Tag | MSDN Posts
The first tutorial covering some of the history of the .NET Sidebar Gadget Creator as well as issues creating .NET based Vista Sidebar gadgets has been posted. View the full post on my MSDN blog:
.NET Sidebar Gadget Creator Tutorial 1
Microsoft have released a new version of the WSS/MOSS SDK below is an overview of what's in it. Download here Overview The Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 SDK is designed for solution providers, independent software vendors, value-added resellers, and other developers to learn about the new Office SharePoint Server 2007 enterprise application and platform. It features conceptual and "How to" articles, sample code, and programming references.What’s New in this Release for the MOSS SDK ...
I've been mentioning the idea of Community 2.0 with my colleagues and peers over the last few months, and a recent discussion of it prompted me to write this post to bring the reality of the community landscape to full focus. Community 2.0, for me, is the emergence of the next generation of influencers in our industry. It’s more than just the changing of the guard, it’s the revitalization of the developer community back to the grass-roots movements that spawned the user group initiative, INETA, and ...
Paul Swanson came across this article that talks about an unsupported capability of MS that allows you to read an ISO file without having to burn to a cd. Not sure if you ever face this, but all the downloads in MSDN pretty much come in iso format. This will take the step out of burning the cd/dvd if you choose not to. I am in the process of using this and it seems to work so far. Enjoy… http://weblogs.asp.net/plel... ...
It has been a while since I last posted, but I haven't stopped working :) I am currently on a project involving WPF and WCF. While I am not a big fan of WPF, but I quite like WCF. During the development of our project we run into a very annoying problem with WCF. After some help from Microsoft, we found a solution at last. The problem is very easy to describe. On the one side, we have a WCF service running. On the other side, we have a client with a reference with to this service. Now and then, we ...
I found this tool from an article in Code Magazine. Package This uses the MSDN Content Service Web Services to first give you a list of MSDN or TechNet categories, then you can just click and download, and generate either HxS or CHM files. If you don't want to install the entire MSDN library this tools allows you to store it in a CHM, which is what I chose. This way, I have the WCF section in a nice CHM package ...
Wow... I feel famous all of a sudden. :-) Microsoft VS Core Community Program Manager, Beth Massi let me know that there were changes in store for the VB Developer Center page by including recognition for those MVP's who have contributed community content. I just took a look and BAM! there I am in the upper right hand corner of the page... now I just need to get that picture updated! :-) Submit an article to Beth and maybe you too can get your mug on the MSDN VB Developer Center page too!! Thanks ...
Normalization 1. A table should have an identifier. A table should store only data for a single type of entity. A table should not have repeating values or columns 4. A table should avoid nullable columns Choosing a SQL Server Monitoring Tool SQL Profiler Enables you to monitor server and database activity (for example, number of deadlocks, fatal errors, tracing stored procedures and Transact-SQL statements, or login activity). You can capture SQL Profiler data to a SQL Server table or a file for ...
1. MSDN Forum Tips - Missing alerts!?! - as read here by Julia Lerman I found lots of other things I was not properly sign up for once I checked out my Live! Alerts profile. 2. IE7Pro - a IE7 Add-In as found at www.ie7Pro.com I think this is pretty neat. Took me a few tries to find out what happened to my CTRL-F shortcut [hint: look at the bottom] Also a huge plus is the in-line live spell check. Honestly being my first priority in getting this plug in...plus who can resist checking out something ...
I posted in MSDN Forum a while ago that I ran into a WPF bug that occurs when you put one template inside another template like <ListBox HorizontalContentAlignment=... VerticalAlignment="Stretch" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" Background="Honeydew" ItemsSource="{Binding}"> <ListBox.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <ListBox ItemsSource="{Binding}"> <ListBox.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <etc.............. </DataTemplate> </ListBox.ItemTemplate> </ListBox> ...
Today I decided to upgrade from Office 2003 to Office 2007 (using my MSDN subscription). I used the DVD, signed onto the MSDN Web site, requested a Product Key and was off. Except... I had an invalid product key. I had just renewed my subscription at the beginning of the month, so I wasn't sure what to try next. I tried the MSDN Online Concierge. Fully expecting to not get an answer, I entered my question. Error message: "Please enter a subject or question in English." GREAT - I was typing in English. ...
Maybe I need to re-subscribe to MSDN magazine or something, it seems there are soooo many things you can learn about programming, there is never enough time.. If you spend all your time programming, you never have time to learn about new stuff. And even if you learn a ton, things seem to slip by... It seems everything most of us developers know is because we had to do something at sometime in the past and had to find a way to do it. If the ways and means we do things are the correct way, who knows.. ...
Come and get it here: Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2
Dates now avaialable for release:
SQL 2008, .Net 3.5, Visual Studio and Windows Server 2008 are now scheduled for a Feb 27 2008 release. Of couse RTM and MSDN availability may be before that :-)
Scott Guthrie earlier today announced the availability of Visual Studio 2008 (Codename Orcas) Beta 2 for download. The downloads available are separate installation disc image for each of VS 2008 editions (including Express), and a couple of more disc images for MSDN library and TFS; also, included separated VPC image for VSTS and TFS. Quote from the download homepage: Installation Disc Images If you prefer to install the software yourself, you can download separate disc images for the following ...
Nick Barclay did an interesting post recently, advocating learning MDX if you are going to be working with Performance Point Server. This is due to the fact that Performance Point builds SSAS cubes on the back end and SSAS which lives and breathes MDX. So the same advice really also extends to anyone using SSAS. You really need at least one MDX guru on your team - someone that can write MDX select statements, if you want to get the most out of SSAS. A couple of resources that Nick did not mention ...
So not only has Justice's little "Become a better developer in 6 months" garnered him the attention of Scott H., but he's now featured in one of the MSDN Canada podcasts (which you can get all the links from via Justice's site here). I thought I'd listen and offer my thoughts on the witty banter and intellectual exchange between John Bristowe and Justice Gray. Let's begin... I can picture Justice lying in bed, listening to John speak his intro over and over and over... "Oh yes John, tell me how wonderful ...
Most of the cases we use cursor, for loop like senarios, like calutating total order for an item and put the sum in a specific column, doing some work on particular table on basis of values of some other tables. Now, cursor is fine for smaller amount of data items, but it becomes really lousy , as the number of items start to grow. Here, i will discuss about a totally alternative to Cursor which is more faster and effective for working with huge number of data items. In my example , i will work with ...
Garbage collection is one of the most fundamental aspects of the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) and is available to all .NET programming languages. Unfortunately, it also seems to be one of the more difficult concepts to understand correctly, both how it works and how to use it. Understanding how the garbage collection system in .NET works is important, but it isn't as important as understanding how to use it correctly. Think about your car...we generally don't have intimate knowledge of how ...
Check out "A talk with James Kovacs on Agile Development", a great little webcast from MSDN Canada's community initiative.
You can watch it here.
D
I have seen posts like this floating around and then the other day I listened to Hanselminutes where Scott and Carl discussed the subject. I figured my enthusiasm has been lacking lately and maybe this would be a good way to bump it up a notch. I need to find a new way to get Microsoft products to learn on. One of the clients I used to work for had been paying for my MSDN subscription. With that gone and my current company being a miser with the developer tools I need to come up with a new plan. ...
I've been through almost all sorts of Timeout related issues with Asp.net web service development. I’d like put a check list here to remind myself and hopefully save some headache of yours. If use database, you may get ‘System.Data.SqlClient.SqlE... Timeout expired’: a: Check your connection string setting for ‘Connect Timeout’: I.e. connectionString="Data Source=SNYC14D11511;Initial Catalog=d_dbivt003;Persist Security Info=True;User ID= user;Password= Password;Connect Timeout=4200 b:Check ...
The second gem from the Analysis Services MSDN forum is also by Adrian Dumitrascu and deals with what the second "CleanUp" argument of the Measures.Remove() method does. MeasuresCollection.Remove() Method The 'cleanUp' boolean argument specifies if the dependent objects will be removed. For a Measure, the dependents include the PerspectiveMeasure objects. For a DimensionAttribute, the dependents include the CubeAttribute objects. If you do not specify the 'cleanUp' parameter, the dependents are removed. ...
Here is another gem from the Analysis Services MSDN forum by Adrian Dumitrascu from the product team. The one from this thread deals with what exactly the .Update() method does. And was in the context of talking about creating new roles in a database. MajorObject.Update() Method Even if you create the role as new, it's still not needed to call database.Update(). Calling role.Update() is enough. The .Update() method only saves the minor properties and collections (thus not the major children) of an ...
Take a look at my recent MSDN blog post to see how you can get around the common issues related to .NET development of Vista Sidebar gadgets. Don't want to write registry access code in javascript? Can't figure out how to uninstall your .NET based gadget? Read on... http://blogs.msdn.com/markh... ...
I was looking for some info on the background compiler, and found an old article on MSDN that gives a good, basic explanation. Thought I'd throw a quick link up to it, as much so I can find it when I want it as anything. :-)
btw, I love the title of that page......
While writing practice programs for my 70-536 exam I encountered interesting problem of writing custom IFormatter implementation. .NET offers many classes that can fit most of ours serialization tasks, yet sometimes it might happen that we would like to do something differently. As I was looking for sample implementation of this interface, I noticed that there was very little about it in internet. One of the most interesting articles was "Run-time Serialization" by Jeffrey Richter found in april ...
Last week we went through a "fire drill" when users of one of our web applications started receiving "Gateway Timeout" errors (HTTP Error 504). This error indicates that a gateway "server" (any host that forwards the HTTP request, including a router or web server) did not receive a timely response from a server that is supposed to respond. Naturally we didn't have a clue as to which host in the connection chain from users' browsers to our web farm was reporting the error, but the leading candidate ...
My daily Silverlight 'Pick of the Litter' from the web, and sometimes even things NOT Silverlight, I will add on as I come across others Streamed Template Processing for Data Binding in Silverlight Joshua Allen took Laurence Moroney's MSDN Article and extended it in Silverlight 1.1 -- with code (although you may have to convert the font on the 2nd half of the article -- I got windings!) LINQ Cookbook from the VB Team Not exactly Silverlight, but if you're doing 1.1 and hitting data, you probably ...
I was recently writing a small practice application for learning pursposes. The task was to read windows log file: %windir%/WindowsUpdate.log and find "exit code" numbers. The problem I encountered was to actually open properly file. I was receiving exception: System.IO.Exception with message: "Additional information: The process cannot access the file 'C:\WINDOWS\WindowsUpdate.log' because it is being used by another process." my code looked something like that: string windir = System.Environment.GetEnvir... ...
If you didn't get a chance to attend the Raleigh Code Camp this past Saturday, you missed a fantastic event! I was fortunate enough to be selected as a speaker and presented my Write Better Code Using the Refactoring Tools in Visual Basic 2005 session. You can find more information about Refactor! on the MSDN site and find a great whitepaper on using it as well. I want to be sure I thank everyone involved starting with all the volunteers from the Triangle .NET User Group, the other speakers, and ...
More of a convenient place to stick this so I can find it later.....
My programming partner and I recently were trying to get one of our custom types to use implicit conversion using reflection. It didn't work. We couldn't get to the conversion code no matter what we did. We found out that we can't use reflection that way. So, we used the suggestion in this great MSDN forum
post.
I personally hate to open blogs, that just have list of links without more useful information. But as I wrote in Ways to store bookmarks/favorites post, blog is a convinient way to save favorites. So I will just save links for now, and hopefully will add more comments about them later. FIDDLER supports HTTPS, ensure that "Capture HTTPS Connects" and "Decrypting HTTPS traffic" are ticked in in "Fiddler options". However running Fiddler in "https mode" can have side effects, e.g. my connection to TFs ...
The Microsoft Office Interactive Developer Map is a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application that helps developers visualize the different programs, servers, services, and tools that will help them build solutions. It allows them to drill down to each product and technology and learn about new features, objects, Web services, namespaces, and schemas required to extend Microsoft Office and build custom Office Business Applications (OBAs). The map is a living document that provides links to ...
I will put a few links related to ASP.NET unit testing. WATIN Initially I saw reference to WATIR from Scott Hanselman's post Integrating Ruby and Watir with NUnit . Recently I've found WatiN Web Application Testing In .Net, including articles WatiN - Web Application Testing In .Net - The Code Project - ASP.NET and WatiN Test Recorder - The Code Project .(The home page for WatiN Test Recorder is here) There is interesting article by Jeremy D. Miller with comment from ScottGu recommending WatiN . Using ...
Lately I’ve spent a lot of time playing with VS.NET “Orcas” Beta 1 and focusing on the language enhancements to C# in the new compilers. As an instructor who teaches the languages and as a developer of large frameworks for clients, the first thing I’m interested is the language enhancements. Then I dive into the addition “add-on” type features (read: WPF/XAML, WCF, Workflow, etc…) So far I’ve found some really intriguing features (like LINQ) that I like and think have some value but which won’t dramatically ...
We've got a custom control that consists of 2 radio buttons, a "normal button", and a text box, all on a single line. Internal to the control, I have all 4 of member controls lined up so that all the text is on one line. So far, so good. Except for one thing. When I put my control on my form, I can not get the text on my form to line up with the text on my label, and I end up manually futzing it into something that resembles "it's place". Where are my alignment functions? I guess it's off to google. ...
I just got done with a long afternoon of implementing a Windows Service to self-host my WCF service. It was a bit trickier than I thought it would be so if I can save you the headache I'll be happy. A good place to start is by reading these two MSDN articles: http://msdn.microsoft.com/m... http://msdn.microsoft.com/m... Next, you'll want to understand these support articles: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/... ...
Hot in the heals of Fridays beta release of Channel 9 version 4 are rumors that there will be a new MSDN channel 9 style forum called Channel 8 but this site will perhaps be aimed more specifically at students. Students do not particular get a rough ride on Channel 9 as many make a great contribution but it can't be all that cool for students to hang-out with a bunch of old techies like us, perhaps the reason for the site? Attracting more students in an effort to support them better, why not! After ...
Yeah, the new release of SQL Server shipped it's first public CTP already. To download the bits you need to register with the Microsoft SQL server 2008 CTP Program on Microsoft Connect, then go to the CTP main page, and watch for the links at the right bar (If you plan to share the links beware that they will give "Page Not Found" error to any one who's not in the CTP MS connect program). More links to check out: CTP Main Page CTP @ Microsoft Connect CTP Overview Whitepaper CTP Samples (At Codeplex ...
I got the following email from fellow MVP Greg Linwood on behalf of the Melbourne SQL Server User Group this morning which was taken from a posting by Ed Lehman from Microsoft in the private MVP newsgroup. I have not read any other feeds yet, but I imagine this news will be all over the web today. There will probably be a flood of information on Katmai, now that a release is publicly available. Enjoy! E D L E H M A N'S P O S T I N G This coming Monday, June 4, we will release the June CTP of Katmai. ...
I tried to find Tools to generate WSDL from SOAP Sample, but wasn't successful. I've started to use WSCF - Web services Contract-First to generate WSDL from XSD, that I've created manually , but I have the next problem. The SOAP example uses collections vector (with apache namespace) and I am not sure how specify them in WSDL to generate expected SOAP messages. Someone suggested "specify a struct in your wsdl file that contains whatever information your vector objects contain, and return an array ...
The latest MSDN Canada Flash newsletter announced a new Microsoft program where they are attempting to get Charities/Non-Profit groups who have technical work to be done, and match them with local IT workers who want to give back to their community. I'm not sure when it launched but there's a almost a couple hundred people signed up and at the moment 25 organizations with 10 job postings. I'd say that even if you're not interested at least let some of your local NPOs know about this site and I know ...
Heard on radio last week: Adobe is selling their "Creative Suite 3" 40% to 100% more expensive here in Europe than in the US. Swiss netizen Danielle Libine is gathering signatures to petition Adobe to change this. While I have my doubts about the power of such a petition against software giants, I also remember that Microsoft decided to include Expression Blend in MSDN after users asked (and asked and asked) them to do so on the web and on usenet. So maybe it'll work if enough people sign the petition ...
This week we need to choose the most appropriate communication technology for one of our projects. The project constraints are the following: .NET on both client and server client and server on same LAN A lot of information to be passed from server to client and vice-versa Performance is important Typed DataSets will be used on server side Presentation layer is developed with WPF Security is needed (sensitive or confidential data) The options we have are the following: ASMX Web Services .NET Remoting ...
The Windows Vista UAC exploit I recently published has garnered some attention as well as some criticism. I wanted to take a moment to reply to some of what I've seen in the press, in comments around the web, as well as the response from Microsoft. On some of the PC World/PC Magazine and their affiliates' web sites, there was a comment that "Pac-Man" should never require elevation (I use a Pac-Man clone as an example of what would otherwise be innocuous software in the whitepaper). This is true, ...
Roy Osherove did the final UG event of his Canadian tour tonight in Winnipeg, speaking to a very attentive crowd about Agile development. Roy had been talking at Dev Teach in Montreal last week, and had presented at the Edmonton .NET User Group last night. We were very grateful that he was willing to do the tour, so a big thanks to Roy for taking the time to stick around in Canada for an extra week! This tour wouldn't have been possible without the generous support of MSDN Canada and Dev Teach, both ...
Needing to learn MOSS "fast" - Tim points me to a bunch of nice videos on MOSS features. Kinda like the MSDN nuggets on MSDN UK site. http://www.microsoft.com/do... ...
Here are few lessons learnt from playing with the BDC on a project 1. Even though the BDC can crawl associated entities in your database schema, the search results will not show related entity instances for the item you searched. 2. In case of mapping 'complex' db schemas specially ones that contain m:n relationships between entities, sometimes it might be advisable to show un-normalized relationships via stored procedures or views, but this approach provides the following roadblocks Un-normalized ...
I was holding an ArcCouncil meeting in St. Louis last week and one of the attendees expressed their frustration with the seemingly 43 places you have to go to download and use the Visual Studio "Orcas", the Silverlight tools and Expression Blend. So, I'll try to clarify this right here and now: Visual Studio "Orcas": Here is the URL for the public download site: http://www.microsoft.com/do... Unfortunately, this site ...