A good article by the man himself as to why Flash is not supported on iPhones, iPads and iPods, at http://www.apple.com/hotnew... there is also a long history between Apple and Adobe as mentioned in the book by Walter Isaacson. This could explain the resistance by Steve Jobs to Adobe Flash. Excerpt from Steve Job's Biography by Walter Isaacson'sTo make this work, the iMac needed to have great video editing software. So Jobs went to his old friends at Adobe, the digital graphics...
I have started to experiment with MiniProfiler to log our query performance. We currently use a mix of pure SQL and Entity Framework, since we need Fulltext search some pure SQL is unavoidable. Depending on the hotspots more queries will move back to pure SQL but for simplicity’s sake trivial queries will remain with EF. Getting started is relatively easy once you figure out which part of the documentation applies – I found my ways through various Stackoverflow questions and GitHub. Starting point...
A few days ago I read an article by Richard Seroter comparing the different cloud storage options and comparing Windows Azure and Amazon S3. I commented on his blog about how Id like to see companies use these more and more for B2B data exchange when you have a batch file rather than the traditional solutions using FTP and the painful infrastructure piece that often goes with this kind of project. The normal challenges include: Who hosts the FTP service or do we both What kind of security do we use...
Windows Phone has now been out for just over a year and Mint.com has had four active threads on their support forums for almost the same amount of time (here, here, here, and here). Out of the four requests, only two have an actual status and they contradict each other, with one saying it is “not planned” and the other saying it is “under consideration”. In addition, the last response from any Mint.com employee was over 4 months ago. These requests, assuming no duplicate votes, have gained a total...
Using locks to implement a thread-safe collection is rather like using a sledgehammer - unsubtle, easy to understand, and tends to make any other tool redundant. Unlike the previous two collections I looked at, ConcurrentStack and ConcurrentQueue, ConcurrentDictionary uses locks quite heavily. However, it is careful to wield locks only where necessary to ensure that concurrency is maximised. This will, by necessity, be a higher-level look than my other posts in this series, as there is quite a lot...
John and I will be making a visit to the UK in March for a week and we are very excited. If we have any London based bloggers or readers, please let us know if you would be up for a gathering while we are there. We have a few meetings during the days, but will be around the area from the 13th to the 18th of March...
A little while ago I was part of architecting and leading a project for http://hub.united.com and one of my very talented ex-coworker was in charge of doing most of the branding. He incorporated the Nivo Slider as part of the rotating banner on the home page. It seems like Rotating banners are the thing to do for internet sites these days. I have to admit, done right, they can be quite tasteful. Since my co-worker was in charge of doing most of the branding I did not get a great chance to see how...
Today's $10 Deal of the day from APress at http://www.apress.com/97814... is Expert F# 2.0"Expert F# 2.0 is about practical programming in a beautiful language that puts the power and elegance of functional programming into the hands of professional developers. In combination with .NET, F# achieves unrivaled levels of programmer productivity and program clarity."...
Standards You've probably done it. I know I have and I'm not too proud to admit that I've stepped outside the lines a time or two and not followed my company's coding standards to a T. Have you done the same?Please fill out my survey and tell me why. <a href="http://www.surveymonk... take our survey</a&... image obtained from http://troll.me/i-dont-alwa...
Our company is standardizing on VMWare for a number of reasons. I won’t list them here, but wanted to write about a problem that I had using VMWare Standalone Converter version 5.0 to convert Hyper-V virtual machines. There were four problems: The converter needs to be run as an administrator You have to be connected to localhost or you’ll be prompted to install the standalone agent first Domain credentials don’t work as expected You need to give explicit permissions to Everyone the directory where...
I was working with some sample code which unfortunately was in Visual Basic. After working on translating the Visual Basic to a language that doesn't suck (anything else is better) for about 20 minutes I started to try to think of ways to increase the rate I translated the VB code to C#. My first thought was to write a Haiku about it. Here it goes:I hate Visual BasicThe Bubonic Plagueis much more preferable Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions...
I come across this problem a lot. I often get work to fix problems that largely stem from bad interface design. Architects know how important interfaces are whether they be WSDL, C# interfaces, stored procedure parameters etc. Developers in my experience should get a grip on this stuff. Once you have some requirements spending some quality time working out what your interface is important. Developers need to hammer this into their skulls, it's pritty simple. This isn't an exhaustive post but try...
Working though the white paper Microsoft Dynamics® AX 2012: Using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 to exchange documents with Microsoft Dynamics AX I came across an issue with incorrect information in the guidance given relating to some of the namespaces used:1. On page 18 the document states:"In the Properties pane, enter the Default Value for the sales order create operation: http://schemas.microsoft.co... Dynamics/2008/01/services/S... This is incorrect and the namespace...
Working though the white paper Microsoft Dynamics® AX 2012: Using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 to exchange documents with Microsoft Dynamics AX I came across an issue when a Dynamics 2012 inbound port was attempting to consume a file created by a BizTalk 2012 send port.Initially the error given was that Dynamics could not access the folder specified. Giving the Dynamics user in question permisions on the folder led to a follow on issue where Dynamics could not consume the file as it was not the...
I have recently started a new project where we will be integrating a large number of systems with Dynamics AX 2012 using BizTalk Server 2010.We are working alongside consultants from both PWC and Microsoft and it is apparent that there is not a great deal of experience or information out there regarding Dynamics AX 2012 integration, nevermind specifically using BizTalk 2010!To that end I thought I would make some notes on the lumps and bumps along the road to integrating Dynamics AX 2012.So far I...
The Kindle Fire, like a lot of devices these days, does not come with a user manual. Kindle Fire: Out Of The Box covers the basics of setting up and using your Fire. This 76-page book is divided into 6 chapters: Get to Know Your Kindle Fire Set Up Your Fire Books, Newsstand, and Docs Music and Video Apps Web and Email The book is loaded with detailed, annotated screen shots, which makes it easy to figure out exactly what you should be seeing on your Kindle's screen. However, this comes at a price...
In this post we will see few of the initial steps for developing BizTalk Solutions for integrating with PeopleSoft Enterprise Systems using PeopleSoft Adapter. In order to proceed further, you must have Installed and Configured PeopleSoft Adapter properly, both on BizTalk side and PeopleSoft System side. This particular post is based on PeopleSoft HRMS 9.0 system. But the steps shown below should be same for any PeopleSoft Enterprise System. The steps will be same to connect to any Component Interface...
A year ago I blogged about how to manage your build process templates using the TFS API. The main reason for doing this is that you can (and should!) store your “golden” build process templates in a common location in your TFS project collection, and then add them to each team project that requires those templates. This way, you can fix a bug or add a new feature in one place and have the change affect all build definitions. However, by having the build process templates in a single location, the...
Many mobile apps define a texture as a background.Especially those on tablets like the iPad. So to make your app more appealing you can add a Background Texture to your app.Fortunately Blackberry provided us with a Class in their GitHub Sample Called Background(source code in Listing) 1: /* 2: * Copyright (c) 2011 Research In Motion Limited. 3: * 4: * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); 5: * you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. 6: * You may...
Every day is an opportunity to learn something or discover something new. Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework offers "Sample of the Day". "Sample of the Day" introduces one amazing code sample every 24 hours that demonstrates the most typical programming scenarios of different Microsoft technologies. If you are curious about and passionate for learning something new, follow the “Sample of the Day” RSS feed or visit the "Sample of the Day" homepage, and share your feedback with us onecode@microsoft.com...
I have some basic rules when it comes to checked in code to TFS. The one at the top of the list of rules is that, any developer should get the latest code from TFS, deploy and have a working web part, workflow or any other customization in SharePoint. This means that all dependencies should be deployed with the customization. If the web part uses a custom list as a data source, then a developer should not have to manually create site columns with the ‘correct’ internal and display name, list instances...
Say you liked the indexes you created on system A and wanted them on system B. Say you are a horrible typist. Say you are reading this blog, and are good at COPY+PASTE. @ECHO OFF SET HOST=eqcmongo01.eq.colo/ SET DB=Photologica mongo %HOSt%%DB% --quiet --eval "db.system.indexes.find({'k... print(c.ns.replace('%DB%','... + '.ensureIndex('); printjson(c.key); print( ');') ;})" The recipe is: Run mongo shell in quiet mode. Query out the indexes except the "natural"...
Summary I ran into a visual issue using DirectX (in C# via SlimDX) in which the texture filtering was not aligning properly. This is difficult to describe in words, so read the fully explanation below. The solution is pretty simple, so I decided to post about it in hopes that it is use to another DirectX neophyte in the future. The Problem Like most normal people, in my spare time I work on an open-source emulator for the long-lost 3DO multiplayer video game system (see fourdo.com for all your 3DO...
Thanks to the UserVoice team for enabling custom statuses on Windows Phone Marketplace Requests! I have added a few additional statuses (I’m still working out exactly what makes the most sense), but the biggest change is to the Declined status. Previously, when a request was marked as Declined, all voting was closed. I was using this status for several different reasons: To show that the request was off-topic, either because it belonged on the Windows Phone Suggestion Box or because it was a feature/enhancement...
In order to migrate (copy) an InfoPath form from one environment (say test to production), there are several things to consider. First, does your form use a data connection to retrieve or submit data? Second, if you update the form in the future, do you want all of the locations where this form is used to be updated as well? Consider these issues while reading the instructions below. Step 1: Create a form First, let’s create a simple InfoPath. For my example, I’ve created an overly simplified leave...
Cloudstore – A marketplace for Government Microsoft Marketplace and the Everything Apple's App Store have revolutionised how we all buy and use software. It's now the best way to 'buy bits'. So why shouldn't government consumers be able to connect with their suppliers in a similar way? That was the challenge to Solidsoft from the Cabinet Office. We responded with the CloudStore. It replaces a complex system which had different applications from different providers spread across multiple locations....
Normally the thumbnails at the new tab page are organized by how often you visited a page. But after removing such a thumbnail by clicking the little gray cross at the right top corner deactivates the logic for this page on the whole. The page is added to an internal black list. So the idea to visited the site often enough newly does not work to show the thumbnail from this page again. So we have to choices: reset the black list remove an entry from the blacklist Reset the black list By removing...
As an MSFT I have the ability to start up a Technet blog, which I gladly take. I will continue to write and post articles here as my "personal" blog store and will share the technical articles on both sites! http://blogs.technet.com/b/...
Today's $10 Deal of the day from APress at http://www.apress.com/97814... is Design Driven Testing"Design Driven Testing brings sanity back to software development by restoring the concept of using testing to verify a design instead of pretending that unit tests are a replacement for design" This is a book that all J*** developers should read from cover to cover. I look forward to C# and VB.NET versions. There is a tendency in software development to go to extremes. This book helps to correct...
A while back I was helping a client upgrade SharePoint 2007 code to SharePoint 2010 and I came across this interesting problem. I was working web parts that were created in Visual Studio 2008 using WSPBuilder extensions. The first order of business was to convert them to Visual Studio 2010 templates instead of using WSPBuilder 2010 extensions. Why Use Visual Studio 2010 templates? There are two main reasons I highly recommend using Visual Studio 2010 templates instead of using WSPBuilder 2010 templates....
Sometimes you need to shorten a long string to certain length without cutting the final word in half and add custom string such as 3 dots to the end, It will moves the pointer up to the previous space, if the limit finished within a word. Here I listed 3 functions may help you. Javascript function Truncate(str, maxLength, suffix) { if(str.length > maxLength) { str = str.substring(0, maxLength + 1); str = str.substring(0, Math.min(str.length, str.lastIndexOf(" "))); str = str + suffix; } return...
Update: Posted the video of “MVVM Applied” below. This week I was “on tour” in Belgium and Netherlands and presented 3 times: “MVVM Applied, From Silverlight to Windows Phone to Windows 8” (in Belgium and Netherlands) The goal of this session was to make people feel confident that the skills they acquired working in various XAML frameworks (Silverlight, Windows Phone, WPF, Surface, etc) are going to help them tremendously when developing Windows 8 applications. It was a session packed with code,...
Having written an extension method to create an instance from a Type and been a bit underwhelmed by its performance, I looked into exactly what was happening and have now got it working much, much faster.To recap, the problem with the first version of this method is that it cached the Funcs it created with all their argument types as object, which meant they had to be cast every time the Func was invoked. This can be seen in all the Convert calls in Visual Studio's expression visualiser: It turned...
If you tried to build applications for Windows 8 with XAML/C#, you may have noticed an annoying issue: If you have a list controls (for example a GridView) and you bind the ItemsSource property to a property of type ObservableCollection<Som... on your ViewModel, the GridView is not updated when the collection’s content changes. The CollectionChanged event is raised properly, but it is not honored by the binding system. Thankfully, this is a temporary bug, and it should be solved in the...
What is Model? A model can be considered as a container that facilitates presentation view, behavior and/or persisting data to/from data source (i.e. database etc). Besides the data container elements, a model may or may not contain behavior (i.e. logic), depending on design context of corresponding architecture. While the term “Model” is frequently discussed and used in Model-View-Controller pattern context, it is one of most important consideration in current world of software architecture. Common...
Our Universities and Colleges haven’t gotten it yet, and its producing a disservice to the technical industry and trickling down to every other industry that relies on technical people (read: All of them). I’m talking about the lack of soft-skills, leadership, interpersonal, and professional training that organizations are demanding from their IT professionals. Gone are the days of the stereotypical programmer that sits in a dark room lit only by a computer monitor, with food and requirements slid...
There is a new version of Videolan available at http://www.videolan.org/"With faster decoding on multi-core, GPU, and mobile hardware and the ability to open more formats, notably professional, HD and 10bits codecs, 2.0 is a major upgrade for VLC. Twoflower has a new rendering pipeline for video, with higher quality subtitles, and new video filters to enhance your videos. It supports many new devices and BluRay Discs (experimental). Completely reworked Mac and Web interfaces and improvements in the...
I had a few minutes of free time at the Windows Phone Garage. During that time, I created the Statistics object for Card Roulette. Of course, all it does is count the types of cards in a deck. With this I can create the statistics on a draw. It is a little bit of a brute force approach. However, it's also somethign that can be cleaned later if I need some inprovements. Filed under: something is better than nothing...
Let me start off by stating that I am in no way an expert on MSBuild, writing build scripts, MSDeploy, Web Deploy, etc. I learned a lot in this process about those things which helped me find a workable solution. I'm sure there are better ways to accomplish what I'm trying to do, but this is what I came up with. My goal in writing this is that someone will hopefully avoid wasting their time as I did trying to get app_offline.htm to work.For those of you who don't know what app_offline.htm is, it's...
At http://shop.oreilly.com/pro... O'Reilly are offering 50% off the ebook, Mastering Regular Expressions, 3rd Edition."If you don't use regular expressions yet, you will discover in this book a whole new world of mastery over your data. If you already use them, you'll appreciate this book's unprecedented detail and breadth of coverage. If you think you know all you need to know about regularexpressions, this book is a stunning eye-opener. As this book shows, a command of regular...
If you have an existing O'Reilly or Microsoft Press book, you can get $4.99 E-book upgrade.The details are at https://members.oreilly.com... but you do need to to create a free logon to see it...
I made some tweaks to Card Roulette. I added some quick interface code so I could make sure the Decks and Cards were working as expected. This lead to the addition of the ability of to add a card to a deck. Otherwise, you can't put a card in a discard pile. I also added a ToString for a PlayingCard. I would pound through some more code, but I need to prepare for tomorrow. What's tomorrow, you ask? Well, remember yesterday when I mentioned the Windows Phone Garage in Birmingham, Alabama? That is tomorrow....
Each week, the different MVP Leads send out an email communication to their MVPs letting us know about upcoming events and other things relevant to us. As part of that newsletter, an individual MVP is often highlighted. This week, I’m the featured MVP! Thanks, Heather, for spotlighting me and the Windows Phone Marketplace Requests site...
We’re coming home! In October of 2012 Prairie Dev Con returns to where it all began: Regina, Saskatchewan! And while we’re over seven months away, we’re already starting to plan for the event – and we need your help to make it the best Prairie Dev Con ever! We’ve set up a *very* short survey asking what topics and workshops you’d like to see at the conference. We’ll also be drawing from survey submissions on May 1st for a free registration to the conference! Just visit our online survey here to fill...
Today we launched a new feature on Geekswithblogs.net to make it easier to share your posts with short URLs. The domain we are using is wblo.gs and you can share individual post or you can share you main blog page through the shortened URLs. To share your blog URL, use your blog application name like this: http://wblo.gs/jjulian – Jeff’s Blog http://wblo.gs/ – Geekswithblogs.net Community Page If you would like to share a post using a short URL, you can find the URL in two places. The first is on...
The key charactersYou may very well run into the same issue I did if you are using the following technologies:Team Foundation Server (TFS) with Team Foundation Build (TFB) - in my case, 2010Visual Studio Unit Tests - also 2010, in my caseReliance on loading assemblies at runtime: Assembly.Load()How might someone run into #3, you might ask? It's pretty common these days teeming with reliance on reflections and other fancy run-time logic. In my case, it was Enterprise Library.IssueI was seeing an issue...
Today's$10 Deal of the day from APress at http://www.apress.com/97814... is Excel 2010 Made Simple."Over 500 screen visuals and clear-cut instructions guide you through the features of Excel 2010, from formulas and charts to navigating around a worksheet and understanding Visual Basic for Applications and macros."...
Few days ago I have received an invitation from Packt Publishing to review this book. I myself is a big fun of Generics and is very interested about it, so i've decided to give it a go. Thank you for letting me review this interesting book. .NET 4.0 Generics (Packt Publishing) is written by Sudipta Mukherjee. The book is primarily targeted to beginners and intermediate programmers who want to know what .NET Generics is all about and how it can help solved real world problems. The book covers the...
Recommendation: Don't use the same action names for get and (Ajax) post.I am always amazed at how bad Microsoft's code examples are. Code generated using the default templates in Visual Studio is not much better. To find out, create an empty project (pick your favorite type) and run static code analysis or FxCop and see how many warnings you see. For some real fun try running StyleCop. The default templates (and therefore commonly-used standard practices) are also not very good in my opinion. Consider...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. First of all, thanks for all the well-wishers for me and my family, things are starting to settle down a bit, so I hope to be able to continue to blog at least on a bi-weekly basis – and I’m hoping to sprinkle in some C++ blog entries as well. But for today, we’re...
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!