I wasn’t able to go to PDC09 this year, but Channel 9 has made most of the content from the sessions and keynotes available. If you want to download all of the content easily, you need to follow these simple steps: Download a recent build of of cURL (~250K) and extract it to a folder. Download PDC09Downloader and extract the .bat file to the same folder you extracted cURL. Run PDC09Downloader from a command prompt. This batch file takes a single parameter, which indicates the file type you want to...
Several months back I finally became frustrated enough with paying roughly $150 per month for my cable television and internet service. I had been slowly adding packages to my cable service over the years (DVR, digital cable, HD channels, etc.) and it had all gotten out of control. I had several hundred channels to watch but maybe watched 10-15 of them on a regular basis (or at all, for that matter). When I started looking into cutting back my service I discovered there seemed to be a huge chasm...
Javascript does not have classes in the traditional sense, but we can achieve something similar in a number of ways. C# and Ruby both have standard class syntax. This post is part of a series comparing the language features of the C#, Javascript and Ruby programming languages. Part 1: Installation and hello world Part 2: Variables Part 3: Classes C# public class Vehicle { protected string Make { get; private set; } protected string Model { get; private set; } public Vehicle(string make, string model)...
Welcome to the 2nd series of building a blog engine. In the first part we have laid out the foundation for this application and modeled the DB structure for quick mockup. You can read the first part here lets-build-a-simple-blog-engine-eboard---1.aspx One thing I missed to mentioned in the first part is the we will be using the excellent ELMAH for error logging. This is a pretty cool module which hooks up to the system and logs all exceptions without writing a single line of code. You can read more...
After installing VS2005 TE on my machine (which previously runs Visual Studio 2008 TE) all mixed projects (VS2005/VS2008 compatibility with TargetFramework=2.0 and ToolsVersion=2.0 options) thrown an error during compilation: C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v8.0\CodeAnalysis\Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.targets(46,4):error : In order to perform Code Analysis on managed binaries, MSBuild needs to launch FxCop.MSBuild is unable to locate the FxCop binaries.Make sure Visual Studio Team Edition...
Welcome to eBoard Hello and welcome to this series of application development using asp.net mvc, jquery, automapper, ninject. Though the world doesn't need another blog engine, but sometimes reinventing the wheel teaches you many unknown things and it's the learning experinece that counts more than anything else. I have been using asp.net mvc + jquery for about a year now. So, it's time to put down something which will help the beginner with this technologies get a good graps of the fundamentals...
Pfew... our presentation at the XpDays is done. You can find all the materials google code at this link: http://agileacceptancetesting.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/.The audience was great, and Pascal and I enjoyed it. We'll probably be trying to find something new to prepare for next year...
I thought I would give a list of DotNetNuke Christmas gifts you could possibly buy for a client, co-worker or yourself. You can start with some Christmas skins that you could put on your site. The folks at All Dnn Skins has some skins for you to look at. Snowcovered has an array of Holiday skins as well. If you only want a Christmas skin for a period of time and want your skins to change automatically then you can take a look at PageChameleon which will do that for you. You can set the special day,...
Open a “visual studio command prompt” and try: tfsbuild stop https://*****:8143 RXXXXX_Sourcecode Gen_2.6_branch_test_20080827.1...
[This is the fifth in a series of posts on getting started with the new features in Entity Framework 4 based on the demos I did in my session at TechEd Europe in Berlin last week (Nov 2009).] Entity Framework v1 did not support a commonly implemented ORM feature called Lazy Loading. Entity Framework 4 adds that feature. In Beta 1 it was known (confusingly IMHO) as Deferred Loading. In Beta 2 it is (thankfully IMHO) known as Lazy Loading. You run up against the absence of Lazy Loading in v1 when you...
[Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman] I've been posting code samples and walkthroughs on MSDN Code Gallery for a while now – keeping them distinct from CodePlex which I use for fully-fledged projects and tools. CodePlex uses TFS for source control, but the Code Gallery only lets you post up individual files, so until now I've been creating releases as ZIP files containing the source. Now I've centralised the source for all those samples in a public repository on github at sixeyed/codegallery....
Let's try a simple in-place edit with jquery. For demonstration purpose I am using the plain old HTML file. However, if you, wish you could apply the same technique to asp.net, asp.net mvc or php or any other web application as well. Here is the html that we will be using for the demo. <body> <div style="line-height:3xm;background-color:skyblue"> Double Click the below paragraph to edit. </div> </br></br> <div class="edit"> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur...
This typical problem is almost faced by all new developer working with asp.net. This behaviour is by design as ASP.NET tries to be efficient in storing sessions for users. Remember unless you store anything in session the session id value keep changing. If you want to tell ASP.NET that you want it to track user sessions, you can do one of 2 things: Store something in the session. Simple handle the Session_Start event in your GLobal.asax. The presence of this method will tell ASP.NET to track sessions...
Maybe I am just crazy, but it seems like removing or deleting items from a collection is always an after thought. Take IList for example, a list of items, with the ability to add and remove from it. We have a flurry of extension methods that are inherited from IEnumerable to add items but it seems like no one thought maybe it would be nice to beef up the remove method with some extension methods. Maybe I missed an extension namespace, maybe I am just crazy. How many times do we have to write the...
I just finished watching a great video about WF4 from Microsoft PDC. The session is WF4 from the Inside Out by Bob Schmidt. I think he did a great job explaining how the runtime is implemented in WF4...
This edition of blog tip shows you how to focus a text input on a page to the desired element. Use jsbin.com for executing/troubleshooting or just for learning jquery or any other popular js framework that it supports. I'll show two ways to do this based on the scenarios you encounter. Using jQuery $(selector).focus method when the DOM is ready: // When the HTML DOM is ready $(function() { $("#elementId").focus(); }); The above works in most cases but may be annoying in situations you have a slow...
OK, I use the term "upgrade" a bit loosely here. There is no upgrade path from 32-bit to 64-bit versions of any edition of Windows, period. However, you can preserve your Active Directory domain, DNS settings, websites, files, whatever, through a slightly long-winded process and get from 32-bit to 64-bit without: Having to uninstall Active Directory from your network and then piece-meal it back together workstation by workstation; Having to do system state backup/restores which won't restore all...
I am typically starting this blog with the "Hello World" kind of post. Just to give an brief summary to the curious out there this blog will be a place where I will be putting down my experience with technologies specifically asp.net mvc, jquery, sql server, sharepoint, tdd, design patterns et el. Also, I plan to record my learnings with developing an asp.net mvc project...
[Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman] As Saravana Kumar has blogged, Microsoft have released an MMC snap-in for SSO configuration. It has pretty much all the functionality of the SSO Config Tool I put together a while ago, including: UI for configuring values in an SSO application store MSBuild task to import/export SSO settings from XML .NET class for accessing SSO values The .NET wrapper is pretty rudimentary, and one thing the snap-in doesn't do is generate a wrapper for typed access...
In the further adventures of OOXML we have been looking at different approaches to tagging content in a Word template to be programmatically replaced. Initially we looked at simple in-line text as a user defined tagging system. The problem is that this is very error prone. The user has to enter the tag exactly the same every time. On top of that if the user backspaces while typing the tag or spell check flags the tag then the tag will be split into multiple tags. This is less than desirable. Content...
Hey all. Just wanted to let you know that the interview that I did with Javier Lozano (lozanotek.com) is now available on DotNetRadio! This was a pretty hefty interview so I had to cut it in half. In the first half of the interview we discussed the following points. How and why was ASP.NET MVC created? What are the pain points of ASP.NET Webforms? What can a WebForms developer expect when moving to ASP.NET MVC? MVC is like BizTalk – it can do anything – it just can’t do anything out of the box! What...
In many larger environments, Exchange 2007 may be deployed with multiple Client Access Servers (CAS) across the AD site boundaries. The common configuration is to have users access one CAS server from the Internet and it proxy the request to a different CAS in the AD site where the user’s mailbox is located. The Internet facing CAS server should have the Internal URL populated with Forms Based Authentication (FBA) and Basic Authentication enabled. The External URL is optional. The authentication...
Been awhile since I posted. So, what have I been up to lately? Good question! Mostly been working a lot with the our most current release. I've been involved with more and more project work these days and less generic single, one-shot tickets at work. Upside is that I am very busy, downside is that I haven't been really able to work on our automation suite very much. However, I did manage to get some time to work on a .Net testbench application for our new hardware solution. It is a USB device that...
I wanted to share this with everyone that wanted a very simple explanation of Asynchronous Method Invocation. Check it out: www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/AsyncMethodInvocation.aspx Sample: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt...
This post is a follow-up on my series about validating business objects throughout different layers of a software system - domain, persistence, and (ASP.NET MVC) GUI. It demonstrates how a self-written validation can be incorporated into a web page (using a bit of JavaScript) and how this can be mapped to a custom validation on the domain side. A short recap In the first part of the above mentioned series, we developed a simple, custom validation aspect that checks if a value really is a member of...
Background: Out of first few tasks that were assigned to me in my new project, I was asked to help testing team with promoting an existing partially tested BizTalk interface. After little bit of code re-factoring and ensuring that the design has been simplified (removed some unwanted logging etc.), we put code to the test. Functionality wise there were not many issues which surprised us and we quickly got over it. However, it wasn’t for long that we realized that there was some obvious issue hidden...
Http to Https redirection is commonly a preferred configuration for Outlook Web Access for most organizations. The challenges presented in IIS7 are that the built-in redirection feature only allows relative redirection without a full URL entered. To perform Http to Https, the full URL is required. This becomes an issue when organizations are trying to redirect for both internal and external users who commonly are using different URLs to access the server. The solution is 2 fold. First, turn on relative...
Please note a link change for AfricanGeek in my last SC post. For some reason that I'll have to figure out later, my code didn't form the link correctly because I Ileft off "http://" But it's correct now, so check it out... Silverlight 4 video tutorials! I'm going to be dark for a couple days celebrating Thanksgiving, I hope everyone does the same and has a great Thanksgiving... even if you aren't in the U.S. :) Stay in the 'Light...
Check the BizTalk road map - PDC presentation on BizTalk Server 2009 R2: http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/SVR15 Check the BizTalk Server 2009 R2 on Windows app fabric from BTS Team blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalk_server_team_blog/archive/2009/11/20/biztalk-server-strong-roadmap-and-innovations-preview-presented-at-pdc.aspx...
By using the argument line array of Main(string[] args) it is important to know such effect. If you specify a quoted folder (e.g. "C:\Projects\PDE\PRJ_EsriDE_Common\trunk\code\Commons\bin\Debug\") the ending backslash makes troubles. My whole argument line (linebreaked for better viewing): -inDir:"C:\Projects\PDE\PRJ_EsriDE_Common\trunk\code\Commons\bin\Debug\" -recursive:false -filter:* -separation:AssemblySeparated -outDir:"C:\Projects\PDE\PRJ_EsriDE_Common\trunk\code\Commons\bin\Debug\" -outFile:AllInOneReg...
We look to learn the Silverlight, WPF and ASP.NET MVC 2 over the next few months. We’ll start developing a data driven application to explore each one of these. I am now in the process of finding a sample database for use. We will start our tutorials from next week. Stay tuned until then. Technorati Tags: ASP.NET,MVC,Silverlight,WPF...
We are in the process of upgrading the entire company to TFS 2010 Beta 2, and in preparing for that we have done some test upgrades to make sure that all things work as expected after the upgrade. As expected, most issues that turned up had to do with builds. This is one of the areas that has changed the most compared to TFS 2008. I thought that I would use this post to run through some of the issues that we found. First of all, when upgrading a TFS 2008 to TFS 2010 Beta 2, all build definitions...
I just came across this article and i taught its a good resource for BI Developers and other Analysts. Hope it helps...
In this Issue: African Geek, Alan Mendelevich, Jeff Wilcox, CorrinaB, Tim Heuer, Jeff Handley, Timmy Kokke, Cameron Albert, Antoni Dol, and Fredrik Normén. Shoutouts: Check out the WCF RIA Services Code Gallery on MSDN ... lots of good resources there! The Silverlight Team Blog posted a new Silverlight Podcast: Expression Encoder 3 Timmy Kokke has his code and slides up from Dutch Code Camp 2009 Michael Wolf has a Tim Sneath Interview on Silverlight 4 and WPF up on his blog. Check out Joe Stegman's...
One of the members in the forum (forums.asp.net) is asking how to limit the number of selected items in the ListBox and so contributors (including me) gave the OP (Original Poster) different ideas on how to validate it. Some of them provided solution using pure Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in...
For those of you who missed the chat today, here is the raw transcript. By raw, I mean that I copied and pasted the discussion without any edits. This is divided into two parts, the top part is the answers from the Microsoft Experts and the bottom part is the questions from the audience. Answers from Microsoft: msft_davbo (Moderator): Our chat today covers the topic of Windows Embedded CE! 1. This chat will last for one hour. During this hour, our Experts will respond to as many questions as they...
During today’s chat with Microsoft’s Windows CE Team, someone asked “is there a way to put additional items to the clean target without modifying makefile.def?” So I decided to see if I could come up with a way. It can’t be done using a sources file. Sources files are only used to set environment variable prior to nmake being called and we need a target named “clean” to handle cleaning the additional files. That leaves makefile.inc and makefile. I tried it in makefile.inc with a WINCETARGETFILES...
Someone confronted me about Ideal vs Necessary Evil in regard to coding to best practices. Today there was a loud debate among myself and two other developers regarding how to handle some legacy code. One developer wants the the legacy code refactored and testable the other wanted to modify the code quickly since the company plans to rewrite the application after the next deployment in a month. I wanted to make a code branch of existing code then refactor as much as possible as long as the new functionality...
I've been working with XML for several years now but I've never been entirely sure that I fully understand all there is to know about namespaces. Of course namespaces are central to how document instances are defined by BizTalk, so I certainly had some understanding. However, it's quite easy to just "get by" without a complete understanding because of the inteli-sense and other helpful features provided by tools like Visual Studio and XML Spy. If I'd had only notepad in which to create the XSDs and...
Over all I think the best indication that someone will be a good agile team member is: Demonstrates a long-term desire to move from journeyman to craftsman. (study groups, software related blogging, seeks out training) Demonstrates that they will share knowledge insights with others.(mentoring,being mentored not just for newbies all team members) Open to debate and new ideas. (question whenever a quick solution does not follow solid principles, or adds unnecessary technical debt) Willingness to work...
Would love to know if there is a way to kick off a SSRS report and pass some parameters into it via T-SQL or SSIS. Unfortunately, we can't have MS SQL Enterprise edition. Sad thing is I know how to make this work with Crystal report, and I hope I can find a similar API for SSRS to make this work. Any help is greatly appreciated...
What is Ontology? Quote from Wikipedia "is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations....ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how such entities can be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences" Quote from other web-site "In ancient times, Ontology referred to study of Being and fell into disrepute...
In this Issue: Rene Schulte, Jason Harper, Brad Abrams, John Papa, Jeremy Likness, Jeff Wilcox, Fredrik Normén, Tim Heuer, Shawn Wildermuth, and Andrej Tozon. Shoutouts: Ward Bell has a PDF up of PDC 2009 Session Links -- thanks Ward! Tim Heuer also has posted a Microsoft PDC09 and Silverlight Round-up... I'm adding this to the Silverlight Links in the WynApse.com outlookbar. Don't forget that Loek van den Ouweland and Fons Sonnemans have SilverlightXP up and running full of resources... They'd like...
It was a warm sunny July afternoon. The lake was cool, calm, and inviting. Little Johnny sat on the bank of the lake skipping rocks while the rest of the cub scouts were out hiking in the woods. Johnny was soaking it all in, the vast lake with the little island in the middle. The bright blue sky, nothing but the sounds of the wind and the occasional bird. Yes, this was a perfect day and Johnny was enjoying every minute of it. However, Johnny got bored (as most little boys often do). He decided to...
This month's meeting will be a social/networking/bar camp type meeting. It will be a good chance to just talk and socialize over beers/wines/ cokes. For those who are interested, we will be meeting at Coach's Bar around the corner from Centriq. Click for directions and map: 414 W 103rd St, Kansas City, MO 64114 See you there...
[I haven’t done QandAs for a long while – very remiss of me.] Anyway, I have been asked this one so many times lately that I felt a more public answer was needed. The short answer is: Mostly. Certainly it is good enough to get work done. The longer answer is below… History In the first version of Entity Framework (which came with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1), the Entity Framework Designer was… bad. I mean very bad. I mean dumbly bad. We had a decent enough runtime but the design surface just wasn’t up...
[This is the fourth in a series of posts on getting started with the new features in Entity Framework 4 based on the demos I did in my session at TechEd Europe in Berlin last week (Nov 2009).] Complex Types make it easier to work with objects, allowing the grouping of related properties in Entities and the reuse of these groupings across Entities. The first release of Entity Framework included Complex Type support but did not expose this capability through the Entity Data Model Designer. The good...
Asynchronous statistics auto update in SQL Server would ensure that the statistics are not updated when a query is executed, ensuring timely response. For this option, we need to set AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS_ASYNC to ON and also AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS to ON. Here, a separate thread runs in the background, which actually does the job of updating the statistics. So updated stats are available the next time for a query. This can also work the way round, meaning that a query might be using old stats and...
Last saturday (yep..., even in the weekends the .NET community is active) I presented a talk on Entity Framework 4.0 for CodeCamp.NL. This was organized by the Dutch .NET communities www.sdn.nl, www.vbcentral.nl and www.dotned.nl. You can find my presentation and code examples (VS2010 beta2) on http://www.codecamp.nl/Default.aspx?tabid=356...
As business applications get built there is usually a need to implement a modal popup to prompt the user for input that is needed before the application can continue. In earlier versions of Silverlight the developer had to roll their own version. In Silverlight 3 the ChildWindow class is used to provide the base functionality needed in a modal popup. This blog will show you how easy the ChildWindow class is to use to implement a simple modal popup function in your application. The finished code for...
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!