• Title: How to develop and deploy Silverlight using WCF RIA services on Windows Azure
• Synopsis: Windows Azure is a cloud based service which supports Silverlight WCF RIA services. This topic discuss about how to develop a simple application using WCF RIA service. Later the application will be deployed to the Windows Azure for accessing it over internet. We also discuss on basic featured of Azure services.
• Speaker: Senthamil Selvan
• Date and Time: 12th January, 2012 ( 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM )
• Location: Microsoft Singapore, Conf Room SINOMB 22CF-12 (60) VTC
• Admission: Free

All credits go to the original designers and people from Touchality and 99designs.

Update:

Patrick Yong shared a working copy of wordpress theme in his blog. You can download it from this link if you like the screenshot below.

Jeff Sanders (MSFT) replied ~

You are not missing anything. In the Preview, it only supports jscript/html5. If you create a new C# application in Visual Studio Express 2011 you will get a XAML editor. You can still edit XAML in Version 4 if you want to install that for now.

What is Implicit Data Template?

Implicit data template is something similar to “Implicit style” that was introduced in Silverlight 4. When you define a data template in <*.Resources> or resource dictionary, you used to define the key over there and reference it from the place where you want to use that data template. With implicit data template, you don’t need to define any key for your data template. There is a new property called “DataType” where you can define the type of data (Model) in data template that you want to use.

The code will be something like that below ~

<DataTemplate DataType="local:MyAwesomeModel">
....
</DataTemplate>

In this example, our model is called “MyAwesomeModel” and we set it to the “DataType” property of data template. Of course, you can create any template you want inside that data template as usual. After that, you can directly bind this model with UI (e.g. ContentControl or ItemControl ). The template that you created will be displayed on the UI when you run the project. How simple it is?

In order to show this feature, I created one demo with metro design in my mind (even thought I’m not professional designer. )

Download :  ImplicitDataTemplatesDemo from github

What I did in this sample is pretty simple. I created an interface called “IPerson” which has three properties such as Name, Description, ProfilePhoto. And, I created three models (MichaelSync, ElenaSync and ShwesinSync) that implement “IPerson” interface. Note that I didn’t implement INotifyPropertyChanged or the setter in any of the classes but you may want to implement them in real project.

public interface IPerson {
 string Name { get; }
 string Description { get; }
 BitmapImage ProfilePhoto { get; }
}

In MainPage, I set the DataContext in order to make the bindng work. Yap! I have to set it before initializing the components. I added new property called “People” and filled it up with the instances of models.

public partial class MainPage : UserControl
{
 public MainPage()
 {
 this.DataContext = this;
 // Required to initialize variables
 InitializeComponent();

People = new List{
new MichaelSync(),
new ElenaSync(),
new ShwesinSync(),
 };
 }

public IList People { get; set; }
}

There is only one ItemControl that bind to “People” property.

<Grid Width="640" HorizontalAlignment="Left">
 <ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding People}" Margin="41,84,41,0"/>
</Grid>

I created three data templates with different data type as below.

When you run it, you will see beautiful metro style application with my family photos. I’m just trying to show you one scenario that you can use but if you really want to use MVVM with implicit data template, I would recommend you to read Julian’s post.

Pros and Cons of using Implicit DataTemplate in MVVM

I would say that Julian’s approach is kinda extreme MVVM approach because it limited you from having any code behind code in View but it does help you more code cleaner (Oh no! I’m not counting code. )  and force developers to use MVVM in proper way (like creating blend bahivors or attached properties or etc). Another good thing is that you can directly bind your model with UI without explicitly calling the views.

Good

• Cleaner and encourage the proper way of doing things
• Easier binding

Bad

• sometimes, it makes developers’ life damn difficult.

That’s all from my side.

Happy Silverlighting!

I like what John Tuld said in the movie. He said there are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat.

I watched it a couple of months back but when he said came across in my mind when I was checking out one site yesterday. Their product is a UX framework that helps developers to create the metro style “web” application. The UI of their website is very clean and well-structured. I was amazed by the beauty of their website and demo application for a few minutes. I would say that they are one of very first few companies that brought the metro concept to the web and mobiles. By looking at the way that they created their website, demo and framework, and the feedback that I found on twitter, they are very smart people who managed to execute the plan that has a lot of potentials.

but be first and be smarter are not good enough for them so they added something so called marketing trick in their site. I know every side has two stories and you may not call it as a cheating but to me, what they did is dishonest so I called it “cheating”

They asked you to login with Facebook to download the icon collections or framework. I liked their work and I understand that there are some companies that don’t want to implement their own authentication system so they just use Facebook’s Oauth for authorization. I also understand that they will be able to access my private information like email, address or etc.. Anyway, I trusted them so I logged in with my Facebook account and gained them access in order to download their framework.

Do you know what I got? They asked me to have 20 points that I need to spend around 35$ to buy it. I was like WTF! Why don’t you tell me in the first place? I know we all want to get rich and want to make money. $35 is a reasonable price. Me and my company is looking at HTML 5, metro concept for our web application as well. I can put my company to buy for team if your framework is really good even I don’t buy it on my own. We bought license from Infragistic, Telerik and a few others in this way as well.

What pissed me off is NOT about asking money. Why can’t you just honestly tell me in the first place before I gain you access to my Facebook profile?

You guys are very talented but I believe that there is at least one person who wants to cheat other people under the name of “money” or “marketing trick”. Anyway, Good luck but be careful.

Community Technology Update is back!!! This is the 9th iteration of CTU and we are doing something different this time round. Thanks to our venue sponsor, we will be holding upcoming CTU at Plug-In@Blk71. Apart from the change in venue, everything else remains the same, especially the Community’s Sprites of CTU!!

User Group of Singapore has come together once again to put up a full day technical sharing event for the community. Like the usual CTU, content are design to keep you updated with the latest technology. We have sessions planned for IT Professionals, Developers and Database Administrators. There is something for everyone so don’t miss this chance and start registering today!!!
As an exclusive member of <Insert your UG name>, you get invited to this event!

Date    07th January 2012
Time   0900 – 1730 hrs
Venue Plug-In@Blk71
Blk71 Ayer Rajah Crescent
#02-18
Singapore 139951
Registration Fees $12 (Early-birds)
$20 (Walk-ins)

Why you should attend this event:

• To learn about the new generation “8” product. Windows 8 Developer Preview and Windows Server 8 will be covered
• To learn about Windows 8 and Dev12 devolvement
• A great chance to network around with IT Pros and Dev in Singapore

Who should attend this event:

• IT Professionals
• Developers
• Database Administrators
• Essentially you, as you’re one of our user group members!

For instruction to register to this event, go to http://www.sgdotnet.org/events/CTU2012/Pages/Registration.aspx

To find out more about the event, go to http://www.sgdotnet.org/events/CTU2012/Pages/default.aspx

To find out how to get to the venue, go to http://www.sgdotnet.org/events/CTU2012/Pages/Venue.aspx

To find out why we’re charging for the event and other questions, go to http://www.sgdotnet.org/events/CTU2012/Pages/FAQ.aspx

If you have any questions, please feel free to email to Desmond(SWUG Lead) at desmond@sgwindowsgroup.org

We had a roundtable section last week and it was awesome. I had good discussion with Hammad regarding Windows 8 and tablets. I’m looking forward to hear more from him soon.

Thanks to Clarisse Ng (my MVP lead) for organizing this event.

• Error: Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage
• Solution: Disable “HTTP Compression” in both Web extension and “Service” tab of Website properties

This short version is for those who are not interested about the details of this problem.

Long version

It took me almost 2 days to figure out about this issue so I’m going to share the details with you guys in this post. But as I didn’t use IIS 6 for long time and my main technical expertise is not IIS, the solution that I found might not be the best solution. If you guys know better solution for this issue, please feel free to share with us in comment section. Thanks!

Environment

Our server is Windows 2003 advanced server. We have .NET 1, .NET 2 and .NET 4 installed on that server. The existing website which is written in ASP.NET 2.0 is currently running on that server.

Problem

We got this issue when we tried deploying our new web application which is a hybrid app of ASP.NET 4.0 and ASP.NET MVC 3 on that server. To my surprise, ASP.NET MVC works great fine but ASP.NET 4.0 pages drove us crazy. I thought that the problem might come from the fact that our application is a hybrid so I created a brand new ASP.NET 4.0 application in Visual Studio 2010 and published it on the server but it didn’t work. It’s very weird because MVC project is working fine so .NET 4 framework shouldn’t have any problem but couldn’t figure out why ASP.NET 4.0 site wasn’t working.

In order to narrow down the problem, I created new Virtual Directory and new application pool and put a HTML page in that directory so we don’t need to worry about .NET issue. but this issue was getting more weird. Can you guess what happened? When I tried accessing that page from browser, it was working fine for the first time request but it didn’t work for second time request. I got different errors as below in different browsers.

IE

Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage

Google Chrome

This web page is not available The web page at http://19x.10x.10x.2:17x/simpleweb/c.html might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address. Error 330 (net::ERR_CONTENT_DECODING_FAILED): Unknown error.

Firefox

Content Encoding Error The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression. Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.

IE didn’t give any information as usual (well, we love IE! :P ) but when I saw the error message in Firefox, the encoding and gzip things came into my mind but I wasn’t so sure whether IIS server stopped responding the second request or the encoding issue. I looked at IIS log. As you can see below, IIS returns 200 so IIS wasn’t blocking the second request.

IIS log

#Software: Microsoft Internet Information Services 6.0
#Version: 1.0
#Date: 2011-12-14 06:27:57
#Fields: date time s-sitename s-ip cs-method cs-uri-stem cs-uri-query s-port cs-username c-ip cs(User-Agent) cs(Referer) sc-status sc-substatus sc-win32-status sc-bytes cs-bytes

2011-12-14 06:29:27 W3SVC1531730165 127.0.0.1 GET /simpleweb/d.html – 170 – 127.0.0.1 Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+7.0;+Windows+NT+5.2;+.NET+CLR+1.1.4322;+.NET+CLR+2.0.50727;+.NET4.0C;+.NET4.0E) – 200 0 0 378 284

Just to make it more sure, I used Fiddler to capture the traffic between the browser and server. I managed to get the response but when I viewed the response stream, I got this error below in Fiddler.

—————————
Fiddler: UnGZip failed
—————————
The content could not be decompressed.
The magic number in GZip header is not correct. Make sure you are passing in a GZip stream.
—————————
OK
—————————

Solution

As Fiddler showed that there is something wrong with gzip, I decided to turn off the HTTP compression on that server.

How to turn off the HTTP compression on IIS 6? It’s pretty simple. Go to the properties of Website (not virtual directory or application) and uncheck “Compress application files” and “Compress static files” on “Service” tab. And set “Prohibit” to “HTTP Compression” in Web extension.

Note that I tested HTTP compression on fresh 2003 server and it works so I think gzip assembly got some problems on that server only. That’s why I mentioned that disabling HTTP compression might not be the best solution but we decided to stop experimenting it for now because we are using 2003 server temporarily. I don’t think it’s good idea to host ASP.NET 4 app and MVP app on IIS 6 so we are going to get new Windows 2008 R2 service with IIS 7 later.. But yeah. if you have a better solution then please share with us.

Credits: Thank you all to everyone who gave a lot of suggestions for this issue. You guys helped me a lot. Thanks! 

I got this error below as soon as I enter my link in yours. Look at the screenshot. How bad is that? Your development team didn’t create the overlay message properly and your QA failed to find out about it.

I’m sure you can’t even read your own message so I posted the text below.

Stop right there criminal scum!

This page may be a forgery or imitation of another website, designed to trick users into sharing personal or financial information. Entering any personal information on this page may result in identity theft or other abuse

It’s not the first time that you treat my site like a spam site, Digg! I will show you the email history that I and your support team had a couple of months back.

Digg Support – Nov 18

Hello mchlsync,

We use the Google Safe Browsing API to help prevent spam and malware from getting submitted to Digg.com. It appears that Google has flagged that domain. For more information please check the link provided below:

http://code.google.com/apis/safebrowsing/

I went to Google Web Master tool and checked my site. I found no issue, Digg!

I replied to your support with this screenshot.

Digg support team – Nov 19~

Hello,

We’ve contacted our development team who are investigating the issue, and will fix it as soon as possible. Please don’t hesitate to contact us should you have any further questions.

For more information, please see Digg’s FAQ section (http://about.digg.com/faq).

Follow us on Twitter! http://twitter.com/digg

After a few hours on the same day, they asked me to try again.

Try again now, it should work. Let us know if you’re still having problems

When I checked it again, I found that the issue has been fixed.

But today, the issue show up again. I’m not sure how you guys are handling the regression issue but it’s not cool if this issue keep on coming back again and again.

So Digg! do something about it!

I received a notification from that plugin saying that it’s suspecting some viruses on my blog this morning so I quickly logged in and scanned my current template manually on dashboard. I found one new file called backwp.php inside the theme folder.

I’m guessing that it might be the back-up file of Twently Eleven them but I couldn’t find any information from theme download page so I posted a question about that file on forum and am still waiting for the answer. Let me know if you have any idea about this file. For the time being, I deleted this file and tested my blog. It’s still working. I think that it’s very safe to delete that file.

Another weird thing which is happening since I started using “Twently Eleven” theme is that I’m getting this error often when I’m playing around in dashboard area. I tried contacting with people behind this theme and no reply from them.

This theme is awesome and it was created by the official wordpress.com team but after using it for a while, I realized that this theme comes with quite a few problem as well.. Maybe, it’s time for me to look for new theme..