Tag | ALM Posts
I've just installed the Windows 8 Developer Preview. These are some first impressions: Installation of the preview was quite smooth and didn't take too long. It took a few minutes to extract the files onto a virtual image, but feature installation then seemed to happen almost instantaneously (according to the feedback on the screen). The installation routine then went into a preparation cycle that took two or three minutes. Then the virtual machine rebooted and after a couple of minutes more preparation, ...
I am like everyone else when it comes to Preview OS Software. I don’t want it on installed on my primary machine and I don’t want to lug around another laptop to try stuff. I am not a fan of booting of VHD (which I will explain in a second). Scott Hanselman made a great post on how to do this if you are interested however. The main issue that I see with this approach is that the bootloader on my MAIN MACHINE is replaced with the Windows 8 Preview one. Yikes! I don’t want any preview software with ...
I kept getting this error whenever I try and do a Windows Update. This used to happen, particularly if I haven’t done a WU for a very long time. The usual suspects are anti-virus, firewall and sometimes, pending windows updates which would get resolved when I do a restart of the machine. I am running a Windows 7 SP1 64 Bit OS. This time, I connected a machine after almost 6 months and had a truck load of windows updates to be done. I tried restarting multiple times but every time, I run the WU wizard, ...
I was recently discussing some common flaws in application architecture with David Adsit (codeobsession.blogspot.com/) about wisdom in development. Have you ever looked at a system and seen somethings done that were either technically or procedurally difficult, and thought, "wow, it must have taken a lot of work and a lot of proficiency to get that done" but then said to yourself, "but doing it was a bad idea". One of the things that experience teaches that you don't get to pick up from simply gaining ...
Our engine is written in almost pure C++ with some part in C# that run on Mono. The code base is huge which mans that we’re primarily looking for platforms that support C++ development. Looking at the current set of platforms on the market this is really not a big issue with Windows Phone being the only platform that does currently not support native development. Sadly this means that we’re currently not planning a Windows Phone release in the near future. Looking at other platforms, about a year ...
We're 10 minutes away from the Build keynote, and I'm going to be live blogging the event. Now, to be clear, you shouldn't just read this - I mean, the keynotes are streaming live online. But I want to capture my thoughts on the announcements as they happen. So without further ado, let's start!And we're done! Great keynote, lots of content! However, we still don't have our schedule! LOL...off for lunch.11:16 - The path to RTM: Beta, RC, RTM, GA - Driven by quality and not a date, I'm ok with that.11:11 ...
Back in June of 2009, I joined an Indianapolis based Company called Apparatus. But there are times when we find forks in the road (Muppet movie reference). So the end of the road has come for my being at Apparatus on Sept. 24th. It has been a couple of years of great experiences.
The future looks fun, entertaining, packed with community interaction and time to take ALM and SharePoint to another level. Stay tuned.
In the previous post I droned on about how to apply the AsyncOperationService to an API conforming to the .NET Asynchronous pattern. In this post I’ll be building a more real world example. Well I say “real world” please don’t confuse that with something actually useful. Its still a little contrived and is not an example of best practice but it is something you could actually build and test. What are we going to build? We are going to build an ambitious ground breaking Silverlight app that allows ...
(Warning: This is semi-advanced stuff. It’s not hard, per se, but it involves editing important project files manually, which, if done wrong, can render them useless making it so that your code won’t compile (and may not even load into Visual Studio). So back up everything or (better still) commit it to your source control repository before doing anything so that in case you mess something up, you can easily recover! You have been warned.) I’ve been steadily becoming more familiar with MSBuild over ...
In this Issue: Michael Washington, Tony Champion, Ollie Riches, Gill Cleeren, Koen Zwikstra(-2-), Peter Kuhn, Xianzhong Zhu, Mike Taulty, Pete Brown, Sumit Dutta(-2-), Asim Sajjad, Dhananjay Kumar(-2-), Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight Spy September 2011 Update" Koen Zwikstra WP7: "Windows Phone 7 on-demand training available" Peter Kuhn LightSwitch: "Quick And Easy Data Management With LightSwitch" Michael Washington PivotViewer: "Extending your CXML Trading Cards in Silverlight 5" Tony ...
When developing WCF services that interact with a custom Security Token Service (STS), you will need to create at least one X.509 certificate. If you have access to a trusted certificate authority – e.g. a Windows Active Directory domain – then this task is pretty simple. But if you don’t, or maybe you would just rather create a set of self-signed certificates, here is an approach that works well for me. This particular scenario utilizes three separate certificates. The first one is named “localhost” ...
I received a surprise mail from Microsoft saying that I’ve been recognized as Microsoft Community Contributor for the year 2011. I am delighted that my contributions in TFS and ALM space have been recognised by Microsoft. Congratulations! We’re pleased to inform you that your contributions to Microsoft online technical communities have been recognized with the Microsoft Community Contributor Award. The Microsoft Community Contributor Award is reserved for participants who have made notable contributions ...
This post is about using the AsyncOperationService with .NET Asynchronous Pattern. Warning: this is another article that is likely to give you a headache. Its designed to provide full details of how things work. If you don’t want the headache then, skim the article and copy’n’paste the code from the “FromAsyncPattern” box below (it assumes you already have AsyncOperationService code). Subsequent articles will outline more real world uses which may (and I say “may” very tentatively) not be so headache ...
It’s been quite a while since I’ve done a GeeksWithBlogs.net Influencers review. This time, I had the opportunity to check out Red Gate’s SmartAssembly 6.1, which is a integrated collection of tools for modifying and manipulating assemblies. Now that phrase, while accurate, is quite a mouthful. So what all does it actually do? SmartAssembly has the ability to: Do strong name signing; Add automated error reporting; Add feature usage reporting; Merge dependencies (e.g. libraries) into the main assembly ...
If your question is, what is this? or perhaps more around … what does this mean? Let me explain a bit about it. Microsoft has been providing this type of services through partners within a given competency to clients that are looking to deploy and implement Microsoft products like SharePoint, Exchange or the strategy behind Windows and Office deployments. The way it works, well you purchase your products and perhaps those products come with Software Assurance and they have training/service credits. ...
I have been very lucky over the span of my career in that every job I’ve had since college has allowed me some flexibility to work from home. Maybe it was just one day a week, maybe a week at home and a week at work, and now I work from home more than 50% of the time. And you know what? It really struck me as totally illogical that more companies don’t allow their employees to do this! Yes, I realize not every industry has the luxury of a remote workforce. It would be kind of hard to build a house ...
I’ve had a lot of bad things happen to me in my life. The past few weeks I believe have been a huge test I’ve had some problems with my personal life and some natural disasters. I was thinking during this entire experience what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. I am going through something traumatic, but you know what I can survive it. I am an incredibly durable person. When things suck I go into crisis mode when I’m on my own. I believe that what made this possible is all the traumas in my life. ...
Over my years of writing code and building systems, several “truths” have emerged. I won’t talk about all of those truths here, but only one in particular: I call it Documenting Your Purpose. The industry has also come to this realization and, lately, this has been referred to as Intentional Programming. Call it what you will, the idea is the same. When you write code, write it so that your intention is embedded as part of the code. When someone reads your finished code, they should be able to completely ...
Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun are offering a free on-line course on AI later this year in conjunction with Stanford University. The course is broadly based on Peter Norvig's book "Artificial Intelligence: A modern Approach" written jointly with Stuart Russell. Along with my colleagues on the Rules Fest committee, we have been following this with interest. In a few days, well over 100,000 people have signed up (112,774 at the time of writing, and still increasing fast). The course broadly overlaps ...
I had added some code behind to a SharePoint 2010 master page and it worked beautifully! I followed Andrew Connell’s blog and article on MSDN. I had actually created two more master pages with an identical code behind as they each needed the same bits. I had each inherit from the same code behind file. Everything worked great until we were having some problems with one of our developers opening a css file form the VPN. So I thought I would just change the master page in SPD temporarily to use a css ...
For a period of time, I have access to both an MSDN and a TechNet subscription. Both offer Microsoft software for download. I wondered what the similarities and differences were between the two subscriptions. I copied the two download lists into Excel and aligned them. Most of the material I would never use. Some products I have never heard of. I present the lists, current as of today, for your reviewing pleasure. TechNet MSDN Applications (63) Applications (79) Access 2.0 Access 2003 Access 2003 ...
I’m on vacation this week, and I didn’t intend to write a blog post. But after the sea changes in the mobile computing industry and, ironically, my extra time to ponder it, I really couldn’t stay silent. In the space of four days, Google may have effectively taken Android “private” and HP seems to have euthanized webOS in public. It’s really hard to believe all of this is happening. But we can at least have a go at understanding what it means and what might, or might not, come next for Microsoft ...
Last time we did have a look into the issues you get if you create many class instances. The more class instances you have the more complex is your object graph which means more work for the GC. If the GC has more work there is less CPU time for your application left which does make it slower. An easy way to fix this issue is to create a struct which is a value type which is copied by value and does not add complexity to your object graph. Common wisdom suggests that your structs should not get bigger ...
Last month at the Microsoft WPC I had the opportunity to see Richard Branson do a live Q&A during one of the morning keynotes. I honestly knew very little about Branson, other than he headed up Virgin – which was, what, a music, mobile phone, and airline company that was also looking into space travel? My education into all things Branson was about to begin. You can see the entire video of the Q&A from the WPC site here, but what was really awesome was the initial intro video that gave a ...
Almost every example of a Silverlight ListBox that I have found merely shows how to get data bound to it, not what to do once you get it there. What good is a ListBox that you can’t get a reference back from? The quickest practical way is to hold your original datasource and use the index of the selected item as you key back into your data. It isn’t pretty and you wouldn’t want to take this approach with large amounts of data, but then again a mobile device isn’t meant to display large amounts of ...
Windows Communication Foundation is a powerful tool for building contract based messaging. As with most powerful technologies with flexibility comes a fair amount of complexity. I ran into one of these situation while trying to send files as part of message in the form of a byte array. In itself this is a simple concept. The problem is that the default configuration of WCF is setup to protect us from denial of service attacks to the best of its ability. In order to achieve this it is setup for relatively ...
If you want to write scalable applications with a high throughput you need to take care of good data structure design to make your application scale. If you want to read for example 200 MB data from a file and process it you can finish it in 5 or 30s. To be on the 5s side it is educational to see how fast you actually can get. To measure the raw disc performance I do read the file into a pre allocated byte array. [Test] public void ReadFile_Store_In_ByteArray() { var sw = Stopwatch.StartNew(); int ...
This post will focus upon introducing the concepts of AI algorithms, and is summerized from "Artificial Intelligence, A Modern Approach" – by Norvig and Russell - 3rd edition - http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/ . Overview General Definition: study of agents that receive percepts from the environment and perform actions Weak AI hypothesis - assertion that software could simulate thought-like behavior - Can machines think – is considered an ill-defined question (does a submarine swim?). Strong AI hypothesis ...
Everyone has a journey. You start off young & stupid, and 2 decades later, you're closer to understanding the nature of reality. That’s one of the main goals in life, to seek knowledge (justified, true beliefs – pick any 2 J ). I must have read 5000 books in my life. From some of my readings it could be construed that reality computes itself, It from Bit. From others, it can be concluded that Entropy is decreased by increased rates of computation, and in the short span of human civilization, ...
Desde que escribí mi primer post sobre como utilizar JqGrid con asp.net (http://geekswithblogs.net/... he recibido varias consultas sobre como realizar un maestro detalle utilizando este control de jquery. Antes de comenzar debo mencionar que para mostrar un maestro detalle con JqGrid tenemos dos opciones: 1. Realizarlo con un subgrid 2. Utilizar dos JqGrid separados Así que, teniendo esto en cuenta, el objetivo de este post será ...
Overview When I was younger I barely knew anything of Dante's Inferno other than that some of my friends were required to read it for a literature class and it sounded like it had a cool name. I knew the epic poem described the nine circles of Hell and thought 'Boy, I bet that'd make a good game'. Then in 2010 Visceral Games came around and put out a loosely-Inferno based game titled Dante's Inferno. Design The story of Dante's Inferno (herein 'Dante's Inferno' will refer to the game, not the poem) ...
CTEs or common table expressions can be used to make recursive SQL stantements. CTEs are ANSI-99 standard. Please read www.sql-server-performance.... for more information. I have only had 2 instances in my career where CTEs made sense for me to use in a pratical setting. If you have found them more practical, please share. The first time I needed a CTE I was displaying corporate branches from a recurssive table. Some branches had branches, which had branches, and so on, whereas ...
Overview Shadows of the Damned is 'a survival horror' game developed by Japanese studio Grasshopper Manufacture, known for it's visionary founder Suda51 and the games Killer7 and No More Heroes. The cover art (US) touts the game as 'A Suda51 Trip' and as my first Suda51 experience, I was treated to a unique game with a few flaws. Design It's hard to even begin to talk about Shadows of the Damned without first touching on the uniqueness of the direction of the game. Now, I'm no stranger to a unique ...
Shervin Shakibi, Microsoft Regional Director, was our speaker at the West Palm Beach .Net User Group July 2011 meeting. Shervin’s talk was demo-centric where he showcased the power of HTML 5 by example. Issues discussed at the meeting included suggestions on mitigating security concerns with HTML 5 source code accessibility as well as the status and timeline for HTML 5 readiness. Shervin’s much anticipated talk brought us over 25 members who filled our CompTec meeting room. We appreciate Shervin’s ...
Wow, it has been awhile, so let's do some catching up. In January 2011 I joined a local gym and have since been pretty dedicated to that and work leaving me little to no time for personal projects (although I've lost almost 40 lbs!). This includes both this blog, posting at Gamasutra, the Deep Fried Devcast, and anything else. Add to this my recent increased interest in music and guitar and I've been left with very little extra time. In fact, I've changed so much about the way I spend my time that ...
I have to admit that I’m a basic user when it comes to JSON serialization/deserialization. I’ve used JSON.NET and the DataContractJsonSerializer. I’ve read that JSON.NET is faster and more efficient than the built-in .NET serializer, but I haven’t had to build a system that is dependent on squeezing microseconds out of my serialization routines. That said, I do prefer JSON.NET because it is more flexible when it comes to using DataContractAttribute and DataMemberAttribute for customizing your JSON ...
Continuing my “From Soup to Nuts” series or sometimes referred to as “The Busy Developers Guide” series, I will take a look at the Surface 2.0 SDK recently released by Microsoft. Before you read ahead, here are the other articles in this series: The Busy Developers Guide to the Kinect SDK Beta. The Busy Developers Guide to Mango. What is it? With the Microsoft® Surface® 2.0 SDK, you can easily create applications to take advantage of the next generation Surface computing device or any Windows touch-enables ...
In a number of talks I’ve given, including a session at last year’s Microsoft BI Conference, I’ve mentioned that if you’re not looking at partner offerings in the Microsoft Business Intelligence ecosystem, then you’re not getting the full Microsoft BI picture. This rubs two ways: Microsoft BI may look misleadingly deficient, in comparison to its competitors, if partner solutions are not taken into consideration If you’re an MS BI user and you’re not looking at partner products, your MS BI investment ...
Download QuadTreeOptimization.zip c# project Background Today I'd like to share with you interesting experiences I made last several evenings when working on one of my open source hobby projects - Source Code Cloud Generator http://sourcecodecloud.code... One of the tasks was arranging of nonintersecting rectangles on a 2D surface in certain pattern. For quick 2D collision detection (rectangle intersection) I decided to use QuadTree data structure [see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wik... ...
Last week I was at the Microsoft WPC conference in Los Angeles. I’ve been to other Microsoft developer conferences like Tech Ed and PDC before, but this was my first WPC and it was a great experience. For one thing, the target audience is blatantly business, sales, and marketing. It was a weird feeling attending a Microsoft conference and not knowing *anybody* (although some familiar faces were found). I have links below to notes I made for the individual days of the conference, but I wanted to point ...
We kick off Day 4 at, you guessed it, another keynote (maybe they should rename this to the Worldwide Partner Keynote Conference?). We kick off with the Canadian Tenors singing some song they wrote for the Vancouver Olympics, and then a parade of partners carrying their country’s flag enters. I feel like I’m at Folklarama back in Winnipeg. ;) So today we have some big names speaking. Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s COO and Sir Richard Branson are on the schedule. Kevin Turner If you have never seen Kevin ...
In the past few months, we at the West Palm Beach .Net User Group have been busy soliciting your feedback on topics you would like covered at our upcoming meetings. We have also been encouraging our members to step up and share on the projects they work on and the technologies they use. The result is the schedule below which we hope brings a good variety of today’s hottest topics. We look forward to seeing you at our meetings and to receiving your feedback as we continuously strive to improve the ...
As I do almost every year, I rearranged my home office. This time I moved my desk against the wall and added a shelve to support my main monitors. This allows me to work from my two macs when I am at home, and RDP into my Windows development laptop (below the monitors). I mainly use the macs for graphics work and photography now. The MacBook Air is still goes with me each day and sometimes I bring the iPad as well. Without better pen support, the iPad is just my couch app device or car device for ...
I just got back from Microsoft’s 15,000 attendee-strong Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Los Angeles, and I have to say, the company and its partners are pumped. How can this be, given the number of people who have written Microsoft’s eulogy of late? If Amazon owns the cloud, if Apple owns the consumer, if Google owns search, if Cisco owns unified communications, if EMC/VMWare owns virtualization, if Oracle and SAP own ERP and if Oracle/Siebel and Salesforce.com own CRM, how can Microsoft be ...
MvcScaffolding is a tremendous productivity improvement for MVC developers. Earlier this year, Steve Sanderson posted the definitive 7-part series on MvcScaffolding which is a must-read for anyone serious about doing scaffolding. The best part about the scaffolding infrastructure is that MvcScaffolding is actually built on top of another package called T4Scaffolding. T4Scaffolding can be used as the basis for *any* scaffolding – not just MVC projects. To that end, we can enjoy the same power of MvcScaffolding ...
I wanted to take this time to introduce myself. My name is Roger O'Dell Jr. My development training is in .NET, but my current job requires me to work with Java and Android. I have been doing mobile development now for almost a year. And what a year it has been. I had the opportunity to go to a Microsoft Conference in Overland Park, KS last year. While I was there, I was one of the lucky few who was introduced to Windows Phone 7. Coming from an ASP.NET background, I found the new Windows Phone to ...
This is a recent question I ran into on the MSDN TFS Forums. Made me think why I use it and how to make it effective. Here is what my response to this was … “My #1 justification is the fact that when you are looking at TFS source control is not all it does. TFS has the benefit of enabling a solutions team with different roles the right level of visibility. Not everyone will use Visual Studio, for example project managers. In many cases Visual Studio can intimidate the individual. When deployed with ...
After done mapping for my entities I wanted to test the basic CRUD operations. I stuck with a problem of inserting a data to tables in many to many relation, so I wanted to look at the generated sql by the NHibernate to find out, what is really generated to investigate the problem in my mappings. The NHibernate have a property called show-sql to show the generated statements. I enabled it in the config: var configure = new Configuration(); configure.SessionFactoryNam... configure.DataBaseIntegrati... ...
Hi there, Recently we had a requirement to integrate a RESTful Service with BizTalk Server. Well no biggie. You can use WCF – Custom Adapter and use webHTTP binding and add a webHttp Endpoint behavior. Wala. Easy to say, little bit tricky to do. You can look at some of these post by my company folks Jesus Rodriguez, Adrian & Leandro and also nice one on MSDN. Well there are bunch of other posts out there. That all is fine, but what if you want to have a polling receive location which needs to ...
Introduction One of the features that I’m surprised to see hardly no one talk about is “Communication Between Local Silverlight-Based Applications”. This is not new to Silverlight as it has been around since Silverlight 3. In other words, this will allow you to have two Silverlight applications running on the same PC talk to one another without using Web Services, etc. I originally was looking into this for a pet project that I was going to use with Kinect, but found this very valuable and decided ...