It was a warm sunny July afternoon. The lake was cool, calm, and inviting. Little Johnny sat on the bank of the lake skipping rocks while the rest of the cub scouts were out hiking in the woods. Johnny was soaking it all in, the vast lake with the little island in the middle. The bright blue sky, nothing but the sounds of the wind and the occasional bird. Yes, this was a perfect day and Johnny was enjoying every minute of it. However, Johnny got bored (as most little boys often do). He decided to...
This month's meeting will be a social/networking/bar camp type meeting. It will be a good chance to just talk and socialize over beers/wines/ cokes. For those who are interested, we will be meeting at Coach's Bar around the corner from Centriq. Click for directions and map: 414 W 103rd St, Kansas City, MO 64114 See you there...
[I haven’t done QandAs for a long while – very remiss of me.] Anyway, I have been asked this one so many times lately that I felt a more public answer was needed. The short answer is: Mostly. Certainly it is good enough to get work done. The longer answer is below… History In the first version of Entity Framework (which came with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1), the Entity Framework Designer was… bad. I mean very bad. I mean dumbly bad. We had a decent enough runtime but the design surface just wasn’t up...
[This is the fourth in a series of posts on getting started with the new features in Entity Framework 4 based on the demos I did in my session at TechEd Europe in Berlin last week (Nov 2009).] Complex Types make it easier to work with objects, allowing the grouping of related properties in Entities and the reuse of these groupings across Entities. The first release of Entity Framework included Complex Type support but did not expose this capability through the Entity Data Model Designer. The good...
Asynchronous statistics auto update in SQL Server would ensure that the statistics are not updated when a query is executed, ensuring timely response. For this option, we need to set AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS_ASYNC to ON and also AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS to ON. Here, a separate thread runs in the background, which actually does the job of updating the statistics. So updated stats are available the next time for a query. This can also work the way round, meaning that a query might be using old stats and...
Last saturday (yep..., even in the weekends the .NET community is active) I presented a talk on Entity Framework 4.0 for CodeCamp.NL. This was organized by the Dutch .NET communities www.sdn.nl, www.vbcentral.nl and www.dotned.nl. You can find my presentation and code examples (VS2010 beta2) on http://www.codecamp.nl/Default.aspx?tabid=356...
As business applications get built there is usually a need to implement a modal popup to prompt the user for input that is needed before the application can continue. In earlier versions of Silverlight the developer had to roll their own version. In Silverlight 3 the ChildWindow class is used to provide the base functionality needed in a modal popup. This blog will show you how easy the ChildWindow class is to use to implement a simple modal popup function in your application. The finished code for...
This past weekend traveled 1,377 mi (2,216 km) from Seattle to LA on a Coast Starlight Amtrak train. What an experience! Doing what you ask? Writing Green/Eco-friendly Mobile Applications on Windows Phone platform for Windows Phone. The even is called Windows Mobile Train Race, sponsored by Microsoft and AT&T Developer program. Kevin Wolf and I teamed up right away to write a Share-A-Ride application, and we feature completed v1.0 on the train! Kevin did the lion’s share of the work providing...
Our company does not have a full SIP phone integration with with Microsoft Communicator. It is used for presence and IM. In Outlook, I like to use the Dialer (as I have my laptop modem plugged into my Phone {which is plugged into OOMA – yea baby!}) to save all those seconds. However, if MOC is running, then when I launch the Outlook Dialer, it pops up MOC and tells me that feature is not operational. Here is how to use the plain old TAPI dialer. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Call...
I really like Windows 7 so far, amazingly, but I was about ready to hate it because my computer kept freezing when I would try to copy large files to the network. After about a week I realized that even though Windows Update is telling me it has no updates for me, if I force it to check for new updates it will find them (until I install the ones it finds). After installing the latest driver for my Atheros NIC, the problem seems to have disappeared (I could recreate it until now, so I'm pretty sure...
I’ve almost finished my first Umbraco project, which is probably the most awesome CMS I’ve ever seen. In case you’ve been under a rock (which, after having rooted around this thing, I am starting to feel like), Umbraco is a brilliant, ingenious, pure-XML-powered .NET CMS – sorry to say, but much better than DotNetNuke, and fully validates with XHTML 1.1 due to it’s XML nature. It supports nested master pages, Intellisense with Visual Studio, custom user controls, XSLT rendering, Web Services and...
If you’ve ever wanted to play around with a Microsoft Surface app but didn’t have the resources to get your own table. This is for you! Until recently, even the SDK was very hard to obtain without access to the device. Microsoft has expanded access and created several new resources for you to try. check it out! Surface Web site (http://www.surface.com) A new Technical Resources section to help you connect to the other available resources and support. MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com) A new Microsoft...
Business scenario: We have an XML file (HIPAA 837) saved as a XML data column in a table and we need to go through each row and get different information on different nodes and output to a table. The real reason of this design lies in with how the claim system is designed, which I will not try to explain here. Approach: Using Common Table Expression (CTE) to get all the necessary info so that the data can be joined later. Use ROW_NUMBER() to make sure the information comes from the correct line....
I’d like to provide you with a SilverBullet™, a small snippet of Silverlight, a class or namespace hidden in the silverlight .NET framework, to help you out in times of need. It’s not to learn, but something to keep in your pocket. Just remember it’s there and you’re safe. When writing the demo for the code-camp I ran into issues getting back on the UI thread after calling a webservice. The call to the webservice was made from the UI thread, but the callback was made on a different thread. The System.Threading.SynchronizationContext...
This post is part of a series comparing the language features of the C#, Javascript and Ruby programming languages. Part 1: Installation and hello world Part 2: Variables Part 3: Classes Variables C# requires that variables be declared with a specific type. Javascript and Ruby determine the type of variables at runtime. Here is the syntax: C# public string publicMessage = "Hello World"; private string privateMessage = "Hello World"; static string PRIVATE_MESSAGE = "Hello World"; Javascript var message...
Along with the new TV we purchased, I need a new antenna for Over-The-Air HD/DTV because I absolutely hate the Trek antenna I bought last year because of it’s bulky size and lack of a strong signal. I was strolling through Lowe’s picking up some stuff for youth group and I wandered by the home audio/video section. You will be amazed sometimes by the stuff Lowe’s carries and the prices compared to Best Buy and the chains. In this case I for the RCA Flat, non-powered antenna (see picture) for around...
I will be presenting on the Entity Framework in Harrisburg, PA at the Central Penn Code Camp on Dec 5th, 2009. Details can be found at the code camp site: http://centralpenn.web121.discountasp.net/home/CodeCamp2009/2009Schedule/tabid/84/Default.aspx...
I added a solution successfully through the stsadm command. But then when I tried to deploy it, it was stuck in a "Deploying" state. If you have a multiple WFEs and have a WSP that is stuck in a Deploying state, the job may be stuck in queue on the front end you are depoloying the solution from or may be stuck on the other front ends. Execute this command for all servers: stsadm -o execadmsvcjobs This will execute the pending jobs on the particular server the command is being run on...
This should work for SQL Server 2005/2008-- ALTER SCHEMA SchemaNameForTarget TRANSFER SchemaNameOfSource.MyTableName example: ALTER SCHEMA RiskEvaluation TRANSFER dbo.ConvertibleDebenture...
Today I saw interesting behavior in VS2008: when you try to edit any View in the ASP.NET MVC project, main window of VS is not responding. Effect is like a some “invisible” modal dialog window is shown, and you can’t close it by Space or Enter. When you try to click in any part of VS’s window, you get an error beep. I tried to unload all of add-ins, uninstall Resharper, reset VS settings – it’s useless. Solution is here (big thank you, guys :)): uninstall “Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component”...
Another great opportunity to ask Microsoft engineers your technical questions is coming up on Tuesday, November 24th. These chats are your opportunity to get advice and answers from the engineers at Microsoft. You may want to review the transcript from previous monthsto get an idea about what kind of topics are discussed. Title: Windows CE Live Chat When: Tuesday, November 24, 2009 9:00 - 10:00 A.M. Pacific Time Add to Calendar Description: Do you have tough technical questions regarding Windows...
Two areas I am looking at right now are SQL Azure and Entity Framework 4. PDC had plenty of content on both these areas. Just need to find the time to watch some of it! I have added direct links to the standard definition WMV and the PPTs to download (which is what I am doing right now). SQL Azure SQL Azure Database: Present and Future Windows Media Video PPT Using the Microsoft Sync Framework to Connect Apps to the Cloud Windows Media Video PPT The Future of Database Development with SQL Azure Windows...
The industry it moving towards identity standards, and with the recent release of Windows Identity Foundation (fka Geneva), and the beta of SharePoint 2010, it’s important to take a look at the direction of how identity is being normalized into a “service” within the SharePoint object model. With SPS 2010, the SPUser object is now a claims identity. Identity management has been normalized to a approach that internally uses an STS that takes all “provider” or external STS identities, then creates...
If you were like me last week – bummed because you weren’t able to make one of the coolest PDC’s in years. You’ll be happy to know (as I was) about a very generous and cool offering from Microsoft – made possible by some very hard work from the channel 9 guys! You can view ALL the sessions here! All of Day 1 is up (including PPTs) and Day 2 and 3 content will follow shortly with the plan being everything up by mid week! Great job guys!!!!!!!!! And thanks...
In this Issue: Jeremy Likness, Andrej Tozon, Lee, Adam Kinney, Karl Shifflett, Andy Beaulieu, and Rob Houweling. From SilverlightCream.com: Revisiting Lorem Ipsum in Silverlight 4 with RichTextArea and Printing Jeremy Likness revisits some previous work on inline hyperlinks now in Silverlight 4B where the task becomes much simpler. He includes samples and code. MVVM with WPF, Silverlight, and… Windows Forms It appears that Andrej Tozon's blog slipped off my list... sorry Adrej, but point being, if...
Interestingly I had two instances last week when I thought different parts of Microsoft were re-inventing the wheel. The first was while listening to Episode 496 of Dot Net Rocks, where they were talking about project Trident from Microsoft Research. My first thought as they were describing the "visual workflows" was that MS Research had re-invented SSIS. Then as they described the versioned catalogue of workflows it sounded more like the way DTS used to store it's packages. But when they started...
I was asked a little while back to pull together the best training resources for .NET development to feed into a MSDN UK site. I thought it would be useful to share here as well. By no means everything is listed but sometimes less is more :-). Enjoy: Top Tip: Watch out – these are sometimes big downloads. For instance I just downloaded a high def PDC2009 session at 600MB! I recommend you check out Free Download Manager – it is a great open source tool for working with large files. Offline Training...
WCF Service Testing: A challenge for a WCF service developer is to know whether the service developed by him is interoperable with other applications made in different technologies. Often People will write sample windows applications to check whether WCF service else we tend to use dynamic Web service invocation tools which can put up a request to a WCF service and show you the result set. One such tool is SOAP UI. I had a requirement where my WCF service should communicate with Java clients. Once...
Just a decade and a half ago, the process of building a simple Windows-based application could have been described as a nightmare. The introduction of Visual Basic changed it so developers could for the first time implement Windows applications in an intuitive, graphical environment by dragging controls onto a form. The web revolution is here and now. Web had become very quickly the platform of choice for all kind of applications. The demand for web applications is ever growing and cloud computing...
In this Issue: Jeremy Likness, Jesse Bishop, Deborah Kurata, Mark Tucker, Fredrik Normén, Corey Schuman(2), Laurent Duveau, Jeff Wilcox, and Erik Mork. Shoutout: Joe Stegman posted his BrowserFlow sample from PDC 2009 From SilverlightCream.com: Rich Data Forms in Silverlight 4 Beta Jeremy Likness' latest is on some of the new features in Silverlight 4B such as IDataErrorInfo, Data Annotations, Implicit Styles, and a lot more all with links out to descriptive posts... great overview posting! Implementing...
I’m going to be looking at a few different languages and blogging my thoughts. I am not a language dork so it will probably be mostly wrong. The languages I care about are c# (which is what I mostly use), javascript (which I love) and ruby (which everyone else loves). This post is part of a series comparing the language features of the C#, Javascript and Ruby programming languages. Part 1: Installation and hello world Part 2: Variables Part 3: Classes Installation C# is installed by installing visual...
I labelled this as Part 01 because who knows, I may do a running series. Just came from a 'pot luck' -- I hate pot lucks, but that's not part of the reason to write. My wife gives me a hard time for not entering into conversation with people and cites that as a reason I never have a good time at such events. So tonight, I decided to 'enter in'. One of the guys that I DO know said something about Silverlight, mentioned I was involved with it and asked the guy he was introducing to me if he was familiar...
This series of posts discusses the use of an Aspect-oriented programming approach for implementing the validation part of a business domain, using the ValidationAspects aspect library, that sits on top of the PostSharp aspect weaver and allows for placing Design by Contract - style attributes on properties and method arguments, as well as for easy runtime validation of an object's state. This is the third post of a three-part series that discusses the use of these validation aspects throughout the...
I am currently on Chapter 10 - Lesson 2 of the (Exam 70-505): Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.5—Windows® Forms Application Development book and I am a bit disappointed. Besides the correction page, which hasn't been updated since May 09, I have found seeral errors on my own. The only positive thing that I can say about the cd-rom is that they really walk you though setting up the databases which is great for someone with no experience. My problem with the book so far is not only the amount of errors...
En mi trabajo actual casi no utilizo el SQL Manager. Esto debido a que yo sólo me encargo de cosas del front (funcionalidades e interacción con el usuario) y lo referente a bases de datos lo ve otra persona. Estarme alejando de las cuestiones de bases de datos me preocupa un poco porque siento que podría 'oxidarme' en esa área que de por sí no ha sido mi fuerte; sin embargo, hace algún tiempo me dí cuenta de que en realidad la persona que se encarga de bases de datos tampoco le mete mucho la mano...
I have written far too many null checks in my life. Why do we have even null values? They only seem to provoke a NullReferenceException in our code after all. F# for example has the option type with the value None which is semantically the same as null without being null which makes it impossible to access invalid values by accident. It is of course possible to create null values in F# but it is not the most natural thing in a functional programming language. How can we make C# safer without writing...
In this Issue: Chris Klug, Gavin Wignall, Jeff Handley, Brad Abrams(2), Mike Flasko, Karl Shifflett, Jeff Wilcox, Nikhil Kothari, and Colin Blair. Shoutouts: John Papa posted the material from his PDC Session: MVVM and Prism Demo for PDC09 Silverlight Session, and while you're at it, here's the video: Video of my Prism and MVVM at PDC Jeff Weber posted that a New Silverlight 3 Book Uses Farseer Physics Joe Stegman posted the slide deck for his PDC 2009 Out Of Browser Session András Velvárt announced...
Tibi has delivered another round of intervenes with some of the presenters at PDC. Vittorio Bertocci, Sara Ford, Ted Malone, Brad Abrams, Ade Miller and Don Box shared their ideas on the latest and greatest technology, and also their visions of the future. Tibi also interviewed Jon Flanders and Paula Januszkievicz at TechEd in Berlin. The interviews are here. Update: It seems there is a permissions issue with Azure Storage Tables at the moment, so you get an error when you try to view videos. Hopefuly...
When you have command line arguments to parse (whether on Windows or Linux), the place to look is Mono.Options. To date, I have not found anything better to get the job done. It is a single C# file if you do not want to download the entire Mono Library to use it. I was first introduced in Mono 2.2. The equivalent product is NDesk.Options by Jonathan Pryor. His single Options.cs file has been implemented as Mono.Options. To demonstrate how easy command line parsing can be, I’m going to show you is...
In this All Submittal Issue: Andrew Veresov, ITLackey, Damian Schenkelman, René Schulte, Michael Wolf(2), Shawn Wildermuth Shoutout: Check out Shawn Wildermuth's schedule and see if you're anywhere near one of his classes because Silverlight Tour Now Includes Silverlight 4! If you're into games and haven't yet checked out the Silver Games Project, now might be a good time. Sorry I'm running behind, but B.B.King was in Phoenix last night, and I can't miss him! From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight...
Code Camp Thanks! Thanks everyone for coming to my session about Modular Silverlight applications with Prism at the third Dutch Code Camp last Saturday! I hope you learned something useful from it. Special thanks to SDN, Stichting dotNed en VBcentral for organizing this event. Code & Slides The slides can be downloaded here. But more important, the source for the demo can be found over here. Links Here are a few links mentioned in the presentation: Silverlight en Expression insiders user group,...
I am learning all I can about the solid principles. Currently I am reading about the Single Responsibility Principle (A class should have only one reason to change). If a class has more than one responsibility, the responsibilities become coupled. This kind of coupling leads to fragile designs that beak in unexpected ways when changed according to Bob Martin. An example I have seen lately is the case of the widget.com public site and the widget.com customer site having the exact same code base except...
I had an issue recently with my SSAS 2008 performance counters - they were all showing up as 0. I could see them listed in Performance Monitor, but none of them worked. The counters for my SSAS 2005 instance worked fine, but the 2008 ones did not. I had observed this behaviour on my old Vista x86 machine and now it was happening on a fresh install of Windows 7 x64. I tried numerous steps to troubleshoot this issue including going through this detailed blog post from the CSS SQL Server Engineers blog,...
Most of 2009 I have been working from home. This is a workforce revolution, made possible by technology advances and attitude changes. Here is my list of simple rules for working from home: don’t do it all the time. It is important to have some face-to-face interaction with your team. even when working from home stay in touch. Call your client or team at least once a day. working from home can be isolating. I make sure that I get out of the house every day so that I don’t end up like Edward Scissorhands....
Sorry for the delay in posting. I almost started a war of sort over my last ad “Don’t trust any one under 30?” on the social network LinkedIn. Well let me state right here this was an ad, with an attention getting subject line. Well on to my post for this week (yes I am trying to do post every week coming out by Monday. Since I last posted, I have spread my group (just a little bit) over the Internet. The group is now on FaceBook (as Gray Matters!), Google groups (as GrayMatters!) and webs.com (as...
should be in one line var s1 = new decimal(10.0); var s2 = new decimal(20.0); var s3 = new decimal(30.0);...
At the recent Calgary Tech Days event I did a presentation on building composite applications with WPF and Silverlight. One question that I get asked frequently when I get to the part of explaining MVVM is how its different from patterns that seem too similar or identical, with MVC and MVP typically being the two common ones raised. Usually my answer is that MVVM is very similar to the others, but it implies *stuff* that’s specific to Silverlight and WPF (how binding works, commanding, etc.). Unfortunately...
I am currently reading Scott Berkun’s book “Confessions of a Public Speaker” and thought this was hilarious and true: …unless presentation terrorists steal your microphone midsentence or put up their own projector and start showing their own slide deck—designed specifically to contradict your every point—you’re free from the pressures other performers face nightly. Small observations like this make it easier to laugh at nerves, even if they won’t go away. I do quite a few presentations to companies...
This took a lot of google foo and twiddling, so I figured I would post this. That, and I fully expect I'll be scratching my head a few weeks from now and wondering where I put my sample XML ;) The configuration file below assumes that you have included the bins from the following folders included with the NHibernate download (I use 2.1.1): <Your NHibernate install frolder>\Required_For_LazyLoading\Castle\*.dll <Your NHibernate install frolder>\Required_Bins\*.dll And here's the App config...
Although delegate type and Enum type are class types, we can not inherit from them as they are sealed classes after compile, public delegate void DelegateTestType(); //Compile time error class myTest : DelegateTestType { ... } we can not make it as a type constraint either on class or method: //Compile time error class myTest<T> where T : DelegateTestType { } From the C# 2.0 specification we can read (20.7, Constraints): A class-type constraint must satisfy the following rules: · The type must...
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!