I am excited to pass along that the Altoona Area .NET User Group will have their first meeting in September! September 21st, 2010 6:00 - 8:00 PM; Link Computer Corporation, Bellwood PA (Bing Map) Topics Review the Central PA .NET User Group Code Camp Roundtable Discussion on How Members are Using .NET Formulate LinkUp Presence / Strategy Plan Topic/Time/Location for Next Two Meetings Eat Pizza SWAG - I have it on good authority that there will be SWAG from Telerik, ComponentOne, and fellow User Groups!...
The last few months have been extremely busy. Herve and I have been heads down working furiously on the SQL Azure book. The is a light at the end of the finally, we are wrapping up the final chapters this week. Along with that, we put on a SQL Saturday event, and continue to run two local SQL Server User Group in the area. However, as if we weren't busy enough, we have run and presented at several Azure Boot Camps around the area, and I have been asked to be the presenter at the Calgary Azure Boot...
Here I had a plan to post in September almost the same way I did in May, June and July, but business has been good (and I hope to not jinx it). There has been plenty of stuff going on, TFS 2010 left and right, MSDN Forums, SharePoint (all flavors and variations), BizTalk, SQL Server, Commerce Server, even Host Integration Server. And of course Hyper-V. A lot has been explored and equal in the realm of learning. From writing a Microsoft Official Course, giving self-publishing a try, creating some...
One of the cool features with Sl 4 is the ability to bind directly to an indexed item such as a dictionary. For instance, i can set a binding to a custom dependency property in a custom user control to this in XAML where MyDictionary is a .Net dictionary of objects: {MyDictionary[A221], Mode=TwoWay} Now, a word of warning. Its cool in most cases to setup a datacontext to an object that does not have data but is initialized. Works just fine. But you can’t do that here. Why not? After beating my head...
Every time I inherit a windows service, I see the same design pattern: public void ServiceProcess() { while (true) { Foo(); Thread.Sleep(300000); } } The theory here is that we are processing a work queue which will receive items, and every five minutes we will check to see what work has arrived in the queue. Do work, sleep five minutes, Do work, repeat. The problem is that we are blocking the owning process thread for five minutes while we sleep. If there is a request to stop the work thread while...
In this Issue: Tony Champion, Tim H, Roger Gullhaug, Jeremy Likness, Brad Tutterow, Derik Whittaker, Paul Patterson, Sam Judson, SilverLaw, Dave Edson, Silverlight Team, and Sergey Barskiy. I'm test-driving something new today... I'm listing 'my' pick(s) from the list of things I'm discussing in each of the various categories I've posted on... which will change daily. Today I'm highlighting a Silverlight post, a WP7 post, and a training one. I'm listing these as "Above the Fold" because they will...
If you don't have the Visual Studio IDE to work with, you can go the old fashioned route with issuing PRINT statements. If you do have the Visual Studio IDE available, execute the following steps: open visual studio navigate to server explorer create/open a connection to your database right click on the stored proc you want to work with and choose "Step into stored procedure" For more details, or for a more visual example with the instructions, navigate to this url: http://www.dotnetfunda.com/articles/article27.aspx...
While building our mobile app I came across a few valuable resources for some of the specific issues I was facing, I thought I'd share those in case others were looking for similar info. Customized Color Progress Bar iPhone This one probably violates all UI rules defined by Apple, but we were looking to change the color of the progress bar for our app based on certain values. As the bar filled up, we wanted it to change to red so the user could quickly see while driving that is represented a different...
There's a new .NET user group forming out there -- in Altoona, PA. I've been lucky enough to listen in on the initial conversations of AltooNUG and I'm excited to hear that they are holding their first meeting on September 21st, 2010! Here's the initial informatioin about the group's first meeting. If you're in or around the Altoona, PA area, you should drop in and pay them a visit. There's a lot of interest in starting this group and I think there will be a lot of activity coming out of Altoona...
Technorati Tags: Linq,IEnumerable.Range,Intersect,F#,FS,C#,CS,C++,CPP,Visual Basic,VB MSDN Reference: Enumerable.Range Method I deal with a lot of RANGES at work for a multitude of reasons. When auditing data and databases, it’s often necessary to check the boundaries of values or to set them. I’ve recently become very fond of IEnumerable.Range because it offers a lot of convenience when dealing with certain types of ranges and can allow a fair amount of complexity. For instance: If I need to represent...
You can find my new blog here...
I've made a couple changes today to the SilverlightCream site and to my blog, after a discussion last night with a cohort. I'm displaying (hopefully obviously) an RSS image that now goes out to Feedburner. The big take-away for me for that is that the feed is now displayed as a 'feed' and not as XML. The take-away for you is that you can now subscribe via Feedburner. I also modified the Search Results page at SilverlightCream.com to tell you how many results were returned. And, did you know you can...
Why Assembly? I was going to start the title as "The Art of Assembly" however, that title was already taken. I am probably going to commit the biggest sin of modern developers, I am going to advocate that developers learn, and consider using, a bit of assembly! I know, I can already hear the voices in my head saying "But Thomas, How could you advocate the use of such a low level, non-crossplatform, and painfully slow language?". Fear not voices, I haven't completely lost my mind yet. There actually...
Below is a multithreaded queue with progress reporting and nice exception handling that I implemented for a project. I hope it might help someone else. You can copy and paste the following code into a console app to see how to use it. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Diagnostics; using System.Threading; namespace WorkQueueTest { class Program { static readonly object locker = new object(); static void Main(string[] args) { //You can play with...
If you build virtual machines running Windows operating systems and aren’t using SYSPREP you are costing yourself untold amounts of time. This post will explain be a brief explanation as to why. Background Over the past few weeks I’ve been rebuilding about a dozen of my virtual machines (VMs) due to getting a new work laptop and finally having the hardware to run 3+ of them at once. The last time I went through a rebuild of VMs like this I started to dig into using SYSPREP so reduce the amount of...
Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework is updated on 2010-09-06. Download address: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/51868 If it’s the first time that you hear about Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, please read the introduction on our homepage http://1code.codeplex.com/, and this Port25 article http://port25.technet.com/archive/2010/01/18/the-all-in-one-code-framework.aspx. Windows Shell Extension New Samples How to write a Windows Shell extension using managed code (C#/VB.NET) is an extremely...
This will be a blog about IT consulting for small and medium businesses. I am a Microsoft Small Business Specialist and MCSE. Currently I work for a two man company called Netwide Technical Solutions, located in the South Shore of MA. Our big project right now is a small business 2003 to 2008 migration for a police department...
we get lot’s of information day by day on coming browser. yesterday Mozilla launch 5 beta of his browser Firefox. you can get information about here : http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/4.0b5/releasenotes/...
This is a great tool for anyone playing with Windows Azure who would like to avoid surprises on their credit card :-) It has only had 85 downloads – I suspect we see that many folks caught out by a demo/poc being “left on” per week :) Check it out at http://greybox.codeplex.com/ Project Description The GreyBox application is designed to alert a user if their Windows Azure compute services are currently running, or are even simply deployed. Great for Azure speakers and POCs you don't want left running....
Namespaces of components in an Add-In It seems that there is only one namespace for all components in an Add-In allowed. The namespace is defined over an attribute of the tag <AddIn>. And this tag is allowed only once per config.esriaddinx file. That worried me stomach pain! If i group the content of my UI-component in distinct folders (separate buttons, extensions, ..) it is common sense that these folders are part of the namespace. So distinct components have distinct namespaces – and this...
My short summary This comparison is mainly originated with attention to XML-based configuration possibilities and grouping implementations of the same contract which are choosable over a key. StructureMap A really nice container with simple XML configuration. But we had problems if the container must instantiate WPF-controls. LightCore Also a really nice container with simple XML configuration. But it seems that there is no way to specify distinct implementations which are choosable by a key. Autofac...
there is many features comes in New Firefox and Google chrome future version. some can be see in their preview and beta version Switch to Tab: in Firefox we can switch to tab without going to site again. Group Your Tab: Useful trick when we not need to open more instance of Firefox Copy-address-bar text: both browser [Firefox and chrome] provide a facility that when user move the text from address bar then he show text. Syncing : both browser provide a facility that we can sync our bookmark history...
Problem context We use a backgroundworker to load MXD documents from several places of the system and extract meta data and thumbnails which a GUI component shows in an asynchron way. The unit tests for this logic throws an exception during the access the thumbnail: 'mapDocument.Thumbnail' threw an exception of type 'System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException' exception = {"Catastrophic failure (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8000FFFF (E_UNEXPECTED))"TargetSite = {stdole.IPicture get_Thumbnail()} Solution...
In this Issue: Emiel Jongerius, PostVision, Mike Taulty, Jesse Liberty, Laurent Duveau, Phil Middlemiss, Xianzhong Zhu, pauliom, Sudhindra Kovalam(-2-), and Alexander Viken. Shoutouts: The Silverlight Blog announced the release of a new WCF RIA Services (Silverlight QuickStart) John Papacreated a stir yesterday with his Top 10 Silverlight Blogs ... thanks for the shoutout John!! Jesse Liberty posted The Great Silverlight Competency Test – 3 From SilverlightCream.com: Datagrid: support for grouping...
Hello spammers, (and of my minority group of genuine readers) and welcome to my blog. I'm am your host, Thomas (AKA Cogman) and I will attempt to vent my random coding thoughts to you. A little bit about me; one of my earliest and most memorable coding experiences came from an old game "Jedi Knight: Dark forces 2". That game had a fairly powerful scripting language with the extensions .cog (hence the name) that controlled most of the games dynamics. Along with that language came a very weak cheat...
New standard the UDDI was announced several years ago [see the history in Wikipedia]. The UDDI future was promising. I was sure for that. I thought, the future is for Web-services [WS], and it is. Isn’t that mean, we need services to search Web-services in internet, some Registries/Catalogs of the Web-services? How we could find the WS in internet? Google Search was not effective in this; it is still not effective now. By any means, the UDDI idea should win; all WS-s should work with UDDI Registers....
While working to get the AutoCompleteExtender control up and running in a custom DNN module, I ran across a forum post that said doing so "just works", which if you have previous ASP.NET AJAX experience and know what is and isn't in DNN is probably very true. Trying to get it to run for the first time though, there's a few items to be aware of. Getting Started First recommendation, go download Fiddler (http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/), like now... no seriously go download it. If you are running...
The coding standards for native C++ and .NET (C# and VB.NET) programming used by the All-In-One Code Framework team is now available to everyone. The Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework project team writes code samples based on this guideline. Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases The coding standards are continuously evolving. If you discover a new best practice or a topic that is not covered, please bring that to the attention of the All-In-One Code Framework Project Group (onecode@microsoft.com)....
As most of you know, I do a lot of presentations each year, mostly at local code camps. As a speaker, it is always great to see new people in my talks and answer questions since in almost every talk, someone asks a question I haven’t heard before. One of the things that most speakers, including myself, like getting is feedback. We want to know what you thought of the presentation, both the material and the delivery. It used to be that most code camps passed out evaluation forms to provide this feedback....
Just a few randoms on cloud I bumped into: Blogger Jeremy Geelan has come up with the Top 250 Players in the Cloud Computing Ecosystem and the Top 50 Bloggers on Cloud Computing. Windows Azure Security Whitepaper is live The paper provides a technical examination of the security functionality available from both the customer's and Microsoft operations' perspectives, the people and processes that help make Windows Azure more secure, as well as a brief discussion about compliance New version of Access...
I knew the daily updates would get old… if they weren’t getting tired for others, they got tired for me. But, today is a week… an odd week though… with a 3-day holiday in it. I’m hoping that’s why I haven’t gotten returns on almost anything yet. That’s not to say I haven’t. There are a couple really nice folks I’m talking to, and I worked all day yesterday and will some today… so that’s good. I’m still waiting for the ‘email in about 20 minutes’ from the lady last Tuesday morning about 10. I’m used...
I recently got the following errors when starting Enterprise Single Sign-On on a pre-production BizTalk Server: Could not create SSOSQL. To fix the problem, reinstall SSO or try 'regasm SSOSQL.dll' from a Visual Studio command prompt. Error Code: 0x80131700 AND The SSO service failed to start. Error Code: 0x80131700 The first error gives two suggestions on how to fix this error. The first suggestion is to reinstall SSO. I tried a repair which did not do the job so what about a full re-install? Unfortunately...
C #4.0 has been here for a while and it has got many interesting features. 1. dynamic keyword: It represents an object that will be resolved at run time. For example, assume that you have 2 different classes that have the same signature. Then you can have a method like this. private void TestMethod(object myObject) { string name = myObject.Name; string address = myObjec.Address; } Now you can pass any object that has the same interface to the TestMethod(). This is some thing which is not possible...
Over the last 11 months, I have worked for a fantastic group of people at SSW and on a fantastic array of projects. However, the time has now come to specialise in one specific area. I have worked with Visual Studio ALM since its launch in 2005 and more recently with Scrum and the Professional Scrum Developer course that launched in April. Therefore, to this end I am leaving my job as a Solution Architect at SSW for an ALM Consultant role at Northwest Cadence. As you may or may not know, my last...
I just posted details of 2 weeks of FREE training in October delivered via Live Meeting but we also recognise that some folks prefer classroom based training. Hence we have scheduled four two day workshops from September through to April. This two-day intensive instructor-led workshop provides delegates with an early opportunity to gain insight into the nature and benefits of the Windows Azure Platform. Delivered through workshop style presentations and hands-on lab exercises, the workshop will focus...
Back in May and June I jointly run a highly successful (IMVHO) training programme on the Windows Azure Platform over a six week period for UK developers (Check out some stats/background). We have been discussing how we can take that format forward and I am pleased to say we have our first “spin off”. Namely the “Windows Azure Platform – Accelerated Virtual Training Workshop” which will take place in October. Yippeee. The training will be delivered over a two week period and combines instructor led...
Today I bought an iPad at the Apple store in Greensboro, NC. No, it's not what you think. I have a client discussing with me some ideas for iPad applications. (I'll be buying a MacBook Pro soon, too.) General Store "Feel" I found it very interesting that they were relatively chaotic in the store. No one greeted us upon entry. It was relatively difficult to distinguish the employees from the patrons. The employees wore blue t-shirts with the Apple apple logo on the front. They did wear name badges...
ArcSig Ft. Lauderdale 09/21/2010 Meet 6:00 PM, Presentation 6:30pm Microsoft Ft. Lauderdale Office: Joe Homnick, Microsoft Regional Director, presents: Building SharePoint 2010 Web Parts with Silverlight 4 Sign up for this exciting event at: http://www.fladotnet.com/Reg.aspx?EventID=486 Posted: Rainer Habermann, ArcSig Director...
(This is a series of posts covering how to include a WinForm app inside a SharePoint 2007 application, which allows users to upload batches of files to a SharePoint document library. For further info, please see Posts One, Two, and Three. All of the code can be downloaded in Post Two.) Just a quick review of our solution, as detailed in the first three posts of this series: a Custom Action adds a menu choice to a document library’s Upload menu, which links to a Windows Form application deployed using...
A while back I looked into localising a WPF application. Because I prefer the MVVM application I wanted something that I could apply to the UI layer specifically in XAML. At the time I found a post on Codeplex that allowed me to achieve this, but when we moved from VS2008 to VS2010 it broke the whole system. I am glad to see that an update to this tool is now available here...
I have a listView that is populated every 1/2 sec and when I set the TopItem to an ListItem whose index > visible items, then the list jumped between the topItem and back 2 spots. To correct the problem, I set the TopIterm AFTER the call to EndUpdate as shown in this code snippet: 1: lvB.EndUpdate(); 2: lvI.EndUpdate(); 3: lvR.EndUpdate(); 4: 5: if (lstEntryInts.Items.Count > 0) lstEntryInts.TopItem = lstEntryInts.Items[iTopVisIdx]; 6: if (lstEntryBools.Items.Count > 0) lstEntryBools.TopItem...
These are my notes on creating a windows service using Visual Studio. Another post will show the code; this just deals with the Visual Studio IDE Add new project -> Windows -> Windows Service Rename service source name Create the installer View service in designer mode Right-click in designer to display menu; choose Add Installer Add Service Process Installer Define parent as Installer Set account as LocalSystem Add Service Installer Set display name Set serviceName; this is what appears in...
Windows Live has had many lives. It started as a single page at www.live.com, where you could set up various widgets in a tiled configuration. The widgets mostly consumed RSS feeds and the idea was that you could have a home page where the content updated dynamically; i.e. where the content was “live.” I remember when the service was still in Beta and called Start.com; Robert Scoble, then a Microsoft employee, was hawking it pretty hard. It was kind of cool for its time, but it petered out, as did...
I fulfilled a lifelong dream (or an 8-year long dream anyway), when I appeared (if you can "appear" on a podcast) on the latest .NET Rocks! episode: http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=590 Original co-host Mark Dunn was the guest. When Mark was on the show, he used to start off each episode by describing how excited he was to be there, saying things like "I'm hiked up like a prom dress in June!". The latest published episode was recorded during the .NET Rocks! live weekend in June, when...
I use structures to group data, such as messages or data records. I also use structures to pass groups of data between functions so that I don't have a long parameter list. Ususually, structures are used within the same class, but I use them to between classes. To allow more than one class to use the structure, I encapsulate the structure(s) within another class that is used by all the classes that use the structure. In this example, I pass a structure from a function in one class to another function...
C# supports what I call waitForEvent threads or formally known as synchronous event threads. This is a thread that is fired whenever an event in another thread occurs. I use this type of thread to perform an action when a bit transitions from true to false, a variable transitions above/below a limit. The reason for doing this is because we do not want to interrupt the timer thread which checks these values on a 1-sec basis with the chore of building & sending messages, updating database tables,...
I love what I do, but sometimes I need a break from software, from the office and from sitting at a computer all day. At such times I like to experience the outdoors and hiking is a great way to do that. The Cooloola Great Walk is a 5 day, 102 km hiking track from Noosa to Rainbow Beach [pdf]. In Queensland it is too hot for long distance walking most of the year so I wanted to complete the walk in winter. On such short notice I could not organise a hiking partner, so I did the walk by myself. It...
When the P & C insurance company I used to work for wanted to start obtaining geocode information for addresses, I was responsible for the architecture and design decisions related to consuming the vendor-supplied data. The background for the task was nothing unusual: the vendor provided the data via a web service that used proprietary (and poorly documented) XML schemas for the input and output messages. We had 2 point-of-sale web applications and an internal underwriting application that would...
Tonight, while I was reading Darwin's Origin of Species, I came across his discussion about variation in nature. What particularly struck my attention is how there is variation even across the same species: It would never have been expected that the branching of the main nerves close to the great ganglion of an insect would have been variable in the same species...the muscles in the larvae of certain insects are far from uniform (p 54 - Origin of Species) So, this started me thinking on the special...
Silverlight es una plataforma dentro del .NET framework para crear aplicaciones poderosas y estéticamente atractivas para web, desktops, y dispositivos móbiles. Es compatible con varios navegadores de internet y sistemas operativos utilizando siempre el mismo código. Funciona con video HD y con protección de contenido, se puede crear aplicaciones multithreaded, integración avanzada de datos, y además se puede crear aplicaciónes que funcionan offline. Para desarrollar en Silverlight utiliza Visual...
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!