Tag | Development Posts
TechEd 2011 got us talking about the next Visual Studio version called vNext. The update adds multiple small and subtle performance improvements as well as major new ALM tools. These tools focus on helping developers work in the so called Virtuous Cycle, which consists of development and operation in a continuous loop. The major tools concentrate on requirements gathering, agile planning, stakeholder feedback, test coverage analysis and much much more. You can see the full session by Cameron Skinner ...
With the release of the Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 Beta, Visual Basic joins C# as a supported development language for XNA. I’ve been busily converting my samples to VB recently. They aren’t all done yet, but quite a few are (only three remain that I plan to convert). Rather than make anyone wait, I’ll share what I’ve completed so far and will add more when I have the remainder finished. Without further ado: Content Pipeline Extension Sample: VB Source Code – Related Blog Post DragAndDropGame: ...
I’m crazy excited about the technology industry right now. We’re seeing evolution happen in real time, and at all levels. From the major platforms, we’re seeing Google’s overall story taking shape, Microsoft playing catch-up but showing with WP7 and Windows 7 that they are very much still a competitor, and Apple continuing to bolster their empire beyond fanboys with their quality technology and innovations. Then there’s the software platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and others that are ...
At http://radar.oreilly.com/20... there is an excellent discussion on whether Software Development has become too process orientated. Whilst not as ground-breaking as Fred Brooks "Mythical Man-Month", the article is thought proking and provoked a lot of useful discussion. For example: I have to agree that process in excess is stifling. "Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler" is the solution to most of our programming problems. What works best, depends ...
June the 23rd the Belgium user groups have another free event. It’s called the Community Day and this year they will celebrate their 5th anniversary! To celebrate this they invited some collegue-usergroups from across the border to speak there as well. Timmy Kokke from Sixin (http://www.sixin.nl) and myself will be there to talk about a number of items. I will be doing a talk on MVC 3 (not so interesting for regular readers of this blog) and a talk on Surface Development (which fits this blog more ...
One of the several hats I wear at work is one of configuration manager for the internal data management application my employer uses. This app currently has 11 solutions of active code which need to be built whenever we release to the QA environment. The QA releases typically occur a minimum of 3 times per month and take approximately 30 minutes from source control "Get Latest" to the final step of the deployment onto the QA servers. A few years ago, my team automated the post-build deployment steps ...
A couple of days ago I had the wonderful surprise to find a mention (and a link!) to MVVM Light on USAToday.com. The article talks about the new USA Today app available for Windows Phone 7. MVVM Light is mentioned as well as JSON.NET just after the high quality of the development tools is mentioned: “That same high bar for tools extends into the community as well. MVVM Light and JSON.Net were extremely useful moving past mundane tasks and instead getting to the business of building our app.” – Tim ...
You probably have already visited Channel 9, and if you have not I would recommend to definitely check it out. There are literally thousands of videos about development using Microsoft technologies (and more). You can watch the videos on the site using Silverlight player or you can use links on each video page for downloading. This usually works fine if you are interested in just one or a small number of videos, but it might become somewhat tedious if you want to download a bunch of them. I recently ...
Its been a while since I blogged. Its been hard balancing blogging time, work and many other activities. Most my days and even evenings have been cluttered with a number of tasks ranging from mundial to critical. There is some which have been most interesting include very nice lessons I took from from some of the people I respect in the industry. I will try and highlight some of the things I did in below. 1) The DataObjects.NET contribution programme. From February this year I quickly responded to ...
At TechEd this year, there's only a few sessions and expo booths aimed squarely at devs rather than sysadmins and DBAs, but one of the things I picked up on was what's going into Visual Studio vNext. There's no shiny new UI features (that they've announced so far...) but they are doing a whole lot of work improving the performance and memory usage of VS - parallel builds (already supported in core MSBuild, just not used in VS up to now), and spinning off a separate process to do each build. This ...
The worst part about web application development is the phase in the unit testing where we developers swear we've fixed something, but still when we test the change, the fix isn't there. After awhile, we remember to clear the browser cache and we discover the fix worked! In some cases, we really haven't fixed what we thought we fixed--and in other cases, we haven't really cleared the cache. I was working in FireFox recently and realized I hadn't really cleared the cache when I added a new button ...
Welcome to my new blog. This blog will be where I share with all of you everything new that I learn about software development in general. I have been in the industry for about ten years, but recently came to the conclusion that I needed to really focusing on developing my skills more than I had been. Not that I hadn't been before. When a Microsoft conference would come around I would always catch the keynote, watch several of the sessions, and spend my evenings learning about the newest technologies ...
He who fails to plan, plans to fail. – unknown In many ways, one of the most dreaded tasks of every iteration is the Sprint Planning Meeting. This meeting is a very important meeting, but many, many things can go wrong and make this meeting a very long and very painful experience. However, this meeting is critical to the success of the team. If the team doesn’t know what they’re doing at the beginning of the iteration, how can they commit to getting the work done? To hopefully help ease the pain ...
In this Issue: David Catuhe, Andrea Boschin, Kunal Chowdhury(-2-), Colin Eberhardt, Mike Ormond, Doug Rathbone, John Garland, Jesse Liberty, Mike Taulty, and Pete Brown. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "ItemsControl from scratch to your own controls" Andrea Boschin WP7: "Metro In Motion #5 – SandwichFlow" Colin Eberhardt Shoutouts: Alan Cruz sent me a link to his Social Network site he's developed in Silverlight... this is another 'sign yourself up' thing... I did it, nothing bad happened :) ... Alan ...
In case you missed it, the Windows Phone Hackathon was last night. TechEd attendees and community folks from around Atlanta showed up to get some free training on Windows Phone development (Silverlight, XNA, Azure) and have some Q&A with various subject matter experts (and free help with their projects.) We had a really good turnout, with most people in the Silverlight room learning about making apps. We had a few folks in the XNA room, some who were brand new to XNA and others who were already ...
If you're in Seattle or will be in Seattle, well ok ... actually Redmond, the 2nd week of June, and you've got some time and money to invest in your career, Alex Golesh announced a great opportunity. Alex is a Silverlight MVP, and way back in February of 2010, I saw the WP7 emulator running on his laptop at the MVP Summit... that means he's been involved since before they told all of us at the Summit that we were now WP7 devs! Lots (maybe all, for all I know) of the WP7 training you'll find at at ...
This has been a fantastic week of XNA activity and news. Standing ovation the the XNA Team for the interaction they’ve been having with the community as well as the new features they’ve been rolling out for Xbox LIVE Indie Game developers. Simply outstanding and I can’t wait to see what might be coming next. It’s also been a fun week to watch people’s Dream Build Play projects inch ever closer to completion. With the submission deadline coming up in June this is the crunch time for many developers. ...
Over the last few months we have been developing custom SharePoint timer jobs. Since the jobs run under a Windows Service it makes it difficult to debug them. The saving grace we found is called ULS. It gives you a logging location that is consistent with the native timer jobs and an API which resembles most other logging frameworks. In order write events you first need to include the Microsoft.SharePoint.Admini... assembly. Then it is simply a matter of getting an instance of a SPDiagnosticsService ...
I’ve had great first quarter working with AgileThought in the Tampa, FL office. Are you still moving in the direction you set out on or have your plans shifted? If there is a change, are you still in the right place to do so? Those were the questions I asked myself, before I began my transition. I’ve spend considerable amount of time thinking of where I am taking my career [different story for a different post] and decided to continue my story at AgileThought. I’ve met with the senior leadership ...
So, the similarities between the tech bubble of the late 90’s and the current hiring frenzy of SharePoint people is too similar to ignore. It seems as though if you put SharePoint on your resume SOMEONE will hire you. This of course is good and bad. Bad because people who don’t know what they are doing are creating huge messes, and good because those who know what they are doing can make more-money-than-they-are-worth cleaning up those messes. Another artifact coming from this SharePoint Bubble is ...
When: Tuesday, May 24, 2011 - 1:30 - 4:30 PM Where: Microsoft Dallas Office - 7000 SR-161 (George Bush Turnpike), Dallas, TX 75039 A free, unbiased look at the current and future development with .NET. Brought to you by Microsoft, CODE Training & EPS Software, this free afternoon event presents an unbiased look at the current and future development with .NET. Join MVP and RD Markus Egger, for an afternoon of free and independent information about current Microsoft development technologies! What ...
Let’s focus on Exam 70-583 this time. This exam is PRO: Designing and Developing Windows Azure Applications. This guide itself will be a different approach to preparing for the exam itself. Instead of just taking the individual topics, let’s review the topic in as much information as we can. Here is a set of resources to get started. This is the topic I will be presenting at TechEd North America 2011, so expect more information after 5/18/2011. Here is the link to the session: http://northamerica.msteche... ...
The very first thing that needs to happen is the need for a Windows Azure account. Try it free! http://www.microsoft.com/wi... The Learning Plan http://learning.microsoft.c... The Training Kit http://www.microsoft.com/do... The General Toolset Assessment and Planning ...
One thing that has become clear over the last couple of years is the inclusion of helpful tools and resources in every Administrator’s Toolbox. Gary Lapointe created a PowerShell Cheat Sheet (a one pager quick hit) http://bit.ly/kJVnGd PowerGUI PowerShell Quick Reference Card for SharePoint. http://www.powergui.org/ent... SharePoint Software Factory 2010 http://bit.ly/eC7efh SharePoint 2010 Operations Guides http://bit.ly/hq9UZy Marcy Kellar’s Branding and Customization ...
This past week the company I work for re-launched our external facing internet site, all powered by SharePoint 2010. I already blogged about it, but have you ever wondered, what does it take to build a great looking site? There are 3 basic levels of Branding in SharePoint 2010: Low Effort Remember the themes in SharePoint 2007? well its incredibly easy to build them in SharePoint 2010.The best examples out there are the ones that use Power Point 2010 to produce color schemes and styles and apply ...
Let’s focus on Exam 70-513 this time. This exam is TS: Windows Communication Foundation Development with Microsoft .NET Framework 4. Additional Resources: http://msdn.microsoft.com/e... http://msdn.microsoft.com/e... The exam objectives are: Creating Services Create service and operation contracts http://msdn.microsoft.com/e... http://msdn.microsoft.com/e... http://msdn.microsoft.com/e... ...
It’s not often I let my personal life creep into affecting the things I’m involved in and doing. I usually let my hobbies kind of get me through the tough parts. And while I’ve been having fun distracting myself with playing games and coding this week, I’ll admit my eye wasn’t on the community like it normally is. I apologize for the late posting of the notes and for how light and sparse they are. I’m sure there was more going on in the XNA community (and if you were missed in this weeks notes, shoot ...
I have mentioned I will be speaking on a Cram 4 exam session at the upcoming TechEd North America 2011 in Atlanta. The topic is the prep for exam 70-583: Designing and Developing Windows Azure Applications. This is a PRO Level exam. There are two other exams needed to get the MCPD Azure credential, those exams are TS level exams. Those exams are: EXAM 70-513 TS: Windows Communication Foundation Development with Microsoft .NET Framework 4 EXAM 70-516 TS: Accessing Data with Microsoft .NET Framework ...
If you organize your BizTalk projects based on the type of artifacts, e.g., a solution contains schema project, pipeline project, map project, orchestration project, you might often encounter build failure problems due to the missing assembly reference. Sometime, even if you have the references properly added and you are able to verify them in object browser, you might still have problem not seeing the newly added or modified artifacts in any configuration window. The reasons for this kind of issues ...
My colleague Giles is speaking at a series of breakfast meetings on Using Tooling to drive Agility across the Development Lifecycle. This session is one of several during an 8:40 to 10:30 “elongated” breakfast :-). The sessions are free and hopefully one is taking place near you: Birmingham, 11 May, Regus, Brindley Place, Birmingham, B1 2JB Manchester, 13 May, Regus, Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester, M1 5AN Dublin, 22 June, SQS offices London, 30 June, 7-11 Moorgate, London, EC2R 6AF Giles ...
Hyper-V Virtual Machines Advantage: 64-bit support dynamic memory allocation multi-core CPU Can install Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 and later Disadvantage: Can't get sound to work on those machines yet [Updated 2011-05-05] This is disappointing, but I guess it fits most people's requirement as most people don't use Hyper-V for personal development environment. Guess I'll just have to set up those machines for remote connect. http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jo... ...
RedGate SQL Source Control is a Management Studio add-in that allows you to seamlessly (hopefully...) connect your existing source control system to SQL Server. It is advertised as doing all the typical stuff you'd expect: Source control schemas and data within SSMS Connect databases to TFS, SVN, Sourcegear Vault, Vault Pro, Mercurial, Perforce, Git, Bazaar, and any source control system with a capable command line Work with shared development databases, or individual copies Track changes to follow ...
In this Issue: David Catuhe, Paul Sheriff, Bill Steele, Den Delimarsky, Bill Burrows, Doug Rathbone, Matthias Shapiro, Jason Alderman, Jessica Fosler, John Garland, WindowsPhoneGeek, Jesse Liberty, and Jeff Prosise. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight 5’s New and Improved Threading Architecture" Jeff Prosise WP7: "Silverlight Game Development webcasts" Bill Steele Shoutouts: Jesse Liberty has a short post up describing some of the features we can expect with the Tooling in Mango From SilverlightCream.com: ...
As Harry Hill might say, "I like Visual Studio. And I like Eclipse. But which one is better? Only one way to find out…" For a lot of people a lot of the time, the question is irrelevant. If you are doing Java development, you are going to pick Eclipse, and for .NET development you are going to pick Visual Studio. But both IDEs are extensible, and have communities providing extensions for other languages, so if you are using another language it might not be so clear cut. And if you are a language ...
Sometimes, the way that LINQ to Twitter materializes queries into entities isn’t immediately clear. It’s easy to get confused until you see the patterns or make a correlation between the Twitter API results and their representations as LINQ to Twitter entities. In this post, I’ll explain some of the logic behind the design of LINQ to Twitter entities and demonstrate an example of one of the more oddly designed entity types, Search. Note: They'll be talking about MVC3 during multiple sessions at Tech-Ed. ...
Intro I’m sure by now you have heard that the Silverlight 5 Beta has been released. I recently had a chance to Guest Blog for SSWUG on “Getting Started with the Silverlight 5 Beta” Now before we get started learning about it, let’s look at a few new features: What is new in the Silverlight 5 Beta? Multiple Window Support - Trusted app can create additional Windows. Ancestor RelativeSource Binding – Enables a DataTemplate to bind to a property on the control that contains it. Implicit DataTemplates ...
If you are: a senior technologist (Application Architect, Senior Developer or similar) with strong experience in developing solutions using the Windows platform (Visual Studio, SQL Server, IIS etc) fancy working for Microsoft UK and are not put off by these pictures of my team (and it is before 1st May 2011) then I would highly recommend you check out the job posting for two positions as Architect Evangelists in my team. My personal ideal “new colleague” would also: Enjoy online FPS gaming and be ...
Many time developer required specific port for development when he/she using Visual Studio for asp.net application development. They specify port by taking Properties of the Web Site and select Web option. Under Server option select Use Visual Studio Development Server and then set port in Specific Port option. Ok when Windows Azure developer need to set a specific port to the WebRole application they need to take different approach. From Solution Explorer Window select open WebRole Section in my ...
The Author provides a very thorough grounding in WCF, The book is excellent and well worth working through the sample downloadable from the Apress web site. I do have an issue with the advertising of the book. It states "You'll also learn how move your current .Net remoting and web service applications to WCF". There were a few pages on upgrading web service to WCF but not the case study and upgrade pointers that I was expecting. In spite of this, I have no hesitation in recommending this book to ...
In this Issue: Dave Davis, Oren Gal, Colin Eberhardt, Dan Wahlin, Jeff Prosise(-2-), @yuriylsh, Bill Reiss, Richard Waddell, Andrea Boschin(-2-), András Velvárt. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Working with User Names and Roles in Silverlight Applications" Dan Wahlin WP7: "Silverlight for Windows Phone Programming Tip #7" Jeff Prosise MIX11: "MIX11 Mass Download Tool" @yuriylsh From SilverlightCream.com: Controlling Silverlight Child Windows Using MVVM Dave Davis has a post up that revisits a subject ...
This has been kind of a crappy week for me. Kids are all puking like crazy so I’m up most nights taking care of them. Fun times being a day! (I have 4 kids in case you didn’t know!). And while my kids have been puking, the community has been busy puking too. Puking up a ton of awesomeness! Yeah…probably not the best analogy but I’m tired. I did want to take the time to point out one thing that resonated loudly with me this week. You’ll see some interviews with Kris Steele by Steven Hurdle. In that ...
Sometime we found that Server have MySQL .net connector pre-installed but matter is that they used old version or another version who not matched with our MySQL .connector version. so in this condition you have unable to make them work on Server. here is a solution how to deploy them with no problem like that. in development system mainly we use .net connector so we need the same version on server to deploy our application. the problem is created because the component on development machine called ...
After much careful consideration, I have decided to host my primary blog with WordPress
Software Development in a Dynamic Environment
Working with the team at GeeksWithBlogs.net has been a wonderful experience, and I will periodically make posts here.
Please stop by the new blog, and see what is happening....
Ajax enabled data centric applications are getting popular day by day in web development space. While these type of web applications provide rich user experience, building a robust and powerful application quickly is a great challenge for developers. Fortunately Microsoft has started providing great frameworks, plug-ins and APIs to facilitate this process. Last week Microsoft announced a new version of java-script API “datajs”, which is intended to help web developers to build data centric AJAX applications ...
HTML5 introduces markup-level functionality for rich graphics, animation and web multimedia. It also supports a richer web application functionality and extends the client capabilities with local storage. Many pundits see it as the next generation web - web 3.0 if you like - and an open standard replacement for propriety plug-ins, Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash. But, for all its new features, HTML5 is still only the end product. This article looks at HTML5 from the web programmer's point of ...
I haven't posted a recap lately, because the Virtual Brown Bag recordings weren't being uploaded for a while. That was fixed two weeks ago, so I had a lot of meetings to catch up on. Here's an all-you-can-eat brown bag buffet… March 3 Guest presenter Jim Christopher - creator of StudioShell, a deeply integrated PowerShell host available inside of Visual Studio 2010 and 2008. StudioShell exposes many of Visual Studio’s extensibility points in a simple and consistent way, and it makes the Visual Studio ...
MIX 11 happened this past week and I’m still trying to find and catch up on all the announcements changes that came from that. It looks like we can now use XNA on the web via Silverlight (and am I reading that we can do 3d?). We can now use Silverlight in our XNA projects with Windows Phone 7 (yay for having an easy way to make UI’s in XNA now!). And I’m still searching around to see if there were any other big news. The Silverlight + XNA news is pretty big because that opens up a lot of new game ...
Here’s a quick start introduction to the ADO.NET Entity Framework Code First Development Pattern. For a more complete (but still intro) walkthrough, check out ScottGu’s blog. At the time of this writing, you’ll need the EF 4.1 Release Candidate. After EF 4.1 is released you’ll no doubt be able to find it on the ADO.NET team blog. 1. Create a new empty ASP.NET MVC2 Web Application, add a reference to System.Data.Entity. If using the EF4.1 RC - add a reference to the EntityFramework dll that comes ...
Last week, I was interviewed by Zandra Nilocas from Microsoft Philippines. It was my first time experience to talk about something in front of the camera so it's not surprising that I looked like an idiot in that interview (you know swiveling my chair back and forth without noticing it). Anyway in the interview we talked about ASP.NET WebForms, MVC and Web Matrix in general and just to elaborate a bit of what we talked about and to clarify things out, I have decided to write this post... WebForms ...