Microsoft
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Microsoft
Unity is a great IoC container. One thing that is lacking, however, is the ability to automatically resolve requests without some kind of mapping. In the past, I’ve applied attributes to classes to do that mapping or used a config file. Recently, though, I looked into extending Unity itself and discovered that it’s actually quite doable to do so. I’ve created an “AutoResolver Strategy” that will allow Unity to take any interface request and automagically translate that into a resolution. It assumes...
So, for the last couple of years, we’ve been giving out Moleskine’s as our swag at conferences. Last year, we gave out one to some Microsoft people. Guess what showed up in the SWAG bags this years? Yup, Internet Explorer branded Moleskine’s! And yes, we’ve been able to confirm that they did in fact get the idea from us. Imitation is the best form of flattery. BTW—Check out www.letmegooglethatwithbing... Technorati Tags: Mix...
So, I’m at mix 2011 this year, and here’s the message I’m feeling from Microsoft: Silverlight is a plug-in. It will always likely do things that the standards don’t yet support, but it’s part of the web (i.e. html5), not competing with it. You should build in HTML first and only use silverlight where the browser can’t fill the gap. Must of the functionality that you get in XAML has been reproduced in CSS3 + HTML5 + all of the other HTML5 stuff. The tooling for HTML5 dev stinks right now. Multiple...
With the release of Internet Explorer 9 RC the browser looks to be in a usable state. So far, my experience has been positive. However, one area where I am having problems is when people are using the jQueryUI library. Versions older than 1.8 cause IE 9.0 to be unable to drag and drop. This is a real pain, especially at sites like Agile Zen, where dragging and dropping is a primary bit of functionality. Now that IE 9 is a release candidate, we’ll see how quickly these things improve. I expect things...
I promised I’d have a simpler mechanism for rebuilding the database. Below is a complete MSBuild targets file for rebuilding the database from scratch. I don’t know if I’ve explained the rational for this. The reason why you’d WANT to do this is so that each developer has a clean version of the database on their local machine. This also includes the continuous integration environment. Basically, you can do whatever you want to the database without fear, and in a minute or two, have a completely rebuilt...
So I’m taking a break from writing about other Agile stuff for a post. :) I’m still going to get back to the other subjects, but this is fun too. Something I’ve done quite a bit of is MSBuild and CI work. I’m experimenting with ways to improve what I’ve done in the past, particularly around database CI. Today, I developed a mechanism for starting from scratch with your database. By scratch, I mean blowing away the existing database and creating it again from a single command line call. I’m a firm...
I’m going to write my history with Agile here. That way, in future posts, I can refer back to it, instead of typing it out in the post that contains information you may actually want to read. Note that I’m actually a pretty senior developer, and do lots of technical interviews. I’m an Agile fan because of the difference it makes in peoples lives and the improvement in quality it brings, and I’ll sacrifice my technological advance to help teams. Management History I started management pretty early...
I'm at PDC, and glad I am as well. First, I need to thank the geeks with blogs people for the AWESOME t-shirt. Well done. The site looks great. Second, this whole cloud thing that you're reading about, if you're not here, is pretty cool. I agree with MS, this will be the big thing of the future. I just wish we knew what they were thinking for cost. Microsoft Azure will be a big deal. They've spent over two years of development on it, torn apart SQL server to make it happen, and are running some of...
I like the new ribbon features of Microsoft Office, although sometimes finding things can be a little difficult, since I've been using office and wordperfect for years and years. I recently bought PowerDirector because windows movie maker just wouldn't do what I needed to do. Upon opening the app, I see nice looking UI, complete with what appears to be a ribbon interface, at least until you click on the "Home" button, and notice that there aren't any ribbons. When you click on the "Home" button you...
Ran into a serialization problem with WCF the other day that was rather interesting to find and fix. It wasn't a problem with WCF, in the end, but rather with what we were telling WCF to do. So we have some complex entities that we're shoving through the serialization layer. We also send through lists of these entities, and the list may have references to itself. To keep our list sizes small, we've implemented a DataContractSerializerOpera... where when we create the data serializer, we...
Well, that was certainly annoying. I'm trying to create a new application manifest (deployment manifest), and if I use the -MinVersion (-mv) option as specified in the Mage documentation, it fails with the error, "The minimum version specified is not valid." I'm guessing that this goes hand in hand with the bug that I ran into earlier where you can't do anything but a check after install when using mage. For that defect, I ended up running some code to replace the <expiration maximumAge="0" unit="days"...
Had a problem with WCF that I thought I should blog about. We're in the scenario where we have a WCF service that needs to call another service to do some calculating and then return the result back to the client. For now, the service is hosted on the same server, but eventually, it could get expensive, so we'll push out that calculation to another server. The WCF configuration also has an endpoint address that is not the same as the base address reported to it by IIS; IIS is of course reporting...
So my exchange server stopped working along with the web server and such, and system attendant started hanging in startup. I searched for the problem and really didn't find anything useful until I found a single forum response that solved the problem. Here's the error message I was seeing in the event viewer: Process MSEXCHANGEADTOPOLOGYSERVICE... (PID=3392). Topology discovery failed, error 0x80040a02 (DSC_E_NO_SUITABLE_CDC). Look up the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) error code specified...
In many ways, CAB and WPF have many similar functions. One area where there's overlap, and a little bit of pain is with WPF commands. If you're new to commands, here's a great blog post about them. The Microsoft Help for commands is here. Suppose the following: You have a search workspace that contains all of the logic for executing a search and displaying search results and a single search textbox. When a search result item is selected, you raise a cab event and then stuff happens. You want to go...
Today someone asked me, "How do you cause the double click event to fire in a tree view control using UI Automation"? Good question, and no, I don't have a good answer. Apparently, there isn't a good way to simulate this. In our case, we have a custom user control that is a popup that contains a WPF TreeView control. The user browses through the control until they find the node that they want and then they double click on the control to select the node, which is then raised as an event through the...
Technorati Tags: MAGE,documentation The mage -Install option is now different in .net 3.5. Instead of defaulting to true (as the documentation reads) it defaults to false, resulting in a online install only. To fix, just add -Install true at the end of your command line and it'll work correctly...
Technorati Tags: ClickOnce,MAGE,Microsoft,.net 3.5 A few days ago I wrote about issues I was having with Mage and click once. Basically, I was always getting the following when I'd try to install the click once application: PLATFORM VERSION INFO Windows : 5.2.3790.131072 (Win32NT) Common Language Runtime : 2.0.50727.1433 System.Deployment.dll : 2.0.50727.1433 (REDBITS.050727-1400) mscorwks.dll : 2.0.50727.1433 (REDBITS.050727-1400) dfdll.dll : 2.0.50727.1433 (REDBITS.050727-1400) dfshim.dll : 2.0.50727.1433...
Technorati Tags: ClickOnce,MAGE,.net 3.5,MageUI We've been struggling with ClickOnce using mage.exe and MageUI.exe to manually deploy the application. Since we're doing continuous integration, we need this to work. I've spent 4 hours with MS support trying different combinations of deployment to no avail. We've tried everything. Today, I built a sample application to see if it was our projects or MS. Using Visual Studio 2008, I created a new WPF application and left everything at it's default. The...
First, I find it interesting that NCover is no longer going to be a free tool. I hope he makes it, it's a great tool. Second, using that free tool, I was having a problem getting things to go. I'm using CCNET for continuous integration and for one reason or another, it needed to run as the local system account with interactive abilities. As soon as we switched from a user account to this account, things started breaking. I spent several days working on the problem and finally found this blog post....
I read an article today that's right on. I've been in the Microsoft world for quite a while, and I'm generally happy with them. That doesn't mean I haven't used other platforms or technologies like Oracle, Eclipse, Java, BEA Tuxedo, Perl, Ruby on Rails, several different distributions of linux (I started an ISP on linux), AS/400, RPG, Visual RPG, VAX, DEC Alpha, WPF, etc. Wow, I look at that list and realize that I've seen quite a few different technologies! I've seen enough to not be a bigot. We're...
Wow, that was a frustrating ride. All I wanted to do was get the initial focus of the application set to a control that was being loaded as part of the application. At first, I tried just the "Focus" command off of the control itself. That didn't work. Turns out, there's two types of focus, Keyboard Focus and Logical Focus. Cool, so then I knew I could use the method: Keyboard.Focus(IUIElement); Except it didn't work. No matter where I put it, it didn't work. I even went so far as to put the control...
It's not just Microsoft that has delays. If this had been Microsoft telling people that they'd decided to pull developers off to work on the IPhone, you'd have heard about how evil MS is and how they are never going to release and how typical this is, blah, blah, blah. You'd also hear about how they had released a vaporware product with the IPhone and how they should be sued for publishing a product before it was ready. So, my question is, how much of the IPhone presentation was smoke and mirrors?...
All consulting positions are not created equal. For example, you can be the eternal consultant with a company like Microsoft where you're nothing more than an employee that they don't want to pay benefits to. You can also find consulting gigs where you are able to do more solutions oriented consulting. Typically, the skill and quality of the solution oriented consultant is higher than the staff augmentation consultant. However, not all consultants understand the difference. As a contractor, your...
Wow, it's been a hectic three weeks! I've been out at a client's site for two of the three weeks and then working on their project for the rest of the time. It's a WPF product and based on that, I can say that WPF is really cool stuff. Some things that I've learned? 1. Use Popup controls when you have content that you need to display out of the stack order on top of other items. 2. The Popup control has built in animation so that you don't have to do anything with it. You can see the example in the...
This is in response to a comment about my last post. I expected something revolutionary and significantly better than what was currently on the market. Microsoft consistently does this with other applications. Sql Server is, in my opinion, FAR superior to Oracle and MySql. .net kick’s Java’s behind. Visual Studio is so far ahead of the competition that using anything else is painful. For those of you that live and die by Eclipse, VS 2005 is clearly a superior product. The XBOX 360 is also much better...
O.K.--so I got a shiny core duo 2 from dell the other day, and have vista loaded onto it. The performance thingy rates me as a 3.5 (because of the video card), and says I should be able to enjoy all of the snazzy new features of Vista.I start to tinker, and soon find that the Aero stuff is really only skin deep--as soon as you go into any of the dialog boxes for more advanced stuff (like the system dialog boxes, the "advanced properties" of the display, etc), you quickly find that this is just XP...
Does open source really work? I’m skeptical. A perfect example is the open source project NDoc. I’ve seen this with more than one project. A project goes open source by a company, supposedly to accept outside contributors, but few open source projects have contributors outside of those that started the project. At best, most successful open source projects only have a handful of contributors and are dependent upon large corporations funding development work on the project. Here’s my take on why:...
This news story is laughable. Why can't Sony stop the spin? Comparing 1 million Talladega Nights movies that were packaged with the PS3 to 60,000 HD DVD movies that were actually SOLD is really not the same thing. People don't, in general, buy the PS3 because it's a Blue Ray player. Sheesh! Additionally, he doesn't know how many games they have or how many they will have in short order? I would think that's a key focus of his, since with no games, nobody wants to buy a ps3. Finally, news.com is so...
In a story on News.com, Novell and Microsoft are apparently going to work together for supporting Suse linux and Longhorn. Very interesting. In my opinion, this is huge. I can only hope that they also collaborate on Mono as well so that we can do .net development for linux and get .net 2.0 on linux. 1.1. is there, but 2.0 is still not quite ready. This should have Red Hat people up at nights...
Call me a geek, but I like to play old dos games (like stelcon3, jazz jackrabbit, epic pinball, etc). I've tried a couple of solutions to get them to work. First is FreeDos running under either VMWare or Virtual PC. FreeDos is a great program, and I'm sure it works well for many people, but it does not work well for playing the old games. Running under either virtualization platform, it frequently gives weird errors with Emm386 (vmware 4.5 and ems just don't get along well together I guess--if you...
I needed to generate html help with the xml documentation that was generated by C#. I hadn't done this in a while, so I assumed that NDOC would be the way to go. Sadly, NDOC is no longer a working product (apparently, people were a “bit“ pushy with the projects primary contributor). Luckily, Microsoft has released Sandcastle, and as of the latest CTP, I like it a lot. I'm using Eric Woodruff's gui to help with the building, and it seems to work very well. The final html help documentation...
Call me an anti-java, oracle biggot, but these technologies are driving me crazy. First, Oracle's licensing plans are EXPENSIVE and COMPLEX. As updated January 11th, they now consider different hardware platforms cores to rate at different levels. For example, AMD/Intel cores are rated at .50 of a processor. Have a four core chip? You need two oracle processor licenses, and depending on the version of db you get, that means big bucks ($40,000 per processor for the enterprise version, YIKES!). DB2...
Something as simple as Date parsing in Java is a nightmare. Suppose the following: users can pass in dates, and I may not know what format the dates are in. For example, I may get MM/dd/yyyy or M/d/yyyy or MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss or whatever. In Java, there is no easy way to parse all of those formats. They say, “Use the SimpleDateFormatter”, but the simple date formatter throws an exception when you try to parse a date such as 06/01/2006 and says it's an invalid date. So if you create a...
Sometimes I think e-mail is a bad thing. Over the weekend, our illustrious sales department decided to send out a new campaign to get old customers back to our service. They didn't tell anyone, and rather than using the mechanisms provided by IT to them for the purpose of sending e-mail campaigns, they just opened up Outlook and started BCC'ing people. They send a 2.2 MB file to THOUSANDS of people over our poor little T-1. The mail server also isn't a super large server (the former sysadmin really...
We have this app that dynamically loads assemblies based on the latest versions that have been published. Prior to today, we've just been putting out an MSI and then using that to install. I finally got around to implementing the dynamic update, even though it's been in place for a while. We're not doing anything fancy, just checking an xml file in the location of the assemblies and if the version there is newer that the version on the machine, we copy out everything in mass. This would be bad if...
As I said in a previous post, here's the code for generating a sitemap. Enjoy. SiteMapGenerator.cs using System; using Snowball.Common; using System.IO; namespace Snowball.Web { /// /// Generates a sitemap for dotnetnuke. /// class SiteMapGenerator { /// /// Generates a site map for a dotnetnuke 2.1.2 website. /// [STAThread] static void Main(string[] args) { string portals=Settings.GetSetting... string[] portalList=portals.Split(new char[]{','}); string htmlFilename=Settings.GetSe...
The code below will generate a Google sitemap for a dotnetnuke 2.1.2 site as well as generate a static html page for the site. Note that the code actually just generates XML, which is then transformed into the results needed. Also note that we're using several internally built objects (like the "Settings" and "XmlTransformer" objects). You'll need to replace these with equivelently similar code. Basically, settings just reads from the config file, and XmlTransformer just does an application of an...
So we have this affiliate that uses PHP for almost everything. Of course, the lip we get from them is that “Linux will rule the world, microsoft will die!” I've written a bunch of web services that basically allow them to talk directly to our system. They're using PEAR::SOAP and NuSoap, and of course, the problem MUST be on our side. I actually write up a telnet example that he can use. telnet to www.mysite.com port 80 and copy and paste in exactly the following: POST /mitwebservice/pageremoved/...