Tag | Development Posts
In this Issue: Peter Kuhn, Mike Ormond(-2-, -3-), WindowsPhoneGeek, Daniel N. Egan, Phil Middlemiss(-2-), Max Paulousky, Michael Washington. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Designing for Browser-Zoom: Part 2" Phil Middlemiss WP7: "Talking about Converters in WP7 | Coding4fun toolkit converters in depth" WindowsPhoneGeek Lightswitch: "LightSwitch: Can We Handle The Truth?" Michael Washington Shoutouts: András Velvárt has a video up of some awesome changes he has planned for SurfCube, check it out: SurfCube ...
Bright Green Projects have an admittedly older blog post entitled Review of Agile Project Management Software | Scrum Kanban Methodology. Since I haven't had time to review Scrum project management tools in quite awhile, it was nice to find a write-up that's as succinct as this one. The thing I like the best about Bright Green's site, besides the product, is the vocabulary they use to describe Agile software development. For example, they couple Scrum with the development methodology they're using ...
Or until my arm falls off at least…. I’ve been meaning to get a new tattoo for quite a while. And I wanted it to be geeky and to represent some memorable milestone in my life. So I was thinking, mulling over some various ideas, sketching some things out. And then it hit me. XNA. Specifically the XNA logo. It’s super geeky (so geeky I’ll probably have to explain to 90% of the people that say it what it even means) and I’m not sure that anything has been so memorable and made such a change in my life ...
The dynamic language runtime (DLR) is a radical development of Dot Net. In some ways it is like the Laser was 40 years, a solution looking for a problem. At the moment the DLR supports languages such as Iron Ruby and Iron Python, together with dynamic extensions for C# and VB.NET. Where DLR will also score is the ability to write your own Dot Net language for specialist areas. So how does this book fare in introducing the DLR? It is a book that will require careful study and perhaps reading several ...
Once again lets dive into the Little Wonders of .NET, those small things in the .NET languages and BCL classes that make development easier by increasing readability, maintainability, and/or performance. So probably every one of us has used an enumerated type at one time or another in a C# program. The enumerated types we create are a great way to represent that a value can be one of a set of discrete values (or a combination of those values in the case of bit flags). But the power of enum types ...
This week I faced an interesting problem on a Windows 7 Development PC. I have run MakeLog (http://commondata.codeplex... sucessfully on my PC but my colleague could not run it sucessfully. Both of us are local administrators, so what I could do on my PC, he should have been able to do. The cure was to turn UAC completely off and re-boot. Once re-booted, the installation ran without incident. While I would never suggest turning off UAC normally, on development PCs, it is a liability ...
I recently finished reading the book Brownfield Application Development in .NET by Kyle Baley and Donald Belcham. The book is available from Manning. First off, let me say that I'm a huge fan of Manning as a publisher. I've found their books to be top-quality, over all. As a Kindle owner, I also appreciate getting an ebook copy along with the dead tree copy. I find ebooks to be much more convenient to read, but hard-copies are easier to reference. The book covers, surprisingly enough, working with ...
I answered this question on the MSMQ forum on MSDN and thought it worth sharing here. The poster wanted to know why all transactional messages have a fixed priority of zero (instead of 0 through 7). They wanted the guaranteed delivery of messages to a queue but wanted to assign different levels of priority. Some aspects of MSMQ were defined way back in the last century and this is one of them. If I remember right, the reason was to avoid the following scenario: You have a single transaction of 3 ...
Hi, I presented on Windows Phone 7 app development using Silverlight. Here are few pics from the event Windows Phone 7 development VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL I demonstrated the Visual studio, emulator capabilities/ features. An demo on Wp7 app communication with an OData Service, along with a demo on XNA app. There was lot of curious questions; I am listing them here because these keep on popping up again and again: 1. What tools does it takes to develop Wp7 app? Are they free? A typical WP7 app ...
During a recent project, while waiting for our Development Database to be provisioned on the clients corporate SQL Server Environment (these things can sometimes take weeks or months to be setup), we began our initial development against a local instance on SQL Server Express, just as an interim measure until the Development database was live. This was going just fine, until we found that we needed to do some profiling to understand a problem we were having with the performance of our ORM generated ...
We had a very interesting meeting on Friday 28th last week. We had 10 attendees and two speakers. The first topic presented was Cloud Computing, presented by Allan Rwakatungu @arwakatungu who works with MTN Uganda. He gave a very brilliant outline of how Cloud computing and service oriented applications had begun changing the platform for operating business and the costs it saves because of scalability and elasticity. He went on to demonstrate the steps you would take if you are beginning a new Windows ...
In this Issue: Max Paulousky, Renuka Prasad, Ollie Riches, Jesse Liberty(-2-, -3-, -4-, -5-), Medusa M, John Papa, Beth Massi, and Joost van Schaik. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Stop What You Are Doing And Learn About Reactive Programming" Jesse Liberty WP7: "Windows Phone Looping Selector for Digits " Max Paulousky Lightswitch: "How To Send HTML Email from a LightSwitch Application" Beth Massi Shoutouts: Shawn Wildermuch has niether GooNews for users of his cool WP7 app or or for the WP7 Marketplace ...
In this Issue: Ollie Riches, Colin Eberhardt, Andrej Tozon, Arik Poznanski, Deborah Kurata(-2-), Jay Kimble, Yochay Kiriaty, Peter Kuhn, Mike Ormond, WindowsPhoneGeek(-2-), and Matthias Shapiro. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Missing Chart Legend" Deborah Kurata WP7: "XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 2 - Text rendering" Peter Kuhn Shoutouts: Timmy Kokke has a post up discussing What’s new in the Expression Design January 2011 preview? From SilverlightCream.com: WP7Contrib: Thread safe ObservableCollection<T> ...
I’ve been updating the Winnipeg Code Camp website over the last few weeks with sessions and speakers as we’ve added them, and I’m happy to announce the full set of sessions!* We have a very interesting mix this year with new speakers and varied technologies! Remember this is a *FREE* event, so head over to our website to find out how to register for what will be a fantastic code camp! *OK, so we still have one session that needs to be have an official title, and one session that’s still TBA…but close ...
Many of my clients are actively using Silverlight 4 and RIA Services to build powerful line of business applications. Getting things set up correctly is critical to being to being able to take full advantage of the RIA services plumbing and when developers struggle with the setup they tend to shy away from the solution as a whole. I’m a big proponent of RIA services and wanted to take the opportunity to share some of my experiences in setting up these types of projects. In late 2010 I presented a ...
I have been chatting with Maurice den Heijer recently about his codeplex project for the BizTalk Map Testing Framework (http://mtf.codeplex.com/). Some of you may remember the article I did for BizTalk 2009 and 2006 about how to test maps but with Maurice's project he is effectively looking at how to improve productivity and quality by building some useful testing features within the framework to simplify the process of testing maps. As part of our discussion we realized that we both had slightly ...
Fear, it’s what turns maintaining applications into a nightmare. Technology moves on, teams move on, someone is left to operate the application, what was green is now perceived brown. Eventually the business will evolve and changes will need to be made. The approach to those changes often dictates the long term viability of the application. Fear of change, lack of passion and a lack of interest in understanding the domain often leads to a paranoia to do anything that doesn’t involve duct tape and ...
It's been 3 years since I did any coding and am starting back up with Java using netBeans and glassfish. Right off the bat I noticed two things about Java's ease of use. The java ide (netBeans) has finally caught up with visual studio, and jUnit, has finally caught up with nUnit. netBeans intellisense exists and I don't have to subclass everything in jUnit. Now on to the point of this very short post ( request) I'm trying to figure out how to do test driven development with vxml and have not found ...
A very common task in Agile Environments is prioritization. Teams that are functioning well will prioritize new features, old features, the backlog, and any other source of stories for the team, and they’ll do it regularly. Not all teams are good at prioritizing according to the real return on investment that building stories will yield to the company. This is unfortunate. Too often, teams end up building features that are less valuable, and everyone seems to know it except perhaps the product owner! ...
The Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework is a free, centralized code sample library provided by the Microsoft Community team. It aims to provide typical code samples for all Microsoft development technologies. The team listens to developers’ pains in MSDN forums, social media and various developer communities and write code samples based on developers’ frequently asked programming tasks. Additionally, our team offers a free code sample request service. Awesome?! I think so. Have also just added it ...
I presented at VBUG last year and can confirm that they put on a really good event. This year I stood aside for my “replacement” Steve Plank to work his magic. Worth checking out… VBUG SPRING CONFERENCE 28/29 March 2011 Wokefield Park, Mortimer, Reading RG7 3AH Day One (Mon 28 March): Developing SharePoint 2010 with Visual Studio 2010 - Dave McMahon Cache Out with Windows Server AppFabric – Phil Pursglove Extending your Corporate Network in to the Windows Azure Data Centre with Windows Azure Connect ...
I know a lot of technical people who work in partners (ISVs, System Integrators etc). I know that virtually none of them would think of going to the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) learning portal to find some deep and high quality technical content. Instead they would head to MSDN, Channel 9, msdev.com etc. I am one of those people :-) Hence imagine my surprise when i stumbled upon this little gem Architectural Guidance for Migrating Applications to Windows Azure Platform (your company and hence ...
As mentioned in some earlier posts, I’ve been hacking on Shopify for the past six months for an e-commerce project. My work with Shopify introduced me to Heroku, which is a simple “cloud-based” service for hosting and running Ruby applications. It’s dead simple to get started and, for the most part, seems to “just work”. While I enjoy playing with new languages and platforms, I’m by no means a Ruby developer. Heroku is a great service, but seemed somewhat inaccessible to me given that I’d have to ...
It’s with great pleasure that I can announce registration for Prairie Developer Conference 2011 is now open! This year we’ve expanded the conference to include more sessions, more speakers, and more technologies! Presenters are coming from across Canada and the US, and we have an amazing group of sponsors supporting the conference! One of those sponsors is Urban Turtle, a company that makes a Scrum add on for TFS. Each attendee will receive 5 FREE licenses for the product (a $450 value)! We also ...
It's all about Letting Go. I'm the Technical Director at an established Software-as-a-Service provider, and I've committed to, without giving away our intentions to any competitor, building a "dominant" online enrollment product that's going to convert our company from a regional turboprop happily cruising at altitude and calmly building up the operating account a little bit each month, into a squadron of deadly stealth fighters, streaking and blurring across the sky, firing lethal laser beams into ...
This morning I was working on a client application after I made my last post on Ben’s article about shared databases. So, I went to check in my code. TFS build ran a bit and then rejected it. The services layer was throwing an exception. Took a bit to track down the exception occurred in the database call to a sproc. So, what was going on? Turns out someone changed a sproc in the shared database. So when my code checked in the unit tests failed. Perfect example of the evil of a shared development ...
In brief…. take 1 minute to register today if you are UK based and work for a company that creates software products and want to dig into SharePoint 2010 development for FREE with a great UK based SME (subject matter expert). And… if you want to understand the background, read on :-) Microsoft Platform Ready is where we are aggregating resources to help companies who develop software products explore and adopt the latest technologies from Microsoft. There are many benefits to signing up (e.g. the ...
Vote for: “Deep Dive MVVM” Vote for: “Exploring a Blendable Windows Phone 7 Application” Last year, the MIX team started a new concept with an open call for sessions. People from the community were invited to submit talks about pretty much anything, and the public voted to select which sessions they wanted to see. It was a huge success, since 150 sessions were submitted, of which 13 sessions were picked (don’t hold me accountable for the numbers, they are plucked from my memory ) I was very honored ...
My wife this weekend noted as she was reading CNET that WordPress had announced a vulnerability to a worm. Well, actually, they announced that if you had skipped the last two releases, failed to do your updates, that you would be vulnerable to the worm. The question often happens, not so much in the actual software development shops, but rather from the common user How does this happen? They should find all the bugs before they ship! I’ve thought about this question a lot. It really does seem somewhat ...
I’ve been running Windows 7 for only a short time now. But in that, as a developer, I find that I avoid doing my development on my actual desktop. Specifically, I have several customers today that run different versions of BizTalk Server from 2004 to 2009. In addition, many of these customers require you to install VPN software that can wreck havoc with your most critical hardware asset you bring to the table, your personal laptop. Let us examine a typical work flow that I have encountered several ...
Your Team Needs You The introduction of Agile into a corporation has many impacts on the team, and many impacts to the executives leading those teams. In my experience, many Agile projects fail, not because the team did their best, but because the executives that should have been supporting the team failed to do so. This lack of support can be manifested in many ways. I’ve seen executives fail by doing the following: Failure to help with the prioritization process Failure to pay attention to the ...
Here’s a quick tip for something that I ran into again this weekend. I was creating service accounts in my development environment’s Active Directory, and one of the names was a little long. My account name was: AccessServicesAppPool . When I went to SharePoint Central Admin and tried to add my new service account, I kept getting an account not found message. I even cut-n-pasted the user name, but that didn’t work. What I failed to notice was that the “pre-Windwos 2000” login was truncated by one ...
So, yesterday I presented a session for the online SharePoint Saturday event SharePoint Saturday EMEA on using SharePoint & jQuery. I created this session as an overview session on using jQuery and SharePoint together detailing best practices on deployment, maintenance, performance, and hopefully pointing some people to some good resources to help them get started. I also spent some time on why jQuery is a valuable tool for the SharePoint developer’s toolkit. If you aren’t just a jQuery hater, ...
2011 Event Recap Event Overview During the weekend of January 14th through January 16th, the St. Louis area technology community participated in a national GiveCamp event. With Microsoft’s assistance, similar events were held simultaneously in the following cities: Austin, Texas Phoenix, Arizona Birmingham, Alabama Colorado Springs, Colorado Dallas, Texas Atlanta, Georgia Houston, Texas Nashville, Tennessee Dallas, Pennsylvania Fayetteville, Arkansas New York City, New York Malvern, Pennsylvania ...
In this Issue: Michael James(-2-), Joost van Schaik, Colin Eberhardt, Jesse Liberty, John Papa, Levente Mihály(-2-), Peter Kuhn, WindowsPhoneGeek, and Daniel Egan. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Creating Packs from the Silverlight Application Themes" Peter Kuhn WP7: "A Windows Phone 7 Jump List Control" Colin Eberhardt Shoutouts: Mike Ormond gave a Tech Days virtual confernece session on Thursday, and posted his material and links: Links from my “Silverlight for Windows Phone” session From SilverlightCream.com: ...
There is a growing consensus that the Scrum community should do a better job of promoting Agile engineering practices along with the project-level guidance provided by the Scrum process. I agree. But I feel cautious about a debate that seems based on the assumption that any Agile technique is the de-facto standard for developing software. It's true that Agile has been around for over a decade, but its adoption isn't a given. Many development teams have a fundamental misunderstanding of what Scrum ...
Another week and another whirlwind of wonderful works coming from the XNA Community. I find it crazy just how hard it is to keep up with everything going on and knowing just how big the community has gotten recognizing just how much I’m missing as well. But here are the things I DID manage to catch… XNA Developers @Chounard ponders whether he should port sfxr to XNA http://twitter.com/Chounard... And showing just how awesome the XNA commmunity @Chounard DOES (and in a day!) ...
I’m trying to find time to update the Prairie Developer Conference 2011 website, and the sessions and speaker information will be up by this weekend including the registration page. For those that are wondering what the session and speaker list looks like, I wanted to give a sneak peak. We have a fantastic set of sessions by world class technologists! We’re covering .NET, Java, Ruby, SQL Server, Agile, User Experience, Mobile, Security, Azure, Office, SharePoint, and others. In fact, this year I’ve ...
I will be presenting several sessions on Silverlight 4 at the SSWUG V-Conference on April 20th through April 22nd. The sessions include: 15 Things I learned about Silverlight. Description: This session is great for an audience that has never worked with Silverlight. It describes my real-world experience developing for Silverlight 4. It should help the audience avoid some of the beginner mistakes with working with Silverlight. Tools and Utilities for the .NET Developer (based off of http://tools.michaelcrump.net) ...
My colleague Keith Burns (top chap with great SQL Server skills – but don’t say I said so) is helping to deliver an event focused on helping UK ISVs understand what it takes to move from Oracle to SQL Server. I would recommend you come along if you currently only target Oracle or primarily target Oracle. Looks to be shaping up into a great day. Register Today What: Oracle to Microsoft Migration Workshop When: Friday 11th February 2011, 09:00–15:45 Where: Microsoft Campus, Thames Valley Park, Reading, ...
In this Issue: Loek van den Ouweland, Andrea Boschin, Jeff Prosise, Jeff Brand, Frank LaVigne, WindowsPhoneGeek, Jesse Liberty, Jeremy Likness, and Haruhiro Isowa. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Pop Up Behavior, now works with your Popup" Haruhiro Isowa WP7: "WP7 working with VisualStates: How to make a ToggleSwitch from CheckBox" WindowsPhoneGeek Entity Frameworks: "Six Free Entity Framework 4 Video Tutorials" Frank LaVigne Shoutouts: Jesse Liberty posted about 12 MORE Insanely Essential Utilities ...
I have been working on a Silverlight Navigation application which uses LINQ to query an XML data source and has been working without a hitch until I added a control to the landing page. All other pages which worked fine were loaded from the navigation service Once I added the control I got a page not found error! (The page is there) and If navigated to, it works as expected. What happens, it that I closed the error Modal dialog and then clicked on another page, then navigate back to the landing page ...
Recently I posted a recap of my goals from 2010. Now it’s time to post my goals and focus areas for 2011. Just as I did in 2010 I’m splitting goals between professional and personal. Professional Blog – I intended to continue blogging at least twice a month, sometimes more frequently when time and motivation allows. I have begun looking at other platforms or distribution methods for my blogging and will continue to investigate those. I’ll post details on here if anything changes. Speaking – In 2010 ...
This past weekend (Jan 14-16) there were GiveCamp events accross the country. At the New York City event, nearly 100 developers, designers and database administrators came together to dontate their time to provide technology solutions for over a half dozen charities. The experience was amazing, projects that would normally take weeks or months went from concept to delivery between 6:30pm Friday evening and 3:00pm Sunday afternoon. There were many comparisions to both Habitat for Humanity and Extreme ...
It's been interesting for me to dive a little deeper into Scrum after realizing how fragile its adoption can be. I've been particularly impressed with James Shore's essay "Kaizen and Kaikaku" and the Net Objectives post "There are Better Alternatives to Scrum" by Alan Shalloway. The bottom line: You can't execute Scrum well without being Agile. Personally, I'm the rare developer who has an interest in project management. I think the methodology to deliver software is interesting, and that there are ...
Silverlight testing is great, we all know that (don’t we??), we’re expected to do it as part of the development process, but once we’ve got an awesome application written and we come to deploy it, we don’t want the test files going out with it… You might be like me, have the files in a Web project – let’s face it, that’s how we’re pushed into doing it… So let’s stick with it! Now. I’m deploying via the wonders of the Web Deployment shizzle, but this also applies to the classic ‘installer’ project ...
"Styles tend to not only separate men - because they have their own doctrines and then the doctrine became the gospel truth that you cannot change. But if you do not have a style, if you just say: Well, here I am as a human being, how can I express myself totally and completely? Now, that way you won't create a style, because style is a crystallization. That way, it's a process of continuing growth."- Bruce Lee This is kind of how I see software development. What I enjoyed in the the early days of ...
Todays Apress $10 deal of the the day is: Windows Mobile Game Development: Building games for the Windows Phone and other mobile devices This book will provide you with a comprehensive guide to developing games for both the Windows Mobile platform and the Windows Phone using the industry standard programming languages C# and VB.NET. $49.99 | Published Apr 2010 | The book dates from the VS2005/VS2008 era but should still be useful to VS2010 developers. Given that such games development can now be ...
2010 was an incredible year of change for me. On the personal side, we celebrated our youngest daughter’s first birthday and welcomed my oldest daughter into our family (both my girls are adopted). Professionally, I put on the first ever Prairie Developer Conference, the 3rd annual Winnipeg Code Camp, the Software Development and Evolution Conference, continued to build the technology community in Winnipeg, was awarded a Microsoft MVP award for the 4th year, created a certification program to help ...
The day has finally arrived for twelve local charities here in the Dallas area, when they’ll get some help from various local Developers with their website initiative needs at this years Dallas GiveCamp. I’m really looking forward to helping out at this year event and what I hope will be the start of many more GiveCamps to follow. Similar to Habitat for Humanity, where people gather to help build and improve homes for people in need, GiveCamp brings together programmers and equips them with the virtual ...