Tag | ALM Posts
Overall, this year has been a pretty good TechEd. I’ve always thought ‘05 & ‘08 (both in Orlando) were the best I’ve attended and ‘10 was probably my least favorite (this was more due to the weather than anything.) This one is right in the middle, maybe leaning towards good rather than bad. There’s a lot of really excellent content on Windows Phone and Azure, plenty of interesting side events (including the WP7 Hackathon – which overall was awesome.) The facilities are nice and OMG huge. Until ...
I'm a fan of pretty much all kinds of music, but certain types of music really resonate with me. For most of my adult(?) life, I've been a huge Danzig fan. I've seen them play live at least 5 times and have managed to collect a few backstage passes, guitar picks, tshirts, etc over the years... along with buying everything they've ever released, for better or worse. Mostly, I'm a fan of the first three albums and the Demonsweat Live EP. After that, there were too many lineup changes and musical direction ...
I recently read an informative and succint book - A mathematician Plays the Market, by John Allen Paulos. Heres my summary of key points: Behavioral finance · Anticipating other's anticipations · A trading strategy can yield the illusion of effectiveness, when only chance is at work. · Keynes - short-term investors anticipate what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. · Distinction between being smart & rich, and distinction between being right & being right about the market. ...
In this almost entirely submittals Issue: Andrea Boschin, Manas Patnaik, Alex van Beek, Michael Washington, Kunal Chowdhury(-2-, -3-), Michael Crump, Richard Waddell, Jeremy Likness, Mike Taulty, Alexandra Rusina, and Pete Brown. Above the Fold: Silverlight 5 Beta: "Silverlight 5: Debugging Bindings with Xaml Breakpoints" Pete Brown Silverlight: "Dynamic Types to Simplify Property Change Notification in Silverlight 4 and 5" Jeremy Likness LightSwitch: "Using The LightSwitch Filter Extension" Michael ...
Introduction I don’t do web programming… I have been programming client applications for years and consider myself a WPF/Silverlight developer. The web thing always seemed a bit scary in its stateless environment with limited functionality and cross browser headaches. That was until recently when apparently HTML5 was going to kill Silverlight and I eventually decided that I would need to get educated and up to date. Since that decision I have re-accustomed myself with HTML, CSS & JavaScript. ...
This is a problem I've struggled and struggled with. No workaround or fix I found on the internet worked. In fact the work around I finally got to work incorporates a combination of fixes. Symptoms The Form or User Control designer in Visual Studio displays the following error: Visual inheritance is currently disabled because the base class references a device-specific component or contains P/Invoke Cause In case you didn't know P/Invoke is used to access un-managed code (com components). The designer ...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. Today we are going to examine the LINQ set operations that are part of the IEnumerable<T> extension methods. Now, most of the time when people think of set operations they think of the math or logic classes they are usually taught in, but really these LINQ methods have a much larger appeal and applicability than just math ...
If you organize your BizTalk projects based on the type of artifacts, e.g., a solution contains schema project, pipeline project, map project, orchestration project, you might often encounter build failure problems due to the missing assembly reference. Sometime, even if you have the references properly added and you are able to verify them in object browser, you might still have problem not seeing the newly added or modified artifacts in any configuration window. The reasons for this kind of issues ...
My colleague Giles is speaking at a series of breakfast meetings on Using Tooling to drive Agility across the Development Lifecycle. This session is one of several during an 8:40 to 10:30 “elongated” breakfast :-). The sessions are free and hopefully one is taking place near you: Birmingham, 11 May, Regus, Brindley Place, Birmingham, B1 2JB Manchester, 13 May, Regus, Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester, M1 5AN Dublin, 22 June, SQS offices London, 30 June, 7-11 Moorgate, London, EC2R 6AF Giles ...
In my quest to dig into how people use social media to communicate about wine I ran into a snag. One of the things I really wanted to do was collect geographic data about each post. When you do a twitter search, a post can contain latitude and longitude data if the source supports GPS, but so far almost none of the posts about wine actually have this data. So the next best thing is to figure out where the user lives. A twitter user profile has a location field. Its free text unfortunately, but its ...
I posted a little while ago about how, with XNA and VB becoming a supported scenario, I was starting down the road to learning VB. Just a brief update on that. If you ever need to learn another language, having practical tasks is a huge benefit. Something I’ve been making use of is Project Euler. Writing the solutions in different ways to intentionally make use of certain syntax features has helped me both internalize them and understand them. As a by-product, I managed to hack together a VB Windows ...
NuGet (pronounced NewGet), is an open source .Net Package Management Tool compatible with Visual Studio 2010 both Express and Commercial Editions. This simple-yet-powerful tool offers a simple way for incorporating and managing .Net packages in Visual Studio 2010 projects. In leveraging NuGet, we get an intuitive user interface allowing the selection of available packages and an easy way to subsequently manage version upgrades or uninstalls for packages already installed via NuGet. I recently spoke ...
RedGate SQL Source Control is a Management Studio add-in that allows you to seamlessly (hopefully...) connect your existing source control system to SQL Server. It is advertised as doing all the typical stuff you'd expect: Source control schemas and data within SSMS Connect databases to TFS, SVN, Sourcegear Vault, Vault Pro, Mercurial, Perforce, Git, Bazaar, and any source control system with a capable command line Work with shared development databases, or individual copies Track changes to follow ...
Luego de varios días de trabajo pesado, nuevamente tengo tiempo para publicar en mi blog. Para este post trataré de dar respuesta a una pregunta que se genera constantemente en los foros de MSDN, como encryptar los valores enviados a través del queryString en una URL. Primero que nada he de decir que métodos de encriptación hay muchos, desde los personales hasta el MD5 y todos los conocidos. En nuestro ejemplo, trabajaremos con un código de encriptación utilizando el DESCryptoServiceProvider de asp.net ...
If you have never read the Fred Brooks book "The Mythical Man-Month", I suggest you do see http://en.wikipedia.org/wik... There is a summary of his essay "No Silver Bullet" at http://en.wikipedia.org/wik... At http://www.codeproject.com/... there is an interesting thread. I will reproduce some of it here as Code Project Loungs discussions can become inacessible. It starts with an excellent article at: http://www.simple-talk.com/... ...
One of the things that I love about the .NET framework is that I am constantly learning new things about it, finding new jewels that save me time, and just some really interesting bits. This latest item I found falls into the “interesting bits” category. Probably like many of you, I’ve written a number of console applications to do some tasks quickly and with little fanfare. Usually these tasks are one-time tasks, and the console application is almost a throw-away project once I’m done with it. Because ...
I realized that I’ve given several people recommendations on how to deal with resuming a game from tombstoning on Windows Phone 7 over Twitter in the past month or so. So I figured I would write up my thoughts on it. There is no perfect and objectively correct solution. But there are certain common sense things that I believe will help make every gamer’s experience great. First: Read these: http://msdn.microsoft.com/e... and http://create.msdn.com/en-U... ...
For most of us, springtime is exciting. The warm weather and the sun puts us in a better mood and makes us want to venture out into the world. But as I am so familiar with, many people out there reach a critical mass and enter an almost depressive state during springtime. Over the past few weeks, I’ve had many (over 5) close friends reach out about the tough times they are going through. Each one expressing a loss of self worth and value due to a failure in a relationship. For some it was a poor ...
It appears that my work in the community and the nominations received from others has secured my status as an MVP for a second year. Thank you all for the award and thank you everyone (including Microsoft) for valuing my contributions to the community. I noticed last year I did quite a bit of travelling and talks. I’m going to need to work hard to keep that up this year. I’m also hoping to gear up for the v1 release of RoundhousE and DropkicK as well as something new I’ve been working on known as ...
Internet Explorer has made huge strides in the last couple of years. Microsoft has at last begun to lay the ghost of IE6 to rest with a solid, fast, standards compliant, reasonably up-to-date (not quite the same thing) forward-looking browser with the cleanest UI in the business. However, one issue clouds the horizon. Other browsers, most notably Google Chrome, rev much faster that IE. The importance of this is that, by bringing out new versions on shorter (much shorter, in some cases) timescales, ...
So, I’m at mix 2011 this year, and here’s the message I’m feeling from Microsoft: Silverlight is a plug-in. It will always likely do things that the standards don’t yet support, but it’s part of the web (i.e. html5), not competing with it. You should build in HTML first and only use silverlight where the browser can’t fill the gap. Must of the functionality that you get in XAML has been reproduced in CSS3 + HTML5 + all of the other HTML5 stuff. The tooling for HTML5 dev stinks right now. Multiple ...
This one almost slipped away from me. It is only a week until the next CITAG meeting. This month Mike Vogt will be discussing ORM Frameworks and what they mean to the amount of code that our development teams have to write. I am sure we will get into a discussion of the truths and myths around these products. Come out and join us for a night of discussion and meet a few of your peers in the process. Register here. del.icio.us Tags: CITAG,Chicago Information Technology Architects Group,ORM,ORM Frameworks ...
With MIX2011 starting today I thought it was quite ironic that I have spent the last few days watching MIX2010 (I guess that means I am at least a year behind the world ). One of the presentations that I really enjoyed had very little to do with programming, but I found extremely entertaining and almost immediately useful. It was title “The Art, Technology, and Science of Reading” and was presented by Kevin Larson who works in Microsoft’s Advanced Reading and Technology team. So, if you have the ...
This post is from a very good friend of mine, Billy Hollis. He’s got some interesting food for thought and I think you’ll enjoy his perspective! For over 15 years now, our industry has been struggling with a crucial tradeoff. We can get broad reach via standards, or we can get the best possible user experience with applications that take advantage of particular devices or platforms. It's a stereotype that people in software development tend to be code and technology centric and not user centric. ...
It's been in an invitation-only beta for a while, but now you can download Mono for Android and develop Android apps in C# and Visual Studio 2010. From the web site: What is Mono for Android? Mono for Android enables developers to use Microsoft™ Visual Studio™ to create C# and .NET based applications that run on Android phones and tablets. Developers can use their existing skills and reuse code and libraries that have been built with .NET, while taking advantage of native Android APIs. Mon requires: ...
I recently asked question this question as a post on the Microsoft modeling and tools forum: Various Microsoft attempts at MDD have failed or been put on the back burner: WhiteHorse, Software Factories, Oslo. Does Microsoft have any strategy for Model Driven Development? Will any of the forementioned tools ever see the light of day? Stuart Kent responded to my question here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/stu... - Have a look at his post: ...
Cuanto trabajamos con formularios, siempre es necesario limpiar todos los controles luego de que el usuario a realizado determinada acción, por ejemplo, luego de que ha guardado un dato. Esto nos ayudará a evitar errores en el ingreso de la nueva información. Este es un pequeño código en javascript que se encarga de realizar esa tarea, al menos, en los controles más comunes. Por supuesto, que es totalmente extendible. <script language="javascript" type='text/javascript'> function ClearAllControls() ...
Leadership Veracity consultants are an interesting group of people. We have some of the best and brightest people working to help our customers deliver great products to their customers. While there are a lot of consulting shops in the industry, most are not like Veracity Solutions. Many shops simply want to put a body into a chair. They offer cheap hourly full time employee replacements (contractors) instead of people that can actually help their business be successful. Veracity, on the other hand, ...
In almost every field, people should never take things for granted, and remain content with their skill level. In the world of information technology, it's doubly true. Some technology folks may sometimes develop a certain comfort level after staying in one organization for a long time. They may also remain so busy with usual daily tasks where thoughts of self improvement may not even occur for months. Sometimes, people may feel that adequate knowledge of certain technologies, are sufficient. In ...
I was happy to receive this email today: Thanks to the great folks at Imaginet and Notion Solutions for all your help and support over the last year. Also, thanks to the MS Product group for being such a great team to engage with. Looking forward to continued interaction over the coming year. Technorati Tags: MVP,ALM ...
I'm just getting to grips with MVC linq etc etc and came across what looks like a common stumbling block. For the more experienced of you reading this please refrain from shouting "Dumbass" at me. All the tutorials are either Code First examples or they create the database from scratch in the App_Data directory. All well and good for a tutorial that need to be easily portable to the readers computer, but not very helpful when setting up a full scale MVC application. My first problem was my lack of ...
Andy Warren (@sqlandy) , Microsoft MVP, was our March speaker at the West Palm Beach .Net User Group. Andy spoke about SQL Statistics and answered all our SQL questions. We appreciate Andy's long drive from Orlando to come speak at our South Florida group and his commitment to sharing his knowledge regardless of the distance barrier. The group enjoyed free pizza brought to us by our group coordinator Venkat Subramanian. It is no easy task running around to buy food for the group, especially after ...
Recently we had a contest to see who could beat my time to get from no code to deployed. Thanks to everyone that participated and everyone that thought about participating in the contest. Most Creative From Zero To Deployed Contest Extended! Unfortunately there were not enough entries to award the most creative video for ZtD. So what we are doing is extending the most creative until May 15, 2011 @ 11:59 PM CST. This gives you almost two months to get your videos in! If you entered before, you are ...
A couple weeks ago I was watching Netflix on the Xbox 360 in my living room and every so often, it would have to take a moment and rebuffer and just generally spoil my television enjoyment. As I thought about this, and thought about how often I was having to cycle the power on my aging Linksys Wireless G router, I decided it might be time for an upgrade. This is no small undertaking, mind you. With 8 desktop/laptop computers, 1 Windows Home Server, 4 Xbox 360s, 2 Wiis, 1 mini cell tower, various ...
Para todos los que hemos trabajamos con Crystal Reports, no es un secreto que cuando tratamos de conectar nuestro reporte directamente a la base de datos, se nos viene encima el problema de autenticación. Es decir nuestro reporte al momento de iniciar la carga nos solicita autentificarnos en el servidor y sino lo hacemos, simplemente no veremos el reporte. Esto, además de ser tedioso para los usuarios se convierte en un problema de seguridad bastante grande, de ahí que en la mayoría de los casos ...
Even with a lot of the XNA community working on Dream Build Play entries ( I swear I’m going to finish mine this year!) people are still finding time to do side projects and be amazingly active in the XNA and XBLIG community. With my one eye on my code and one eye on the community, here’s what I noticed these over achievers doing this past week! Time Critical XNA News: Xbox LIVE Indie Games sales data will be delayed March 17-20th due to some schedule maintenance http://create.msdn.com/en-u... ...
My blog has been quiet recently, mainly because I've been spending a bunch of time putting together an iPhone app which talks to a set of RESTful WCF services hosted in Azure, backing onto SQL Azure for storage. This post is a technical walkthrough of that architecture and some of the learning experiences, but after this it will be back to normal. I have a couple of nice open-source projects which are coming soon, including a log4net appender which writes to Event Tracing for Windows (ETW), and a ...
How can that be? We're in the realm of micro-micro-optimisation here, but I'm working on a log4net appender which writes to Event Tracing for Windows. The setup gives you the runtime configuration of ETW with the easy use of log4net. ETW logging is ultra-efficient, so I want to impact that as little as possible, which is why I'm optimising string comparison. The appender will let you capture different levels of logging per assembly or per type, and I need to check where the call comes from to identify ...
An important part of Agile is the concept of transparency and visibility. In proper functioning teams, stakeholders can look at any team at any time in the iteration or release and see how that team is doing by simply looking at what we call Big Visible Charts. If you’ve done Scrum, you’ve seen these charts. However, interpreting these charts can often be an art form. There are several different charts that can be useful. In this newsletter, I’ll focus on the Iteration Burndown and Cumulative Flow ...
Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is now available for general download for almost a week now. The Beta of SP1 came couple of months back and it did a lot of performance enhancements, added support for HTML5 tags and few other stuff related to web development. Now, the final release of SP1 is available. The good part is that, if you had installed the SP1 beta, you don’t have to remove the Beta and start all over again. You can apply the final release on top of the Beta and it works like a charm. ...
If you are in the Overland Park area and are in need of some physical recreation (and who isn’t) I have to recommend Master’s Tae Kwon Do in Overland Park KS . Master Tom is an 8th Dan teaching Tae Kwon Do and Hapkido. Yah, he teaches almost all of the classes himself. I used to take ishin ryu but stopped some 12 years ago (seems like yesterday. God I am getting old.) I had wanted to get back into some type of Martial Arts training and I wanted to get my son involved as well – Master’s Tae Kwon Do ...
If your website uses the AppPoolIdentity and requires access to the private key of an x509Certficate, you’ll need to grant the read permissions to the iis application pool. To grant permissions to the AppPoolIdentity: Run Certificates.MMC (or Start->run->mmc.exe, Add Certificate Snap-In for LocalMachine) Select the certificate (Personal node on the certificate tree) , right click and Manage Permissions. Add a new user to the permissions list. Enter "IIS AppPool\AppPoolName" on the local machine". ...
The much anticipated RTM release of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) happened today. IE9 preview release was first showcased at MIX 2010 and post that there were 7-8 Platform Preview releases. Also, IE9 Beta came out in September 2010 with close to 10 million downloads within a month. More recently, the RC version was out with much improved performance. Today, marks the launch of IE9 RTM. What this means is that, within an year, the IE Team has shipped the stable product, much faster than the earlier cycles ...
The phone revolution that is under way at the moment is insanely interesting and continuously full of buzz about directions, failures, and promises. The movement started with Apple completely reinventing what a smart phone was all about and now we have the followers. Though – don’t dismiss the followers, they are usually the ones that come out with the leap frog products when most of the world is thinking about jumping on. Remember the often used analogy – the USA invented the TV – but it was Japan ...
Like most developers, I prefer to not have to pick up the mouse if I don’t have to. I use the Executor launcher for almost everything so it’s extremely rare for me to ever click the “Start” button in Windows. I also use shortcuts keys when I can so I don’t have to pick up the mouse. By now most people know that the Package Manager Console that comes with NuGet is PowerShell embedded inside of Visual Studio. It is based on its PowerConsole predecessor which was the first (that I’m aware of) to embed ...
I had always been a fan of ANTS products (Reflector is absolutely invaluable, and their performance profiler is great as well – very easy to use!), so I was curious to see what the ANTS Memory Profiler could show me. You can check out more information about the profiler at Red Gate's web site at www.red-gate.com/products/d... Background While a performance profiler will track how much time is typically spent in each unit of code, a memory profiler gives you much ...
*Moved to: Installing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1As has become customary when the product team releases a new patch, SP or version I like to document the install. This post seams almost redundant as I had no problems, but I think that is as valuable to other thinking of installing the Service Pack as all the problems that we sometimes get. Read more about Installing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 on my new blog on http://blog.hinshelwood.com... more...Follow my new blog on http://blog.hinshelwood.com ...
In this Issue: Joost van Schaik, Manas Patnaik, Kevin Hoffman, Jesse Liberty, Deborah Kurata, Dhananjay Kumar, Dennis Delimarsky, Samuel Jack, Peter Kuhn, WindowsPhoneGeek, and Jfo. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "How I let the trees grow" Peter Kuhn WP7: "Simple Windows Phone 7 / Silverlight drag/flick behavior" Joost van Schaik Shoutouts: SilverlightShow has their top 5 from last week posted, plus the ECOContest is ready to be voted on: SilverlightShow for Feb 28 - March 06, 2011 Drew DeVault is ...
*Moved to: Visual Studio ALM MVP of the Year 2011 For some reason this year some of my peers decided to vote for me as a contender for Visual Studio ALM MVP of the year. I am not sure what I did to deserve this, but a number of people have commented that I have a rather useful blog.Read more...Follow my new blog on http://blog.hinshelwood.com ...