Geekswithblogs.net

Lets build a simple blog engine [eboard] - 2

Rajesh Pillai — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 20:47:50 GMT

Welcome to the 2nd series of building a blog engine. In the first part we have laid out the foundation for this application and modeled the DB structure for quick mockup.

You can read the first part here lets-build-a-simple-blog-engine-eboard---1.aspx

One thing I missed to mentioned in the first part is the we will be using the excellent ELMAH for error logging. This is a pretty cool module which hooks up to the system
and logs all exceptions without writing a single line of code.

You can read more about ELMAH at code.google.com/p/elmah/

What we will be doing is creating the public facing website first rather than creating the administration screens. We will decide upon the themes to use and mockup a
quick prototype for the public view.

The following the is the project structure I came up with. This is just skeleton and the meat will be added incrementally over next couple of weeks.

Project Structure

I have divided the project according to the responsibility of each component. As you can see we will be using the LinqToSql along with the Repository pattern for
data access. This will provide us with the flexibility to switch data provider at will and also provides the principle of OCP (Open for Extension and Closed for Modification).

I prefer to keep the model in a separate project rather than keeping it along with the web project. For this project the controllers wil be lying in the default "Controllers" folder.

We will also change the layout of the "Content" folder. The content folder is where all your css are kept. We will take a different approach possibly to enable easy theming
of our blogs.

Watch for the next post, where we will be mocking up the public site for the blog.

Visual Studio 2005/2008 Code Analysis Error

Marko Apfel — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 11:52:58 GMT

After installing VS2005 TE on my machine (which previously runs Visual Studio 2008 TE) all mixed projects (VS2005/VS2008 compatibility with TargetFramework=2.0 and ToolsVersion=2.0 options) thrown an error during compilation:


C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v8.0\CodeAnalysis\Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.targets(46,4):
error : In order to perform Code Analysis on managed binaries, MSBuild needs to launch FxCop.
MSBuild is unable to locate the FxCop binaries.
Make sure Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Developers or Visual Studio Team Suite is installed 
and run MSBuild from within the "Visual Studio Command Prompt" 
or specify the path to FxCop by setting the FXCOPDIR environment variable.

Specifying the FXCOPDIR-variable brings up the next obscure errors.

Replacing the VS2005 CodeAnalysis targets with the VS2008 targets lets run everything fine.

So replace [dont forget to make a backup ;-)]

C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v8.0\CodeAnalysis

with

C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v9.0\CodeAnalysis

But now you get an error in Visual Studio 2005:


MSBUILD : error : Invalid settings passed to CodeAnalysis task. See output window for details.
Code Analysis Complete -- 1 error(s), 0 warning(s)

Setting the build output information to diagnostic you get an good hint what the problem is.

So we edit as the last step the VS2005 target:

the line

<UsingTask TaskName="Microsoft.Build.Tasks.CodeAnalysis" AssemblyFile=".\FxCopTask.dll"/>

we modify to:

<UsingTask TaskName="Microsoft.Build.Tasks.CodeAnalysis" AssemblyFile="..\..\v9.0\CodeAnalysis\FxCopTask.dll"/>

and the following lines

<CodeAnalysisPath Condition="'$(CodeAnalysisPath)'=='' and '$(FxCopDir)'!='' and '$(TeamBuildConstants)'==''">$(FxCopDir)</CodeAnalysisPath>
<CodeAnalysisPath Condition="'$(CodeAnalysisPath)'=='' and '$(VSINSTALLDIR)'!=''">$(VSINSTALLDIR)\Team Tools\Static Analysis Tools\FxCop</CodeAnalysisPath>

are replaced with

<CodeAnalysisPath>C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Team Tools\Static Analysis Tools\FxCop</CodeAnalysisPath>

not beautiful – but working!

Lets build a simple blog engine [eboard] - 1

Rajesh Pillai — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 19:17:59 GMT

Welcome to eBoard

Hello and welcome to this series of application development using asp.net mvc, jquery, automapper, ninject. Though the world doesn't need another blog engine, but sometimes reinventing the
wheel teaches you many unknown things and it's the learning experinece that counts more than anything else.

I have been using asp.net mvc + jquery for about a year now. So, it's time to put down something which will help the beginner with this technologies get a good graps of the fundamentals skill required
to do web development.

The side effect of this is we will also learn about some design principles, best practices and troubleshooting will add icing to the cake.

Without further ado, lets begin. Let's first lay down the basic business requirement for the blog engine. This may be simple in form, but will help us keep an eye on the actual requirement and prevent
us from deviating from the main goal.

The blog engine will be named as "eboard".

Requirements

Multi blog support : The user should be able to create multiple blogs.
Make posts
Assign a category to the post
Assing one or more tags to the post
Allow readers to post comment
Comment Moderation
Simple Blog Settings like theme selection.

Apart from creating a working blog engine the following are educational/learning benefit the reader may derive from this experience

Learn asp.net mvc and jquery
Learn to design/extend a validation framework
Learn about Repository pattern
Learn dependency injection using Ninject.
Service design
Design for testability (though we won't be writing test at this point in time).

With the above requirements in mind lets move ahead a take a shot at creating the database for our blog. Some of the reader may frown at this idea. Designing the database first or the model first is akin to
the chicken and the hen problem. But for this small application I think the database design will closely mimic the model as well. Please free to shout at me if you feel anything is terribly wrong here.

The initial DB model looks like the figure shown below.

DB Model

We are using the membership provider for users and roles. The above DB model gives us a good start in designing our blog. It has all the essential elements to support the business
requirement that we have laid out for "eboard".

The below table highlights the essential details about the above model.

BlogSettings	This stores the essential settings related to blog. Curently it has only the name of the theme and comment moderation flag. This can be extended as required.
Blog	This allows us to have multiple blog created.
Post	The posts that goes with the blog.
Comment	The comments that goes with the post.
Category	A post can belong to only one category.
Tags	A post can hve multiple tag. Tags are useful for search.

That's it for this episode. In the next episode we will layout the folder structure for the "eboard" application. Till then happy learning and enjoy blogging.

Agile Acceptance Testing @XpDays

Michel Grootjans — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 15:52:14 GMT

Pfew... our presentation at the XpDays is done. You can find all the materials google code at this link: http://agileacceptancetesting.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/.The audience was great, and Pascal and I enjoyed it. We'll probably be trying to find something new to prepare for next year.

Need ideas for a DotNetNuke Christmas gift?

Brian Scarbeau — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 14:51:18 GMT

I thought I would give a list of DotNetNuke Christmas gifts you could possibly buy for a client, co-worker or yourself.

You can start with some Christmas skins that you could put on your site. The folks at All Dnn Skins has some skins for you to look at. Snowcovered has an array of Holiday skins as well. If you only want a Christmas skin for a period of time and want your skins to change automatically then you can take a look at PageChameleon which will do that for you. You can set the special day, the occurring frequency, skin and container. Then PageChameleon will change the skin and container in the special day and change back to normal skin after that day. And users of your web site can select their favorite skins.

Subscribe or renew to DNN Creative Magazine. There are many good tutorials listed here and what I like is that the information is very current.

There are several very good DotNetNuke books that you can get. Here’s a list:

Professional DotNetNuke 5: Open Source Web Application Framework for ASP.NET (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) by Shaun Walker, Brian Scarbeau, Darrell Hardy, and Stan Schultes

DotNetNuke 5 User's Guide: Get Your Website Up and Running (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) by Christopher J. Hammond, Patrick Renner, and Shaun Walker

Professional DotNetNuke Module Programming by Mitchel Sellers and Shaun Walker

Beginning DotNetNuke Skinning and Design (Programmer to Programmer) by Andrew Hay and Shaun Walker

You could consider a gift certificate to a co-worker with the words Come With Me to OpenForce 2010. You do have two options to consider for this gift. Will it be in Europe or Las Vegas? Gift certificates could also be used for consulting with top DotNetNuke professionals like Mitch Sellers, Michael Washington, SEO specialist Tom Kraak,or Skinning pro Ryan Morgan to name a few.

Finally, get out of the winter cold and come to an Orlando DotNetNuke User Group meeting. What a great gift to give. We have several good topics and some great speakers too! DotNetNuke Corp. Co-Founder/Technical Fellow, Joe Brinkman will be here in Orlando on January 12th.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Technorati Tags: DotNetNuke

Stopping a build at the TFS

Marko Apfel — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 06:54:43 GMT

Open a “visual studio command prompt” and try:

     tfsbuild stop https://*****:8143 RXXXXX_Sourcecode Gen_2.6_branch_test_20080827.1

Getting Started with Entity Framework 4 – Lazy Loading

Eric Nelson — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 10:23:54 GMT

[This is the fifth in a series of posts on getting started with the new features in Entity Framework 4 based on the demos I did in my session at TechEd Europe in Berlin last week (Nov 2009).]

Entity Framework v1 did not support a commonly implemented ORM feature called Lazy Loading. Entity Framework 4 adds that feature. In Beta 1 it was known (confusingly IMHO) as Deferred Loading. In Beta 2 it is (thankfully IMHO) known as Lazy Loading.

You run up against the absence of Lazy Loading in v1 when you start moving across associations between Entities (Objects). Imagine for instance you had an instance of Order from Northwind and wanted to access its Order_Details, perhaps to do something as simple as return a count of the number of Order_Details.

You would be tempted to write:

order.Order_Details.Count

However this will return 0 unless you have already explicitly loaded the related Order_Details into the ObjectContext.

In v1 you could either explicitly project in your query (stating up front that you were interested in the count of Order_Details) or you could use explicit loading :

Orders.Include(“Order_Details”)

Either approach would ultimately give you the correct value instead of a dreaded 0.

However Lazy Loading ensures that in situations like the above, “It just works” and the beauty is that it requires a single statement to turn it on.

context.ContextOptions.LazyLoadingEnabled = true;

The following example performs the same operation, first with Lazy Loading off, then with it on:

Will product the output:

In a future post I will talk about the hidden dangers of LazyLoading and compare it to other ORM implementations.

Code Gallery Reshuffle

EltonStoneman — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 08:16:37 GMT

[Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman]

I've been posting code samples and walkthroughs on MSDN Code Gallery for a while now – keeping them distinct from CodePlex which I use for fully-fledged projects and tools. CodePlex uses TFS for source control, but the Code Gallery only lets you post up individual files, so until now I've been creating releases as ZIP files containing the source.

Now I've centralised the source for all those samples in a public repository on github at sixeyed/codegallery. The clone URL is: git://github.com/sixeyed/codegallery.git. If you're new to git, the Illustrated Guide to Git on Windows is a good starting point.

For future work, I'll continue posting the source ZIPs as resources on MSDN Code Gallery, but the master will be on github.

In-Place-Edit with jQuery

Rajesh Pillai — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 07:54:42 GMT

Let's try a simple in-place edit with jquery. For demonstration purpose I am using the plain old HTML file. However, if you, wish you could apply the same technique to asp.net, asp.net mvc or php or any other web application as well.

Here is the html that we will be using for the demo.

<body>
    <div style="line-height:3xm;background-color:skyblue">
        Double Click the below paragraph to edit.
    </div>
    </br></br>
    <div class="edit">
        Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Integer nec odio. Praesent libero.
        Sed cursus ante dapibus diam. Sed nisi. Nulla quis sem at nibh elementum imperdiet. Duis sagittis ipsum. Praesent mauris.
        Fusce nec tellus sed augue semper porta. Mauris massa. Vestibulum lacinia arcu eget nulla.
        Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos.
        Curabitur sodales ligula in libero. Sed dignissim lacinia nunc. Curabitur tortor.
    </div>
</body>

The element that needs to be made editable is given a class of "edit".

The following is the minimal CSS we will be using for this demo.

</style>

Let's add a reference to the jquery library

If you have a local copy then refer it as follows

<script src="scripts/jquery-1.3.2.min.js"></script>

The above assumes you have a copy of the jquery library in the scripts folder on your root directory.

Otherwise you can always grab the latest copy from google..

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js"></script>

Now let's setup the event handler to make the div editable.

The $() function is jquery's way of telling the browser to execte the function when the DOM is ready.

Here' is the setEditable function.

function trim(stringToTrim) {
return stringToTrim.replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g, "");
}

The above function essentially does three things.

Hook up the click event handler on the element with class ".edit".
Inside the function the following are the sequence that happens
1. Build the html for inserting a <textarea> for editing.
2. Build the html for inserting a "save" and "cancel" button.
3. Save the current value of the element.
4. Removes the current div (with class .edit) and inserts the above html.
5. Hooks up the events for "save" and "cancel" button.

Note: the jquery function after() inserts content after each of the matched elements.

The below function is called when you click "save" or "cancel" button

That's it. You can actually make an ajax request and send this data to the server for persistence. We will see that in an another post.

ASP.NET Session Id getting lost

rajeshpillai — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 13:25:31 GMT

This typical problem is almost faced by all new developer working with asp.net.

This behaviour is by design as ASP.NET tries to be efficient in storing sessions for users. Remember unless you store anything in session the session id value keep changing.

If you want to tell ASP.NET that you want it to track user sessions, you can do one of 2 things:

Store something in the session.
Simple handle the Session_Start event in your GLobal.asax. The presence of this method will tell ASP.NET to track sessions , even if there is no data in the session..

// NOTE: There is no need to add any thing to session if you are doing this...

public void Session_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
}

The related stackoverflow post can be read here stackoverflow.com/questions/1533709/session-id-changing-randomly/1535573#1535573

This behavior had caused me much worry in the past :)

Remove<T>(this IList<T> source, Func<T,bool> selector) why not?

Wes McClure — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 05:58:48 GMT

Maybe I am just crazy, but it seems like removing or deleting items from a collection is always an after thought. Take IList for example, a list of items, with the ability to add and remove from it. We have a flurry of extension methods that are inherited from IEnumerable to add items but it seems like no one thought maybe it would be nice to beef up the remove method with some extension methods. Maybe I missed an extension namespace, maybe I am just crazy. How many times do we have to write the following bloated code just to remove something from a collection?

var ingredient = Ingredients.FirstOrDefault(i => i.FeedId == feed.Id);
Ingredients.Remove(ingredient);

Even worse, is when we want to remove multiple items from a list based on some criteria. I have to add a foreach loop of some sort to remove each item one at a time. Oh and, deal with the always wonderful: (System.InvalidOperationException: Collection was modified; enumeration operation may not execute). So, I have to remember to create a new list to avoid this dreadful mistake:

var ingredients = Ingredients.Where(i => i.FeedId == feed.Id).ToList();
foreach (var ingredient in Ingredients)
{
	Ingredients.Remove(ingredient);
}

Of course, now that I have created a new list, ToList(), I can simplify this to:

var ingredients = Ingredients.Where(i => i.FeedId == feed.Id).ToList();
ingredients.ForEach(i=> Ingredients.Remove(i));

But that is still icky, all that code just to remove an item or a set of items? So enough complaining on my part, it's time to put up or shut up. This is what I want to do in code:

Ingredients.Remove(i => i.FeedId == feed.Id);

Simple, right? And to do this here is the simple extension method:

public static void Remove<T>(this IList<T> source, Func<T, bool> selector)
{
	if (source == null || selector == null)
	{
		return;
	}

	var itemsToRemove = source.Where(selector).ToList();
	itemsToRemove.ForEach(i => source.Remove(i));
}

Now, I no longer have to worry about all these things when I want to remove items based on searching my list:

Doing a separate search for the items I want to remove
Creating a new list, avoiding the pitfall of enumerating when removing and getting "Collection was modified" exceptions.
Iterating over those items and calling remove on each

Some purists out there would be mad that I just quietly allow the source/selector to be null and not throw an exception. That's how I chose to implement this, if you want different behavior that's great. Just make sure you add this extension method to your arsenal! Maybe another RemoveSingle that throws an exception if it finds 0 or more than 1 item would be appropriate to add as well?

Happy coding!

Windows Workflow Foundation 4 at PDC

David Paquette — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 05:36:11 GMT

I just finished watching a great video about WF4 from Microsoft PDC. The session is WF4 from the Inside Out by Bob Schmidt. I think he did a great job explaining how the runtime is implemented in WF4.

jQuery Receipe: Focussing a Text Input on Page

rajeshpillai — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:32:42 GMT

This edition of blog tip shows you how to focus a text input on a page to the desired element.

Use jsbin.com for executing/troubleshooting or just for learning jquery or any other popular js framework that it supports.

I'll show two ways to do this based on the scenarios you encounter.

Using jQuery $(selector).focus method when the DOM is ready:

// When the HTML DOM is ready

$(function() {
$("#elementId").focus();
});

The above works in most cases but may be annoying in situations you have a slow internet connection and the cursor may be focussed than desire as the user may have already started entering the desired input when the DOM loads and the cursor is reset again.

To avoid this put the script block immediately after the input tag where you wish to have focus on

"Upgrading" Windows Server 2008 x86 to x64

TheInspiredGecko — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 03:31:37 GMT

OK, I use the term "upgrade" a bit loosely here. There is no upgrade path from 32-bit to 64-bit versions of any edition of Windows, period.
However, you can preserve your Active Directory domain, DNS settings, websites, files, whatever, through a slightly long-winded process and get from 32-bit to 64-bit without:

Having to uninstall Active Directory from your network and then piece-meal it back together workstation by workstation;
Having to do system state backup/restores which won't restore all your other server applications (Exchange, SQL Server etc.).

I'm only running one physical server here - which was Windows Server 2008 32-bit, and then I realised about 2 hours after finishing installing, that my CPU was x64 (Intel Xeon 3.06GHz). Damn.

So to get all the 64-bit shinyness and still preserve my Active Directory, I figured out the following:

Set up a new virtual server ("Bohr") on my laptop.
Clone the existing physical server ("Einstein") hard disk and mount it on Bohr.
Configure Bohr as an additional domain controller (DC) and global catalog server (GC).
All my users, computers and settings get replicated from Einstein to Bohr.
Test all applications, databases and websites are working on Bohr.
Demote Einstein and remove it from the domain, wipe the hard disk with Eraser, format, and clean-install Windows Server 2008 x64, with new name "Brunel".
Install Active Directory on Brunel as an additional domain controller again, and watch the settings replicate back across.
Move databases and applications back.
Remove virtual server Bohr.

It appears a bit long-winded but this is the first time I've had to think about these kinds of migrations so if anyone can suggest better alternatives then please do so in the comments.

Tools I used:

Disk2VHD by Microsoft's Sysinternals team;
WinImage (free 30-day trial);
VMware Server (called ESX4 I think, but their product family names are a little confusing);

I looked at Virtual PC as I've used it before for virtualising operating systems and servers whilst working for clients, and I discovered that Windows 7 (which is what my laptop runs) has Windows Virtual PC already installed, with an image of Windows XP Pro for application backward-compatibility.
At this point I cloned Einstein's hard disk to a VHD file and went to VPC to create a new machine and mount the VHD as the hard disk.
First brick wall - VPC will only let you run XP, Vista, or Windows 7 inside VPC. So I couldn't create a virtual machine running my cloned Server 2008 (as demonstrated by the lovely error message you see here). Damn.

So I'm driven to the arms of VMware, and after a bit of reading, I download and install VMware Server. With a bit of configuration, I soon have my virtual machine.

Next brick wall - VHD is a Microsoft format, VMware won't read it. Damn.
WinImage to the rescue, which performs conversion from VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft's hard disk virtualisation format) to VMDK (VMware DisK - their format - gotta love competition for different "standards", haven't you...) - my 20GB of data takes 36 minutes to convert, apparently.

Once I have my VMDK hard disk image, I mount it to the VM (Bohr) I've created in VMware Server.

Here comes the fun bit where stuff actually gets moved around and I feel like I'm making progress instead of just clogging up my hard disk further by downloading and installing yet more software to achieve the task at hand.

I configure Bohr with a static IP address so it'll sit on my wireless network and interact with my server, laptop and router as if it were just another physical box. My laptop is close to death at this stage cause it only has 2GB of RAM (ouch) and I've allocated 1GB of it to Bohr (yes, I'm planning on an upgrade as a Christmas present to myself, along with a very nice Hugo Boss winter coat I've seen. Donations and Christmas cards accepted, preferably together :-D).

Once I'd powered on Bohr, I remoted in using VMware's Firefox browser plugin (RDP was very flaky for some reason and Bohr's network connection kept bombing) and renamed it using netdom and a little help.
Once this was done I uninstall Active Directory Domain Services entirely - Bohr can't see Einstein's domain services and so thinks it's still the only DC on the domain. A reboot later, I reinstall Active Directory as a new domain controller for the existing forest, and hey presto, my user and computer accounts and DNS settings replicate across! Shiny.

To summarise at this stage - I have two DC's on the network, one physical "Einstein" and one virtual "Bohr", which is just a clone of Einstein's hard disk, but reconfigured as an additional DC on the whole domain rather than a primary domain controller.
I've also just run a quick test on Bohr and my websites and SQL Server are functioning perfectly, including connecting via Management Studio using Windows Authentication.
Lastly, I right-click on the domain in Active Directory Users & Computers and hit "Properties", then change all domain control services from Einstein to Bohr, before uninstalling Active Directory from Einstein.

Further steps to follow, but this is most of the headache-inducing legwork done!

CodeGecko

P.S. Please submit other interesting server names using the comments box below!

Update: it's 0237 GMT and I'm installing Server 2008 x64 onto "Brunel" now. W00t. Man I need a smoke. And some sleep. Or maybe coffee.
Another update: it's now 0318 GMT and "Brunel" is installed. Definitely time for sleep.

Hello World !!!

rajeshpillai — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:16:54 GMT

I am typically starting this blog with the "Hello World" kind of post. Just to give an brief summary to the curious out there this blog will be a place where I will be putting down my experience with technologies specifically asp.net mvc, jquery, sql server, sharepoint, tdd, design patterns et el.

Also, I plan to record my learnings with developing an asp.net mvc project.

Early Retirement for SSO Config Tool

EltonStoneman — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 21:20:04 GMT

[Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman]

As Saravana Kumar has blogged, Microsoft have released an MMC snap-in for SSO configuration. It has pretty much all the functionality of the SSO Config Tool I put together a while ago, including:

UI for configuring values in an SSO application store
MSBuild task to import/export SSO settings from XML
.NET class for accessing SSO values

The .NET wrapper is pretty rudimentary, and one thing the snap-in doesn't do is generate a wrapper for typed access to SSO values. The snap-in lets you read values like this:

bool cacheEnabled = bool.Parse(SSOClientHelper.Read("SSOApp1", "CacheEnabled"));

- whereas SSO Config Tool generates a class per SSO application, which lets you read values like this:

bool cacheEnabled = SSOApp1.CacheEnabled;

Overall the snap-in is a better management tool, so I suspect I'll switch to it the next time I'm setting up config in SSO.

I'll look to extracting the functionality for generating the typed wrapper into a standalone T4 template.

Choosing Custom XML For Tagging In Word With OOXML

Tim Murphy — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:59:33 GMT

In the further adventures of OOXML we have been looking at different approaches to tagging content in a Word template to be programmatically replaced.

Initially we looked at simple in-line text as a user defined tagging system. The problem is that this is very error prone. The user has to enter the tag exactly the same every time. On top of that if the user backspaces while typing the tag or spell check flags the tag then the tag will be split into multiple tags. This is less than desirable.

Content Controls were the next option we explored. This gives you specific object types to search for, but you still have the user filling in the Tag property for each control. The user error factor is still not eliminated. The other problem is that each control has a possible different type. This is a better option, but still not optimal.

Ultimately we settled on Custom XML schema. We found that they can equally wrap all of the different types of content within a document. The user error factor is also removed because you highlight your content and then select the tag from a list. In the end you have a reliable template format and have simplified your code to locate tags.

More to come.

Technorati Tags: office open xml,OOXML,.NET

Javier Lozano’s interview for DotNetRadio is now available!

Andrew Siemer - www.andrewsiemer.com — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 18:18:13 GMT

Hey all. Just wanted to let you know that the interview that I did with Javier Lozano (lozanotek.com) is now available on DotNetRadio! This was a pretty hefty interview so I had to cut it in half. In the first half of the interview we discussed the following points.

How and why was ASP.NET MVC created?

What are the pain points of ASP.NET Webforms?

What can a WebForms developer expect when moving to ASP.NET MVC?

MVC is like BizTalk – it can do anything – it just can’t do anything out of the box!

What did ASP.NET MVC get right…what did it get wrong?

What are the differences between WebForms and MVC with regards to saving state and workflow?

What sort of validation is provided with MVC 1 or MVC2?

What is a strongly typed view and how does that work?

Creating strongly typed views and why that is important

What is the difference between a Model and a ViewModel and why would a developer want to use that?

What does the term “magic string” mean and why is that bad?

How do magic strings relate to MVC 1, MVC 2, and what tools are provided by MVC Contrib to help remove magic strings from an MVC application?

What are MVC Contrib Input Builders and how do those work?

How would you use templating in ASP.NET MVC?

How does Dynamic Data work in ASP.NET MVC?

How do you create inject-able controllers via an MVC Contrib Controller Factory?

Using inversion of control containers in the MVC framework

What is painful about the WebForms view engine used in ASP.NET MVC?

Why are there so many view engines available for MVC?

How does nVelocity make working in the View easier?

Why are code behind files the ultimate evil?

How is the workflow different in the WebForms view engine compared to other MVC view engines such as SPARK or nVelocity?

Subscribe to the podcast!

Please feel free to let me know if you have any feedback. In the next post I will put up the second half of Javier Lozano’s. And after that I will post the Sara Chipps interview!

Upcoming interviews will include include Jeffrey Palermo, Ayende Rahien, Gil Zilberfeld, Bill Pringle, Patrick Smacchia, Scott Belware, and many more! Stay tuned.

Follow me on Twitter at @asiemer and follow the show at @dnetradio.

Exchange Outlook Web Access Proxying across CAS Servers

cajunmcse — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:21:35 GMT

In many larger environments, Exchange 2007 may be deployed with multiple Client Access Servers (CAS) across the AD site boundaries. The common configuration is to have users access one CAS server from the Internet and it proxy the request to a different CAS in the AD site where the user’s mailbox is located.

The Internet facing CAS server should have the Internal URL populated with Forms Based Authentication (FBA) and Basic Authentication enabled. The External URL is optional. The authentication method can be any of the 3 configurations allowed, Domain\Username, Username only, or UPN (email address).

NOTE: A stumbling block here is that Integrated Windows Authentication needs to be enabled on the OWA virtual directory. There isn’t a way to enable both FBA and Integrated Windows Authentication from inside the EMC, so IIS Manager must be used.

The second CAS at the remote AD site needs to have FBA disabled with Basic and Integrated Windows Authentication enabled through the EMC. Also the internal URL must be populated with a name the first CAS can resolve through DNS. Ensure that port 443 is clear between both servers. You can test the SSL connectivity by performing a telnet from the first server to the second over port 443.

NOTE: If the external URL is populated on the remote CAS server, OWA will give the user a new URL to try instead of proxying his request. Remember to leave this field blank.

With this configuration, a user accessing OWA from the Internet will get proxied to the best available CAS server in the same AD site his mailbox resides in. Internal Users who access the remote CAS will be automatically authenticated through the Integrated Windows Authentication and then served their mailbox or given the FBA page then proxied to the correct AD site if they access the internet facing CAS.

Another random post

Theo Moore — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:32:20 GMT

Been awhile since I posted. So, what have I been up to lately?

Good question!
Mostly been working a lot with the our most current release. I've been involved with more and more project work these days and less generic single, one-shot tickets at work. Upside is that I am very busy, downside is that I haven't been really able to work on our automation suite very much.
However, I did manage to get some time to work on a .Net testbench application for our new hardware solution. It is a USB device that is driven by a data stream on the machine. I have written an test rig application that can drive the device directly and extract readings from the hardware, logging them in an easily graphable form. The company responsible for manufacturing our device has done tests, but we want our own set run internally as an audit. My prototype of the testbench was well recieved, although I sort of threw it together as more of a POC rather than a full-flegded app. I've been asked to add some more functionality next week which I am going to use as an opportunity to refactor it.
I also wrote an automated test app that exposed/proved a significant flaw in our system, even though it had be pretty much dismissed by the development team. It was thought to be a "corner case" until I could replicate the behaviou approx. 10% of the time. Score one for automated testing!

Asynchronous Method Invocation [Very good code project article]

mbcrump — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:50:31 GMT

I wanted to share this with everyone that wanted a very simple explanation of Asynchronous Method Invocation. Check it out:

www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/AsyncMethodInvocation.aspx

Sample:

private void button3_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

MethodInvoker simpleDelegate = new MethodInvoker(Test);

simpleDelegate.Invoke();

}

private void Test()

{

MessageBox.Show("TEST");

}

Including custom client-side validations in your ASP.NET MVC app

Thomas Weller — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 06:00:00 GMT

This post is a follow-up on my series about validating business objects throughout different layers of a software system - domain, persistence, and (ASP.NET MVC) GUI. It demonstrates how a self-written validation can be incorporated into a web page (using a bit of JavaScript) and how this can be mapped to a custom validation on the domain side.

A short recap

In the first part of the above mentioned series, we developed a simple, custom validation aspect that checks if a value really is a member of a specified enumeration. Here's the typical usage for this EnumValue attribute:


[EnumValue(typeof(Gender))]
public Gender Gender
{
    get { return this.gender; }
    set { this.gender = value; }
}

And this is the validation method that gets called in the end:


if (!Enum.IsDefined(EnumType, @value))
{
    throw new ValidationException(string.Format(
        "'{0}' is not a valid value for enumerations of type '{1}'.",
        @value,
        EnumType.FullName));
}

In the third part of the series then, I demonstrated how server-side validations (using the PostSharp-based ValidationAspects framework) can be "translated" to client-side validations that reside in ASP.NET MVC pages, using the xVal framework to do the mapping.

Using a custom xVal rule together with a custom JScript function

The aforementioned post showed only the mapping for the built-in aspects of the VA library. To do the same thing for our custom EnumValue attribute, we must declare another xVal RulesProvider, which is specific to this attribute, and provides a set of xVal rules that correspond to the EnumValue attribute. The xVal framework provides the PropertyAttributeRuleProviderBase<TAttribute> base class for this purpose, all we have to do is to provide an implementation of the MakeValidationRulesFromAttribute enumeration method for the specific attribute. Here's the declaration for the EnumValue validation aspect:


public class EnumValueRulesProvider : PropertyAttributeRuleProviderBase<EnumValueAttribute>
{
    protected override IEnumerable<Rule> MakeValidationRulesFromAttribute(EnumValueAttribute attribute)
    {
        yield return new RequiredRule(); // field must not be empty
 
        const string jsMethodName = "isOneOf";
        var parameters = new { allowedValues = Enum.GetNames(attribute.EnumType),
                               secretValue = "EASTER_EGG" };
        string errorMessage = string.Format("Not a valid value for the '{0}' enumeration.",
                                            attribute.EnumType.Name);
 
        yield return new CustomRule(jsMethodName, parameters, errorMessage); // checks actual value against enum values
    }
 
} // class EnumValueRulesProvider

As you can see, the EnumValue validation aspect is represented by two xVal rules on the client side: The first one (xVal's RequiredRule) makes sure that there actually is some value provided on the web form, whereas the second one is a bit more interesting: An instance of the CustomRule class is used to reference a self-written JScript function ("isOneOf()") along with the required parameters ("allowedValues" and "secretValue") and the error message that should appear in case of validation failures. The function arguments must be provided in the form of an anonymous type, with the individual items as its members.

And of course, our new RulesProvider must be registered with the application on startup. Hence, the following line must be added to the Application_Start() event handler in Global.asax.cs:


xVal.ActiveRuleProviders.Providers.Add(new EnumValueRulesProvider());

Now on to the client side. A JScript function, that is referenced in an xVal CustomRule class, must take three parameters:

value: the value to validate (usually the content of some sort of HTML input element)
element: the HTML input element itself
params: an array that contains the CustomRule-provided method arguments

The function should return true or false, depending on the result of the validation operation. The above referenced isOneOf() function could look like this:


// Return true if 'value' matches one of the values in 'params.allowedValues' (case insensitive).
// Used in a custom xVal rule to map the 'EnumValue' VA aspect.
//
// Parameters
// ----------
//
// params.allowedValues
// Comma-separated list of possible values for the 'value' param
// params.secretValue
// A 'secret' string (for demo purposes)
function isOneOf(value, element, params) {
    if (params.secretValue == value) {
        alert("Congratulations!\nYou have found the secret value (but it won't validate...).");
    }
    var possibleValues = params.allowedValues
                               .toString()
                               .toLowerCase()
                               .split(",");
    var valueToCheck = value.toString().toLowerCase();
    for (i = 0; i < possibleValues.length; i++) {
        if (possibleValues[i] == valueToCheck) {
            return true;
        }
    }
    return false;
}

That's it! Quite simple and straightforward. As a result, we will have a client-side validation similar to this:

...or this, respectively:

I could think of many possible use cases for this technique of mapping C# validations (server-side) to JScript functions (client-side)...

Performance bottleneck - Low latency interface

kapilc — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:12:01 GMT

Background:

Out of first few tasks that were assigned to me in my new project, I was asked to help testing team with promoting an existing partially tested BizTalk interface. After little bit of code re-factoring and ensuring that the design has been simplified (removed some unwanted logging etc.), we put code to the test. Functionality wise there were not many issues which surprised us and we quickly got over it. However, it wasn’t for long that we realized that there was some obvious issue hidden somewhere beneath the layers of the code, which ultimately got highlighted during our stress testing of the interface.

Interface Scenario:

Customers make a call into BizTalk - HTTP receive-location hosted under IIS (normal setup). This in turn instantiate an orchestration that makes a call into a backend ERP application (slow in nature) using custom-written socket code. In case of positive response from ERP application it simply maps a result back on to the HTTP response body. In case of an exception; orchestration tries to fetch a custom response configured in one of the custom SQL Server tables and maps this to the body of HTTP response.

(I believe that SQL adapter was not used as the .net code to manage configuration held in SQL Server was presented as a library code and was been used from various other locations of the solution/s)

Crunch Time:

All was going reasonably well while we stressed the interface with the gush of inbound HTTP requests though we felt that it was slightly below our expectations. It was expected performance though. Then we attempted to perform a little bit of negative testing. One of the guys (always happy chap) here, kindly obliged by switching ERP into the mode that started to refuse any request. We thought that this should reduce overall latency time greatly as ERP processing time has simply been discarded out of the equation. To our surprise, interface slowed down heavily, BizTalk started to queue up messages, overall thread usage shot up, spool table started growing (and was very resistant to SQL purge jobs) etc etc..

All this behavior at first came as a shock to us and drove us mad for the good few minutes. I started looking for bottleneck/s. Surprisingly, BizTalk was not throttling, which indicated to me that thresholds haven’t been broken yet. So what the hell was slowing interface down? Well, it soon became obvious when I looked into the HAT and noticed that the call to the .Net code that pulls custom response message back from the custom table was taking horribly long (in the region of 15-20 seconds). That was the first time I looked into that part of the solution and found that the way configuration was interrogated was by using inline “Select” statements which were fired against the SQL Server. No need to say that this style of coding has a major affect on the performance. Anyways, I quickly modified the code by pushing the logic into the stored procedure and do another round of stress testing. The performance gains were astonishing. We gained 80% in performance and all quickly fell in place.

The bit that surprised me was that this is a well known fact in the industry and still we sometimes manage to overlook it and end up paying performance penalties. Good that we picked this up in our test rounds; otherwise on production it could have been really difficult (with lot more and types of interfaces) to isolate the performance bottlenecks.

Therefore, the moral of a story is “Never-ever use inline SQL statements in your .Net code or for that matter any front end production ready application code”.

Ps: One of the reasons that I wrote this blog is; on numerous occasions I have come across situations when people bash BizTalk for all sorts of issues without really understanding the underline design and real bottlenecks in the solutions.

Below are some numbers that backs up the story above:

HTTP-Sync message processing benchmarking

Inputs

	Number of threads	150
	Submission batch size	150
	Sleep interval between each submission (ms)	1
	Total num of messages	600

Result

	Old Code (With inline SQL execution)

RA1	Start Time	25/11/2009 13:07
RA2	Stop Time	25/11/2009 13:14:28
RA3	Total time taken (seconds)	430.9
RA4	Number of messages processed /sec	1.4



	New Code (Using stored procedure)

RB1	Start Time	25/11/2009 13:19
RB2	Stop Time	25/11/2009 13:21
RB3	Total time taken (seconds)	80.85
RB4	Number of messages processed /sec	7.42


	Performance gain (secs)	350.05
	Performance gain (%)	81.23694593

Redirection for Outlook Web Access with IIS 7 for Internal and External URLs

cajunmcse — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:16:15 GMT

Http to Https redirection is commonly a preferred configuration for Outlook Web Access for most organizations. The challenges presented in IIS7 are that the built-in redirection feature only allows relative redirection without a full URL entered. To perform Http to Https, the full URL is required. This becomes an issue when organizations are trying to redirect for both internal and external users who commonly are using different URLs to access the server.

The solution is 2 fold.

First, turn on relative redirection by entering the the virtual directory for exchange and checking the “Only redirect requests to content in this directory (not subdirectories)”

NOTE: Http Redirect is a feature in Windows 2008 and must be installed through the Features in Server Manager or through the cmd prompt:

c:\>servermanagercmd –i Web-Http-Redirect

NOTE: “Require SSL” needs to be turned off on the Default Web Site. In IIS 7 this will also turn if off on all the virtual directories. Each virtual directory will have to have “Require SSL” turned back on individually.

NOTE: When you apply redirection to the Default Web Site, redirection will also be applied to all subdirectories. It needs to be unchecked on all directories except the Default Web Site.

Secondly, the Http to Https redirection need to be enabled for any URL entered whether its an external FQDN or an internal server name. There is a great article here on Using custom Error 403.4 to perform HTTPS redirects in IIS 7

Update to Silverlight Cream #743

Dave Campbell — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 13:54:05 GMT

Please note a link change for AfricanGeek in my last SC post.

For some reason that I'll have to figure out later, my code didn't form the link correctly because I Ileft off "http://"

But it's correct now, so check it out... Silverlight 4 video tutorials!

I'm going to be dark for a couple days celebrating Thanksgiving, I hope everyone does the same and has a great Thanksgiving... even if you aren't in the U.S. :)

Stay in the 'Light!

BizTalk Server Roadmap 2009 & Beyond…

SURESH GIRIRAJAN — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 13:47:53 GMT

Check the BizTalk road map - PDC presentation on BizTalk Server 2009 R2: http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/SVR15

Check the BizTalk Server 2009 R2 on Windows app fabric from BTS Team blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalk_server_team_blog/archive/2009/11/20/biztalk-server-strong-roadmap-and-innovations-preview-presented-at-pdc.aspx

Parsing argument line with a folder-parameter ending with backslash

Marko Apfel — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 04:21:11 GMT

By using the argument line array of Main(string[] args) it is important to know such effect.

If you specify a quoted folder (e.g. "C:\Projects\PDE\PRJ_EsriDE_Common\trunk\code\Commons\bin\Debug\") the ending backslash makes troubles.

My whole argument line (linebreaked for better viewing):

     -inDir:"C:\Projects\PDE\PRJ_EsriDE_Common\trunk\code\Commons\bin\Debug\"

    -recursive:false

    -filter:*

    -separation:AssemblySeparated

    -outDir:"C:\Projects\PDE\PRJ_EsriDE_Common\trunk\code\Commons\bin\Debug\"

    -outFile:AllInOneReg

    -outFormat:RegistryFile

is wrongly splitted to:

The following variant without a ending backslash:

    -inDir:"C:\Projects\PDE\PRJ_EsriDE_Common\trunk\code\Commons\bin\Debug"

    -recursive:false

    -filter:*

    -separation:AssemblySeparated

    -outDir:"C:\Projects\PDE\PRJ_EsriDE_Common\trunk\code\Commons\bin\Debug"

    -outFile:AllInOneReg

    -outFormat:RegistryFile

is no problem:

and also the forward slashes:

    -inDir:"C:/Projects/PDE/PRJ_EsriDE_Common/trunk/code/Commons/bin/Debug/"

    -recursive:false

    -filter:*

    -separation:AssemblySeparated

    -outDir:"C:/Projects/PDE/PRJ_EsriDE_Common/trunk/code/Commons/bin/Debug/"

    -outFile:AllInOneReg

    -outFormat:RegistryFile

works in both variants (with and without an ending one):

Our plan for the next few months…

Max — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:35:43 GMT

We look to learn the Silverlight, WPF and ASP.NET MVC 2 over the next few months. We’ll start developing a data driven application to explore each one of these. I am now in the process of finding a sample database for use.

We will start our tutorials from next week. Stay tuned until then.

Technorati Tags: ASP.NET,MVC,Silverlight,WPF

TFS 2010 Beta 2 – Upgrading Builds from TFS 2008

Jakob Ehn — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:23:13 GMT

We are in the process of upgrading the entire company to TFS 2010 Beta 2, and in preparing for that we have done some test upgrades to make sure that all things work as expected after the upgrade. As expected, most issues that turned up had to do with builds. This is one of the areas that has changed the most compared to TFS 2008. I thought that I would use this post to run through some of the issues that we found.

First of all, when upgrading a TFS 2008 to TFS 2010 Beta 2, all build definitions will be upgraded. They will all be redefined to use the UpgradeProcessTemplate build process template in the new Windows Workflow based build engine. Jim Lamb has a good post that describes this here http://blogs.msdn.com/jimlamb/archive/2009/11/03/upgrading-tfs-2008-build-definitions-to-tfs-2010.aspx

A nice feature is that you can still use Visual Studio 2008 to create new build definitions in a TFS 2010 server. Under the surface, this will create a build definition using the UpgradeBuildProcess template and it will check in the TFSBuild.proj/rsp files for you. So it will actually be easier to use VS2008 to do this rather than VS 2010, when creating builds targeting legacy MSBuild builds.

So, what issues did we run into after the upgrade?

Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client.BuildServerException: Updating build information is not supported from this client. Please use a client compatible with Team Foundation Build Codename Rosario and try again

When running our release builds, most of them failed after the upgrade with this error message. It happened in several different custom build tasks that we have developed inhouse. The thing they had in common was that they were trying to update the running build. For example when adding/updating build steps using the InformationNodeConverter.AddBuildStep method. Also when attaching custom build data using the IBuildInformationNode interface we got the same error.

Actually this error message is the same that you get when trying to work against a TFS 2010 Beta 2 instance from a VS2008 client that does not have the VSTS 2008 SP1 Forward Compatibility Update installed. Even with the upgrade installed there are still things that can’t be done using VSTS 2008. For example you can create a new build definition from a VSTS 2008 client, but you can’t edit it. Try and you will get this dialog:

The problem for our build tasks are of course that they were still compiled against the old 9.0 version of the TFS API assemblies. You need to reference the 10.0 version of these assemblies, and the only place that I have been able to locate them at so far is at: %PROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\ReferenceAssemblies\v2.0:

The version of these assembies are 10.0.21006.1. I would assume that these assemblies was installed somewhere when installing the Forward Compatibility Upgrade but I haven’t found them anywhere so far.

The command ""\..\..\Common7\IDE\tf.exe" checkout /recursive xxxxxx exited with code 3
This was another problem that turned up after the upgrade. We use the tf.exe command line tool a lot during builds. For example we check out and in files, we create and modify workspaces etc. In our 2008 build definitions we define a property that contains the full path to tf.exe like this:

<TF>"$(TeamBuildRefPath)\..\tf.exe"</TF>

TeamBuildRefPath is a Team Build property that provides the path to Team Build binaries (the logger, tasks, etc.). Typically %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies. But in TFS 2010 Beta 2 this property has been changed which of course breaks the builds using it like this. We can see where this change is done by looking at the file TFSBuild.rsp that is generated on the fly by Team Build and is located in the BuildType folder. This file contains all the properties that are used when running MSBuild on the TFSBuild.proj file and is a miz of generated properties and the ones that you can define in your own TFSBuild.rsp file in source control. Here is a sample of this file:

### Begin Team Build Generated Arguments ###

/dl:BuildLogger,"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Tools\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Server.Logger.dll";"BuildUri=vstfs:///Build/Build/43;TFSUrl=http://tfsrtm08:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection;TFSProjectFile=C:\Builds\2\project\xxxx\BuildType\TFSBuild.proj;InformationNodeId=2769;LogFilePerProject=False;"*BuildForwardingLogger,"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Tools\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Server.Logger.dll";"BuildUri=vstfs:///Build/Build/43;TFSUrl=http://tfsrtm08:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection;TFSProjectFile=C:\Builds\2\project\xxx\BuildType\TFSBuild.proj;InformationNodeId=2769;"
/fl /flp:"logfile=C:\Builds\2\project\xxxx\BuildType\BuildLog.txt;encoding=Unicode;verbosity=normal;"
/p:ProjectFileVersion="3"
/p:BuildDefinition="xxxx"
/p:BuildDefinitionId="5"
/p:DropLocation="\\TFSRTM08\Drop"
/p:BuildProjectFolderPath="%24/project/xxxxxx/Main/Build/Test"
/p:BuildUri="vstfs:///Build/Build/43"
/p:TeamFoundationServerUrl="http://tfsrtm08:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection"
/p:TeamProject="project"
/p:BuildAgentName="TFSRTM08 - Agent1"
/p:MachineName="TFSRTM08"
/p:BuildAgentUri="vstfs:///Build/Agent/2"
/p:BuildDirectory="C:\Builds\2\project\xxxxx"
/p:BuildAgentId="2"
/p:SourceGetVersion="C10"
/p:LastGoodBuildLabel="xxxxx”
/p:LastBuildNumber="xxxxx_20091116.4"
/p:LastGoodBuildNumber="xxxxx_20091110.4"
/p:NoCICheckInComment="%2a%2a%2aNO_CI%2a%2a%2a"
/p:IsDesktopBuild="False"
/p:TeamBuildRefPath="C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Tools\\"
/t:EndToEndIteration

### End Team Build Generated Arguments ###

### Begin Checked In TfsBuild.rsp Arguments ###

# This is a response file for MSBuild
# Add custom MSBuild command line options in this file

### End Checked In TfsBuild.rsp Arguments ###

So the TeamBuildRefPath now points to the Tools folder below the TFS 2010 install folder. But tf.exe is typically installed at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE. At the moment, we have resorted to redefining our TF property by using the full path which of course is not a very good solution. But it works, until we find what other MSBuild property we can use to reference to the 10.0 path

Work Items are not associated with builds
When running builds, we noticed that sometimes the workitems that had been associated with the changesets for the build were not associated with build. When looking more closely on the build log, this warning were generated:

C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\TeamBuild\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets (1162): TF42093: The work item xxx could not be updated with build information. The field Microsoft.VSTS.Build.IntegrationBuild is not available on this work item.

This turned out to be a known bug in TFS Beta 2 and affects all work item types that do not have the Microsoft.VSTS.Build.IntegrationBuild field. At the moment there is no work around for this problem than to add this field to all your work item types.

Aside from these problems, the upgraded builds works fine in TFS 2010 Beta 2, which is reassuring because we can still use our investments in the TFS 2008 build process. WE are about to migrate our build process to 2010, using Windows Workflow instead of MSBuild, but this means that we don’t have to do this immediately.

Microsoft Business Intelligence Project Booster Kit

Patrick Olurotimi Ige — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 07:01:11 GMT

I just came across this article and i taught its a good resource for BI Developers and other Analysts.
Hope it helps

Silverlight Cream for November 24, 2009 - 2 -- #743 - updated

Dave Campbell — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 05:45:18 GMT

In this Issue: African Geek, Alan Mendelevich, Jeff Wilcox, CorrinaB, Tim Heuer, Jeff Handley, Timmy Kokke, Cameron Albert, Antoni Dol, and Fredrik Normén.

Shoutouts:

Check out the WCF RIA Services Code Gallery on MSDN ... lots of good resources there!

The Silverlight Team Blog posted a new Silverlight Podcast: Expression Encoder 3

Timmy Kokke has his code and slides up from Dutch Code Camp 2009

Michael Wolf has a Tim Sneath Interview on Silverlight 4 and WPF up on his blog.

Check out Joe Stegman's Channel 9 video: Joe Stegman: Silverlight 4 - Out of Browser Evolves

From SilverlightCream.com:

Silverlight 4 Video Tutorials: So much for quality control, I had African Geeks' link messed up last night, but it's correct now. Yes I know this is the same link for all of African Geek's postings, but they're in his scrolling video menu... he's got two new ones in there (on the left) that are the first two of a 4-parter on Silverlight 4. Both using the right-click menu and printing... cool!
Writing WPF/Silverlight compatible code. Part 4: Geometries: Alan Mendelevich continues with part 4 of a series on writing code that's compatible to WPF and Silverlight. This time out he's talking about geometry... and there are differences... check out his post for the details.
Walkthrough: The power of the November 2009 Silverlight Toolkit testing tools: Jeff Wilcox blogs about the new features in the Toolkit drop and gives a walkthrough of installing the toolkit and Creating a Silverlight class library with unit testing.
Windows System Color Theme for Silverlight: CorrinaB hits a homerun again with a mapping to Windows System colors ... check out the project to download... and provide feedback! ... this is great stuff...
Fixing Visual Studio 2010 and Blend Preview for .NET 4 integration: Tim Heuer comes to our rescue as usual with a solution to the problem of not being able to 'open in Expression Blend' in VS2010... be sure to read Tim's warning as well!
(Not) Doing Back Flips with DomainDataSource [SubmitChanges sends user to first page]: Jeff Handley reports on a change that was made to resolve a (possible) problem with paging after SubmitChanges() that actually ended up being pretty 'heavy handed' (their words)... read about it and the bug they've turned in on it, and how to make it NOT do what the change is trying to do.
SilverBullet #13 - System.Threading.SynchronizationContext: Timmy Kokke has his Silver Bullet #13 up on the site, discussing System.Threading.SynchronizationContext with sample code to demonstrate.
Silverlight Tile Map using WriteableBitmap: Cameron Albert took some WriteableBitmap code that Bill Reiss produced and turned it into a tiled map creator for his game... check it out... it's too cool!
Silverlight Style: GlassBorderStyle: Antoni Dol has an awesome glass button up on their new Silverlight & Expression Insiders site ... real quick drop-in :)
WCF RIA Services and DTO with association: Fredrik Normén has a post up about WCF RIA Services and DTO... specifically addressing sending an object graph that includes an association to other objects.

Stay in the 'Light!

Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 SilverlightCream

Limit the Number to be Selected in the ListBox control - (Server Side way)

Vincent Maverick Durano — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 02:52:53 GMT

One of the members in the forum (forums.asp.net) is asking how to limit the number of selected items in the ListBox and so contributors (including me) gave the OP (Original Poster) different ideas on how to validate it. Some of them provided solution using pure JavaScripts and a mixture of code behind and JavaScript. However the OP doesn’t want to use JavaScript validation for some reason, so I decided to post the solution that I have provided on that thread as a reference to others.

Here it is:

ASPX:

</head>

<body>

<div>

<asp:ListBox ID="ListBox1" runat="server" AutoPostBack="True" Height="109px" SelectionMode="Multiple" OnSelectedIndexChanged="ListBox1_SelectedIndexChanged" Width="141px">

<asp:ListItem >A</asp:ListItem>

<asp:ListItem >B</asp:ListItem>

<asp:ListItem >C</asp:ListItem>

<asp:ListItem >D</asp:ListItem>

<asp:ListItem >E</asp:ListItem>

<asp:ListItem >F</asp:ListItem>

</asp:ListBox>

</div>

</form>

</body>

</html>

CODE BEHIND:

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) {

if (!Page.IsPostBack)

{

ListBox1.ClearSelection();

}

protected void ListBox1_SelectedIndexChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

int count = 0;

int limit = 0;

int lastSelectedIndex = 0;

if(ViewState["lastSelectedIndex"] != null){

lastSelectedIndex = int.Parse(ViewState["lastSelectedIndex"].ToString());

ViewState["lastSelectedIndex"] = lastSelectedIndex;

}

else{

lastSelectedIndex = ListBox1.SelectedIndex;

}

for (int i = 0; i < ListBox1.Items.Count; i++) {

if (ListBox1.Items[i].Selected) {

if (ViewState["CountLimit"] != null) {

count++;

ViewState["CountLimit"] = count;

limit = (int)ViewState["CountLimit"];

}

else {

count++;

ViewState["CountLimit"] = count;

}

if (limit > 3) // Selected Item Limit is up to 3

{

Page.ClientScript.RegisterStartupScript(this.GetType(), "ShowBox", "alert('You are only allowed to Select 3 items!');", true);

ListBox1.Items[lastSelectedIndex].Selected = false;

}

That's it! Hope you will find this example useful!

Windows CE Chat Transcript (November 24, 2009)

Bruce Eitman — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 01:40:18 GMT

For those of you who missed the chat today, here is the raw transcript. By raw, I mean that I copied and pasted the discussion without any edits. This is divided into two parts, the top part is the answers from the Microsoft Experts and the bottom part is the questions from the audience.

Answers from Microsoft:

msft_davbo (Moderator): Our chat today covers the topic of Windows Embedded CE!

1. This chat will last for one hour. During this hour, our Experts will respond to as many questions as they can. Please understand that there may be some questions we cannot respond to due to lack of information or because the information is not yet public.

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msft_davbo (Moderator): We are pleased to welcome our Experts for today’s chat. I will have them introduce themselves now.

Chat will begin in a couple of minutes.

<http://www.Microsoft.com/Embedded>;

mskim_MSFT (Expert)[12:01]: Hello, this is mskim from Windows CE JDP team.

RajeevDubey[MS] (Expert)[12:01]: Hi, this is Rajeev Dubey, Program Manager for Bluetooth.

mikehall_ms (Moderator)[12:02]: Hi, I'm Mike Hall, Software Architect

Sing Wee [MS] (Expert)[12:05]: Hello, I'm Sing Wee, member of the CoreOS/BSP Test Team.

FBlanq_MSFT (Expert)[12:05]: Hi, I'm Francisco Blanquicet, SDET with CoreOS/WinCE

msft_davbo (Moderator)[12:05]: Chat is started so ask any questions you may have about Windows CE.

rajran[MSFT] (Expert)[12:06]: Hi , I'm Rajeev Rangappa, PM in Core Team

kurtken_msft (Expert)[12:09]:

Q: [1] hi experts, is there any way to provide debug information for assembler files (.s) to the debugger so that i can step through the sources? currently only exported symbols are visible to the debugger

A: As far as I know, the only way to step into and through assembler sources is to either (1) first switch to the 'disassembly' pane of the debugger, then either set a breakpoint on a CPU instruction, or (2) switch to the disassembly view in the source view and "step into" a function call. (bl on ARM, call on X86)

kurtken_msft (Expert)[12:13]:

Q: [6] [1] so there is no way to get debug info for assembler files into the pdb files?

A: What kind of info are you wanting to get into the PDB files? What is missing and what way are you accessing information?

kurtken_msft (Expert)[12:16]:

Q: [11] [6] i know i can step i the disassembler view, but it is somewhat painful without the coments of the sourcefile. So I would like to see and step in the assembler sourcefile while debugging like when debugging c or cpp files

A: ah, so what you're wanting is a mixed assembler/code bytes view. I do not thing our tools currently have such a view for the Windows CE debugger. You would have to open a source code window side-by-side in platform builder to see the comments.

kurtken_msft (Expert)[12:17]:

Q: [12] [6] also local (not exported] labels are not known to the debugger

A: No, unfortunately local assembler labels are not accounted for in the debugging information.

kurtken_msft (Expert)[12:17]:

Q: [13] [11] well thats the way i spend most of my time

A: We can give this feedback to our tool chain developers. Thanks for the input.

mskim_MSFT (Expert)[12:22]:

Q: [15] XAML + Other Windows: I have an MFC app which contains window based user draw controls (caches and draws bitmaps and overlays data on them). I want to update the UI to use XAML. How can I embed some of these existing controls in the XAML app?

A: Here is MSDN link regarding Win32Control in Silverlight for Windows Embedded.

mskim_MSFT (Expert)[12:23]:

A: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee502772.aspx

mskim_MSFT (Expert)[12:24]:

A: Yes, you can use Win32Control in Silverlight for Windows Embedded. Here is the link on msdn regarding Win32Contro. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee502772.aspx

Travis Hobrla [MS] (Expert)[12:25]:

Q: [2] hi experts, i have integrated lint in the build prrocess. to see the output i have used the build_markers for C files, so they are also shown as c files in the summary. is there any way to show them with the "other files", in other words which build marker

A: Drivers should get notifications when suspend is happening if there's a driver that's not responding to a notification properly (in this case the driver for the RAM file system), you can definitely expect resource leaks or other bad behavior. Since this problem occurs only after a few suspends/resumes, I suspect that a very large amount of memory is being leaked - much more than the size of the file you're opening and closing. To debug this, I think you will want to instrument your app. As a next step, can you track the available object store space in your thread and try to understand more deeply how the memory is being used? See GetStoreInformation (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa916952.aspx). After that, it may be worthwhile to turn on DEBUGZONEs in filesys.dll to see if there are any useful messages that can help you understand the situation.

Travis Hobrla [MS] (Expert)[12:25]: Ack

Travis Hobrla [MS] (Expert)[12:25]: Answered the wrong question, one moment!

Travis Hobrla [MS] (Expert)[12:26]:

Q: [10] I'm creating the file in RAMFS, and I don't believe my thread can have any leak considering it's just opening and closing the same file. Do you have any idea what could go wrong ? Thank you.

Sing Wee [MS] (Expert)[12:26]:

Q: [13] [11] well thats the way i spend most of my time

A: I just tried something similar to this. In a debug build, I break into my C code, and go to disassembly view. I see the assembly code inline with my C code and my comments, so I would expect you should be able to see your assembly code inline with your comments as well.

mskim_MSFT (Expert)[12:26]:

Q: [16] XAML + Other Windows: Effectively I want to skin the current app using XAML. Maybe there are some examples shipped with R3?

A: In R3, there is a IEsample_exr in public\ie\oak you can reference. How to skin the existing application with Silverlight for Windows Embedded.

Travis Hobrla [MS] (Expert)[12:27]: @winceLover: use "Ask the Experts"

Travis Hobrla [MS] (Expert)[12:29]:

Q: [18] hi experts, is there an easy way to enable debug zones in advance for dlls that haven't been loaded yet? Some dlls only get loaded while an application is running and by the time I get to click on Target->CE Debug Zones-><module name> it's already too late

A: I would recommend the "Host side (desktop) registry" method outlined here: http://blogs.msdn.com/ce_base/archive/2006/12/18/debug-messages-and-debug-zones-in-windows-ce.aspx

Travis Hobrla [MS] (Expert)[12:32]:

Q: [20] [10] - I will try to track the memory used in my thread more thoroughly. It's too bad I can't use KITL at that point as I'm doing suspend/resumes tests. So Travis, you're saying that there might be a leak in the RAM file system (which is public code) ?

A: It's certainly possible, but there is more investigation which is required before you can be sure.

Travis Hobrla [MS] (Expert)[12:33]:

Q: [19] Sing Wee [13] well that doesn't work for assembler files, at least in my environment, although I have to say I use trace32 vom lauterbach most of the time. But this is the behaviour i would wish for .s files.

A: It's a good feature request for the tools but I don't think we have any support for it right now. Sorry!

Travis Hobrla [MS] (Expert)[12:37]:

Q: [17] hi experts, is there a way to put additional items to the clean target without modifying makefile.def?

A: I believe the only way is during the WINCETARGETFILES or WINCETARGETFILES0 phase, you could completely override the clean rule in your own makefile.inc.

Sing Wee [MS] (Expert)[12:37]:

A: I haven't tried this over suspend/resume cycles, but have you by any chance tried using AppVerifier to see if you can catch where memory may be leaking from?

Sing Wee [MS] (Expert)[12:39]:

Q: [23] Sing Wee [19] well, perhaps there are not much assembler junkies out there , thank you any way

A: No worries. Out of curiosity, are you doing this in CE6 or CE5? My observations were based on CE6.

msft_davbo (Moderator)[12:40]:

Q: [22] We need to give camera data to the appln for displaying it on the WINCE 6.0 device LCD or we need to send the camera frames to the device USB video class for displaying at the desktop PC app.IS both my requirement will be acheived by DSHOW camera driver?

A: Yes DirectShow is the best place to build your camera application. Check Mike Hall's blog for a USB Camera Driver download http://blogs.msdn.com/mikehall/archive/2007/06/07/download-ce-6-0-usb-camera-driver.aspx. This driver allows you to pull in frames into DirectShow from a USB attached camera on Windows CE. For communicating to a Desktop you'd need to build a custom communication sink filter to send the frames from Windows CE to a corresponding custom source filter on the Desktop. If interested can post a sample on codeplex w/ details on setting up the filters send email to davbo@microsoft.com.

kurtken_msft (Expert)[12:40]:

Q: [21] What is the best way to setup a filesystem storing hive registry ? In our system, the SD card will be the storage holding it. Should we setup the SD card as MountPermanent, and are there other registry keys worth setting ?

A: Is the SD card fixed in place in your unit? If so, you should be safe to mount the card permanently. Also, make sure it is set to mount at boot time. For reference, examine some existing drivers that use persistent store for their registry

mskim_MSFT (Expert)[12:40]:

Q: Prabu, what's UVC stack?

ks [MS] (Expert)[12:40]:

A: And which public code RAMFS driver are you using? The RAMDISK, RAMFMD or?

Travis Hobrla [MS] (Expert)[12:40]:

A: In addition to what Kurt said, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa914710.aspx gives you a good introduction. Basically you need to make sure the registry for your SD driver is wrapped in ;HIVE BOOT SECTION tags, as well as anything that driver depends on, so that it can get loaded in phase 0.

Sing Wee [MS] (Expert)[12:44]:

Q: [27] Sing Wee [23] i am doing CE6, porting to a OMAP platform, currently working on the bootloader, but work is proceeded to jump to BootloaderMain

A: Understood - thanks.

Sing Wee [MS] (Expert)[12:47]:

Q: [26] [20] Sing Wee : I haven't tried using AppVerifier, does it support well checking leaks while suspending/resuming the system ?

A: That's the part I haven't tried. AppVerifier keeps track of memory by monitoring calls to allocate/deallocate memory on processes/DLLs you point it at. *If* it works over suspend/resume, the checkpoint/delta feature might help you narrow down the problem more quickly. I'm having difficulty finding my original posting, but a copy of it has apparently made it here: http://www.pocketpcjunkies.com/Uwe/Forum.aspx/wince-test/481/Can-app-verifier-detect-memory-leak-in-a-driver

Travis Hobrla [MS] (Expert)[12:49]:

Q: [28] [21] - yes, this is setup correctly and works fine, until going to suspend/resume, where the SD gets unmounted and remounted. My question is : should we absolutely keep the power on to the SD card (it's never removed), and set it as MountPermanent ?

A: You should be able to call RegFlushKey (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa917036.aspx) during your power-down code and unmount / remount.

msft_davbo (Moderator)[12:49]:

Q: [24] Using DSHOW layer can we give the camera frames to the client UVC stack?

A: Is you question about around if you have a Windows CE Web Camera and plug into a Desktop Machine how to provide the frames from Windows CE to the Desktop UVC Stack? Desktop MSDN info for UVC Stack http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee349147.aspx.

ks [MS] (Expert)[12:50]:

A: In addtion to keep the power (or handle the power cycle correctly), MountPermanent , you SD Host controller driver should never simulate a card replug after suspend/resume.

Travis Hobrla [MS] (Expert)[12:51]:

Q: [30] Travis [17] I am not sure if i understand you right, the WINCETARGETFILES targets are executed after building so not really good for cleaning, WINCETARGETFILE0 are executed before compiling, but what if only the clean target is performed?

A: Do you mean by calling 'nmake clean' ?

Travis Hobrla [MS] (Expert)[12:53]:

Q: [33] Travis [17] yes, for example, or clicking Build - Clean in VS2005

A: Unforunately I don't think there is a way to handle 'nmake clean' without modifying makefile.def. Build - Clean I believe executes "build -c" which would execute the WINCETARGETFILES0 pass - you could do cleanup at that point, before things get compiled.

Travis Hobrla [MS] (Expert)[12:56]:

Q: [34] Travis [33] ok, are there "best practices" for modifying makefile.def?

A: The 'best practice' is to make a backup, change as little as possible, and do so at your own risk! What exactly are you trying to accomplish?

Sing Wee [MS] (Expert)[12:56]:

Q: [31, 29] Can you point me to the KB entry or tell us what exactly has to be adapted in the OAL Cache routine?
In a previous QFE adressing the L2 cache it is documented that one has to adapt the OAL Cache routines. To found out how we were hoping for more information from the KB entry which however does not seem to exist. Question following.

A: Title: FIX: Kernel does not properly handle BSPs that distinguish between L1 and L2 cache flushing in Windows Embedded CE 6.0.

Symptoms:
A performance problem was found in Cortex-A8 based processors due to excessive PSL API call overhead caused by unnecessary L2 cache flush operations.

With the code changes included in this QFE, the kernel now maintains proper L2 cache coherence so that the system can benefit from performance enhancements obtained by separating L1/L2 cache flushing in the OAL. To take advantage of this performance improvement, the OAL should be modified to flush L1 and L2 cache only when necessary.

This QFE may also address L2 caching issues in other CPU architectures whose OEMCacheRangeFlush implementations properly respect L2 cache flags:
• CACHE_SYNC_WRITEBACK: write back L1 data cache to L2 data cache
• CACHE_SYNC_DISCARD: write back L1 data cache to L2 data cache and discard L1 data cache
• CACHE_SYNC_L2_WRITEBACK: write back L2 data cache to memory
• CACHE_SYNC_L2_DISCARD: write

msft_davbo (Moderator)[12:56]:

Q: [32] Multiple Displays: One of our projects requires two displays with independent content. Under CE6 is it possible using direct show to display different media (ie. different videos) on each of the display and two channels of Audio? We will write custom app.

A: Check out Microsoft Embedded Automotive who has support for up to 10 zones of AV content: http://www.microsoft.com/auto/ma.mspx. Typically they are just using 1-2 zones for front and rear AV zone control in the vehicle.

Sing Wee [MS] (Expert)[12:57]:

Q: [31] Can you point me to the KB entry or tell us what exactly has to be adapted in the OAL Cache routine?

A: Damian, can you please send me your email in a private message? I'll see if I can dig up the KB number for you.

Sing Wee [MS] (Expert)[12:58]:

Q: [31] Can you point me to the KB entry or tell us what exactly has to be adapted in the OAL Cache routine?

A: Looks like there was a limit to how much I could put in my response. Here's the final line in it's entirety:
• CACHE_SYNC_L2_DISCARD: write back L2 data cache to memory and discard L2 data cache

Travis Hobrla [MS] (Expert)[12:59]:

Q: [35] Travis [33] i am integrating lint, doxygen and some other tools (see previous question about build marker). so there are some non standard files to clean

A: I see. Well, the clean rules in makefile.def are pretty straightforward, so you should be able to alter them without affecting too much. I'd recommend adding a 'cleanlint' target to the clean rule, and implementing that.

ks [MS] (Expert)[12:59]:

Q: [31] Can you point me to the KB entry or tell us what exactly has to be adapted in the OAL Cache routine?

A: Basically, the OAL's OEMCacheRangeFlush implmentation needs to follow the guideline in http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee478186.aspx

msft_davbo (Moderator)[13:00]: Hello everyone, we are just about out of time.

Thank you for joining us for our Windows Embedded CE 6.0 chat today!

<http://www.Microsoft.com/Embedded>;

A special thank you to the product group members for coming out.

The transcript of today’s chat will be posted online as soon as possible, to <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/chats>;. We’ll see you again for another chat next month. Please check <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/chats>; for the list of upcoming chats.

If you still have unanswered questions, let me suggest that you post them on one of our newsgroups on
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsembedded/ce/default.aspx>

-Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R3 Now Available! <http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsembedded/ce/dd630616.aspx>;

The Questions

msft_davbo (Moderator)[12:05]: Chat is now started.

Andrew Scholan MCTS[12:05]: Hello, this is Andrew Scholan from Plextek in Cambridge, UK.

wolfelectronic[12:06] asked the experts: hi experts, is there any way to provide debug information for assembler files (.s) to the debugger so that i can step through the sources? currently only exported symbols are visible to the debugger

wolfelectronic[12:09] asked the experts: hi experts, i have integrated lint in the build prrocess. to see the output i have used the build_markers for C files, so they are also shown as c files in the summary. is there any way to show them with the "other files", in other words which build marker

wolfelectronic[12:09] asked the experts: should i use for other files?

Sebastien[12:11] asked the experts: Hello everyone, I am currently testing my WinCE 6 iMX31 based platform and doing automated suspend/resume stress testing. My application first sends a message to a PIC to ask the PIC to resume the processor later, then my application goes to suspend.

Sebastien[12:12] asked the experts: After ten seconds, the PIC wakes up the system and the process repeats.

wolfelectronic[12:12] asked the experts: [1] so there is no way to get debug info for assembler files into the pdb files?

Sebastien[12:12] asked the experts: After making this work properly, I added a thread in my test application which does nothing more than opening a file and closing it in a loop.

Sebastien[12:12] asked the experts: After a few suspend/resumes, a message box appears in CE telling me that the program memory is very low and the system becomes unresponsive.

Sebastien[12:12] asked the experts: When I'm not executing this thread, my system can suspend/resume up to a thousand times or more.

Sebastien[12:13] asked the experts: I'm creating the file in RAMFS, and I don't believe my thread can have any leak considering it's just opening and closing the same file. Do you have any idea what could go wrong ? Thank you.

wolfelectronic[12:15] asked the experts: [6] i know i can step i the disassembler view, but it is somewhat painful without the coments of the sourcefile. So I would like to see and step in the assembler sourcefile while debugging like when debugging c or cpp files

wolfelectronic[12:16] asked the experts: [6] also local (not exported] labels are not known to the debugger

wolfelectronic[12:17] asked the experts: [11] well thats the way i spend most of my time

Bruce Eitman[12:17]: Sebastian - does your question have anything to do with the suspend/resume? What happens if you just run your file access thread without suspending?

wolfelectronic[12:18] asked the experts: [12] ok, thankyou kurtken

Andrew Scholan MCTS[12:19] asked the experts: XAML + Other Windows: I have an MFC app which contains window based user draw controls (caches and draws bitmaps and overlays data on them). I want to update the UI to use XAML. How can I embed some of these existing controls in the XAML app?

Andrew Scholan MCTS[12:22] asked the experts: XAML + Other Windows: Effectively I want to skin the current app using XAML. Maybe there are some examples shipped with R3?

wolfelectronic[12:23] asked the experts: hi experts, is there a way to put additional items to the clean target without modifying makefile.def?

Sebastien[12:23]: Bruce: sorry I didn't see you message until now. If I don't suspend/resume, I don't have this problem

winceLover[12:26]: hi experts, is there an easy way to enable debug zones in advance for dlls that hasn't been loaded yet? Some dlls only get loaded while an application is running and by the time I get to click on Target->CE Debug Zones-><module name> it's already too late

PaulT[12:27]: winceLover: Don't forget to check the Ask the Experts checkbox. This puts your question in a queue from which it is answered...

winceLover[12:28] asked the experts: hi experts, is there an easy way to enable debug zones in advance for dlls that haven't been loaded yet? Some dlls only get loaded while an application is running and by the time I get to click on Target->CE Debug Zones-><module name> it's already too late

wolfelectronic[12:29] asked the experts: Sing Wee [13] well that doesn't work for assembler files, at least in my environment, although I have to say I use trace32 vom lauterbach most of the time. But this is the behaviour i would wish for .s files.

Sebastien[12:30] asked the experts: [10] - I will try to track the memory used in my thread more thoroughly. It's too bad I can't use KITL at that point as I'm doing suspend/resumes tests. So Travis, you're saying that there might be a leak in the RAM file system (which is public code) ?

Andrew Scholan MCTS[12:31]: XAML + Other Windows: Thanks.

Sebastien[12:32] asked the experts: What is the best way to setup a filesystem storing hive registry ? In our system, the SD card will be the storage holding it. Should we setup the SD card as MountPermanent, and are there other registry keys worth setting ?

Prabu[12:33] asked the experts: We need to give camera data to the appln for displaying it on the WINCE 6.0 device LCD or we need to send the camera frames to the device USB video class for displaying at the desktop PC app.IS both my requirement will be acheived by DSHOW camera driver?

Sebastien[12:33]: Thanks Travis

wolfelectronic[12:36] asked the experts: Sing Wee [19] well, perhaps there are not much assembler junkies out there , thank you any way

Prabu[12:37] asked the experts: Using DSHOW layer can we give the camera frames to the client UVC stack?

Sebastien[12:40]: [20] Sing Wee : I haven't tried using AppVerifier, does it support well checking leaks while suspending/resuming the system ?

Prabu[12:41] asked the experts: USB Video Class

Sebastien[12:41] asked the experts: [20] Sing Wee : I haven't tried using AppVerifier, does it support well checking leaks while suspending/resuming the system ?

wolfelectronic[12:41] asked the experts: Sing Wee [23] i am doing CE6, porting to a OMAP platform, currently working on the bootloader, but work is proceeded to jump to BootloaderMain

Sebastien[12:43] asked the experts: [21] - yes, this is setup correctly and works fine, until going to suspend/resume, where the SD gets unmounted and remounted. My question is : should we absolutely keep the power on to the SD card (it's never removed), and set it as MountPermanent ?

Damian Barnett[12:46] asked the experts: In a previous QFE adressing the L2 cache it is documented that one has to adapt the OAL Cache routines. To found out how we were hoping for more information from the KB entry which however does not seem to exist. Question following.

wolfelectronic[12:46] asked the experts: Travis [17] I am not sure if i understand you right, the WINCETARGETFILES targets are executed after building so not really good for cleaning, WINCETARGETFILE0 are executed before compiling, but what if only the clean target is performed?

Damian Barnett[12:47]: Can you point me to the KB entry or tell us what has to be adapted in OAL Cache routine?

Damian Barnett[12:47] asked the experts: Can you point me to the KB entry or tell us what exactly has to be adapted in the OAL Cache routine?

Sebastien[12:49]: [26] Thank you Sing

Andrew Scholan MCTS[12:51] asked the experts: Multiple Displays: One of our projects requires two displays with independent content. Under CE6 is it possible using direct show to display different media (ie. different videos) on each of the display and two channels of Audio? We will write custom app.

Sebastien[12:51]: [28] - Thank you Travis

wolfelectronic[12:51] asked the experts: Travis [17] yes, for example, or clicking Build - Clean in VS2005

wolfelectronic[12:55] asked the experts: Travis [33] ok, are there "best practices" for modifying makefile.def?

wolfelectronic[12:57] asked the experts: Travis [33] i am integrating lint, doxygen and some other tools (see previous question about build marker). so there are some non standard files to clean

Damian Barnett[12:59]: Thanks Sing!

Chat Topic: Open Peer-to-Peer Technical Chat in Progress

Platform Builder: Cleaning Non-Standard Files

Bruce Eitman — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 01:34:51 GMT

During today’s chat with Microsoft’s Windows CE Team, someone asked “is there a way to put additional items to the clean target without modifying makefile.def?” So I decided to see if I could come up with a way.

It can’t be done using a sources file. Sources files are only used to set environment variable prior to nmake being called and we need a target named “clean” to handle cleaning the additional files.

That leaves makefile.inc and makefile. I tried it in makefile.inc with a WINCETARGETFILES set for a different target than clean. It didn’t work.

I added a clean as a target in the makefile after including makefile.def, that didn’t work either. On a whim, I put it before including makefile.def and it worked. The following is my test makefile.

clean:

-@del /q file.txt

!INCLUDE $(_MAKEENVROOT)\makefile.def

This successfully deletes file.txt and the clean target in makefile.def is still functioning to clean obj and cod files.

An alternative to this would be to create your own makefile.def and include it. For this, I put a makefile.def in the root of my platform (_TARGETPLATROOT) which is an exact copy of the makefile above. Then I modified my makefile to be:

!INCLUDE $(_TARGETPLATROOT)\makefile.def

This method allow me to have a common makefile.def for my platform which will make maintenance easier in the future.

Ideal vs Necessary Evil

technodrone — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:10:44 GMT

Someone confronted me about Ideal vs Necessary Evil in regard to coding to best practices.

Today there was a loud debate among myself and two other developers regarding how to handle some legacy code. One developer wants the the legacy code refactored and testable the other wanted to modify the code quickly since the company plans to rewrite the application after the next deployment in a month. I wanted to make a code branch of existing code then refactor as much as possible as long as the new functionality was working first. At the end of the long discussion there was still no agreement. One of the developers sent me this email after the meeting. (yes I have his permission to post)

"In few years back, Dental flossing is Ideal, but now enough studies are done to prove it’s necessary now. But still some people with bad habits, (sometimes including myself), think that it’s not necessary.

Whatever view we have, the reality of dental impact on the health doesn’t change. Same goes to SOLID principle in specific, agile practices, values in generals.

An agile developer expresses values through practices. Like daily dental flossing for health. For some, dental flossing is ideal ( I used to have that view). Now I know enough, it’s not ideal for me anymore. My point is that you learn agile practices, principles till the point you see there are necessary for your professional development. The danger of view of Idealism where necessity is demanding is that as long as we have that conviction, our minds can trick us to give up easily in daily pressured activities. There were cases in my learning experience, I got tricked , and I paid for it. This is from my years of observation. I am writing this to elaborate more on my point on ideal, and its impact on us. "

I was trying to find a way to refactor the code and to not break existing code. Lesson learned: Making everyone happy makes no one happy it seems.

XML Namespaces

RobBowman — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:43:47 GMT

I've been working with XML for several years now but I've never been entirely sure that I fully understand all there is to know about namespaces. Of course namespaces are central to how document instances are defined by BizTalk, so I certainly had some understanding. However, it's quite easy to just "get by" without a complete understanding because of the inteli-sense and other helpful features provided by tools like Visual Studio and XML Spy. If I'd had only notepad in which to create the XSDs and XML documents then I'm sure I would have been stuck.

Anyhow, this has been bothering me for a while, so today I decided I was going to learn all there is to know about XML namespaces - and make it stick! This learning involved reading sections from the excellent book "The XML Schema Companion" by Neil Bradley, and otherwise messing around with XSDs and XML documents in Visual Studio.

Key Points

It is possible to create an XSD that does not define a namespace. Such schemas can be used to validate unqualified XML documents. Below I have pasted a simple XSD that does not define a namespace:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<xs:schema xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" elementFormDefault="qualified" attributeFormDefault="unqualified">

<xs:element name="RootNode">

<xs:annotation>

<xs:documentation>Comment describing your root element</xs:documentation>

</xs:annotation>

<xs:complexType>

<xs:sequence>

<xs:element name="Name"/>

<xs:element name="Age"/>

</xs:sequence>

</xs:complexType>

</xs:element>

</xs:schema>

I then used XML spy to create an XML document instance from the above XSD, this is what it came up with:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<Name/>

<Age/>

</RootNode>

Note, the root node has the attribute "xmlns:xsi", this is simply defining a prefix for a namespace - it is not setting the document level namespace. In effect it is saying that elements, attributes etc from the namespace http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance can be used by prefixing XSI, however where there is no prefix then the element, attribute etc does not belong to a namespace - it is unqualified. The attribute noNamespaceSchemaLocation is interesting. This gives the URL reference to the XSD that will be used when validating the XML document. It also infers that the XSD does not define a namespace - and that this document is not "namespace qualified" at document level.

I then went back to the XSD and defined a namespace for it by adding a "TargetNamespace" attribute to the root node as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<xs:schema xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" elementFormDefault="qualified" attributeFormDefault="unqualified" targetNamespace="http://samplenamespace">

<xs:element name="RootNode">

Etc...

I then used XML spy to generate a new sample XML instance document from this, updated XSD - this is what it came up with:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<RootNode xmlns="http://samplenamespace" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://samplenamespace

D:\Rob\LearnXMLNamespaces\Person.xsd">

<Name/>

<Age/>

</RootNode>

A couple of things have changed:

The attribute xmlns has been added to the root node and assigned the value "http://samplenamespace". This specifies that, unless explicitly qualified with a different namespace, all elements and attributes defined with the XML instance belong to the namespace "http://samplenamespace"
The attribute schemaLocation (which happens to belong to the xsi schema instance namespace) has been added to the root node. The attribute contains a pair of values, the name of the namespace defined by the schema followed by a space then a URL reference to the XSD that defines the namespace

The above just skims the surface of what can be done with namespaces but in does provide the basics. There are many cases where an XML document will contain items defined in multiple namespaces. However, understanding such a document is straight-forward once you are aware of the key concepts and implementation as described above.

Do you have potential to be a great agile developer?

technodrone — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:16:10 GMT

Over all I think the best indication that someone will be a good agile
team member is:

Demonstrates a long-term desire to move from journeyman to craftsman. (study groups, software related blogging, seeks out training)
Demonstrates that they will share knowledge insights with others.(mentoring,being mentored not just for newbies all team members)
Open to debate and new ideas. (question whenever a quick solution does not follow solid principles, or adds unnecessary technical debt)
Willingness to work closely with non-developers (users, business owners, managers)
Patience with the process (complex problems are not easily solved it takes time and investigation).
Can make the argument for refactoring code.

Calling SSRS report using either T-SQL or SSIS

LifeLongTechie — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:53:19 GMT

Would love to know if there is a way to kick off a SSRS report and pass some parameters into it via T-SQL or SSIS. Unfortunately, we can't have MS SQL Enterprise edition.

Sad thing is I know how to make this work with Crystal report, and I hope I can find a similar API for SSRS to make this work. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Define the Enterprise Architecture: Ontology, Typology, Taxonomy

Chris Han — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:00:31 GMT

What is Ontology?

Quote from Wikipedia "is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations....ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how such entities can be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences"

Quote from other web-site "In ancient times, Ontology referred to study of Being and fell into disrepute in modern times, but Edmund Husserl revived the idea of the study of different forms of Being and Phenomenology and Existentialism have given rise to a new concern with Ontology, the central problem of which is the age-old problem of Mind and Body."

Quote from Zachman web site "a theory of the existence of a structured set of essential components of an object for which explicit expressions is necessary and perhaps even mandatory for creating, operating, and changing the object"

What is Typology and Taxonomy then?

I fund so far the best explaination is from the web site http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/t/a.htm:

Taxonomy and Typology are two opposed methods of classification. Typology classifies according to the sensuously given attributes of the thing; Taxonomy classifies objects according to the genesis of the thing.

At a given stage in the development of a science, when as yet the genesis of the object is not known, typology is the only possible method of classification. Classification into types and classes aids sensuous perception. Once a notion of the genesis of the object is gained, the types must be re-ordered and objects which appear to belong to the same type, fall into different species and genre of the new taxonomy and vice versa, objects of different type are found to be of the same species.

Typology and taxonomy are necessary stages in making sense of the world, which aims to revealing the inner connections between things.

My Conclution:

Typology and Taxonomy are the types of Ontology. You usually start with Typology by observing the world and you can only confirm that your Typology is a Taxonomy when most of people conclude that it's true.

Analyzing the objects and classify them in a Taxonomy is always the first step we build and operate on their 'right' perceptions - the architecture of a enterprise system and even a software system.

This is also the way called 'frame it' in the book 'THE MCKENZIE WAY'.

Silverlight Cream for November 24, 2009 -- #742

Dave Campbell — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:38:55 GMT

In this Issue: Rene Schulte, Jason Harper, Brad Abrams, John Papa, Jeremy Likness, Jeff Wilcox, Fredrik Normén, Tim Heuer, Shawn Wildermuth, and Andrej Tozon.

Shoutouts:

Ward Bell has a PDF up of PDC 2009 Session Links -- thanks Ward!

Tim Heuer also has posted a Microsoft PDC09 and Silverlight Round-up... I'm adding this to the Silverlight Links in the WynApse.com outlookbar.

Don't forget that Loek van den Ouweland and Fons Sonnemans have SilverlightXP up and running full of resources... They'd like submissions and suggestions!

Joe Stegman posted his TrustedApp Sample from PDC 2009

From SilverlightCream.com:

EdgeCam Shots - Saving Silverlight 4 Webcam Snapshots to JPEG: Rene Schulte extended his Silverlight 4 webcam and edge detection shader sample to save webcam snapshots as JPEG files and discusses some limitations of Silverlight's built-in CaptureSource.AsyncCaptureImage snapshot method. Furthermore he gives some ideas on how to build a Silverlight 4 video chat / conference application on top of the JPEG capturing and encoding code.
Ria Services under the hood Part 1 – Service Operations: Michael Washington pointed me at Jason Harper, and he's got a good series going on RIA Services. I decided to start with his part 1 and work my way out. This is a bit of a different slant because he's going 'under the hood'... thanks for the link, Michael!
RIA Services: A DomainService IS A WCF Service – Add Service Reference: Brad Abrams has a link to his PDC09 talk, then goes on to explain his statement that a DomainService is a WCF Service. He then shows how to consume a DomainService from a WinForms app ... I know, don't hate me for that, but it's WCF goodness, ok??
10 Steps to Debug Silverlight Out-of-Browser Applications without Attaching: Trying to debug a Silverlight 4B OOB app and having problems figuring out how to do it? John Papa has a 10-step solution for you that doesn't involve attaching, and don't worry, it won't interfere with your 12-step program :)
Getting Silverlight Applications Ready for the Real World: Jeremy Likness has a great post up for anyone building a Real-World application. He's discussing things from his experience that we should all address.
Taking the Silverlight Control Browser sample Out-of-Browser … plus a tutorial: Jeff Wilcox posts about the new OOB Control browser sample in the Toolkit, then goes on with a tutorial on how to do a first-class OOB experience for your own app.
How to create a Module based Silverlight application (Part 1): Fredrik Normén is doing a bunch of blogging lately, but don't skip his post on modularizing your Silverlight. This is the first of a series and he says the next one is going to be using MEF so stay tuned to his blog!
Silverlight 4 NotificationWindow and Queuing multiple notifications: Tim Heuer has a post up about 'toast' ... no not *that* kind of toast! ... the NotificationWindow kind :) Good article, a link to a video about it on Silverlight.net and all the source.
Taking a WebCam Photo with Silverlight: Shawn Wildermuth's latest is an app demonstrating capturing images from a webcam using Silverlight 4B... with source! I guess my only comment would be to use it only for good :)
Detecting duplicate instances of a running Silverlight application: If you've got a Silverlight app that you want to limit to one instance running what do you do? Well... go read Andrej Tozon's post and see how to get the job done... that's what I'd do :)

Stay in the 'Light!

Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 SilverlightCream

SharePoint Buddy System

Mark Rackley — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:08:55 GMT

It was a warm sunny July afternoon. The lake was cool, calm, and inviting. Little Johnny sat on the bank of the lake skipping rocks while the rest of the cub scouts were out hiking in the woods. Johnny was soaking it all in, the vast lake with the little island in the middle. The bright blue sky, nothing but the sounds of the wind and the occasional bird. Yes, this was a perfect day and Johnny was enjoying every minute of it. However, Johnny got bored (as most little boys often do). He decided to take his shoes off and wade out into the cool, crisp water. The refreshing water and the soft sand between his toes only added to his enjoyment of the day. Yes, life was good… Johnny stood there, the water up to his knees now, looking at that small island in the middle of the lake. It looked so perfect. It had big trees for shade and a rope swing that could not be resisted by any mere mortal. The island was far away, but Johnny knew he could make it… so he leapt up out of the water to swim for it. “WHAM”… he was not such a good diver though and landed right on his now tomato red stomach…

“OUCH! That’s gonna leave a mark” Johnny thought. “No matter… I will make it to that island. I heard someone say there’s buried treasure there too… Nirvana awaits.”

Johnny started swimming. It was easy at first, but with each stroke he grew more and more tired. He had to stop and catch his breath several times. “Wow, that island is a lot further than I first thought.” Suddenly, Johnny had a horrible cramp and couldn’t move… “Why did I eat that chili dog for lunch?!?”. He tried to swim, but the pain was unbearable. It was all he could do to not sink to the depths of the lake, which now looked ominous and dark. This was not good, not good at all. Johnny tried to scream for help, but he was so tired and out of breath that he couldn’t make a sound. How could this have happened? It was such a perfect day! Little Johnny was losing hope. Is this how it would end? In pain, out of breath, scared, and without hope Johnny looked up and realized the island was right in front of him. Johnny was suddenly filled with hope as he painfully inched his way closer to the island… closer and closer.. almost there. He was so close he knew that his feet would touch the bottom at any moment now. He was going to make it! Everything was going to be okay! “SPLASH"!” A giant lake monster came out from nowhere and swallowed little Johnny whole. The End.

If only little Johnny had the sense to bring a buddy with him. His buddy could have warned him how far the island was and convince him not to try it. His buddy could have helped him get back to shore when the cramp started, or his buddy could have been lunch for the lake monster giving little Johnny ample time to get away.

Always use the buddy system.

So, go back and read the little story and instead of a large lake, it’s SharePoint, instead of a paradise of a little island, it’s some project or application. Sure, when you start playing with SharePoint it seems harmless and fun. Then you start to get brave and try new things. There’s nothing wrong with that. Then you decide to try something something really cool and before you know it you are in WAY over your head. You fight it and fight it and search for help everywhere. Then, when you see a glimmer of hope everything comes crashing down and you are left with nothing but despair. Sound familiar? I can TOTALLY relate to that in my early days of SharePoint. However, these days things are much better. One of the reasons is the SharePoint buddy system! I am the architect/developer for my organization and I routinely wade into the waters of SharePoint trying things for the first time. Luckily, I work with a Rock Star SharePoint admin (@lorigowin). She has pulled me from the lake multiple times gasping for air and has even warned me on multiple occasions of the right way to get to that island. Sure, neither of us know all the answers. Sure we both still have to ask others for help and do research, but because we have different backgrounds (dev and admin) we see things from different points of views and can routinely find better answers than if we were left to our own devices. Also, I’m a much more effective developer because I can depend on my admin to do that administrative tasks that are a little over my head. I can also help the admin see different ways of solving issues that may not be as obvious to someone without a dev background.

So, where’s your buddy? (no, you can’t have mine). Yes, I realize this is a “fluff” piece, or maybe I’m on to something here. I say over and over again that SharePoint is too massive for anyone to be an expert in all aspects. So, stop trying to be. Find a buddy and help each other out. I’ve learned a lot of admin tips and tricks along the way.

Now all I need is a branding buddy then I can do a blog on the Three Musketeers..