I thought I would restart this blog that I've barely used, by doing the traditional introduction. I'm Kelly Jones and I work for Sogeti USA in the Columbus, Ohio office. I've been working in the IT field for ten years now. Like most computer geeks, I've always tinkered with them, going clear back to my Commodore VIC-20 circa 1983. Several years ago, I setup Another Old Computer Museum website. The name was a little bit of a joke, since there were quite a few websites devoted old computers. I originally...
Don't get me wrong, it's a powerful language, but sometimes it just hacks me off. In case anyone is wondering where the rant is coming from, I'm trying to take two stored procedures and merge them. One gets a list, and the second gets child records of the first list. And trust me, it is more complicated than it sounds because of particular nuances in the SPs. If I solve it, I'll let you know! Benjamin...
While I am not always all that interested in IBM DB2 XML contests, this one interested me because I collect Rubick's cubes. I probably have 50 different cubes from 6 sided to a 12 sided puzzle that works on the same principles of the Cube. Anyway, I may have to enter just to increase my chances of getting another Cube. Check it out over here...you could win a 32GB iPod Touch! http://antoniocangiano.com/2008/12/01/ibms-xml-challenge-lots-of-prizes-inside/...
Day one of my Dev Teach week found us at Ye Old Orchard pub in Montreal. In addition to fine beverages, really good food, and Monday Night Football, it was also trivia night. So what insight did I gleam? Hummingbirds are the only bird that can fly upside down. Marie Curie was the first woman to win two Nobel peace prizes. Molson is the oldest Canadian brewery. Pan is the Greek god of shepherds (we thought maybe it was David Woods…). …and a bunch of other stuff. We also learned… If you’re going to...
I made the trip from Phoenix to Montreal yesterday with only a couple issues... our flight out of Phoenix was delayed 20 minutes so my 45 minutes between planes in Denver got tight. From wheels down to wheels up was exactly 30 minutes and that included switching concourses and almost giving me a stroke :) Of course my bag-o-clothes did NOT make it, and as of 8am it has not yet, but Air Canada just told me on the phone that it was on it's way. I packed one spare set of clothes in my laptop bag, thankfully....
Steve Ballmer raised the Search Challenge to MVPs at 2008 Summit, with the words, “I’m going to ask you one week switch your default, one week. At the end of the week…I’ll want feedback, how was your week, what happened, what did you like, what didn’t you like … Can I make that deal with you? (Cheers and applause.) That’s the deal.” I was there, I agreed, so here goes... I'm giving up Google and going to use Live Search for one week. For one week I have the opportunity to provide feedback every time...
You have designed Aggregations for your cube, but how do you know that they are currently processed? Hopefully you have your processing routines setup in production so that your indexes are always kept processed. But maybe you are working in a development environment or you are performance tuning that you want to double check that your aggregations are currently processed. It is not immediately obvious how you can figure if the indexes for a partition or a set of partitions are processed as this...
Updated and improved for Team System 2008. http://www.codeplex.com/TFSEventHandler The TFS Event Handler makes it easier to notify users of changes to Work Items in Team Foundation Server. You will no longer need to add individual alerts to users. It is developed in .NET 3.5 SP1 for Team Foundation Server 2008 and is deployed as a system service. I have added support for groups. If you add a TFS group into the Assigned To drop down all members of that group will receive notifications! You will need...
Here are the slides from the presentation I gave to the UK BizTalk User group (now the UK SOA/BPM group). I gave two sessions – firstly an overview of the work we had done at my current employer and then running through some code, configuration and live demos. The download location might change if I find a more suitable home. The initial project was part of the Integration story in rolling out a global instance of SAP. The first interfaces we put live were those between the UK Warehouse Management...
In this issue: Alex Golesh, Silverlight SDK, John Stockton, Page Brooks(2), Mike Snow(2), Terence Tsang(2), Adam Kinney, Shawn Wildermuth, Jesse Liberty, and Jonathan van de Veen. Shoutouts: Adam Kinney has some good comments about a much-viewed Surface video: Extending the Surface experience in the BMW app. Jesse Liberty waxes poetical about divElements, and it looks like with good reason :) SandDock for Silverlight – Commercial floating windows Corey Schuman is going to be on GeekSpeak on the 10th:...
My pics from the Venus, Jupiter, Moon conjunction. Venus moved significantly over the last few days, as much as two full moon widths a night. It was joined by the crscent moon on Dec 1. 11/26/2008 - Jupiter on top, Venus on the bottom 11/26/2008 - Jupiter on top, Venus on the bottom 11/29/2008 - Jupiter on top, Venus still on the bottom 12/01/2008 - Just after sunset. Big change in two nights. Crescent moon on left, Venus on bottom, Jupiter on right. 12/01/2008 - Starting to see some Earthshine on...
Here is something that you may not be aware of. In .NET, if you use regular expressions, your code would perform much better if you minimize the times when you instantiate a Regex object. For example, if you have a regular expression that you use repetitively throughout your code, you should construct the Regex object once and reuse it throughout your code. You'd be surprised how much overhead the Regex constructor requires. Additionally, you should always pre-compile your regular expressions as...
Now Microsoft Chart controls Add-on for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 can be used for charting needs. Prerequisite: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5. For sample Environment for Microsoft Chart Controls check here. The sample environment contains over 200 samples for both ASP.NET and Windows Forms. See the following related links: Chart Controls for .NET Framework Chart Controls for .NET Framework Language Pack Chart Controls Add-on for...
There are several possibilities, however one of the most common reasons is the combination of Internet Explorer version 7 and the Google Desktop/Toolbar. For some reason, the plugin does not seem to be compatible. Try removing the Google Desktop and/or Toolar...
Just wanted to write a bit about the upcoming Day of .NET conference coming soon to St. Louis. We are putting the final pieces together this week and currently have nearly 200 people registered. The conference will be on December 13th, 2008 and, if you want more information or just want to register, please check out the site at www.StLouisDayOfDotNet.com. If you are waiting to register, please be aware that our registration closes on Monday, December 8th and we cannot accept on-site registrations....
The eznwupd.exe program is an update program for the greater spyware program called eznorun.exe. To get rid of this menace, do the following: Go to c:\Program Files\ezn. Delete the directory. Empty the trash to actually remove it. Go to run at the start menu and type: regedit. Search for and remove all keys, values, etc. to eznorun.exe Go to to run at the start menu and type: msconfig. Go to the Startup tab. Delete the eznorum.exe entry. That should do it! You should no longer see this message appearing...
I'm really not obsessed with performance -- honest! However, when a co-worker asked me today exception handling was an acceptable way of coding defensively, my reaction was rather predictable. Exceptions are pure evil, and should be... well, exceptional. Yes, you guessed it. The next question was "How bad is try/catch really?" The short answer is that is involves minimal overhead... unless an exception is thrown. In that case, the .NET exception handling mechanism does a few nice things, like providing...
Hi everyone, It's been a fair few weeks since I last wrote a blog post so I thought I'd scribble one together very quickly! Things are going great at the moment. I work for a fantastic (and I truly mean fantastic) marketing firm in central Bristol as a software developer, helping with the development of their award-winning direct marketing and response tracking products! And they're getting me a company laptop - I feel important... *warm glow inside*! I've just moved the site to a new server (fully...
Yes that is not a mistake. One of the interesting things we are doing at Microsoft is bringing the User Experience folks into focus for our application development platform. One of my good friends has started a blog to cover this emerging area. Check it out when you get a chance. Happy Coding...
This looks pretty cool. I wonder if they are using devices with GPS's...
Recently the Exchange server at work has been upgraded to an Exchange 2007 SP1 server. With this has come the chance to finally get rid of the MAPI CDO solutions we have, by switching to using Exchange Web Services (EWS). I've spent quite a while looking for easy ways of doing this, and for the majority of the time, it seems ok, but the biggest issue I've had (and unfortunately the solution I needed) was accessing public folders. Specifically public folders in a hierarchy. Public Folders\ \Testing...
I was working on a small web application that was built very quickly using Linq to SQL and I wanted to ensure that a particular page wasn't loading more data than needed into memory. This particular page had a simple GridView, and in the one and only item template, there was an ASP.Net Image (along with some other stuff). The data source was of type IQueryable<Article> and an Article may have zero to many ArticleImages. A relationship was present in the dbml, so the ArticleImages were generated...
Hi!, As I wrote in previous post, I'm gonna show you a little about ASP.NET MVC. If you wanted to read this and next posts, I would expect you to know what is MVC pattern and how ASP.NET works. Here is something about MVC pattern on MSDN and here is something about ASP.NET, if you don't know what is it yet ;] Okay, so we reached the point, where we start studying technical details of ASP.NET MVC. (I assume that you too have installed MVC Beta October 2008) For first post we'll make pretty simple,...
Welcome to my new blog about web technologies. Firstly, sorry for my poor english, I guess that sometimes it would be difficult for you to understand, what I wanted to say, but you should always try ;]. You know I'm from Poland and that's a country, where they teach as they wouldn't want you to know anything. Very sad country. But whatever happens, you must never give up. In next posts I'm gonna consider mainly ASP.NET MVC. Kinda new framework, as described by guys form m$ it's alternative approach...
To Use VS 2005 Web Deployment Projects 1. install VS 2005 Web Deployment Project add-in at "setup" link below a. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/asp.net/aa336619.aspx 2. In File Name Box - "*.*" -> Click Open Button 3. Select an available .wdproj file Other links: · http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/asp.net/aa336619.aspx · http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479568.aspx...
I came across a requirement where we needed to create types dynamically based on XML Configuration files, so that in the furture new types are required we dont need to update the application again by creating a new class. The additional requirement was to populate the property names of the class based on the Cml configuration and its values using the Querystring values from the HttpWebRequest. I earlier thought about using Dynamic methods from .NET Framework 2.0, but that did not fit my purpose since...
This is a lot harder than it sounds. At first you think there will be a built in option with the Read Identities method on the IGroupSecurityService Interface, but you would be wrong! When capturing an event from Team Foundation Server you have access to a lot of information about the change, including the Display Name of the fields for Assigned To and Changed By. But what if you allow Work Items to be assigned to groups! First, lets achieve that. Create a group called “Program Management” on a project...
So, got the Motorola MC75 working with its inbuilt camera. However during a demo the other day I inadvertently clicked my camera capture button on a device that doesn't have an inbuilt camera (doh). Of course my application then blew up. So here's the code that performs a camera capture but also detects (well catches) if the device doesn't have one... try { CameraCaptureDialog ccd = new CameraCaptureDialog(); ccd.InitialDirectory = @"\"; ccd.DefaultFileName = "test.jpg"; ccd.Mode = CameraCaptureMode.Still;...
Tampa CodeCamp is this weekend. Great speakers and great sessions, see you there! 12/6/2008 8:30 AM - 5:30 PM Welcome Time: 12/6/2008 7:30 AM Eastern Time K-FORCE BLDG 1001 E Palm Ave Tampa, FL , FL 33605 Be sure to sign up for this event ASAP at - http://www.tampacodecamp.com/...
The 2009 date has been set for January 24, 2009 from 8:00 - 4:30 at New Horizons of MN. Details are being finalized and as soon as the registration page is open, we will post the information here SharePoint Camps are about the SharePoint community at large. They are meant to be a place for developers, administrators and any SharePoint user to come and learn from their peers. Topics are always based on community interest and never determined by anyone other than the community. Registration link: http://www.nhmn.com/Courses/CrsDetail.aspx?C=NHTCSPCamp2...
To access a method from master page in the content page ensure first: The method in master page is declared as public than call this code from your content page code behind: MasterPageClassName MyMasterPage = (MasterPageClassName)Page.Master; MasterPageClassName.SetMenuToRegistered(); where: SetMenuToRegistered() - is a method positioned in the master page class...
Annual Holiday Networking Event Where: Eagan Community Center When: Tuesday, December 9, 2008, Special Time: 3:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. Speaker: Sue Lindgren, YESS! Registration Link: http://www.ctamn.org/cde.cfm?event=219036 Are you as effective as you could be? Do you know what is holding you back or getting in your way so you can be effective? What is Emotional Intelligence? Event Notes: • Afternoon Event (3 p.m. to 6 p.m.) • Plenty of Networking Delight • Appetizers • Cash Bar (registration includes...
You're invited. Register at www.sharepointmn.com Please join us on Wednesday, December 10, for another opportunity to collaborate with experts on methods used to maximize the potential of the Microsoft Office SharePoint platform. Previous MNSPUG presenters will team to facilitate an open forum around the platform. Be sure to bring your questions and experience to participate in this dynamic discussion. Several subject areas within the SharePoint platform will be covered, including: • Planning • Development...
Following the PDC, there has been a whole host of announcements about the new features we’ll be seeing in .NET 4.0. I’d like to take a moment to look at some of the features that will be coming to VB.NET 10. Auto implemented properties When this feature came to C# it created real language envy among VB developers. In those instances where all you need a property to do is hold a value (i.e. where a public field would do the job nicely if it wasn’t evil), C# 3.0 allows the developer to write the property...
Here is a HelloWorld sample on the new ASP.NET Charting control. To begin with, install the free Microsoft Chart Controls and the "Tools for VS 2008 for Chart Controls" from here and here Note that if you don’t install the Tools for VS 2008 for Chart controls, the Chart Server Control doesnt show up in the Toolbox Once you are done with the installation, restart Visual Studio if you are already running the same (of course, save your work) 1. Start Visual Studio 2008 and create a File – New – ASP.NET...
Last week, I had a discussion with some friends about the new features in C# programming language. It is kind of interesting that for most of the new features, I always found myself start with some sort of reluctance and then gradually accept it and finally find myself couldn’t write code without it. When I started learning C# a few years ago, I didn’t even like properties (I was a big fun of java). I didn’t understand that if they are just getters and setters, why we were bothered to have properties...
In one of static class in our application, I found local static members that were used to pass data between calls of static methods. It’s wrong and can cause errors that are intermittent and very hard to reproduce. The problem will happen if the same code executed for 2 users simultaneously. In this case value for one user could be used for the second user and result will be unpredictable. The code was similar the following: public static class HelperClass { private static string _dataToPass = "";...
The Windows Live Team put up a neat bunch of controls that can be used in your ASP.NET Websites. In fact once you install the Windows Live Tools for Visual Studio 2008 from http://dev.live.com/tools/ you get a few server controls in the toolbox as well as website templates for Visual Studio 2008 project/website. I wanted to demonstrate how you can quickly add a video to your website that is being streamed from the Silverlight Streaming Service, all within 5 minutes. Pre-requisites 1. Visual Studio...
For many years savvy iTunes users have been setting up US iTunes accounts to not only get music, video and film at a reduced cost but also be able to get TV programs early. It has been one of the ‘legal’ ways of breaking the Sky monopoly. That has all been stopped as Apple decides to maximize revenue. Previously a US account could be had by setting up an iTunes account and selecting the ‘No’ card payment option. Of course a US address was required and the purchase of iTunes US gift certificates thro’...
Hello. I’ve often wondered why I’ve never blogged before and never really came up with a convincing reason why not. I guess it’s partly laziness and partly wondering if no-one is going to read it then what is the point. I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that I should at least blog my thoughts so that even if nobody else reads them, at least I’ve taken the time to consider more about what I am thinking and writing which can only be a good thing. I’m currently focused on Integration and have been...
This web page from Sprint takes web widgets to the nth level. It most certainly is one page to rule them all! Lord of the widgets...
Ever had the issue, when you think you're laptop is powering down. Place laptop in bag only to find a while later laptop didn't power down and has done a nice job in warming up your bag? This phenomenon has been happening more and more to me, as the graphics drivers are causing a crash when my machines attempts to hibernate. I just thought we'd better give this syndrome a name. I've called it 'Hot Bag Syndrome'...
VMware workstation is 25% of today at the www.vmware.com estore, use CyberMondayDeal code to get the discount. Thanks to Oliver Sturm for the top tip...
Selecting Items in a list using DIVs instead of Radio Buttons Problem: Radio buttons cannot be styled using CSS. Another problem is that they simply f*** up your design if used incorrectly. They are also not very useful if you would like a user to be able to click on a large item in order to select it. Solution: A solution to this problem would be to allow the user to click on whole DIVs in order to select an item. This is done using some javascript, CSS and a hidden textbox. This is how it's done...
So you have a Silverlight application, and you want it to serve up some videos or deep zoom images, but you don’t want to fork over major cash to your hosting provider for the extra disk space and traffic. Well has Microsoft got a deal for you… The Microsoft Silverlight Streaming program gives you space online to not only host your media files but also the bandwidth to serve them up to your Silverlight app…and its *free*! Here’s the details: - 10 GB of space to host your media files. - Up to 5 TB...
I've been struggling through a Team Foundation Server 2008 install with Sql Server 2008 over the weekend. It seems to be having an especially hard time with the SQL Server Reporting Services. After analyzing a few things, I determined that the configuration tool was having an issue due to some prior installations of software. The report urls were pointing to a SQL Express directory. I went about setting up the virtual directories manually. This required setting up an application pool, and I assigned...
When you program in a high level language like .NET where the Garbage collector takes care of your memory you do not have to think about memory as often as it is the case in C++. Memory leaks tend to show up much more often in C++ and other non garbage collected languages because nobody is cleaning after you. Garbage collection is a good thing but somehow your application consumes much more memory than you thought it should. What should you do now? First of all you need to understand how your memory...
Back in the past (circa May 2006) I entered the GWB Game Contest. Six weeks of design and programming in Visual C#.Net 2005, pre-XNA days. I created a post-apocalyptic arena card game, similar to Magic, where patrons fight their champions (or slaves) in an arena. It included anime game art created by my daughter Mindy. Now I have been converting it to XNA. In addition, I want to significantly tweak the gameplay, and add lots more cards. Mindy is unavaila