Thursday, May 08, 2008 #

Silverlight Cream for May 08, 2008 -- #270

Corey Schuman on Animations in Blend, Jeff Wilcox on SL Link Cloud, Expression Media Team on Web Galleries, MSCUI on Patien Journey Demonstrator, Via Tecia on My Travel Management, and Jesse Libery on Dynamic User Controls firing Events back.
From SilverlightCream.com:
Animations in Blend
I'm not sure if what Corey is describing in this article will be good in Blend 2.5 for Silverlight 2, but I blog enough WPF things that this is all good info, and I figure eventually will be useful to us Silverlighters :)... besides, it looks pretty cool!
Homepage “link cloud" application
Jeff Wilcox has taken on something I've threatened to do for a while and that is to do a tag cloud in Silverlight. This one is a bit interesting in that you can take it on as your own, and use it as a home page... clever idea!
Silverlight Web Galleries
The Expression Media Team blog has this nice demo on setting up a Silverlight Web Gallery. They're demo'ing the one that ships with Expression Media 2, but others can be produced (and shared).
Patient Journey Demonstrator
I found this Patien Journey demo via Tim Heuer, and Tim Sneath, and is from the Microsoft Common User Interface organization that Tim Sneath credits to Martin Grayson. Whoever is involved, these are serious uses of Silverlight, and something we can all use as great examples. I wish it was a little more interactive as a demo... I wasn't able to actually do anything once I got the Administrator screen open, but it looks GREAT. I was able to make it fall over though ... and oops... it appears seriously stuck in that mode now :(
My Travel Management
Another link from Tim Heuer on the same page as the last one... this is a take-of (no pun intended) on the Silverlight Airlines app that we've all seen. This uses real data, but is a demo app... not as slick-looking as the MSCUI one, but definitely a serious piece of work. I love the flyovers on the flight information. They don't just appear, they expand into view. It's a tad disconcerting that the bottom refreshes as I get small flyovers on the airport names in the upper view though.... but hey, who am I to detract from all this :)
Dynamically Creating User Controls That Fire Events Back To You
Jesse Liberty posted this yesterday afternoon and I saw it on my way out the door... this continues his "create something dynamically" postings he's been doing. This one almost sounds like one of those pranks I pulled back in the DOS days... dynamically create a user control that ends up closing itself, removes itself from the container and fires a message back to mom that it's done... hmmm... have to remember that when the use case strikes me :) ... lots of SL goodness in here, don't throw it out because you can't think of an application for it!

Stay in the 'Light!
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posted @ Thursday, May 08, 2008 3:18 PM | Feedback (1)

404 - Page not found on new server

This is *way* outside what I normally have to deal with. Yeah, I've got some websites, but they're on shared hosting and I don't have admin rights to the servers, and hey, they just work ... and that's a good thing :)

As I mentioned in my latest CrystalReports post, I had trouble with a new web app on a brand new state-of-our-art Windows 2003 IIS 6.0 web server. The app runs in (also state-of-our-art) VS2005 no problem, but I thought it would be nice at this point in the cycle to get it on the server, to test from there as well, and since I was hassling IT over other things, it seemed like a good time to ask for an alias for this.

I had initially been told that the server did NOT have .NET 1.1 on it. But... when I fired up the IIS Manager (after I FINALLY got admin rights), the tool allowed me to select either 1.1 or 2.0, so hey... let's just put up the legacy code and I'll deal with the other later, so I went with 1.1.

So now at the end of the process, I got the alias to my new app. When I tried to run my .NET 2.0 app however, it fell over... it was giving me "404 - Page Not Found" errors. I dorked around with that for some unknown quantity of time doing the 'insanity thing' .. you know... continuing to do the same thing repeatedly, hoping for different results? ... but alas, nothing worked. I compared all the properties, all the user permissions, everything in sight between a running .NET 1.1 app and a non-running .NET 2.0 app.

I also noted that in the add/remove programs, .NET 2.0 was there, but there was no .NET 2.0 entry in the controlpanel admins area, but there WAS one for .Net 1.1 ... so that was curious.

Finally I blew the whistle on myself and did a shout out to my local .NET group, AZGroups. Didn't take long before Robert Miller and Jonas Bush replied and said "Depending on the install order, you may have to re-register the .Net 2.0 framework to IIS."

Being out of my comfort zone, I googled that and found this page, of which the most important part for me was the registration line:

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis.exe -i -enable

I ran that, and everybody's up and happy and I'm glad I don't have to mess with it anymore. I'm listing this here as much for my reference as anyone else's :)

Stay in the 'Light!
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posted @ Thursday, May 08, 2008 9:57 AM | Feedback (2)

Why Does Crystal Reports ALWAYS kick my Axx - Part VII -- Merge Modules/GAC

This one isn't a rant... surprise! ... this one is to report how I resolved the latest problem I had and some of the web resources I used for it.

I've been working moving some web applications and associated Oracle databases from an old server to a new virtual one. I finally got the production applications running and had asked the IT folks to give me an alias through DNS to my test .NET 2.0 application that I want to run on the same server. First I had problems with getting 404 errors, and that'll be a different post, but once I started seeing Crystal Reports errors I knew I was getting there... sad how the error messages give you that warm and fuzzy :)

At first glance at the errors, I thought it was missing all the VS2005 assemblies. Not surprising, since I had just gone through this exercise for VS2003 and the legacy .NET 1.1 apps that I'm replacing. So I figured... what the heck, I know what I'm doing here, right?

Turns out, I had already run what I thought were the important parts of VS2005 in using a setup.msi that called out some merge modules, but I guess I needed more. Since the ones I was needing didn't involve license keys, I thought I could just copy them into the GAC.

I went on a search mission for them and dang... they don't live on my machine anywhere other than in the GAC... so I guess they were installed straight there by the VS2005 install. Hmmm...

That's when I came across this article by Richard Dudley. Richard has some good hacks in there, and one of them was to go to the reference (in your VS2005 project) for the ones that are missing, select one, go to properties, then set the "Copy Local" property to 'True'. I did that for the 2 that it was complaining about that were in my Reference list, and when I published the app, hey look! ... there they are in my bin folder... cool :)

I went one farther than that though, after I played with it... after I had a copy in my bin folder, I copied them to the GAC on the server, and then set the Reference properties back.

So far so good, but yikes ... it's still not running, and now it's complaining about some crap that not only is NOT in my Reference list, but also not anywhere on my machine... sigh... back to Google.

That's when I came across this page from Business Objects... I guess that's what CrystalReports now is? ... anyway, this page is for VS2005, back the link up or take a menu to find the one for your system. There's a doc and a merge module in that zip and tells you how to build the setup.msi to get everyone onboard.

I followed the instructions, built the setup.msi according to the doc, accessed it from the server, and w00t... it works!

Whew... This actually took less time than the freaking IIS issues, but am I glad it's done. I still have some CSS issues on the pages to get the look-and-feel to match what the users are used to, but it's very nice to see all this come up from the new server!

I have been archiving sites that have been useful to me for all the CrystalReports issues I've had and they can be found here: http://www.wynapse.com/TagContent.aspx?Tag=CrystalReports.

Of course this has nothing whatsoever to do with Silverlight, so be sure to check out some Slverlight goodness on one of the links below :)

Stay in the 'Light!
Twitter SLNews | Join me @ SilverlightCream | SL Web Articles | SL2 Web Articles | My Articles | My Tutorials | My Tooltips | My SL2 Articles | My SL2 ToolTips | SilverlightCream
posted @ Thursday, May 08, 2008 8:58 AM | Feedback (0)
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