Geekswithblogs.net

Redirect for SharePoint Page

Cherie Riesberg — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:51:04 GMT

To redirect to a specific SharePoint site or page:

1. Create c-name entry in DNS and point to SharePoint server

2. Create directory in c:\inetpub\wwwroot and create one html file called "index.htm" in the folder with this content:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">

<html>
<head>
<title>Redirecting Page</title>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0;URL=http://sharepoint/sites/default.aspx">
</head><body></body>
</html>

3. Open IIS and create a new Web site. The port is the same as the default Web application. Fill in a host header value- make it the same as you specified in the c-name entry. Also, add a host header for the FQDN. Specify the Home Directroy as the same folder that was created in step one.

4. Start the Web site in IIS.

Setting up ODP.net with Windows 7 x64 and VS2008

mbcrump — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:30:38 GMT

Its very simple to setup the latest ODP.NET with Windows 7 and VS2008.

Just do the following:

Download the following: www.oracle.com/technology/software/tech/dotnet/utilsoft.html from oracle and install it.
Oracle 11g ODAC and Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio 11.1.0.7.20

	Download Includes
		Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio 11.1.0.7.20
		Oracle Data Provider for .NET 2.0 11.1.0.7.20
		Oracle Providers for ASP.NET 11.1.0.7.20
		Oracle Database Extensions for .NET 2.0 11.1.0.7.20 -- for upgrade only
		Oracle Provider for OLE DB 11.1.0.7.20
		Oracle Objects for OLE 11.1.0.7.20
		Oracle Services for Microsoft Transaction Server 11.1.0.7.20
		Oracle ODBC Driver 11.1.0.7.0
		Oracle SQL*Plus 11.1.0.7.0
		Oracle Instant Client 11.1.0.7.0

Go to the following folder and setup your tnsnames.ora

C:\app\<user>\product\11.1.0\client_1\Network\Admin

It should look simular to this:

xxxxx =
(DESCRIPTION =
    (ADDRESS_LIST =
      (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = xxxxx)(PORT = xxxxx))
    )
    (CONNECT_DATA =
      (SERVICE_NAME = xxxxx)
    )
)

Next Reboot your machine and try to connect via Toad or Server Browser in VS2008.

Silverlight Cream for November 20, 2009 -- #737

Dave Campbell — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:26:03 GMT

In this Issue: Michael Wolf, Colin Blair, John Papa, Ning Zhang, Andy Beaulieu, and Tomasz Janczuk.

Shoutouts:

In case you missed it in the rush the other day, Robby Ingebretsen announced the release of Seesmic for Windows ... that's going on my laptop this weekend!

The Microsoft Expression Blog has a great tutorial upon the use of Panels in Expression Web.

Don't forget, I have all Silverlight 4B articles tagged at WynApse.com, along with lots (>7600 posts) of other stuff :)

From SilverlightCream.com:

Silverlight 4 beta and web cam support: WebCam support ... well... now that SL4B has it, wonder what everyone will be screaming for :) .. Michael Wolf has a post up describing it's use. He has a video on the post that's actually pretty cool showing the user experience.
A guide to new features of WCF RIA Services: Colin Blair has a post up showing the differences you should know in the transition from .NET RIA Services to WCF RIA Services in Silverlight 4.
Enabling Validation in Silverlight 4 with IDataErrorInfo: John Papa has a short article and code up explaining the use of IDataErrorInfo in Silverlight 4.
Silverlight Clipboard API: Find out what Clipboard support in Silverlight 4 really means. Ning Zhang explains what we've got and how to use it. Yikes... lots of moving parts to worry about!
Silverlight 4 Beta, RIA Services... and Beer!: Ready for a long Friday morning Silverlight 4 RIA application tutorial? Andy Beaulieu has a great one up... lots of details and hints... required reading!
Pub/sub sample with WCF net.tcp protocol in Silverlight 4: Tomasz Janczuk continues with discussion of net.tcp and describes the conversion of a previous sample from HTTP Polling Duplex to the new WCF net.tcp protocol.

Stay in the 'Light!

Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 SilverlightCream

Hosted exception collection for .NET applications made easy – Exceptioneer.com

Liam Westley — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:32:54 GMT

I own a company, Tiger Computer Services Ltd, which is an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) providing .NET software solutions to clients in the London area.

One of the most significant considerations when running a small ISV is the cost of supporting software in the field. For some clients, support is not a billable item, especially if the fault is within the software we have provided. This means that every time the telephone rings, we bleed money, and if we have to actually go on site to resolve an issue it gets worse.

Whether the software solution is ‘packaged’ or is a custom solution, all our clients run the software on their own equipment at their own premises. We have never asked for VPN access into their network. We take the view that if you cannot easily VPN into a system you have a real incentive to write reliable software that works first time and doesn’t need continuous intervention.

However, although all the clients can be reached within about one hour by public transport, an on-site visit is bad for many reasons;

It costs money; either to ourselves or to the client (the latter is even worse if someone has to approve the cost in advance of the visit)
It takes time, which can lead to more issues; i.e. data corruption through continued use of the software
It is highly disruptive of work being undertaken for other clients

Exception handling is a good thing

This may sound obvious, but however good your programming is, it’ll generate exceptions. It is impossible to account for all eventualities and you need to be ready to handle them and log the state of the system when they occurred.

The solutions we deliver are generally a combination of ASP.NET web applications, Windows Services (Windows Forms applications with no user interface) and usually with some database server in the background (SQL Server, MySQL or Oracle). Our exception handling is wrapped up in a set of reporting libraries whose history dates back to before Visual Basic 6.

The reporting libraries were overhauled in the transfer to C#, and they provide a simple method for logging messages and exceptions simultaneously to the Windows Event Log, text based log file, SMTP e-mail and interactive dialogs (for Windows Forms applications with a user interface).

The libraries consist of a central reporting engine, into which various reporters are plugged and these handle all the various methods for recording exceptions. One call to the reporting engine to display a message or exception calls all the reporters in turn. This allows new methods of reporting exceptions to be added quickly, and for various methods to be turned off as required (such as disabling writing to the Event Log on shared hosting providers).

Whether you use the Microsoft application block, log4net or some home grown exception handling, the biggest issue is getting access to the log files or event log messages once an exception has occurred.

Without remote access, we rely on the client IT team to either take the text log file, or dump the Event Logs to a CSV file, and e-mail the file to us. Of course, this assumes that the client is already aware they have a problem, which means it has very likely started to affect their use of the application.

Proactive exception handling

In an ideal world you would receive notification automatically about any exceptions in your applications, without requiring intervention from the client.

Nothing impresses a client more than when you phone them to tell them they have an issue, and that you have already got a solution which they can implement to fix it.

Although our reporting libraries do include an SMTP e-mail reporter which can provide some of this proactive functionality it is not always possible to persuade clients that their SMTP gateway or firewall should be ‘tweaked’ to allow support e-mails out of the building.

Exceptioneer

Earlier this year I was kindly invited into a beta program for a ‘hosted exception collection’ service called Exceptioneer run by the good chaps at Pixel Programming, Phil Winstanley (a Microsoft MVP, no less) and Chris Gaskell.

These guys write .NET applications for a living and had already created their own centralised exception collection system for their own applications, solving the issues encountered when creating this type of solution. Realising they had something well worth sharing, they turned their system into a packaged, hosted service for other developers and Exceptioneer was born.

.NET support

Exceptioneer supports ASP.NET, Windows Forms and JavaScript (although I have yet to use the JavaScript exception hander).

Integration in an ASP.NET application is simple; reference the Exceptioneer web client assembly and add a few lines in the Web.Config and it will be reporting unhandled exceptions right away.

For Windows Forms, you need to reference a windows form assembly and integrate the API into whatever exception handling system you are already using. We had it integrated with our reporting engine within an hour or so.

What does Exceptioneer provide?

The management interface of Exceptioneer provides a very clean web interface, where you can view all your registered projects (limited to three in the free service), and drill down into the various exceptions which might have occurred, when the last occurred and what application generate the exception.

Repeated exceptions are intelligently grouped with drill down for further detail, including stack traces and full source code from the PDB file if you are testing a debug compilation. You can identify the exact line causing the issue, and 75% of the time it is possible to identify the underlying cause without even starting up Visual Studio to view the source code.

Exceptioneer provides e-mail notifications, and if you are a Twitter user, Exceptioneer can even send direct messages when new exceptions occur, which tends to catch the eye even quicker than e-mails.

... and it works

Since integrating Exceptioneer with a new system deployed in September, it has proved invaluable for resolving issues (related to user input which was not being verified correctly) which would have come close to an on-site visit to identify exactly what was happening.

Even better, on most occasions we phone the client first to inform them that they had the problem (which occurred more than once) and the IT support guys were able to fix the problem before the end user actually realised something had gone wrong.

Try it yourself

Now the beta program has been completed, the service has been opened for everyone. I recommend heading over to http://www.exceptioneer.com and registering for a free account, and giving it a spin in your own projects.

BizTalk Server 2009 - Rule deployment issue

Charles Young — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:28:40 GMT

There is a small configuration issue with the Microsoft Business Rules Composer in BizTalk Server 2009. This will only affect you if you deploy the rules engine by itself without the rest of BizTalk Server. In a full installation of BizTalk Server, BTS provides a set of BTS-specific Rule Framework components in as assembly called Microsoft.BizTalk.RuleEngineExtensions. This includes a RuleSetDeploymentDriver component that manages deployment of rules via the SQL Server repository.

The BTS-specific RuleSetDeploymentDriver has a dependency on WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation). In a full BTS installation, BTS creates an instance of a CIM class called MSBTS_GroupSetting and populates various property values from the BizTalk management database. This includes the assembly and class name of a RuleSetDeploymentDriver. If you install only the rule processing components, there is no BizTalk management database, and no instance of this class is created. Unfortunately, this means that, whenever you try to deploy a rule set from the Rules Composer, you get a rude message saying:

The database "<server>:<database>" associated with the deployment driver does not match the database ":" specified during product configuration

The message is entirely correct. Microsoft's BTS-specific RuleSetDeploymentDriver component performs this check presumably to ensure that registry settings for the rule repository database name and server name are identical to those configured in the BizTalk management database. This ensures that the Rule Engine Update Service is using the same BTS-specific RuleSetDeploymentDriver component.

When you install only the rule processing components, the registry is unfortunately configured as if a full BizTalk installation had been done. The Rule Composer tries to use the BTS-specific RuleSetDeploymentDriver component to deploy rule sets and fails because no instance of MSBTS_GroupSetting has been created in the CIM store.

Fortunately, this is a simple problem to fix. Microsoft provides a non BTS-specific RuleSetDeploymentDriver component for the rule repository database. All you need to do is change the registry settings to use this instead.

Open the Registry Editor (regedit) and locate the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\BusinessRules\3.0

If you have installed the rule processing components on a 64-bit version of Windows, they key will be at:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\BusinessRules\3.0

You should find the DeploymentDriverAssembly and DeploymentDriverClass values under the key. These should be changed to the following values, respectively:

Microsoft.RuleEngine, Version=3.0.1.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35
Microsoft.RuleEngine.RuleSetDeploymentDriver

That's it. The Rule Composer should now be able to deploy rule sets.

Microsoft PDC 2009 – Day Two Keynote

Bill Evjen — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:36:54 GMT

The second day keynote at PDC 2009 in Lost Angeles was shared by Steven Sinofsky and Scott Guthrie. Steven is the President of Windows and Windows Live Division and it really must have been a great day for him as he came out for the first time in a major conference with the new Windows 7 launched and the old Vista problems just fading away into Microsoft’s past. There is a lot of excitement for Windows 7 and there is excitement for the new Windows 7 APIs that are available for developers to work with to take advantage of the new features that this new OS offers.

The big thing that Steven brought forth was the achievement that was Windows 7’s release. He was rather excited about how they developed this OS. One of the big changes in the development process was the introduction of the Windows 7 Engineering blog. This was a tool that the Windows 7 used to let people know what they were thinking and how things were going to work. The team got considerable comments from this blog and it helped shape what they were doing. For me, I did find it interesting in how open they were to their process and how they got the community involved in the process. I can see how that would be hard to do given the fact that Microsoft probably doesn’t want to give much information to their competitors on what they are doing. But they put out quite a bit of information that in the end – really made a difference.

There were also some interesting stats on the Win7 development process that Steven outlined. These included:

1,729,890 people pressed the send feedback reports button
91,521 external devices were plugged in
14,057 unique printers were plugged in
883,612 unique applications were used
8,107,258 installations were done
4,357156 installations of the RC were done
10,427,189 aggregated Windows Error Reports were sent in
4,753 code changes were made because of these WERs
6,114 SQM Measurement Points
~900,000,000 SQM Sessions (Logon to Logoff/Standby)
514,253,176 times the Start menu button was clicked in the last 6 months
46,447,784 times Aero Snap and Shake were used

It is important to note that these stats are only collected during the pre-RTM releases and are not something that Microsoft collects off of the production release of the OS.

After this, Steven then went through some hardware with another Microsoft worker and in the end help up a laptop – a not yet released Acer Aspire 1420P. It had the following stats: it is a convertible TabletPC with a Core2 Duo U2300 processor, Mobile Intel GS45 video, 2GB of DDR3 1066 MHz memory (supports up to 8GB), an 11.6" 1366x768 multitouch screen, webcam/mic, 3G WWAN, WLAN (supporting up to Draft-N), S/PDIF for digital speakers, 3 USB, 250GB HDD, card reader, and even an HDMI port. Then he said he was offering us a deal on the laptop for the price of FREE!

I was totally shocked! Here is me with my new laptop:

I see why Microsoft did this. They just introduced all the cool features that you can do with the new Windows 7 APIs including multitouch and more. Most developers don’t even have computers to deal with this or some of the other capabilities. If Microsoft really wants development in this space, there isn’t a better way to spur the development than by giving some of your community’s best developers the equipment to get the job done? Perfect.

Next up was ScottGu – all .NET developer’s hero. He continued on with the day 1 keynote message from Ray Ozzie and talked about the Silverlight everywhere message. The biggest message was the release of Silverlight 4 Beta. This is now available and includes a plethora of new features. These new features include things like:

Media
- Continuing to invest in the rich media stack
- Media stack is by far the most feature rich of any media stack out there
- Winter Olympics will be coming on Silverlight
- Adding
  - Webcam and microphone
  - Multicast
  - H.264 Output Protection
  - Offline DRM

Business Applications
- Printing
- Rich Text
- Clipboard Access
- Right click
- Mouse wheel
- Implicit styles
- VS 2010
- Drag/Drop
- Bidi & RTL - Right to left layout
- Updated Controls
- Data Binding - Support for string formatters
- Networking

Beyond the Browser
- Windowing APIs
- Notification Popups
- HTML Support
- Drop Target

Trusted applications
- Custom Window Chrome
- Local File System
- Cross-Site Networking
- Full Screen Keyboard
- Hardware Device Access
- COM Automation Support
- Office Integration

As you can see, there is a lot to this release! Though, as Ray Ozzie really said in the first keynote – this PDC was really about touching the “three screens” – mobile, PC, and TV&game console, etc. Ray pointed out that Silverlight was the technology to get you there and Scott spent his keynote really showcasing Silverlight and its future in this regards. Again, it is interesting to note that there wasn’t any mention of WPF and it’s role in this revolution.

More "Getting started with managed code (C#) development for Windows Mobile" articles

TechTwaddle — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:53:14 GMT

Last year Chris Craft wrote this excellent "30 days of .NET" articles where he wrote 30 .NET applications in C# each day. I have gone through the initial few and plan to complete the list as and when I find time. He hasn't actually explained the code and the application logic in detail and that would surely be some task if you are doing 30 apps in 30 days (; You couldn't ask for more.

The source code for all the applications is available. So just download'em and dig through. There's no better way to learn than to dive-in and experiment.

Windows Mobile 6.5 Gestures : Introduction (C++)

TechTwaddle — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:38:12 GMT

Found a nice article on Code Project about using gesture API's on Windows Mobile 6.5 devices.

Hit the link and give it a read. And off I go to try the program out.

T4 Templates and the answer to life, the universe and everything

Eric Nelson — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:22:31 GMT

[This is the third 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 4 relies significantly on the Text Template Transformation Toolkit (T4) to generate code from the EDM.

I thought it would be useful to show a really simple example of T4 in action which is nothing to do with Entity Framework.

In a Visual Studio 2008/2010 solution, add a new item of type Text Template:

Edit the “output extension=” pragma to generate a “.cs” file and add some C# code for a very simple class which has a single method TheAnswer which contains a single WriteLine. In the WriteLine use a T4 <#= #> block. <#= represents the start of a simple evaluation block, in this case the evaluation is to add 41+1:

NB: I am using the Tangible T4 editor to give me syntax highlighting and intellisense. You will need to add this into Visual Studio using the Extensions Manager.

Next build the project or click on Transform Templates in the Solution Explorer:

You will now see a new C# file in your project, SimpleTemaplate.cs:

In summary a T4 template is composed of:

Blocks of text: text that simply is copied into the output file(s)
Directives: meta information for the template such as “output extension=” enclosed in <#@ … #>
Statements: code enclosed in <#...#>
Expressions: code that is evaluated to a string <#= …#>

The above is pretty much the most basic example of T4 I could come up with. However there are plenty of other great resources on T4 out there. Oleg Sych has been heavily involved with T4 for many years and has many great posts. You may want to start with this tutorial done as a series of posts.

Tangible T4 Editor – a life saver

Eric Nelson — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:18:04 GMT

I have been working with T4 (Text Template Transformation Toolkit) lately thanks to the Entity Framework team moving their code generation model over to T4 in Visual Studio 2010. However by default Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 do not include syntax highlighting or intellisense support for T4 files, which makes it rather difficult to work with them (very difficult at times!). Thankfully there are partners who address this. The one I am using with Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010 is the Tangible T4 editor. You can easily add this into Visual Studio using the Extensions Manager from the Tools menu:

Once added, it will change this:

Into this:

Sweet!

PDC 2009 Hangover

Mike Huguet — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:38:45 GMT

For the first time in my career I have attended a major conference and it was well worth the wait. I had a handful of major objectives in attending of which all were met.

Gain an understanding of Azure and how we can leverage it for our small and mid market customers.
Gain more detailed insight into changes in SharePoint 2010 that will impact customizations and solutions that we provide our customers.
Have some dialog with some of the MS data team members and others to understand MS’ vision for data store interaction.
Meet people and make some great contacts.

There are a few things that became VERY clear as early as the first day.

MS’ Vision is “clouded.” (pun intended)

Microsoft has made major investments in software (across a large portion of product lines), hardware, and relationships in order to make their vision of 3 screens and a cloud a reality. They now have a modular datacenter in which they will be reselling at some point in the future. You can see an installation at http://www.microsoft.com/video/en/us/details/bafe5c0f-8651-4609-8c71-24c733ce628b. It is essentially a data center in a box that can be delivered like a POD storage unit. It can be “plugged” into your existing datacenter or it can be standalone. In either case Windows Azure is the operating system for the data center. It has services that facilitates many features, but an example is support for quick scale out of servers. This is controlled by a customer developer portal that only takes a few configuration changes in the browser and clicking a button to increase the number of servers. Silverlight is being highlighted as part of this vision as it enriches the browser experience and will soon find its way to a mobile device.

There is a Focus on OS Usability with Win 7

Microsoft has gone back to the basics and spent much time and effort in improving the usability of their consumer operating system. They want Windows 7 to be successful so much that they gave us each a laptop loaded with the Ultimate edition that supports all features including the multi-touch display. They spent a decent chunk of time on this during the second day keynote.

There is a Push for SharePoint Adoption by Developers

The development environment for SharePoint customizations is now a first class citizen in Visual Studio and SharePoint. While there seem to be a few kinks to work out between now and the release of MSS 2010 and VS 2010, it is VERY exciting. It was unfortunate to see that a good portion of developers left the keynote when they started talking about Office and SharePoint 2010. For every session block there seemed to be a session on something SharePoint related.

The Data team (as they are now called) has heard our pain of getting something drastically new annually

In listening to the keynote and several sessions as well as speaking with Elisa Flasko from the data team it became evident that one of the main reasons for them introducing oData was to make things more consistent and transparent. This will allow us to have one consistent API/Protocol to use instead of having to choose from between ADO.NET Data Services, REST Services, etc. I was pretty impressed with what I saw. Check out the new data site on MSDN, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/default.aspx.

Thanks again to Chris Koenig, MS Developer Evangelist, for letting a newbie hang around!

Silverlight Cream for November 19, 2009 - 2 -- #736

Dave Campbell — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:28:15 GMT

In this Issue: Rob Houweling, Michael Washington, Colin Eberhardt, Laurent Bugnion, Tomasz Janczuk, Jeremy Likness, and Andy Beaulieu.

From SilverlightCream.com:

Silverlight 4 – Using the webcam: Rob Houweling has a tutorial up on using the webcam in Silverlight 4 Beta ... all good stuff, and hmm... I'm not following their new site, so that brings the total up to 397 :)
Silverlight Bridge - A Silverlight 4 File Manager: Access your local file system and drag-and-drop, and OOB in Silverlight? --- wow, check out the work Michael Washington's been up to!
Silverlight 4 beta released leaving Flex behind: Colin Eberhardt goes so far as to say Silverlight has now left Flex behind... check it out and see if you agree... don't ask me, I drank the Kool-Aid :) -- and thanks for the shoutout, Colin!
Silverlight 4 beta released at #PDC09: I held back Laurent Bugnion's post about Silverlight 4 this morning because he discusses what's on many people's mind, and that's "what does this mean for WPF?"
WCF net.tcp protocol in Silverlight 4: Tomasz Janczuk discusses the new WCF service capability in Silverlight 4 Beta using net.tcp
Dynamic Module Loading with Silverlight Navigation using Prism: Jeremy Likness has a post up on Prism and Silverlight, Dynamic Modules, and Navigation. This is a farily involved tutorial, so give yourself time to read.
Silverlight 4 Beta: Implicit Styles: Andy Beaulieu has a post up talking about the new Implicit Styles in Silverlight 4 Beta with code examples and Blend examples.

Stay in the 'Light!

Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 SilverlightCream

SharePoint Saturday Cleveland 2009 Recap

Brian Jackett — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:02:36 GMT

As noted in my previous post I attended and spoke at the SharePoint Saturday Cleveland 2009 conference. For those unfamiliar, SharePoint Saturday is a community driven event where various speakers gather to present at a FREE conference on all topics related to SharePoint. This was my first SharePoint Saturday and it was a great community event to attend. Over the past 6 months or so I’ve been following various Twitter users talking about SharePoint Saturdays in their region so I was excited to see what all the buzz was about.

Friday night I arrived in Cleveland for the speaker (nerd) dinner at Fahrenheit in Tremont. I was finally able to put a face (real, not just their picture online) to various names like Eric Harlan (@ericharlan) and Jesse Murray (@lackscreativity) from the Baltimore and Detroit Sogeti offices, Rick Black (@ricknology), and also see some familiar faces again like John Ferringer (@ferringer), Sean McDonough (@spmcdonough), Callahan (@cacallahan) and Melissa Lucarelli (@smartyskirt). Can you sense that I know too many people by their Twitter names?

Saturday started off early as I was scheduled to speak during the first session. I gave my “The Power of PowerShell + SharePoint” presentation to about 20 people. As most of the crowd was still waking up I threw in some jokes and funny slides to keep things lively. They had a number of great questions as we went along and hopefully learned a good introduction to PowerShell and how to use it with SharePoint.

After my session I tried to attend talks on other topics that I hadn’t heard much about such as PerformancePoint, InfoPath Forms, SharePoint branding, and the new Metadata Manager. I wish I could have attended more sessions, but only so much time in the day and I can only be in one place at a time. Overall the level of content was good and I appreciate all the time and hard work each speaker put into the day.

Following the conference wrap-up session a dozen or so attendees and speakers met at The Blind Pig in downtown Cleveland for a ritual SharePint. The Blind Pig was nice enough to host us and provide drinks and appetizers while us conference folks got to unwind from the day. It was good to hear positive feedback from the conference and get to share SharePoint and personal stories.

As all good things must come to an end, so did my time at SharePoint Saturday Cleveland. I was able to snap a few pictures which I’ve posted a link to below. I’ve heard there will be a SharePoint Saturday Indianapolis early in 2010 as well as ones being planned for Pittsburgh and Columbus not far after. If you’ve never been to a SharePoint Saturday I would highly encourage you to attend (did I mention it’s FREE!) A final thanks to everyone who helped put on the event, spoke, sponsored, or had any hand in making this event happen. Without you this never would have been possible. I look forward to attending more such events and keeping the SharePoint community growing.

View Full Album

-Frog Out

Mitch.Web Re-Branded to The Evil Little Developer's Toolbox

Mitchell Lee — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:48:18 GMT

Let's face it, it needed a rename. Mitch.Web just lacks everything in terms of marketing, so I've re-branded my (currently error logging :P) framework to "The Evil Little Developer's Toolbox" in game with my EvilDev theme. I've also made advancements (not guaranteed to work yet) on my error logging framework, mostly in terms of a new Services Project, and the Logging Service. The logging service, is a WCF Service, designed to log errors to a database.

The idea behind it, well, I generally focus my efforts towards Web Applications, and one thing I've been looking for, and haven't had much luck in finding is, a standardized end-to-end error logging solution. I like to know when my javascript breaks, or my silverlight application has a heart attack. I like to know when my flash components fail horribly. Now, each platform has methods of error logging (let's face it, this isn't exactly a "new" concept). I haven't had much chance to play with WCF before this, so I figured I could kill two birds with one stone if you will.

Once I solidify my service code, (and hopefully find a pleasant way to make it easily redistribute), I'll set about writing libraries for the various platforms I plan to support (I want to be able to simply include a js file in my GlobalMaster.aspx for example, and have all javascript errors logged).

It's a rather simple Architecture, requiring only some basic error info/log message, and a Registered Application Guid (to ensure not just anybody can log to my service.

Anyways, if you feel like checking it out, codeplex URL has been changed (although apparantly the old url will just redirect), so check it at:

http://evildevtoolbox.codeplex.com/

#PDC09 ’s Final Verdict: Eyes on The Prize, Not in the Sky

andrewbrust — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:19:10 GMT

What a difference a day makes…at least to some. While the Day 1 keynote at PDC seemed mostly like a news update on last year’s announcements, and a somewhat dry one at that, Day 2 gave developers some real “red meat.” It began with a presentation by Steven Sinofsky on Windows 7’s progress since its launch last month, including demos of the diverse array of hardware on which it now runs. Sinofsky then offered the ultimate crowd pleaser: he described the specs for a multi-touch Microsoft-designed laptop manufactured by Acer, and then explained that all attendees would be receiving one for free. That greased the wheels for sure, and was followed up with a glimpse of IE9.

The pièce de résistance was a presentation by developer folk hero Scott Guthrie describing features that would be in the forthcoming Silverlight 4, the beta of which he announced was being made available immediately. We learned from Guthrie that this release of Silverlight will add an impressive array of client capabilities, from things like printing and microphone/webcam access to applications running in full trust and performing COM automation of Office. Scott Hanselman showed us how Silverlight 4 and Visual Studio 2010’s Data Sources window make this new version of the RIA platform keenly well-suited for data-over-forms line-of-business applications. All of this really showed the audience that WPF was becoming more and more of a technology for ISVs (and Microsoft itself), and that custom app developers will find their rich client home in Silverlight.

After Guthrie finished his presentation, the audience was shown some of the cool new dev-features in SharePoint 2010. Much of this was a summary of stuff shown at Microsoft’s SharePoint conference a few weeks earlier. Given that, and the fact that Guthrie’s a hard act to follow, the keynote ended somewhat anti-climactically. At about that time, my live and prolific “tweeting” of the keynote encountered an anti-climax of its own: Twitter told me I had exceeded my allowance of status updates and shut me down.

As annoyed as I was by Twitter’s forced interruption of my reports, I thought about it and realized that it was OK. I really didn’t need to give people the blow-by-blow. Why? Because this Day 2 keynote, at which we saw new Internet Explorer and new Silverlight, was still really about incremental developments at Microsoft, as opposed to giant leaps. Giant leaps are more fun to tweet. Giant leaps are more fun to see covered at a $2000 conference. Pondering giant leaps can invoke excitement, optimism and inspiration. And that’s not what this PDC or this keynote, despite its improvement over Day 1’s, was about.

Maybe that’s OK. Maybe it’s alright that this PDC was more like a mid-year parent-teacher conference than starting a new grade and learning new subjects. The pipeline of the 2010 (and 2008 R2) new releases is dizzying, and developers really need help in absorbing them. Perhaps now is not the time for bold new vision, but rather for doing the homework and housekeeping necessary to ensure last year’s vision is implemented calmly, clearly and competently. There’s little point in planning a new game while we’re still in an active one and we need to win.

A Pilgrim’s Diary

kariemali — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:14:51 GMT

أحياناً أوثر الصمت لأني ربما أعجز عن إنتقاء كلمات تنقل ما أشعر به. أو ربما أظن أن الكلمات لا تكفي أحياناً. فهذه أجزاء من قصيدة الفيتوري يوميات حاج فلتأخذ منها ما شئت فلا أرى وقتاً يوافق واقعه تلك الكلمات مثل هذا الوقت:

قوافل يا سيدي قلوبنا إليك
تحج كل عام
هياكل مثقلة بالوجد والهيام
تسجد عند عتبات البيت والمقام
تقرئك السلام
يا سيدي عليك أفضل السلام

يا سيدي عليك أفضل السلام
من أمة مضاعة
خاسرة البضاعة
تقذفها حضارة الخراب والظلام
إليك كل عام
لعلها تجد الشفاعة
لشمسها العمياء في الزحام

يا سيدي
منذ ردمنا البحر بالسدود
وانتصبت بيننا وبينك الحدود
متنا
وداست فوقنا ماشية اليهود

يا سيدي
تعلم أن كان لنا مجد وضيعناه
بنيته انت وهدمناه
واليوم ها نحن
أجل يا سيدي
نرفل في سقطتنا العظيمة
كأننا شواهد قديمة
تعيش عمرها لكي
تؤرخ الهزيمة

لا جمر في عظامنا ولا رماد
لا ثلج لا سواد
لا الكفر كله ولا العبادة
الضعف والذلة عادة
يا سيدي
علمتنا الحب
فعلمنا تمرد الإرادة

mocra off railers t-shirt

Liam McLennan — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:14:06 GMT

In a little over 5 weeks Dr Nic and the Fair-brothers will begin their Homeric rickshaw running adventure from the Himalayas to the south of India. Their adventure is raising money for some worthy causes so please give generously.

As you can see, Greg was kind enough to send me a mocra off railers t-shirt. It is very comfortable. Thanks Greg and good luck!

Silverlight (beta) 4.0 is here!!

subodhnpushpak — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:03:22 GMT

Silverlight has come to an age from WPF/E days and today 4.0 version was launched.

Features includes:

Support for enterprise applications:

Printing support: Silverlight application can print itself, how the content is formatted when printed, and determine the content that will appear. It even has capabilities to print a portion of the Silverlight content.

RichTextArea control / WebBrowser Control: The RichTextArea has Bi-Di support, allows hyperlinks, XAML content, and embedding of images. It also supports changing the font size, foreground color, and making text bold, italicized, and underlined as well as many other rich text features. The WebBrowser control displays HTML in the control when running Out-of-Browser

WCF RIA services: Exposes an object model on the server through an optimized .NET to .NET binary format as well as an open JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format to Silverlight application. WCF RIA Services has features to assist with change tracking on the client in Silverlight, user authentication, and personalization ( a la EDM change tracking system for integration with DB!!!)..

MEF suuport: Deploy application in multiple Silverlight applications (XAP) files. This allows the XAP files to be dynamically downloaded at runtime. MEF allows applications to be context-aware where the available parts change based on the state of the application. It also improves the general maintainability of Silverlight applications by greatly introduce loose coupling between its components.

InBuilt support for MVVM: Command Property on ButtonBase and Hyperlink

IDataErrorInfo, INotifyDataErrorInfo : Get errors when (data) bindings fails.

Auto-Sizing Columns and Copy from DataGrid

Navigation Page Loading Extensibility: introduces MVC-style navigation

Excellent data binding support through XAML code: Binding to String Indexers / SelectedValue and SelectedValuePath on the Selector / StringFormat, TargetNullValue, FallbackValue:

Databinding Support for Dependency Objects: Allows bind properties on a DependencyObject (DO) and not just on FrameworkElements.

CompositeTransform for animations:

ObservableCollection<T> Constructor Accepts IList and IEnumerable :

Inbuilt MouseWheel Support:

Right Mouse Click:

Programmatic Clipboard Access:

Webcam and Microphone Support:

Offline Digital Rights Management

Notifications (Toast)

File System Access / COM automation for trusted applications: If both return true and Microsoft Office is installed, you can create an instance of an object such as Microsoft Word

Cross-Domain Networking Access: An Out-of-Browser Trusted Application can perform cross-domain network calls.

It could NOT have been better than this… i wished i had all these features for a silverlight application(currently in SL3) i am involved in and SL team has delivered!!

Will be blogging more on these once a have more time…

Technorati Tags: Silverlight 4.0

Creating a comma separated list from IEnumerable<T> … again

Will Smith — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:02:16 GMT

So in response to some comments on my original post on this topic, I started playing around with some other ideas. I figured it would be cleaner to post code here, rather than the comments.

How many variations on the theme can we really have?

As suggested in the comments on the previous post:

   1: public static string Join1<T>( this IEnumerable<T> items, string delimiter, Func<T,string> converter )

   2: {

   3:     return string.Join( delimiter,

   4:                         items

   5:                             .Select( converter )

   6:                             .Where( s => !string.IsNullOrEmpty( s ) )

   7:                             .ToArray() );

   8: }

Using Aggregate Linq extension:

   1: public static string Join2<T>( this IEnumerable<T> items, string delimiter, Func<T, string> converter )

   2: {

   3:     return items

   4:         .Aggregate( string.Empty,

   5:                     ( agg, next ) =>

   6:                         {

   7:                             var sNext = converter( next );

8:

   9:                             return string.IsNullOrEmpty( sNext )

  10:                                        ? agg

  11:                                        : agg + delimiter + sNext;

  12:                         } );

  13: }

Aggregate again:

   1: public static string Join3<T>( this IEnumerable<T> items, string delimiter, Func<T, string> converter )

   2: {

   3:     return items

   4:         .Select( converter )

   5:         .Aggregate( ( agg, sNext ) => string.IsNullOrEmpty( sNext )

   6:                                           ? agg

   7:                                           : agg + delimiter + sNext );

   8: }

And again:

   1: public static string Join4<T>( this IEnumerable<T> items, string delimiter, Func<T, string> converter )

   2: {

   3:     return items

   4:         .Select( converter )

   5:         .Where( s => !string.IsNullOrEmpty( s ) )

   6:         .Aggregate( ( agg, next ) => agg + delimiter + next );

   7: }

In the comments for my previous post, there was a decent discussion about the performance of string aggregation, and the suggestion of using StringBuilder instead. I’m not too concerned about it. I’m not dealing with large data sets.

Tags: .Net, C#

Review of Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook

Josh Holmes — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:24:32 GMT

For full disclosure, Packt Publishing sent me a review copy of this book. They did not ask for a positive review, just a review.

This is the first book by Jorge Ramon that I’ve read. This book is exactly what the title says that it is, a Cookbook. It’s got 109 solutions to problems solved by Ext JS 3.0. I was expecting, like a lot of other books to get a fill of all of the philosophy behind what they are trying to promote but that wasn’t the case. This book just in with no nonsense and gets right to the code.

More on my blog at Review of Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook

NotAtPDC Demo

Dane Morgridge — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:01:52 GMT

I just got done with my NotAtPdc Session On "Getting to Know the Entity Framework". Of course like a good live presentation, my demo broke. The problem was in the connection string. When I did the model first development, I named the model something different for some reason and that caused the connection string to be out of sync in the actual application. Someone had mentioned that was the problem in the chat, but I didn't see it until after the demo was over. So, in case anyone else happens to run into this error down the road, be sure your connection string in the app that is using your data model is up to date. And thanks to the person who mentioned that. (I don't have the chat log in front of me so I don't have your name or I'd give you credit)

Thanks to all that attended my session and you can download the demo code (that actually works) here.

My talk at #notatpdc postponed

Laurent Bugnion — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:16:05 GMT

Hey guys,

I am really sorry for having to postpone my talk about Expression Blend 3 and SketchFlow. We had some huge difficulties with the NotAtPDC.com website, and unfortunately we were not able to locate the site administrator on time to solve the issue. Without a speaker login, I was able to talk to the attendees, but not share my desktop. Now I love to talk about Blend but I love even more to show Blend ;)

Ironically, as a Microsoft MVP I do have a LiveMeeting account, so I would be able to host the talk myself, but organizing a LiveMeeting take a little time, and I didn’t want to rush into that, cut my talk short or step on the next speaker’s feet (let’s hope that the issues get solved in time for him!)

We will definitely reschedule the talk, either within NotAtPDC (if we find a suitable time slot) or a bit later, so definitely stay tuned on this blog and my twitter feed for more info.

Exciting New Experiment in Data Visualization

Jim Kita — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:06:06 GMT

Within the world of Business Intelligence and Analytics, data analysis can only be automated so far and manual analysis is often required to add an important component of human intelligence. To that end, data visualization is a useful, if not critical tool to be able to absorb and understand large amounts of data. So it came as a bit of a surprise that Microsoft’s Live Labs has a research project called “Pivot” intended to help visually analyze data patterns on a Web scale. What intrigues me the most about this project is that, while it is intended to operate at “Web scale” it would appear to be able to scale down to handle any size data set as long as it can be organized into “Collections,” even if the collection represent business data like customers and product orders. While the project is very limited at this time the sample video teases a user interface that is very intuitive for any user comfortable with Web 2.0 technologies.

Has anyone work with this technology yet?

Outlook 2010 Social Networking Plugins

Matt deClercq — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:35:06 GMT

Just moved from the Office 2010 Technical Preview to the Beta that was released last week or so and noticed a new bit of functionality in Outlook. I don't know the extent of the interoperability just yet but I look forward to seeing it in action with anything other than SharePoint.

MS Info Page Here

Office Communicator 2007 R2 – AOL PIC Issue

BWCA — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:55:11 GMT

After we enabled our Office Communicator 2007 R2 Access Edge Server for Federation with AOL, Yahoo, and MSN, our Communicator 2007 R2 clients were able to chat successfully with Yahoo and MSN users and vice versa. Also, AOL users could send instant messages to our clients.

However, our Communicator clients could not send instant messages to or reply to IMs from AOL users. When an AOL user would send us an instant message, we would get the following error message when we attempted to reply or when we tried to send a new instant message to an AOL user. Also, we could not see presence information for AOL contacts in Office Communicator.

The following message was not delivered to mikesmith1@aol.com. More details (ID:430)

After troubleshooting the problem for a few days, I opened up a Microsoft Premier Support ticket requesting additional assistance. It took us approximately six weeks to isolate and fix the problem.

In a nutshell, we used the OCS 2007 R2 Logging Tool on the Access Edge Server to monitor traffic between an AOL and MOC IM conversation and vice versa to isolate the problem. Using snooper, we noticed a 80072746 error message specific to sip.oscar.aol.com when a MOC client tried to reply to an AOL user IM. Every time a MOC client tried to send a new IM or reply to an AOL user, the AOL IM Federation Servers would refuse the connection. With this information, Microsoft PSS opened a ticket with AOL to troubleshoot this further.

After speaking with AOL and Microsoft, we learned that our Comodo 2048-bit signed Root CA was causing the problem in our Certificate Chain on the OCS 2007 R2 Access Edge Server. Please note we did not have to make any changes to our 2048-bit Intermediate and 1024-bit Personal CAs.

With this information, we worked with our CA to issue a new 1024-bit Root CA. After receiving the new certificate, we deployed it on our Access Edge Server and restarted the services. Shortly thereafter, our Communicator 2007 R2 clients were able to chat successfully with AOL users and vice versa. Also, we could see presence information for our AOL contacts. A big thanks goes to Microsoft PSS and AOL for helping us troubleshoot the problem.

For more information regarding similar issues, you can check out a couple of postings, especially the Comments section, on Scott Oseychik’s blog.

http://blogs.msdn.com/scottos/archive/2009/07/14/federation-and-or-pic-may-fail-against-partners-using-2048-bit-signed-root-cas.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/scottos/archive/2008/12/30/pic-stops-functioning-after-installing-renewing-your-certificate.aspx

Locating your MediaElement Video Source File in a Silverlight 3 Control

RockStarCoder — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:24:37 GMT

In this Demo I will show 3 ways to have your web page locate your MediaElement’s video file.

I have created a Silverlight 3 application and let it automatically create a web site to host the control.

Drag a <MediaElement> onto the UserControl and set its source file attribute.

Drag the video file using window explorer and drop it in the root of my Silverlight’s UserControl project.

Note the size of this file is about 25mb.

I will demo 3 different methods for setting the location so that the web page can find it.

Method 1

Highlight the video and set its “Build Action” to “Content”

Your properties will look like below:

Change the source attribute to have a forward slash before the video name.

Build the solution.

Test using the test aspx page (TestMediaTestPage.aspx) in your web project and the video should work fine.

Check the size of your xap in the ClientBin folder. Notice that it includes the video file.

Method 2

Again from a fresh Silverlight solution containing the 2 projects, drag the video to the root of the Silverlight project.

Highlight the video and set its “Build Action” to “Resource”.

Add a <MediaElement> onto the UserControl and set its source file attribute.

In this case a slash is not used in front of the file name in the MediaElement

Build the solution.

Once again check the size of your xap in the ClientBin folder. Notice that it includes the video file.

Test using the test aspx page (TestMediaTestPage.aspx) in your web project and the video should work fine.

Method 3

Again from a fresh Silverlight solution containing the 2 projects, drag the video to the root of the Silverlight project.

Highlight the video and verify its “Build Action” is set to “None”.

Add a <MediaElement> onto the UserControl and set its source file attribute.

It does not matter if a slash is in front of the file name or not in the MediaElement

Build the solution and using windows explorer check the size of the xap file in the ClientBin.

Notice that it does not include the video file.

Using windows explorer, drag the video file into the ClientBin folder.

Test using the test aspx page (TestMediaTestPage.aspx) in your web project and the video should work fine.

Here is a video recap.

Silverlight Cream for November 19, 2009 -- #735

Dave Campbell — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:26:49 GMT

Silverlight 4 Overview Postings

Every time there's a beta or a release I try a different way to get all the good stuff out. I waited until today, and am scooping up all the overview blog posts, and posting them first in this post. I've got a few submissions I'll get out later today and then I'll start catching up with everyone as the days go on... I've tagged 63 posts so far! -- oh, and I added a "4 Beta" tag on Silverlight Cream, so that's ready to roll

For now, here is the (SL4ß Overview) end-result of looking at 396 blogs at varying times since 5:30 this morning:

Andy Beaulieu has a post up: Silverlight 4 Beta Summary with links out to his and other posts

Adam Kinney reports a Rundown of Silverlight 4 Beta Features and 6 Hands on Labs with lots of goodies

David Anson discusses SL4: Silverlight 4 Beta is out - and the Toolkit has it covered! [Silverlight Toolkit November 2009 release now available for Silverlight 3 and 4!]

Stefan Olson already has a list up of Bugs fixed (or not) in Silverlight 4 Beta

Ning Zhang reports and demonstrates that Silverlight 4 Adds Arabic Support

John Papa has some good information and links: Silverlight 4 Beta Announced at PDC09: Great Learning Material Too!

Chris Anderson posted this one from watching the keynote: PDC09 News

Nikhil Kothari has a great overview of and links to the PDC demos: Silverlight 4 Debuts with Killer Demos at PDC09

Shawn Wildermuth's post I mentioned yesterday in my mad dash to post: Silverlight 4 Beta Announced!

Koen Zwikstra is nothing if not efficient... he's got a Silverlight 4 Beta version of SilverlightSpy up already: Silverlight Spy 3.0.0.5

And if you thought the Expression Blend and Design folks were napping: Download Expression Blend Preview for .NET 4

Tim Heuer's great post of yesterday referenced by *everyone*: Silverlight 4 Beta – A guide to the new features

Andrea Boschin has a post and some sample code up: Silverlight 4.0 beta released

András Velvárt has a good list of what's new: Discovering Silverlight 4 – What is new?

The Silverlight SDK has a couple good posts up. First the obligatorey Silverlight 4 Beta Released! with a ton of links, then Silverlight 4 Beta Bugs

Katrien De Graeve has a good post up with links: Silverlight 4 Beta – Overview of the new features

Stay in the 'Light!

Time for a new computer!

mbcrump — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:10:19 GMT

I have finally completeed building my computer. So far, it is very fast. I am using Windows 7 x64 and I am amazed that I have not had many problems. Check out the build and leave comments below.

Part	New Machine Q4 - 2009	Old Machine Q4 -2004
CPU	Q6600 4 Cores @ 2.4Ghz	Athlon 64 4000+
Motherboard	Intel G31	Abit AV8
RAM	4GB DDR2	2GB DDR
HardDrive 1 (SATA)	1.5TB	160GB
HardDrive 2 (SATA)	None	400GB
Video	Geforce 8600GT (PCI-E)	Geforce 6600GT (AGP)
CD/DVD Drive	CD/Dvd Reader	CD/Dvd Burner
Sound Card	7.1 Channel Surround Sound	Integrated Sound
TV Tuner	Hauppauge TV Tuner with Remote	None
Total Price	Q6600 - $130 HDD - $110 Sound Card - $11 TV Tuner - $51 Total Invested $302	$800 Total Price

Hurray: NUnit's equivalent for MsTest's AssemblyInitialise is SetupFixture!

marocanu2001 — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:13:02 GMT

We used MsTest framework for a project that mainly had integration tests for Wcf Services, and found particularly useful to use AssemblyInitialise method to start the services hosts before all the tests are run and AssemblyCleanup to stop all the hosts after all the tests in the assembly have run.

At some point, the company decided they would like to change this project to use NUnit instead of MsTest (for sake of uniformity, as all thi other project were using NUnit).

The only problem that I saw there was that I didn't find any easy way to simulate this AssemblyInitialise and AssemblyCleanup methods.

But here we are saved, as someone told me about this SetupFixture which works like this:

The class with this attribute can contain a SetUp method and a TearDown method.
The setup method from the Setup fixture is executed before all the tests from a namespace are executed, TearDown method, after all the tests in a namespace are executed.

This was very useful for out DB integration tests as well, as we needed to setup database stuff before executing all the DB integration tests.

So here we are, saved and NUnit is still better than MsTest ! (but not better than MbUnit , imho) :)

Getting Started with Entity Framework 4 - Templated Code Generation

Eric Nelson — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:47:05 GMT

[This is the second 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).]

Code generation from the Entity Data Model (EDM) has changed significantly in version 4 of the Entity Framework. The product does retain a backwardly compatible model of code generation but also now includes T4 templates for code generation. This is a fantastic addition to the Entity Framework as many developers want to (easily) control the code generated from the EDM to meet their specific needs, which was very difficult to do in version 1 as it depended on the CodeDom. T4 gives us:

Full control over the code generation from an EDM
The ability for developers to easily customise the templates produced by Microsoft
The ability for Microsoft to easily add additional templates in the future
The ability for developers to easily share templates between projects, teams and companies

T4 was first introduced in Visual Studio 2008 and stands for Text Template Transformation Toolkit – a code generation tool similar in capabilities to the likes of CodeSmith.

T4 was largely overlooked in Visual Studio 2008, in the main because there was no real UI for T4. In general I come across very very few developers who have heard of or understand the power of T4. However, now that the Entity Framework team (and the ASP.NET MVC team) have adopted T4 wholeheartedly I expect T4 will itself get the attention it deserves.

The EF team include a single T4 template in Beta 2 but add a further template in CTP2 for self tracking entities (In Beta 1 they also had a singel template but added an additional two in the companion CTP1).

By default you are not using T4 if you add a new EDM or if you open a version 1 EDM. You need to enable T4 code gen for your EDM. You do this by right clicking on the EDM design surface and then add in the template(s).

In Beta 1 this was called (confusingly) Add New Artifact Generation Item:

In Beta 2 it is renamed to Add Code Generation Item:

This will display the available choices:

Beta 1 with CTP 1

Beta 2 with CTP 2

Once you have added a template you will notice that the Custom Tool generation for the EDM is now blank (It normally is the value EntityModelCodeGenerator):

In my case I have added the POCO Code Generator (which was available in CTP1 for Beta 1 and will reappear in a future CTP for Beta 2). My solution now contains two T4 files – one to generate the Object Context class and another responsible for the generation of a class (and C# file) per Entity in the EDM. Note that a single T4 template can generate several files:

If we take a brief look at the contents of SimpleModel.Context.tt:

We can see that the text wrapped inside <# #> is evaluated by T4 to ultimately generated the resulting C# files. The code outside is just text in the final output. This approach should feel very familiar to anyone who has developed web sites using classic ASP. For example, this section of SimpleModel.Types.tt:

generates the partial class code in the C# file Order.cs:

All pretty straightforward really – although a lot of “smarts” is contained within those .tt files! I will add a more general post on T4 shortly.

RoundhousE: Version Your Database

Robz / Fervent Coder — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:26:05 GMT

Versioning your database is as important as versioning your code. How much time do we waste currently before we are even productive when we have to fix or enhance something in a database?

RoundhousE versions your database how you want. The recommended way is to version based on source control, but that may not be your solution. But for a moment let’s pretend it is.

Why would versioning your database based on source control be a big help? What happens if you get a prod fix (or work order) to fix a view or a stored procedure (sproc)? How do you know where in source control that is? Do you even know what repository it lives in? How can you even be sure right away that the item you have in source control directly maps to the item in production? Oh right. You can’t. At least not without doing a manual comparison (or with a diff tool). And if you are not even familiar with the item, how do you get back to it in source control? You ask someone. And then someone else. And so on until you find someone that knows where you can find that view in source control. “Oh….Samsonite! I was WAYYYY off.”

How much time are we using up currently before we are even productive? Probably quite a bit more than we realize. Let’s put it in perspective. You are a new hire today. If I was to point you to a database and tell you to fix a view and update the view in source control, how soon do you think you could be productive? What questions are you going to ask me?

Where is the view in source control? When is this needed by? etc etc

If your company instead used RoundhousE (RH) you could empower the new hire or any developer that suffers from can’t remember stuff (CRS)! Just point them to the database. Let’s take a moment to see what happens as we run the migration.

RoundhousE Versions During Migration

Remember our look at the runner? I want to concentrate in just one area.

Attempting to resolve version from C:\code\roundhouse\code_drop\deployment\_BuildInfo.xml using //buildInfo/version.
Found version 0.0.0.67 from C:\code\roundhouse\code_drop\deployment\_BuildInfo.xml.
Migrating TestRoundhousE from version 0 to 0.0.0.67.
Versioning TestRoundhousE database with version 0.0.0.67 based on http://roundhouse.googlecode.com/svn.

What exactly is happening here? We are looking into an xml file that contains a version. RH also asks for the repository the versioning information comes from. That all gets recorded in the database.

What does that build file look like?

<?xml version="1.0" ?>

<buildInfo>

  <projectName>RoundhousE</projectName>

  <companyName>FerventCoder Software</companyName>

  <versionMajor>0</versionMajor>

  <versionMinor>0</versionMinor>

  <buildNumber>0</buildNumber>

  <revision>25</revision>

  <version>1.0.22.25</version>

  <repositoryPath>http://someotherplace/svn/repositoryname/</repositoryPath>

  <microsoftNetFramework>net-3.5</microsoftNetFramework>

  <msbuildConfiguration>Release</msbuildConfiguration>

  <msbuildPlatform>Any CPU</msbuildPlatform>

  <builtWith>UppercuT v. 0.9.0.216</builtWith>

</buildInfo>

It is the output of an automated build product called UppercuT. Some of you have heard me talk about it before. It records the version in an xml output file to be used by deployment products etc.

Now I have a way to find the query at an exact point in source control history!

What if I don’t use UppercuT? That’s fine, create something in your automated build to create a simple xml file that contains a version. Then pass the file path and xpath for the version info to RH.

Or another way you can get to version is to point to a DLL you have versioned based on source control.

Attempting to resolve assembly file version from C:\code\roundhouse\code_drop\RoundhousE\NAnt\roundhouse.dll.
Migrating TestRoundhousE from version 0.0.0.67 to 0.0.0.67.
Versioning TestRoundhousE database with version 0.0.0.67 based on http://roundhouse.googlecode.com/svn.

RH will automatically pull the file version from the DLL and use it to version the database.

Back To Your Empowerment

So you query the scripts ran table for the view. You notice version_id is 1.

Now you query the version table.

Boom. You have a path to a repository. You also have an exact point in source to find the item. You can now look revision 67 versus the current revision in source control.

You now know exactly where to look. Two steps to productivity. You get that production fix done in no time and we are so impressed we give you a raise on the spot.

One Repository – Multiple Databases

That’s great, but I hit multiple databases when I deploy. Easy as pie. Do you remember last time how we said to always include the database name before the scripts (see the picture to the right)? For each database, it is just another call to RH to run telling it the specific information about the next database. Super simple.

Multiple Repositories – One Database

What if I have multiple repositories that address the same database? We got you covered. If you have more than one repository versioning a database, they will version the database independently.

Found version 1.0.22.25 from C:\code\roundhouse\code_drop\deployment\_BuildInfo.xml.
Migrating TestRoundhousE from version 0 to 1.0.22.25.
Versioning TestRoundhousE database with version 1.0.22.25 based on http://someotherplace/svn/repositoryname/.

Notice how RH said the prior version was 0. That’s because versioning is based on repository. That repository had never ran against this database before. Now looking in the version table, we see two different repositories with two different versions.

Conclusion

Versioning your database is as important as versioning your code. RoundhousE is a very powerful product for migrating your database (rivaling even some paid alternatives). And it’s free. RoundhousE is just going to keep getting better. So why not give it a try? DBAs approve. It makes auditors smile. I heard it once helped a lady walk again.

The gem in the BizTalk Administrators toolbox

BizTalkMonitoring — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:14:02 GMT

There seems to be a too strong trend in too many product development organizations: This is the trend to only deliver; don’t get me wrong, delivering quality software on time and within budget is a good thing. The issue is that there is in many cases only focus on delivery of applications and not too much though and focus on how the operational aspect of that software will work.

This observation applies to almost all types of projects, with integration projects being no exception. Probably one of the most important factors after releasing your well coded and QA’ed system is ensuring that it meets a required level of uptime. The point I am trying to make is that no product development lifecycle can be complete without taking into consideration the monitoring of the product in the intended production environment. Very often system implementations are seen as less than successful due to the fact that a production system has gone down without anyone (except of course the users or downstream systems!) knowing about it.

BizTalk or any other integration solution for that fact is no different. In fact the potential problem of downtime and system failure can be multiplied by a factor of the number of systems being integrated. This is where the vision of Minotaur was born.

Minotaur is an essential component in your operational toolbox that will not only provide your BizTalk administrators with up to the minute monitoring metrics via email and a dashboard, but also provide your administrators with proactive monitoring data to try and ensure that your integration systems stay available and healthy.

Minotaur takes BizTalk monitoring to the next level; Minotaur will not only monitor your custom built BizTalk product, but also the overall BizTalk Server environment including the BizTalk databases, services and performance metrics. Minotaur can then also be configured to monitor any peripheral applications and services including SOA services that your BizTalk solution depends on. The end result is complete end to end monitoring of BizTalk centric solutions, not just BizTalk application monitoring; A feature that differentiates Minotaur from the rest.

The Raging Bull Tech vision is also to make effective monitoring of BizTalk Server available not only to big budget organizations, but also to smaller companies. This is why Minotaur has a competitive once-off pricing model. I invite you to visit the Minotaur product page and look at the product yourself, I am sure you will find that takes monitoring BizTalk server to the next level; Minotaur was designed to be a differentiator in the BizTalk monitoring tool market after all.

Having now just gone through this shameless punt of the system I am affiliated with, I have to take some time to add that there are a few products in the market today that will provide BizTalk monitoring capabilities. Many of these products are good products, and dependant on your requirements, may or may not fulfil your requirements. I suggest doing your research on BizTalk monitoring software and evaluating each one based on a set of logical predefined criteria:

· Product features

· Pricing model

· Vendor support

Happy BizTalk monitoring!

Not sure if you need the Professional version of DotNetNuke?

Brian Scarbeau — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:14:23 GMT

The DotNetNuke web hosters at PowerDNN have put together a nice 3 minute survey to analyze your needs on what version of DotNetNuke that you might need to have.

The survey has 3 categories.

1. Website Size

2. Website Usage

3. Project Details

With an easy UI of drop down lists, you just answer the questions listed in each category and then submit them to the site.

After you submit, you'll get reasons why you should use either the Community or Professional Edition of DotNetNuke.

Here's an example of the results that I received based on my input:

You should use DotNetNuke Community Edition because:

DotNetNuke Community Edition is designed for Small Business Websites.

DotNetNuke Community Edition is recommended for websites using only 1GB or Less of disk space.

DotNetNuke Community Edition is recommended for websites using only 1GB or Less of database space.

DotNetNuke Community Edition is recommended for websites with only 1 Portal.

DotNetNuke Community Edition is designed for small websites with only 25 - 100 User Accounts.

DotNetNuke Community Edition does not contain content approval workflows because it would overburden 2 - 5 Content Editors.

DotNetNuke Community Edition is designed for websites with only 1 Web Server.

DotNetNuke Community Edition is free and will not impact a small budget of $0 - $3k.

DotNetNuke Community Edition is much simpler for an organization with only 1 - 15 Employees to adequately leverage.

DotNetNuke Community Edition does not include legal indemnification which may be acceptable because your organization is small.

You may consider DotNetNuke Professional Edition because:

DotNetNuke Professional Edition's content management is designed for websites that have 25 - 50 Pages or more.

DotNetNuke Professional Edition is optimized for heavy usage which includes 100 - 500 Concurrent Users or more.

DotNetNuke Professional Edition's advanced security model is recommended for high-security and VPN environments.

DotNetNuke Professional Edition's Unlimited Support and Guaranteed Issue Resolution will reduce maintainance costs once the outsourced project is complete.

The results were very honest and PowerDNN was not trying to sell me the Professional version of DotNetNuke. Great idea to have for those that really don't know what version they should get.

Check it out!

Technorati Tags: DotNetNuke, PowerDNN

SQL Azure slides and links from EdgeUG session

Eric Nelson — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:42:52 GMT

A big thanks to all those who attended http://edgeug.net/ last night to hear about SQL Azure and SQL Server 2008 R2. I really enjoyed it and once again “Merry Christmas”!

Links

http://bit.ly/startazure takes you to the getting started page for SQL Azure (and Windows Azure)
Download SQL Server Management Studio R2 which works with SQL Azure
Brief walkthrough of using SSMS R2 with SQL Azure (nice screenshots similar to what I showed in the first demo)
Download the SQL Azure Migration Wizard
http://twitter.com/ericnel
http://twitter.com/ukmsdn
The UK MSDN Flash Podcast which I tinker with :-) Slowly moving onto Channel 9

Slides

SQL Azure Overview - ericnel

View more presentations from ukdpe.

Should a Build Environment match Development or Production?

Liam McLennan — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 05:32:16 GMT

Today I had a twittersation about build servers, and how closely they should match the development and production environments. Damian’s position was that the build server should match the development environment, while I held that the build environment should be as close to production as possible. Martin Fowler’s Continuous Integration article says:

Test in a Clone of the Production Environment

The point of testing is to flush out, under controlled conditions, any problem that the system will have in production. A significant part of this is the environment within which the production system will run. If you test in a different environment, every difference results in a risk that what happens under test won't happen in production.

As a result you want to set up your test environment to be as exact a mimic of your production environment as possible.

I can provide an example of why this is a good idea. I am currently working on a project that is using Asp.Net MVC 2, which is installed on developer’s machines as a standalone MSI. The same article I mentioned before also says, “everything you need to do a build should be in there [repository] including: test scripts, properties files, database schema, install scripts, and third party libraries”. Being fallible, I made a mistake and failed to include one of the required MVC DLLs in the source repository. Because the build environment matched production we quickly detected the error because the build broke. If the build server was similar to the development environments then it would have had the required DLL in the GAC and the bug would have gone undetected.

Here are the things that I consider to be important for a build environment:

The build server should, as close as possible, match the production environment
The build server should be fast. Rapid feedback is important
The same build that runs on the build server should also be runnable on the developer’s machines
When a build fails, everyone should know

Hyper-V Server on a laptop - don't forget to check the power settings for the default power scheme

Liam Westley — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:39:39 GMT

If you install Hyper-V Server it comes without the usual Windows Server UI. On a laptop this means there is no control panel applet or system tray battery icon available to adjust the power configuration.

It's highly unlikely that the default option of Balanced is what you really want for hosting virtual machines, and you will ideally to set it to High Performance instead.

No need to worry, you need the command line tool, powercfg. Run the command line with the option list and then use the -setactive option with the long GUID to select your desired power scheme, as shown in the screen grab below. Job done.

BizTalk 2009 – ESB Itinerary Deployment Tool

SURESH GIRIRAJAN — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:43:25 GMT

When an itinerary is created using the itinerary designer you can deploy the Itinerary in different ways. Listed some of them and also I created a app which is basically derived from ESBImportUtil to do the deployment :

ESBImportUtil.exe

You can use ESBImportUtil.exe utility located at C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0\Bin.

Ex: ESBImportUtil.exe /f: onewayitinerary.xml /c: deployed /o

Power Shell Script

Check out the Itinerary sample in the C:\projects\microsoft.practices.esb\Source\Samples\Itinerary\Install\Scripts\Itinerary_install.ps1

Itinerary Deployment tool

Itinerary deployment tool basically provides similar functionality of ESBImportUtil, instead of deploying from command line now you have this app to deploy Itineraries and also planning to enhance later for modifying Itinerary configuration during deployment and also modify existing itinerary settings.

First step is to export your itinerary using Itinerary designer as xml. Choose the Itinerary xml to import in the Itinerary Deployment tool and click deploy. Import will automatically check whether the itinerary already exists in the Itinerary database or not. It will have option to overwrite the existing itinerary or not. You can overwrite an existing itinerary.

Check for the Source code and document: BizTalk ESB Importer

Why does SubSonic’s SimpleRepository ‘Add<T>’ return a decimal instead of an int? (Part 2)

Jesse — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:16:47 GMT

Last time I was taking a look at SubSonic’s SimpleRepository functionality and wondering about the return value of the ‘Add<T>’ method. More specifically, I was wondering why the ‘object’ instance being returned was typed as a decimal rather than an int when the object I was persisting had a primary key field that is typed as an int.

I had discovered that the while Add<T> was returning a decimal, it was also updating the primary key field (PostID on my Post class instance in this case) with the same value; essentially I was getting the correct number back both from the return value and the PostID field but the values were being typed differently.

Since SubSonic is an open source project I have the luxury of pulling down the code and having a look for myself. This was easily accomplished by doing a git clone of the repository at github: git://github.com/subsonic/SubSonic-3.0.git to a folder on my local machine. Opening the solution and building the source code only took a second and I was then able to directly reference the newly built SubSonic.Core assembly in the bin folder of my local SubSonic copy from my sample project so that I can easily F11 into the Add<T> method and see what’s going on.

This little block of code appeared to be the origin of the return value for the method:

object result = null;
using(var rdr = item.ToInsertQuery(_provider).ExecuteReader())
{
    if(rdr.Read()) 
    result = rdr[0];
}

The ‘rdr’ variable above is a simple System.Data.IDataReader, the run-time instance of which is a SqlDataReader in this case. To try and understand what’s happening it’s helpful to know what the SQL that the data reader is reading from looks like. Drilling down a little bit further into the ‘ToInsertQuery’ method can show us the SQL that’s being built up at run time:

Pulling that SQL out and formatting it some gives us this:

INSERT INTO [Posts](
  [Posts].[Title],
  [Posts].[Body],
  ...)
VALUES (
  @ins_PostsTitle,
  @ins_PostsBody,
  ...)

SELECT SCOPE_IDENTITY() as new_id

So our data reader is reading back the result of ‘SELECT SCOPE_IDENTITY()’. Taking a quick look at the ‘Posts’ table that the SimpleRepository created in my database reveals that the PostID column is indeed set as the primary key/identity and is typed as an int. Some poking around in the MSDN documentation reveals what’s going on:

This article on SCOPE_IDENTITY shows that that it has a return type of ‘NUMERIC(38,0)’ while this article on SQL Server Data Type Mappings in ADO .NET shows us that numeric SQL Data Type gets converted to the ‘decimal’ .NET Framework type automatically. So that mystery is solved, but this still doesn’t explain how the integer typed ‘PostID’ field was correctly updated with the new identity value while the return type remained a decimal. The next code block down in the Add<T> shows us how:

if (result != null && result != DBNull.Value) {
  try {
    var tbl =  _provider.FindOrCreateTable(typeof(T));
    var prop = item.GetType().GetProperty(tbl.PrimaryKey.Name);
    var settable = result.ChangeTypeTo(prop.PropertyType);
    prop.SetValue(item, settable, null);

    } catch(Exception x) {
      //swallow it - I don't like this per se but this is a convenience and we
      //don't want to throw the whole thing just because we can't auto-set the value
    }

return result;

The point of this is to provide convert the ‘result’ variable to the type of the primary key of the object being persisted. I’m not sure that I agree with swallowing the exception here, though that’s easy for me to say as an outside observer who hasn’t poured hours and hours into this code. The main reason I don’t agree with it is that I feel like the calling method really needs to be able to rely getting back the identity of the newly created record and if something blows up I would want to know about it. You can always still rely on the ‘result’ object that gets returned, but as we’ve already seen you can’t simply cast that to an int as you might think you could. I’m kind of curious to know under what circumstances this code throws an exception and see if there’s any way to make it more reliable. I can see that the definition of the ‘ChangeTypeTo’ extension method can explicitly throw an exception when the underlying database is SQLLite, but the exception thrown also hints at the workaround for that issue. I suppose this kind of thing can be the cost of doing business when you’re trying to support multiple database platforms; not everyone has the luxury of being “SQL Server only”.

Oh, and the (Exception x) isn’t needed in this case since we’re not doing anything with the caught exception object; I think a simple ‘catch’ would do just fine, but I digress. :-)

It wouldn’t be very difficult to modify this code to attempt to return a properly typed ‘object’ variable since we’re already trying to convert the ‘result’ object for the purposes of setting the primary key field in the provided ‘Post’ instance by trying to do something like this:

object typedResult = null;
if (result != null && result != DBNull.Value) {
  try {
    var tbl =  _provider.FindOrCreateTable(typeof(T));
    var prop = item.GetType().GetProperty(tbl.PrimaryKey.Name);
    var settable = result.ChangeTypeTo(prop.PropertyType);
    typedResult = settable;
    prop.SetValue(item, settable, null);

    } catch(Exception x) {
         //swallow it - I don't like this per se but this is a convenience and we
                    //don't want to throw the whole thing just because we can't auto-set the value
    }
 }

 return typedResult ?? result;

This would attempt to return a properly typed result if the type conversation was successful but would return the original result if needed. This would let the calling code look closer to what I originally expected would work:

SimpleRepository repo = new SimpleRepository("SampleDB", SimpleRepositoryOptions.RunMigrations);
object returnValue = repo.Add<Post>(newPost);
int newPostID = (int)returnValue;

The problem here is that since the type conversion could swallow an exception there’s no guarantee that our cast to an int would work at runtime. This could pose an issue if you were relying on being able to determine the newly created ID of the object immediately after its edited. For example, you might want to take the user to the ‘view’ screen for the post right after they create it. So what’s the solution? I’m not sure that I have the right answer, especially if you don’t have any other means to uniquely identify your records. I think it’s pretty safe to assume that you’re going to get some kind of return value back. The calling code could ‘ToString()’ the returned object and use Int32.Parse but that kind of smells to me. You could also use ‘Convert.ToInt32’, which I think I like better. I think I would also be in favor of removing the empty catch block to be able to rely on the type conversion when the method returns. I think it partially comes down to whether or not you think these potentially platform-specific quirks should be the burden of the library or the library’s consumer. Given that the consumer is always going to be in a better position to know about the specific needs of context in which the library is going to be used I think I’m leaning toward the latter.

That said this is open source so you can always fork it and modify it for your own purposes which is part of the fun. :-)

Windows Phone Camp - News and RSVP

Nikita Polyakov — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:39:48 GMT

I’m very excited to see some progress and buzz at Tampa Code Camp since we announced. We are still accepting speaker submissions and we are working having more sessions now. Continue spreading the word in person, online and even in general public too!

We can still use your help to reach out to your fellow geeks and let them know about Windows Phone Camp, you never know who is not admitting to be a fan.

Don’t believe the hype? At the very least come out and learn about what’s new for yourself. We will even have a few devices on display for you to play with.

Our website is: http://www.windowsphonecamp.com

Expect to:

Learn everything you need to get you started developing for the new Windows Phone

Meet other Mobile enthusiast and professionals

Cool raffle prizes

Chance to attend WinMoDev StartUp event later that night [see earlier post]

Here are just a few of the sessions you will see:

Why Windows Mobile Platform?

Getting started with Developer tools

What is Marketplace for Mobile and how to Submit My Application

How to work with SQL Compact and Sync Services

What are Widgets and how to develop them

How to build a Touch friendly Application

A Windows Mobile Gaming Framework

A bonus Zune HD XNA game programming session

Don’t forge to RSVP - http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=xcEvvkDzUJvsuX7m4f8ftA_3d_3d

Got Questions? Want to be a Speaker?
Or if you or someone you know, knows of a Mobile Company that would like to sponsor this event?
Then email us at contact@windowsphonecamp.com

Silverlight for Windows Embedded tutorial (step 3)

Valter Minute — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:54:47 GMT

After the first two tutorial steps were published on this blog I received many requests about using images inside a Silverlight for Windows Embedded application. This is the topic of this post.
To be able to load and use image files (jpegs,bmps,gifs) inside your application you should include the imaging library components in your OSDesign.
Those component are not included automatically when you add the XAML runtime (the runtime can run also without the imaging components, it will simply not load your images!).
To display an image inside your application user interface you have to use the image control of Silverlight.
This is a very simple XAML file that includes just an Image object and a button:


<UserControl
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    x:Class="ImgTest.Page"
    Width="640" Height="480" x:Name="ImagePage"> 
    <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White">
        <Image Margin="17,25,25,103" x:Name="MyImage" Source="\Windows\img01.JPG"/>
        <Button Height="49" Margin="259,0,253,28" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" Content="Button" x:Name="MyButton" Click="OnClick"/>
    </Grid>
</UserControl>

The image object is named "MyImage" and the button is named "MyButton".

We also have an OnClick event handler for the Click event of the button.

We can create a new Win32 application inside platform builder.

Using the XAML2CPP we can generate some code for us.

We will just have to include "XAML2CPP.h" inside your main C++ source file to use the code that XAML2CPP created for us:

#include "XAML2CPP.h"

We also have to include "XAML2CPP.rc" inside the rc file of our application to include the XAML code as a resource inside our application.

XAML2CPP has created a base class that we can use to implement our own class and handle the OnClick event:

class ImagePage : public TImagePage<ImagePage>  {  ...  }

In this sample we will just swap two images inside the image control each time you click on the button.
We have to declare a state flag (to be able to swap images) and two IXRBitmapImagePtr objects to store our bitmaps.

    bool state;          IXRBitmapImagePtr    img01;     IXRBitmapImagePtr    img02;

A very simple constructor will reset the state:

    ImagePage()     {          state=false;          }

The main initialization will be performed inside our Init method (it's not a good idea to put this kind of initialization code inside the constructor because some API calls may fail and you don't have a way to return an error code from a C++ constructor).

    virtual HRESULT Init(HINSTANCE hinstance,IXRApplication* app)          {             ...     }

Inside our Init method we have to call the Init method of our base class (declared by XAML2CPP), and check its return code for errors:

        HRESULT retcode;                    if (FAILED(retcode=TImagePage<ImagePage>::Init(hinstance,app)))              return retcode;

We declared two IXRBitmapImagePtr objects but we still haven't initialized them.
To create a Silverlight for Windows Embedded object we should use the CreateObject method of the IXRApplication object:

        if (FAILED(retcode=app->CreateObject(IID_IXRBitmapImage,&img01)))              return retcode;         if (FAILED(retcode=app->CreateObject(IID_IXRBitmapImage,&img02)))              return retcode;

The we can load the bitmaps and store them inside the IXRBitmapImagePtr objects:

        if (FAILED(retcode=img01->SetUriSource(TEXT("\\Windows\\img01.jpg"))))                           return retcode;         if (FAILED(retcode=img02->SetUriSource(TEXT("\\Windows\\img02.jpg"))))              return retcode;

In the OnClick event handler we just have to swap the image displayed by the MyImage object and change the state flag:

    HRESULT OnClick(IXRDependencyObject* source,XRMouseButtonEventArgs* args)      {                    HRESULT retcode;                    if (FAILED(retcode=MyImage->SetSource(state?img01:img02)))                          return retcode;                   state=state?false:true;                  return S_OK;           }

The main function of this sample is quite simple and it's not much different for the WinMain functions of the previous samples (just the class name changes):

int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance,                       HINSTANCE hPrevInstance,                       LPTSTR     lpCmdLine,                       int       nCmdShow)  {      if (!XamlRuntimeInitialize())              return -1;          HRESULT retcode;            IXRApplicationPtr app;          if (FAILED(retcode=GetXRApplicationInstance(&app)))          return -1;        ImagePage imagepage;        if (FAILED(imagepage.Init(hInstance,app)))          return -1;        UINT exitcode;        if (FAILED(imagepage.GetVisualHost()->StartDialog(&exitcode)))          return -1;        return 0;   }

You can download the full source code of this sample here:

http://cid-9b7b0aefe3514dc5.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/ImageTest.zip

Automated Acceptance Testing With NGourd and WebAii

Liam McLennan — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:51:18 GMT

I have written about about WebAii before. It is functional but the API sucks. I have written about NGourd too.

I am currently working on a project that is using the combination of NGourd and WebAiii for automated acceptance testing. We start with a story:

Feature: Search
    As a user
    I want to search for items
    so that I can find data that I am interested in

and then write some scenarios like:

Scenario: Search for a compensation agreement
    Given I am at the home page
    When I select the Agreements perspective
    And I search for 'agreement 1'
    Then the search results should be displayed

Within the test project we have the following directory structure:

Search.feature is a text file containing the previously listed feature and scenario definitions. For each scenario step we must have a corresponding step definition. For example the step ‘When I select the Agreements perspective’ matches the following step definition:

[Step(@"select the ([\w\s]+) perspective")]
        public void select_perspective(string perspective)
        {
            CurrentBrowser.Click(CurrentBrowser.Find.PerspectiveButton(perspective));
        }

Note the use of regular expressions to parameterise the step. Because this step is an action we put it in the ActionSteps file. Everything that we need to do for our tests falls into one of the three categories: Action, ContentAssertion or Navigation. The goal is to avoid defining the same step twice so that the set of steps form a domain specific language that can be used by business analysts and the like.

NGourd is a Cucumber knockoff, but without many of the features. However, it is surprising how far you can get with just the basics. So far it is working nicely.

XAML2CPP ver. 1.0.0.1

Valter Minute — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:37:02 GMT

I just found (and fixed) some bugs inside the XAML2CPP tool.

You can download the new release from here:

http://cid-9b7b0aefe3514dc5.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/XAML2CPP.zip

Changes history:

ver 1.0.0.1

- the application version is inserted in the generate files and written on the console

- the x:Name tag of the user control is used as class name instead of the XAML file name. If no x:Name attribute is specified the XAML file name will be used.

New Silverlight 4 Book Content

slria — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:23:32 GMT

Today we are happy to be able to announce the availability of some Silverlight 4 book content. For existing Silverlight developers looking to get up to speed quickly with the features we are releasing the Silverlight 4 Overview. This is a little over 50 pages of content covering the new Silverlight 4 features. For the rest of this week using code SL4DaveBlog at checkout you can get the new Silverlight 4 content for only $5 almost half off the normal price. More details on the book site http://www.silverlightjumpstart.com

For developers that are new to Silverlight but are comfortable with .NET we are releasing a preview of Silverlight 4 Jumpstart. Silverlight 4 Jumpstart content builds on the success of the Silverlight 3 Jumpstart book to offer content focused at the business .NET developer.

Both of these offerings are available today and will continue to evolve with the Silverlight 4 release. These are delivered in an electronic format (PDF) and will continue to be updated with more current releases of Silverlight 4.

The following is an excerpt from the Silverlight 4 Overview chapter that is available as part of Silverlight 4 Jumpstart Preview book or as a standalone chapter from SilverlightJumpstart.com. The full overview chapter covers all the major new features of Silverlight 4 to help you get up to speed quickly.

Microsoft has fast tracked Silverlight to be a strong competitor in the global RIA space and squarely positioned itself against competitors like Adobe, Google and Yahoo for production of the finest RIA toolset. The initial battleground was video, but we are now seeing Silverlight has strong potential for building business applications as well. We have tried through the previous chapters to streamline your learning of the current version of Silverlight by focusing on the key areas a business developer needs to know. Now it’s time to talk about the future and what the road ahead looks like for Silverlight.

It had only been about nine months since Silverlight 2 was released in October 2008 that Silverlight 3 hit the street in July 2009. Then, just four months after the release of Silverlight 3 Microsoft released Silverlight 4 Beta at its Professional Developer Conference in November 2009. Each of these releases build on the prior one to add new features while at the same time keeping compatibility to support this fast pace of innovation.

If I had to pick a single theme for the main items that are part of Silverlight 4 I would have to choose “You Asked, Microsoft built it”. I say that because many of the items like Printing or Web Camera/Microphone support for example were some of the highest user prioritized features. You can check that out for yourself at Silverlight.UserVoice.com and while you’re there add or vote on a couple of your requests.

Silverlight 4 is also a major deal because it’s the first release of Silverlight to support .NET 4 CLR (Common Language Runtime). This gives developers access to the latest runtime features that are added to CLR4 including things like dynamic object support.

In addition to the core Silverlight 4 Beta, Microsoft also released corresponding updates to the other tools and products used with Silverlight. The tools for working with Silverlight from within Visual Studio were updated to support the Silverlight 4 Beta. This includes increased designer support to make it easier to develop Silverlight applications without having to leave Visual Studio for a separate tool. A new version of the Silverlight Toolkit was also released that goes along with the Silverlight 4 update. An update was also released for .NET RIA Services which has now been renamed as WCF RIA Services to reflect the fact that it now rides on top of WCF. This is an evolution of the prior .NET RIA Services releases and positions it to leverage WCF as a foundation to build on going forward. In addition to the WCF change a number of additional features such as improved inheritance support were added to WCF RIA Services in this release. Finally, a preview release of Blend for .NET 4 was released to allow it to work with Silverlight 4.
In the rest of this chapter we are going to preview some of these features that you will see in the Silverlight 4 Beta release.

Web Camera / Microphone Support

Silverlight 4 now allows developers to access to the raw audio and video streams on the local machine from applications running both in and out of the browser. Using these capabilities developers can write applications including capture and collaboration using audio and video. This is built-in to the core runtime and no other special downloads are required on each machine. When the audio or video is accessed for the first time by the application the user will be prompted to approve the request. This ensures that audio and video is never accessed without the user’s knowledge preventing applications that capture silently in the background. The following is an example of the prompt the user sees when the application requests access to the devices.

You will notice in the above image the site name is displayed. This is another safeguard to ensure the user knows which site is requesting access to the devices. Access is granted to just this application and only for this session of the application. Currently there is no option to persist the user’s approval to avoid re-prompting each time the application is run. Additionally, it’s all or nothing; you don’t get to choose video or microphone. It’s a combined approval.

Users with multiple devices can select the devices they want to be the default devices using the properties on the Silverlight plug-in. This can be selected by right-clicking on a Silverlight application and going to the Webcam/Mic tab.

The following is an example of what you will see on that tab.

Developers can get access to the chosen devices using the CaptureDeviceConfiguration class. Using this class you can call the GetDefaultAudioCaptureDevice or GetDefaultVideoCaptureDevice methods to retrieve the users selected defaults. The class also has GetAvailableAudioCaptureDevices and GetAvailableVideoCaptureDevices methods that allow you to enumerate the available devices if you want more control of choosing a device besides the default.

Prior to using the devices you must request access to the device by calling the RequestDeviceAccess() method from the CaptureDeviceConfiguration class. When this method is called it is responsible for showing the user approval dialog we saw earlier. This method must be called from a user initiated event handler like the event handler for a button click event. If you call it at other times it will either not do anything or produce an error. Using the AllowedDeviceAccess property you can query if access has already been granted to the device.

The quickest way to get started using the video is to attach the capture from the device to a VideoBrush and then use the brush to paint the background of a border. The following XAML sets up the button to trigger the capture and a border that we will paint with a video brush.

<Button x:Name="btnStartvideo" Click="btnStartvideo_Click"

Content="Start Video"></Button>

</StackPanel>

Next, the following private method TurnOnVideo method is called from the handler for the click event on the button. This satisfies the requirement to be user initiated.

private void TurnOnVideo()

{

VideoCaptureDevice videoCap =

CaptureDeviceConfiguration.GetDefaultVideoCaptureDevice();

AudioCaptureDevice audioCap =

CaptureDeviceConfiguration.GetDefaultAudioCaptureDevice();

CaptureSource capsource = new CaptureSource();

capsource.AudioCaptureDevice = audioCap;

capsource.VideoCaptureDevice = videoCap;

if (CaptureDeviceConfiguration.AllowedDeviceAccess

|| CaptureDeviceConfiguration.RequestDeviceAccess())

{

capsource.Start();

VideoBrush vidBrush = new VideoBrush();

vidBrush.SetSource(capsource);

borderVideo.Background = vidBrush;

}

As you can see in the code above, default audio and video devices are retrieved and assigned to a CaptureSource. Access to the devices is then checked and requested if not already approved.

If access is granted the Start() method on the CaptureSource is invoked to begin capturing audio and video. Finally, the VideoBrush source is set to the CaptureSource instance and the background on the border is set to the VideoBrush.

Overtime we will probably see some very interesting applications of the audio and video support. One example that we put together was using it with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. In this example application a membership application was simulated that associated members with pictures and stored the pictures in a database. Think of a place similar to Costco, Sam’s Club or your local gym that snaps your photo for their records.

In the following image you can see how a tab has been added to the Contact form using the CRM customization capabilities.

A Silverlight 4 application is then hosted inside that tab that will provide the user experience for capturing the images. When the Start Camera button is clicked the user will be prompted to approve the access and the video feed will begin as you can see below.

The video feed will keep showing the live image updated from the web cam until stopped. The Capture button on the above application allows the user to capture one of the image frames from the capture source. The AsyncCaptureImage(..) method on the CaptureSource class allows you to request that a frame be captured and your callback invoked. The callback is then invoked and passed a WriteableBitmap representing the captured frame.

This image can then be saved back to the Dynamics CRM server and associated with the record being viewed.

In the above example we looked at how you could use the video capabilities to capture a static image. More advanced applications are also possible for things like collaboration by showing the real time audio and video feed of multiple users.

You have been reading about one of the many new and exciting features of Silverlight 4 that are covered in the complete overview chapter. Visit SilverlightJumpstart.com today to access the full chapter.

Silverlight 4 beta released at #PDC09

Laurent Bugnion — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:58:06 GMT

Well people, it was an amazing keynote. Silverlight 4 beta was just presented by Scott Guthrie at the Professional Developer Conference 2009 in Los Angeles. As soon as Silverlight 3 was released a few months ago, the Silverlight team started working on new features to create what will be a really exciting release.

As of now, the Silverlight 4 beta bits and all the necessary tools are available for download. Probably the best place to start is Tim Heuer (Silverlight evangelist for Microsoft) who has a guide to the new features on his blog. A great and very clear read!

Another fantastic resource is my friend Corrado Cavalli’s PDF document with all the new features (there is also an Italian version on Corrado’s blog).

Update: Just found out about the Silverlight 4 Training Course available on Channel 9, put together by Adam Kinney and John Papa, two Microsoft evangelists!

What happens with WPF?

Those of you who know me well know that I love WPF as much as Silverlight, and I am really super happy to work for IdentityMine, a firm that is very active in both environments.

Windows Presentation Foundation is not dead, not at all. With WPF4 (which is available in beta with Visual Studio 2010 beta 2), a load of new features is making it to the desktop as well. In the beginning of the year at MIX09, I had a talk about the .NET continuum, and we are exactly there, with Silverlight and WPF coming closer, but still having their respective features. WPF is more than ever Silverlight’s big sister, they are closer than they have ever been, which is a blessing for us developers because passing from one world to the other has never been easier.

With Silverlight running out of the browser with elevated permissions, and with the possibility to modify the appearance of the window hosting the out-of-browser application, Silverlight is coming very close to a desktop application. But it is not one yet. So the question is, will we see a “merge” between Silverlight and WPF in the coming few years? Well to be frank, I am a very vocal proponent of the convergence, and I am pretty sure that we will go that way sooner or later. The good news is that all that Microsoft learned over the years while creating WPF is invested in Silverlight. In some areas, it has been made even better, because they learned from some mistakes. In others, they capitalized on the fantastic functionalities available in WPF and made that available to us without a change in Silverlight. My point is that talking about the death of WPF is a cow’s opinion, it’s a moo point. WPF and Silverlight will continue to grow ever closer, and we will continue to enjoy the best of both worlds, the desktop and the web! Exciting years to be a client developer indeed!

These are YOUR features

One thing the Silverlight does really well is listen to the community. I read somewhere that 70% of the features requested by the community have made it into Silverlight 4 beta. This is pretty amazing. So continue that work, place your requests either directly to Microsoft evangelists if you have the chance to know one, or through Silverlight MVPs who have possibilities to get to talk to the Silverlight team often.

And the story is not over yet… Keep your eyes open, we have amazing years in front of us!

Happy coding!!

Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft)
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My Entity Framework Sessions for November 19

Dane Morgridge — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:41:58 GMT

I am doing my "Getting to the Entity Framework" talk at NotAtPDC this year. It will be a virtual event via live meeting and will start at 1:30 CST tomorrow, November 19, 2009. You can get all the details at the NotAtPDC site: http://www.notatpdc.com/Schedule/Detail/27

I will also be doing a quick 15 minute quick start on Entity Framework tomorrow night at the monthly Philly.Net metting with a discussion panel to follow: http://phillydotnet.org/

If you are all interested in checking out what Entity Framework has to offer, both in it's current state and upcoming release, checkout my NotAtPDC session tomorrow.

I also have several blog posts in the works on some new features coming in Entity Framework 4 and I'll start posting them with in the next few days.

PDC 09 : Day 2

ChrisD — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:30:21 GMT

Keynote:

HOLY SMOKES!! Now this is why I came to PDC! Announced today: Silverlight 4 Beta. Printing? Yep. Access to Local File System? Yep. Want to share your assemblies between SL and native .NET assemblies? No Problem. Want access to the clipboard? COM Interop? Web Cam & Micrphone? Done and Done.

SketchFlow.. Wha!?!?! OMG thats a cool prototyping tool.

Sharepoint 2010 is looking like a tour de force. The ease of development, integration and deployment. Debugging and sandbox support. Solutions can be deployed and tested on client OS machines. Client toolkits uses REST or a Client SDK make it all so attractive. NICE JOB SHAREPOINT.. NICE JOB.

oh yeah.. and then there was this: Microsoft gives free laptop to PDC 2009 attendees. Some days its great to be a GEEK.

On to Windows Identity Foundation overview.

Windows Identity Foundation Overview:

Covered the basics of WIF: Stand up an STS (custom or ADFS), configure your application (RP) to be defended by the tokens issued from your new STS. Configure the claims to fetch, etc. WIF Wizards take care of the client configuration, and the WIF http modules will map the incoming token to an Identity, Principal, and a set of claims. Optionally you can control authorization logic based on the incoming claims either directly in code or by establishing policy articulated in the RP’s configuration file. WIF supports Active, Passive and Delegated (ACTAS) scenarios.

Nothing new in this session for me, but I still found the validation to be worth while.

Windows Workflow (Overview and Host Deep Dive)

WF (pronounced dub-eff) 4.0 looks like a great improvement over the 3.0 version. The product looks highly extensible and powerful, but the overview session was anything but. Presented by Matt Winkler (Mr. WF) presented a 200 level talk to a bunch of people who were asking “What is Workflow?”. I have some WF 3x experience, and found it difficult to grasp how the pieces fit together.

The follow up session was the “under the hood” of the workflow host, which was surprising interesting and insightful.

The WF presenters needed a session on “How to build, deploy and debug WF 4.0”. It would have provided attendees with the skills needed to get going with WF. For a product line still searching for its user base, I think the WF team missed a great opportunity.

Ask The Experts

Pick a topic, move to the roundtable filled with experts, and dialog with your peers and gurus. I sat at the WF table for a while, then moved over to C#. Met two members of the C# dev team. One, DJ Park, was great to talk with, the other (who shall remain nameless) was an arrogant douchebag. Tomorrow I’m excited to check out the IntelliTrace stuff in VS2010, but now its time to party down, Geek Style.

GeekFest

Wall-to-wall geeks having fun the geek way; there was class video games, air hockey tables, pool tables, on thz,line sessions of Gears of War, and gaggles of geeks competing in a “Puzzle contest”. Yeah thats right, they were competing over puzzles. I enjoyed the video games, pool tables, virtual roller coaster, and free chair massages (I really enjoyed that last one). Plenty of food and drink, and I’m sure somewhere they were hosting a D&D game, but I can’t confirm that.

Silverlight 4 Beta is Out!

Dave Campbell — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:43:26 GMT

Silverlight 4 Beta is out!

Yes boys and girls, you heard that right!! This morning at PDC, Scott Guthrie announced the news.

And I was so interested in posting this, I had a bad link for Shawn's site -- that's now fixed -- sorry Shawn!!

Go to Silverlight 4 Beta Information to get all the information, and download the bits.

All the usual suspects have posts up alread as well:

Tim Heuer has a great long post up about it on his site: Silverlight 4 Beta – A guide to the new features

Shawn Wildermuth as one: Silverlight 4 Beta Announced!

Have fun, watch for lots more posts and

Stay in the 'Light!

Dynamically Launching A WinForm Via Object Factory Article

Jim Duffy — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:38:47 GMT

Woo hoo!! My article on dynamically creating and launching a WinForm object has made it’s way to the MSDN VB DevCenter. I’d be a slacker if I didn’t give props to Rod Paddock for all his help with the code in the article.

This article focuses on answering a simple yet not-so-easy to answer question. “How do instantiate an object when the class I want to instantiate is determined at runtime, not compile time?” If you’re wondering why you would want to do that in the first place, this article provides a simple real world reason why as well.

Have a day. :-|

The Future: Web or Windows Client Development, your thoughts?

Jim Duffy — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:10:25 GMT

A question I have for you is with all the focus on web or cloud-based applications (Silverlight, ASP.NET MVC, Azure, etc.) is there still a vibrant future out there for Windows Client desktop applications? Will Windows 7 do much to swing the focus back to desktop applications? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying desktop based application development is dead, it’s not by a long shot. With development tools like WPF and ClickOnce deployment desktop applications still rock. I’m just saying that it appears that the pendulum has definitely swung to the web-based side of the software development grandfather clock and I’m not sure it’ll ever swing back to the other side.

Most of the development we’re doing these days is on web-based applications. I don’t really see that changing anytime soon. With the maturity of RIA platforms like Silverlight the advantage that desktop applications traditionally held in the user experience department has been slipping for a while now.

So what percent of the work you’re doing is on desktop applications? What percent is on web-based applications? What is the percentage of web vs desktop for new applications in your organization?

Have a day. :-|

Six Reasons Why Windows 7 Will Win in Business

Jim Duffy — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:44:21 GMT

I came across this PC Mag article and figured I’d share it with you. My primary reason for doing so is to provide additional ammunition to those developers out there who want to upgrade to Windows 7 but management is hesitant to do so. I’ll leave reading the article to you but here are the six reasons stated in the article.

1. Windows XP

2. Stability and Compatibility

3. Aging Hardware

4. Vista: A 3-Year Beta Test

5. Smaller, More Agile Companies

6. Business Demand

To me the most significant item is number 4. I’ve often kidded around with attendees in our training classes, or developers attending my user group, code camp, or conference presentations that I was running a very early beta of Windows 7 called Windows Vista. While I was kidding around of course, I couldn’t have been any more accurate. I believe it took the hammering Vista received in the press for Windows 7 to be the overwhelming success I think it is going to be. Check out the article and let me know what other factors you think will help drive Windows 7’s success.

Have a day. :-|

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PDC 09 : Day 2

Keynote:

HOLY SMOKES!! Now this is why I came to PDC! Announced today: Silverlight 4 Beta. Printing? Yep. Access to Local File System? Yep. Want to share your assemblies between SL and native .NET assemblies? No Problem. Want access to the clipboard? COM Interop? Web Cam & Micrphone? Done and Done.

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