We have not had a social mixer in a while, but the next one is scheduled! So here are the details:

The Southeast Valley .NET User Group would like to invite you to join us for a little bowling on the evening of April 19th at AMF Chandler Lanes located on N Arizona Ave. We will arrive at about 6PM and start bowling at 6:30PM on 3 lanes that we have rented until 9:00PM.

We hope that members come out and enjoy some time hanging together and getting to know one another outside of our standard meetings. There is no agenda but to have fun! If you have any questions or comments please let me know.

This is open to the members of SEVDNUG so please head on over to Eventbrite and get your ticket today. They are limited and you will need one to attend. Due to the our generous sponsor COMSYS we will also have some snacks and drinks available for the group. So make sure you thank them!

On March 7th it was announced that I got elected to to the position of Treasurer for INETA. I am very excited about this opportunity to help grow the community that I enjoy being part of and at the same time learn some skills that I can use in the future.

So what is INETA? I have talked to a lot of .NET developers that have heard of INETA but are not really sure what it is all about. First off I recommend heading over to the INETA site and reading this about page. The elevator pitch for INETA is as follows:

“INETA provides structured, peer-based organizational, educational, and promotional support to the growing worldwide community of Microsoft® .NET user groups. Our mission is to offer assistance and resources to community groups that promote and educate their membership in Microsoft’s .NET technologies. INETA welcomes all facets of the .NET user community, from developers and architects to project managers and IT professionals.”

INETA provides many resources for user groups and community leaders to help in growing their local community. In addition they provide programs for speakers, contests for user group members and ways for company’s to assist activities via sponsorships.

My term for the Treasurer position is two years so hopefully over this time I can make sure INETA remains strong and provides the resources that communities need in these times.

Please if you have any feedback on ways that we can help your group let me know. There is a great group of people that have a drive to help our community so please let us know how we can help.

I look forward to providing more information about INETA details and opportunities in the future.

I have been working on getting Hudson CI slave server setup at Integrum for all of our .NET builds and during the process I came across a problem with the MSBuild plugin for Hudson that caused me just to go grab NAnt and start creating the XML build files that we needed. While I was working on the first files I was thinking of the tools that the Rails developers at Integrum used for their builds and heard the discussions about Rake tasks. So after doing a little bit of investigation I found that plenty of others had done it so I started down the path of using IronRuby and Rake for our builds. The goal of this post is to get you introduced and setup with running your first simple build using IronRuby, Rake and Albacore.

Install IronRuby

First off you are going to need to get IronRuby installed. IronRuby is a version of the Ruby language that targets the .NET framework and is built using the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR). I have spent very little time in Ruby and figured all this would be a great way to get started.  Head on over to the project on codeplex and download the install package, I used the latest version (v.1.1.1).

After the install is completed you will need to reboot your system for the path changes to take effect or until then you can open a command prompt and enter the following to update the path:

SET PATH=%PATH%;"C:\Program Files (x86)\IronRuby 1.1\bin\"

Now inside the same command prompt window go ahead and enter “ir” and if everything has been successful you will be prensented with the IronRuby interpreter. Go ahead and enter the following to give it a go:

puts "Hello world"

After hitting enter you should be presented with the output. You can type “exit” at anytime to leave the interpreter.

Installing Rake

Now that we have IronRuby installed we are ready to get Rake installed. Rake (Ruby Make) was created to provide an alternative for building Ruby applications and aimed to provide the same capabilities for builds as make does. One of the primary attractions to it is the fact that it does not use XML files for defining your builds. You will be instead creating Rake files (Rakefile.rb) that define the builds via code.

Rake is installed using the gem installs which is done by using the igem command for IronRuby. To install the Rake gem run the following command:

igem install rake

This will take care of downloading and installing the library for you. Once the install has completed you can test the install by entering “rake” at the command line. You should be presented with an error “rake aborted” because no rake file was found.

Now lets build a simple hello world example using rake. To do this we are going to be creating a file named rakefile.rb so you may want to switch over to a temp directory. Create the rakefile.rb file and enter the following:

task :default => [:hello_world]

desc "Just says hello to the world"
task :hello_world do
	puts "Hello world from Rake"
end

After you have saved the file as “rakefile.rb” you can process it using Rake by just entering rake in the command line while still in the directory that you created the file in. You should be presented with the expected output “Hello world from Rake”. The first line in this file defines the default task to run if none is specified and then starting on line 3 we have the task of just outputting text. This simple rake file only performs one task and you can simple include multiple tasks in a single file. Change the rakefile.rb to match the following and then run rake:

task :default => [:hello_world]

desc "Just says hello to the world"
task :hello_world do
	puts "Hello world from Rake"
end

desc "Just hello to you"
task :hello_you do
	puts "Hello you"
end

desc "Hello to you and the world"
task :hello_to_all =>
	[:hello_world,:hello_you] do
	puts "Hello to everyone"
end

Since by running just rake you are only running the default task specified all you will get is the same “Hello world from rake” output. But if you enter the following:

rake hello_to_all

It will run that task which in turn executes the other tasks specified and you will get all 3 lines written out.

Albacore for .NET Rake Tasks

Rake is used to run the tasks that we need but where do these tasks come from? This is where the Albacore library comes in. The tasks that are provided with the library are to access and use the common tools for building and running tasks for .NET projects. Instead of you having to learn how to build your own tasks the library provides many. To install Albacore we will use igem just like we did for rake:

igem install albacore

Now that the library is installed we can create a simple console project in a solution and then use rake to run a build on the solution. I have attached the project to this post so we do not have to go through the standard Hello World app building. There is a project folder that contains the RakeFile.rb and a src folder that contains the solution to be built. Here is the contents of the RakeFile.rb used to build the solution.

require 'rake'
require 'albacore'

task :default => [:full]
task :full => [:standard_build]

msbuild :standard_build do |msb|
  msb.properties :configuration => :Release
  msb.targets :Build
  msb.solution = "src/BuildHelloWorld.sln"
end

This file uses the albacore task to run MSBuild against our solution. The task requires that you specify a couple pieces of configuration information like the configuration to be built, the target (such as build, clean etc) and then the location of the Solution file to be used. There are many other configuration options available and you can get more info over at the wiki pages on github. The wiki provides information on the tasks that are available such as NUnit, SQLCmd and PLink.

So far I have found using this method very easy to manage and also very easy to read. Working with the tasks instead of XML just takes pain out of building upon the files and makes them easier to follow. I will be doing some more posts on using Hudson and going further with builds using Albacore tasks.

Download Project

I have been working on a Windows Phone 7 application for viewing and consuming web content, including videos. During testing of the application, I came across a problem that was driving me crazy: Videos would not play in the emulator. While I was working on this, I was also testing new video links, so I was thinking there was a problem with the video content or a incompatibility I was not aware of. Needless to say, I spent a decent amount of time researching and digging for answers… and then it hit me. I tried it on the phone to no avail. Then I finally disconnected the sync cable from the phone and boom, it starts working perfectly — no errors to be seen.

So the quick point is, when running across a problem that just seems crazy, deploy to device and disconnect.

To explain the problem, I will just give short example that allows you to dupe the issue. I have not yet been able to nail down completely what the problem is, but it does seem that all videos having the issue are VC-1 encoded for video. I have tested this on three different dev machines and had the same issue across all.

In your WP7 application you can just add a MediaElement to any page.

    <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="Transparent">
        <Grid.RowDefinitions>
            <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/>
            <RowDefinition Height="Auto" />
            <RowDefinition Height="*"/>
        </Grid.RowDefinitions>
        <StackPanel x:Name="TitlePanel" Grid.Row="0" Margin="12,17,0,28">
            <TextBlock x:Name="ApplicationTitle" Text="MY Video Test" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextNormalStyle}"/>
            <TextBlock x:Name="PageTitle" Text="Video Viewer" Margin="9,-7,0,0" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextTitle1Style}"/>
        </StackPanel>
        <Grid x:Name="ContentPanel" Grid.Row="1" Margin="12,0,12,0"></Grid>
        <MediaElement x:Name="MediaElement" Grid.Row="2"/>
    </Grid>

Next, in the cs file for the page you can set the source for the MediaElement, and by default the control is set to AutoPlay. Once the source is set, it should start playing when you run the app in the emulator.

    public partial class MainPage : PhoneApplicationPage
    {
        // Constructor
        public MainPage()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
            ConfigureVideoPlayer();
        }

        public void ConfigureVideoPlayer()
        {
            MediaElement.Source = new Uri("http://content5.catalog.video.msn.com/e2/ds/b2ee41d1-8d9f-4c70-b40d-303ebe154f6f.wmv", UriKind.Absolute);
        }
    }

The video in this sample is a WMV that is using Windows Media Audio 10 Professional for audio and VC-1 video. If you deploy this application to a device for testing, it will not work until you remove the device from its connection to the host computer. Also, if you want to see a video that plays with no problems, just change the Uri to use http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/7/4/B741136A-7672-4B74-88A1-04DE9443574F/Springboard_061809_MBR.wmv and then run the app. This second video is Windows Media Audio 9.2 and Windows Media Video 9.

Now with the new video lets hook up to the MediaFailed event and take a look at what is getting reported back:

        // Constructor
        public MainPage()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
            ConfigureVideoPlayer();
        }

        public void ConfigureVideoPlayer()
        {
            MediaElement.Source = new Uri("http://content5.catalog.video.msn.com/e2/ds/b2ee41d1-8d9f-4c70-b40d-303ebe154f6f.wmv", UriKind.Absolute);
            MediaElement.MediaFailed += new EventHandler<ExceptionRoutedEventArgs>(MediaElement_MediaFailed);
        }

        void MediaElement_MediaFailed(object sender, ExceptionRoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            var errorException = e.ErrorException;
        }

When running this code and looking the exception being reported, we see that the message is “AG_E_NETWORK_ERROR” and appears to be a generic error that can be given when there are authentication issues, cross domain access issues, or just problems opening files.

It took awhile but I am happy to announce that the new date and venue for our SQL Saturday event is now set!  SQL Saturday Phoenix will be held on February 19^th 2011 at the Chandler-Gilbert Community College Pecos Campus. As you are probably aware, the event was originally scheduled for July 17th of this year and we unfortunately had to postpone.

The postponement was due to feedback that we had received from several potential attendees and speakers who had scheduling issues due to summer activities. Also, some just didn’t want to head to the “Valley of the Sun” in the middle of summer (OK so 115 degree temperatures can be a little crazy). So we went with the new date in February to avoid getting caught up in the holidays and also hope that some folks from the colder areas will have a really good reason to come. Phoenix is awesome in the “winter” time! Just take a look at the average temperatures for February. 

The event site has been updated with the latest information, with more regarding sessions and sponsors coming soon. Samson and I are working with all involved to make sure that speakers can still make it for the event and that sponsors are still onboard. With all that being said, we are open for registration and the call for speakers is once again processing submissions (ok so it never stopped). If you have any questions, comments, concerns or maybe are interested in helping out let us know!

Also, we would like to thank the City of Chandler for their help in getting the location for the event. It just needs to be said that they help when they can and are really working to grow the technology community in their city!

Last week I was excited (and very surprised) to find out that I was awarded the INETA Community Champion Award for Q2 2010. During the last year I have found a great deal of pleasure and enjoyment by getting more involved in the technical community. Most of my involvement came from being new to Phoenix, wanting to meet new people and just wanting to help so the community keeps growing.

Here is the description for the award from the INETA site:

“The INETA Community Champion Award is an annual award given to those who give to the developer community. It is awarded on a quarterly basis and lasts for twelve months. Members record their numerous contributions to the community. At the end of each quarter the top contributors will be selected to receive the INETA Community Champion Award.”

So here’s to starting my second year in the Phoenix area and helping to build our community stronger with each day. Thank you very much for the recognition (even though it is tough for me to think of myself as a champion)!

I hope that I can continue to provide value to the community and am excited to see what we do in the future.

On June 22nd we held another Social Mixer for SEVDNUG (Southeast Valley .NET User Group), and had a great time! The event was hosted at the AMF McRay Lanes in Chandler. The goal of these Social Mixers is to allow members of our local tech community to come together and communicate outside the typical monthly meetings which are predominantly presentation-based.

During the past year, the group has organized several of these events, and they have been quite a success in allowing our members to talk freely, enjoy a evening together, and get to know each other better. Personally, I enjoy the fact that several of these mixers have been hosted at locations that allow our members to bring their families along for a good time. Not only does this help foster great conversations, but friendships and long lasting networking contacts are also made.

These events would not be possible with out the support of our sponsors and our local tech community! We would like to thank COMSYS for sponsoring and participating in this particular event

To see more of our bowling adventures,  check out these pictures taken by Joseph Guadagno.

For more information on future events please watch the SEVDNUG usergroup website and follow us on Twitter. Join us this month on July 22nd for our next SEVDNUG meeting, which will feature a presentation on Easing ASP.NET Deployment with Visual Studio 2010 and Web Deployment.

We look forward to seeing you at our next meeting!

I have been dipping into Microsoft’s Entity Framework

Microsoft Entity Framework in Action

The book is broken into four parts, each building on the knowledge gained from the previous section. Part 1 of the book is an introduction to O/RMs and a quick guide as to what they provide developers. The coverage in this section is to help you get a better understanding of the Object/Relational Mismatch that occurs in applications and how solutions such as EF are developed to help with this mismatch. At the end of this section you will build the structure for a sample app that will be referenced throughout the book. This is a simple order application but it is used intelligently and explained in such a way that makes referencing it later helpful for understanding how EF usage is a benefit to the project.

Part 2 quickly starts diving into EF and guiding the reader through querying and understanding the model. In addition, it goes into the mechanics used for persistence and concurrency via EF. I’ll be referencing this section quite often due to all the examples that are included for dealing with data via querying, such as grouping, sorting and projecting results for ease of use. After the querying sections you are guided through the Entity Data Model (EDM) and how it is constructed and described using its different parts: Conceptual Model (CSDL), Storage Model (SSDL) and the Mapping (MSL). In most cases developers will use the Designer and the EDMX file generated in Visual Studio. Having an understanding of how the XML is built and how to build one manually, however, can really help when you want to make tweaks outside of the designer, such as extending the EDM with custom annotations.

In the last two chapters of this section the book goes into Persistence and Concurrency via EF. The persistence was one of the most interesting areas of the book for me (due to my DBA experiences). I think that too many times we use frameworks like EF without understanding the impact that some of our coding makes on the data store of our applications. These two sections give the reader a better understanding of how,and when, entities are marked in such a way that SQL calls will be made to the database for managing them. Having a better understanding of EntityState and ObjectStateManager can help a developer in mitigating the number of calls that will be made to the database by making sure that objects are marked correctly before calling SaveChanges methods. Also, through some of the techniques described for managing concurrency and transactions in your EF application, including managing entities in a disconnected manner, you can help ensure that the application works as expected.

Part 3 of the book focuses on some of the more advanced topics of EF including Entity SQL, usage of Functions and Stored Procedures in your model, querying the EDM programmatically, and customizing the EF code and designer. I was mainly interested the usage of Functions and Stored Procedures here. The book does a good job of providing the reader with several examples for mapping and consuming SPROCs from EF; including selecting data, updating entities and building functions that can be used against the inheritance hierarchy that you defined in your application.

The final section of the book walks you through bringing all of this new found EF knowledge together for building the order application. The authors did a good job of presenting not only their example application, but also providing the reader with meaningful information that can be used for building application architectures that use EF. Chapters include ASP .NET, Windows Applications and how to integrate EF with a traditional n-tier application. The last chapter provides helpful information on building unit tests against your EF enabled application.

I would recommend the book for those who are looking to increase their understanding of Microsoft’s Entity Framework. The book is not only a walk-through of how to build and use EF, it also provides the reader with a lot of reference material that can be used in day-to-day development work. I plan on referencing the “Working with Entity Framework” section quite often on my next project with EF in my attempts to streamline all data transactions that occur in my application when dealing with my entities.

I just finished reading the MEAP version of Jon Skeet’s C# in Depth Second Edition from Manning Publishing. For those that are not familiar with Manning Early Access Program (MEAP) you can check it out here. The idea is that you can purchase a book, eBook or physical, and during the development of the book you get access to eBook drafts from the publisher. They have some great books/authors, and this gives you access to material before the book comes out. Handy if you are learning new technologies and do not want to wait.

I had not read the first edition and wanted to get caught up on some of the changes made to the framework for C# 4. The book is broken up into 4 main sections with a total of 16 chapters. The first section touches briefly on version 1 of C# and then each section builds on this foundation while introducing you changes in C# 2, 3 and 4 in the remaining sections.  At the time of this writing I was not able to read Chapter 1 and Appendixes due to them not being available via the MEAP program yet, but the meat and potatoes of the book were here.

The book flows differently than some of the other development books I have read. It walks you through where the language started and builds through the different versions and the improvements made with each. In the first chapters I was coming across a decent amount of "We will discuss this in 3.4" kind of references and generally I do not like this. For me, if a topic is being touched on why not go ahead and just tell me. But Skeet did a great job of giving a brief description as to why the topic is described later and once you get to the more advanced topic it makes sense.

This book does not strike me as a good book for beginners (but it wouldn’t hurt: keep reading) due to the depth that the author takes in explaining the challenges and changes made in previous versions of the framework. It is written to expect a certain level of experience with C# and the framework. I found times that I needed to do some research to make sure I understood what was being discussed. But if you are willing to do some extracurricular digging while reading the book you will be fine at any level and find yourself rewarded with a better understanding at the end.

The best part of the book is that Skeet keeps you involved and wanting to learn more. This is done by using several examples of the concepts being taught and then building on those concepts as you learn about the next version of the language. Also the book remains engaging due to the sprinkling of humor and explaining some less-than-recommended ways of using features.

Overall I would highly recommend this book for developers looking to gain knowledge of C# 4 and also to understand some of the “why” behind how we got to the current language feature set. Using Skeet’s style of building upon previous knowledge and deconstructing features in order to explain them, I found the chapters on Dynamic Binding and Code Contracts very engaging and they helped me to better understand these concepts in C# 4. This book will be staying on my kindle for awhile to use as a reference.

This post is being written after having just moved to the Phoenix area about 6 months ago, and discovering a new level of “community”. This new level and insight has changed the way I have looked at what I do everyday and how I feel about my Life, my Career, and the place I now call home. I want to start by saying that as much as I have enjoyed moving to Phoenix, it has been tough. Really tough. My wife and I left the place that I had called home for the last 30+ years: Columbus, Ohio. I grew up there, I have family there, and I have life-long friends there, but my wife and decided it was time to move on and make the jump to Phoenix. This jump was to help our own sanity and to be near some important family members (the only city in the US that provided us with parental units for both of us).

During the last couple of years I have been attending several developer community events in the Great Lakes region for .Net developers. I had not ventured outside the .Net topics much, but with every event or group I felt that I had expanded myself. This personal expansion was done by meeting new people and having some great discussions with others. Now I found myself in a new city where I did not know anybody at all and it scared the living crap out of me. Was I going to be able to make some connections and what would the community be like, based on the limited community experience I had? I needed to find it. At first I did not find much in the way of community, and I was concerned… But I was just not digging far enough.
Discovering What is Here

Twitter to the rescue! I logged in and started tweeting. I had an account that I had hardly used at all and started to connect with some friends back East at first. Then I started tweeting about being new to the Phoenix and quickly found myself pointed to a local community site www.azgroups.com. Bang(Bing for all you MS lovers), there it was! I had found a great resource and I was very happy. I had not spent a lot of time looking, just because job hunting and moving had taken up most of it. I don’t mean to say that the community was hidden in any way.

Several meetings, 1 Laid Off Camp and 1 Desert Code Camp later I now find myself loving where I am and what the people of this city have to offer. There is more community here then I imagined possible. It is a new experience for me and it is making me change the way I look at myself and my interactions with the community. Now I wonder: What was back East that I was missing? Maybe a lot. In the Phoenix area there is one place that personifies this community and it is Gangplank.

Now to Gangplank! All I can say about this place is: Amazing! It is simply (if it can be put that way) a place for people to come together to work, learn and share. It is a open environment that can be used by anybody… just show up and do your thing. Any day of the week you can find people here working, learning and hacking. It is like the old rec center that I used to go to when growing up… but they have video games and internet access. Currently there are several business that rent space at the GP, but there is still plenty of room for YOU to show up. They hold weekly brown bag talks, usergroup meetings throughout the month, meetings for local businesses, and so much more.

What is the Point?

This is meant just to give you a look into what is available, not just here but in many cities. During the last 6 months I have made so many connections and new friends that I am now happy to call this new (to me) city home. And each day I wake up wondering what will I find here today. I feel that so many people are missing this in their lives! It changes you and makes you want to do better, and all along YOU ARE bettering yourself!

I would like to send out a big “Thank You” to all those involved in the Phoenix community. There is a special thing here and it is helping others grow.

So what can you do?

    * Explore social media in your area (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
    * Look for community groups that interest you (coffee groups, interest group meetings and such)
    * Get involved in the conversation (when you attend, say “Hi” to some people). This may take some time, I know it does for me, but it is worth it!
    * Pay it forward in your community. When you find somebody that could use a boost, try to find a way to give it them. You feel you can give back? Do it! The first thing I have learned is that if you try to give back (no matter how little) it will come back to you more than you can imagine.

If you are in the Phoenix area, I urge you to check out some of the following sites and see what excites you. Each one lists events in the area and you can research further what each offers:

    * GangplankHQ – www.gangplankhq.com
    * AZGroups – www.azgroups.com
    * Eventification – www.eventification.com