Here is the scenario: You have a Windows Form Application that calls a method via Invoke or BeginInvoke which throws exceptions. Now you want to find out where the error did occur and how the method has been called. Here is the output we do get when we call Begin/EndInvoke or simply Invoke The actual code that was executed was like this: private void cInvoke_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { InvokingFunction(CallMode.Invoke); } [MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.NoInlining)] void InvokingFunction(CallMode...
Ok, the title is misleading – I’ll admit it, but there is a way to store your data in Windows Phone 7 Series. Windows Phone 7 Silverlight solutions have what is called Isolated Storage. [XNA has content storage as well] At this time there is no port of SQL Compact engine for Silverlight Isolated Storage. There is no wind of such intention. [That was a question way before WP7 was even rumored to have Silverlight.] There a few options: 1. Microsoft recommends you “simply” use client-server or cloud...
For those that don’t know, you can download the W7 Phone developer tools now. It is available here. I have installed it and wanted to share my experience so far. You can read the pre-release documentation here. First, here is what it comes with the install: The Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP includes the following: Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone CTP Windows Phone Emulator CTP Silverlight for Windows Phone CTP XNA 4.0 Game Studio CTP First impressions: No ISO image install (Bad for...
“Full House” at the ArcSig Ft. Lauderdale March meeting at the Microsoft Office! After all participants had the opportunity to get free pizza and soft drinks, Quent Herschelman, Developer Solution Specialist at Microsoft, gave an excellent presentation about Architecture Tools in Visual Studio 2010. He started with a brief introduction to the new MSDN subscriptions, the different versions of Visual Studio, and the full circle of application and solution integration for the new Team Foundation Server....
Hello! I have decided to start a blog of my adventures learning how to solve problems coding things with the intent that what I put out there might be of some use to some down-trodden developer out there that is trying to solve a problem that I have already figured out...
I would like to thank everyone who came out to last night’s event and especially thank Mike Vogt for the presentation. I think at first everyone glassed over since very few of us spend a lot of time with Integration Architecture and most of us live more in the application architecture space. Learning about subject like BPEL and BPMN was refreshing. The discussion after Mike’s talk was lively and I think that everyone came away with a good idea of areas they might want to know more about. People stuck...
The P&P team have started to share guidance on the Windows Azure Platform. They plan to group their efforts around: 1. Moving to the Cloud 2. Integrating with the Cloud 3. Leveraging the Cloud First up is a document which explains the capabilities and limitations of Enterprise Library 5.0 Beta 2 in terms of use within .NET applications designed to run with the Windows Azure platform. You can download it here. Related Links: UK Azure Online Community – join today. UK Windows Azure Site Start working...
I was happy with Windows 7 at the beginning, until I started to add in the peripherals. Windows 7 was never able to recognize any of my PCI video card (I know, I know, we should be in the DVI age). Anyway, I went through another 4 days of trouble setting my computer up with dual monitor in XP (also did a bunch of other things like getting rid of my sound card and taking the computer off RAID. Kind of feel stupid to put the computer on RAID in the first place because now I can have 2 drives: double...
On Tuesday (16th March 2010) I presented on Azure to a none technical audience at the Cloud Computing Congress. Great audience, lots of folks, lots of questions during and after – although it did feel odd to do a session with no code :-) Lots of people asked me for my slide deck – which is a 30minute none technical overview. I will get it on my slideshare.net (which is being temperamental) but in the meantime I have hosted it on skydrive. or download link. Related Links: Steve Ballmer on Cloud Computing...
When you are building complicated software and working with customers it is always nice for them to have some idea on who to speak to about a particular story during a sprint. In order to achieve this one of the Team takes responsibility for “looking after” a story” a story and manages it to completion. They will collect all of the “Done” emails and make sure that everyone follows the Done criteria identified by the team as well as answering any Product Owner queries. Figure: Bad example, the product...
MIX is happening and there is a lot of excitement around the various releases such as the Windows Phone 7 Developer Preview, IE9 Platform Preview and few other announcements that have been made. Clearly, the Windows Phone 7 Developer Preview has generated the maximum interest and opened a plethora of opportunities for .NET Developers. It also takes the mobile development to a new generation and doesn’t force developers to learn different programming language. Along with this, few other releases have...
Douglas Purdy explains. I think the best part will be the governmental aspect. All public record should be available in a way that’s easy to query IMHO. From the article: Many of us at Microsoft believe the OData protocol can help usher in a more open and programmable Web by creating a common funnel to expose rich data, thereby creating a world of customized consumer mash-ups; a world where government data is transparent and accessible to any citizen; a world where you can ask a question and know,...
Unless you've been living in the caves of Lascaux for the past couple of days, you probably know what's happening in the world of Windows Phone. Microsoft unveiled the developer tools required to develop applications and games for Windows Phone 7 at MIX10 a couple of days back. Silverlight and XNA being the major frameworks, no big surprise there. And the best news of all is that all the development tools are free! So if you are planning to develop apps for Windows Phone 7, read on. The first place,...
So I spent a couple of hours yesterday building my first Windows 7 Phone Series. application. I still can’t get used to saying Windows 7 Phone Series. So I think I’ll just go with WP7. I must say I’m really impressed. Calling web-services a breeze laying out User Interface a very straight forward. I had made called into Dynamics NAV using web-services in under 10 minutes. Working in XAML takes a bit of getting used to, I’m not trying to-do anything too clever yet. One thing I will point out to transition...
Finally Silverlight 4 RC is released and also that Windows 7 Phone Series will rely heavily on Silverlight platform for apps platform. its a really good news for Silverlight developers and designers. More information on this here. You can use SL 4 RC with VS 2010. SL 4 RC does not come with VS 2010, you need to download it separately and install it. So for the next part, be ready with VS 2010 and SL4 RC, we will start using them and not betas. With this momentum, let us go to the next part of our...
MIX day 1’s keynote was all about Windows Phone 7 (WP7). MIX day 2’s was a reminder that Microsoft has much more going on than a new mobile platform. Steven Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie, Doug Purdy and others showed us lots of other good things coming from Microsoft, mostly in the developer stack, that we certainly shouldn’t overlook. These included the forthcoming IE9, its new JavaScript compiling engine and support for HTML 5 that takes full advantage of the local PC resources, including the Graphics...
Well, day 2 of the MIX10 conference did not disappoint. The keynote speakers introduced the preview release of IE9, which looks really cool and quick, and Visual Studio 2010 RC that is scheduled to RTM on April 12th. It seemed to have a lot of improvements aimed at making developers more productive. Here are the current links to these two offerings: Internet Explorer 9 – Platform Preview Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 – Release Candidate While both of these were interesting, the demos that really...
This is a great utility which i have used countless times to generate CAML Queries. Enjoy.... http://www.u2u.net/res/Tools/CamlQueryBuilder.aspx...
Topic: nServiceBus is mature and powerful open source framework that enables to design robust, scalable, message-based, service-oriented architectures. Latest improvements in the configuration API enables developers to quickly get started and build a working simple system that uses messaging infrastructure. The goal of this session is to give a jump start with the framework, introduce basic concepts such as message handlers, Sagas, Pub/Sub, Generic Host and also create a working demo application...
I have made a change to my code-based BDD style. I start with a scenario such as: Pre-Editing * Given I am a book editor * And some chapters are locked and some are not * When I view the list of chapters for editing * Then I should see some chapters are editable and are not locked * And I should see some chapters are not editable and are locked and I implement it using a modified SpecUnit base class as: [Concern("Chapter Editing")] public class when_pre_editing_a_chapter : BaseSpec { private User...
We are running a survey to collect feedback around scenarios where people were experimenting with velocity on windows 2003 in the CTP but are now in a position where the beta requires windows 2008. We would like to understand how important this scenario is precieved to be. If you are in the Connected Systems Community and would like to provide feedback please complete the following survey http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/N3VKZWN...
Wow, creating IE Accelerators is superbly easy. If you want to learn how to create one, go here (some MSDN blog) and the MSDN documentation (clearly written). I was fed up of dictionary.com bringing all those popups and the stupid definitions of Google's dictionary. So I decided to scratch my own itch. I randomly stumbled on the site called Wordnik and it provides with all examples plus definitions plus lots more for words and its popup-free (as far as I know). So I decided to write and accelerator....
Hello World. I am a hobbyist developer in the teens and I am a fan of Microsoft and its products.I am learning C# and have learned C and experimented with a few languages such as Python, Ruby, and IO (A really new language). Here, I am going to share my developing adventures. Watch out, World...
I just saw that the video for my MIX10 session is online already! Impressive work, MIX10 team. I also published the sample code on my web server, so here are the links: Powerpoint slides Video MVVM Demo 1 (start) MVVM Demo 1 (final) Command sample RelayCommand sample Messaging sample MVVM Demo 2 (start) MVVM Demo 2 (final) MVVM Light Toolkit Version 3 It was a real pleasure and an amazing experience to have this talk and to get all the great feedback! Thanks all for coming, and as usual don’t hesitate...
From time to time a developer makes a break from their platform of choice (.NET, Java, VB, Access, COBOL) and moves to perceived greener pastures. Zed Shaw did it, jumping from Ruby to Python, and Mike Gunderloy went from .NET to Rails. But it can be difficult to change platform. My clients don’t come to me looking for a software developer, they come looking for a .NET developer. This is a tragic side effect of big software companies marketing. If your village is under attack by bandits, would you...
Coming from someone who loves the KISS method, I was surprised to find that I was making something entirely too complicated. I know, shocker right? Now I'm no unit testing ninja, and not really a WCF ninja either, but had a desire to test service calls without a) going to a database, or b) making sure that the entire WCF infrastructure was tip top. Who does? It's not the environment I want to test, just the logic I’ve written to ensure there aren't any side effects. So, for the K.I.S.S. method: Assuming...
I rolled over to the Mandalay for breakfast. There I met a couple guys that were really excited about the new Windows 7 Phone. They, as I, are also hopeful that the phone really gets a big push and some penetration into the market. Not because we don’t like any other of the phones, but because this phone is so much better in many ways. From a developer's perspective creating applications in Windows 7 Mobile will be vastly superior in ease, capabilities, and other aspects. The architectural, existing...
V3 of the MVVM Light Toolkit was released during MIX10, after quite a long alpha stage. This post lists the new features in MVVM Light V3. Compatibility MVVM Light Toolkit V3 can be installed for the following tools and framework versions: Visual Studio 2008 SP1, Expression Blend 3 Windows Presentation Foundation 3.5 SP1 Silverlight 3 Visual Studio 2010 RC, Expression Blend 4 beta Windows Presentation Foundation 3.5 SP1 Windows Presentation Foundation 4 RC Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 RC For more...
During my session “Understanding the MVVM pattern” at MIX10 in Vegas, I showed some components of the MVVM Light toolkit V3, which gave me the occasion to announce the release of version 3. This version has been in alpha stage for a while, and has been tested by many users. it is very stable, and ready for a release. So here we go! What’s new What’s new in MVVM Light Toolkit V3 is the topic of the next post. Cleaning up I would recommend cleaning up older versions before installing V3. I prepared...
I see the question posted fairly often asking what kind SharePoint team an organization should have. How many people do I need? What roles do I need to fill? What is best for my organization? Well, just like every other answer in SharePoint, the correct answer is “it depends”. Do you ever get sick of hearing that??? I know I do… So, let me give you my thoughts and opinions based upon my experience and what I’ve seen and let you come to your own conclusions. What are the possible SharePoint roles?...
If there's nothing else to know about Scrum (and Agile in general), it's this: You can't force a team to adopt Agile methods. In all cases, the team must want to change. Well, sure, you could force a team. But it's going to be a horrible, painful process with a huge learning curve made even steeper by the lack of training and motivation on behalf of the team. On a completely unrelated note, I've spent the past three months working on a team that was formed by merging three separate teams. One of...
Just passing on the good news from MIX Keynote yesterday. The CTP Developers Kit for Windows Phone 7 Series, is available here. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2338b5d1-79d8-46af-b828-380b0f854203&displaylang=en#filelist First impressions are great. Hello World up and running in under 2 minutes - Technorati Tags: Windows Pgone 7 Series...
This post is specific to India Its been a month since I wrote my last post. Much of work has been happening around planning for Tech Ed India, the upcoming Virtual TechDays this week as well as our Developer content at the Great Indian Developer Summit 2010. Its going to be one exciting period starting this week and I am glad I would be able to meet a lot of folks who have written to me personally that they would like to catch up at Tech Ed India. For now, I had a chance to meet the Microsoft India...
As I have previously written, I am trying to organise a software craftsman pilgrimage. The idea is to donate some time working with quality developers so that we learn from each other. To be honest I am also trying to be the worst. “Always be the worst guy in every band you’re in.” Pat Metheny I ended up posting a message to both the software craftsmanship group and the Seattle Alt.NET group and I got a good response from both. I have had discussions with people based in: Seattle, New York, Long...
I have to say that in most of my time as a network engineer I have had the opportunity to play with servers, but mostly it's been to put our management software on, and that was about it. I have been a Systems Network Engineer for about three months now, and as such I have been respnosible for the configuration of our test devices... this being said, I have had to start working through how to configure and apply such things as GPO through a new forest, domain and OU. I have configured about three...
Another March, another MIX. For the fifth year running now, Microsoft has chosen to put on a conference aimed less at software development, per se, and more at the products, experiences and designs that software development can generate. In all four prior MIX events, the focus of the show, its keynotes and breakout sessions has been on Web products. On day 1 of MIX 2010 that focus shifted to Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7). What little we had seen of WP7 had been shown to us in a keynote presentation,...
I went to the session on Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework (MSAF) today while here at MIX 2010. It was a great walk through the features, ideas, and what the end goal is. Michael Scherotter did a great job of lining up the ideas, intentions, and the functional ideas behind the framework. The framework is built around the Silverlight Behaviors. If you aren't sure what behaviors are, check out these entries from Nikhilk.net Silverlight Behaviors, Silverlight 3 Drag Behavior, An Introduction...
C# 4 is getting a new feature called named parameters. Although this is a stand-alone feature, it is often used in conjunction with optional parameters. Last week when I was giving a presentation on C# 4, I got a question on a scenario regarding overload resolution that I had not considered before which yielded interesting results. Before I describe the scenario, a little background first. Named parameters is a well documented feature that works like this: suppose you have a method defined like this:...
There were a lot of announcements made during the keynote at MIX10 today, most notable were the releases of Silverlight 4 RC, Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010, Expression Blend 4 Beta and the Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools. I was glad to see that developers will be able to use Silverlight to create awesome applications for Windows Phone 7 so we can reuse our WPF and Silverlight skills to target mobile devices! With so much information coming out of this conference, I wanted to be sure...
This past weekend I attended SharePoint Saturday Michigan (SPSMI) in Ann Arbor, Michigan. For those unfamiliar, SharePoint Saturday is a community driven event where various speakers gather to present at a FREE conference on all topics related to SharePoint. This made my third SharePoint Saturday attended and second I’ve spoken at. I believe today it was announced that about 210 people total attended the event. I was very happy with the turnout, especially the ratio of male to female attendees. Typically...
Alright, these steps might be a little detailed and of few might not be necessary but still it's a pretty accurate road map to deploying on azure... This procedure assumes that you've created a solution with an Azure project into it. 1) Open your solution 2) Rebuild ALL 3) Right click on your Azure project and click "Publish" 4) It should open a windows explorer window with your package to be uploaded (.cspkg ) and its associated configuration (.cscfg) to be uploaded too. Keep it open, you'll need...
My whitepaper discussing BizTalk and NService Bus is now available on MSDN http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=b57b7625-7316-4f56-b88e-1fb685efae5b Thanks to Steve Lemkau for his contribution and to Udi Dahan and the NServiceBus User Forums for help with a few questions I had...
Every once in awhile I get the opportunity to write an application that is important enough to do, but not important enough to do the right way -- meaning standards, best practices, good architecture, et al. I call it lazy coding. The industry calls it RAD (rapid application development). I started on the conversion tool at the end of last week. It will convert our legacy data to a completely new system which I'm working on piece by piece. It will be used in the future, but only the new parts because...
Left the Circus Circus and headed to the geek circus at Mandalay Bay. Got in, got some breakfast, met a few more people and headed to the keynote. Upon arriving the crew I was hanging with at the event; Erik Mork, Beth Murray, and Brian Henderson and I were entertained with several other thousand geeks by the wicked yo-yoing. The first video demo of something was of Bing Maps and various aspects of Microsoft Research integrated together. Namely the pictures, put in place, on real 3d element maps...
testing the blog and windows life writer...
$('#someCheckbox').attr('checked','true')...
The official developer story for Windows Phone 7 Series was finally announced at MIX10. You can review the recording of the Keynote at http://live.visitmix.com, also all the sessions will be available within 24hours of their posting. There is extensive list of presentations for Windows Phone listed here. You can start playing with these tools today! Official Silverlight site for Mobile Development: http://silverlight.net/getstarted/devices/windows-phone/ Channel 9 has a training information here:...
So I have been battling around with F# for a few weeks and it has been frustrating just getting my brain around the syntax etc. Then someone put a comment on my blog that I should check out the following online book called the F# Survival Guide. I highly recommend those wanting to get into the basics of the language to go through this resource. It is easy to understand, especially for someone coming from a C# background. Give it a read… it gets a two thumbs up from me...
After long time, once again started blogging. This time i planned to go with www.geekswithblogs.net. Reason behind this decision is quality of the articles written in this site. Whenever i google for some solution, i will definitely get a link from this site. Please wish me to have nice time with blogging. All your comments on my future topics are more appreciable. -Hari...
12 months back (today is March 15th 2010) on the 16th of March 2009 I created a poll on Entity Framework v1 – the marmite of ORMs? A quick poll…. Entity Framework v1 was getting a mixed reception at the time – I met developers who genuinely hated it and I met developers who were loving the productivity improvements they were seeing. There were definitely issues with v1, too many IMHO. Which is why the product team placed a huge effort on listening to the community to drive the feature set for v2...
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!