Sorry for the delay in posting. I almost started a war of sort over my last ad “Don’t trust any one under 30?” on the social network LinkedIn. Well let me state right here this was an ad, with an attention getting subject line. Well on to my post for this week (yes I am trying to do post every week coming out by Monday. Since I last posted, I have spread my group (just a little bit) over the Internet. The group is now on FaceBook (as Gray Matters!), Google groups (as GrayMatters!) and webs.com (as...
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At the recent Calgary Tech Days event I did a presentation on building composite applications with WPF and Silverlight. One question that I get asked frequently when I get to the part of explaining MVVM is how its different from patterns that seem too similar or identical, with MVC and MVP typically being the two common ones raised. Usually my answer is that MVVM is very similar to the others, but it implies *stuff* that’s specific to Silverlight and WPF (how binding works, commanding, etc.). Unfortunately...
I am currently reading Scott Berkun’s book “Confessions of a Public Speaker” and thought this was hilarious and true: …unless presentation terrorists steal your microphone midsentence or put up their own projector and start showing their own slide deck—designed specifically to contradict your every point—you’re free from the pressures other performers face nightly. Small observations like this make it easier to laugh at nerves, even if they won’t go away. I do quite a few presentations to companies...
This took a lot of google foo and twiddling, so I figured I would post this. That, and I fully expect I'll be scratching my head a few weeks from now and wondering where I put my sample XML ;) The configuration file below assumes that you have included the bins from the following folders included with the NHibernate download (I use 2.1.1): <Your NHibernate install frolder>\Required_For_LazyLoading\Castle\*.dll <Your NHibernate install frolder>\Required_Bins\*.dll And here's the App config...
Although delegate type and Enum type are class types, we can not inherit from them as they are sealed classes after compile, public delegate void DelegateTestType(); //Compile time error class myTest : DelegateTestType { ... } we can not make it as a type constraint either on class or method: //Compile time error class myTest<T> where T : DelegateTestType { } From the C# 2.0 specification we can read (20.7, Constraints): A class-type constraint must satisfy the following rules: · The type must...
Sometimes you have a t-shirt idea, but there is no way to try it out – until now. Introducing OnAShirt.net. It is a simple app I coded in a couple of hours today that allows the user to place text over a picture of a t-shirt, or even to conduct t-shirt conversations with themself. Thanks to jQuery for making this sort of thing so easy...
[Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman] Following on from the sample for processing Excel uploads with nServiceBus, I have a comparable version using BizTalk on MSDN Code Gallery here: BizTalk and nServiceBus Excel Upload. The BizTalk (2006 R2) sample uses a FILE receive port with a simple pipeline component to disassemble the Excel file into separate messages. A SQL send port subscribes to the messages, and with an outbound map calls the AdventureWorks stored procedure to insert each product....
Good news, this is my first video post, so less typing for me! Bad news, you have to hear my eloquent voice. Regardless, I thought I’d try it out and see how it flies. So, a requirement popped up to allow the business to store “Contact Us” information in SharePoint and use workflows to manually send emails to the people who submitted the contact information. Very easy.. nothing spectacular. They also wanted the ability to send pre-formatted email templates as responses. Also fairly easy to do creating...
I use Boot Camp on my MacBook Pro to run Windows 7. Last night I thought I would try installing Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. Sadly, the install kept failing with an "access denied" error. I was determined to figure it out. I ran Process Monitor to see what was going on and looked at some of the log files it was writing to. One of them said it found drive E: to have the most space, but failed when it attempted to write to it. Drive E: was my OS X partition. So, I fired up disk manager in Windows 7 (diskmgmt.msc)...
With the release of Windows 2008 R2, highly available Hyper V deployments have increased in popularity. One of the big questions during these deployments is what to virtualize and what to leave on physical hardware and in particular when it refers to domain controllers. Domain controllers are basically highly transactional database servers which service most basic network functions including authentication, name resolution, replication, and of course many secondary services like DHCP or Radius. In...
I recently saw several folks whose blogs I follow incorporate Sribit so I got curious. Sribit allows readers to suggest blog topics. It provides another mechanism for a blogger and the reader to interact. You can always comment on existing blog posts. Now you can also suggest blog posts. You can ask questions about topics that I have never posted about or haven't posted on in a while. So if you have a topic that you would like to see me blog about, by all means suggest away. I will make every effort...
To redirect to a specific SharePoint site or page: 1. Create c-name entry in DNS and point to SharePoint server 2. Create directory in c:\inetpub\wwwroot and create one html file called "index.htm" in the folder with this content: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <title>Redirecting Page</title> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0;URL=http://sharepoint/sites/default.aspx"> </head><body></body> </html>...
Its very simple to setup the latest ODP.NET with Windows 7 and VS2008. Just do the following: Download the following: www.oracle.com/technology/software/tech/dotnet/utilsoft.html from oracle and install it. Oracle 11g ODAC and Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio 11.1.0.7.20 Download Includes Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio 11.1.0.7.20 Oracle Data Provider for .NET 2.0 11.1.0.7.20 Oracle Providers for ASP.NET 11.1.0.7.20 Oracle Database Extensions for .NET 2.0 11.1.0.7.20 -- for upgrade...
In this Issue: Michael Wolf, Colin Blair, John Papa, Ning Zhang, Andy Beaulieu, and Tomasz Janczuk. Shoutouts: In case you missed it in the rush the other day, Robby Ingebretsen announced the release of Seesmic for Windows ... that's going on my laptop this weekend! The Microsoft Expression Blog has a great tutorial upon the use of Panels in Expression Web. Don't forget, I have all Silverlight 4B articles tagged at WynApse.com, along with lots (>7600 posts) of other stuff :) From SilverlightCream.com:...
I own a company, Tiger Computer Services Ltd, which is an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) providing .NET software solutions to clients in the London area. One of the most significant considerations when running a small ISV is the cost of supporting software in the field. For some clients, support is not a billable item, especially if the fault is within the software we have provided. This means that every time the telephone rings, we bleed money, and if we have to actually go on site to resolve...
There is a small configuration issue with the Microsoft Business Rules Composer in BizTalk Server 2009. This will only affect you if you deploy the rules engine by itself without the rest of BizTalk Server. In a full installation of BizTalk Server, BTS provides a set of BTS-specific Rule Framework components in as assembly called Microsoft.BizTalk.RuleEngineExtensions. This includes a RuleSetDeploymentDriver component that manages deployment of rules via the SQL Server repository. The BTS-specific...
The second day keynote at PDC 2009 in Lost Angeles was shared by Steven Sinofsky and Scott Guthrie. Steven is the President of Windows and Windows Live Division and it really must have been a great day for him as he came out for the first time in a major conference with the new Windows 7 launched and the old Vista problems just fading away into Microsoft’s past. There is a lot of excitement for Windows 7 and there is excitement for the new Windows 7 APIs that are available for developers to work...
Last year Chris Craft wrote this excellent "30 days of .NET" articles where he wrote 30 .NET applications in C# each day. I have gone through the initial few and plan to complete the list as and when I find time. He hasn't actually explained the code and the application logic in detail and that would surely be some task if you are doing 30 apps in 30 days (; You couldn't ask for more. The source code for all the applications is available. So just download'em and dig through. There's no better way...
Found a nice article on Code Project about using gesture API's on Windows Mobile 6.5 devices. Hit the link and give it a read. And off I go to try the program out...
[This is the third in a series of posts on getting started with the new features in Entity Framework 4 based on the demos I did in my session at TechEd Europe in Berlin last week (Nov 2009).] Entity Framework 4 relies significantly on the Text Template Transformation Toolkit (T4) to generate code from the EDM. I thought it would be useful to show a really simple example of T4 in action which is nothing to do with Entity Framework. In a Visual Studio 2008/2010 solution, add a new item of type Text...
I have been working with T4 (Text Template Transformation Toolkit) lately thanks to the Entity Framework team moving their code generation model over to T4 in Visual Studio 2010. However by default Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 do not include syntax highlighting or intellisense support for T4 files, which makes it rather difficult to work with them (very difficult at times!). Thankfully there are partners who address this. The one I am using with Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010 is the Tangible T4 editor....
For the first time in my career I have attended a major conference and it was well worth the wait. I had a handful of major objectives in attending of which all were met. Gain an understanding of Azure and how we can leverage it for our small and mid market customers. Gain more detailed insight into changes in SharePoint 2010 that will impact customizations and solutions that we provide our customers. Have some dialog with some of the MS data team members and others to understand MS’ vision for data...
In this Issue: Rob Houweling, Michael Washington, Colin Eberhardt, Laurent Bugnion, Tomasz Janczuk, Jeremy Likness, and Andy Beaulieu. From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight 4 – Using the webcam Rob Houweling has a tutorial up on using the webcam in Silverlight 4 Beta ... all good stuff, and hmm... I'm not following their new site, so that brings the total up to 397 :) Silverlight Bridge - A Silverlight 4 File Manager Access your local file system and drag-and-drop, and OOB in Silverlight? --- wow,...
As noted in my previous post I attended and spoke at the SharePoint Saturday Cleveland 2009 conference. For those unfamiliar, SharePoint Saturday is a community driven event where various speakers gather to present at a FREE conference on all topics related to SharePoint. This was my first SharePoint Saturday and it was a great community event to attend. Over the past 6 months or so I’ve been following various Twitter users talking about SharePoint Saturdays in their region so I was excited to see...
Let's face it, it needed a rename. Mitch.Web just lacks everything in terms of marketing, so I've re-branded my (currently error logging :P) framework to "The Evil Little Developer's Toolbox" in game with my EvilDev theme. I've also made advancements (not guaranteed to work yet) on my error logging framework, mostly in terms of a new Services Project, and the Logging Service. The logging service, is a WCF Service, designed to log errors to a database. The idea behind it, well, I generally focus my...
What a difference a day makes…at least to some. While the Day 1 keynote at PDC seemed mostly like a news update on last year’s announcements, and a somewhat dry one at that, Day 2 gave developers some real “red meat.” It began with a presentation by Steven Sinofsky on Windows 7’s progress since its launch last month, including demos of the diverse array of hardware on which it now runs. Sinofsky then offered the ultimate crowd pleaser: he described the specs for a multi-touch Microsoft-designed laptop...
أحياناً أوثر الصمت لأني ربما أعجز عن إنتقاء كلمات تنقل ما أشعر به. أو ربما أظن أن الكلمات لا تكفي أحياناً. فهذه أجزاء من قصيدة الفيتوري يوميات حاج فلتأخذ منها ما شئت فلا أرى وقتاً يوافق واقعه تلك الكلمات مثل هذا الوقت: قوافل يا سيدي قلوبنا إليك تحج كل عام هياكل مثقلة بالوجد والهيام تسجد عند عتبات البيت والمقام تقرئك السلام يا سيدي عليك أفضل السلام يا سيدي عليك أفضل السلام من أمة مضاعة خاسرة البضاعة تقذفها حضارة الخراب والظلام إليك كل عام لعلها تجد الشفاعة لشمسها العمياء في الزحام يا سيدي منذ ردمنا...
In a little over 5 weeks Dr Nic and the Fair-brothers will begin their Homeric rickshaw running adventure from the Himalayas to the south of India. Their adventure is raising money for some worthy causes so please give generously. As you can see, Greg was kind enough to send me a mocra off railers t-shirt. It is very comfortable. Thanks Greg and good luck...
Silverlight has come to an age from WPF/E days and today 4.0 version was launched. Features includes: Support for enterprise applications: Printing support: Silverlight application can print itself, how the content is formatted when printed, and determine the content that will appear. It even has capabilities to print a portion of the Silverlight content. RichTextArea control / WebBrowser Control: The RichTextArea has Bi-Di support, allows hyperlinks, XAML content, and embedding of images. It also...
So in response to some comments on my original post on this topic, I started playing around with some other ideas. I figured it would be cleaner to post code here, rather than the comments. How many variations on the theme can we really have? As suggested in the comments on the previous post: 1: public static string Join1<T>( this IEnumerable<T> items, string delimiter, Func<T,string> converter ) 2: { 3: return string.Join( delimiter, 4: items 5: .Select( converter ) 6: .Where(...
For full disclosure, Packt Publishing sent me a review copy of this book. They did not ask for a positive review, just a review. This is the first book by Jorge Ramon that I’ve read. This book is exactly what the title says that it is, a Cookbook. It’s got 109 solutions to problems solved by Ext JS 3.0. I was expecting, like a lot of other books to get a fill of all of the philosophy behind what they are trying to promote but that wasn’t the case. This book just in with no nonsense and gets right...
I just got done with my NotAtPdc Session On "Getting to Know the Entity Framework". Of course like a good live presentation, my demo broke. The problem was in the connection string. When I did the model first development, I named the model something different for some reason and that caused the connection string to be out of sync in the actual application. Someone had mentioned that was the problem in the chat, but I didn't see it until after the demo was over. So, in case anyone else happens to...
Hey guys, I am really sorry for having to postpone my talk about Expression Blend 3 and SketchFlow. We had some huge difficulties with the NotAtPDC.com website, and unfortunately we were not able to locate the site administrator on time to solve the issue. Without a speaker login, I was able to talk to the attendees, but not share my desktop. Now I love to talk about Blend but I love even more to show Blend ;) Ironically, as a Microsoft MVP I do have a LiveMeeting account, so I would be able to host...
Within the world of Business Intelligence and Analytics, data analysis can only be automated so far and manual analysis is often required to add an important component of human intelligence. To that end, data visualization is a useful, if not critical tool to be able to absorb and understand large amounts of data. So it came as a bit of a surprise that Microsoft’s Live Labs has a research project called “Pivot” intended to help visually analyze data patterns on a Web scale. What intrigues me the...
Just moved from the Office 2010 Technical Preview to the Beta that was released last week or so and noticed a new bit of functionality in Outlook. I don't know the extent of the interoperability just yet but I look forward to seeing it in action with anything other than SharePoint. MS Info Page Here...
After we enabled our Office Communicator 2007 R2 Access Edge Server for Federation with AOL, Yahoo, and MSN, our Communicator 2007 R2 clients were able to chat successfully with Yahoo and MSN users and vice versa. Also, AOL users could send instant messages to our clients. However, our Communicator clients could not send instant messages to or reply to IMs from AOL users. When an AOL user would send us an instant message, we would get the following error message when we attempted to reply or when...
In this Demo I will show 3 ways to have your web page locate your MediaElement’s video file. I have created a Silverlight 3 application and let it automatically create a web site to host the control. Drag a <MediaElement> onto the UserControl and set its source file attribute. Drag the video file using window explorer and drop it in the root of my Silverlight’s UserControl project. Note the size of this file is about 25mb. I will demo 3 different methods for setting the location so that the...
Silverlight 4 Overview Postings Every time there's a beta or a release I try a different way to get all the good stuff out. I waited until today, and am scooping up all the overview blog posts, and posting them first in this post. I've got a few submissions I'll get out later today and then I'll start catching up with everyone as the days go on... I've tagged 63 posts so far! -- oh, and I added a "4 Beta" tag on Silverlight Cream, so that's ready to roll For now, here is the (SL4ß Overview) end-result...
I have finally completeed building my computer. So far, it is very fast. I am using Windows 7 x64 and I am amazed that I have not had many problems. Check out the build and leave comments below. Part New Machine Q4 - 2009 Old Machine Q4 -2004 CPU Q6600 4 Cores @ 2.4Ghz Athlon 64 4000+ Motherboard Intel G31 Abit AV8 RAM 4GB DDR2 2GB DDR HardDrive 1 (SATA) 1.5TB 160GB HardDrive 2 (SATA) None 400GB Video Geforce 8600GT (PCI-E) Geforce 6600GT (AGP) CD/DVD Drive CD/Dvd Reader CD/Dvd Burner Sound Card...
We used MsTest framework for a project that mainly had integration tests for Wcf Services, and found particularly useful to use AssemblyInitialise method to start the services hosts before all the tests are run and AssemblyCleanup to stop all the hosts after all the tests in the assembly have run. At some point, the company decided they would like to change this project to use NUnit instead of MsTest (for sake of uniformity, as all thi other project were using NUnit). The only problem that I saw...
[This is the second in a series of posts on getting started with the new features in Entity Framework 4 based on the demos I did in my session at TechEd Europe in Berlin last week (Nov 2009).] Code generation from the Entity Data Model (EDM) has changed significantly in version 4 of the Entity Framework. The product does retain a backwardly compatible model of code generation but also now includes T4 templates for code generation. This is a fantastic addition to the Entity Framework as many developers...
Versioning your database is as important as versioning your code. How much time do we waste currently before we are even productive when we have to fix or enhance something in a database? RoundhousE versions your database how you want. The recommended way is to version based on source control, but that may not be your solution. But for a moment let’s pretend it is. Why would versioning your database based on source control be a big help? What happens if you get a prod fix (or work order) to fix a...
There seems to be a too strong trend in too many product development organizations: This is the trend to only deliver; don’t get me wrong, delivering quality software on time and within budget is a good thing. The issue is that there is in many cases only focus on delivery of applications and not too much though and focus on how the operational aspect of that software will work. This observation applies to almost all types of projects, with integration projects being no exception. Probably one of...
The DotNetNuke web hosters at PowerDNN have put together a nice 3 minute survey to analyze your needs on what version of DotNetNuke that you might need to have. The survey has 3 categories. 1. Website Size 2. Website Usage 3. Project Details With an easy UI of drop down lists, you just answer the questions listed in each category and then submit them to the site. After you submit, you'll get reasons why you should use either the Community or Professional Edition of DotNetNuke. Here's an example of...
A big thanks to all those who attended http://edgeug.net/ last night to hear about SQL Azure and SQL Server 2008 R2. I really enjoyed it and once again “Merry Christmas”! Links http://bit.ly/startazure takes you to the getting started page for SQL Azure (and Windows Azure) Download SQL Server Management Studio R2 which works with SQL Azure Brief walkthrough of using SSMS R2 with SQL Azure (nice screenshots similar to what I showed in the first demo) Download the SQL Azure Migration Wizard http://twitter.com/ericnel...
Today I had a twittersation about build servers, and how closely they should match the development and production environments. Damian’s position was that the build server should match the development environment, while I held that the build environment should be as close to production as possible. Martin Fowler’s Continuous Integration article says: Test in a Clone of the Production Environment The point of testing is to flush out, under controlled conditions, any problem that the system will have...
If you install Hyper-V Server it comes without the usual Windows Server UI. On a laptop this means there is no control panel applet or system tray battery icon available to adjust the power configuration. It's highly unlikely that the default option of Balanced is what you really want for hosting virtual machines, and you will ideally to set it to High Performance instead. No need to worry, you need the command line tool, powercfg. Run the command line with the option list and then use the -setactive...
When an itinerary is created using the itinerary designer you can deploy the Itinerary in different ways. Listed some of them and also I created a app which is basically derived from ESBImportUtil to do the deployment : ESBImportUtil.exe You can use ESBImportUtil.exe utility located at C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0\Bin. Ex: ESBImportUtil.exe /f: onewayitinerary.xml /c: deployed /o Power Shell Script Check out the Itinerary sample in the C:\projects\microsoft.practices.esb\Source\Samples\Itinerary\Install\Scripts\Itinerary_install.ps1...
Last time I was taking a look at SubSonic’s SimpleRepository functionality and wondering about the return value of the ‘Add<T>’ method. More specifically, I was wondering why the ‘object’ instance being returned was typed as a decimal rather than an int when the object I was persisting had a primary key field that is typed as an int. I had discovered that the while Add<T> was returning a decimal, it was also updating the primary key field (PostID on my Post class instance in this case)...
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!