Same Old Applications

KulenDayz na BUG online

dadamec — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 16:51:00 GMT

Pročitajte osvrt na KulenDayz konferenciju u BUG online izdanju i uključite se u rasprava o pravopisu i gramatici ;-) Zanimljivo je vidjeti kako rasprave skrenu sa početne teme i dobiju neki svoj novi život :-)

KulenDayz 2009 community event

dadamec — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 12:37:00 GMT

KulenDayz community event is near... Check agenda and view list of speakers and sessions info!
And follow it on KulenDayz twitter!

AJAX Control Toolkit - May 2009 Release

dadamec — Fri, 15 May 2009 09:20:00 GMT

There is 3 new controls in version Version 3.0.30512 of ASP.NET AJAX Control toolkit: HTML Editor, ComboBox and ColorPicker.

MSDN Article by Andrej Radinger

dadamec — Mon, 11 May 2009 07:24:00 GMT

Croatian MS Community member and our MVP Andrej Radinger publish article Getting Started with Building Windows Mobile Solutions with Visual Studio and Windows Mobile 6 SDK on MSDN.
We hope this is just a first one :-)

WinDays 2009 PnP predavanja - najava

dadamec — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 21:37:00 GMT

Svi koji dolazite na tehnološki dio konferencije posjetite PnP predavanja - predavanja izabrane od strane MS Community zajednice. A to su:

	Do's & Don'ts u izradi Windows aplikacija (300) , Utorak, 17:00
	Umjetnički paviljon Juraj Šporer Vedran Kaldi, CITUS d.o.o.

	Marketing za IT geekove, mikrotvrtke i nemarketingaše (200) , Utorak, 19:00
	Umjetnički paviljon Juraj Šporer Vatroslav Mihalj, HUPRO/Microsoft Community

	Virtualni diskovi na Windowsima 7 (300) , Četvrtak, 15:40
	Hotel Grand, dvorana Orhideja Josip Medved, Siemens

WinDays 2009 virtualna konferencija

dadamec — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 21:24:00 GMT

Posjetite virtualnu WinDays 2009 konferenciju. Pogledajte satnicu pa ako malo bolje pogledate možete vidjeti i i moje ime iza predavanja Microsoft Azure Services Platform Development. Navratite u petak na web site virtualne konferencije i pogledajte u kojem na smjeru vodi virtualizacija ;-)

One od vas koji dolazite na zemaljsku konferenciju pozivam da posjete predavanja mojih kolega iz tvrtke Citus:

Do's & Don'ts u izradi Windows aplikacija (300) , Vedran Kaldi, Utorak 17:00
Azure Services platforma (300) , Tomislav Bronzin, Četvrtak 11:00
Windows 7 Development, Tomislav Bronzin, Petak, Virtualna konferencija, 11:50

MSCommunity.net at the MVP Global Summit

dadamec — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 08:25:00 GMT

Alessandro Taglia in his article about MVP Global Summit recognize MSCommunity.net and especially people from our community as ones from "some of the most incredible community sustainers". I would like to thank all of our MVPs that attend MVP Global Summit because they make this positive picture of our community in the world.

Alessandro also gives special thanks to our member (and not only a member ;-) ) Tomislav Bronzin as he is obviously moving things globally.

WinDays 2009 PnP predavanja - zadnji dan za prijave

dadamec — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 09:06:00 GMT

Požurite! Još samo danas možete nominirati predavanje za WinDays 2009 PnP track:

Pregled prijava: http://www.mscommunity.net/Default.aspx?tabid=1307

Prijava: http://www.mscommunity.net/Default.aspx?tabid=1182

WinDays 2009 PnP predavanja

dadamec — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 12:23:00 GMT

I ove godine naša zajednica ima pravo na PnP (pivo and pizza) predavanja u sklopu WinDays konferencije. I to ne bilo kakva predavanja - već predavanja koja sami predlažemo i koja drže izabrani predavači. Prijave predavanja su otvorene i traju do 18.02. a od 19.02. do 25.02 možete glasati i izabrati predavanja za naš sadržaj na WinDays 2009 konferenciji. Ukoliko ne prijavljujete svoje predavanje prijavite opis predavanja kakav bi željeli čuti i vidjeti!

Prijavite predavanje za WinDays 2009 PnP track!

Pregled prijava...

SpaceBlock - application for managing blobs/data services

dadamec — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 15:40:00 GMT

While developing application for Azure platform developers often need to check the content in the blob storage. Or after publishing the application the view on Storage could be usefull. Don't run and build a new blob viewver because there is one allready published on CodePlex. SpaceBlock is windows forms application for managing:

You can use SpaceBlock (install with ClickOnce deployment) it to put or delete storage content on any of those services and also watch the REST calls written to log ;-)

Azure Image Resizer - Running on Windows Azure

dadamec — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 20:57:00 GMT

While learning Windows Azure I developed simple image resizing application called Azure Image Resizer. It's developed for and hosted by Azure Services Platform. Application is build for exploring Azure Services Platform possibilities and learn about it in practice with Windows Azure SDK and Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio.

Deployment is made thru the Azure Services Developer Portal. I like the way staging/production management works - you can only upload new version to Staging area and after testing it promote to Production.

Application consist of Web Role (UI and managing upload) and Worker Role (unzipping, resizing, zipping in the background) and Azure Storage, Azure Tables and Azure Queues are used. The plan is to work further on this application adding functionallity based on Live Services, SQL Services, Workflow services etc. and make it sort of showcase or learning playground for Cloud technologies.

Application is online on http://adamec.cloudapp.net/Default.aspx and you can test it. The URL cloudapp.net says: "yes I'm application in the cloud" ;-)

I would like to add something like:

Integrate Live Services - LiveID authentication
Integrate SQL Services - storing usage informations
Workflow Services
Service Bus
AJAX or Silverlight uploader

If you have any interesting idea for some Cloud based functionnality please make a comment about it ;-)

Azure - Reading and Writing with LocalStorage

dadamec — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 14:45:00 GMT

In a post Azure Storage Services vs SQL Services I mentioned that we could think of Azure Storage as this is File System for us. After that came the usual question: is there any access to File System from Web Role deployed into Azure environment. Well - there is - usage is simple thru the ILocalResource inteface.

It had to be LocalStorage element (WebRole element child) in Service Definition File ServiceDefinition.csdef.

And this declared local storage is accessible thru the ILocalResource:

ILocalResource myIO = RoleManager.GetLocalResource("AIResizerStorage");

After the initialization you could use the free space in your storage like you use to:

string PathToFile = Path.Combine(resource.RootPath, "myFileInCloud.txt");
FileStream stream = File.Open(PathToFile , FileMode.Create, FileAccess.ReadWrite);

But be carefull!!! This is non-persisted storage - it exists only while WebRole is up and running. Every suspend or restart of the role will clean the local storage. So this is really a temporary storage and we should have this in mind. It is usefull for caching some data, temporary serialization on IO or upload in chunks for example but for the persisted storage we should stick to Storage Tables or Blobs.

Azure Storage Table - deleting the table

dadamec — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 11:33:00 GMT

After deploying application on Windows Azure (Staging or Production) there is often need for cleaning Azure Storage Tables on start up of an application. There is two ways of acomplish this task.

First is deleting the data - iterating thru all the entities in the table and deleting the object by object. If there is a lot of objects in Storage Table this process would result in lot of HTTP requests to the Azure Storage Service (for example: 200 objects = 200 HTTP DELETE calls)
Second one is deleting the whole table and recreate it. This would run over 2 HTTP calls and in the most scenarious would be faster then deleting objects one by one.

Windows Azure SDK 1.0 came with samples and in the Storage Client sample is TableStorage class - helper class for accessing the table storage service. Usage of this class is good and clean way to start connecting to Azure Storage Services. For deleting the table you could add following method:

And then in the Application_BeginRequest or any other place that suite your app logic you could use it to delete tables that "belongs" to your data model and context.

Of course - you should recreate the tables from your model after this action ;-)

Azure Storage Services vs SQL Services

dadamec — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 09:32:00 GMT

Microsoft push a lot of technologies lately (read Damir Dobrić Live Services Summary post) and it might get us confused with a lot of options for one task. One of many questions that came is how to choose beetween Azure Storage and SQL Services. The names might confuse you 'cause Azure Storage has entites, tables, columns, RowGuid etc. But the truth is that we had to look at Azure Storage primaly as File System in the Cloud. Aldo we can create tables and put data in it they are non-relational. Any relations, if you need them, must be handled with the custom logic. If you need scalable and relational storage with the DB in mind you should stick to SQL Services.

Querying Azure Storage and SQL Services share the same REST logic and syntax but there is lot of differences. There is one small example.

If you want to order the data from Azure Storage Table you could try to add "orderby" in LINQ query like in:

LINQ query from upper code would be encoded into HTTP GET call with order by in query string (ADO.NET Data Services syntax):
http://adamecstorage.table.core.windows.net/MeteoInfoDataTable()?$orderby=Date

And the response would get us unwanted message "... not implemented ...":

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>
<error xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/metadata">
<code>NotImplemented</code>
<message xml:lang="en-US">The requested operation is not implemented on the specified resource.</message>
</error>

SQL Services supports order by clause and of course more. We should carefully read the docs and announcements to be sure not to start driving over this Live wide highway into wrong direction ;-)

Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 - how to start

dadamec — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 13:27:00 GMT

Microsoft acquired Dundas company a year and a half ago and implementing theirs charting technology into the products. And from last month they give us the free charting controls (both Web and WinForms) for use in our .NET 3.5 application. To start you need to download and install:
Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 and Microsoft Chart Controls Add-on for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008.

For introduction try Samples Environment for Microsoft Chart Controls and read the docs: Microsoft Chart Controls for .NET Framework Documentation

There is post from Alex Gorev about MS Charts - Dundas Charts relation.