A customer approached me recently to ask if I had any code that demonstrated how to use STORAGE_IDENTIFICATION, which is the data structure used to get the Storage ID from a disk. I didn’t have anything, which of course sends me off writing code and blogging about it. Simple enough, right? Go read the documentation for STORAGE_IDENTIFICATION which lead me to IOCTL_DISK_GET_STORAGEID. Except that the documentation for IOCTL_DISK_GET_STORAGEID seems to have a problem. The most obvious problem is that...
Orlando is coming up fast behind Tampa and South Florida Code Camps. This year, even more so. Check out the schedule and register: http://www.orlandocodecamp.com/ What: All day geek fest focusing on code and not marketing fluff. When: Saturday, March, 27, 2010 All day (registration opens at 7:00am) Where: Seminole State College - Sanford\Lake Mary Campus - 100 Weldon Boulevard Sanford, FL 32773 Cost: Free! A good fellow community leader Will Strohl has a great blog post on What to Expect from Orlando...
I created this quick generic example after noticing that several people were asking questions about it. If you have any questions then let me know. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Globalization; namespace ConsoleApplication4 { //New class where Type implements IConvertible interface (interface = contract) class Calculate<T> where T : IConvertible { //Setup fields public T X; NumberFormatInfo fmt = NumberFormatInfo.CurrentInfo;...
Consider this common construct that you and I have thrown into ASPX pages for years now: <%# DataBinder.Eval (Container.DataItem, "EmployeeID") %> In .NET 3.5.1 and older it returns -- tada -- a string. No mystery there. But in .NET 4.0 it returns the same type as the underlying data type -- which in this case for me was a nullable int. Interesting, no...
Good post here from Bill Anderson http://scienceblogs.com/bookoftrogool/2010/03/battle_of_the_opens.php...
In this Issue: Michael Washington, John Papa(-2-, -3-, -4-), Jonas Follesø, David Anson, Scott Guthrie, Andrej Tozon, Bill Reiss(-2-), Pete Blois, and Lee. Shoutouts: Frank LaVigne has a Mix10 Session Downloader for us all to use... thanks Frank! Read what Ward Bell has to say about MVVM, Josh Smith’s Way ... it's all good. Robby Ingebretsen posts on his 10 Favorite Open Source Fonts You Can Embed in WPF or Silverlight Mike Harsh posted Slides and Demos from my MIX10 Session . The download link at...
Introduction Although it was possible to write extensions for Expression Blend and Expression Design, it wasn’t very easy and out of the box only one addin could be used. With Expression Blend 4 it is possible to write extensions using MEF, the Managed Extensibility Framework. Until today there’s no documentation on how to build these extensions, so look thru the code with Reflector is something you’ll have to do very often. Because Blend and Design are build using WPF searching the visual tree with...
Last week (March 2010) I presented on Entity Framework 4 and the Windows Azure Platform at www.devweek.com. As usual, it was a great conference and I caught up with lots of old friends and made some new ones along the way. Entity Framework 4 Entity Framework 4 In Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 View more presentations from Eric Nelson. Windows Azure and SQL Azure Building An Application For Windows Azure And Sql Azure View more presentations from Eric Nelson. Entity Framework 4 Related Links Poll on...
An article about unit testing in VSTS 2008 and utilising Moq...
The GAC in .NET 4.0 is cut into two parts now -- one half for .NET Framework 2.0 stuff, and the other for v4.0 stuff. When compiling any project, targeting .NET 2.0, 3.5, or what have you, this annoying error may pop up: Could not load file or assembly 'System.EnterpriseServices, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. If you are working on a 32-bit system then open a run box and perform this copy command:...
AZURE: I haven’t blogged from long time.I was actually busy with doing some Azure. For any starters with Azure,I would recommend to go with Neil: http://nmackenzie.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!B863FF075995D18A!564.entry Awesome content. Another thing that has come in my interests:Robotics Yes,I am finally reading up on robotics, specially the mobile robotics. Since,I don’t have any prof to guide yet,I am doing it independently by reading research papers and books. My first robot is not autonomous but...
Microsoft Learning has announced the availability dates for .NET 4.0 Exams from 2nd July 2010 onwards. Being a MCSD.NET for 2005, My friend and I decided to skip certification exams for 2008 exams aiming towards MCST/MCPD coz we felt it was a mere layer on the top of .NET 2.0. But not so for .NET 4.0. We see .NET 4.0 as a major overhaul with the best of .NET releases in hand. The following exams and their link have been posted below for direct reference. Exam 71-511, TS: Windows Applications Development...
A while back, maybe 6 months, I got some bad news about 2010. Microsoft was removing Office from the MOSS equivalent of 2010, so basically my alias would be obsolete the second 2010 caught on in the community. I thought about it for some time. I had some discussions with friends in the community. I even noticed that the MOSSMan changed his twitter id. I started my blog around a WSS 3.0 project when I worked for LRS in there St. Louis Office in February/March 2007. So I think it’s fitting to keep...
I recently had a requirement to update the branding on an existing Windows SharePoint Services (WSS version 3.0) site. I needed to update the theme, along with the master page. An additional requirement is that my client likes to have all changes bundled up in SharePoint solutions. This makes it much easier to move code from dev to test to prod and more importantly, makes it easier to undo code migrations if any issues would arise (I agree with this approach). Updating the theme was easy enough....
Few days ago I faced a problem with printing in new Silverlight 4 RC. When you try to dynamically load image (in code behind) and print it, it doesn't work. Paper sheet is blank. Problem XAML file: <Image x:Name="image" Stretch="None" /> XAML.cs: image.Source = new BitmapImage(new Uri(imageUri, UriKind.RelativeOrAbsolute)); Print: var pd = new PrintDocument(); pd.PrintPage += (s, args) => { args.PageVisual = image; }; pd.Print(); Result: Blank paper. Solution What you need to do, is forced...
There are many ways to generate a PowerPoint presentation using Open XML. The first way is to build it by hand strictly using the SDK. Alternately you can modify a copy of a base presentation in place. The third approach to generate a presentation is to build a new presentation from the parts of an existing presentation by copying slides as needed. This post will focus on the third option. In order to make this solution a little more elegant I am going to create a VSTO add-in as I did in my previous...
“Innovation” is a heavy word. We regard those that embrace it as “Innovators”. We describe organizations as being “Innovative”. We hold those associated with the word in high regard, even though its dictionary definition is very simple: Introducing something new. What our culture has done is wrapped Innovation in white robes and a gold crown. Innovation is rarely just introducing something new. Innovations and innovators are typically associated with other terms: groundbreaking, genius, industry-changing,...
I often get asked by my colleagues, “how do you prepare for Microsoft exams?” Well, the answer for me is a little complicated, so I thought I’d write up here what I do. The first thing I do is go to Microsoft’s website to find the exam that I need to take. If you’re looking to get a particular certification, then their site lists the exam or exams that you’ll need to pass. If you’ve already taken an exam, you can log onto the MCP website and use their certification planner. This little tool tells...
In this Issue: Andy Beaulieu(-2-, -3-), Alex Golesh, Damian Schenkelman, Adam Kinney(-2-), Jeremy Likness, Laurent Bugnion, and John Papa. Shoutouts: Adam Kinney has a good summary up of where to go for all the tools and toys: Install checklist for Silverlight 4 RC, Blend 4 Beta and Windows Phone Developer tools from MIX10 ... tons of links Laurent Bugnion had a few announcements at MIX10: MVVM Light V3 released at #MIX10, and he followed that with What’s new in MVVM Light V3 ... now for Windows...
The Southern Colorado .NET User Group has announced their VS2010 launch event, to be held May 4th in Colorado Springs. More details can be found here. For those of you in northern Colorado… watch this space for a similar announcement soon...
In my office, I have a wall mounted monitor who's whole purpose in life is to display perfmon stats from our various servers. And on a fairly regular basis, I have folks walk by asking what the lines mean. After providing the requisite explaination about CPU utilization, disk I/O bottlenecks, etc. this is usually followed by some blank stares from the user in question, and a distillation of all of our engineering wizardry down to the phrase 'So when the red line goes up that's bad then?' This of...
We recently added OAuth to MentionNotifier so that users can quickly view and edit their subscriptions without needed an additional login. This is enabled by default for new users, but existing users will need to do the following steps to associate their subscriptions with OAuth: 1) Go to http://software.engraph.com/ManageMentionNotifier 2) Click “Sign in with Twitter” 3) Verify that your twittername and email are correct 4) Click "Associate with OAuth" This will also allow you to reply to notification...
if you are within 30-40 miles of Joplin, you have got to check out http://www.broadbandbeyondborders.com/ Google is going to provide fiber-to-the-home in one community in the US. Broadband Beyond Borders will give them the experience of dealing with 6 counties, 3 states, and 10 nations (the US and 9 native american n...ations.) Follow the instructions on the web page. It was pretty simple...
So some more basics… One of the things you will be taught at any college after conquering arrays is different derivatives of collections. Stack is one of the simplest of those and very useful… A stack is a LIFO (last in first out) data structure and has at least two basic method calls – push & pop. Push, “pushes” an item on the top of the stack. Pop, removes the top most item off the stack. Because all elements on a stack are of the same type, one can use an array to implement a stack or a linked...
I spent a few hours scratching my head on this one... So I thought I would blog about it in case someone else had the same headache. Assume you have a class, and you are wanting to use the INotifyPropertyChanged interface so that when you bind to an instance of the class, you get the magic sauce of binding to do you updates to the UI. Well, I had a special instance where I wanted one of the properties of the class to add some additional formatting to itself whenever someone changed its value (see...
General Every time I go back to university I find myself wading through sorting algorithms and their implementation in C++. Up to now I haven’t really appreciated their true value. However as I discovered this last week with Dictionaries in C# – having a knowledge of some basic programming principles can greatly improve the performance of a system and make one think twice about how to tackle a problem. I’m going to cover briefly in this post the following: Selection Sort Insertion Sort Shellsort...
Multithreading is supported in Windows Phone 7 Silverlight applications, however the emulator has a bug (which I discovered and was confirmed to me by the dev lead of the emulator team): If you attempt to start a background thread in the MainPage constructor, the thread never starts. The reason is a problem with the emulator UI thread which doesn’t leave any time to the background thread to start. Thankfully there is a workaround (see code below). Also, the bug should be corrected in a future release,...
Last week on Software Craftsman Pilgrimage I was trying to organise where I will be travelling, and the companies I will be pairing with. I now have a confirmed itinerary. 9 - 11th April Alt.NET Seattle 12th April Craftsman visit with Didit (Long Island) 13th April rest day :) 14th April Craftsman visit with Obtiva (Chicago) 15th – 16th April Craftsman visit with 8th Light (Chicago) 17th – 18th April Seattle Code Camp I am looking forward to all of my visits and talking to all the smart people who...
At Mix we announced that we will be offering a new 50gb size option in June. If you would like to become an early adopter of this new size option before generally available, send an email to EngageSA@microsoft.com and it will auto-reply with instructions to fill out a survey to nominate your application that requires greater than 10gb of storage. Other announcements included: MARS in April: Execute multiple batches in a single connection Spatial Data in June: Geography and geometry types SQL Azure...
In Part 1 I showed how to create and publish a simple Orchestration demo. Now we’ll finish configuring it in the admin console and test it. Open the BizTalk Server 2009 Administration Console, and expand BizTalk Server 2009 Administration, then Applications. You should have an entry for OrchestrationPortDemo – expand it as well. First, we’ll add the Receive Port – the place that we’ll drop the test file. Right-click on Receive Ports and select New One-way Receive Port. On the General tab, name it...
(This is a reference for a lunch & learn I'm giving at my company) This demo will create a BizTalk process that monitors a directory for an XML file, loads it into an orchestration, and drops it into a different directory. There’s no real processing going on (other than moving the file from one location to another), but this will introduce you to Messages, Orchestrations and Ports. To begin, create a new BizTalk Project names OrchestrationPortDemo: When the solution has been created, right-click...
If you haven’t spent the last week in the middle of the Sahara desert or traveling on a sled in the north pole area you should have heard something about the launch of Windows Phone 7 Series (or Windows Phone Series 7, or Windows Series Phone 7 or something like that). Even if you are in the middle of the desert or somewhere around the north pole you may have been reached by the news, since it seems that WP7S (using the full name will kill my available bandwidth!) is generating a lot of buzz in the...
A new updated release of everybody favourite XAML to CPP conversion tool (at least because it’s the only one available!). New features: - support for resource dictionaries (app.xaml if you use Blend to generate your XAML) Bugfixes: - the parameters for the mouseleftbuttondown and up events were incorrect As usual you can download the new release here: http://cid-9b7b0aefe3514dc5.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/XAML2CPP.zip Technorati Tags: XAML,Silverlight for Windows Embedded...
In MDI application we can have multiple forms and can work with multiple forms i.e. MDI childs at a time but while developing applications we don't pay attention to the minute details of memory management. Take this as an example, when we develop application say preferably an MDI application, we have multiple child forms inside one parent form. On MDI parent form we would like to have menu strip and tab strip which in turn calls other forms which build the other parts of the application. This also...
With SharePoint's next release on the horizon (May 12th) many of my clients and colleagues are starting to ramp up for the upcoming tidal wave of functionality. Microsoft has been doing a terrific job of getting as much information out in the public lime light as possible over the last few months and I think that will definitely pay off with regards to acceptance of the new version of SharePoint. However, there are still some aspects of the new platform that are a little murky. Aspects such as: "Should...
I have uploaded the presentation and source code samples of the session we had for the Malaga .net user group to my sky drive, you can find it here. About the session it self: is an express introduction to Silverlight and line of business application development, heavily based on samples / demo’s to cover the basics (Binding, INotifiable, ObservableCollections, Converters, …)...
/// <summary> /// Redirects parent of IFrame to specified URL /// If current page doesn't have parent, redirect itself /// </summary> /// <param name="page"></param> /// <param name="url"></param> public static void NavigateParentToUrl(Page page, string url) { String script = @" try { var sUrl='" + url + @"'; if (self.parent.frames.length != 0) self.parent.location=sUrl; else self.location = sUrl; } catch (Exception) {} "; page.ClientScript.RegisterStartupScript(TypeForClientScript(),...
Pekka from Frends gave me the opportunity to have a look at the beta-version of their Helium 2.0. For all of you, who don't know the tool: Helium is a web-application that collects management-data from BizTalk which you usually have to tediously collect yourself, like performance-data (throttling, throughput (like completed Orchestrations/hour), other perfomance-counters) and data about the state of BTS-Applications and presents the data in clearly structured diagrams and overviews which (often)...
Windows Virtual PC (aka XP Mode) When XP Mode was released, it insisted on hardware virtualisation being present on your CPU and enabled in the BIOS. Given that Windows Virtual PC was based on an improved Virtual PC 2007, which provided hardware virtualisation as a user selectable option, I did wonder why on earth Microsoft thought this was a good idea. Not only do many people not have a CPU with hardware virtualisation support, some manufacturers don't provide a BIOS option to enable this setting,...
Thanks to Steve and Andy at NxtGenUG Manchester for making me very welcome and for the guys who didn't head down the pub for a Guinness for St Patrick's Day and came to NxtGen instead. I hope you all got something from the presentation, if not technical insights, at least a can of Guinness of Tunnocks caramel wafer as swag. As promised here is the presentation in both PowerPoint and Adobe PDF format (with speaker notes), http://www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/nxtgenugmanc/hyperv4devs-ppt.zip http://www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/nxtgenugmanc/hyperv4devs-pdf.zip...
The new release of Employee Info Starter Kit contains lots of exciting features available in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. To get started with the new version, you will need less than 5 minutes. Minimum System Requirements Before getting started, please make sure you have installed Visual Studio 2010 RC (or higher) and Sql Server 2005 Express edition (or higher installed on your machine. Running the Starter Kit for First Time 1. Download the starter kit 4.0.0 version form here and extract it....
After banging my head for days on a “A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detected" issue when post (ajax-ing) a form in ASP.NET MVC 2 on .NET 4.0 framework using jQuery and CKEditor, I found that when you use the following: Code Snippet $.ajax({ url: '/TheArea/Root/Add', type: 'POST', data: $("#form0Add").serialize(), dataType: 'json', //contentType: 'application/json; charset=utf-8', beforeSend: function () { pageNotify("NotifyMsgContentDiv", "MsgDefaultDiv", '<img src="/Content/images/content/icons/busy.gif"...
My EntSSO (Enterprise Single Sign-On Server, part of BizTalk) did not start today, with the message: The SSO service failed to start. Error Code: 0x80131700 Could not create SSOSQL. To fix the problem, reinstall SSO or try 'regasm SSOSQL.dll' from a Visual Studio command prompt. Error Code: 0x80131700 The only reason for this that I can think of is that I have just installed the .net framework 4.0 RC but I have not verified this. The solution suggest in the error message works like a charm! Open...
My laptop housing my life in entirety decided to go south this last weekend, cant blame it because I wanted it to do things that not even normal people :) but it corrupted and could not get it going no matter what I tried. Imagining what I would loose (my POC's, Couple of VM's and lots and lots of documentation) pushed me to try anything short of reinstall. After toiling for about an hour looking for solution, I ended up at http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Recovering+the+Vista+Bootloader+from+the+DVD...
Employee Info Starter Kit is a ASP.NET based web application, which includes very simple user requirements, where we can create, read, update and delete (crud) the employee info of a company. Based on just a database table, it explores and solves most of the major problems in web development architectural space. This open source starter kit extensively uses major features available in latest Visual Studio, ASP.NET and Sql Server to make robust, scalable, secured and maintainable web applications...
My organization has an ongoing project to take documents produced for internal regulations and such, change some of the formatting and then export it as PDF. Our requirements were that only one person would be doing this, but it has been painfully tedious and sometimes error-prone to do by hand. Enter the fearless developer to automate the situation! Since I am one of those guys that just plain does not like VB, I wanted to do the automation in the ever-so-much-more-familiar C#. While Microsoft had...
Introduction We are adopting Click Once as a deployment standard for Thick .Net application clients. The latest version of this tool has matured it to a point where it can be used in an enterprise environment. This guide will identify how to use Click Once deployment and promote code trough the dev, test and production environments. Why Use Click Once over SCCM If we already use SCCM why add Click Once to the deployment options. The advantages of Click Once are their ability to update the code in...
This weekend, we were planning on going to Mt. Rushmore, but with the weather the way it is, we decided to head south instead. So what are we going to do? A tour of different restaurants on the show Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives. Not very original I know since there are web sites and iPhone apps dedicated to locating the establishments, but it definitely sounds like it could be some fun. We are going to leave KC tonight and go through St. Louis, Memphis, Little Rock, Dallas, Oklahoma City, and back...
The Chicago Architects Group will be holding its next meeting on April 20th. Please come and join us and get involved in our architect community. Register Presenter: Matt Hidinger Topic: Onion Architecture Location: Illinois Technology Association 200 S. Wacker Dr., Suite 1500 Room A/B Chicago, IL 60606 Time: 5:30 - Doors open at 5:00 del.icio.us Tags: Chicago Architects Group,Data Integration Architecture,Mike Vogt...
We have been getting hit very hard with comment spam as of late. As mentioned in the last post, this is something we typically deal with on a regular basis for the past 6 years, but some weeks are like this week where it is just crazy. Because of the way things are right now, I have disabled the ability to toggle on or off the CAPTCHA controls for comments. I know some bloggers are going to get mad, but we need to see if the lack of CAPTCHA on some blogs is the key cause of SPAM or if they are manually...
Geekswithblogs Gets a Facelift
Celebrating the five year anniversary of the first post on Geekswithblogs, the GWB team has launched a new look and functionality for the community designed to help the community continue to grow and increase interaction amongst bloggers.
The new design offers bloggers and readers the ability to quickly check recent posts, popular posts, Twitter users from the community, community news, and featured bloggers.
The redesign also makes it easier for bloggers to find tutorials on how to get the most from their blogs, support information, and a community-wide tag cloud.
We hope that you will enjoy the new features and look. Here’s to another five years and to everyone that makes up Geekswithblogs!
GWB Goes to PDC ’08 – Let Us “Tag Your Top”
Geekswithblogs is proud to be a Silver Media Sponsor for the upcoming PDC ’08! This will be a great opportunity for face-to-face interaction with the developer community.
If you happen to be going to Los Angeles for the PDC, and we highly suggest you do, make sure to swing by the Geekswithblogs booth (#100) in the Expo Hall to say hi! We will have some amazing looking Geekswithblogs stickers hot off the press ready to “tag your top” – so bring your laptop by to take it from drab to fab!
GWB Podcasting from PDC ‘08
Make sure to look for fellow Geekswithbloggers Chris Williams and D’Arcy Lussier roaming around the floor. They will be playing the part of on-site GWB ambassadors and roving reporters; stop and chat with them!
We’d like to know what you think about the upcoming podcast. We are thinking of firing PodcastStudio.net (the official podcast of GWB) back up after the event and would like to hear your thoughts and suggestions.
GWB and PDC ’08 – We’ll Make You Famous!
A major part of our display at our PDC booth is going to include a video featuring none other than the Geekswithblogs community members! We’re proud to have you as contributors to a large, healthy blogging community and want to give you some additional exposure.
Here’s what to do; record yourself saying “I’m a geek with a blog, and I…”. Simply fill in the rest with something interesting about yourself. It could be anything from what technology you love, what you like to do in your spare time, where you live, etc.
Examples include:
- I’m a geek with a blog, and I rock at ASP.NET.
- I'm a geek with a blog, and I support my development community by presenting at user groups.
- I'm a geek with a blog, and I love playing guitar.
- I’m a geek with a blog, and I volunteer to help the homeless.
- I’m a geek with a blog, and I chug energy drinks.
First 30 bloggers that send in a video with at least 5 statements get a ultra-stylish Geekswithblogs t-shirt with their blog URL on the back!
Stay tuned for FTP information for uploading your files!