload. As I mentioned before, the port is not really important if you are sending the packet on the same subnet of your target computer (without the need of routing).  Port on wikipedia you find to be 7 or 9. However 0 can be used:

WolManager.SendMagicPacket("B8-AC-6F-59-56-55", 
    new IPEndPoint(IPAddress.Parse("255.255.255.255"), 0));

This is fun, and I've used it to power on my computer at home from the Internet a few times. But now, when I got Windows 8, the fun wasn't quite working.

This KB from Microsoft describes the change:

Windows 7:  In Windows 7, the default shutdown operation puts the system into classic shutdown (S5) and all devices are put into the lowest power state D3. Wake-On-LAN is not officially supported from S5 in Windows 7. However, some network adapters can be left armed for wake if enough residual power is available. As a result, wake from the S5 state is possible on some systems where enough residual power was supplied to the network adapter even though the system is in S5 and devices are in D3. 

Windows 8:  In Windows 8, the default shutdown behavior puts the system into hybrid shutdown (S4) and all devices are put into D3. Remote Wake-On-LAN from hybrid shutdown (S4) or classic shutdown (S5) is unsupported. Network adapters are explicitly not armed for Wake-On-LAN in both the classic shutdown (S5) and hybrid shutdown (S4) cases because users expect zero power consumption and battery drain in the shutdown state. This behavior removes the possibility of spurious wakes when explicit shutdown was requested. As a result, Wake-On-LAN is only supported from sleep (S3) or hibernate (S4) in Windows 8.

What a bummer. Anyway, not time to give up, right? Digging a bit deeper one understands better the changes, and enabling wake on lan on windows 8 is possible again:

Check out this post from Phil Pendlebury which talks about it.

Moq Return method not available after Setup

If you are familiar with the mocking framework Moq, you're used to call Setup with the overload taking a Func<T, TResult> and expect after that the Return<TResult> method to be available. And it's normally there.

However, I just ran into an interesting scenario, where calling the correct overload did not make available the Return<TResult> method.

In my case the code being mocked is a dependency that makes a request on a webservice.
A mockup of the wrapper class is created, and the Load method, which returns an XDocument, is setup.

But Return wasn't available:

Interesting that the overload resolution resolved my Func<T, TResult> to Action<T>, therefore ISetup<T> was being returned instead of ISetup<T, TResult> even though the method I setup had return type!

I inspect the method I setup to double check the return type defined:

Yes, it's missing a reference to System.Xml.Linq.
The Unit Test Project template doesn't include a reference to this assembly (and that makes sense).
Well, I added it, it works now.

SignalR: Using a Hub instance not created by the HubPipeline is unsupported

When you need to push data to a SignalR hub from outside the hub (from a Controller for example), don't try to create a new instance of the Hub, like I did. Otherwise you'll see this nice exception:

"Using a Hub instance not created by the HubPipeline is unsupported"

From Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR.Core

Instead, the hub context must be retrieved:

var context = GlobalHost.ConnectionManager.GetHubContext<HubType>();
context.Clients.All.Whatever();

Regex to match executing a stored procedure within a stored procedure

Unless you're working with a custom string format, which requires you writing a regular expression, I suppose (suggest?) you'll look it up online, right?

If you need a Regex to match an IP, MAC or an E-mail, would you spend time writing it? Chances are that you might leave room for false positives and/or false negatives, unless you really test it. That's why it's common to look it up online.

I needed to take a list of proc names and parse thousands of create procedure scripts, looking up if anything from the input list was used (executed) from those procs. A procedure executing another procedure.

This kind of call can be made in several different ways. It might have or not the database name (cross db call), server name (linked server), it might have or not the EXEC/EXECUTE keyword. It might have or not brackets or set the result to a variable.

Since I looked it up and couldn't find it, I wrote it.
In case you need it, here you go:

^\s*((exec(ute)?)\s+)?(@\w+\s+=\s+)?((\[?\w+\]?\.{1,2}){1,3})?\[?p_storedProcedure\]?\s.*$

Note that if you use SQL Server with default collation, proc names are case insensitive. So make sure you let your Regex engine know it should ignore cases! Otherwise you'll have to mind the case of the EXEC/EXECUTE keywords anyway.

Also note that cross database and linked server calls will also match. Some examples of valid proc calls (that will match against the Regex) are:

p_storedProcedure -- comments
p_storedProcedure @id, @anotherParam
[p_storedProcedure] @id, @anotherParam
EXEC p_storedProcedure @id, @anotherParam
EXECUTE p_storedProcedure @id, @anotherParam
EXEC p_storedProcedure
EXEC p_storedProcedure -- comments
EXEC [p_storedProcedure] @id, @anotherParam
EXEC dbo.p_storedProcedure @id, @anotherParam
EXEC dbo.[p_storedProcedure] @id, @anotherParam
EXEC anySchema.[p_storedProcedure] @id, @anotherParam
EXECUTE dbo.[p_storedProcedure] @id, @anotherParam
EXEC [dbo].[p_storedProcedure] @id, @anotherParam
EXEC [dbo].p_storedProcedure @id, @anotherParam
EXEC DBTEST..p_storedProcedure @id, @anotherParam
EXEC DBTEST..[p_storedProcedure]
EXEC DBTEST.dbo.p_storedProcedure @id, @anotherParam
EXEC [DBTEST]..[p_storedProcedure] @id, @anotherParam
EXEC [DBTEST]..p_storedProcedure @id, @anotherParam
EXEC [DBTEST].[dbo].[p_storedProcedure] @id, @anotherParam
EXEC [LINKEDDATABASE].[DBTEST].[dbo].[p_storedProcedure] @id, @anotherParam
EXEC LINKEDDATABASE.DBTEST.dbo.p_storedProcedure @id, @anotherParam
EXEC LINKEDDATABASE.DBTEST..p_storedProcedure @id, @anotherParam
EXEC @paramName = [dbo].[p_storedProcedure] @id, @anotherParam
EXEC @paramName = dbo.p_storedProcedure
EXEC @paramName = p_storedProcedure @id, @anotherParam
EXECUTE @paramName = p_storedProcedure @id, @anotherParam
EXECUTE    @paramName     =     p_storedProcedure     @id, @anotherParam