Satter Ramblings

Web Translation

2012-05-22T12:42:02-07:00

My blog is read around the world but I do not localize my blog. Well until now. At the bottom of the page I have put the Microsoft Translation widget. This will do machine translation at a minimum. You can also enable collaborative translation as well. Enjoy!

MVC 4 - Game Changer

2011-09-28T18:32:07-07:00

During the //build/ Day 2 keynote, Scott Guthrie announced a new release of MVC. MVC 4 is a developer preview meaning "danger, Will Robinson, danger". However it is definitely worth a look as it makes building mobile web applications easier. It is also what I have been waiting for to get moving on Web LOB Accelerator. Read on for how to build a multi-device site using MVC 4.

One downside is that MVC requires Visual Studio. So you will need at a minimum Visual Studio Web Developer Express SP1 (link to Web Platform Installer). Since I work for Microsoft I am using Visual Studio Ultimate. Some other things you will need is different browsers and/or devices like iPad, iPhone, Android, WP7, etc. To simulate some of the devices

Windows Phone Emulator
Opera Mobile Emulator
Apple Safari setup for iPhone. To simulate iOS go into the setup Advance Preferences and ensure that "Show Developer menu in menu bar" is checked. Then use the developer menu to change the user agent string.
ibbdemo2 emulates an iPhone web browser.
Android Emulator

NOTE: There is no substitute for using a real physical device. Emulators are great for getting your UI roughed out. However there are differences so do not gamble use a real device for final testing.

Make sure you install MVC 4 using Web Platform Installer or the standalone installer. I prefer Web Platform Installer which you might need to upgrade. There is also a version for Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview.

Hello MVC 4

The first thing is to just build a hello world application. The steps are straight forward

Open up Visual Studio 2010 and create a new web site (FIle|New Project).
Select ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application and call it WebLOBApp.
You will get another dialog box for the type of web application. For now select Internet Application.
Run the application. The template has guidance on how to modify the basic template that is built into MVC. If you run it in a mobile browser you do not get a mobile specific view.

One thing to note is that by default the new template is using viewport. The style sheet is setup for devices with a display under 850 pixels and 850 pixels. If the browser has 850 pixels or less it will use a different layout. You can see this in action by resizing your browser.

jQuery Mobile

Using CSS to change the site can be useful. However what is better is to think through the user scenarios for the device. For example

if the device is a phone you should probably turn the phone number into a clickable link to call the number
if the device has GPS and you have an address or destination coordinates you might want a button to show a map or directions to the location

A new way to build Ajax type application for mobile applications is jQuery Mobile. MVC 4 has got your back and has published NuGet package to enable jQuery Mobile. Simple use NuGet (Project|Manage NuGet Packages) and search for jQuery Mobile. Select jQuery.Mobile.MVC and install it.

Hit run and watch as the web page blows up. Note this might not happen to you but at least at the time I wrote this there were bugs. Hey it is a developer preview and I did warn you. Fortunately, I can help you fix this. What has happen is that jQuery dependencies are wrong. Look in the script folder for the jQuery-x.x.x*.js files.

You need to fix the layout files (Views\Shared\_Layout.cshtml and _Layout.Mobile.cshtml) to match the new script files. And presto the browser version works again.

Now run the page in a mobile browser. You should see something like below.

It is a start. A couple of things to notice. The first is the layout for mobile is different. MVC 4 has built-in detection for mobile. Simply append ".Mobile" to the file name and when the mobile detection kicks in if a ".Mobile" file exists that will get used. For example copy the Views\Home\Index.cshtml file and rename it to Index.Mobile.cshtml. Next replace the contents with

@{
ViewBag.Title = "Home Page";

}    <div class="content-wrapper">
        <hgroup class="title">
            <h1>@ViewBag.Title.</h1>
            <h2>@ViewBag.Message</h2>
        </hgroup>
        <p>Hello Mobile Device</p>
    </div>
</section>
}

Loading the page in a mobile browser now gives you different output from a desktop browser.

At this point there are three choices. One use a single set of mobile pages and dynamically change the output when device specific need arises. Or direct MVC to use a specific set of pages for specific devices or sets of devices. The last method is to use both for example setup iOS devices but then have dynamic page generation for linking phone numbers to be dialed depending on whether it is an iPhone or not.

To override MVC page routing you need to add display modes during application start-up. DisplayModes lets MVC know how to route to various content based on condition. It is order based so as soon as it finds a condition and content for that condition it stops. For example to add a separate index page for iPhone you would add the following code to Application_Startup method in Global.asax.cs.

DisplayModes.Modes.Insert(0, new DefaultDisplayMode("iPhone")
{
ContextCondition = Context => Context.Request.Browser.MobileDeviceModel == "iPhone"

});

The above code uses 51 Degrees in evaluating what the calling browser is probably running on. You can also use the Official WURFL .NET APIas well. Both can be found using NuGet and searching for WURFL.

If you use 51 Degrees make sure to do the following after adding their NuGet package

Delete Mobile folder
Remove Redirect node from 51Degrees.mobi.config

You can just copy the Index.Mobile.cshtml and rename it to Index.iPhone.cshtml. Then change the string "Hello Mobile Device" to "Hello iPhone".

Now you have a site that displays a custom index page for

regular browsers with a client area more than 850 pixels
regular browsers with a client area 850 pixels or less
iPhone devices
Mobile devices

If you would like the code you can find it at GitHub.

WURFL .NET API

2011-06-27T11:19:55-07:00

The WURFL team has introduced a new .NET API. The first pass does not have a Nuget package but they are working on it. So it should eventually show up on Nuget.

The WURLF .NET API is different from my earlier post. It made to dynamically create your views based on the browser capabilities. This approach is different from 51 Degrees implementation. In 51 Degrees you can simply redirect your pages to a specific sub site rather than changing your view on the fly. You can also change the view on the fly if you like with 51 Degrees.

Either implementation will get you to where you want to be. It is great to see the WURFL project expand the their reach past Java and PHP. They include bothe WebForm and MVC examples.

Creating a Multi-Device Web Site

2011-04-20T15:55:38-07:00

One of the things I have always wanted to do was write the Mobile LOB Accelerator as multi-device application. One of the things that has held me back is the lack of ADO.NET in Silverlight. Yes I know I can use a lot of database implementations for Silverlight. The problem is that I have yet to find a way to spoof in ADO.NET. I would like a class library that device specific UI then consumes. Ah but how about a web site with device specific UI. This is very doable.

Step one is how do I route the incoming request to the right UI. And it turns out in ASP.NET this is very easy. You just need a database of device attributes. Then lookup the device and redirect to the right web pages. MVC makes this easy. WebMatrix makes it even easier. Right now you probably want to scream at me. First, where do I get the database and secondly, how do I write all the code?

The database is the easy part. What you want is a Wireless Universal Resource File (WURFL). And it turns out you can get that from a SourceForge project by the same name. Here is the catcha. The project is very Java and PHP focused. So what is a .NET developer suppose to do? In comes 51Degrees.mobi with a Codeplex project that uses the WURFL database and implements it ASP.NET style.

But wait there is more. "The latest version of WebMatrix actually includes a Nuget package for 51degrees.mobi for WebMatrix. How sweet is that! So fire up WebMatrix and lets get started.

Launch WebMatrix
From the WebMatrix Welcome Screen select "Site from Template".
Select "Empty Site" and name it. I named my site RazorDevice.
Add a new file called Default.cshtml. GIve the page a title like "Detect Device" and put "Hi Desktop" in the body.

<html lang="en">
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8" />
        <title>Detect Device</title>
    </head>
    <body>
      Hi Desktop
    </body>
</html>

Now run the site. Note this is important. You actually cannot get to the administration site without running the site with an actual return before calling, http://localhost:portid/_Admin.
Once you run the web page go to the Administration site. After creating the password you need to go find the password file and rename it. The password file is under App_Data/Admin and currently called _Password.config. Rename the file by removing the underscore (_).
Now reload the administration site and login. You should see a list of packages to install. If not make sure you have Show set to Online. The first one should be "51Degrees.mobi-WebMatrix - Beta 1.0.1.6". Install that package.
Refresh the file set and you should see more directories
Move 51Degrees.mobi.config to the root.
Rename 51Degrees.mobi.config to web.config.

The site is now ready to route requests from browsers based on browser characteristics. As a requests come in a new HTTP Handler looks at the web.config and reroutes the request. The routing information is held under the redirect node in web.config. To test you will need to fire up an emulator. If you do not have one you might try the Opera Mobile Emulator. You can download it on to the desktop. Just look for Opera Mobile Emulator.

Running the site from Opera yielded a different page that what I had created. The Nuget package added a device test page. And the web.config routes all mobile devices in the current device database to the test page.

Now here is where it gets complicated. In order to get this to work with other emulators I had to jump through some hoops. The first is getting IISExpress to accept remote connections.

Setup HTTP.Sys to allow remote connections. This is accomlished by adding to the URL access list. From an elevated command prompt
netsh http add urlacl url=http://hostname:port/ user=everyone
Next restart WebMatrix. This time start WebMatrix as administrator. This is important as only an administrator can change the hostname setting.
Bring up the setting tab. Replace localhost with the fully qualified DNS name of your computer.
Test that it works by clicking run. If your local browser works then Android and Windows Phone 7 emulators will work.

Now for the bad news. To test emulators and devices you will have to always run WebMatrix with elevated privileges. Hopefully this will be fixed in future versions of WebMatrix.

Android

Windows Phone 7

The next step is building the screens. Stay tuned.

.NET 4 on Server Core

2011-04-18T18:59:18-07:00

In March a version of .NET Framework 4 was released to run on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. You can download the RTM version but what do you get?

The team struggled with this question. What should you get? Depending on what you got would control what you could do. Why did we struggle you ask? Simple, should we only give you what would work or everything. If we gave you everything you should be able to build anything. Plus if we missed something in a special package then a lot of work would be required to create an updated Server Core profile. In the end for a lot of reason we gave people everything. But what actually works is another story.

Here is the list of DLLs that I believed should work on Server Core. This list was created when we were looking at giving only what worked on Server Core. I have this lists as I ran the release of .NET Framework 4 Server Core Profile before I took a new role within the .NET Developer Platform group.

The list below lists the files and namespaces in that file. If you do not see something and you think it should work try it. After all the Server Core install contains the Full .NET Framework 4. Just make sure you thoroughly test your application on a Server Core install!

Filename	Namespaces
Accessibility.dll	Accessibility
CustomMarshalers.dll	System.Runtime.InteropServices.CustomMarshalers
ISymWrapper.dll	System.Diagnostics.SymbolStore
Microsoft.Build.Framework.dll	Microsoft.Build.Framework
	Microsoft.Build.Framework.XamlTypes
Microsoft.Build.Tasks.v4.0.dll	Microsoft.Build.Tasks
	Microsoft.Build.Tasks.Deployment.Bootstrapper
	Microsoft.Build.Tasks.Deployment.ManifestUtilities
	Microsoft.Build.Tasks.Hosting
	Microsoft.Build.Tasks.Xaml
Microsoft.Build.Utilities.v4.0.dll	Microsoft.Build.Utilities
Microsoft.CSharp.dll	Microsoft.CSharp.RuntimeBinder
Microsoft.JScript.dll	Microsoft.JScript
	Microsoft.JScript.Vsa
Microsoft.Transactions.Bridge.dll	System.ServiceModel.Internal
Microsoft.Transactions.Bridge.Dtc.dll	N/A - Internal Use Only
Microsoft.VisualBasic.Activities.Compiler.dll	N/A - Internal Use Only
Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll	Microsoft.VisualBasic
	Microsoft.VisualBasic.ApplicationServices
	Microsoft.VisualBasic.CompilerServices
	Microsoft.VisualBasic.Devices
	Microsoft.VisualBasic.FileIO
	Microsoft.VisualBasic.Logging
	Microsoft.VisualBasic.MyServices
	Microsoft.VisualBasic.MyServices.Internal
Microsoft.VisualC.Dll	Microsoft.VisualC
Microsoft.VisualC.STLCLR.dll	Microsoft.VisualC.StlClr
	Microsoft.VisualC.StlClr.Generic
Microsoft.Windows.ApplicationServer.Applications.dll	N/A - Internal Use Only
SMDiagnostics.dll	N/A - Internal Use Only
sysglobl.dll	System.Globalization
System.Activities.dll	Microsoft.VisualBasic.Activities
	Microsoft.VisualBasic.Activities.XamlIntegration
	System.Activities
	System.Activities.Debugger
	System.Activities.DurableInstancing
	System.Activities.ExpressionParser
	System.Activities.Expressions
	System.Activities.Hosting
	System.Activities.Persistence
	System.Activities.Statements
	System.Activities.Tracking
	System.Activities.Validation
	System.Activities.XamlIntegration
System.Activities.DurableInstancing.dll	System.Activities.DurableInstancing
System.AddIn.Contract.dll	System.AddIn.Contract
	System.AddIn.Contract.Automation
	System.AddIn.Contract.Collections
	System.AddIn.Pipeline
System.AddIn.dll	System.AddIn
	System.AddIn.Hosting
	System.AddIn.Pipeline
System.ComponentModel.Composition.dll	System
	System.ComponentModel.Composition
	System.ComponentModel.Composition.Hosting
	System.ComponentModel.Composition.Primitives
	System.ComponentModel.Composition.ReflectionModel
System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.dll	System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations
System.configuration.dll	System.Configuration
	System.Configuration.Internal
	System.Configuration.Provider
System.Configuration.Install.dll	System.Configuration.Install
	System.Diagnostics
System.Core.dll	Microsoft.Win32.SafeHandles
	System
	System.Collections.Generic
	System.Diagnostics
	System.Diagnostics.Eventing
	System.Diagnostics.Eventing.Reader
	System.Diagnostics.Eventing.PerformanceData
	System.Dynamic
	System.IO
	System.IO.MemoryMappedFiles
	System.IO.Pipes
	System.Linq
	System.Linq.Expressions
	System.Management.Instrumentation
	System.Runtime.CompilerServices
	System.Runtime.InteropServices
	System.Security
	System.Security.Cryptography
	System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates
	System.Threading
	System.Threading.Tasks
System.Data.DataSetExtensions.dll	System.Data
System.Data.dll	Microsoft.SqlServer.Server
	System.Configuration
	System.Data
	System.Data.Common
	System.Data.Odbc
	System.Data.OleDb
	System.Data.ProviderBase
	System.Data.Sql
	System.Data.SqlClient
	System.Data.SqlTypes
	System.Xml
System.Data.Entity.dll	System.Data
	System.Data.Common
	System.Data.Common.CommandTrees
	System.Data.EntityClient
	System.Data.Mapping
	System.Data.Metadata.Edm
	System.Data.Objects
	System.Data.Objects.DataClasses
	System.Data.Objects.SqlClient
System.Data.Linq.dll	System.Data.Linq
	System.Data.Linq.Mapping
	System.Data.Linq.SqlClient
	System.Data.Linq.SqlClient.Implementation
System.Data.OracleClient.dll	System.Data.OracleClient
System.Data.Services.Client.dll	System.Data.Services.Client
	System.Data.Services.Common
System.Data.Services.Design.dll	System.Data.Services.BuildProvider
	System.Data.Services.Design
System.Data.Services.dll	System.Data.Services
	System.Data.Services.Internal
	System.Data.Services.Providers
System.Data.SqlXml.dll	System.Xml.Utils
	System.Xml.Xsl
	System.Xml.Xsl.IlGen
	System.Xml.Xsl.Qil
	System.Xml.Xsl.Runtime
	System.Xml.Xsl.XPath
	System.Xml.Xsl.Xslt
	System.Xml.Xsl.XsltOld
	System.Xml.Xsl.XsltOld.Debugger
System.Deployment.dll	System.Deployment.Application
System.Design.dll	System.ComponentModel.Design
	System.ComponentModel.Design.Data
	System.ComponentModel.Design.Serialization
	System.Data.Design
	System.Diagnostics.Design
	System.Messaging.Design
	System.Resources.Tools
	System.ServiceProcess.Design
	System.Web.UI.Design
	System.Web.UI.Design.WebControls
	System.Web.UI.Design.WebControls.WebParts
	System.Windows.Forms.Design
	System.Windows.Forms.Design.Behavior
System.Device.dll	System.Device.Location
System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement.dll	System.DirectoryServices
	System.DirectoryServices.ActiveDirectory
System.DirectoryServices.dll	System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement
System.DirectoryServices.Protocols.dll	System.DirectoryServices.Protocols
System.dll	Microsoft.Csharp
	Microsoft.VisualBasic
	Microsoft.Win32
	System
	System.CodeDom
	System.CodeDom.Compiler
	System.Collections.Concurrent
	System.Collections.Generic
	System.Collections.ObjectModel
	System.Collections.Specialized
	System.ComponentModel
	System.ComponentModel.Design
	System.ComponentModel.Design.Serialization
	System.Configuration
	System.Diagnostics
	System.Diagnostics.CodeAnalysis
	System.IO
	System.IO.Compression
	System.IO.Ports
	System.Media
	System.Net
	System.Net.Cache
	System.Net.Configuration
	System.Net.Mail
	System.Net.Mime
	System.Net.NetworkInformation
	System.Net.Security
	System.Net.Sockets
	System.Runtime.InteropServices
	System.Runtime.InteropServices.ComTypes
	System.Runtime.Versioning
	System.Security.AccessControl
	System.Security.Authentication
	System.Security.Authentication.ExtendedProtection
	System.Security.Authentication.ExtendedProtection.Configuration
	System.Security.Cryptography
	System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates
	System.Security.Permissions
	System.Text.RegularExpressions
	System.Threading
	System.Timers
	System.Web
System.Drawing.Design.dll	System.Drawing.Design
System.Drawing.dll	System.Drawing
	System.Drawing.Design
	System.Drawing.Design2D
	System.Drawing.Imaging
	System.Drawing.Printing
	System.Drawing.Text
System.Dynamic.dll	N/A - Internal Use Only
System.EnterpriseServices.dll	System.EnterpriseServices
	System.EnterpriseServices.CompensatingResourceManager
	System.EnterpriseServices.Internal
System.IdentityModel.dll	System.IdentityModel.Claims
	System.IdentityModel.Policy
	System.IdentityModel.Selectors
	System.IdentityModel.Tokens
System.IdentityModel.Selectors.dll	System.IdentityModel.Selectors
System.IO.Log.dll	System.IO.Log
System.Management.dll	System.Management
	System.Management.Instrumentation
System.Management.Instrumentation.dll	System.Management.Instrumentation
System.Messaging.dll	System.Messaging
	System.Messaging.Design
System.Net.dll	System.Net
	System.Net.PeerToPeer
	System.Net.PeerToPeer.Collaboration
System.Numerics.dll	System.Numerics
System.Runtime.Caching.dll	System.Runtime.Caching
	System.Runtime.Caching.Configuration
	System.Runtime.Caching.Hosting
System.Runtime.DurableInstancing.dll	System.Runtime.DurableInstancing
System.Runtime.Remoting.dll	System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels
	System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.Http
	System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.Ipc
	System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.Tcp
	System.Runtime.Remoting.MetadataServices
	System.Runtime.Remoting.Services
System.Runtime.Serialization.dll	System.Runtime.Serialization
	System.Runtime.Serialization.Configuration
	System.Runtime.Serialization.Json
	System.Xml
System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap.dll	System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap
System.Security.dll	System.Security.Cryptography
	System.Security.Cryptography.Pkcs
	System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates
	System.Security.Cryptography.Xml
	System.Security.Permissions
System.ServiceModel.Activation.dll	System.ServiceModel
	System.ServiceModel.Activation
	System.ServiceModel.Activities.Activation
System.ServiceModel.Activities.dll	System.ServiceModel
	System.ServiceModel.Activities
	System.ServiceModel.Activities.Configuration
	System.ServiceModel.Activities.Description
	System.ServiceModel.Activities.Tracking
	System.ServiceModel.Activities.Tracking.Configuration
	System.ServiceModel.XamlIntegration
System.ServiceModel.Channels.dll	System.ServiceModel.Channels
	System.ServiceModel.Configuration
System.ServiceModel.Discovery.dll	System.ServiceModel.Discovery
	System.ServiceModel.Discovery.Configuration
	System.ServiceModel.Discovery.Version11
	System.ServiceModel.Discovery.VersionApril2005
	System.ServiceModel.Discovery.VersionCD1
System.ServiceModel.dll	System
	System.Collections.Generic
	System.IO
	System.ServiceModel
	System.ServiceModel.Activities
	System.ServiceModel.Activities.Configuration
	System.ServiceModel.Channels
	System.ServiceModel.ComIntegration
	System.ServiceModel.Configuration
	System.ServiceModel.Description
	System.ServiceModel.Diagnostics
	System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher
	System.ServiceModel.MsmqIntegration
	System.ServiceModel.PeerResolvers
	System.ServiceModel.Security
	System.ServiceModel.Security.Tokens
	System.ServiceModel.Syndication
	System.ServiceModel.XamlIntegration
System.ServiceModel.Routing.dll	System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher
	System.ServiceModel.Routing
	System.ServiceModel.Routing.Configuration
System.ServiceModel.ServiceMoniker40.dll	System.ServiceModel.ServiceMoniker40
System.ServiceModel.WasHosting.dll	N/A - Internal Use Only
System.ServiceModel.Web.dll	System.ServiceModel
	System.ServiceModel.Activities
	System.ServiceModel.Channels
	System.ServiceModel.Configuration
	System.ServiceModel.Description
	System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher
	System.ServiceModel.Web
System.ServiceProcess.dll	System.ServiceProcess
	System.ServiceProcess.Design
System.Transactions.dll	System.Transactions
	System.Transactions.Configuration
System.Web.Abstractions.dll	N/A - Internal Use Only
System.Web.ApplicationServices.dll	System.Web.Configuration
	System.Web.Security
System.Web.DataVisualization.dll	System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting
System.Web.dll	System.Web
	System.Web.Caching
	System.Web.Compilation
	System.Web.Configuration
	System.Web.Configuration.Internal
	System.Web.Handlers
	System.Web.Hosting
	System.Web.Mail
	System.Web.Management
	System.Web.Profile
	System.Web.Routing
	System.Web.Security
	System.Web.SessionState
	System.Web.UI
	System.Web.UI.Adapters
	System.Web.UI.HtmlControls
	System.Web.UI.WebControls
	System.Web.UI.WebControls.Adapters
	System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts
	System.Web.Util
System.Web.DynamicData.dll	System.Web.DynamicData
	System.Web.DynamicData.ModelProviders
	System.Web.UI
System.Web.Entity.dll	System.Web.UI.WebControls
System.Web.Extensions.Design.dll	System.Web.UI.Design
	System.Web.UI.Design.WebControls
System.Web.Extensions.dll	System.Web.ApplicationServices
	System.Web.ClientServices
	System.Web.ClientServices.Providers
	System.Web.Compilation
	System.Web.Configuration
	System.Web.DynamicData
	System.Web.Handlers
	System.Web.Management
	System.Web.Query.Dynamic
	System.Web.Script
	System.Web.Script.Serialization
	System.Web.Script.Services
	System.Web.UI
	System.Web.UI.WebControls
	System.Web.UI.WebControls.Expressions
System.Web.Mobile.dll	System.Web.Mobile
	System.Web.UI.Design.MobileControls
	System.Web.UI.Design.MobileControls.Converters
	System.Web.UI.MobileControls
	System.Web.UI.MobileControls.Adapters
	System.Web.UI.MobileControls.Adapters.XhtmlAdapters
System.Web.RegularExpressions.dll	System.Web.RegularExpressions
System.Web.Routing.dll	N/A - Internal Use Only
System.Web.Services.dll	System.Web.Services
	System.Web.Services.Configuration
	System.Web.Services.Description
	System.Web.Services.Discovery
	System.Web.Services.Protocols
System.Windows.Forms.dll	System.Resources
	System.Windows.Forms
	System.Windows.Forms.ComponentModel.Com2Interop
	System.Windows.Forms.Design
	System.Windows.Forms.Layout
	System.Windows.Forms.PropertyGridInternal
	System.Windows.Forms.VisualStyles
System.Workflow.Activities.dll	System.Workflow.Activities
	System.Workflow.Activities.Configuration
	System.Workflow.Activities.Rules
	System.Workflow.Activities.Rules.Design
System.Workflow.ComponentModel.dll	System.Workflow.ComponentModel
	System.Workflow.ComponentModel.Compiler
	System.Workflow.ComponentModel.Design
	System.Workflow.ComponentModel.Serialization
System.Workflow.Runtime.dll	System.Activities.Statements
	System.Activities.Tracking
	System.Workflow.Runtime
	System.Workflow.Runtime.Configuration
	System.Workflow.Runtime.DebugEngine
	System.Workflow.Runtime.Hosting
	System.Workflow.Runtime.Tracking
System.WorkflowServices.dll	System.ServiceModel
	System.ServiceModel.Activities
	System.ServiceModel.Activities.Description
	System.ServiceModel.Configuration
	System.ServiceModel.Description
	System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher
	System.ServiceModel.Persistence
	System.Workflow.Activities
	System.Workflow.Runtime.Hosting
System.Xaml.dll	System.Windows.Markup
	System.Xaml
	System.Xaml.Permissions
	System.Xaml.Schema
System.Xaml.Hosting.dll	System.Xaml.Hosting
	System.Xaml.Hosting.Configuration
System.XML.dll	System.Xml
	System.Xml.Resolvers
	System.Xml.Schema
	System.Xml.Serialization
	System.Xml.Serialization.Advanced
	System.Xml.Serialization.Configuration
	System.Xml.XPath
	System.Xml.Xsl
System.Xml.Linq.dll	System.Xml.Linq
	System.Xml.Schema
	System.Xml.XPath

Post PC Era

2011-03-21T16:16:17-07:00

By now there has been a lot of press about the Post PC Era. Ok I will bite lets do the math.

Let us break down the numbers. The IDC says that tablets sold 14-16 million units in 2010. A lot of people in the media are saying that this is the dawning of a new age in computing aka Post PC. Or some of the more blunt commentators are saying the PC is dead. 16 million is a large number. Let me give you another number 346.2 million. The estimated number of PCs shipped in 2010. Yup more than 21 times the number of tablets.

Ok, but certainly the tablets will cut into the market in the following years. Flashback to 2008 when netbooks were all the rage. The media said netbooks would replace the PC. I bet you that tablets will replace netbooks which are replacing PCs or so the argument goes. Here is a dose of reality again sticking with IDC. IDC projects that netbook sales are down. Netbooks are being replaced with low priced laptops and all in one desktops. The PC market will be over half a billion machines by 2014. Tablets will certainly compose a chunk of the portable devices. The IDC is predicting 50 million tablets in 2011. If you quadrupled sales by 2014 which is highly unlikely that is still less than half.

My point in this is that just reading news is not enough. You need to dig into the research to understand what is really going on in a particular area.

.NET 4 on Windows 2008 R2 SP1 Server Core

2011-03-02T10:50:53-08:00

One of the most asked features of .NET 4 is the ability to install on Server Core OSs. I am pleased to let you know that you can now do this with a caveat. You must be running Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. So you must upgrade your server to SP1 before installing .NET Framework 4 Server Core Profile.

One other thing to note you must also turn on .NET 2.0 support as well as WOW support. While we are installing the Full Framework be aware that not everything will function on Server Core for example WPF and ClickOnce do not work on Server Core.

The WebMatrix is Here

2010-11-16T07:23:07-08:00

WebMatrix Beta 3is now available. WebMatrix is a lightweight development environment to enable Razor development, a new syntax for .NET web pages. Lightweight does not mean less features. It is very full featured and cool.

Razor is simple mix HTML and an @ sign to denote C# or VB.NET code. In this quick blog entry I will show you how to build a web page to connect to Twitter and Facebook.

Startup WebMatrix
Select Site from Template
Select Empty Site and name the site HelloWebMatrix
Click Browser your files
Click Add a File to Your Site
Razor uses cshtml for C# HTML or vbhtml for VB.NET html based pages. For now select cshtml and set the filename to Default.cshtml. Then click ok. By the way did you notice that php is supported?

Down the left side you have a list of files. And then in the main area you have the editor with what looks like a HTML web page. The layout is similar to VS.

The web page will end up being a mix of HTML and C#. Now you might be think this could be bad, mixing HTML and code. But it can actually be useful if you think about the web page just being a few. The code you put in should call methods to render additional HTML.

In the body tag you put

@Twitter.Search("#WebMatrix")

Hit run to view the web page. You will probably get an error, "Compiler Error Message: CS0103: The name 'Twitter' does not exist in the current context". What this is telling you is that your site does not know about the Twitter class.

You will need to tell your site about Twitter. To do this go to the admin site, http://yourserver/_admin. The easiest way to get to the admin site is to append _admin. The first time you go to the admin site you will need to create a password. Once that is accomplished the Package Manager is shown. The Package Manager allows you to add packages like the Microsoft Web Helpers which contain the Twitter class or the Facebook package for Facebook. Click "Install package from an online feed.". This will take you to a list of packages you can install. Install the Microsoft Web Helpers and Facebook by clicking the install button for each package. Go back to WebMatrix and hit Run again. You should now see a web page like below.

The Twitter type also includes Profile. Profile will show the profile of a user. For example

@Twitter.Profile("Microsoft")

To add a like button for Facebook put

@Facebook.LikeButton("www.satter.org")

In literally took me longer to write the blog entry than to get a web page mashing up Twitter and Facebook. Have fun using WebMatrix.

Porting LOB Accelerator to iPhone using MonoTouch

2010-09-18T12:20:54-07:00

People who have read my blog probably knew this was coming. I assisted Rob Tiffany in writing the second version of his Windows Mobile Line of Business Solution Accelerator. So it is only natural that I try and port it to MonoTouch.

This is going to take a while. I decided rather than doing the port and then a blog entry. I will do blog entries as I work on the port. This entry maps out the plan, the developer environment, and my starting steps.

The Road Ahead
This is a big project. It consists of porting the UI, application logic, and database. I believe it should ends up being a medium difficulty project.

The UI port should be relatively easy using Interface Builder. The gotchas will probably be in how to layout the UI interface.

The application logic for the most part should be straight forward. One of the great things about LOB Accelerator is that the code was partitioned into UI, Application and Database layers. Each layer only referenced the layer it used. In addition, the interface did not expose the underlying internals. Thus only a common set of objects in the application layer needed to be exposed.

Ah the database layer and my nightmare. Well maybe. The database layer uses a provider model to access the actual physical database. Hopefully I can find a relational database that can be manipulated with ADO.NET. If so then the data port is straight forward. If not it could get really fun.

The Environment
The developer environment will consist of MonoDevelop, MonoTouch, and the iPhone SDK. In addition, I have setup Git and a GitHub to enable easy sharing of the code and more importantly version control for the project.

If you are starting from scratch this will take some time. I already had a bunch of this done from setting up from my blog entry on .NET Development for OS X. Git takes some time to setup due to the need to generate ssh key and config. Be prepared to spend some time on getting the environment up and running.

The last step was creating the project. And copying over the code I thought would be a good starting point. The code was the business objects. In a sign of good fortune I only had 4 errors. I did not copy over the service API as I knew there would be problems. The business objects do call into the service API just like the UI would. Commenting out the 4 key code blocks gave a clean compile.

I then committed the project to GitHub. Next up building the UI layer.

.NET Development for OS X

2010-09-12T18:13:03-07:00

Yes you read that right. This entry will show you the basics of building a Mac application in .NET. How can this be .NET is a Microsoft Windows technology? Enter Mono. And no I don't mean the disease. I mean the Mono Project a Novell project that has ported .NET to Linux and other platforms including Mac OS X. What follows is a step by step guide to using .NET and no PCs were killed in the writing of this blog entry.

Get a Mac

Step 1 get a Mac. Prices can actually be very reasonable for a Apple Mac Mini a low cost of $699. I decide to shutdown my PC and just use the Mac Mini with my MS keyboard/mouse and Samsung PX2370 . Thus literally all I bought was the Mini. Now comes the hard part setting up.

Plug in the Mini to power. No stupid power brick, very nice. Next, I plugged in the speakers, network, mic and video. Finally, I turned on the power. I went through a couple of screens to setup my language, time, network, Apple Id and user id. All of this was quick and painless. While it could not recognize my keyboard, all I did was tell it ANSI and it was set. It even fired up iTunes when I hit my play key. Not surprising iTunes complained it was not the latest version and asked to update. Sure go ahead do your update.

Yeah if I was a consumer I would be done and ready to go. But I am a developer and had miles to go before I could program. I will not bore you with the details but give you a list of things to do.

Go and signup to Apple's developer program. I selected both Mac and iOS development. Once I was signed up I downloaded Xcode including Mac development. This took a while as Xcode is huge like Visual Studio 2+ Gbs.
Next I downloaded and installed MonoDevelop 2.4, an IDE from Mono. It also requires Mono 2.4 and GTK.
Finally I downloaded and installed MonoMac a new community project building a Mac UI bindings for Mono. I downloaded and installed the latest trunk build.

It took a while but soon I had Mono Developer up and running.

Building HelloMac

If you have not already fire up MonoDevelop. I am going to walk you step by step in building your first hello world application. It is based on the blog entry by Michael Hutchinson. His article is ok but shy on details and steps. It took me some experimenting to get my application to work.

First you need to create a project. From the Welcome screen or File Menu select New Solution. I am using C#. I opened up the C# node and selected MonoMac sub node. Then selected MonoMac Project and named my project HelloMonoMac.

This gave me a solution with a single project that contained

info.plist - text file containing property strings about your application. See reference guide for more information.
Main.cs - this is the code for a class with a Main method.
MainMenu.xib - NIB fileset containing the menu resources and coding. See Interface Builder User Guide for more information.
MainWindow.xib - NIB fileset for your main window. See Interface Builder User Guide for more information.

MonoMac tries to maintain the Xcode paradigm for building UI applications. Xcode uses a MVC model. The UI is contained in the NIB file and has extensions for your code.Your controller and model will be in .NET while the view will be written using Interface Builder hence why Xcode had to be installed.

Using Interface Builder the UI is laid out, extensions and action interfaces created. Thus our first step after creating the project is to open the MainWindow.xib and build the UI. Double click the MainWindow.xib node in the solution viewer.

In the layout you should see 4 Windows. The first Window, Library, on the Left would be like the Toolbox in VS. It contains widgets to drag and drop onto your Window. In the middle you should see two Windows. The top one contains a list of objects in the NIB. The Window canvas on which you will layout the Window is below. The last Window is a window similar to the Property Window in VS.

Look for NSButton in the Library. Drag the button on to the canvas. Change the title from "Button" to "Click Me!"

Next add a NSTextField with "Click the Button!" as the title.One of the nice things is you can click into the TextField and change the text.

The next step is to create an interface between the UI and our control. First is a property to update the TextField. Then an event that the control can receive when the button is clicked. Inside the event the controller written in c# will update the the string in the TextField using the property.

Goto the Library and look for MainWindowController and click on it. Below the list of widgets you should see MainWindowController with Inheritance in the selection. Change it from Inheritance to Outlets. Using the "+" button add a new outlet. Name the outlet label and the type should be NSTextField. To change the type click on "id".

The next step is to map our actual NSTextField to label. This is accomplished using the Toolbox and canvas. Bring up the MainWindow.xib Window, the top middle Window, and click "File's Owner". In the property Window you should see it say MainWindow.Control.Attributes in the caption. You might need to double click it to have the property window change. On the property window click the 5th button that looks like an arrow pointing to the right. This puts you into the connections settings. Under outlets you should see one called "label" with a circle on the right. When you hoover your mouse over the circle it changes into a "+" sign. Click and drag it to the NSTextField on the canvas. When you release the mouse you should see your NSTextField linked as the label.

Almost done. The next step is in Interface Builder to setup an event for when the button is clicked. For this an action in the interface must be created. It will link the action to the button. Go to the Library window. Make sure it is still showing the outlets for the MainWindowController. Change to Actions. Click the "+" and add buttonClicked as a NSButton. In the property window you should see a new received action called buttonClicked. Link it to the button on the canvas the same way you did the label.

The last step is to save your changes. This is important as MonoDevelop needs to read in the changes. In building my first application I forgot to save. When I ran the program I got a null reference exception until I saved the file. You can save the file using the menu.

Now it is time to switch back to MonoDevelop and write the one bit of code, buttonClicked event. Bring MonoDevelop back up. And add the code below into the MainWindow.Controller.cs file. The key is creating a method called buttonClicked that takes a NSButton. The application will call this method whenever the button is clicked. Inside the buttonClicked method the label linked to the NSTextField is modified. Compiler and run.

int count = 0;
		
partial void buttonClicked(NSButton sender)
{
	label.StringValue = string.Format("Button clicked {0} times.", ++count);
}

I hope this helps you with your .NET programming with MonoMac. Good luck.