As a brief interlude from my Concurrent Collections series, I thought I would give an roundup of how the lean startup experiments have been progressing. As you can expect, there's been some good aspects and some bad aspects. The experiments so far After lots of discussions, arguments, posing and ruling out hypotheses, we came up with two 'starter' hypotheses we could test fairly easily: Customers don't agree to send data on how they use SmartAssembly; which features they use, the versions of .NET...
I just got back from the Consumer Electronics Show 2012 (CES) which was held in Las Vegas. This is a good show for me and the company that I work for as it shows us some of the possible future trends of digital media consumption. Things presented at CES may just come and go and be quickly forgotten, but at the same time, there are definite themes on the conference that companies need to pay attention to. 3D is so yesterday! This was actually the second CES that I have been to and both were focused...
I’ve been seeing many members in the forums asking how to display a large copy of the image on mouseover. Some of them are displaying the image in a Repeater, GridView or DataList control. I didn’t find any direct solution that shows the scenario they wanted so I thought of writing this post to demonstrate how to go about it. I know there are lot of ways of doing/implementing a solution for this scenario and this is just one them. In this example I’m going to use the DataList control for displaying...
I presented two talks on windows azure recently. One among them was focusing on Windows Phone 7 app development. The other one was on MVC3 ASP .Net app. The idea was to introduce how Windows Azure can be leveraged in both these exciting platforms. The talk was demo centric; below are the slides and the demo / webcasts recordings links for the same. Talk one- Building Windows Phone Applications with Windows Azure Platform and Visual Studio 2010 Demo included: Creating a Demo application from VS 2010...
Its been a while since I've played with Message Queuing and C# and decided that I should reduce that counter.During the simple process of figuring how to follow Microsoft's MSDN directions, I ran into a couple of headaches that could have been solved with a few navigational pictures. To the small number of people that this may help (and my future self when I need to do this again) here are the needed pictures.My journey started out with google and the keywords "installing MSMQ", the first selection...
I’m not sure I have ever thrown this down in writing. I probably have said this 800 or 900 times, but I think that HTML 5 in SharePoint 2010 sucks. The support is terrible in the two most prevalent web browsers at the enterprise level – Internet Explorer and Firefox. If you can’t even get the video tag to work in IE 9 or the latest version of Firefox then that’s a huge fail for the product with HTML 5. What I think needs to be done in the product to improve HTML 5 support so that we can move towards...
Today's $10 Deal of the Day from APress at http://www.apress.com/97814... is Beginning Google Maps API 3"This book is about the next generation of the Google Maps API. It will provide the reader with the skills and knowledge necessary to incorporate Google Maps version 3 on web pages in both desktop and mobile browsers."...
Not sure why this is being blocked, must be the word Amazon or maybe the link? So I am posting my review here word for word and hope they unblock it.ReviewGot it yesterday for my anniversary as a gift and was loving it. Great size for a tablet, hardware performs well, screen is good, and it's priced very well. If you want a tablet to read and watch "some" video it's a good purchase, that would be even better if they had TV show and movie rentals like Amazon. It would have gotten 4 starts, but this...
I have been a member of GWB for a while now, and have really enjoyed it. There is a sense of community and I enjoy some of the feedback and comments I get from other posters as well as reading other community members blogs. Part of the reason of joining GWB was seeing what other people with similar interests were blogging about and interacting with them. What does worry me is lately I have noticed an increase in spam by some of the other bloggers… By spam, I don’t mean reviews of products as blog...
Note No poker players where harmed during the making of my poker bot. Origin and idea One of my pet projects was a poker bot. This poker bot worked on Pokerstars. It was able to play poker without human intervention. Unfortunately it lost most of the time. The mouse movement was a issue with this bot. To avoid detection i wanted the mouse to move as humanly as possible. So no straight line and at normal speed. After searching on Google and grabing some ideas i have made some code to round the gathered...
Note that this is a “rant” about the following post: BOMBSHELL: Huge Company Bans Internal Email, Switches Totally To Facebook-Type-Stuff And Instant Messaging @ http://www.businessinsider.... At the end of November ABC posted an article stating Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos (formerly known as Atos Origin), wants to move to a “Zero-mail” policy for it’s internal communications. Mr Breton is not the first one to come up with this plan but his claim that he has not sent an...
Welcome to Part 2, In Part 1 we discussed the advantages of creating a Test Rig in the cloud, the Azure edge and the Test Rig Topology we want to get to. In Part 2, Let’s start by understanding the components of Azure we’ll be making use of followed by manually putting them together to create the test rig, so… let’s get down dirty start setting up the Test Rig. What Components of Azure will I be using for building the Test Rig in the Cloud? To run the Test Agents we’ll make use of Windows Azure Compute...
Part of the challenge with HTML5 is understanding the range of different technologies and finding good samples. The following are some of the sites I have found most useful. IE TestDrive http://ie.microsoft.com/tes... A good set of demos using touch, appcache, IndexDB, etc. Some of these only work with IE10. Be sure to click the "More Demos" link at the bottom for a longer list of Demos in a nicely organized list form. Chrome Experiments http://www.chromeexperiment... Chrome browser-oriented...
It’s no secret that daylight savings time can wreak havoc on systems that rely heavily on dates. The system I work on is centered around recording dates and times, so naturally my co-workers and I have seen our fair share of date-related bugs. From time to time, however, we come across something that we haven’t seen before. A few weeks ago the following error message started showing up in our logs: “The supplied DateTime represents an invalid time. For example, when the clock is adjusted forward,...
Hello, I've been struggling with Google maps till I found that someone implemented a wrapper so that you can use Google Map as an ASP.Net user control which is a great effort indeed. You can download it from this link. However, after using it for a while, I've found out that it is storing the Google map object only once in the session and getting it from there whenever needed which was a problem for me that when you update the map in some page, you'll find it updated on another page. So, I've digged...
One of the groups that I am currently President of (IASA Kansas City) is hosting an event by Rachel Hack (Google Community Manager) about the Google Fiber Project in Kansas City. The event will be hosted at Balance Point’s office off 92nd and Ward Parkway on the Missouri side of the state line. If you are interested, please check out further details here and get registered. It is after work hours from 6 to 8 PM on the night of November 29, 2011. It is free to attend and open to anyone who gets registered....
There’s been a lot of discussion around Scott Hanselman’s recent blog post around profanity in presentations. He discusses whether the use of profanity is appropriate in conference presentations, and the feedback through comments and the Twitterverse are varied. Some say its ok, others say it isn’t. Everyone seems to be discussing about the presentation itself, the “artistic license” that presenters are granted when creating their presentation. I wanted to give a different take on the subject – the...
In this Issue: Andrea Boschin, Mark Monster, Antoni Dol, Chaitanya Venneti, Erik Arthur and Jeffrey Ferman, David Kelley, Jose Fajardo(-2-), Andy Beaulieu, Rudi Grobler, Chad Campbell, and Andrej Tozon. Above the Fold: VS2011: "Visual Studio XAML Designer: New Grid Features" WP7: "Statistics for your Windows Phone application (Google Analytics)" Mark Monster Metro/WinRT/Windows8: "Physics Games: Multi-targeting Windows 8 + Windows Phone 7" Andy Beaulieu Shoutouts: Michael Palermo's latest Desert...
In trying to comparing complex objects to confirm a unit test, I thought rather than going through the hassle of trying to implement IComparable or overriding .Equals that perhaps reflection would be a better means. A quick google search turned up some useful code that compares via reflection. This was close to what I wanted but I thought it’d be better to have it available as an extension method and I needed it in vb.net (excuse the horror) so this is what I came up with: <System.Runtime.Compiler...
I have always been a fan of Google Reader. I have been using it since it first came out and have never tried another feed reader. Yesterday they decided to update the UI to fit their new G+ look and in my opinion, made the application almost impossible to use. I have three main machines I use on a daily basis. A Dell XPS desktop with dual 24 inch monitors, a Toshiba Protégé with a 13 inch display, and a 11 inch MacBook Air. When I am at my desk all day, the Dell is awesome for getting development...
Error: There is a temporary failure. Please retry later. (The request failed, because you exceeded quota limits for this hour. If you experience this often, upgrade your subscription to a higher one). Additional Information : Throttling due to resource : Connections." If you Google this issue, you only find different blogs and forums where geeks discussing this issue and giving suggestion to each other. Even when I counter this issue I also review my application architecture and I re-write the Azure...
Yet another non-technical post (because y'all love knowing what is going on in my life xD) and a not so long one at that. Soon I'll be starting these postings with "Dear diary" and talking about how painfully in love I am and emotionally unstable... Wait no, google would love to index that . So tomorrow is my last day in Belgium for (hopefully) a long long time. I grew up here so I have a love/hate relationship with it all. Well, I can rejoice in being present when they split Brussel-Halle-Vilvoorde....
I may be a bit slow on the uptake here, but I'm not sure how excited to get about my social networks influencing my search results? I think it's good that you can indicate you like something on Facebook as your friends can have a look at the item or choose to ignore it, and I guess it makes sense that if you like something, then some of your friends will like the same thing. But when I do a Google search, do I *really* want it to show bias towards things my friends have liked? Also, how many clicks...
.Net has several methods of serialization and sometimes it causes a lot of confusion even for experienced programmers. I believe the best article to describe the different methods is Aaron Skonnard’s Serialization in Windows Communication Foundation(MSDN Magazine > Issues > 2006 > August) (by some reason it’s not highly rated by Google and other articles are coming first for Serialization related requests) There is also a brief comparison table in StackOverflow What are the differences between...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders post can be found here. This post continues a series of Little Wonders in the BCL String class. Yes, we all work with strings in .NET daily, so perhaps you already know most of these. However, there are a lot of little fun things that the String class can do that often get overlooked....
I've just installed the Windows 8 Developer Preview. These are some first impressions: Installation of the preview was quite smooth and didn't take too long. It took a few minutes to extract the files onto a virtual image, but feature installation then seemed to happen almost instantaneously (according to the feedback on the screen). The installation routine then went into a preparation cycle that took two or three minutes. Then the virtual machine rebooted and after a couple of minutes more preparation,...
So I’ve played with the developer preview of windows 8 today. I’m trying to like Metro. But, at least on the desktop, it feels wrong. In fact, its not really windows anymore. In the sense “windows” are less in favour compared to full screen apps. It really should be called Boxes 1.0 I played around a bit with the new visual studio with metro templates….. great tools as usual. But…designing metro apps feels like a subset. The variety of apps in the windows world would find it hard to translate into...
Recently I attended Microsoft HTML5 WebCamp where I had a chance to get insights on all new features HTML5 has to offer. Couple things to mention: - Canvas - a new HTMl5 feature that uses JavaScript to draw bitmap graphics on a web page. Simple approach (less JS coding) makes this interesting: empty space is treated as a painter canvas and a painter brush is replaced with JavaScript. - SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is another graphic tool widely publicized. It is not new, it has been around for...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders post can be found here. This post continues a series of Little Wonders in the BCL String class. Yes, we all work with strings in .NET daily, so perhaps you already know most of these. However, there are a lot of little fun things that the String class can do that often get overlooked....
I’ve always liked Red Gate products. Reflector is a great tool for decompiling assemblies to see how something was constructed, and the ANTS Memory Profiler is an excellent tool for discovering sources of memory issues in your applications. So when I had a chance to really examine the latest ANTS Performance Profiler (6.3), I jumped at the opportunity to see how well it works. Background A performance profiler’s main job is to keep track of how much time is typically spent in each unit of code. This...
Para los que quieren smartphones con Mango, cada vez hay más a la venta. La compañía Taiwanesa HTC es la segunda en sacar lanzar smartphones con Windows Mango. Mango es la última versión del sistema operativo para celulares de Microsoft. Este sistema operativo ahora si podrá competir contra iPhones y smartphones con Android. Los dispositivos HTC Radar y Titan saldrán primero a la venta en Europa y Asia, para nuestros países latino americanos Nokia parece prometedora. Microsoft debe ahora apurarse...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders post can be found here. I’m going to begin a series of Little Wonders in the BCL String class. Yes, we all work with strings in .NET daily, so perhaps you already know most of these. However, there are a lot of little fun things that the String class can do that often get overlooked and...
Recently I used Entity Framework 4.1 with Code First approach and step on a hidden rake. My application should create an SQL Server CE database file using supplied model classes. I created some model classes, one of the classes was declared as namespace MyProject.Models { public class Object { public int Id {get; set;} public String Name {get; set;} } } Then, I tried to declare property of DbSet<MyProject.Models.O... type in my class derived from DbContext: namespace MyProject.Models { public...
I am a reformed former JavaScript hater. In the 90s and early 2000s I muddled through JavaScript compatibility issues, poor performance and a lack of development & debugging tools. When ASP.NET came out, promising to hide me from the complexity of browser incompatibilities, I fully embraced server-side web development. This approach may have worked in 2002, but it does not today. The world's expectations have been reset by Ajax, Google Maps, mobile web sites, high performance JavaScript engines,...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders post can be found here. Today we will look at five easy ways to aggregate sequences. Often times when we’re looking at a sequence of objects, we want to do perform some sort of aggregation across those sequences to find a calculated result from the sequence. The methods we will be looking...
After setting up the Cross Domain parameters properly, using _setDomainName(), _setAllowHash(), and _setAllowLinker(), and making sure to call the _trackPageview() last, using ga_debug.js in Chrome, I was able to see that the AccountID and the SessionID were still changing upon navigating to the other Domain. This meant the cookies were not being shared across the Domains using the _link() method from Google Analytics Asynchronous Library. So what is the [workaround]? After carefully studying how...
I’m on vacation this week, and I didn’t intend to write a blog post. But after the sea changes in the mobile computing industry and, ironically, my extra time to ponder it, I really couldn’t stay silent. In the space of four days, Google may have effectively taken Android “private” and HP seems to have euthanized webOS in public. It’s really hard to believe all of this is happening. But we can at least have a go at understanding what it means and what might, or might not, come next for Microsoft...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders post can be found here. Today we’re going to look at a very small, and sometimes helpful static method of the object class. Of course, we know most of the key methods of the object class by heart, especially the ones we tend to override often such as Equals(), GetHashCode(), and ToString()....
Microsoft isn’t the only one who seems to be pushing native computing once again. We’re now seeing Google at the same table with the current beta release of Chrome. Yes, Chrome now supports native applications to be embedded in a web site and it’s just like embedding JavaScript. More information can be found in here: http://chrome.blogspot.com/... The native client SDK runs a sandbox environment which means Chrome handles security of the module just like...
Recently I was working on a project where I needed to implement mapping functionality - I am not new to mapping technology, as a matter fact, a few years back I created my own Winform mapping control which interfaced with yahoo and ArcGIS maps which works great in some of my apps, however, I was looking for something more and didn’t want to re-invent the wheel – so to speak. I stumbled upon GMap.NET and as one user put it, “Absolutely fantastic piece of work”. The only thing lacking is proper documentation....
C# is a wonderful language for modern programming. While everything in C# has a reason and a place, occasionally there are things that can be confusing for a developer who isn’t aware of what is happening behind the scenes. This is my fifth post in the Little Pitfalls series where I explore these issues; the previous Little Pitfall post can be found here. Side Note: I’ll be presenting sessions on the Little Wonders and the Little Pitfalls at the St. Louis Day of .NET conference on August 5th and...
CTEs or common table expressions can be used to make recursive SQL stantements. CTEs are ANSI-99 standard. Please read www.sql-server-performance.... for more information. I have only had 2 instances in my career where CTEs made sense for me to use in a pratical setting. If you have found them more practical, please share. The first time I needed a CTE I was displaying corporate branches from a recurssive table. Some branches had branches, which had branches, and so on, whereas...
C# is a wonderful language for modern programming. While everything in C# has a reason and a place, occasionally, there are things that can be confusing for a developer who isn’t aware of what is happening behind the scenes. This is my fourth post in the Little Pitfalls series where I explore these issues; the previous Little Pitfall post can be found here. Today we are going to look at a potential pitfall that can bite developers who expect the default behavior of declaring the same method (with...
I just got back from Microsoft’s 15,000 attendee-strong Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Los Angeles, and I have to say, the company and its partners are pumped. How can this be, given the number of people who have written Microsoft’s eulogy of late? If Amazon owns the cloud, if Apple owns the consumer, if Google owns search, if Cisco owns unified communications, if EMC/VMWare owns virtualization, if Oracle and SAP own ERP and if Oracle/Siebel and Salesforce.com own CRM, how can Microsoft be...
C# is a wonderful language for modern programming. While everything in C# has a reason and a place, occasionally, there are things that can be confusing for a developer who isn’t aware of what is happening behind the scenes. This is my third post in the Little Pitfalls series where I explore these small pitfalls; the previous Little Pitfall post can be found here. In the last Little Wonders post, we talked about the Nullable static class (not to be confused with the Nullable<T> struct) and...
In this Issue: Rudi Grobler, Roy Dallal, Hannah Watkins, AfricanGeek, Kunal Chowdhury(-2-), Beth Massi, Mohamed Mosallem, Michael Crump, and Jesse Liberty. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Communicating between two local Silverlight Applications" Michael Crump WP7: "Designing for Steam Achievements, a Windows Phone 7 app" Hannah Watkins LightSwitch: "Relating and Editing Data from Multiple Data Sources on the Same Screen" Beth Massi Shoutouts: My Friends at SilverlightShow have their top 5 posts from...
Hace unos días recibi un email de Microsoft con noticias sobre Visual Studio, y algo que me encanto fue ver que por fin tenemos soporte para HTML y CSS 3 en el editor de VS. Así que, me di la tarea de leer el contenido de los blogs recomendados en el artículo y tome la decision de traducir el contenido del blog de Scott Hanselman’sa español (por supuesto con algunos cambios), para que toda la comunidad que no tiene aún un buen conocimiento de inglés pueda aprovechar el contenido. Inicamos… La gente...
The message may also say something line: Unable to update app: Error posting to URL: https://appengine.google.co... 409 Conflict Another transaction by user Your.Name is already in progress for app: your-appName, version: x. That user can undo the transaction with "appcfg rollback". Basically this means that in the midst of your previous deployment of the application, the process was interrupted. The Google SDK interprets this as a deployment...
The "scour" or Rootkit.Win32.TDSS virus has a long history which can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wik... Here is the primary symptom: after searching for something in your web browser using google, one of the results that you click on redirects you to scour.com. If you've executed ClamWin, Malwarebytes, McAfee, Norton, etc. to find and isolate the virus without any luck--this isn't really a surprise, since this virus attaches to existing system drivers. I only know of one reliable package...
Goal: Rotating text using css only. How: Surprisingly IE supports this feature rather well. You could use property filters in IE, but since this is only supported on IE browsers, I would not recommend it. CSS3, still in proposal state, has a "writing-mode" property for doing this. It has been part of IE's browser engine since IE5.5. Now that it is part of the CSS3 draft specification, would be the best way to implement this going forward. Webkit based browsers; Firefox 3.5+, Opera 11 and IE9 implement...