Al Pascual

Visual Studio Live Redmond 2012

Wed, 30 May 2012 19:26:00 -0700

General Conference Information:

August 6-10, 2012

Event web site: http://vslive.com/redmond

Visual Studio Live is five days of practical, Microsoft-supported training for developers to help solve your tough .NET development challenges. You'll find how-to advice and the tips and tricks that you'll be ready to implement as soon as you get back to the office. Our expert faculty - including many Microsoft instructors - makes each session interactive so you can discuss your particular development roadblocks and come away with actionable solutions.

Visual Studio Live Redmond offers in-depth training in:

Cloud Computing and Services
Cross Platform Mobile
Data Management
HTML5
Silverlight / WPF
Visual Studio /.NET
Web
Windows 8 / WinRT
Windows Phone

Visual Studio Live Redmond – Expert Solutions for .NET Developers

Who is pushing Apple without Steve Jobs?

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 19:46:00 -0700

Now that Steve is gone, and Apple kept going, the answer about the new products from Apple has been answered. If you kept close attention on the iPhone 4S and the iPad 3 or New iPad, whatever you want to call it, you’ll find something missing. Nobody was behind the curtain telling the engineers at Apple they needed a new and better design.

The iPhone 4S and the iPad got a little obvious upgrade, yet feels like if Steve was still be alive will demand a new re-design of the hardware to make it look better and force the engineers to work in more than 100 designs before he could select one.

No having Siri in all devices won’t be something that Steve will tolerate, he will demand to push iOS 5.1 with Siri for all devices the same way he push to create a computer without a fan.

The New iPad is just the same device with a better upgrades, there is no “one last thing”, there is no magic behind it or a new awesome magnet cover that an engineer created to show Steve.

I miss Steve Jobs, I can see now Apple relaxing and riding the wave their leader created.

Download the new Running Analyzer for the iPhone.

The most advanced Run application that analyzes your progress.
- Creates a graph as you run of your progress.
- Shows you the gain in altitude as you run and to analyze it later.
- Shows the movement of the device as you run.

Compatible with any iOS based device: iPhone, iPod Touch

Plays your music selecting the playlist, you can use the iPod app without stopping the app.

Complete graph of your progress with movement included.

Continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life.

ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap 2 beta 3 is up for download

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:46:00 -0700

Finally after lots of work, Esri released the ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap.

The ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap is a free, open source add-on for ArcGIS for Desktop that helps you become an active member of the growing OpenStreetMap (OSM) community. OpenStreetMap is an open and freely available database of geographic data. The editor makes it easy for you to download OSM data, make changes to the dataset, and contribute those changes back to the entire OSM community.

The OSM Editor provides

Simple tools to upload and download OSM data

An OSM-compatible geodatabase schema to locally store OSM data

An OSM symbology template for faster editing

Conflict-resolution tools for reconciling data back to the OSM database

The ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap, its documentation, and its source code are available on CodePlex, Microsoft's open source repository, and released under the Microsoft Public License.

You can get all the information from this link http://esriosmeditor.codeplex.com/

Then make sure you download the latest beta here, just by clicking this link http://esriosmeditor.codeplex.com/releases/view/81830

Deploying a simple ASP.NET MVC 3 to Azure with SQL Server Compact

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 20:46:00 -0700

The SQL Compact Database format is a simple file that acts as a SQL database, lately I have loved that kind of database as the set up is mainly non existing and the portability is amazing. Of course, without explicitly saying it, there are lots of limitations. You need to use that kind of technology for simple applications that do not require lots of data.

Using the SQL Compact Database with Entity Framework Code First is just elegant and clean code, then a little ASP.NET MVC 3 creates a project that can be deployed almost anywhere.

First stop was the Azure Cloud, just by adding a new project Azure to the solution, will let you publish the web project to Azure, that simple, you do not need to convert the ASP.NET MVC 3 app to Azure, you still can deploy the web app to your server with a simple Publish or Web Deploy.

Now, when deploying to Azure, you’ll see this error with the SQL Server Compact:

General failure Unable to load the native components of SQL Server

Compact corresponding to the ADO.NET provider of version 8482.

Install the correct version of SQL Server Compact.

Refer to KB article 974247 for more details.

The problem is a missing DLL that is required for the SQL Server Compact, to avoid this problem,

I recommend to go to project and add all deployable dependencies to the project like the image below:

Now all the dlls required to run the application will be in a folder ready to package and be sent to Azure.

In a few minutes, your ASP.NET MVC 3 with SQL Server Compact Database using Entity Framework Code First will be running in the cloud. Please make sure to delete the package from Azure when you are not using it to avoid charges, just by doing an stop of the application is not enough.

Cheers

The end of the year App List for 2011 at http://sprinkleware.com

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 20:28:00 -0700

So, it's the end of the year.And what have I done? My pet projects for 2011 was to learn Objective-C and the iOS SDK. I plan a few apps that will use different parts of the SDK and I stated creating those and submitting them to the app store.

In the process, I have learned more than expected about the Apple App Store process, I was lucky to be contacted by Apple a few times to discuss my submissions, after the first time, I shamelessly targeted some apps to the issues that trigger the phone call from Apple.

I have learned that I’m not good designing user interfaces for the mobile platform, even when Apple makes it simple with limited controls. Bad news for me is that biggest percentage of people look at the screen shots instead of reading the descriptions.

4 apps were completely rejected from Apple, of course I use 1 of them to target different reactions from Apple. They didn’t disappoint as much as TSA when trying to smuggle a huge toothpaste at the airport.

For the record, I was a little late submitting the flash light app to Apple after iOS came out.

For all the applications I wrote, I created a website to keep track of them, some of them are in the 3^rd version, others need a face lift still.

You’ll find the complete list at http://sprinkleware.com

Cheers

Releasing SquareMashUp for iPhone at the Apple iOS store

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:07:00 -0700

This is my first try of a iPhone game. Using some animation this game is a puzzle of 4 letters words. I need as many ideas as possible to improve this game.

You can download it here:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/squaremashup/id483854117?ls=1&mt=8

Other apps you may want to consider:

For Learning to read there are 2 apps. Learn2Read 1 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/learn2read/id473522680?ls=1&mt=8

and then Learn2Read 2 for more advance readers https://itunesconnect.apple.com/WebObjects/iTunesConnect.woa/wo/11.0.9.7.3.11.1.11.5.0.4.4.3

Have fun.

Cheers

Notes from DevConnection Las Vegas 2011

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 20:07:29 -0700

A few notes I have been gathering from DevConnections this year.

Main attraction to me is to see what Scott Guthrie is interested on. I like that he introduces the hold presentation before turning into the slides. This time everything is about the Microsoft Cloud; Azure.

The cloud save money? What about for development and research that is not expecting to have users for a long time? Mr Guthrie didn’t tell us how can developers start testing Azure without adding a credit card on the profile.

You can start to create a Azure app by just creating an MVC 3 app. Then add Windows Azure Deployment project that creates a new project that will take care of all your Azure options without changing your MVC app. Great to port existing Web Apps to Azure, this are great news, when there are so many projects that start like a web application and when you are ready to deploy, you decide to go to the cloud instead of hosting it in a “classic” way.

Debugging for Azure creates 2 instances in your computer. I can see that Microsoft is providing all the tools for developers besides allowing it to run on the cloud for limited IPs for free.

Background roles to run without UI for processing data is everything we always need in a web application, the database to create reports, for example, always needed a background process. This is the way to do it in the cloud.

The publish process is easier and can be done in TFS as well to let the team keep building and testing without the overhead of deployment and configuration. A real agile approached here, I see a lot of companies adoption Azure for dynamic development.

Storage with Azure is for safe and massive amount of data with NOSQL, drag and drop files to the web. The presentation from Mr. Guthrie didn’t answer the question: Can it also work in SQL 2008 Compact files?

Cheers

Google Voice API

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 21:01:00 -0700

Found a fantastic documentation for the Google Voice API to send SMS messages, Google does not have a documentation of how to use Google Voice, in fact is always hard to find any good documentation to any of their products besides Google Wave, any we all know where that project went.

This will give you the rest api to place a call as well as send an SMS, there is possible as well to read your SMS messages. We should all thank Chad Smith.

http://posttopic.com/topic/google-voice-add-on-development

For SMS

POST /accounts/ClientLogin accountType=GOOGLE&Email=[google account]&Passwd=[google password]&service=grandcentral&source=[your app name]

Sending an SMS:

POST /voice/sms/send/ id=&phoneNumber=[number to text]&text=[URL Encoded message]&_rnr_se=[pull from page]

Water Hackathon In Washington DC

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 11:12:00 -0700

I attended and participated at the Water Hackathon in Washington DC connected via uStream to other places in the world, I personally love the stream from Lima. Many problems were presented and people responded quickly to find solutions to those problems. We helped each other with technology and writing code. I mainly wrote code to solve a water access map to centralized all that data into a common editable dataset.

The problem:

Water Access Map of the World - Accessible Water Sources and their Attributes

For the solution, we went to centralize all data and create an iPhone application as well as a JS Viewer using ArcGIS.com http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=d79f0fc97aa3426eb96f780ade9ce815

Water Access Map View Larger Map

The Climate Change Picture Game also needed a map service from ArcGIS.com to geo tag pictures to show the difference from year to year in different parts of the world.

View Larger Map

Applications are expected to have a root view controller at the end of application launch

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 19:00:00 -0700

New changes on iOS 5 has cause application using the default MainWindow.xib will break on the new SDK.

Make sure you add the RootViewController

RootViewController *rootViewCont = navigationController.visibleViewController;

- (BOOL)application:(UIApplication *)application didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:(NSDictionary *)launchOptions { }

All iOS 5 applications should have a root view controller

Found a great sample of how make modifications to your existing application or to start a new app here:

http://cupsofcocoa.wordpress.com/tag/tutorial/

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>
@class RootViewController;
@interface AppDelegate : UIResponder <UIApplicationDelegate>

@property (nonatomic, retain) UIWindow *window;
@property (nonatomic, retain) RootViewController *rootViewController;
@end 


and
 


#import "AppDelegate.h"
#import "RootViewController.h"

@implementation AppDelegate

@synthesize window = _window;
@synthesize rootViewController = _rootViewController;

- (void)dealloc {
	[_window release];
	[_rootViewController release];
    [super dealloc];
}

- (BOOL)application:(UIApplication *)application didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:(NSDictionary *)launchOptions {
    self.window = [[[UIWindow alloc] initWithFrame:[[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds]] autorelease];
    // Override point for customization after application launch.
    self.window.backgroundColor = [UIColor whiteColor];
	_rootViewController = [[RootViewController alloc] init];
	self.window.rootViewController = self.rootViewController;
    [self.window makeKeyAndVisible];
    return YES;
}

@end

I'm sure there were still another 100 ideas that will never see the light of the day.

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 15:06:00 -0700

Thanks for everything Steve Jobs.

Picture from Apple posted in their website 10/6/2011 http://apple.com

iOS Control libraries

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 16:23:15 -0700

A website that people creating controls for the iOS can share as Open Source libraries. Those Custom UI Component Database for iOS and Mac OS X are now at your finger tips to create more exciting applications

You can find the controls here http://cocoacontrols.com/platforms/ios/controls

My favorites :

WhirlyGlobe

WhirlyGlobe is an interactive 3D globe toolkit for ios. It handles the rendering and data manipulation side and strives to maintain a constant frame rate. It's pretty and it's quite good. It can be used to display a few data points on the earth or as a center piece for an earth based app.

Basic PDF Reader/Viewer for iOS

Basic PDF reader/viewer code for iOS developers struggling with wrangling PDF files onto iOS device screens.

ToolDrawer

A collapsible toolbar that is affixed to one of the four corners of the screen.

DCRoundSwitch

DCRoundSwitch is designed to be a drop in replacement for UISwitch. It is styled 'modern' so will unify the look of your apps into the future whilst retaining backwards capability. Drawing is done in CoreGraphics so no images are required.

MKTickerView

MKTickerView is a drop-in replacement for a horizontal stock ticker kind-of control. Infinite scrolling, and wraps around automatically when the last item is hit. Butter smooth scrolling.

Pie Menu

A pie menu implementation specially designed for iPhone and iPod touch

BulbView

Cocoa/UIKit view to display text like light-up bulbs on a sports scoreboard.

MeterView

Dashboard-style gauges for iOS.

MRMapView

An iOS library for displaying tiled maps with support for custom tile providers.

AcaniChat

An open-source version of iPhone's native Messages app.

CoolButtons

CoolButtons is a subclass of UIButton that draws glassy iOS style buttons, all using CoreGraphics and no images.

iOSPlot

Draw line charts and pie charts in iOS.

August 24, 2011 will be an historical date with a simple letter from Steve Jobs

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 22:33:00 -0700

To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.

I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.

I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.

Steve

Esri European User Conference 2011

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 19:28:00 -0700

Save the date October 26-28 in Madrid.

For three days, in one place, you can get the latest in GIS and connect with Esri staff and partners. Register now to join your fellow GIS professionals

Visual Studio 2010 may fail to compile a 32-bit application targeted for .Net Framework 4.0 on x64 machines

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 19:36:00 -0700

Keep having this problem when compiling COM in 32 bits applications that target .NET 4. This is the article that takes care of the issue and you’ll have to run it in each machine

1. Close all instances of Visual Studio.
2. From the Visual Studio Tools subfolder, open an elevated “Visual Studio Command Prompt (2010)” (using “Run as administrator” option). Change directory to "<system_drive>:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v<x.xx>\bin\”.
3. Issue the command :

corflags /32bit+ ResGen.exe /force

4. Open <project_name>.csproj in notepad.
5. Add the following property <ResGenToolArchitecture>Managed32Bit</ResGenToolArchitecture> under the PropertyGroup section. Save and close the csproj file.

More info here

Cheers

How to keep Visual Studio 2010 up to date

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 19:50:00 -0700

With Visual Studio coming out with out of band updates, Service Packs, platform support and Web Standards Updates including support for HTML 5 and CSS3 is really hard to keep your development machine up to date. Now when NuGet and other tools can be installed on your IDE we just find it more complicated.

There are ways to keep developers for having to fetch each update, there is a magic button of love on the web that will update all the needed items in VS2010. That button is mislabeled in my modest opinion, and hopefully that button will be called “The Magic Button of Love” if Microsoft is listening. Right now says “Install Visual Studio Express” and that’s kind of correct, yet if you have VS2010 already, will just install SP1 with all updates.

So, keep your development current by clicking at it:

Magic button that installs everything can be found here: http://www.asp.net/mvc

The HTML 5 and CSS3 Support for Visual Studio 2010 (aka Web Standards Update)

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a15c3ce9-f58f-42b7-8668-53f6cdc2cd83

How to find out what twitter users are unfollowing you

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 19:34:00 -0700

Twitter sends you notification for everything, when people start following you and when they reply to your tweet, even when they add one of your tweets into the favorites list. The only notification you don’t get so far is when a user stops unfollowing you.

Wouldn’t you like to know when people dislike your opinion so much that you start losing lots of twitter users? Building followers is not an easy task, realizing what people finds boring and what is good content, is an art in the twitter world. The iPhone and IPad application is another tool for you to find out how good are you doing in the micro blog sphere. Learning each twitter user unfollower can be great information.

You can download the iPhone/iPad app here:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/unfollowers/id438011083?mt=8

Any feedback is appreciated

Cheers

Enabling Cross-Origin Resources in IIS 7

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 19:01:00 -0700

For JavaScript and CSS3 to access your website resources without having to post using proxies, CSS3 is now here to help. On your web application add on your web.config under system.webServer and all response to javascript will include that letting JavaScript know that is ok to post without the limitation and without using a proxy.

<system.webServer>
   <httpProtocol>
     <customHeaders>
       <add name="Access-Control-Allow-Origin" value="*" />
     </customHeaders>
   </httpProtocol>
 </system.webServer>

In ArcGIS 10 you can enable that by adding it to the web.config found at c:\inetpub\wwwroot\ArcGIS\rest\web.config

Hope this helps

Cheers

Error: Unable to find the requested .Net Framework Data Provider. It may not be installed

Fri, 27 May 2011 19:13:00 -0700

Having some issues deploying applications with ASP.NET MVC 3 and Entity Framework Code First using Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition, even after I have installed on the server Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition and Express.

Deploying ASP.NET MVC 3 with Entity Framework Code First you may have a few issues when deploying into a computer with only .NET 4 installed, I have to install MVC 3 dlls and Entity Framework CF to use the Compact Database.

This is the error you may get if you do not copy all the dlls.

[ArgumentException: Unable to find the requested .Net Framework Data Provider. It may not be installed.]
   System.Data.Common.DbProviderFactories.GetFactory(String providerInvariantName) +160
   System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.SqlCeConnectionFactory.CreateConnection(String nameOrConnectionString) +168
   System.Data.Entity.Internal.LazyInternalConnection.Initialize() +158
   System.Data.Entity.Internal.LazyInternalConnection.get_ConnectionHasModel() +10
   System.Data.Entity.Internal.LazyInternalContext.InitializeContext() +265
   System.Data.Entity.Internal.InternalContext.GetEntitySetAndBaseTypeForType(Type entityType) +17
   System.Data.Entity.Internal.Linq.InternalSet`1.Initialize() +62
   System.Data.Entity.Internal.Linq.InternalSet`1.GetEnumerator() +15
   System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.DbQuery`1.System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable<TRes

Steps to fix the problem

You need System.Data.SqlServerCe.dll make sure in the properties you enable the local copy.

Add the provider to your web.config

<system.data> <DbProviderFactories> <remove invariant="System.Data.SqlServerCe.4.0" /> <add name="Microsoft SQL Server Compact Data Provider 4.0" invariant="System.Data.SqlServerCe.4.0" description=".NET Framework Data Provider for Microsoft SQL Server Compact" type="System.Data.SqlServerCe.SqlCeProviderFactory, System.Data.SqlServerCe, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91" /> </DbProviderFactories> </system.data>

Then you going to get this error, yet not to worry.

Unable to load the native components of SQL Server Compact corresponding to the ADO.NET provider of version 8482. Install the correct version of SQL Server Compact. Refer to KB article 974247 for more details.

Now you should reference the dll System.Data.SqlServerCe.Entity.dll located in a private directory

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition\v4.0\Private

Make sure you set the flag in the properties to copy it local, so gets deploy with all the dlls to the server that may not have that dll.

You may also get the error: Could not load file or assembly 'System.Data.SqlServerCe.Entity, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91' or one of its dependencies. The located assembly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131040)

Still not having any success is running ASP.NET MVC 3 with Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition

Cheers

Creating your NuGet enterprise server

Tue, 24 May 2011 21:01:13 -0700

Phil Haack, Project Manager at Microsoft for NuGet had a post of how to create a NuGet Server and host your own packages. The steps were simple, now in the source code for the next release that you can download and compile yourself.

The Web Forms ASP.NET website is now on the source code. Download it, build it, make the Server project the start up project and publish it to your IIS server.

The results is the NuGet.Server 1.4.0.0 running and ready for you to load your own packages. Note the developers at codeplex haven’t released that version yet, so we should all wait until they release it. In another hand, there is something to be said of new car smell.

I personally cannot wait until the integration with Orchard is seamless and complete.

Cheers