Struggling thru .NET

A Trip Thru Azure (part1)

2011-01-27T21:49:00.003-05:00

As a member of BizSpark, I get an Azure account to play with, so I have been trying to figure out what to do with it. So I now have a couple apps in mind for Azure and have begun playing with my account. I started to play with Azure storage and storing blobs.

I have the need for some storage for audio files for a website that I have hosted for years. After cleaning up a test file it ended up being about a 56M mp3 file. This would be a good test for Azure Storage and blobs.

Looking at the code for Azure, it seemed that I needed to use the API to code the saving of the files. I figured that someone wrote an app for it already and found one named Blobber. In the config file for the app, you had to put in the AccountName, SharedKey, and ContainerName for where you want things stored. So after getting the AccountName and the SharedKey that I setup in the Azure account site. I was not sure what the ContainerName was. The blob storage does not use folders, but uses the ContainerName as a virtual folder to help sort your data. So I created the ContainerName of audio. Running the app, it took a long time to upload the 56M file.

Then I started to test the downloading of the file. I created the url that it should have been http://accountname.blob.core.windows.net/audio/blobtest.mp3 put it in a browser and.... nothing. It did not work. I tried one thing after another and came up with nothing.

I then found a great little application called CloudBerry Explorer for Azure Blob Storage. This allows you to access your cloud storage just like you would in explorer. You can add/remove files and containers. With a right click, it allows you to get a url to the blob. It also had options to have a time limit for the url using parameters. I got a url with a timelimit until the end of the month. Put that into my browser and it worked great.

I was very happy to finally have some success, so I emailed the link to others and went to bed. The next morning I get a reply saying that the link does not work. I did some more research and found out that the link with time limits only lasted one hour. After a couple more emails saying that it did not work, I tried to figure out why. I ended up emailing a friend that works at Microsoft and does alot of talks on Azure, Jim O'Neil. He had the answer for me quickly. Containers get created as private to start. Jim suggested to change the container to public. Once I did this, the url worked great.

Ok, this first step into the world of Azure was a success with abit of help. I can store large files and serve them up with a url to let others get at them. The next step for me is to get Azure SQL setup to support a couple of phone apps that I am building.

RIA Services thru Web Services

2010-08-19T01:31:00.005-04:00

Intro

I have been using Silverlight 4 and RIA Services on a large project lately and love how easy it is to expose a data layer with it. I was working on a different project with a co-worker using Silverlight 3 and my friend created proxies to get to the database and it was extremely messy code. I look back at it and just wondered what we were thinking about when we did it. Hind-sight is usually 20-20 and this was proving that saying since RIA Service is so much simpler to use.

I also create other things like iPhone/iPod/iPad apps using MonoTouch and am starting to look at the new MonoDroid for making android apps. One thing that would be very useful for a few of my projects will be a nice Web Service to save data into a SQL Server. I always could manually make a Web Service to get and store data off, but I wanted to see if there was any way to do it with RIA Services creating the data layer for me. It took some digging and searching but I found a way to do it and want to share this on the blog.

Machine Setup

To get this setup and running I have Win7 running with the following software and toolkits. I did not have the RIA Services Toolkit at first and that was a problem that I will talk about later, but you should be able to run the code samples here using the following.

Visual Studio 2010
Silverlight 4
RIA Services Toolkit
Silverlight Developer Tools

Demo Project

I wanted to come up with a nice simple example. I am sick of NorthWind, and I cannot use the database I am using for my Silverlight projects that I am currently working on. So I came up with the idea of doing a task list system. I wanted this to be simple, so I setup the database using the following schema and filled the database with some sample data.

User Data

1	Steve
2	Joel
3	Paul
4	John

Task Data

1	1	Update Blog	1
2	1	Finish project	4
3	3	Buy coffee	1
4	4	Unpack from vacation	2
5	4	Report back to base	1

Silverlight / RIA Projects

I started this project with the Silverlight project that had RIA Services enabled in it. I added a new database to the sample web project and put the schema and data above into it. Then I added the Entity Framework Model to the web project as well and added both tables to it. After this I added a Domain Service to the project to allow the Silverlight app to get to the data.

In the Silverlight project, I then added a combobox and a listbox to show the data. One of the things about using RIA Services is that calling the queries are done asynchronously. The Load method of the WebContext is used to call the query and provide a method to call with the results.

    /// <summary>
    /// Method to handle the loaded event to load up the users for the combobox
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="sender"></param>
    /// <param name="e"></param>
    void MainPage_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
    {
        theContext.Load(theContext.GetUsersQuery(), OnUsersLoaded, null);
    }

       
    /// <summary>
    /// Method called after the users are loaded from the RIA Service query
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="loadOpp"></param>
    void OnUsersLoaded(LoadOperation<Web.Models.User> loadOpp)
    {
        comboBox1.Items.Clear();
        foreach (var item in loadOpp.AllEntities)
        {
            ComboBoxItem cbi = new ComboBoxItem();

       
            cbi.Content = (item as Web.Models.User).Name;
            cbi.Tag = item;
            comboBox1.Items.Add(cbi);
        }
    }

Then on the selection change of the combobox, the tasks for the selected user needed to be loaded. Now since the query runs over the connection on the web server, I wanted to limit the data that was coming back. But by default there was no method created to just get the tasks for a user, so I added the following method to the Domain Service.

    /// <summary>
    /// Method to get the tasks for a user
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="userId">UserId for the user that we are getting the tasks for</param>
    /// <returns></returns>
    public IQueryable<Task> GetTasksByUser(int userId)
    {
        return this.ObjectContext.Tasks.Where(t => t.UserId == userId);
    }

Now I was able to query the RIA Service for just the tasks for the selected user. This code was then added to the Silverlight project to display the tasks.

    /// <summary>
    /// Method for handling the selection change on the user combobox 
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="sender"></param>
    /// <param name="e"></param>
    private void comboBox1_SelectionChanged(object sender, SelectionChangedEventArgs e)
    {
        theContext.Load(theContext.GetTasksByUserQuery(((Web.Models.User)((ComboBoxItem)comboBox1.SelectedItem).Tag).UserId), OnTasksLoaded, null);
    }

       
    /// <summary>
    /// Method to handle the return of the tasks from the RIA Service
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="loadOpp"></param>
    void OnTasksLoaded(LoadOperation<Web.Models.Task> loadOpp)
    {
        listBox1.Items.Clear();
        foreach (var item in loadOpp.AllEntities)
        {
            listBox1.Items.Add((item as Web.Models.Task).Name);
        }
    }

Now I had a Silverlight app that got its data from the web server and the database attached to it. It is a small simple sample of a Silverlight/RIA Services project that can be expanded on for more complicated projects.

Adding SOAP Endpoint

To allow a standard Web Service to be used a SOAP endpoint needs to be added to the web.config. This was a simple thing to add to the web.config from samples that I found online. The highlighted section below was added to make sure that the wsdl is enabled for discovery.

  <system.serviceModel>
    <domainServices>
      <endpoints>
        <add name="OData" type="System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting.ODataEndpointFactory, System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting.OData, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" />
        <add name="Soap" type="Microsoft.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting.SoapXmlEndpointFactory, Microsoft.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" />
      </endpoints>
    </domainServices>
    <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true" multipleSiteBindingsEnabled="true" />
  </system.serviceModel>

Now I also need to add a reference to the Microsoft.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting assembly. But I did not see this at all in the list of assemblies. I did some more searching and found that I needed to have the RIA Services Toolkit installed to have this available. I found this, installed it, and was up and ready to go.

Adding the reference and the app.config changes was what I thought I needed to do, but I had a small problem when I tried to reference the service. I could not get the name right. It turns out that the service automatically gets put into a virtual folder named ~\Services. All of the websites that have information on this say that the service is named by the namespace-class. One of the things that nobody says is that you need to change all '.' in the namespace or class into a '–'. Without using this type of naming, you will not be able to discover the service. When I ran my sample and tried to add the web service, I had to use the following address.

http://localhost:49423/Services/RIAasWebService-Web-Services-RiaWSDomainService.svc?wsdl

Client WPF App

I decided to use WPF as the client app since I use that the most and I can reuse some of the code from the Silverlight to this project. I made the project the exact same as my Silverlight, with a single combobox and a listbox.

When I added the web service I used an Advanced setting to add the async methods from the service. This allows you to call just like in the RIA Services call and get a callback when it is complete. I wanted to test out using it the other way, so I did not use the these methods, but I checked them out to see if they were similar to the RIA Service versions and they are close. This simplified the functions to only two.

    /// <summary>
    /// Method for loading the users from the Web Service
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="sender"></param>
    /// <param name="e"></param>
    void MainWindow_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
    {
        var users = ws.GetUsers();

       
        foreach (var item in users.RootResults)
        {
            ComboBoxItem cbi = new ComboBoxItem();

       
            cbi.Content = (item as User).Name;
            cbi.Tag = item;
            comboBox1.Items.Add(cbi);
        }
    }

       
    /// <summary>
    /// Method for handling the selection change for the users to load the tasks
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="sender"></param>
    /// <param name="e"></param>
    private void comboBox1_SelectionChanged(object sender, SelectionChangedEventArgs e)
    {
        var tasks = ws.GetTasksByUser(((User)((ComboBoxItem)comboBox1.SelectedItem).Tag).UserId);
        listBox1.Items.Clear();
        foreach (var item in tasks.RootResults)
        {
            listBox1.Items.Add((item as Task).Name);
        }
    }

There is a bit of a delay in starting the app because it is calling the web service to get the users before it shows up, but this was expected with how I called the services.

Issues

There were a few issues as I was trying to get this up and running. The first, I already mentioned was the RIA Services Toolkit was needed to get things to work. Then there was the naming issue when I tried to connect to the service.

Using the ASP.NET Development Server, I could not connect to the service it was hosting from another machine. I would have to put the projects into IIS on my development machine and then expose it to the rest of my network. This would allow me to test it going to an iPhone app. I wish this was simpler, but the tasks to do this are not hard, but I did not get this tested.

Conclusion

Having a RIA Service exposed so that it can be consumed like a standard Web Service can be a helpful thing. It allows non-Silverlight apps to use the same data and especially since Silverlight cannot run on an iPhone or Android based phone. To make some phone apps that all use the same information this type of technique can be used. One thing to remember when you use this sample code, you may have to refresh the web service with the localhost port that visual Studio sets up for you. Or switch things to get it running in IIS. Good luck with it and I hope the code and article help.

RIA as Web Service demo

SQL Azure Pricing Changes

2010-08-19T00:53:00.002-04:00

I know I am a bit late with this post, but wanted to spread the news of the changes to the pricing for SQL Azure. I have been looking at this myself lately because I am debating moving hosting companies and might need the extra SQL space.

SQL Azure had two options to start with. This was a 1G database for $9.99 or a 10G database for $99.99. This is an easy to figure out linear system. It looks like there are people that wanted something else in-between and even larger.

Web Editions
1G	9.99
5G	49.99
Enterprise Editions
10G	99.99
20G	199.98
30G	299.97
40G	399.96
50G	499.95

They are setup for the smaller users and then targeting large databases. But you are limited to 50G right now. So if you need a larger one, you will have to split it up to use Azure. I am looking at using this for a project or two that I am working on. It is not a bad price and using SQL Azure should be as simple as normal SQL Server. If/when I get a database setup with this, I will be sure to post about it.

RIA Services Updating Queries

2010-06-22T21:09:00.003-04:00

I am working on a Silverlight 4 and RIA Services. I needed to take a query from the server and update it every minute or with a button press. I put the code in to clear a local collection and re-call the query. I ran all of my tests using VS2010 on my laptop and everything worked great. I put the Silverlight app up on the server and gave it to someone that was doing a demo. It failed to do any updating.

At first, I thought it was an IIS caching issue. I have seen IIS do this with other projects. We tried a few things and it did not work at all. So I did a little bit a research on the RIA call that I was using for the callback. I was using this call...

theContext.Load(theContext.GetInfoByPageQuery(page), OnAllInfoLoaded, null);

Looking at the Load help, I tried out a different version that adds a LoadBehavior to the parameters.

theContext.Load(theContext.GetInfoByPageQuery(page), LoadBehavior.RefreshCurrent, OnAllInfoLoaded, null);

When I put this on the server it updated everything perfectly. This is something that alot of the online samples do not have in them so I thought I would share it.

I will be posting more about my adventures in Silverlight 4 and RIA services soon.

BizSpark

2010-03-25T10:38:00.003-04:00

At the .NET user group meeting that I presented at last night some people were interested in BizSpark. Here is the link for it. You will also need a person to approve you. I suggest using Bob Walsh ( http://47hats.com/ ) He is the largest referrer for the program in the world. When you email Bob make sure to put BizSpark in the title.

BizSpark
http://www.microsoft.com/BizSpark/

.NET on the iPhone

2009-09-18T10:21:00.007-04:00

Novell, who makes Mono - the open source, multi-platform .NET implementation, has not release MonoTouch. I was in the beta for this and found it to be extremely exciting.

You are able to use C# on the iPhone and iPod Touch. C# is the only .NET language supported right now. It uses MonoDevelop as the IDE for developing but uses the normal Interface Builder that you use from XCode, which is the default development platform for iPhone development. So if you are going ot use MonoTouch, you still need to have a Mac. I purchased a MacMini for my iPhone development. I know, I know, it is not a Microsoft product and I have drank the MS koolaid. I had put off doing this for a while but in reality it is the best way to get an iPhone app developed. It is not the only way but the simplest. Plus normally iPhone apps are written in Object-C. I can safely say that I really dislike Objective-C. C# is so much easier to use for me because I use it all day long and have for years.

Now this is the first version of the system. And on the iPhone you cannot have dynamically linked components. Everything is linked into the executable, so MonoTouch had to do that as well. They also provided a way to call a C library so that you can have things built in Objective-C and used in a C# based product.

Currently they have two versions available, Individual and the Enterprise. This is if you want to do enterprise releases or not. They are talking about an evaluation version soon, but did not get it out when they released. overall it is not a cheap tool for a single person, but if you look at it from the cost of your time, you will easily make it up in the first app that you develop.

Yes, I know that this is a post on iPhone development and I am actually spending alot of time on this myself right now, but it is also using .NET. It shows that .NET is a popular system that people want to use on many different platforms. And this is the first time it is available for the iPhone.

Free Online Training with Microsoft Ramp Up

2009-05-31T16:54:00.001-04:00

Chris Bowen posted a great link to some free online training from Microsoft.

Check out http://www.myrampup.com/ for info. It includes training on ASP.NET, changing from PHP to ASP.NET and other topics (including VS2008 and Windows Mobile 6)

Get training on things. Hopefully if you are looking for work it might help you out.

Certification Presentation

2009-05-29T05:32:00.003-04:00

This week I gave a presentation on Microsoft certifications. I currently have 11 certifications and wanted to share some ideas to help others get their certifications as well. With the job market like it is, we can all use a boost up to help us. Here is the presentation for all to enjoy. If you need it in an older version of Powerpoint, let me know.

Microsoft Certifications

WPF Splash Screen

2009-05-13T15:28:00.010-04:00

One thing that many people write for their programs is a small dialog that loads up when you start your application. Sometimes this is just an image file and other times it might show you the progress of the app loading, or even something else. Well now WPF applications can have a simple splash screen for free. This only applies to WPF since I tested it with Forms and it did not work at all. Well on to the coding....

Add an image to your project. I added simple.png to my little test app. from there, look at the properties of the image and it will say that the image is a resource. Just change the build action to be SplashScreen and you are done.

There are some down sides with this way of doing a splash screen. You do not get to control it. If you want to have a progress bar or to programatically change the version number, you cannot do it. Ok, I will say that there is no immediate way to do it. I am sure that one of the many smart people out there will be able to do it someday

The second thing is that it is setup to fade out in 0.5 seconds by default. There is no property on the image to allow you to change this. To make it more customizable you will have to set the image back to a resource and then in your App class create an instance of a ScreenSaver class. From this you can set the time to do the fading and the image resource to use. This gives you more flexibility, but still no handle to the dialog.

This should be simple enough for anyone to recreate it. If you want my sample project, just let me know.

This is a nice small start for WPF to get this type of feature. I like the new things that keep coming out for WPF and can't wait for VS2010 to be completed and released.

Shameless plug for Whiteboards Can't Jump (my new iPhone app)!

2009-05-07T00:27:00.002-04:00

Apple approved my iPhone application, Whiteboards Can't Jump, today, and I'm pretty excited about it! It's nothing earth-shattering, but developing it kept me busy for a bunch of nights the past two months.

So why am I posting about an iPhone app on a .NET blog? Well, I wrote the app, for one ;-) The biggest reason, though, is because the entire backend service layer of my app is written in C# using WCF. At some point soon I'll outline how it works, but it's a REST API using some of WCF's fun new functionality, hosted on a Windows Server 2008 VPS.

More later, but feel free to check it out if you have an iPhone/iPod Touch! US $1.99 at the App Store. You can find a link to it's iTunes page right on the home page of my website, http://www.chordfusion.com!

Unemployed? Get some training!!

2009-05-05T23:10:00.003-04:00

I went to a local .NET user group meeting a week ago. There was about 20 people in the meeting and it was sponsored by a recruiter and he asked how many people were looking for work. About half of the people raised their hands. Microsoft has a program that will help people to get training and certified. This is to help people get ready for the workforce. Some of it is low cost and other parts are free.

http://www.microsoft.com/about/corporatecitizenship/us/communityinvestment/elevateamerica.aspx

I wish I could hire alot of the people that I know that are looking for work, but I can't. Good luck.

Where did my WPF Namespace go?

2009-05-02T00:21:00.003-04:00

At work we are using a WPF gui but calling it from some old code. To get this to work we had to work around a few things with the application and the main window showing up. But this post is not about that. The new project that I am working on now is moving that same WPF application back to be the main app that gets run. But I found a small namespace issue when getting this to run.

Since the App.xaml was not being run, the old code actually called the App class directly and then created and showed the main window. During this time there was a new policy in place where we changed the namespaces to include the company name first. So MyProduct changed to MyCompany.MyProduct everywhere.

During my converting this WPF to be stand-alone again, I changed the project type back to WinExe and put a breakpoint in the constructor of the App class. The breakpoint never got hit and it went directly to the Window1 constructor. I had some important resource calls in that constructor that had to be called before things in the rest of the code were called. Why was it not hitting the breakpoint??

So in the Window1 class I got a copy of the current application and tried to call something on it to allow me to setup the resources that I needed. But when I did this:

MyCompany.MyProduct.App app = (MyCompany.MyProduct.App)Application.Current ;

I got an error that said that it could not convert MyProduct.App to MyCompany.MyProduct.App. This was strange. It took a while to figure out that the App.xaml file had a different namespace than the App.xaml.cs file. The xaml file never got the MyCompany name added to the namespace. This worked because of a could things. We were calling the App class directly and not letting the project file select it for us. The second thing is that if you look at the new App class in a new WPF project you will see that the constructor is empty. This means that there is nothing really connecting the xaml created partial class and the xaml.cs part of it. For any window class the constructor has a call to InitializeComponent. If the namespace gets out of sync the xaml.cs for the window will give an error on compiling. After fixing the namespace in the App.xaml file, all was good. The program ran and then I had a lot of other work to do. But that is a story for another time.

Get On the Bus!!!

2009-03-24T20:21:00.000-04:00

The Microsoft Learning group is traveling to 12 cities around the country and inviting certified people to join them. Learn all about it by clicking on the image above. I wish they were abit closer to me so that I could meet up with them as well. Oh well, have fun meeting them and maybe you can join them on the bus.

Thank you .NET!!!

2009-03-11T21:35:00.003-04:00

I have been playing with a new iPod Touch and a Mac Mini to develop some applications for the iPhone and iPod. All I have to say about it is Thank You .NET!!!!!

I have been a programmer for.... over 20 years now and have taught college, co-authored a SQL Server book and now I am looking at Objective-C for the iPhone/iPod. Oh my... this is a pain in the neck to use. You have to use a certificate from Apple to put a test application on a real device. And you have to PAY either $99 or $299 for the certificate.

Now I have a couple friends that are Mac people and they are helping me thru this. I may be missing something in this. The Mac world is new to me and sometimes it could just be something that did not see. I will keep the blog up to date on my trials and tribulations using Objective-C. I know it is not .NET based, but it is from the sense of me saying THANK YOU for .NET!!!!

Of course I do have Mono installed on my Mac to do some .NET development on the Mac to test some of my other apps out. More on that later.

Certification: Benefit or Just Drinking the Kool-Aid?

2009-02-28T13:16:00.010-05:00

I have had certifications from Microsoft for 10 years now and have heard many people think that it is useless. Others think it's a good thing. I wanted to share some of these thoughts and how I got started in certifications. I was a software developers with a BS and wanted to continue my education. I worked hard and got an MS in Software Development and Management. I thought it was a more useful MS than the other ones I looked at that had topics like A.I. and graphics. It had classes and topics like requirements, managing teams of developers, and understanding the entire software lifecycle. At this time in history, not many computer science programs had those classes. After I got my MS, I was asked if I wanted to go for a PhD. But Microsoft started a certification program for software developers. This was cool, this was something that would really help me in what I did day to day - a PhD would not do this.

Soon after this I changed jobs. When my new boss asked for me to make a career plan, I mentioned the new certification program. He was excited by it and looked the plan over. Originally I was looking at use Frontpage for my elective, but my boss suggested SQL Server instead. This would be more useful than Frontpage and would apply to what we did at work. From there I started doing alot of certification and SQL work. Just want to say thanks to Steve Z. for that.

Ok - fast forward to closer to today. I look at many different programming sites, like CodeProject and some people that are regulars hate the idea of certification for programmers. They think that it is a waste of time and pretty useless. Some have commented that why should they let Microsoft dictate what is a good thing for programming or SQL Server. For example, the exams wanted to cross reference tables in SQL to have an identity index instead of just a composite. If you answered with a composite it was the wrong answer. But this type of thing is a choice for the DBA to setup and recommend. It is a personal choice, but for this type of exam it makes you to HAVE to follow what Microsoft says. I argue with them and tell them that I have learned alot by working on my certifications, but they don't listen.

Now on to today - well a year or so ago now. I got a promotion partly due to my certification. It is not the only thing that gave it to me, but it is definitely a part of it. Plus all of the things that I have learned on my way to getting all of my certifications. I have talked with that manager that encouraged me to get a certification in the first place and I asked him if it would help someone to get a job with him, he said, no it would not help. Talking a bit more, he said that it would help a person to get into the short list, but it would not be a deciding factor in who gets the job. Just who gets a phone call or an in-person interview.

Of course if you are not looking for a new job, how does it help you? Many people have asked this question. One guy that works for me has said that he has learned so much with studying for the certification exams that he did not learn with day-to-day use of the technology. This allowed him to use other techniques or classes that he would not have used before studying for the exams. So this as definitely helped him. Not just because I promote certifications, but because he is learning and working with these things on his own.

So if all the certifications and exams do is to make you drink more of Microsoft's Kool-Aid, I say, pour me another large glass.

Upgrade Exam and Second Shot

2009-02-17T20:31:00.005-05:00

This year marks 10 years of certification for me. Of course I look back and I have not gotten any new certifications in TWO years. TWO years is huge. Have I been too busy to get any new certification? Have I been a slacker? I felt it was time to continue with some certifications and decided to take the upgrade exam 70-553. This was the first time I ever did an upgrade exam and was abit nervous about it. But I want to share how it went and something else, Microsoft's Second Shot program - which I had hoped to never use.

I first went to the web page for the 70-553 exam to see what areas the exam is going to cover. Take a look at it, there is ALOT to cover. Three different sections of material and in each section huge lists of topics. I looked up all of the different sections and tested things out for a while. I studied for a long time. Dang there are alot of parts to this exam. Am I sure I want to do this upgrade exam? I have been using .NET 2.0 for my own things and for work, so I felt I was ready.

When I went to sign up at Prometric, I first went back and signed up for the Second Shot. I figured that if something happened and the test was harder than I expected I could take it again. Then I entered the Second Shot voucher code into the payment form when I paid for the exam.

I get to the test and go thru the normal things that we all do when the test starts. It was a long test, but I thought I did pretty well, I took my time, checked things over, wrote down some comments on a few questions, marked some for review, and finished up. Time to come to the results and...... I failed. I failed?? I have been doing .NET 2.0 Windows apps and ASP.NET apps for years. How could I fail? I get the results paper and it says something different than other ones. The results of the upgrade exam are the results from the lowest scoring exam (I am paraphrasing). It showed how I scored on each section and my grade was the grade of the lowest one. At first I was a bit upset. I never read anything that says that each section was graded separately. Any other test that I had taken was not like that. How could they do this without warning me?

In the afternoon after cooling off abit, I went back to Prometric to see about scheduling the makeup exam. But the Prometric website still had the test as pending so I could not sign up for it again. By 5pm, the results were on the Prometric website and also showing up on the Certification Planner on the MCP Member site. I mthen went to sign up for it again and got a slot on Friday 13th. That is a lucky day for me, so I figure it would be a good day to retake the exam. To get the right Second Shot code, I had to call Prometric to get the voucher code to enter. By now it was after 5 and was hoping they were open later than this. They were open until 8pm for phone support. I get the code, enter it, and get the makeup exam for free. Thanks for that Microsoft.

So remembering the areas of the exam that I felt I did bad in, I went back to studying and the exam web page to make sure I knew what areas were on the exam, because I did not know if I was going to get some of the same questions, all the same questions, or none of the same questions. I knew I did well on some things and on other parts I struggled. So I studied and studied, looked up things in the MSDN library, and wrote some sample test apps to see what I remembered if it worked one way or another from what I expected. Friday came, the test started, the questions were... hard, I second guessed myself here and there, and passed the test.

The upgrade exams for VS2005 up to VS2008 are actually separate for Windows and Web. I think that this will make them easier since not everyone does both web and Windows. I do both, but not everyone does.

So overall, this was my first experience with an upgrade exam. My first use of the Second Shot program. I wanted to blog about both of these things to show others what to expect. The upgrade exams 70-553 and 70-554 are scheduled to expire on March 31st, 2009, so if you need to take the exams, take them soon. Study hard, sign up for the Second Shot, and good luck.

Obfuscating Silverlight

2009-01-28T22:51:00.007-05:00

One thing that people that develop .NET applications know is that users can use tools to decompile the app and get to your source code. This is good and bad. The good is that it is easy to look at source that people use and see how they do things. The bad is that people can look around at your source and steal what you do or even unlock functionality or sell it as theirs.

There are alot of .NET obfuscators and .NET protectors out there to buy. Most do a good job to at least obfuscate the code and at best totally stops the decompiling. When Silverlight came out people were concerned that their dlls would get downloaded and people could just see the code just like with any other .NET assembly. With Silverlight 2, things compile into a dll that gets put into a .XAP file, which is just a zip file. I even have a plugin for .NET Reflector that can look at a Silverlight URL and let you look at the source. If it is this easy to get the source how can developers protect themselves?

I have a protection system that I use for my .NET applications and wanted to see if it would work for a Silverlight 2 application. I ran it using the normal settings that I use for .NET apps and it just throws exceptions for Silverlight. Then I played with all of the options and finally got it to work. It is not as secure as I would like but it works. If you want details on what I use and the settings, please contact me.

I went and searched to see if any other systems out there support Silverlight 2. I found 2 systems out there that say they support Silverlight and 1 that says that it supports .XAP files directly. I mean they are just zip files, why should that be too hard to support. The first one is DeepSea Obfuscator. It says that it supports .XAP and Silverlight 2. The second that I found is SmartAssembly Professtion Edition. I have not used these since mine is working for me, but they are advertising that they support Silverlight and will obfuscate or protect it. Good luck with protecting your Silverlight applications. Let me know if you have success with either of these tools.

Shrinking Silverlight

2009-01-14T22:33:00.003-05:00

One thing that is interesting about Silverlight 2.0 is that it makes a xap file which is really just a zip file. One thing that you can do to make a smaller xap file is to unzip it and rezip the files using your favorite zip program. On one app that we are working on, using the techniques mentioned in the article we save about 50%. This helps to make the file smaller for downloading and makes it faster for people with slower connections or systems. Take a look and see how much file size you can save....

http://designwithsilverlight.com/2009/01/04/shrinking-xap-size/

Cool Tool

2009-01-05T19:44:00.002-05:00

I was looking for a tool to mount an ISO image to a drive letter that works in Windows. I found a free one that works great in Windows (even x64).

http://www.slysoft.com/en/virtual-clonedrive.html

Certification Second Shot Changes

2008-10-22T08:00:00.003-04:00

Microsoft is trying to entice more people with their Second Shot program. If you sign up for this program Microsoft will give you a free second change to take a certification exam if you fail it. I have signed up for this in the past, but never actually used it (hehe). Well this program is now even better.

You still get to retake an exam if you fail it. But now there is an incentive for people that pass the exams. If you pass you get 25% off the price of the next exam that you take. If you take alot of exams like I do, this is a nice little benefit.

http://blogs.technet.com/mslcommunity/archive/2008/10/16/and-the-goodies-just-keep-rolling-in-second-shot-s-double-incentive.aspx

Have fun with your testing.

Linq-to-SQL and Derived Classes

2008-10-12T21:57:00.007-04:00

LINQ is a nice new data technology that really provides alot of functionality. LINQ-to-SQL is a version of it that talks to a SQL Server database and will generate classes for you to use. I had a small problem that took a while to figure out that I wanted to share.

I had a class generated from the database called User. From there I had a derived class named ProtectedUser that has some things set in it automatically. When I created a ProtectedUser object when I went to save off the object to the database a null exception was thrown. This was confusing since there was nothing wrong with the object and nothing was null.

Looking around online I found this article that describes the problem:

http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=310798

After changing my code to create a new User object and save that off instead things worked perfectly fine. This was hard to find and took weeks of working on it on and off to find it. I wanted to make sure to share this with others to save them the time.

Free beta SQL exam

2008-09-18T06:43:00.003-04:00

The folks over at the certification group at Microsoft are offering a free beta exam for the new 70-433. Remember that beta exams are numbered with a 71 and not a 70. This is a nice exam to get you started with the new SQL Server 2008.

http://blogs.technet.com/betaexams/archive/2008/09/17/register-for-beta-exam-71-433-microsoft-sql-server-2008-database-development-beginning-september-19-2008.aspx

Good luck on the exam. Remember that beta exams do count toward certifications but you have to wait until they decide what questions to use and what ones to throw away. The last two beta exams that I have taken earlier this year took over 12 weeks to get results back, but I did pass both of them.

Run .NET 3.5 SP1 from Network Drives

2008-08-14T09:23:00.001-04:00

It looks like Microsoft has finally got it where managed code to be able to run from a network drive. Here is some more info on it from a Microsoft blog.

http://blogs.msdn.com/vancem/archive/2008/08/13/net-framework-3-5-sp1-allows-managed-code-to-be-launched-from-a-network-share.aspx

VS2008 SP1 Released

2008-08-14T09:19:00.003-04:00

Well the time has come and the long awaited VS2008 SP1 has been released to the MSDN subscriptions. I downloaded this and installed I on my main system and want to share my experiences.

The downloads are iso file, so they will have to be burned to a dvd or you will have to use a program to mount the iso files as drives.
After getting things to a dvd, I tried to install the servicepack and it quickly crashed. It died in the VC++ x86 installer. This is strange since I am running Vista Ultimate x64 on my system. So I tried many different things went with my favorite search engine to help. I was not able to find anything useful since the service pack had only been released hours ago.
I finally read the actual log for the install that was failing and figured out that it was saying that it needed to be rebooted. I have been working on a Windows Service that used .NET 3.5 and that could have caused issues as well. So I uninstalled the app and service that I am working on (more on this in a later post) and restarted my laptop.
I then restarted the installer and waited to see what happened. It got past the error I was seeing before. Yea!!!!
Then I waited…. And waited…. I made sure my laptop was set to high performance and it still took about 2 hours to install. The laptop is an AMD TL-64 with 4G of ram so it should not be too slow.
Everything installed fine and I was off to install the MSDN for sp1. Well it was 3am already so I went to bed and let it install overnight, so I do not know how long it takes to install this part.

Everything seems fine so far. I am looking at some .NET code protectors and will see if the ones I am thinking about work with sp1 or not.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ScottHanselman/~3/364322053/HiddenGemsNotTheSameOld35SP1Post.aspx