sebastian gomez

Featuring GXpowerCommands

2011-10-24T13:25:00.001-02:00

After @gmilano’s Cool Commands for Visual Studio I thought I should write my own “cool commands” for Genexus. There a few tasks the I need to do quite often and I thought I’d be great if I could have right there on a contextual menu, like completely deleting a folder and it’s content or “Rebuild and run” an object… or even run (execute) an object as is, no further specification of analysis needed

WCF RIA Services Compositions with Entity Framework

2011-03-31T11:46:00.001-03:00

I haven't been working on anything outside Genexus, Deklarit and Genexus Server for a while, so when my friend Mateo asked to help him on a new project for a client of his, based on brand new Microsoft technologies, I was saying yes before the end of the sentence. This blog post and probably some more to come will be related to our experience with Entity Framework 4, RIA Services 1 and

Annoy Smarx from Windows Phone 7

2010-08-06T13:05:00.001-03:00

Annoy Smarx is a web app that Steve Marx showed in Windows Azure Firestarter event. It is a web app that once you clicked on an image, Steve’s notebook wallpaper would change to the selected image. It was a pretty cool demo cause it showed you a good practical sample of AppFabric ServiceBus. Last week I started playing around with the new Windows Phone 7 SDK, and I faced the problem I do when I

Introducing shelltwit

2010-06-30T18:49:00.001-03:00

Some time ago I talked about a command line twitter client I was developing. Today I can proudly say it is finished… for now And I decided to upload the code to Codeplex for a few reasons. First of all it uses xAuth with .net with no extra library. Some may be asking “why would you want to do that if there are hundreds of libraries out there?”… well yeah but… no I don’t have an answer for

HTTP Error 404.17 - Not Found

2010-06-22T15:29:00.001-03:00

The requested content appears to be script and will not be served by the static file handler. For some (unknown at the time) reason I had this error while trying to view a WCF service app in the web browser. I googled (and binged) around and there was many reasons for that message. My problem was that my brand new computer came with Microsoft .net 3.0 installed but IIS was not active. So I

Encoding strings for the twitter API

2010-05-17T15:58:00.001-03:00

Some time ago, I started to work on shelltwit a command line twitter updater (it only updates your status), but I didn’t want to use any existing library because I wanted to learn how to work directly to twitter API. I looked around for some examples, the Twitter API doc is not well updated or complete, so it is not easy to start coding right away, you need to read a lot first (I hate when

My Run 2.0 samples

2010-04-19T14:12:00.001-03:00

Last week Run 2.0 took place in Montevideo and I had the privilege of working with Guadalupe Casuso (from Microsoft) and Luis Pandolfi (from Infocorp) on part of the Keynote, we talked about Windows Azure and if you ask me it was too short. After the keynote I talked to some people who told me the session was great, but most of them already knew about Azure, so I guess I never know how good/

Goodbye trim()

2010-03-24T15:58:00.001-03:00

I’ve been playing a bit the the RC version of the .net framework 4 and already found a new cool method. Until now when I wanted to check for a valid string I had to use the following code: if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(text) || string.IsNullOrEmpty(text.Trim())) throw newArgumentNullException("text", "text is not valid"); And I had to do that because a string containing nothing but white

New features to the Azure Web Storage Explorer

2010-03-09T17:00:00.001-02:00

On the first version you could only manage blobs, upload, delete and download them. Now I added the same functionality for Queues and Tables. I found a pretty cool way of showing unstructured data from the Azure tables from a gridview control. How? with my good old friends the DataSets :) I also updated the source code so you can download the source files from the version that it’s right

YATC (yet another twitter client)

2010-01-25T19:10:00.003-02:00

My twitter followers have probably realize by now that I’ve been playing around with the Twitter API. I’ve been trying out the API and I created a command line tool to update my twitter status. I tried lots of clients but it is still a pain in the a*s to go to a different application or web browser to update my status. I have a command line window open all the time so now I’ll be easier to

Moving from basicHttpBinding to customBinding

2010-01-18T18:16:00.001-02:00

We’ve been having a few issues with some users that cannot authenticate to Genexus Server. Logging the server side, thanks to SvcConfigEditor, I found that the probles had nothing to do with the user credentials themselves but with some WCF configuration that prevent packages “from the future” to reach the server. How did that happen, and most important, how do I change it? It happened because

Windows Azure Web Storage Explorer

2009-12-16T12:53:00.001-02:00

A few days ago I posted about my first useful Azure application, which is hosted on here http://storageexplorer.cloudapp.net. Today I just wanted to announce I just uploaded the code to a Google Code project called windowsazurewebstorageexplorer :) It is a good (I think is good) example of both programming for the Windows Azure platform and programming against the Windows Azure Storage client

Great programming quotes!

2009-12-09T13:01:00.001-02:00

I recently read on stackoverflow a ton of great programmers quotes I thought it’d be good to share. Here are some of my favorites. “Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.” “Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.” “Linux is only free if your time has no

How to disable assert dialogs while testing (.net)

2009-12-02T11:10:00.001-02:00

Why would you want to do that in the first place? Let’s say you have a complex (long) test you want to run in your application, so you decided to start it before going home so it’ll be ready tomorrow morning with the results. What would happen if when get to you computer the next morning you find an assert dialog waiting for you to “Abort”, “Retry” or “Ignore”? Believe me, it is frustrating and

Mi first useful Azure application

2009-11-26T18:11:00.001-02:00

I’ve been plying around with Windows Azure for over a year now, I started with the CTP Microsoft showed at PDC 2008 and played with SQL Azure (FKA: SDS) and Windows Azure ever since. But today I uploaded my first useful application. I’m currently working the on Genexus deployment project which includes being able to deploy Genexus-generated applications to every supported platform (including of

Ode to The Ramones

2009-11-11T10:33:00.001-02:00

Google just released a new experimental programming language called Go, and they had the brilliant idea on titling their introductory post as The Ramones did with their songs… “Hey! Ho! Let’s Go!” … brilliant :) Read more about it from the official blog at http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/11/hey-ho-lets-go.html Listen to the Ramones here:

Internal Error 500 returned by IIS7 hosted WCF services

2009-10-27T17:24:00.001-02:00

Here's an issue I had for quite a long time. For some (unknown at the time) reason the server was returning a "500 - Internal Server error" whenever an exception was thrown. Even the message on the exception was an html document (pasted below), so who was modifying my exceptions? it turned out to be the IIS itself due to some configuration settings. There's a "feature" which avoids

Great simple explanation on Windows Azure

2009-09-24T17:23:00.001-03:00

During the last GeneXus International Meeting held in Montevideo, I had the chance to talk for a few minutes with Steve Marx from the Windows Azure team. Milano and I were telling him what we expect to do with GeneXus and the Windows Azure platform. The first scenario is having a one-click deployment to the cloud (Windows Azure platform) of the GeneXus generated applications. Since the SQL Azure

Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 Configuration missing?

2009-09-04T12:46:00.001-03:00

After my Windows7 install I needed to modify some of the machine.config properties thru the .net configuration utility and I could find it. It wasn’t where it used to be (Administrative Tools) and even the Snap-in on the MMC was not present. After a little bit of search I realize I had to install the .net framework 2.0 SDK. I guess I did it a long time ago cause I don’t remember even doing it.

Genexus X Evolution 1 Released!

2009-09-02T14:32:00.001-03:00

Genexus X Evolution 1 was finally released today at 12:55 (GMT-3). It is a great version with tons of new features and a great stability (check out the release notes here). To me it’s a big deal since I was really involved in the new Team Development features and the communication with Genexus Server. BTW, GeneXus Server is now on RTM and will be released on the XIX Genexus International

Windows 7: Best OS upgrade experience ever!

2009-08-30T12:24:00.001-03:00

Despite the known chart, upgrading my notebook to Windows 7 was a great and easy experience. As some of you already know my notebook came with Microsoft Vista installed which I uninstalled after some time of work with it. (here’s my post about that) Having Windows 7 installed at work I decided to go ahead and install it on my notebook. Two things surprised me, first of all, the installer

Bing vs. Google

2009-08-15T13:01:00.001-03:00

It’s been quite a while since my latest post, and I encountered myself many times thinking I should blog about this and then for some reason I didn’t do it. So now I decided to stop for a minute (actually I’m waiting for the build) and write about this search engine ‘war’ we’re in the middle of. At the red corner we have Google which does not need any further presentation, and on the blue

Log4net, WCF, and ASP.net trace

2009-04-21T14:07:00.000-03:00

Forget what I said in my last post. Well… not all of them. What I posted before works! and that’s the way to do it if you want to enable asp.net trace in your WCF services. So what’s wrong with that? The problem is that if one of your services uses something from the session, asp.net starts using a lock mechanism so two process don’t step over each other. In other words, you won’t be able to

log4net with WCF Services

2009-03-19T19:44:00.001-03:00

This week I ‘ve been working on adding tracing to a WCF IIS hosted application. It all started pretty easy since log4.net already has an appender for asp.net. So, I created a little wrapper around the log4net library and called the Debug function. My project had both aspx pages and svc services. These services were implemented in a separate dll (not in the web project). Oh! I forgot to mention

Forget what I said about SQL Data Services :(

2009-03-12T22:27:00.001-03:00

Remember my two posts about Microsoft Sql Data Services (Starting Up With SDS and Writing Data To The Cloud)?, well, they are both wrong now. Not wrong but old. This week I read on the SDS blog that they will introduce relational data base features (which I think it’s great) but also that they are removing the good old ACE model. Read the original post here Edit: I just read a new post from