Ive just been working on upgrading the build generator to support BizTalk 2009 projects. While doing this one of the things i wish to do is to change the compile step to use MsBuild rather than dev env. I found a little issue which others who use MsBuild may come across when migrating custom scripts. Previously for BizTalk 2006R2 scripts I used to use the below command: <Exec Command='"$(DevEnvPath)" $(SolutionName) /Build $(ConfigurationName)' /> This would compile the whole solution using...
My first remote computer access outside my home was via CompuServe in 1985. I sat at my original IBM PC and connected via a Hayes Smartmodem 1200 to the service. I spent lots of geeky time sucking text through that modem and its replacements. I used CompuServe from all over the country as I traveled, and even internationally a few times. It worked great and kept down the long distance phone bills. Remember those? Back in the day, we had to call long distance to a company's bulletin board service...
The newest version of Virtual PC seems to have several interesting features. See the Microsoft Comparison here. To install this version, the Processor needs to have Hardware Virtualization capabilities. Not all processors have this capability. The list of processors with Hardware Virtualization is available here. If you are about to buy a new Notebook or PC to run virtual machines, it may be a good idea to consider this before making a decision...
I’ve been looking with Windows Azure for a months now, and thought it would be about time to launch my own Azure hosted site. Cloud TV is a community based website for hosting webcasts relating to Microsoft technologies. The idea for the Cloud TV project is to develop a cool application using Windows Azure that can show off the potential of Azure and the ease of use for existing .net developers and to create a community site for developers to contribute content in the form of webcasts. It’s along...
It is the 4th of July again. We are dragging out dusty flags and threadbare platitudes professing our belief in liberty and freedom. We cook out hotdogs and hamburgers, watch our fireworks, and sing songs about how our country is the greatest in the world because we are free. Some of us (like me) do it everyday and don't need one day a year to me reminded. Those of us who sing the loudest and pound our proud, stuck out chests the hardest will soon pack away those "strong" beliefs and get back to...
File sharing? – The desktop version of Windows can share files with up to 10 remote clients (same limit as WHS) Printer sharing? – Any version of windows can share a printer on the network; However, all of my printers are actually on the network themselves (wired and wireless) implicitly available. There is no need for “sharing” via desktop or server OS. Remote Access? – The desktop version of Windows contains a remote access client and a remote access server. You can manage security and access to...
There is some confusion in how-to setup a BlackBerry in tether mode to share internet with your laptop or PC so I would like to share my setup process. Overview: Since you are already paying for a data plan why not take advantage of this data connection when you are away from home? Hotels and other facilities can charge you $15+ per day for Internet access. BlackBerry and other hardware providers allow you to tether your smart phone as a modem to your laptop or computer. Keep in mind that your tethered...
I found this information on Brad Abrams blog and thought I’d pass it along. “Dinesh Kulkarni recently posted our current thinking on the release roadmap for .NET RIA Services. One thing I love about this product is that we are able to iterate rapidly with the community to get the product right. This means being in “preview” mode for a while so we can ensure we have taken all the feedback, but it greatly raises the likelihood of us ending up with a product that can be widely used. We used a similar...
When I am using Google Docs, quite often I am copying the portion of code from Visual Studio or SQL Management Studio. but the text is reformatted to become messy. E.G. ALTER PROCEDURE [dbo].[CheckNotProcessed] @limit int = 10 AS declare @StartDate datetime declare @EndDate datetime declare @NotProcessedCount int is shown as ALTER PROCEDURE [dbo].[CheckNotProcessed] @limit int = 10 AS declare @StartDate datetime declare @EndDate datetime declare @NotProcessedCount int I've tried to manually insert...
I wanted to create a custom alert on the SQL Database when number of records with some values(considered as invalid) exceeds the expected limit. First of all you need to Set up Database Mail for SQL 2005 and follow procedure How to setup SQL Server alerts and email operator notifications IMPORTANT: don't forget to Restart SQL Agent to activate settings. Similar to the article Define custom error messages in SQL Server 2005 I've defined the error EXEC sp_addmessage 60001, 1, N'Number of not-processed...
Information theft is a BIG thing and it’s only going to get bigger in the foreseeable future. Now, a lot of people talk the talk – but my question to you today is: do you walk the walk? Can you honestly say that in the event of your notebook OR desktop being stolen today, that you wouldn’t be worried about your data getting into the wrong hands? If your answer wasn’t a resounding “YES, I would not be worried”, then take the time to think about your security strategy today! As a developer, I have...
More often than not i see redundant code for displaying popups with AJAX and encapsulated markup in copy/paste html containers. This might seem like an easy and fast way to program at first, but as soon as you need to change the popup location of those 50 dialogs, or change the blue backgrounds to green on those 30 rounded-corner containers, you (should) start thinking about how you can improve these tasks. Templating allows us to reuse our controls and to avoid the mess that copy/paste code creates....
There is no need to write any custom code if your are trying to validate your textboxes date values which are in UK format. You can use CompareValidator to perform this action. Download the attached project to see the solution in action. Make sure you have set up the page to use the desired culture with <%@ Page culture="your culture" %>. Default.aspx ------------------ <%@ Page Language="VB" AutoEventWireup="false" CodeFile="Default.aspx.vb" Inherits="_Default" Culture="en-GB" %> <!DOCTYPE...
/* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;...
Ok, that was cool and somewhat easy. Sign up for Google Analytics add your GeeksWithBlogs (GWB) url (mine is "geekswithblogs.net/geekusconlivus") You will be given a chunk of code. Log into your GWB page, select Options | Configure At the bottom of the page (underneath where it says "Static News/Announcement") paste that code in. Go to a couple of your pages, use some of the navigation. Go back to google analytics and click check status. You should be set. Oh, and if you haven't checked the thirty...
This is the final post in a four part series to demonstrate how to use the standard MSFT technologies to implement a CRUD data application in Silverlight. The steps in this post build upon those completed in part 3. The goal of this series is to show those of you who are relatively new to Silverlight how analogous building such an app in Silverlight is to say building it in ASP.NET, Win Forms or WPF. This app is built on Visual Studio 2008 SP1, SQL Server 2008, Silverlight 2.0 and the Silverlight...
In this Issue: Andrej Tozon(2), Walt Ritscher, Chris Klug, Timmy Kokke(2), Koen Zwikstra, and Dan Wahlin. From SilverlightCream.com: Countdown to Silverlight 3 #6: System colors Andrej Tozon continues his Countdown discussing the ability to get to system colors with Silverlight 3B. Countdown to Silverlight 3 #7: Navigation In his latest, Andrej Tozon discusses the Silverlight Navigation aspects of Silverlight 3B and a quick walk-through of it's use. Disable Autoplay on Silverlight Video in Expression...
Resumen MSMQ is a component of Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and will be included in Windows Vista and future server versions of Windows. It allows cooperating applications to send and receive messages to each other—even if the intended recipient application is not running, or the computer on which the sender or recipient application is running is disconnected from the network. Messages are stored and forwarded by MSMQ until they reach the destination queue. A recipient application...
I wanted to replace some strings in files using my deployment MSbuild script. I've noticed that MSBuild Community Tasks Project has RegexReplace task. But when I've looked in documentation (By the way, it will be good if Reference help will be available online, not only from download) I've realized that the task is applicable for strings(e.g file names) not to content within a file. Almost accidently in one of the posts i've found a reference to FileUpdate task, that support Regex and does content...
SQL Server allows you set a case sensitive collation at both the database and column level but often you will need to do a case sensitive search when everything is case insensitive. Not to worry, you can set the collation directly in the query. /* To test string equality including case when the DB is not case sensitive you must include collation as part of the test as follows: */ declare @mystring1 varchar(10) declare @mystring2 varchar(10) set @mystring1 ='abc' set @mystring2 ='ABC' -- by default...
The forth episode of Geeks on a role focuses on gateways and how to use them when creating web & cloud applications with Visual WebGui. Geeks on a role is an online show for the Visual WebGui open source developers community. You can watch episode 4 here and previous episodes on the geeks on a role homepage...
I want to share with everyone my Bachelor’s thesis. It is called “Sisteme bazate pe reguli, o implementare moderna. Algoritmul Rete” (eng. “Rule based systems, a modern implementation. Rete algorithm”) and it is written in Romanian. Feel free to download it from its page and *please* provide feedback...
Bing is a new search engine from Microsoft that has been released exactly one month ago. During this month it has created a lot of buzz. Bing is advertised by Microsoft to be a “Decision Engine” and it seems like there is a general feel, or at least enquiry, about bing constituting serious competition to Google search. After reading Scott Hanselman’s recent blog post comparing Lenovo’s ThinkPad W700 with the W500, I decided to give bing a little try. Google VS. Bing I decided to use google-vs-bing.com...
June was a busy month. I didn’t have time to write anything on blog, even though I wrote some tweets on Twitter. I managed to finalize the paper about Rete algorithm and expert systems. Will publish it soon. Also, I presented it at the faculty and I want to write about this presentation. The Bachelor’s presentation from the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics from the Transilvania University of Brasov, Romania is awful. First of all Read more >>...
Moving from C++ to C#, I discovered that constants in the way I was using them are not supported; however, they can be emulated. they are now defined in their own class as static variables; I go a step further by making them private and only available through a property. Before I show a code example, let's explore static further. When a variable is declared as static, the variable is essentially global. All instances of the class share the same static variable. A static variable is initialized to...
This is the third post in a series to demonstrate how to use the standard MSFT technologies to implement a CRUD data application in Silverlight. The steps in this post build upon those completed in part 2. The goal of this series is to show those of you who are relatively new to Silverlight how analogous building such an app in Silverlight is to say building it in ASP.NET, Win Forms or WPF. This app is built on Visual Studio 2008 SP1, SQL Server 2008, Silverlight 2.0 and the Silverlight Toolkit using...
This is the second post in a series to demonstrate how to use the standard MSFT technologies to implement a CRUD data application in Silverlight. The steps in this post build upon those completed in part 1. The goal of this series is to show those of you who are relatively new to Silverlight how analogous building such an app in Silverlight is to say building it in ASP.NET, Win Forms or WPF. This app is built on Visual Studio 2008 SP1, SQL Server 2008, Silverlight 2.0 and the Silverlight Toolkit...
BDUF was especially interesting when I heard Peter Provost and Billy Hollis speak on this topic during their presentations at the PnP Summit last year. Both made points that I could definitely relate to. You see the (embarrassing) thing about this post is that I didn’t know what BDUF was, and was living it everyday, but waterfall was supposed to be OK? I never heard anyone say BDUF until I hooked up with .NET a few years ago (I wrote my first line in December of 2003), even having done a few tours...
All of our developers have recently been dealing with a lot of shelving and unshelving in Team Foundation Server to share code. When unshelving shelvesets, we get prompted to fill in an Owner name text box. If you don't know the owners user name, an easy way to search through shelvesets is by entering an asterisk in the Owner name text box and then pressing the find button. This wildcard will bring up all the shelvesets available for you to unshelve. It's a handy little trick when you need to broaden...
In this Issue: Erik Mork(2), Michael Washington, Faisal(2), Andrej Tozon(2), and Jose Fajardo. I feel like I went through a time-warp or something because there is a flurry of SL out there right now. And a couple of folks are just flooding me! Hopefully I can catch up this weekend. From SilverlightCream.com: Downloading Prism Prism apparently is not straightforward to get up on your machine (oops, kinda lets you know I'm not running it eh?) oh well..Erik Mork has a great tutorial links and all, no...
I’ve had this tendency to deploy CLR Functions manually by providing the dll and scripts to the data management team. This has generally worked out great, and I’ve always thought I’d have a dba available to perform the database duties. Imagine my surprise when I could not contact anyone today. Apparently database administrators take their holidays and vacations seriously (it’s Independence Day weekend for my non-American readers). Another developer asked me why I couldn’t deploy my clr functions...
I had the honor of speaking at CodeStock this year, and it was an awesome experience. The highlights of the weekend include: 1) Getting picked up at the airport by Alan Stevens with his awesome sign. 2) The pre-conference get-together where I met many of my tweeps FINALLY… and they were all as awesome in IRL! 3) Rocking “Thriller” in Alan’s van after we learned that Michael Jackson had died (RIP). 4) The impromptu pool party at the ghetto hotel where we dueled with the kiddies to see who could be...
Microsoft Patterns & Practices group has just released some guidance around Acceptance Test Engineering. This is fortunate timing for me as I’ve been digging into the new testing tools with Team System 2010 in an attempt to incorporate the full testing cycle into my ALM thinking. Look forward to a few posts coming incorporating this work. Technorati Tags: P&P,Acceptance Test,ALM...
Recently I have been doing some work on an older system using ADODB recordsets. Every now and then we still have to support these old systems. I wanted to create an open recordset in code on the .NET side to pass to the older system, but ADODB really wants an open database connection in order to open a recordset. My first obvious attempt was to create the recordset object, then create the field objects and add them to the recordset. I could create the recordset this way, but I couldn't open it, and...
Building web-apps using the new MVC-framework for ASP.NET can be challenging if you need to build the boiler-plate code for the SMART controls that come standard with ASP.NET, like the GridView, ListView, etc. However, jQuery's plug-in, jqGrid, makes this easy. Although it can be time-consuming to setup the template that specifies the requirements for the grid, it is easy to duplicate once you have it set up. So basically you specify the columns you want to see in the grid, specify the format for...
The scenario: A web app is using the OutputCacheAttribute to set a cache duration for data that has different life spans. The IDE: ASP.NET MVC with Visual Studio 2008 The environment: Web-App on IIS The data that is being retrieved varies greatly in terms of their lifespan: Some data is very static like States, Countries Other data is more fluid, especially during end-user testing, like the load of scripts that have to be fixed occasionally and pushed to production during the day. Especially early...
Firebug adds a global variable named "console" to all web pages loaded in Firefox. This object contains many methods that allow you to write to the Firebug console to expose information that is flowing through your scripts. console.log(object[, object, ...]) Writes a message to the console. You may pass as many arguments as you'd like, and they will be joined together in a space-delimited line. The first argument to log may be a string containing printf-like string substitution patterns. For example:...
Network Monitoring Your web app on the server has plenty of tools and ways to measure performance, as well as tools like SQL-Server Profiler for SQL databases. But how do you trace, track and debug client-side code interactively? The use of alerts has been useful but does not support an interactive way for you to interact with the web-page on the fly. To make matters worse, even if you place some traces into your js code to help find the slow functions, etc, network latency may be another cause of...
Recently during migration BizTalk project from SQL to WCF adapter had some rather confusing moment. After deploying to test environment WCF ports started generate errors like this: Failed to open Microsoft.ServiceModel.Channels.Common.Channels.AdapterRequestChannel, Faulted Microsoft.ServiceModel.Channels.Common.Channels.AdapterRequestChannel, Faulted System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannel, Failed to open System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannel After few frustrating troubleshooting sessions...
Scenario: You are using the jqGrid to edit rows that contain fields that are of HTML tag type "SELECT". Problem: You do not want to hard code the values of the select tag like in the jqGrid samples. For example: editoption: { value: "FE:FedEx; IN:InTime; TN:TNT" } Solution: For example to load a list of countries dynamically, define the variable before the definition of the jqGrid: //get all countries var countries = $.ajax({url: $('#ajaxAllCountriesUrl').val(), async: false, success: function(data,...
I’m building out a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (SharePoint 2007) site for my client. The site uses two different methods of authentication, one for intranet users and one for extranet users. The intranet users will be logging onto their workstations using their corporate domain based username and password. We have one Url in SharePoint for these users, which is set to the out of the box Windows authentication. When the user goes to this Url, IE6 is set to send the credentials to the site, so...
The Problem: Recently was testing my web-app against a SQL-Server 2008 database and got a time-out expired message from the SQL database. No matter what I did after that it just did not want to drop the transaction and I continually got the time-out. I needed to find and stop the SQL transaction. The solution: Sign onto the SQL-Server with the Enterprise Manager. Execute sp_who2 and look for rows that are blocked on another connection (the BlkBy column will have the spid of the blocking connection...
Hello All, Recently I am engaged in an Integration project in which I have to Integrate BizTalk Server 2006 R2 with EMC Solutions product called Smarts Software. This Smarts Software exposes a Java API and a Web Service interface. Initially knowing that it exposes a Web Service I felt relief and it would make my life easy but then talking with the Smarts Software people they told us that the Web Service Interface is very naïve and it does not have all the functionality we need for the Integration....
Welcome to my first post. I’m not sure how much time I’m going to be able to dedicate to this BLOG, but hopefully I’ll have some interesting stuff to blog about during my c# development activities (I’m often working on some winforms or webforms stuff for work or even for fun). I’ll keep you posted...
Seeing as I wrestled with this topic for the better part of a day, I'll post the process here for posterity and for the off chance someone finds it useful. Pardon my lack of proper terminology here. I'd rather get the concept down quickly than look everything up. In your ASPX page, your GridView control needs an OnSorting setting. <asp:GridView ID="SomeName" runat="server" AllowSorting="true" AutoGenerateColumns="false" OnSorting="gvSorting"> Now, in your code behind, you need to have a code...
Tags: Surface A lot of people come to me with the question “why should we, as an organization, invest in Surface?” Or, to be more honest: developers come to me with the question “What can I do to convince my manager to buy us a Surface Unit"?”, which is the same question but more honest. The answer is, of course, the same answer as I give to everyone who asks me for a justification for investing in hard- and software: there needs to be a business case. And in these hard economic times: there needs...
Yesterday I’ve been informed that I’ve gained the Most Valuable Professional award again for next year, in ASP.NET category. This is the third time I have received this award, which is pretty exciting. Here is my MVP profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/Ashraful Special thanks to few Microsoft employees including Technical Fellow Brain Harry, Sr. Program Manager Joe Stagner, Lead Product Manager Dan Fernandez and South Asia MVP Lead Abhishek Kant who encouraged and supported me in several...
Few weeks ego we went to an exhibition in one of Kraków’s malls to celebrate the 100 year anniversary of robotics. Besides some nice exhibits there was also a place where kids could try to build a robot from Lego Mindstorms NXT and Fishertechnik sets. We spent few hours there with my older son Jaś and even managed to build a walking robot. It was fun for both of us so I started looking if we could continue playing with robots at home. Unfortunately most of the sets I found are pretty expensive (starting...
In case you missed it, a really good whitepaper by Rick Strahl and Michele Leroux Bustamante was published a few days ago on dealing with localization in WPF. At 66 pages long, I found the whitepaper really good, as it takes a hands-on, no-bull approach (in the familiar style of the authors ;) ) on the subject. There is also sample code for download containing examples and some goodies. For those interested, here's a quick summary of the paper (which is NOT supposed to replace reading it): you can...
Tonight I committed pre-task hooks for custom tasks in UppercuT. What has been available up to this point is only the post-task custom hooks. Now you can hook in before a task runs and run your own custom tasks! This is done the same way as the post run custom tasks. The naming convention here is *.pre.build in the name. For example _compile.pre.build would be the pre-task custom tasks for _compile.build. The post task custom tasks are now moving to a *.post.build naming standard. For now using the...
Geekswithblogs Gets a Facelift
Celebrating the five year anniversary of the first post on Geekswithblogs, the GWB team has launched a new look and functionality for the community designed to help the community continue to grow and increase interaction amongst bloggers.
The new design offers bloggers and readers the ability to quickly check recent posts, popular posts, Twitter users from the community, community news, and featured bloggers.
The redesign also makes it easier for bloggers to find tutorials on how to get the most from their blogs, support information, and a community-wide tag cloud.
We hope that you will enjoy the new features and look. Here’s to another five years and to everyone that makes up Geekswithblogs!
GWB Goes to PDC ’08 – Let Us “Tag Your Top”
Geekswithblogs is proud to be a Silver Media Sponsor for the upcoming PDC ’08! This will be a great opportunity for face-to-face interaction with the developer community.
If you happen to be going to Los Angeles for the PDC, and we highly suggest you do, make sure to swing by the Geekswithblogs booth (#100) in the Expo Hall to say hi! We will have some amazing looking Geekswithblogs stickers hot off the press ready to “tag your top” – so bring your laptop by to take it from drab to fab!
GWB Podcasting from PDC ‘08
Make sure to look for fellow Geekswithbloggers Chris Williams and D’Arcy Lussier roaming around the floor. They will be playing the part of on-site GWB ambassadors and roving reporters; stop and chat with them!
We’d like to know what you think about the upcoming podcast. We are thinking of firing PodcastStudio.net (the official podcast of GWB) back up after the event and would like to hear your thoughts and suggestions.
GWB and PDC ’08 – We’ll Make You Famous!
A major part of our display at our PDC booth is going to include a video featuring none other than the Geekswithblogs community members! We’re proud to have you as contributors to a large, healthy blogging community and want to give you some additional exposure.
Here’s what to do; record yourself saying “I’m a geek with a blog, and I…”. Simply fill in the rest with something interesting about yourself. It could be anything from what technology you love, what you like to do in your spare time, where you live, etc.
Examples include:
- I’m a geek with a blog, and I rock at ASP.NET.
- I'm a geek with a blog, and I support my development community by presenting at user groups.
- I'm a geek with a blog, and I love playing guitar.
- I’m a geek with a blog, and I volunteer to help the homeless.
- I’m a geek with a blog, and I chug energy drinks.
First 30 bloggers that send in a video with at least 5 statements get a ultra-stylish Geekswithblogs t-shirt with their blog URL on the back!
Stay tuned for FTP information for uploading your files!