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This error occurred on our TFS2008 build server which we had upgraded to cater for VS2010 projects (by installing VS2010 on the build server - see this article). Error MSB4019: The imported project "C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\Vis... was not found. Confirm that the path in the <Import> declaration is correct, and that the file exists on disk. However - although we had installed VS2010 on the build server - we had not installed ...

In this Issue: András Velvárt, Kunal Chowdhury(-2-), AvraShow, Gill Cleeren, Ian T. Lackey, Richard Waddell, Joe McBride, Michael Crump, Xpert360, keyboardP, and Pete Vickers(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Grouping Records in Silverlight DataGrid using PagedCollectionView" Kunal Chowdhury WP7: "Phone 7 Back Button and the ListPicker control" Ian T. Lackey Shoutouts: Colin Eberhardt has some Silverlight 5 Adoption Predictions you may want to check out. Michael Crump has a post up showing lots ...

I hope those that attended my Windows Phone 7 talk this morning at Winnipeg TechDays enjoyed it! As promised, below are relevant links and info from my session. Differences Between Silverlight on Windows and Windows Phone http://msdn.microsoft.com/e... Isolated Storage Best Practices for Windows Phone http://msdn.microsoft.com/e... Class Library Support for Windows Phone http://msdn.microsoft.com/e... ...

At the end of November 2010 we released a new version of the Windows Azure SDK which contains many new features driven by the great feedback of early adopters plus a shiny new portal. New Portal implemented in Silverlight: The new portal is implemented using Silverlight and replaces the (IMHO rather clunky) original HTML + JavaScript portal. It is 100% better although does still have a few bugs. Enjoy! P.S. You can if you wish still use the old portal: New runtime functionality: The following functionality ...

If you are interested in software development including a heap of great open source frameworks, then get over to the DDD9 web site and vote for some sessions for the next DDD conference. It will take place at Microsoft's UK headquarters in Reading on 29th January 2011. http://developerdeveloperde... I've proposed a session on the new Async CTP announced at PDC, but there's loads more interesting stuff such as Ruby, CQRS and jQuery Mobile, so get your votes in now ...

With all the news and focus on the new features coming in Silverlight 5 I thought I’d take a few minutes to remind folks about the work that Microsoft has done on LightSwitch since the applications created by LightSwitch are Silverlight applications. LightSwitch makes it easier for non-coders to build business applications and easier for coders to maintain them. For those not familiar with LightSwitch, it is a new tool that provides a easier and quicker way for coder and non-coder types alike to ...

Had an interesting Twitter convo today about WP7 development. Question was raised on how to use a WP7 device as the deployment target from within VS.NET. Thinking that this would be an *obvious* question, I replied that you need to set the right value in one of the drop lists in the IDE… I did this, hooked up my device, then tried to run my app, just as a final test that it was as easy as I thought it would be. It wasn’t. So first, your phone can’t be locked, so make sure you unlock it. Also, don’t ...

This book is more than just a book about an ASP.NET CMS system - it has much practical advice and examples for the Dot Net web developer. I liked the use of JQuery to detect that JavaScript was not enabled. One chapter was about MemCached - this one chapter could justify the price of the book if you run a server farm and need to improve performance. Some links to get you started are: Windows Memcache at http://code.jellycan.com/me... Dot Net Access Library at http://sourceforge.net/proj... ...

The Windows Azure Team had just published their new development portal this week and the SDK 1.3. Within this new release there are a lot of cool feature available. The one I’m looking forward to is Remote Desktop Access to your running Windows Azure Virtual Machine. Configuration Remote Desktop Access It would be very simple to make the azure service enable the remote desktop access. First of all let’s create a new windows azure project from the Visual Studio. In this example I just created a normal ...

There's an interesting discussion going on over on the Scrum Development list, dealing with technical stories verses user stories. The idea is that "Improve our continuous integration server" may not directly translate to visible functionality for a customer, so how do you handle this in Scrum. It's a conversation that pops up regularly and there are a couple of schools of thought on the subject. I'm not going to get into here. In the midst of this discussion I jokingly (sort of) made a reference ...

Setting up a WCF RESTful service is extremely easy to do. In fact, you can do this with no *.svc file and no config file. However, you might run into a situation where your service worked fine during development using the Visual Studio web server but when you deploy to IIS 7.5 it no longer works. Specifically, for a simple request like http://localhost/help you get the error: “HTTP Error 404.0 - Not Found. The resource you are looking for has been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily ...

Joel Semeniuk and I just finished kicking off the Internet Explorer 9 webcast series from Imaginet and Microsoft. Our webcast started out with a high level overview of what IE9 brings to the table in terms of features and performance, and we finished up with an interview with everyone’s favourite Microsoftie John Bristowe. During our webcast, a number of different links were mentioned on where you can get more information about IE9 and what it can do for you and your organization. Those links have ...

All-In-One Office Development Code Samples Introduction Download Office development code samples Request Office development code samples Introduction The All-In-One Office development code samples demonstrate the typical programming topics about Microsoft Office. These topics are either frequently asked in MSDN forums and Microsoft Support, or are requested by many developers via our code sample request function. We want to alleviate the frustration felt by developers when they are developing Office ...

All-In-One Silverlight Code Samples Introduction Download Silverlight Code Samples Request Silverlight Code Samples Introduction Silverlight is a powerful development platform for creating engaging, interactive applications for many screens across the Web, desktop, and mobile devices. The All-In-One Silverlight code samples demonstrate the typical programming topics about Silverlight. These topics are either frequently asked in MSDN forums and Microsoft Support, or are requested by many developers ...

Well now I’m busy with preparing my session about the Windows Azure AppFabric on TechED 2010 China, one of my colleagues Chen Pu told me that the new Azure Developer Portal was released last midnight. Then I just closed my session presentation and have a look on this new webiste. I had seen it before in the PDC10 videos and knew that it will be more quickly and user-friendly. Now let’s take a look on what it is. When you log on the development portal of Windows Azure, SQL azure or AppFabric, there ...

Today (well, yesterday now) was Thanksgiving here in the U.S. In addition to doing my traditional family things (making and eating a large, Turkey-centered dinner), I found some time to pop on to the computer. To my dismay I saw that the #WP7 hashtag on Twitter was filled with news of a program/project called “ChevronWP7” (which presumably has no connection to the U.S. petroleum products company, Chevron Corp. – which has a market cap of $166 billion dollars and whose trademark lawyers may well decide ...

In this Issue: Brad Tutterow, Kevin Dockx, Richard Waddell, Roberto Sonnino, Dustin Horne, Tim Greenfield, Rod Paddock, Timmy Kokke, Tim Heuer, Manuel Felício, Mike Taulty, and Brian Noyes. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Using Visual States in custom controls in Silverlight" Timmy Kokke WP7: "Leveraging the Silverlight ecosystem with Windows Phone 7" Tim Greenfield Silverlight/JS: "JavaScript Can't Do Math - SilverlightCalculator A New Silverlight OSS Project" Rod Paddock Shoutouts: Telerik announced ...

In this Issue: Gill Cleeren, Peter Kuhn, Erik Mork, Jesse Liberty, Kirupa Chinnathambi, Michael Crump, Brad Tutterow, Jay Kimble(-2-), and Rob Tiffany. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Part 1 of 4 : Tips/Tricks for Silverlight Developers" Michael Crump WP7: "Using the Pivot Control" Kirupa Chinnathambi Shoutouts: The SilverlightShow folks have a good webinar series going. The next one is December 15th: Building a Silverlight 4 Application End-to-end with Gill Cleeren. From SilverlightCream.com: Using ...

The Prairie Developer Conference is about providing a valuable professional development opportunity to its attendees, and we want your input to help shape the sessions for Prairie Dev Con 2011! Head on over to www.prairiedevcon.com/surve... and take our short survey on what topics and technologies you’d like to see at the conference. As a thanks for your input, we’ll put all submissions into a draw for one of two free conference registrations (see the survey page for all contest details)! So tell ...

I have been working with infopath 2007 to build an application for SharePoint. I put together a dashboard that pushes and pulls data from lists within SharePoint. With Visual Studio Tools for Applications you can write code that will accompany the form for extra functionality. Part of the code is that you can reference the "Microsoft.SharePoint.dll" to have access to the SharePoint object model and ultimately the data in SharePoint. Part of the architecture decisions I made quite early was to implement ...

I presented Windows Phone 7 talk on Microsoft Virtual tech Days (VTD) [22/11/2010] and here are the demo and the slide deck I referred to. Please feel free to download and refer. It covers: —Introduction to Windows Phone 7 —Tools for Development on Windows Phone 7 —Using Silverlight for WP7 development —Navigation among pages of application —WP 7 application lifecycle —Launchers and Choosers — Tombstoning —Fetching data from server using ODATA service (using LinqPad 4) —Deployment model of WP7 application ...

In this Issue: Dan Wahlin(-2-), Kirupa, Jeff Handley(-2-), Mike Snow, Robby Ingebretsen, David J. Kelley, Jonathan van de Veen, Lee, and Walt Ritscher(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Prism 4 – Silverlight and Custom Commands" Lee WP7: "Windows Phone 7 Themed Videos" Kirupa Expression Blend: "Building and Using Expression Blend Behaviors" David J. Kelley Shoutouts: The Studio 6 Software Blog folks have updated their ComboBox... check out the demo, and grab the code: Silverlight ComboBox Updated ...

Gizmox R&D team has been working very hard in order to bring our 6.4 version of Visual WebGui to the required stability level. During that period, 13 QA versions have been produced and our QA team and beta-testers group have been testing it for a coupon real-world applications while covering all the possible scenarios we could think of. The stability added in this version is really across the framework, mostly concentrating in client-side behavior and display matters but also in server-side and ...

In this Issue: Kunal Chowdhury, John Papa, Jesse Liberty(-2-), Den Delimarsky, Paul Sheriff, Charles Petzold, Brad Tutterow(-2-), Alexander Viken. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Using ValueConverter to Show/Hide Element in Silverlight (MVVM)" Kunal Chowdhury WP7: "Playing Music Files on WP7" Charles Petzold Shoutouts: Rob Tiffany has been kind enough to aggregate some (all?) of the Windows Phone 7 Demo Fest Tech Ed Video From SilverlightCream.com: Using ValueConverter to Show/Hide Element in Silverlight ...

The last couple of weeks I have been working through some proof of concepts for Windows Phone 7. While working through one exercise I had a flashback. The book I was reading mentioned how you needed to code your application to have the smallest possible memory and and processing speed footprint. Suddenly I was back in high school with my Tandy hand-held computer which had a single line of text screen and a whopping 1K of memory. Talk about limitations. So what else can you learn from developing in ...

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Social Networking is booming in last few years. For example, Facebook reaches 500 million users(as on July 2010) and Twitter has 190 million visitors per month. It's human tendency to know about others and share information with them. In any organization collaboration is key thing and it helps to improve operating efficiency. SharePoint 2010 development team keeps all these in mind and bundled cool Social Networking features with SharePoint 2010. Social Networking Features Ask Me About Activity Feed ...

I am a firm believer in learning best practices. I enjoy reading and studying SOLID and how to spot violations in the wild. I whole-heartedly concur with Separation of Concerns, Behavior-Driven development, lean software development and a hundred other things that have really cool buzz-wordy names and make me sound really smart. All these things only serve to enhance one binding truth about software development: it a thinking exercise. You can master every GoF pattern, and be the master of every ...

In this Issue: Martin Krüger, Vikas, Kevin Dockx, Brian Noyes, Kunal Chowdhury, Gergely Orosz, Garry McGlennon, René Schulte, Matias Bonaventura, Bart Czernicki, and Dennis Doomen. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "How to: create a nonrectangular ChildWindow - part 1" Martin Krüger Prism: "Prism Training Kit: Updated to Prism 4.0" Matias Bonaventura Shoutouts: Component Ways has a releast of their xamlDataGrid for Silverlight... might be worth a look ... check out the feature set and download the eval. ...

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, or performance. Today I’m going to focus a bit on the System.DateTime. This nice little value type (struct) has been in the BCL since the beginning, and while being broadly used to represent an instance of a date and time, there are many great properties, methods, and operators in this class that perhaps folks are less ...

I have, over the past 2 weeks, been developing on a system which should use Active Directory as it's user source. That is to say, it get's the usernames from AD and stores them in it's own database with a custom password for security. Now, when I first started work on this system, there were already a couple of hundred users set up, mostly using the correct username structure, but some which weren't. The requirement was to ensure that all users had a standard username which matched their AD username, ...

TDD, it has caused more office arguments than just about anything recently. In business, it's all about the money, so by telling a management team that you need to take a little longer to develop an application because you want to write a full test suite won't go down well. The management team will tell you that they can't afford the time it's going to take, so skip the tests and just develop the App. The problem is, that is a very short term view. I've been in that same situation, I've had that ...

PDC stands for Professional Developers Conference, an event regularly hosted by Microsoft, often at Seattle. It is a great opportunity for developers who work with Microsoft products to come together under one roof, get to know about new forthcoming products, be briefed about key technologies ruling the market and finally, mingle with one another. At least that was how it used to be all these years. So what was different this year? This year, when PDC 2010 was being held in the last week of October, ...

It's a common question very often I've been asked. Well , Microsoft defines "SharePoint is a Business Collaboration Platform for the Enterprise and the Internet". It's a perfect definition or IT Pros (esp. CXOs), but when it comes to Developers it requires more or different definition. SharePoint first released in the year 2001 as SharePoint Portal 2001. Basically It's a portal which has functionalities for intranet website. The features can be used as it is or can be customized minimum level. SharePoint ...

So my UNISA exams are over for the year – and I can finally dedicate some time to professional learning. Since my last development blog post I have had the opportunity to be exposed to some great technologies that I would like to learn more about, so here’s the plan… Continue my exploration of F# and finish reading Expert F# Learn Blend, partly because I feel it is a great tool that exposes some of the real power of XAML Do a few blog posts on my .Net Based RF Reader Explore some more design principles ...

In this Issue: Justin Angel, Colin Eberhardt, Kellabyte, Jesse Liberty, Jeremy Likness, Ryan Alford, and Brad Tutterow. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Using a Grid as the Panel for an ItemsControl" Colin Eberhardt WP7: "Windows Phone 7 Development Best Practices Wiki V0.1" Justin Angel MVVM: "Jounce Part 7: Validation and Save/Confirm/Cancel Operations" Jeremy Likness Shoutouts: If you're in Portland and ya wanna go to the Firestarter... Erik Mork & Co. scored a bus: Silverlight Firestarter Bus ...

The first step in improving your environment and taking steps to become more agile is understanding what is going on in your pipeline. Many shops today have no concept of where all their various changes are, what state they are in, and when they can expect to get stuff out the door. Dev churns out code as fast as they can and then they lob it over the wall to QA. QA is almost always understaffed and can’t keep up with the mass of code that keeps being flung at them from the developers. When you throw ...

It takes a short overview of Microsoft development tools and platforms evolvement in order to demonstrate the importance of supporting Web Forms development for ASP.NET Ajax with HTML5 enhancements. In an article that Todd Anglin publishes in Redmond Developers, under the title "Silverlight: What Web Forms Wanted to Be", Todd says that ASP.NET was supposed to be Web Forms. A framework that meant to duplicate VB6 ease of development or rather its more mature successor Window Forms. Asp.Net was expected ...

I've been meaning to write a blog post for a while about how we implemented a scatter gather pattern at one of my clients. Ive recently been reading Richard and the gangs new book which discusses a very similar pattern but with a different design decision. Based on that I have decided to expand on the original planned post to talk about what we did and our decision process using the decision framework discussed in the book. The aim here is to show that the "it depends" principle means that there ...

In this Issue: Brian Genisio, goldytech, Martin Krüger, Shawn Wildermuth, John Papa, Kunal Chowdhury, Michael Washington, Joost van Schaik, Karl Shifflett, Joe McBride, Bruno Terkaly, Xpert360(-2-, -3-), and Brad Tutterow. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Customized Scrolling in Silverlight using Expression Blend" Kunal Chowdhury WP7: "Windows Phone 7 Development for Absolute Beginners (The parts you care about)" Michael Washington Training: "In the Box – MVVM Training" Karl Shifflett Shoutouts: bspann ...

Does anyone know of a module for DotNetNuke which allows me to interact with a KeePass data file? I use KeePass a lot and have access to my different KeePass files on my desktop, my mobile phone, etc. Now I want to create a KeePass file which has things my development team needs access to. I would like to store the KeePass file in a location the web server can access and serve up the information through my DotNetNuke site. Any ideas on how to accomplish this ...

As you know I’m working in Ethos as an architecture and azure expert. Our company will arrange an azure training plus hands-on labs in December in Beijing office. And I will be one of the trainer which would be very existing. If you are in Beijing and can undersand Chinese (we will use Chinese in the training) and more important, if you are intrested in Azure just like me, please find the training details as follows. The training fee is 300RMB with the seats, computers and dinner. In order ensure ...

In this Issue: David Anson, Bart Czernicki, Jesse Liberty(-2-, -3-), Kirupa Chinnathambi, Jeremy Likness, and Martin Krüger. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "New SetterValueBindingHelper sample demonstrates its usefulness on Windows Phone 7 (and Silverlight 4)" David Anson WP7: "Windows Phone From Scratch #6 – Data Binding (Really)" Jesse Liberty MVVM: "Jounce Part 6: Visual States and Multiple Views per ViewModel" Jeremy Likness Shoutouts: Yesterday I mentioned Mindscape's control suite release but ...

Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework Microsoft SDKs MSDN Code Gallery Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework The Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework is a free, centralized code sample library provided by the Microsoft Community team. Their goal is 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. They write code samples based on developers’ frequently asked programming tasks, ...

I have been playing with the Windows Phone 7 Toolkit all day long (Saturday), all while reading Charles Petzold’s eBook brought to us for free by Microsoft Press. Time for this 1013-page book couldn’t have been better as it provides us with insights into WP7 development right at the time WP7 phones are becoming available to consumers. We greatly appreciate and acknowledge the cost Microsoft must have incurred and the big time sacrifice Charles must have made to get that high quality book publicly ...

Recently I have been given a short term assignment to develop a number of reports in Crystal Reports. Upon arriving to the client location I quickly found out that the only tool I will be using to create the reports is basically the Crystal Reports itself. My initial look at the database quickly revealed that the database structure is far from perfect and that it has some confusing table relationships, another hurdle was in the fact that several columns in various tables were user customizable for ...

In this Issue: Michael Washington, Peter Kuhn, Bill Reiss, Lee, Walt Ritscher, John Papa, Kunal Chowdhury, cherylws, Jeremy Likness, Martin Krüger(-2-), Michael Crump, and Brad Tutterow. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "I know what you downloaded last summer" Peter Kuhn WP7: "Free fonts for commercial game development" Bill Reiss Training: "A couple of more data-related Silverlight Quickstarts for you" cherylws Shoutouts: Martin Krüger has an accordian style published in Expression Gallery: New accordion ...

A couple of weeks ago, I took a four hour drive to visit Tampa where I got to meet our Microsoft Developer Evangelist Joe Healy (aka. Devfish). Present were (in alphabetical order) Scott Dorman, Nikita Polyakov, Bill Reiss, Ken Tucker, and Kevin Wolf. If you have been following Windows Phone 7 news lately, you will notice the names above being quiet familiar. Joe Healy was recently featured in a Jessie Liberty YapCast discussing WP7 and the important role Florida plays in evangelizing the value this ...

Last week we discussed returning immutable POCOs from an enclosing class so that you can prevent someone who asks for your class’s data to mutate it out from under you. Now we’re going to get a little more complex and talk about returning immutable collections from an enclosing class for the same reasons. I will discuss several different methods for returning collections in a read-only fashion with their pros and cons, including performance implications. The Problem Many times you will create a type ...