Silverlight makes creating compelling Rich Internet Applications fairly easy. That said the cut down version of .Net means some things that you would do within an application have to be relegated to Web Services which can benefit from the full .Net library. One of these is of course Azure, after all that is the whole point - an online store of Business Logic and data. The application I'm working on uses Silverlight on the front end, and Azure will provide the bulk of the backend. There are reasons...
Anyway, I wanted to get the full Java JDK to support ANT and so, I dutifully did so. Only when I did, Eclipse would't start. I got a huge ugly dialog box which started with: JVM Terminated: Error Code=-1 followed by a ton of parameter information. What followed I won't detail here, but it suffices to say I lost a couple of hours of my time. I tried all kinds of things to get it work, but nothing. I even installed netbeans in an attempt to verify that Java was working. Turns out it was all my goof:...
In this issue: Quadra Silverlight Outsourcing, John Papa, Tim Heuer, Laurence Moroney, Terence Tsang, and Robby Ingebretsen. Shoutouts: For those of you not up on it yet, Laurence Moroney has a post up about Silverlight and Windows Live. Barak has a couple cool New Year's Cards up. I liked the video on the Ascentium one, but the comments on the Razorfish are pretty good, such as "Seattle grunge band discovers a fifth chord" :) From SilverlightCream.com: Quadra Silverlight Image Carousel Quadra Silverlight...
The “Yull” vacation has finally given be the chance to start digging into Windows Azure. There’s quite a few services in the Azure platform and as I’ve already spent some time looking at “BizTalk Services” before it was re-branded to .net Services I thought I’d take a look at SQL Data Services (SDS). SDS is very easy to work with if you know a bit about WCF and choose to take the SOAP road. I labbed a bit with the REST stuff and found it more complex than SOAP, so I stuck with the SOAP client. I’ve...
Recently we spoke about reading radio data in C#, however as in any vehicle we have also CD players. So what can be better, than to have an ability to play CDs while being notified about track name, gathered from CD-Text? So, let’s start. First of all, I want to express my pain with MSDN documentation about CD-ROM structure. Documentation team, please, please, please update it. First of all it is no accurate, then there are a ton of things missing. However, “À la guerre comme à la guerre”, thus I...
I recently encountered a troubling problem while creating a BizTalk 2006 R2 solution. Everything was working fine until I tried to open the Orchestration Designer to edit one of the orchestrations I had been working of for a couple of days. Visual Studio crashed immediately. I tried a few things, but I could not open any orchestration without Visual Studio crashing (no errors in event log, no dialog, nothing...). I finally fixed it by backing up and deleting my Visual Studio profile. The profile...
Just in case you weren’t convinced that I read it all of the time, I’m referencing another article from Computerworld. In it, the writer discusses how President-elect Barack Obama’s stimulus could create thousands of IT jobs. This is good news for you and great news for me!! So watch the stimulus closely to see how you or your organization can utilize it. Even without the stimulus, the article continues to say that the IT job outlook for 2009 is better than other industries. So keep on coding, troubleshooting...
Unwrapping my new Wolves wall calendar I realized its time to do some prognosticating. I've blown the dust off my Nostradamus predictions book, taken some fresh tea leaves and smeared them all over my cracked crystal ball (it rolled off my desk last March and I haven't taken the time to get a replacement) and I'm ready to peer deep into the future... Oh yeah, don't hold me to these. :-) Google Acquires IKEA: Google figures the best approach to gaining ground on the computer desktop is to buy the...
A while back I made a post about the Joel test and how badly my current employer is doing according to it. I've made it a personal goal to help improve my working conditions here as long as I am employed here, and as such I've started tackling weak areas, namely beginning with implementing source control management (SCM). As I've mentioned in my year wrap-up, we've made great progress in this department. I no longer write code unless I've first created a repository. For older jobs, as I use and update...
What a Scathing review from Newsweek about MacWorld. Wow. Never thought I would see that from MacWorld. An opening quote like this is a rough as it gets: “At the annual Macworld trade show in San Francisco today, Apple put on an excruciating 90-minute keynote that may go down in history as the worst Apple event of all time. In brief: for the first time in recent memory, Apple has nothing interesting to sell. And the company's remarkable decadelong run as the hottest company in consumer electronics...
A bittersweet emotion came over me when I heard that some of the most renowned of industry experts, even those heavily invested into the SOA movement, have now declared that SOA officially died on 1 Jan 2009. {a moment of silence, please} It will not come as a great loss for me, as I have had a difficult time explaining SOA to technologists and making the business case to financial stakeholders. But since I firmly believe in the scalability benefit of loosely coupled, autonomous systems as proscribed...
I've been working in Selenium RC for the past couple of weeks, and so far, I am pretty pleased. Selenium does some very cool things. However, it is open source, so there are some missing pieces. Some random thoughts (good and bad) in no particular order: - Web only. Totally cool with this, though. All of the apps I am expected to test are web-based. - No default logging mechanisim. By my own research (which could be wrong), it seems that most people have written their own logging mechanism. I'll...
So I received a exciting email from GoDaddy this weekend stating I could “Get www.Julian.com for 25% off” and I was shocked. Not only is it a common name and most likely in high demand, but it was on sale? But of course there is fine print when you see the “**” so what did that say? Ok, so I think at this point they put this because they send out enough emails to people with the name Julian that it is “first come first serve” and I may be late to the game. So I rush over the GoDaddy and make it through...
Today, after more than two weeks of vacation I run into a totally new error when trying to compile any BizTalk project. The error message was: Build failed. Compiler for file type '*.xsd' failed. Value cannot be null. Parameter name: pUnk Huh!??! Punk!??! What the F*** does that mean!??! I googled on the message and didn't find much so I guess it's not a very common problem. But I found this old article KB 884412. I'm still not sure what caused the problem but I did a repair on the BizTalk installation...
The world is a vampire, sent to drain. Secret destroyers, holds you up to the flame. And what do I get for my pain? Betrayed desires, and a piece of the game. ~ Smashing Pumpkins, Bullet with Butterfly Wings I had a horrible world view in 2008. I embraced everything negative, unjust, and unscrupulous that I saw around me, experienced, and remembered, and viewed the world through glasses tainted with bitterness, anger, jadedness, and defeat. Hope had no place in my world and I formed a barrier of...
I pulled into my driveway after work yesterday and my son immediately starts asking if we could go feed the ducks near one of the ponds in the neighborhood. I had told him yesterday that we could do it and so we grabbed some bread and his wagon and walked down there. My wife and daughter followed (at first, then raced ahead of us) on their bikes. The pond we picked was along one of two main roads in our neighborhood. Even though the speed limit is 25 and there's a pool and playground near the pond...
Recently one of our customers had an issue when migrating from ASP.NET 1.1 to ASP.NET 2.0. The issue came up particularly in the deployment server where any page that had validations raised the error ‘Webform_PostBackOptions’ is undefined. If you had worked with ASP.NET 1.1 you would recollect there was an aspnet_client folder that contains all the scripts that help in client side validation as well as raising the postback events. In ASP.NET 2.0, the “WebResource.axd” file is the handler that generates...
Will Strohl has put together a nice track for all DotNetNuke users at the South Florida code camp scheduled for next month. Here's the lineup: DotNetNuke 5: Introduction & Overview Brian Scarbeau, co-author of the upcoming Professional DotNetNuke 5 book by Wrox gives an overview of DotNetNuke 5. This session will review an Introduction to DotNetNuke and some of the new features that comes with DNN 5. Learn how to install DNN and learn how to create pages and put modules on your pages. Learn how...
I’m Speaking at Code Camp NYC (http://nyc.codecamp.us/) this Saturday, January 10 on Virtualization for Developers. You can register for the code camp at https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=134146. Hope to see you there...
I was recently reminded of an article for "Things to Say When You're Losing a Technical Argument". In recent years with RoR and ASP.NET MVC, you've probably come across Reason #66 more often. What's old is new again. How many of these have you run across? And how would you re-sort the list if judged on frequency...
This is like a very common issue, specially for those who are working on public site which is live and they have to release the builds every week or month and if the new build contain JS files then your change will not reflect on the client browser until someone there presses ctrl + F5. So, after googling this issue. I came to know it is possible to prevent the browser from accessing the cache copy by writing the script tag as below 1: <script type="text/javascript" src="../Includes/main.js?random=556"></script>...
That's my first blog. I start blogging from Geekswithblogs.net But in past few days I maintain my own blog called aghausman.net and an asp.net one which is http://weblogs.asp.net/aghausman. While maintaining both of them I ignore my first blog totally. So let me confess, I have done this mistake but I will never do it again. from now and on I will keep posting on this blog. cheers...
Continuing The Project That Time Forgot, a UML case study in comic strip form... (Click pictures for larger images.) Here, for your convenience, is a larger version of the activity diagram from panel 2: Figure 1: The Recipe for Growing a Dinosaur And here is Editor Bill's comment on that diagram: "I hope in the commentary you plan to explain that this activity diagram tells the story of the rest of the Episode." Well, no, Editor Bill. I hoped that by now my readers were UML-savvy enough to figure...
For me, this error was caused by MvcContrib and Castle binaries being out of sync. So the fix is to make sure you have corresponding versions...
Lately I've had a few people approach me after speaking engagements or conferences and ask for some advice on becoming a .NET developer. Sometimes this has been moving into IT from an unrelated field or other times it's just been a transition of existing development skills into .NET. Now if you have been in this industry for awhile (and had any success) you have apparently demonstrated at least some capability to migrate your skills from one newly released technology to the next. In 2009 it's hard...
Remember that 50% off Dev Teach code I mentioned? Some have asked why it only gives a discount of $324 when you enter it in. The regular price for DevTeach is $1249. The code is good for 50% off of THAT. Currently the early bird rate is $949. So to get the 50% off discount means that you only pay $625, or the early bird price minus $324. So in a nutshell, its still a good deal folks. :) D...
You can find the PowerPoint for the FlaDotNet session that Max, Thom and I held at Citrix on 1/6/2009. http://www.fladotnet.com/MeetingSamples.aspx It was a fun session, everyone got involved. A number of topics could use more coverage… - Entity Framework and alternatives - Exception handling strategies and practices - Build automation and tool sets See ya next time...
I tried loading up my Reporting Services 2005 on my visra machine today via url: http://localhost/reports/Pages/Folder.aspx And it loaded up blank which i means i couldn't see my Report Folders and DataSources etc but i ccould see the menu like home,my subscribtion etc.. So i taught let me give the Report Server a try at http://localhost/ReportServer and i go an error insufficent permission I was too sure it was a permission issue so i checked IIS and made sure Windows Auth was enable and Anonymouse...
There is often a good reason to allow only one instance of an application to run at any time. One example of this is the serial debug menu application that I present in Windows CE: Serial Debug Menu Summary. If that application were to have more than one instance the results would be unpredictable, unless you count user confusion. The input would randomly go to instance of the application based on which instance looked for input first. One way to prevent multiple application instances is to use a...
One of the best ways to understand the concepts that lie behind a new technology is to compare and contrast it with similar technologies provided by other communities. ‘Oslo’ addresses the modelling domain which has enjoyed a great deal of attention over several years. This article is an attempt to articulate something of the nature of Oslo by relating it to the wider world of modelling, especially as envisaged by the OMG (Object Management Group). http://geekswithblogs.net/cyoung/archive/2009/01/05/128369.aspx...
Sometimes there is value in determining an application name or folder from within the application. The application can use this to display the application name in the title bar, or even change behavior based on the name. GetModuleFileName() fills in a string with the path and filename of the application. The following code fragment uses the hInstance passed into WinMain() to get the application path and filename. int WINAPI WinMain( HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, LPTSTR lpCmdLine,...
So it looks like the first SharePoint Saturday event will be this weekend. I have most of my demos and a few slides thrown together and ready. They have about 200 people signed up for the event. They had to cut off registration. I hope that we can get nearly as many people in Kansas City as they have in Virgnia Beach. I am getting so many session abstracts and will be cutting them off around January 16th at midnight. I have called so many different consulting firms in the area and heard the words...
So it looks like the first SharePoint Saturday event will be this weekend. I have most of my demos and a few slides thrown together and ready. They have about 200 people signed up for the event. They had to cut off registration. I hope that we can get nearly as many people in Kansas City as they have in Virgnia Beach. I am getting so many session abstracts and will be cutting them off around January 16th at midnight. I have called so many different consulting firms in the area and heard the words...
I have been building mobile line of business applications for a while now. Over the past few years, I have separated out the client and middle tier explicitly (using web-services). This has enabled me to rapidly build different front end applications for a range of different devices. I have recently extended our timesheet application to run on iPhone/iPod Touches using a combination of .Net and the excellent IUI library built by Joe Hewitt. One thing, I needed however was a calendar control mimicking...
I've got the paperwork now, so I guess this is official. I submitted a talk on writing concurrent applications for VS Live in San Francisco in February. I'll be speaking on Thursday Feb 26th -- if you happen to be making the conference, look me up! I'm looking forward to this; there's lots of great content being presented, including a full day post-con on Azure...
I want to know who at PEZ CANDY, INC thought that a Plush PEZ dispensers were a good idea. “ewww is that a hair on my candy?”...
My current project at s2000 Field Service Solutions is a web application called SalesWeb. It’s an interface to the Sales and Marketing portion of their desktop-based service dispatch suite, s2000win. In the past, I was doing database calls with my own DatabaseHelper and a set of SQL query builder classes. This solution was clunky and often required 50+ lines for one query (including manually mapping the results to objects using LINQ). I could have used something like NHibernate, but s2000win uses...
Recently I built some new IIS 7 server and realized that I had forgotten to include Windows Authentication as one of the modules during the initial install. No big deal, I'll fire off a ServerManagerCmd command and then it will be available. So I opened a command prompt and ran the following: ServerManagerCmd.exe -i Web-Windows-Auth Now in theory, you would think that after doing this and opening up or refreshing Inetmgr that I would now see Windows Authentication as an option for my site. Wrong....
In this issue: James Bacon, Chris Anderson, Jesse Liberty, Expression Blend and Design Blog, Laurent Bugnion, John Stockton, Alex Golesh, Gerard Leblanc, Lee, Andy Beaulieu, Jonathan van de Veen(3), Jobi Joy, and Damon Payne. I think everybody was working on stuff over the holidays and dumped it onto the interweb last night! Shoutouts: Jeff Wilcox has aggregated A bunch of AutoCompleteBox posts... save you some search time. Jeff also asks Using the Silverlight Toolkit? Let us know!. Here's your chance...
I have been playing with both the iHttpHandler and iHttpAsyncHandler lately, and I came across some interesting information. There are a couple of blog posts out there explaining when to use one over the other (see Mads Kristensen's post here, or Vlad Hrybok's post here) So when does it make sense to use Async? Consensus seems to be that it makes sense to use the iHttpAsyncHandler for long running operations, so while it probably doesn't make sense to use an iHttpAsyncHandler for say, loading images,...
Very interesting article on SOA and Services from Anne Thomas Manes. I’m guessing there will be a lot more articles like this in the near future. Also thought the image was great: Here’s the link to the original article: Application Platform Strategies Blog: SOA is Dead; Long Live Services Thanks for checking out this post! Cheers, Murray Gordon ISV Architect Evangelist Microsoft Corporation http://blogs.msdn.com/MurrayG US ISV Team Blog My GeeksWithBlogs Blog...
Just read a great post from Doug Ware on how to use Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) on Amazon EC2. This is a very compelling and cost effective solution. Once SharePoint Services are publically available in the Windows Azure Platform, I’m guessing Doug will consider a move. Awesome how-to Doug! Here’s the link to Doug’s original post: Windows SharePoint Services on Amazon EC2 Windows SharePoint Services on Amazon EC2 - eLumenotion Blog Thanks for checking out this post! Cheers, Murray Gordon ISV...
In an effort to end the year on a good note, I’ve taken on a huge challenge. About a year ago I sat down to video capture an entire installation of a Virtual PC image of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Although the video took me several days to complete, once I finished the installation I never went back to the video. Now, a year later << Read more . . . >>...
Our friends at Lightning Tools have created another survey so that you can provide feedback on how you are using SharePoint. The results of this survey will be posted on their site as well as discussed in a future episode of the SharePoint Pod Show. Take the Survey here...