Tag | Development Posts
This past week (much like every week in the XNA community) was filled with things happening and people doing cool things (and getting noticed for doing cool things!). You can definitely tell there are some Xbox LIVE Indie game developers starting to make some names for themselves. Can’t wait to name drop them at bars. Me- “Oh you played Game X? Yeah, I know the guy that made that. Pretty cool guy.” Yeah, I’ll be THAT guy. Time Critical XNA News 30 days left to submit XBLIGs made in XNA Game Studio ...
I have been working to get a SharePoint development course delivered online in February and March – online means lots of opportunities to ask questions. The first dates are now in place. The training is being delivered as a benefit for companies signed up to Microsoft Platform Ready. It is intended for UK based companies who develop software products* Agenda: Day 1 (Live Meeting 3 hours) 1:30 - 4:30 • Getting Started with SharePoint: Understand why and how to start developing for SharePoint 2010 ...
I just released an open source project at codeplex, which includes a set of T-4 templates to enable you to build logical layers (i.e. DAL/BLL) with just few clicks! The logical layers implemented here are based on Entity Framework 4.0, ASP.NET Web Form Data Bound control friendly and fully unit testable. In this open source project you will get Entity Framework 4.0 based T-4 templates for following types of logical layers: Data Access Layer: Entity Framework 4.0 provides excellent ORM data access ...
Over the years I have used a number of different types of phones. Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Nokia, and now Android. Until the Blackberry, which was my last phone (and I still have one issued from my office) I had never found a phone that “just worked” especially with email and messaging. The Blackberry did, and does, excel at those functions. My last personal phone was a Storm 1 which was Blackberry’s first touch screen phone. The Storm 2 was an improved version that fixed some screen press detection ...
1,000 blogposts is quite a few, but to die-hard geeks, 1000 isn't the number... 1K is the number, and today is my 1K blogpost! I've been working up to this for at least 11 months. Way back at MIX10, I approached some vendors about an idea I had. A month ago I contacted them and others, and everyone I contacted was very generous and supportive of my idea. My idea was not to run a contest, but blog as normal, and whoever ended up on my 1K post would get some swag... and I set a cut-off at 13 posts. ...
What better way to start the New Year than with a brand new web development tool.
Get a calendar reminder from http://web.ms/enter to tune into the online stream from CodeMash between 5pm and 8pm UK time this Thursday (13th).
Enjoy!
First of all, I haven’t been updating this blog as regularly as it used to be. Primarily, due to the fact that, I was visiting a lot of cities talking about SharePoint, Web Matrix, IE9 and few other stuff. IE9 is my new found love and I simply think we have done great work in improving the browser and browsing experiences for our users. This post would talk about IE, general things happening around the web and few misconceptions around IE (I had earlier written about IE8 and common myths ) When you ...
One year ago I came to work for a company where the entire development team is 100% “remote”; we’re spread over 3 time zones and each of us works from home. This seems to be an increasingly popular way for people to work and there are many articles and blog posts out there enumerating the advantages and disadvantages of working this way. I had read a lot about telecommuting before accepting this job and felt as if I had a pretty decent idea of what I was getting into, but I’ve encountered a few things ...
Whilst the W3C do provide an excellent service for manually checking your web pages, there are times when an alternative is required. There is for example a web service at http://validator.w3.org/doc... This can be for programmatically checking your pages (provided you make no more than 1 call per second). The W3C do provide all the source code needed to run your own validation service. Get the full details at: · Installation and development information for the W3C Markup Validator http://validator.w3.org/doc... ...
I have been specifically requested to blog about getting an ASP.NET 4.0 site working on a Windows 2008 server that has never run a 4.0 web site before. Make sure the 4.0 framework is installed on the server! Patch it will ALL the security patches have been applied. ((for a live server, make sure that you tested the patches on your development server first) You will find the HTTP Log status codes at http://support.microsoft.co... - they are very important in understandign the IIS logs) After ...
“Write great code and everything else becomes easier” is what Paul Pagel believes in. That´s his version of an adage by Brian Marick he cites: “treat code as an end, not just a means.” And he concludes: “My post-Agile world is software craftsmanship.” I wonder, if that´s really the way to go. Will “simply” writing great code lead the software industry into the light? He´s alluding to the philosopher Kant who proposed, a human beings should never be treated as a means, but always as an end. But should ...
If we have to get data from the SQL database, the standard way is to use a receive port with SQL adapter. SQL receive adapter is a solicit-response adapter. It periodically polls the SQL database with queries. That’s only way it can work. Sometimes it is undesirable. With new WCF-SQL adapter we can use the lightweight approach but still with the same principle, the WCF-SQL adapter periodically solicits the database with queries to check for the new records. Imagine the situation when the new records ...
I am in the midst of witnessing a variety of teams moving away from Scrum. Some of them are doing things like replacing Scrum terms with more commonly understood terminology. Mainly they have gone back to using industry standard terms and more traditional processes like the RAPID decision making process. For example: Scrum Master becomes Project Lead. Scrum Team becomes Project Team. Product Owner becomes Stakeholders. I'm actually quite sad to see this happening, but I understand that Scrum is a ...
Overview I recently needed to build a web page that would allow a user to capture some information and most importantly select multiple dates. This functionality was core to the application and hence had to be easy and quick to do. This is a public facing website so it had to be intuitive and very responsive. On the face of it it didn't seem too hard, I know enough juery to know what it is capable of and I was pretty sure that there would be some plugins that would help speed things along the way. ...
In the last couple of months SharePoint traffic (consulting, training and speaking) has picked up. And with that also the requests for deployments. There are good, great, bad and really bad things around this. But that is for another topic. However part of the good and great has been the fact of organizations wanting to do a proof of concept deployment (even when WSS or MOSS has been deployed). We can go through a session (Microsoft has the SDPS concept, SharePoint Deployment Planning Services) of ...
A decade is a milestone in one’s life, regardless of when it occurs. 2011 might seem like a weird year to mark a decade, but 2001 was a defining year for me. It marked my emergence into the technology industry, an unexpected loss of innocence, and triggered an ongoing struggle with faith and belief. Once you go through a valley, climbing the mountain and looking back over where you travelled, you can take in the entirety of the journey. Over the last 10 years I kept journals, and in this new year ...
In this all-Submittal Issue: Gill Cleeren(-2-), Brian Noyes, Brian Genisio, René Schulte, and Andy Schwam(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "The INavigationContentLoader interface in Silverlight 4" Gill Cleeren WP7: "Sending Windows Phone Screenshots in an Email" René Schulte WCF RIA Services: "WCF RIA Services Part 10 - Exposing Domain Services To Other Clients" Brian Noyes Shoutouts: Want to know what it takes to be an MVP? Check out René Schulte's recap of 2010: Goodbye 2010 - Hello 2011 ... ...
If you’ve ever written an application that accepts date and/or time inputs from an external source (a person, an uploaded file, posted XML, etc.) then you’ve no doubt had to deal with parsing some text representing a date into a data structure that a computer can understand. Similarly, you’ve probably also had to take values from those same data structure and turn them back into their original formats. Most (all?) suitably modern development platforms expose some kind of parsing and formatting functionality ...
Apress Books Introducing Visual C# 2010 - ISBN 978-1-4302-3171-4 Having read through parts 1 and 2 of this 4 -part book, I am very impressed by its practical approach to C#. I cannot improve on the by-line "Get started on your C# journey with an expert by your side leading by example" Adam Freeman teaches C# by precept and example. I suspect he drives a Volvo C30 as it comes up in many of the code examples! Throughout the book there are numerous links back and forth so as to avoid overcomplicating ...
In this Issue: Michael Washington, Thomas Martinsen, Mike Ormond, William E. Burrows(-2-), Vangos Pterneas, Jesse Liberty, Diptimaya Patra, and Jeff Blankenburg(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Drag from Multiple Source In Silverlight 4" Diptimaya Patra WP7: "What I Learned In WP7 – Issue 12" Jeff Blankenburg Shoutouts: Paul Thurrott posted a great phone comparison chart: Great Windows Phone comparison chart Kunal Chowdhury announced his new Silverlight Site: Welcome to Silverlight-Zone - Site ...
As we approach the end of 2010 I’d like to take a few minutes to reflect back on this past year and revisit the goals that I set for myself at the beginning of the year (click here to see those goals). I feel it is important to track your goals not only to see if you accomplished them but also to see what new directions in life you pursued. Once we enter into 2011 I’ll follow up with a new post on goals for the new year. Professional Blog – This year I intended to write at least 2 posts a month. ...
I've been writing software for a while and recently had an opportunity to broaden my horizons and start developing for iOS. We decided to leverage, as much as possible, our existing skills and use MonoTouch and MonoDevelop by Novell. For those of you who do not know, Mono is a .NET port originally designed for Linux but adapted for other platforms as well. MonoTouch is a port specifically for building iOS applications using the .NET framework. MonoDroid is a port (in CTP-esque release) for Android. ...
I have been spending the last 2 weeks immersing myself in a number of Windows Azure and SQL Azure technologies. And in setting up a new business (I’ll speak more about that in the future), I have also become a customer of Microsoft’s BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services). In short, it has been a fortnight of Microsoft cloud computing. On the Azure side, I’ve looked, of course, at Web Roles and Worker Roles. But I’ve also looked at Azure Storage’s REST API (including coding to it directly), ...
XML has been a pervasive tool in software development for over a decade. It provides a way to communicate data in a manner that is simple to understand and free of platform dependencies. Also pervasive in software development is what I consider to be the anti-pattern of using string manipulation to create XML. This usually starts with a “quick and dirty” approach because you need an XML document and looks like (for all of the examples here, we’ll assume we’re writing the body of a method intended ...
Visual WebGui offers its developers a set of out-of-the-box themes which they can easily apply to their applications. This allows developers to focus on the development and business logic rather than dealing with UI design missions. However, design tools and customization freedom are available for those who need to customize current themes or create their own custom theme. As part of the constant updates and enhancements to Visual WebGui and its developer CompanionKit a new available theme was added ...
Background One of the clients I work with had been experiencing some issues for a while surrounding web service timeouts. It's been a little challenging to work through the problems due to limitations in the diagnostic information available from one of the applications, but I learned some interesting things while troubleshooting the problem which don't seem to have been discussed much in the community so I thought I'd share my findings. In the scenario we have BizTalk trying to make calls to a .net ...
In this Issue: Sacha Barber, David Anson, Jesse Liberty, Shawn Wildermuth, Jeff Blankenburg(-2-), Martin Krüger, Ryan Alford(-2-), Michael Crump, Peter Kuhn(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Part 4 of 4 : Tips/Tricks for Silverlight Developers" Michael Crump WP7: "Navigating with the WebBrowser Control on WP7" Shawn Wildermuth Shoutouts: John Papa posted that the open call is up for MIX11 presenters: Your Chance to Speak at MIX11 From SilverlightCream.com: Aspect Examples (INotifyPropertyChanged ...
I finally got the first one done! This is the first of a series of webcasts that I have wanted to do for a while. I call it Cooking with Expression because developing great user experiences are very similar to cooking great food. So please, check it out, leave some feedback, and enjoy! --- To kick off the series, we want to talk about some techniques that we will be using throughout the series for the different recipes. Since HTML 5 is literally the future of the web and buzz topic in development ...
I'm going to try something here... if it seems useful, I'll continue, if it doesn't, I'll stop... so give me feedback! There are *lots* of Apps in the WP7 Marketplace, and heaven help me, but the Marketplace sucks for finding stuff. I won't rehash what's already been said in the blogs, but I agree with one and all. I went out last Saturday to find 2 apps that I knew were released, and couldn't do so on my device. Even in the Zune app, it took quite a while to find them... ok, I'll back off a bit, ...
Microsoft have made available a security development starter kit at http://www.microsoft.com/se... Actual Download is at http://www.microsoft.com/do... The kit is free and covers a variety of security concerns for ASP.NET developers ...
This book introduces a new technology that promises a considerable improvement on the ASP.NET membership system. If you ever had to write an extranet, system you should be aware of the problems in setting up membership for your site. The Windows Identity Foundation promises to be an excellent replacement. Therefore the book Programming Windows Identity Foundation - ISBN 978-0-7356-2718-5 at http://oreilly.com/catalog/... is breaking new ground. I recommend this book to all ASP.NET development ...
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 I wanted to create a series of blog post that gets right to the point and is aimed specifically at Silverlight Developers. The most important things I want this series to answer is : What is it? Why do I care? How do I do it? I hope that you enjoy this series. Let’s get started: Tip/Trick #16) What is it? Find out version information about Silverlight and which WebKit it is using by going to http://issilverlightinstall... Why do I care? I’ve had ...
Today, I'm going to talk about a touchy subject: the notion of working in a company that doesn't use the prescribed "best practices" in its software development endeavours. Over the years I have, using a variety of pseudonyms, asked this question on popular programming forums. Although I always add in some minor variation of the story to avoid suspicion that it's the same person posting, the crux of the tale remains the same: A Programmer’s Tale A junior software developer has just started a new ...
Todays $10 bargain PDF from Apress is: Beginning SQL Server Modeling: Model-Driven Application Development in SQL Server 2008 Get ready for model-driven application development with SQL Server Modeling! This book covers Microsoft's SQL Server Modeling (formerly known under the code name "Oslo") in detail and contains the information you need to be successful with designing and implementing workflow modeling. $49.99 | Published Jul 2010 | ...
In this Issue: Michael Washington, Pete Brown, Robby Ingebretsen, Bill Reiss, Jordan Knight, Mike Taulty, Justin Angel, Jeff Blankenburg. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Creating the Silverlight View Model (MVVM) Control: Calendar Icon" Michael Washington WP7: "United Nations News for Windows Phone 7" Justin Angel Silverlight, WP7/WPF: "CameraPanel: A Parallax Panel for Silverlight, WP7 or WPF" Robby Ingebretsen Shoutouts: Michael Scherotter produced a Silverlight Webcam photo app that he's providing ...
I have been in the market for a new computer for several months. I set out with a budget of around $1200. I knew up front that the machine would be used for developing applications and maybe some light gaming. I kept switching between buying a laptop or a desktop but the laptop won because: With a Laptop, I can carry it everywhere and with a desktop I can’t. I searched for about 2 weeks and narrowed it down to a list of must-have’s : i7 Processor (I wasn’t going to settle for an i5 or AMD. I wanted ...
In an effort to get some synergy in the Silverlight community, the SilverlightShow folks and I have decided to share some information. As always, I'm running a bit behind, so I get to post first with the material they provided to me :) Check out the five most popular news at SilverlightShow for last week (06 - 12 Dec 2010). The news that hit the top is the announcement for the upcoming SilverlightShow webinar with Gill Cleeren [which I posted about a couple weeks ago] (check other webinars Gill delivered ...
Well, I'm getting cabin fever and short-timer's ADD all at the same time. I haven't been anywhere outside of my greater city area in FOREVER and I'm only days away from my vacation. I have brainlock because the last few days have been non-stop diffusing amazingly hostile conversations. I think I'll write about that. So then, I "do" software. At the end of the day, software is pretty straightforward. Software is that thing we love and try to make do things not currently in play, in existence. If a ...
In 2009 Microsoft released a case study about a project that we had done using the OOXML SDK 1.0 for Research Directors Inc. Since that time Microsoft has released version 2.0 of the SDK and PSC has done significant development with it. Below are some of the mile stones we have reached since the original case study. At the time of the original case study two report types had been automated to output as PowerPoint presentations. Now that the all the main products have been delivered we have added ...
With the new release of the Windows Azure platform there are a lot of new features available. In my previous post I introduced a little bit about one of them, the remote desktop access to azure virtual machine. Now I would like to talk about another cool stuff – Windows Azure Connect. What’s Windows Azure Connect I would like to quote the definition of the Windows Azure Connect in MSDN With Windows Azure Connect, you can use a simple user interface to configure IP-sec protected connections between ...
The code samples in Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework are updated on 2010-12-13. Download address: http://1code.codeplex.com/r... Updated code sample index categorized by technologies: http://1code.codeplex.com/w... (it also allows you to download individual code samples instead of the entire All-In-One Code Framework sample package.) If it’s the first time that you hear about Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, ...
The SOA consultants invaded the executive suite at your company or agency, preached the true religion, and converted the unbelievers. Now by divine imperative you must convert your legacy applications into a suite of reusable services. But as usual, you lack the time and resources that you need in order to develop the services properly. So you googled or bing’ed, found this blog post, and began crying in gratitude. Yes, as the title implies, I am going to reveal my easy, 3-step, works-every-time ...
At the DreamForce 2010 event in San Francisco Force.com unveiled their next big thing in the Fat SaaS portfolio "Database.com". I am still wondering how would they would've shelled out for that domain name. Now why would a already established SaaS player foray into a key building block like Database? Potentially allowing enterprises to build apps that do not utilize the Force.com stack! One key reason is being seen as the Fat SaaS player with evey trick in the SaaS space under his belt. You want ...
.NETTER Code Starter Pack contains a gallery of Visual Studio 2010 solutions leveraging latest and new technologies released by Microsoft. Each Visual Studio solution included here is focused to provide a very simple starting point for cutting edge development technologies and framework, using well known Northwind database. The current release of this project includes starter samples for the following technologies: ASP.NET Dynamic Data QuickStart (TBD) Azure Service Platform Windows Azure Hello World ...
Here are some excellent links for anyone developing for Windows Phone 7: J.D. Meier’s Windows Phone Developer Guidance Map – this is immense. Also check out the Silverlight version Justin Angel’s site – some really great articles on unlocked roms, automation and Continuous Integration Windows Phone 7 Development Best Practices Wiki Jeff Blankenburg’s 31 days of Windows Phone 7 This post of Links to sample code for Windows Phone Tim Heuers blog, particularly this post of Tips and Tricks Kevin Marshall's ...
The perfect solution to the “January blues” is a good solid few hours learning about great technology. The 'Build an app for that' Online Conference is exactly that, featuring demo-rich sessions on building applications for the browser, Windows 7, and Windows Phone 7. There are three tracks letting you choose which sessions are most relevant to you - whether you're just considering client development with Silverlight, or you've already got stuck in to an advanced project. We'll also explore new form ...
I was having a hell of a time tonight with my IIS on my development laptop. I don’t remember doing anything to change the IIS settings. I don’t use IIS that much on my dev machine. Usually Cassini is enough for testing my development efforts but tonight I needed to replicate a problem that seems to stem from x86 v x64 mismatch, so I went to create an IIS site pointed to my dev folder. When I did, I got a “503.1 Service Unavailable Error”. First thing I did is go over all my setting to make sure I ...