It is stupid to compare those two beasts. BizTalk Server is a pricey, huge development and run-time system, it includes tons of the tools, supports tons of protocols and systems. It works for very specialized middle ware integration stack. It integrates big and complex systems as SAP, CRM, Oracle and intermediates many protocols and standards as SOAP, EDI, SWIFT, FTP, tons of them. It is a messaging system. ZeroMQ is a low-level, wire-level protocol, the same level as TCP. It has ultra-simple API....
I’ve been testing\evaluating ComponentOne’s Studio for ASP.NET Wijmo suite for an MVC 3 project and I’m quickly becoming a fan! This product has so many things going for it that I’m not sure where to start. I’m going to focus on the Wijmo components, but the suite also contains a set of controls for ASP.NET WebForms development. If the Webform controls are as good as the MVC controls, they’re worth a look. There are two versions of the Wijmo components. An open source version containing 30 widgets...
One of the great things about 2012 is that I am not in our office nearly 100% of the time during business hours. This is the first time I have been able to work from our office this much in about 4 years. In fact, we have moved three times during that four years and I have only averaged about 10-25% of my time in the office. This means I can actually setup my desk for development instead of business related tasks only. That means THREE MONITORS! My first reaction after a week with this setup: I never...
JetBrains have recently released ReSharper 6.1, along with compatible updates to dotCover (version 1.2) and dotTrace Performance (version 4.5.2). Here is a list of common developer tasks that ReSharper 6 helps handles better than previous versions: Improve Visual Studio responsiveness: While developing ReSharper 6.0 and 6.1, Jet Brains have fixed more than 200 performance and memory consumption issues, as well as over 2900 bugs!Use proper tooling for web development: ReSharper 6 introduces extensive...
I have recently been turned on to the world of microcontrollers while doing some hobby development. Here is the first “real” program I have written with the Texas Instruments MSP430 LaunchPad development tool. Check it out…$4.30 to get a development board with 2 devices and a USB connection to your Windows PC for programming and debugging. It’s a lot of fun…especially if you enjoy bit-twiddling! The MSP430 processors specialize in low power operations. They accomplish this by enabling peripherals...
Earlier this week Google’s Android team released a new section to their Developers website. It’s called Android Design. I had a chance to look most of it over yesterday and I must say that I am impressed. They have finally decided to put out some documentation for developers to follow for a more immersive design. They say that there is more to come, and I believe there will be. They already have a section for people to learn Android called Android Training. I can only imagine where they want to take...
My collegue told me that placing the opening curly brace at the end of the line is safer than at the beginning of the new line, because it prevents some hard-to-debug errors, related to Automatic Semicolon Insertion and pointed me to the article Basic JavaScript Part 6: Automatic Semicolon Insertion. The article has the recommendation Trying to outline curly braces at the end of the line can save you some headaches in case a semicolon is forgotten somewhere in the code.The statement is misleading...
We’ve used dbdeploy.net on a number of projects and have found it to be a useful tool, especially around CI environments. We recently started a Windows Azure project that uses SQL Server and discovered that DbDeploy.Net didn’t work. There have been a few nagging issues with DbDeploy.Net as well, like the lack of support for recursive script directories, and when we looked into the code base, we discovered that it’s not really written to modern software development standards, and that getting it there...
In the New Testament in Luke 4:23 Jesus speaks of a proverb, “Physician, Heal Thyself.” What, you may ask, does this have to do with being a good developer or a good ScrumMaster? In my experience, it has quite a bit to do with it, actually, and recently, it’s had far more meaning to me than it used to have in the past. In large part, my own increased awareness has stemmed from reading Lyssa Adkins fantastic book, “Coaching Agile Teams.” My Command and Control Roots My dad owns several independent...
Today's APress deal of the day at http://www.apress.com/97814... is Pro Drupal 7 Development"Pro Drupal 7 Development is geared toward professionals who need to deploy and customize Drupal. This book delves deep into the internals of the Drupal 7 system and teaches you everything you need to know to deploy a highly customized and optimized Drupal installation."...
As many of you may already know that, I'm working at a global gaming and entertainment company taking the responsible for design and implement the next generation platform which will be running on the cloud, and also design the cloud platform as well. Currently one of the goal is to replace the active directory integrated security and identity solution with certificate-based solution in our product. In short, we need to work with Active Directory Certificate Service to request and issue the certificates...
If you are familiar with scrum – then I recommend that you give the scrum guide a read. This documents the scrum framework and is maintained by Scrum’s creators, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland. While reading through the latest revision of it (on page 6) it has a section that specifies the characteristics of the development team. One sentence that stood out was the following “Scrum recognizes no titles for Development Team members other than Developer, regardless of the work being performed by the...
Hi Everyone, By now you are very well aware of the Windows Phone and the development environment that you get after installing Windows Phone SDK on your computer. And if you have tested the tools you might have seen the Windows Phone Emulator which looks like the Test Phone Microsoft showed when they launched Windows Phone last year. Since the launch of the first Windows Phone, we have enough options to choose from on what type/size/memory/color/specs that we want in the phone that we use. Among...
Apart from the Introduction that I gave from my previous blog posts about the book and the Windows Phone 7.5 Development, I think we have to jump into the technology of it. In this post we are going to talk about the Design Language, Real Estate, Input Patterns. Design Language: Design Language in my view is something that first strikes to the user/developer when they think of the application usage/development. How you want to design your application or how they users react with the navigation screens/patters...
If you are not following Shawn Wildermuth or haven't bought the Essential WP 7.5 Application Development with Silverlight I would highly recommend. I am not going to talk about why we need a smartphone or how smartphone is taking over all the World, We all know how it started and where it took and where is going to take us in the future. Since we all know the future of the Mobile Eco systems I think it will be a good time to be a part of. lets jump into our series of blog posts of Windows Phone 7.5...
I wanted to introduce to you all to a wonderful book that I came across recently by, Shawn Wildermuth “Essential Windows Phone 7.5 Application Development with Silverlight”. I never bought a text book but I decided to buy this and start reading it, as I was going thru the book I decided that I made a good buy here. This book is very easy to read and a very good place to start developing Applications for Window Phone 7.5 with Silverlight. This series of blog posts are going to be on just Windows Phone...
Today's APress Deal of the day at http://www.apress.com/97814... is Pro ASP.NET 4 in C# 2010"ASP.NET 4 is the principal standard for creating dynamic web pages on the Windows platform. Pro ASP.NET 4 in C# 2010 raises the bar for high-quality, practical advice on learning and deploying Microsoft's dynamic web solution." This is an excellent book that I recommend to all C# Development teams...
Happy New Year! I am excited to be speaking at the first meeting in 2012 for the Tampa Bay Windows Phone 7 User Group As usual at Tampa WP7UG there is a jump start session for beginners before the meeting: 5:30PM An Intimate intro to WP7 Development with a local MVP Kevin Wolf in room 1, or a work session in the main room. Come on by early to hangout with other developers or attend the intro sessions. Here is the description of my presentation starting at 6:30PM: Live Tiles, Toasts and Push Notifications...
With TFS 2010 a basic installation of TFS has been reduced to a matter of clicks, the pain however lies in getting an appropriate environment provisioned from the Infrastructure team. There will be planned and unplanned downtime as the infrastructure team takes the environment down for patching. There are various TFS hosting services available out there that’ll take this pain point away from you. Some of the leading players amongst others include DiscountASP.net, TeamDevCentral, Praktik Hosting…...
About a week ago we received a support call from one of our customers asking why she couldn’t open PDF files on our website anymore. She was using Chrome and the browser tab would just hang with the ‘Loading’ animation and a gray background after requesting an invoice PDF. After a little digging we figured out that this hang-up was occurring while Chrome was opening the PDF document. We were easily able to reproduce this issue ourselves in the production environment, but only while using Chrome....
Disclaimer:, The views and opinions expressed in this post are solely my own and I’m not getting paid or compensated for anything. I am also an employee of Microsoft but try not to drink the Kool-Aid too much. [Update 2012-01-02: It appears posting Windows Phone app recommendations is making the rounds on the web today. My friends Jeff Blankenburg and Sarah Dutkiewicz have also posted recommendations. Also was referred to a posting on tested.com. I’ve already downloaded a few apps based on these...
Now that 2011 has come to a close I wanted to take a few minutes to review the year and the goals I had set at the beginning of the year (click here to see those goals). I’ll follow up with new goals for new 2012 year soon. Year in Review 2011 was a big year in many ways. This year included a change in employers, buying a condo, my oldest brother getting married, starting a new relationship with my girlfriend Sarah. helping plan 2 conferences, writing two chapters of a book, and numerous other activities....
I recently accepted to do a review of “The Learn Microsoft Visual C# book 2010” by John Paul Mueller. I was in two minds on whether I really wanted to read this book – in it’s description it says it is targeting fundamentals of modern programming with Visual C#, but I wasn’t sure how fundamental it would be and since I have been working with C# for a while now, I wasn’t sure if it would be worth my while. After going through a few of the chapters of the book I would say this really targets very basic...
I’m not sure I have ever thrown this down in writing. I probably have said this 800 or 900 times, but I think that HTML 5 in SharePoint 2010 sucks. The support is terrible in the two most prevalent web browsers at the enterprise level – Internet Explorer and Firefox. If you can’t even get the video tag to work in IE 9 or the latest version of Firefox then that’s a huge fail for the product with HTML 5. What I think needs to be done in the product to improve HTML 5 support so that we can move towards...
A little more than three months ago, Microsoft hosted the //build/ conference at which they unveiled the upcoming version of Windows (commonly called Windows 8, though I don’t know if the marketing folks have accepted the fact that that is the name most of us are expecting for it yet). They released to the developer world a build of it called the Windows Developer Preview (and Windows Server Developer Preview) along with various tools for creating the new “Metro style” apps. I wasn’t able to make...
This demo is a continuation of my previous article about "ASP.NET MVC 3: Creating a Simple Sign-Up Form" which I wrote few months ago. Basically in this post I'm going to demonstrate how to create a simple LogOn form in which users can supply their username and password. And how to authenticate and validate users in ASP.NET MVC 3. I will not elaborate more in details about the model, view and controllers function so before you go any further, I'd suggest you to check my previous article first about...
I have just installed the UDDI 3 server on my BizTalk development environment. All looked good until I tried to open the publish page on the web interface. The page 'http://localhost/uddi/edit... returned a page cannot be displayed error. The same error occured when I tried to open the Subscribe and Coordinate pages.After playing around with the configuration for a while I tracked the problem down to the page using https. By connecting to the UDDI Service Console, right clicking on the...
Wishing a very happy and blessed New Year to you in advance! A new release of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework is available on December 29th. We expect that its 11 new code samples covering typical programming scenarios in Windows Phone 7, ASP.NET, WPF, Windows Shell, and WDK would ease your development in the coming New Year. You can download the code samples using Sample Browser or Sample Browser Visual Studio extension. They give you the flexibility to search samples, download samples on demand,...
Yesterday I received my copy of “Pro Windows Embedded Compact 7” by Avi Kcholi. http://www.apress.com/97814... It’s a great book for people that have some experience and knowledge Windows Embedded Compact 7 and want to learn the “black magic” behind device driver development on this operating system. The book guides the reader trough different aspects of drivers (and BSP) development, starting from the foundation and reaching some advanced topics that are not covered in the on-line reference....
I would like to share with you some exciting news from the Gizmox labs. If you haven't heard by now the Visual WebGui Mobile Team @ Gizmox has been working on a .NET Mobile Framework for a few months now. This mobile dedicated framework continues the Visual WebGui vision towards the mobile development workd by enabling Microsoft core .NET developers to leverage their existing skills for developing cross-platform HTML5-based mobile apps within Visual Studio. As with its Web Framework, the Visual WebGui...
I was recently inspired to write on this topic after two client experiences that demonstrated serious misconceptions about the role that software architecture plays in producing quality software. After performing an assessment of a mid-sized company, it was obvious that they were in dire need of a good software architect to design and maintain the design of the application that they were in the process of planning. After making the recommendation, the CIO began to explain that they had already chosen...
Spinning as described in my previous article is all about flow. Its premise is: flow can emerge when work is partitioned in small, evenly sized chunks processed in a smooth manner. There is a constant input of requests to the development team. A backlog is filled with strategically important requirements, support is reporting bugs, feedback requires changes, management wants to see ideas realized on short notice. Under these circumstances any plan becomes obsolete within a day or two. Or a lot of...
To me the answer of whether or not you need version control is simple - do you have users? If the answer is yes, then you need version control. Note that "version control" is not the same as "source control". Source control refers to maintaining history of your source code. Version control (also known as "configuration control" or "configuration management") is more than that. Version control, as its name indicates, means tracking versions of your software. The best way to illustrate the purpose...
Everyone has an opinion. When you embark upon your first real job as a programmer you will find this out very quickly. I have found that software developers can be some of the most opinionated and dogmatic people you will ever meet. This certainly is not a bad thing. However, young programmers will need to cultivate the ability to make their own minds up when it comes to how to write software. There are those who start out in a corporate environment where the styles and conventions used have already...
A friend of mine works for a large bank… about a year and a half ago they needed a new system developed for their division. They went through the normal process of using one of the recommended service providers to develop the system and this was their experience, which is still typical with most institutions I know… For the first few months development of the system seemed to be progressing along fine. They had meetings, business analysts put things on paper and the developers nodded their heads...
Agility needs to get onto the next level – that´s what I tried to explain in my previous articles. After a reality check – what´s missing from Agile practice? –, and some general musings about how a next level of Agility could look like, here now some very tangible suggestions. Crank up the frequency Current Agile practice is suffering from too little attention to Acceptance. To change this, very, very clear Acceptance dates need to be set. Acceptance can only get into a real pulling mode, if dates...
A co-worker was showing me an in phone scripting environment on the iPhone and I knew I had seen one mentioned for the Windows Phone before. TouchDevelop is an app from Microsoft Research that allows you to create small applications that do a wide variety of operations including using most of the capabilities of the device. So could this be a fun way for us geeks to waste some time while waiting for our oil to be change or a table to open up at your favorite restaurant? So what does this language...
In November Alex Groß (http://therightstuff.de/) was in Uganda for holidays and we hijacked him to speak to us on some .NET geek stuff. In the image above you see Allan Rwakatungu, Jude Opima, Myself and Alex Groß. More pictures http://www.flickr.com/photo... These are some of the topics that were discussed. Test Driven Development. Alex shared a great amount detail and a step by step tour of how you can work with unit tests and went on to show MSpec as a BDD tool....
Its been several months since I last updated my blog. I don't really have an excuse other than just being busy. My gaming had taken alot of my time and well, I had to make a tough decision. When you really think about it, its not really a tough decision, it is just the right one. That decision is of course that my development is more important. Enough of my excuses. I have began resource gathering and interface concepts for my first project. Its called Novus. Now this may or maynot be the final name...
There are a lot of reasons why the 2011 holiday season is a great time to take a look at Azure development. There are a number of offers and releases that allow you to start to explore cloud-based development on the Microsoft platform, best of all; they are all pretty much free to take advantage of. $0 Spending Limit on Azure Trial & MSDN Accounts Ever since the introduction of billing for Windows Azure it has always been an issue for many developers wanting to learn Azure that, if you are not...
When Rob Conery left Microsoft I gave a blog retrospective on possible reasons behind his exit. Today I’m happy to reload the cannon and aim it square at the latest Microsoftie to hand in his blue badge – Phil Haack. Phil has been a huge part of why Microsoft MVC is a success, and his contributions have changed the way web development is done on the Microsoft platform. So why leave, and why leave to Github? Couldn’t he have just switched to the TFS team if he liked code repositories so much? Well,...
I just finished reading new book on Microsoft BizTalk 2010 written by BizTalk colleagues Kent Weare, Richard Seroter, Thiago Almeida, Sergei Moukhnitski, and Carl Darski. There are many good books that explore core BizTalk features for beginners, intermediate, and advanced developers. This one stands out by the fact that it covers relatively less documented aspect of BizTalk development – integrating with different line of business applications. The subject is vast and diverse so attempt to fit it...
In my previous article I came to a couple of conclusions based on the reality of software development, or should I say “the nature of software development”? Here are the – to me - undeniable facts of what our industry is all about: Customers hardly know, what they want. Any specification is inherently fuzzy and incomplete. What fits the customer´s needs can only be determined by actually trying it out. The customer can only recognize a running piece of software as acceptable. Because customers hardly...
It's always exciting when a new application you've worked on goes live. The last couple of weeks have seen the 'soft' launch of a new service offered by the UK government called 'Tell Us Once' (TUO). You can probably guess from the name what the service does. Currently, the service allows UK citizens to inform the government (as opposed to Register Officers, who must still be notified separately) just once of two types of 'change-of-circumstance' event; namely births and deaths. You can go, say,...
Tell Us Once (TUO) is the award-winning, cross-government programme that lets people inform central government and local authorities just once of a birth or death. By March 2012 it will be in service in over 95% of councils in England, Scotland and Wales. It has provided a permanent solution to the long-standing and frustrating issue of people having to notify the government multiple times. Several years ago, research showed that people had to make up to 44 contacts when reporting a death to government...
Let´s get real about software development: It´s never going to be a quietly flowing river. Never. And that´s why the current approaches to software development like XP, Scrum, and Kanban will always cause pain. Their basic assumption is you should be able to isolate a team for a while to work on features. Leave it alone during an iteration or a sprint to complete a set of features, or at least sit still until the current feature is done. Certainly that´s what we all want as developers: being able...
I've been at GeeksWithBlogs for 6 years now, and over the years its been great to see new people join the GWB community. I wanted to highlight a few blogs that started up this year that you might want to add to your RSS feed.Simon Cooperhttp://geekswithblogs... has some crazy deep, low level type posts on .NET code which I'm sure some people would think is fantastic. But what I really like is the insight into RedGate. Simon works for RedGate software, and shares experiences...
What could you build with the XBox Kinect? Well we want to know! Connect your Kinect to your PC and build an application using your favorite .NET language. Kinect for Developers is a 2-day workshop for developers, artists and technicians interested in Kinect hacking or 3D scanning. This hands on workshop will teach you the basics of programming for Kinect and the potentials for developing on video and depth sensor cameras. Expect live demonstrations, presentations, food, and lots of hacking. You...
So, to step back up on my soapbox for a quick moment. The buzz and the noise around jQuery and Client Side development in general is growing and at a fairly rapid pace. This of course is good and bad. It’s good because our applications are becoming more and more user friendly and the visual appeal is increasing exponentially a well. Plus, as developers, we get to develop some pretty awesome functionality that before we would have had to crack open Visual Studio to get the same results. It’s definitely...
Don’t miss out on these great session with Markus Egger in the Dallas office! Where: Microsoft Dallas Office – 7000 SR-161 (George Bush Turnpike), Dallas, TX 75039 When: Tuesday, December 13, 2011 – 1:30 – 4:30 PM Signup for this FREE event in Dallas Join Markus Egger, Microsoft RD and one of the longest running MVPs, for an afternoon of free information. CODE Magazine and EPS Software are in a unique position to share information based on real world experience in projects that are either our own...