Tag | Windows Posts
As someone who works a lot on Silverlight and as someone who have presented lots of trainings / talks over Silverlight; i am been getting a lot of questions based on future of Silverlight. Is Silverlight dead? http://www.zdnet.com/blog/m... These are often from end-clients, managers, architects or even consumers. Sometimes also from guys who have little exposure to Silverlight; but still want to engage in the conversation as it is "happening" ...
Today I had an issue with Jenkins where I wanted it to perform a set of tasks, but not worry about the exit code of any of the tasks…. In my instance I was using Jenkins to run DotCover to check the code coverage of a solution and then run a custom application to make sure the coverage was sufficient….The challenge I was facing that for DotCover to generate coverage statistics, it would need to run NUnit. If a test in NUnit failed for some reason, regardless of the the total coverage of the tests ...
I checked the SMTP headers on an email sent from the Biztalk 2010 SMTP send port.
X-Mailer: Microsoft CDO for Windows 2000
Really? CDO Really?
The main way that Twitter provides feeds is through JSON. Unfortunately the version of the .NET Framework that is on the phone does not include the System.Runtime.Serializatio... namespace. Rather than trying to brute force the JSON feed I have been looking into using the Newtonsoft JSON.NET library. The first thing that I ran into with JSON.NET is that the documentation is severely tilted to the serialization side with almost no mention of deserialization. This would have been my preferred approach ...
We have just published SDNavigation a library that integrates the WP7 Navigation Framework into the MVVM pattern. It is based on Laurent Bugnion's INavigationService idea and combined with Rob GarFoot MVVM Navigation Framework approach to obtain the page context (via behavior). The current version contains a sample app to start using it, in the following days / weeks we expect to publish training material (posts, videos), stay tunned !! The team that have built this small (and hopefully useful ) ...
I remember myself a tweet from Scott Hanselman a couple of months ago, where he asked us to check out a small application he wrote. As one of the first testers of his new "thing", I was interested but there were no documentation or libs available yet. A couple of days a go, I read a blogpost from Maarten Balliauw about SignalR. (Maarten's blog). Because I allready heard about SignalR a couple of months ago, I had to develop a very small application to test how it really works. 1. Install SignalR ...
Welcome to the hidden treasure of “MTM.config.exe” Navigate to “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE” and open the 1. Can I change the number of Action Recording steps selected when a Bug is created? When you are exploratory testing using Microsoft Test Manager or performing a feedback session using Feedback Manager and decide to raise a bug or create a test case, the last 4*10 Action recordings are selected by default. You can change the number of action recordings selected ...
What could you build with the XBox Kinect? Well we want to know! Connect your Kinect to your PC and build an application using your favorite .NET language. Kinect for Developers is a 2-day workshop for developers, artists and technicians interested in Kinect hacking or 3D scanning. This hands on workshop will teach you the basics of programming for Kinect and the potentials for developing on video and depth sensor cameras. Expect live demonstrations, presentations, food, and lots of hacking. You ...
Highlighting a Managed Application As you search (Google is better, because Bing lacks BANG!!) for existing solutions for SharePoint Central Admin tasks You are usually instructed to highlight one app or another, or one web app or another. Nobody tells you how to achieve this task, but on occasion you scratch your head in puzzlement. You click on the app and some window opens, but you actually wanted the ribbon. Scratch your head no longer! Here is what needs to be done. Just click on the line under ...
As someone who works a lot on Silverlight and as someone who have presented lots of trainings / talks over Silverlight; i am been getting a lot of questions based on future of Silverlight. Is Silverlight dead? http://www.zdnet.com/blog/m... These are often from end-clients, managers, architects or even consumers. Sometimes also from guys who have little exposure to Silverlight; but still want to engage in the conversation as it is "happening" ...
I was playing with the new Membership API (System.Web.Providers) for the upcoming Virtual TechDays While I was trying out a lot of options for using as DB store, one of the obvious choices was SQL Azure. With SQL Azure, I could offload the Database hosting capabilities to Azure and just focus on my application code. Of course, it comes at a cost and SQL Azure is a subscription based database available in different sizes and rates there of. One of the challenges I faced was, working with the Membership ...
So, to step back up on my soapbox for a quick moment. The buzz and the noise around jQuery and Client Side development in general is growing and at a fairly rapid pace. This of course is good and bad. It’s good because our applications are becoming more and more user friendly and the visual appeal is increasing exponentially a well. Plus, as developers, we get to develop some pretty awesome functionality that before we would have had to crack open Visual Studio to get the same results. It’s definitely ...
In this blog post I’ll show you how to use the TFS 2011 API to get the Exploratory Testing & Feedback Manager session information programmatically. Introduction TFS 2011 includes Exploratory Testing and Feedback Manager, the first empowers the testers to explore the application and second empowers the stake holders to explore the application. This rhymes a bit… that’s because… under the hood both use the same infrastructure to drive and store the session information. If you try to run both at ...
Don’t miss out on these great session with Markus Egger in the Dallas office! Where: Microsoft Dallas Office – 7000 SR-161 (George Bush Turnpike), Dallas, TX 75039 When: Tuesday, December 13, 2011 – 1:30 – 4:30 PM Signup for this FREE event in Dallas Join Markus Egger, Microsoft RD and one of the longest running MVPs, for an afternoon of free information. CODE Magazine and EPS Software are in a unique position to share information based on real world experience in projects that are either our own ...
About a month ago'ish I read some very sad news. Microsoft announced that they were killing off the DryadLinq (or LINQ-to-HPC) project in favor of Hadoop. I was one of the first users of DryadLinq outside of Microsoft, back when it was a pre-alpha project inside Microsoft Research. My company had a running HPC cluster and my boss convinced me to install DryadLinq on it to see what I could make it do. I worked with it for a year, and being a big LINQ and PLINQ fan, really enjoyed how easy it was to ...
I often use the VS 2010/TFS 2010 evaluation virtual machines that Microsoft publishes every 6 months with the latest bits. It’s a great timesaver to use an image where everything is already setup and also contains a bit of sample data that is useful when you want to demo something for customers. There is one thing that has always been a, albeit small, but still very annoying problem and that is that the builds always partially fail when you start using the image. When you want to demo the powerful ...
I came across a challenge last week, wherein I was asked to remove the path information from the dll files which were build inside my project. For those who don’t have an idea about what I am talking about, here is a quick introduction. The dll/exe files which are build by Visual Studio contains the Win32 PE header information, and this is true for all the dll and exe on Win32 platforms. Read about it at (http://en.wikipedia.org/wi... To check the headers in your dll/exe files ...
For an integration solution with lots of dependencies, it's difficult to definitively state that everything is wired up correctly and that all components in the stack are working. A while ago, Michael Stephenson proposed having a diagnostic service in a solution as a quick way of verifying that a given environment was working, end-to-end. Initially I was sceptical, on the grounds that there shouldn't be any code in a solution which isn't directly solving a business problem, but having tried it out ...
Lync mobile client is now available for Windows Phone Microsoft Lync lands in the Windows Phone Marketplacehttp://www.neowi... Lync Mobile Feature Comparisonhttp://unifiedcol... More detailed Mobile Client Comparisonhttp://technet.mi... ...
This is another x64 issue where I was really surprised that it does exist. When you compile in VS2010/MsBuild a managed target for which the corresponding serialization assembly is generated you will find that all works until you try to compile for 64 bit. There you will get: "SGEN : error : An attempt was made to load an assembly with an incorrect format: xxxx.dll." Here is the 32 bit SGen is called for the 64 bit target which cannot load a 64 bit assembly. I have no idea why MS did not provide ...
In this blog post I’ll be walking you through the process of customizing the TFS 2011 Scrum 2.0 Process Template to add a new work item type, introducing new work item queries, modifying existing queries, adding new reports, etc. To give you a bit of context, at the 2011 ALM Summit Anu Bharadwaj presented a talk on Exploratory Testing highlighting how the Team @ Microsoft took advantage of MTM 2011 to test various VS ALM products in the “fun” way by organizing “Testing Tours.” To dive deep in to ...
Here we go! After the Microsoft team released version 5 of Silverlight yesterday, MVVM Light is available for this version of the framework too. I did not create the installer yet (that will take a few more days), but you can download the source code and build it yourself easily. Source code on Codeplex. Instructions to build the code. With this latest release, this puts the number of supported frameworks to 8: .NET 3.5 SP1, .NET 4, Silverlight 3, Silverlight 4, Silverlight 5, Windows Phone 7.0, ...
Whenever I do use Visual Studio and try to compile something under 64 bit I run into problems. It seems that most MS Devs for Visual Studio and the relevant tool chain are still mainly writing 32 bit applications. Here are some of the latest issues I did run into. COM applications targeting x64 are still using x32 as target platform for the MIDL compiler by default Resolution: You have to select in the UI MIDL – Target Environment X64 by yourself. Alternatively you can edit the vcxproj file directly ...
Microsoft just released the version 5 of Silverlight! It’s a great news and I really want to congratulate the whole team on this impressive collective effort. The official announcement is on the Silverlight team blog! The purpose of this article is not to be exhaustive about the list of features (there have been, and will be, many more very detailed articles such as this series on the Silverlight blog) but rather to explain why this version in particular makes me happy to be a Silverlight developer ...
This week I spent three day with close to 30 of my new best friends doing lots of Windows Phone coding and helping each other with our application. The sessions were lead by Jeff Blankenburg and Dave Bost who and kept the atmosphere light. This included us finding out a lot about Dave’s tastes in music. While most of the time was spent working on our individual apps we saw how an app is submitted to the market place and what you can prep your app for the market place using the Marketplace Test Kit. ...
I have recently been using NDbUnit for integration tests exercising the database. I am new to the tool, so the following exception caused a few hours of scratching my head before I figured out the obvious. Assume you are going through the quick start guide from the website, everything works perfectly. Then I changed to my production database and did the same thing and I get the following error…] DbCommandBuilder.CreateSele... string) failed for tableName = '…. Turns out the name of ...
UPDATE 10.01.2012: The issue has been resolved by Microsoft and will be addressed in patch soon. Here is the full description from the Connect site: “We've identified the rootcause. This bug was introduced in the compatibility GDR patch released for VS 2010 to work against 2011 TFS Server. We shall be releasing a patch soon. Till then, please follow the workaround mentioned to unblock yourselves. “ When setting up a physical environment for a new test controller on our TFS 2010 server, I ran into ...
Yesterday, Microsoft announced the forthcoming release of BizTalk Server 2010 R2 on the BizTalk Server blog site. This is advanced notice, given that this new version will ship six months after the release of Windows 8, expected in the second half of next year. On this basis, we can expect the new version of BizTalk Server to arrive in 2013. Given the BizTalk team’s previous record of name changes, I wonder if this will eventually be released as BizTalk Server 2013. Microsoft has been refreshingly ...
Anyone working with developing custom activities in TFS 2010 Build has run into the following dreadful error message when running the build: TF215097: An error occurred while initializing a build for build definition \TeamProject\MyBuildDefinit... Cannot create unknown type '{clr-namespace:[namespace]... What the error means is that when the TFS build service loads the build process template XAML for the build definition, it can’t create an instance of the customer workflow ...
In my previous post we started a discussion about concepts that are critical to really understanding LINQ. The next couple of posts will build on the same theme by introducing three very closely related (and somewhat evolutionary) pieces of the C# language – delegates, anonymous functions, and lambdas. My original intent had been to introduce them together in single post, but that would be a rather long post. Delegates are a language feature that have been in C# since version 1 of the language and ...
The top 5 list for last week at SilverlightShow is up at WindowsDevNews
Today tutorial, I will show you how to send email in ASP.NET 2.0. If you use ASP.NET 4 to send email, here is the tutorial that discuss sending email from ASP.NET 4 – C# Sample .The steps required to send an email from ASP.NET are as follows : 1. Declare the System.Net.Mail namespace C# - using System.Net.Mail;VB.NET - Imports System.Net.Mail 2. Create a MailMessage object. This class contains the actual message you want to send. There are four overloaded constructors provided in this class. We will ...
Daytona - Iterative MapReduce on Windows Azure Overview MapReduce is a framework for processing highly distributable problems across huge datasets using a large number of compute nodes. It is a generic mechanism that comprises 2 steps: Map step: The master node takes the input, partitions it up into smaller sub-problems, and distributes them to worker nodes. The worker node processes the smaller problem, and passes the answer back to its master node. Reduce step: The master node then collects the ...
I am not the fastest typist… I know it. Up till about a year ago I was a two finger typist and my two fingers could fly over the keyboard doing all sorts of acrobatics getting me up to a whopping 30 odd words per minute. Not bad for two fingers but barely close to some of my friends who speed away at 90+ words a minute using both hands. So it bugged me…. I mean I would like to consider myself a professional developer and feel that if I will be typing most of days then I should at least be doing it ...
This was a very interesting event, I had never spoken in an event with so many developers in one place. It was cool! I had two talks, one on HTML5 and IE9 where I demonstrated the HTML5 and CSS3 coverage in IE9 and performance improvements, the second on ASP.NET MVC Best Practices where I talked about a fraction of things that you need to be aware of and possibly use when you are developing an MVC application. The HTML5 and IE9 talk was more of a showcase and focused on new features that will continue ...
PrairieDevCon is a great conference hosted in Canada a few times a year. For the first time it’s coming to Calgary in March and I couldn’t be more excited. I’ve participated as a speaker in every PrDC to date (2 in Regina, 1 in Winnipeg), and that streak will continue into Calgary. In addition to the 2 conference sessions I’ll be doing: Why do we Suck at Estimating? And How to Get Better Evolve Your Code: Fundamental Design Principles I’m also doing a full day Pre-Con Workshop on TFS Build. I plan ...
Build 2011 announced the September release of the Windows Azure Service Bus. For those of you who have just tuned in, the WA Service Bus is part of the AppFabric middleware that enables almost seamless connectivity between applications that are restricted to limited connectivity options by their firewall or custom security protocols. By leveraging the service bus one can build distributed applications on cloud or hybrid solutions featuring on-premise and cloud apps while maintaining the worthwhile ...
Upgrading a SharePoint farm can reveal hidden issues that may not be causing any visible consequences in your current environment. This was especially the case in a recent customer visit to assist with an upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010. During the upgrade we encountered the error “Failed to create field: Field type <field name> is not installed properly” while attempting to upgrade hundreds of SharePoint lists and document libraries. The issue my customer faced related to a ...
When you’re debugging security related things, sometimes you need to take a look at the thread identities user token. When you’re inside of Visual Studio 2010 – in the watch windows you enter ‘$user’ and you’ll get the same as when in windbg with !token –n ...
MS knowledge base article which is of interest: Consider the following scenario: You have multiple servers that are running Microsoft Exchange Server. The servers that are running Exchange Server are hosted in a VMware ESX environment. The servers that are running Exchange Server are part of a Windows Network Load Balancing cluster. Windows Network Load Balancing is configured to run in unicast mode. In this scenario, Windows Network Load Balancing may not work correctly. For example, network traffic ...
The Microsoft team will be conducting an event in Cebu regarding Windows Azure this coming December 8, 2011 at 8:30 am to 5:00 pm. So if you are new to Azure and want to learn this new exciting developer platform then don't hesitate to join and register!For more details please visit: http://www.microsoft.com/ph... you guys there! =} ...
Overview Windows HPC Server 2008 is infrastructure for high-end applications that require high performance computing clusters – i.e. for scaling out parallelizable across many compute nodes in a grid. These compute nodes can be coordinated by a head node , which in turn can be proxied via a service broker node that exposes a SOA WCF interface for job scheduling. Additional functionality includes the ability to coordinate between job processes running on nodes via MPI (message passing interface). ...
My friend in Zimbabwe sent me an email a day ago with the following contents suppose i have a table called week_days with only 3 fields i.e. SEQUENCE DAY SALES as follows: SEQUENCE DAY SALES 1 Sun 23 2 Mon 18 3 Tue 30 4 Wed 15 5 Thu 20 6 Fri 08 7 Sat 0 i need a query that converts DAY column to a header row and sort by SEQUENCE as follows: DAY Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat SALES 23 18 30 15 20 08 0 Pliz Help!!!!!!!! I was like’ this looks like a candidate for pivot, but it requires that the result ...
Last week I get the information directly from Microsoft, that at build machines SDKs must be installed to guarantee that MSBuild works well in some circumstances. We have the problem, that a self-containing build should include all necessary build artifacts – particularly Silverlight stuff. I tried to encapsulate the special steps in own targets and a build was finally possible (see my former posts). But at local machines without installed Silverlight stuff it gives problems for problems. Because ...