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• What I saw at TechEd North America 2014

  - by Brian Schroer

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/brians/archive/2014/05/19/teched-north-america-2014.aspxI was thrilled to be able to attend TechEd North America 2014 in Houston last week. I got to go to Orlando in 2008, and since then I’ve had to settle for watching the sessions online (which ain’t bad – They’re all available on Channel 9 for streaming or downloading. Here are links to the Developer Track sessions and to the sessions from all tracks.) The sessions I attended (with my favorites bolded) were: Shiny new stuff The Microsoft Application Platform for Developers: Create Applications That Span Devices and Services INTRODUCING: The Future of .NET on the Server DEEP DIVE: The Future of .NET on the Server ASP.NET: Building Web Application Using ASP.NET and Visual Studio The Next Generation of .NET for Building Applications The Future of Visual Basic and C# Stuff you can use now Building Rich Apps with AngularJS on ASP.NET Get the Most Out of Your Code Maps SignalR: Building Real-Time Applications with ASP.NET SignalR Performance Optimize Your ASP.NET Web App Modern Web and Visual Studio Visual Studio Power User: Tips and Tricks Debugging Tips and Tricks in Visual Studio 2013 In a world where the whole company uses TFS… Using Functional, Exploratory and Acceptance Testing to Release with Confidence A Practical View of Release Management for Visual Studio 2013 From Vanity to Value, Metrics That Matter: Improving Lean and Agile, Kanban, and Scrum Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That As usual, there were some time slots with nothing of interest and others with 5 things I wanted to see at the same time. Here are the sessions I’m still planning to watch… Getting Started with TypeScript Building a Large Scale JavaScript Application in TypeScript Modern Application Lifecycle Management Why a Hacker Can Own Your Web Servers in a Day! Async Best Practices for C# and Visual Basic Building Multi-Device Apps with the New Visual Studio Tooling for Apache Cordova Applying S.O.L.I.D. Principles in .NET/C# Native Mobile Application Development for iOS, Android, and Windows in C# and Visual Studio Using Xamarin Latest Innovations in Developing ASP.NET MVC Web Applications Zero to Hero: Untested to Tested with Microsoft Fakes Using Visual Studio Cool and Elegant ASP.NET Web Forms with HTML 5 for the Modern Web The Present and Future of .NET in a World of Devices and Services

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• Quick Hint: Formatting JSON for Debugging

  - by Aligned

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Aligned/archive/2013/06/25/quick-hint-formatting-json-for-debugging.aspxI needed a way to quickly format JSON that I copied from the Network view in Google Chrome Developer Tools. A co-worker pointed me to the Notepad++ (or use Chocolatey to install Notepad++) plugin JSMin. Now all I have to do is copy the JSON into Notepad++ and Alt + Ctrl + M and I can see it easily.

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• Complimentary Refills

  - by onefloridacoder

  My son and I were out to dinner and right after we sat down, he combs the menu to locate the soda  selection.  Then he looks up at me and says “Looks like we get free refills here, sweet!”  While we were sitting there I was thinking where that statement came from and I remember one time where he was helping to figure out the tip and saw that were we charged for six sodas, but there were only four of us at the table.  I would say that’s when this started for eateries he’s not familiar with. I was talking a friend of mine this week and this thought came to me, why can’t we manage expectations like my son – find out before the order is placed.  Find out what’s expected first then use the other bits of guidance to move forward.  But how many times have we all paid way to much for something we thought was free on a project – me, plenty.  This quote is going up in my work space, next to one I picked up Corey Haines’ Software Craftsmanship talk at Open Agile Romania - “Work != Practice”.  So if anyone else has gotten burnt, maybe check the menu, it will be in the area where the customer will pick two from the list of “Price, Quality, or Speed”.  Refills will be listed just beneath that.

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• Windows Live Writer

  - by TechTwaddle

  This is a sample post. Checking out the Windows Live Writer to post to my blog. (-:

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• Goodbye my beloved Nexus One, hello Windows Phone 7

  - by George Clingerman

  Last night my wife’s Nexus One finally bit the dust. You may not know but I’ve been nursing her Nexus One one along for quite a while after her screen shattered. I was able to replace it on my own (go me!) but little quirks have been popping up and the phone was quickly deteriorating. Lately it’s been the power button. Wifey would often have to press the power button several times to get her phone to turn on and last night it just wouldn’t wake up again. I took it apart and tried my best to see if I could somehow make it live once again but no luck this time. It was finally ready to retire. We looked at first for a replacement phone for her but she wasn’t really seeing anything she liked. So I decided to make the ultimate sacrifice and offer up my much loved Nexus One and I would then get a new Windows Phone 7 device. I love T-Mobile for my service so my choices were immediately limited to basically just a single phone. The HTC HD7. I read reviews and they were all over the board from people loving to people hating the phone but I decided, hey, why not, let’s take this plunge. And I did. I’ve only had the phone for about two days now so below is my list of first reaction pros/cons. These are basically things I’ve missed or things I’ve noticed that I really like about my new Windows Phone. Cons: * No Google Talk – I used this a LOT on my Nexus. I’ve found an application called “Flory” but it’s just an ok substitute, not the same as the full featured GTalk I had on my Nexus. * Seesmic is limited– I loved the way Seesmic worked on my Nexus. It was my mobile twitter client of choice. Everything about it worked really well. On Windows Phone 7 it’s just ok. I don’t get notification of new tweets, it’s several clicks to even see a new tweet. It’s definitely got some more development before it has the same features as it did on my Nexus. * Buttons don’t give great feedback – I’d read this on the reviews about the HTC HD7 and I’m finding it true myself. Pressing the buttons on the side of the phone and the power button on the top is finicky and I have to be looking at my phone to make sure I actually got them to press. * Web browsing is slow – I’m not sure what’s up with this, I’m connected to my wireless network at my house but it’s noticeably slower on my WP7 device than my Nexus. I even switched back to verify and it’s definitely true. Retrieving tweets, hitting up the XNA forums and just general web activities are all much slower on my WP7. I can’t think of any reason this would be true but it almost seems like it’s not using my wireless for everything.   Pros: * It’s pretty – the phone is really gorgeous. I loved the form of my Nexus One by the HTC HD7 is just as pretty, maybe even prettier! It’s got a nice large, bright screen. It feels good in my hand. And it even has a little kickstand to set the phone up for movie watching. Definitely a gorgeous phone. * LIVE integration – I lost a lot of nice integration with Google services but I gained a lot of integration with LIVE services that I also use. Now I can see when I get new GMail messages AND Hotmail messages. And having the Xbox LIVE integration is admittedly cool as well. * Tile notification rock – The Windows Phone 7 commercials are TRYING to get this message out but they’re doing a really poor job of this. Tile notifications really do save you from your phone. I have a whole little mini-informational dashboard at a glance. I unlock my phone and at a glace I can see new IMs, new mail messages, software updates etc. All just letting me know in the tiles I have arranged. That’s pretty cool. * The interface works really well – I feel super hip and cool swiping and sliding things around on my Windows Phone 7. Everything works that way and it’s great and fast and really good looking. I’m all about me feeling cool. * I’m gaming more – I had gotten a few games on my Nexus One but there really weren’t a lot of good developers flocking to the service. Just browsing through the Windows Phone 7 marketplace I’m already seeing a ton of games I want to try and buy. And I sat down and bet Pixel Man 0 just yesterday on my phone. I’m already gaming more than I did on my Nexus One. * Netflix integration is fantastic - It works just like it does on my Xbox 360 and I love having this feature on my phone. * It’s basically a Zune – I’ve been taking my Zune to work and listening to music off of that while I code. I no longer need to take it with me, now I just sync songs onto my phone and it’s my new Zune. I freaking love that. One less device to carry around.   All in all my cons have really little to do with the phone (just the buttons and the web browsing) and more to do with the applications needing to catch up a bit to what I’m used to. And the Pros are things that ARE phone specific so I’m seeing that as a good sign that I’m going to be very happy with my Windows Phone 7. So Wifey is happy having her Nexus One again, I’m happy with my new Windows Phone 7. Life is good. Now I just need to make a game to pay for it….

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• Farmyard

  - by Richard Jones

  Moooooooo     For a while now we’ve been using Apple’s enterprise device app distribution mechanism.   This allows you to have a user, click on a URL on their iOS device and it pulls down a new version of an enterprise app. of of our servers. Its really nice,  have a look at - http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#featuredarticles/FA_Wireless_Enterprise_App_Distribution/Introduction/Introduction.html   I’ve embedded this, into a check on application launch, that a web-service is called to detect a newer version of the software is available.  It then calls the URL to the App and a new version is deployed. You can alert users that a new App update is available by sending them a push notification.  See screenshot at the top. We send our push notifications out to users,  using a simple C# service.    The fun part is this.   You can instruct the push notification to play a sound (embedded in the app already). So our push notification’s play a random farmyard noise, i.e from a selection of - cow.wav dogbrk.wav duck.wav goose.wav horse.wav lamb.wav monkey.wav – left field I know rooster.wav Imagine my amusement being able to periodically send out an update and watch our office (of about 60 people) turn into farm for a few seconds. I’ve messed up a few times, with people being interrupted on customer conference calls,  but people seem good humoured about it. (so far) Simple(ish) pleasures…

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• Beginners Guide to Client Application Services

  - by mbcrump

  What is it? Client application services make it easy for you to create Windows-based applications that use the ASP.NET AJAX login, roles, and profile application services included in the Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions. These services enable multiple Web and Windows-based applications to share user information and user-management functionality from a single server.   What can you do with it? Authenticate a user. You can use the authentication service to verify a user's identity. Determine the role or roles of an authenticated user. You can use the roles service to change the user interface of your application depending on the user's role. For example, you can provide additional features for users who are in an administrator role. Store and access per-user application settings located on the server. You can use the Web settings service (also known as the profile service) to share settings across multiple applications and locations. Client application services take advantage of the Web services extensibility model through client service providers that you can specify in your application configuration files. These service providers include offline functionality that uses a local cache for authentication, roles, and settings data when a network connection is unavailable. Give me an example of where I would use this! Sharing login and user role information between a Windows Form application and a ASP.NET application. How do I configure it? Click Here

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• Development teams do not scale

  - by Matt Watson

  Recently I have been thinking about how development teams don't scale very well. The bigger a team and the product get, the more time the team spends fixing software bugs. This means they spend more time doing troubleshooting and debugging as the grow. The problem is that since developers don't typically have access to production servers, there is a bottleneck in the process when doing production troubleshooting.For a team that has 10 developers, I would guess than 0-2 of them have access to production servers. If that team grows to 20 people, it is probably the same 0-2 people that have production access still. This means that those 2 key people are a bottleneck and the team does not scale correctly as you add more resources. All those new developers want is to help track down and fix software bugs, but they don't have the visibility to do it. So they end up being less productive and frustrated because they really want to fix the problems. The people who do have production access end up spending too much of their time doing troubleshooting instead of working on new projects.The solution is to remove the bottlenecks and get those people working on more important tasks. Stackify can solve this problem by giving all the developers read only access to production servers. This allows them to access the information they need to do troubleshooting on their own.

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• Content Based Routing with BRE and ESB

  - by Christopher House

  I've been working with BizTalk 2009 and the ESB toolkit for the past couple of days.  This is actually my first exposure to ESB and so far I'm pleased with how easy it is to work with. Initially we had planned to use UDDI for storing endpoint information.  However after discussing this with my client, we opted to look at BRE instead of UDDI since we're already storing transforms in BRE.  Fortunately making the change to BRE from UDDI was quite simple.  This solution of course has the added advantage of not needing to go through the convoluted process of registering our endpoints in UDDI. The first thing to remember if you want to do content based routing with BRE and ESB is that the pipleines included in the ESB toolkit don't include disassembler components.  This means that you'll need to first create a custom recieve pipeline with the necessary disassembler for your message type as well as the ESB components, itinerary selector and dispather. Next you need to create a BRE policy.  The ESB.ContextInfo vocabulary contains vocabulary links for the various items in the ESB context dictionary.  In this vocabulary, you'll find an item called Context Message Type, use this as the left hand side of your condition.  Set the right hand side to your message type, something like http://your.message.namespace/#yourrootelement.  Now find the ESB.EndPointInfo vocabulary.  This contains links to all the properties related to endpoint information.  Use the various set operators in your rule's action to configure your endpoint. In the example above, I'm using the WCF-SQL adapter. Now that the hard work is out of the way, you just need to configure the resolver in your itinerary. Nothing complicated here.  Just select BRE as your resolver implementation and select your policy from the drop-down list.  Note that when you select a policy, the Version field will be automatically filled in with the version of your policy.  If you leave this as-is, the resolver will always use that policy version.  Alternatively, you can clear the version number and the resolver will use the highest deployed version.

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• New article on preventing multiple concurrent use in asp.net

  - by Frez

  I have posted up an article today entitled Preventing a User From Having Multiple Concurrent Sessions

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• Twin Cities Code Camp 8 (EIGHT?!?)

  - by Chris Williams

  Yep, Twin Cities Code Camp EIGHT is just around the corner (11 days from this writing.) We've got some great sessions lined up, and a mini-mountain of swag to give away. If you haven't registered yet, we're ALMOST at capacity... so don't delay. See you there...

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• Disneyland Inside Out on iPhone and Android

  - by Ryan Cain

  It's hard to believe October was the last time I was over here on my blog.  Ironically after getter the developer phone from Microsoft I have been knee deep in iPhone programming and for the past few weeks Android programming again.  This time I've spent all my non-working hours programming a fun project for my "other" website, Disneyland Inside Out.  Disneyland Inside Out, a vacation planning site for Disneyland in California, has been around in various forms since June 1996.  It has always been a place for me to explore new technologies and learn about some of the new trends on the web.  I recently migrated the site over to DotNetNuke and have been building out custom modules for DNN.  I've also been hacking things together w/ the URLRewrite module in IIS 7.5 to provide strong SEO optimized URLs.  I can't say all that has really stuck within the DNN model of doing things, but it has worked pretty well. As part of my learning process, I spent most of the Fall bringing Disneyland Inside Out to the iPhone.  I will post more details on my development experiences later.  But this project gave me a really great opportunity to get a good feel for Objective-C development.  After 3 months I actually feel somewhat competent in the language and iPhone SDK, instead of just floundering around getting things to work.  The project also gave me a chance to play with some new frameworks on the iPhone and really dig into the Facebook SDK.  I also dug into some of the Gowalla REST api's as well.  We've been live with the app in iTunes for just about 10 days now, and have been sitting in the top 200 of free travel apps for the past few days.  You can get more info and the direct iTunes download link on our site: Disneyland Inside Out for iPhone Since launching the iPhone version I have gotten back into Android development, porting the Disneyland Inside Out app over to Android.  As I said in my first review of iPhone vs. Android, coming from a managed code background, Android is much easier to get going with.  I just about 3 weeks total I will have about 85 - 90% of the functionality up and running in the Android app, that took probably 1.5 - 2x's that time for iPhone.  That isn't a totally fair comparison as I am much more comfortable w/ Xcode and Objective-C today and can get some of the basic stuff done much faster than I could in the fall.  Though I'd say some of the hardest code to debug is still the null pointer issues on objects that were dealloc'd too early in Objective-C.  This isn't too bad with the NSZoombies enabled for synchronous code, but when you have a lot of async, which my app does, it can be hairy at times to track exactly what was causing the issue.   I will post more details later, as I am trying to wrap up a beta of the Android app today.  But in the meantime, if you have an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad head on over to the site and take a look at my app.

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• Copy diagram with swimlanes in Enterprise Architect

  - by blomqvist

  This is a post mostly to myself, so that when I forget this I can come here and check it out :) (I forget about ctrl-b from time to time) When copying diagrams from Enterprise Architect you can use ctrl-B to include the swim-lanes. A normal ctrl-c will not give you the swim-lanes. A side effect is that ctrl—b gives you a copy of the whole diagram, you cannot select what objects to copy. So marking objects first or pressing ctrl-A to selects all is both unnecessary and meaningless since ctrl-b seems to mean: “copy the whole diagram now and include all the stuff in there, even the swimlanes” (which ctrl-A, ctrl-C does not).

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• NDC Oslo

  - by Alan Smith

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/asmith/archive/2013/06/14/153136.aspx2013 has been a hectic year for conference presentations so far, NDC in Oslo has been the 6th conference I have attended, and my session there was my 11th conference presentation this year. I have been meaning to make the short trip over from Stockholm to NDC for a few years, and this was the first time I made it. I have heard a lot of great things about the event, and was impressed with the location, the sessions, and most of all the atmosphere around the event boots and during the party on Thursday evening. The session I was delivering was my “Grid Computing with 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles & Kinect” demo, which I have delivered at many events over the past 12 months. The demo went fine. I’m always a little nervous when I try to scale out the application to 256 worker roles, it almost always works well and the application will scale in minutes, but very occasionally there can be a longer delay due to the provisioning process in the Windows Azure data centers. This would not be an issue for many scenarios, but when standing on stage in front of a room full of developers you really want things to run smoothly. A number of people have suggested that I should pre-provision an environment so that it is guaranteed to be there when I run the demo during a session. For me the aim has always been to show the rapid scalability on cloud-based platforms live on stage. Pre-provisioning an environment may make for a more reliable demo but to me that would be cheating, and not half as much fun!

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• Microsoft Build 2012 Day 1 Keynote Summary

  - by Tim Murphy

  So I have finally dried the tears after watching the Keynote for Build 2012.  This wasn’t because it was an emotional presentation, but because for the second year I missed the goodies.  Each on site attendee got a Surface RT, a Lumia 920 and a voucher for 100GB of SkyDrive storage. The event was opened with the announcement that in the three days since the launch of Windows 8 over 4 million upgrades have been sold.  I don’t care who you are that is an impressive stat.  Ballmer then spent a fair amount of time remaking the case for the Windows and Windows Phone platforms similar to what we have heard over the last to launch events. There were some cool, but non-essential demos.  The one that was the most fun was the Perceptive Pixel 82” slate device.  At first glance I wondered why I would ever want such a device, but then Ballmer explained it’s possible use for schools and boardrooms.  The actually made sense. Then things got strange.  Steve started explaining features that developers could leverage.  Usually this type of information is left to the product leads.  He focused on the integration with the Charms features such as Search and Share. Steve “Guggs” Guggenheim showed off an app that would appeal to my kids from Disney called “Agent P” which is base on Phineas and Ferb.  Then he got to the meat of the presentation.  We found out that you could add a tile that can be used to sell ad space.  In the same vein we also found out that you could use Microsoft’s, Paypal’s or any commerce engine of your own creation or choosing. For those who are interested in sports and especially developing sports apps you would have found the small presentation from Michael Bayle of ESPN.  He introduced the ESPN app which has tons of features.  For the developers in the crowd he also mentioned that ESPN has an API available at developer.espn.com. During the launch events we were told apps were coming.  In this presentation we were actually shown a scrolling list of logos and told about a couple of them.  Ballmer mentioned specifically Twitter, SAP and DropBox.  These are impressive names that were just a couple of the list impressive names. Steve Ballmer addressed the question of why you should develop for the Windows 8 platform.  He feels that Microsoft has the best commercial terms for developers, a better way to build apps than other platforms and a variety of form factors.  His key point though was the available volume of customers given the current Windows install base and assuming even a flat growth of the platform.  This he backed with a promise that Microsoft is going to do better at marketing and you won’t be able to avoid the ads that they are bringing out. The last section of the key note was present by Kevin Gallo from the Windows Phone team.  This was the real reason I tuned into the webcast.  He impressed upon those watching that the strength of developing for the Microsoft platform is the common programming model that now exist.  While there are difference between form factor implementations you can leverage code across them. He claimed that 90% of developer requests for Windows Phone 8 had been implemented.  These include: More controls with better performance Better live tiles including lock screen integration Speech support in custom apps Easier submission to the market place App camera integration VOIP and chat support Bluetooth and NFC support Native C++ development Direct 3D development   The quote from Kevin that stood out for me was that “Take your Dramamine and buckle your seatbelt type of games are coming to Windows Phone 8”.  He back this up by displaying a list of game development frameworks and then having Unity come out and do a demo. Ok, almost done … The last two things of note for me were the announcement that the SDK is immediately available at dev.windowsphone.com and that they were reducing the cost of an individual developer account to $8 for the next 8 days. Let the development commence. del.icio.us Tags: Build 2012,Windows 8,Windows Phone 8,Windows Phone

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• The Current week dates

  - by MoezMousavi

  The Current week dates Might be a bit vierd as we normaly not writing a multicultural web site. So not very frequently using CultureInfo however, it is  actully quite good to use it to get the week days.               CultureInfo info = Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;             DayOfWeek firstday = info.DateTimeFormat.FirstDayOfWeek;             DayOfWeek today = info.Calendar.GetDayOfWeek(DateTime.Now);               int diff = today - firstday;               DateTime firstDate = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-diff);             DateTime lastDate = firstDate.AddDays(6);

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• SharePoint Unit Testing and Load Testing Finally?

  - by Kit Ong

  It has always been a real pain to incorporate extensive SharePoint Unit Testing and Load Testing in a project, could Visual Studio 2012 finally make this easier? It certaining looks like it, here's a brief overview on SharePoint support in Visual Studio 2012. Load testing – We now support load testing for SharePoint out of the box. This is more involved than you might imagine due to how dynamic SharePoint is. You can’t just record a script and play it back – it won’t work because SharePoint generates and expects dynamic data (like GUIDs). We’ve built the extensions to our load testing solution to parse the dynamic SharePoint data and include it appropriately in subsequent requests. So now you can record a script and play it back and we will dynamically adjust it to match what SharePoint expects.Unit testing – One of the big problems with unit testing SharePoint is that most code requires SharePoint to be running and trying to run tests against a live SharePoint instance is a pain. So we’ve built a SharePoint “emulator” using our new VS 2012 Fakes & Stubs capability. This will make unit testing of SharePoint components WAY easier.Read more in the link belowhttp://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2012/09/12/visual-studio-update-this-fall.aspx

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• Get to Know a Candidate (6 of 25): Jill Stein&ndash;Green Party

  - by Brian Lanham

  DISCLAIMER: This is not a post about “Romney” or “Obama”. This is not a post for whom I am voting. Information sourced for Wikipedia. Stein is a physician with degrees from Harvard College and Harvard Medical School.  She serves on the boards of Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility and MassVoters for Fair Elections, and has been active with the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities Jill Stein advocates a "Green New Deal" in which renewable energy jobs would be created to address climate change and environmental issues with the objective of employing "every American willing and able to work". Citing the research of Dr. Phillip Harvey, Professor of Law & Economics at Rutgers University, as evidence of the successful economic effects of the 1930s' New Deal projects, Stein would fund the plan with a 30% reduction in the U.S. military budget, returning US troops home, and increasing taxes on areas such as capital gains, offshore tax havens and multimillion dollar real estate. Stein plans on impacting what she sees as a growing convergence of environmental crises in water, soil, fisheries and forests, through the creation of sustainable infrastructure based in clean renewable energy generation and sustainable communities principles such as increasing intra-city mass transit and inter-city railroads, creating 'complete streets' that safely encourage bike and pedestrian traffic and regional food systems based on sustainable organic agriculture The Green Party of the United States was founded in 1991 as a voluntary association of state green parties. With its founding, the Green Party of the United States became the primary national Green organization in the United States, eclipsing the Greens/Green Party USA, which emphasized non-electoral movement building. The Green Party of the United States of America emphasizes environmentalism, non-hierarchical participatory democracy, social justice, respect for diversity, peace and nonviolence. Their "Ten Key Values," which are described as non-authoritative guiding principles, are as follows: Grassroots democracy Social justice and equal opportunity Ecological wisdom Nonviolence Decentralization Community-based economics Feminism and gender equality Respect for diversity Personal and global responsibility Future focus and sustainability The Green Party does not accept donations from corporations. Thus, the party's platforms and rhetoric critique any corporate influence and control over government, media, and American society at large. Stein has access to 403 electoral votes and is a write-in candidate in GA, IN, and MS Learn more about Jill Stein and Green Party on Wikipedia.

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• Composing Silverlight Applications With MEF

  - by PeterTweed

  Anyone who has written an application with complexity enough to warrant multiple controls on multiple pages/forms should understand the benefit of composite application development.  That is defining your application architecture that can be separated into separate pieces each with it’s own distinct purpose that can then be “composed” together into the solution. Composition can be useful in any layer of the application, from the presentation layer, the business layer, common services or data access.  Historically people have had different options to achieve composing applications from distinct well known pieces – their own version of dependency injection, containers to aid with composition like Unity, the composite application guidance for WPF and Silverlight and before that the composite application block. Microsoft has been working on another mechanism to aid composition and extension of applications for some time now – the Managed Extensibility Framework or MEF for short.  With Silverlight 4 it is part of the Silverlight environment.  MEF allows a much simplified mechanism for composition and extensibility compared to other mechanisms – which has always been the primary issue for adoption of the earlier mechanisms/frameworks. This post will guide you through the simple use of MEF for the scenario of composition of an application – using exports, imports and composition.  Steps: 1.     Create a new Silverlight 4 application. 2.     Add references to the following assemblies: System.ComponentModel.Composition.dll System.ComponentModel.Composition.Initialization.dll 3.     Add a new user control called LeftControl. 4.     Replace the LayoutRoot Grid with the following xaml:     <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="Beige" Margin="40" >         <Button Content="Left Content" Margin="30"></Button>     </Grid> 5.     Add the following statement to the top of the LeftControl.xaml.cs file using System.ComponentModel.Composition; 6.     Add the following attribute to the LeftControl class     [Export(typeof(LeftControl))]   This attribute tells MEF that the type LeftControl will be exported – i.e. made available for other applications to import and compose into the application. 7.     Add a new user control called RightControl. 8.     Replace the LayoutRoot Grid with the following xaml:     <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="Green" Margin="40"  >         <TextBlock Margin="40" Foreground="White" Text="Right Control" FontSize="16" VerticalAlignment="Center" HorizontalAlignment="Center" ></TextBlock>     </Grid> 9.     Add the following statement to the top of the RightControl.xaml.cs file using System.ComponentModel.Composition; 10.   Add the following attribute to the RightControl class     [Export(typeof(RightControl))] 11.   Add the following xaml to the LayoutRoot Grid in MainPage.xaml:         <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" HorizontalAlignment="Center">             <Border Name="LeftContent" Background="Red" BorderBrush="Gray" CornerRadius="20"></Border>             <Border Name="RightContent" Background="Red" BorderBrush="Gray" CornerRadius="20"></Border>         </StackPanel>   The borders will hold the controls that will be imported and composed via MEF. 12.   Add the following statement to the top of the MainPage.xaml.cs file using System.ComponentModel.Composition; 13.   Add the following properties to the MainPage class:         [Import(typeof(LeftControl))]         public LeftControl LeftUserControl { get; set; }         [Import(typeof(RightControl))]         public RightControl RightUserControl { get; set; }   This defines properties accepting LeftControl and RightControl types.  The attrributes are used to tell MEF the discovered type that should be applied to the property when composition occurs. 14.   Replace the MainPage constructore with the following code:         public MainPage()         {             InitializeComponent();             CompositionInitializer.SatisfyImports(this);             LeftContent.Child = LeftUserControl;             RightContent.Child = RightUserControl;         }   The CompositionInitializer.SatisfyImports(this) function call tells MEF to discover types related to the declared imports for this object (the MainPage object).  At that point, types matching those specified in the import defintions are discovered in the executing assembly location of the application and instantiated and assigned to the matching properties of the current object. 15.   Run the application and you will see the left control and right control types displayed in the MainPage:   Congratulations!  You have used MEF to dynamically compose user controls into a parent control in a composite application model. In the next post we will build on this topic to cover using MEF to compose Silverlight applications dynamically in download on demand scenarios – so .xap packages can be downloaded only when needed, avoiding large initial download for the main application xap. Take the Slalom Challenge at www.slalomchallenge.com!

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• Development Quirk From ASP.NET Dynamic Compilation

  - by jkauffman

  The Problem I got a compilation error in my ASP.NET MVC3 project that tested my sanity today. (As always, names are changed to protect the innocent) The type or namespace name 'FishViewModel' does not exist in the namespace 'Company.Product.Application.Models' (are you missing an assembly reference?) Sure looks easy! There must be something in the project referring to a FishViewModel. The Confusing Part The first thing I noticed was the that error was occuring in a folder clearly not in my project and in files that I definitely had not created: %SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\(versionNumber)\Temporary ASP.NET Files\ App_Web_mezpfjae.1.cs I also ascertained these facts, each of which made me more confused than the last: Rebuild and Clean had no effect. No controllers in the project ever returned a ViewResult using FishViewModel. No views in the project defined that they use FishViewModel. Searching across all files included in the project for “FishViewModel” provided no results. The build server did not report a problem. The Solution The problem stemmed from a file that was not included in the project but still present on the file system: (By the way, if you don’t know this trick already, there is a toolbar button in the Solution Explorer window to “Show All Files” which allows you to see files all files in the file system) In my situation, I was working on the mission-critical Fish view before abandoning the feature. Instead of deleting the file, I excluded it from the project. However, this was a bad move. It caused the build failure, and in order to fix the error, this file must be deleted. By the way, this file was not in source control, so the build server did not have it. This explains why my build server did not report a problem for me. The Explanation So, what’s going on? This file isn’t even a part of the project, so why is it failing the build? This is a behavior of the ASP.NET Dynamic Compilation. This is the same process that occurs when deploying a webpage; ASP.NET compiles the web application’s code. When this occurs on a production server, it has to do so without the .csproj file (which isn’t usually deployed, if you’ve taken your time to do a deployment cleanly). This process has merely the file system available to identify what to compile. So, back in the world of developing the webpage in visual studio on my developer box, I run into the situation because the same process is occuring there. This is true even though I have more files on my machine than will actually get deployed. I can’t help but think that this error could be attributed back to the real culprit file (Fish.cshtml, rather than the temporary files) with some work, but at least the error had enough information in it to narrow it down. The Conclusion I had previously been accustomed to the idea that for c# projects, the .csproj file always “defines” the build behavior. This investigation has taught me that I’ll need to shift my thinking a bit to remember that the file system has the final say when it comes to web applications, even on the developer’s machine!

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• UppercuT v1.0 and 1.1&ndash;Linux (Mono), Multi-targeting, SemVer, Nitriq and Obfuscation, oh my!

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Recently UppercuT (UC) quietly released version 1 (in August). I’m pretty happy with where we are, although I think it’s a few months later than I originally planned. I’m glad I held it back, it gave me some more time to think about some things a little more and also the opportunity to receive a patch for running builds with UC on Linux. We also released v1.1 very recently (December). UppercuT v1 Builds On Linux Perhaps the most significant changes to UC going v1 is that it now supports builds on Linux using Mono! This is thanks mostly to Svein Ackenhausen for the patches and working with me on getting it all working while not breaking the windows builds!  This means you can use mono on Windows or Linux. Notice the shell files to execute with Linux that come as part of UC now. Multi-Targeting Perhaps one of the hardest things to do that requires an automated build is multi-targeting. At v1 this is early, and possibly prone to some issues, but available.  We believe in making everything stupid simple, so it’s as simple as adding a comma to the microsoft.framework property. i.e. “net-3.5, net-4.0” to suddenly produce both framework builds. When you build, this is what you get (if you meet each framework’s requirements): At this time you have to let UC override the build location (as it does by default) or this will not work.  Semantic Versioning By now many of you have been using UppercuT for awhile and have watched how we have done versioning. Many of you who use git already know we put the revision hash in the informational/product version as the last octet. At v1, UppercuT has adopted the semantic versioning scheme. What does that mean? This is a short read, but a good one: http://SemVer.org SemVer (Semantic Versioning) is really using versioning what it was meant for. You have three octets. Major.Minor.Patch as in 1.1.0.  UC will use three different versioning concepts, one for the assembly version, one for the file version, and one for the product version. All versions - The first three octects of the version are owned by SemVer. Major.Minor.Patch i.e.: 1.1.0 Assembly Version - The assembly version would much closer follow SemVer. Last digit is always 0. Major.Minor.Patch.0 i.e: 1.1.0.0 File Version - The file version occupies the build number as the last digit. Major.Minor.Patch.Build i.e.: 1.1.0.2650 Product/Informational Version - The last octect of your product/informational version is the source control revision/hash. Major.Minor.Patch.RevisionOrHash i.e. (TFS/SVN): 1.1.0.235 i.e. (Git/HG): 1.1.0.a45ace4346adef0 SemVer is not on by default, the passive versioning scheme is still in effect. Notice that version.use_semanticversioning has been added to the UppercuT.config file (and version.patch in support of the third octet): Gems Support Gems support was added at v1. This will probably be deprecated as some point once there is an announced sunset for Nu v1. Application gems may keep it around since there is no alternative for that yet though (CoApp would be a possible replacement). Nitriq Support Nitriq is a code analysis tool like NDepend. It’s built by Mr. Jon von Gillern. It uses LINQ query language, so you can use a familiar idiom when analyzing your code base. It’s a pretty awesome tool that has a free version for those looking to do code analysis! To use Nitriq with UC, you are going to need the console edition.  To take advantage of Nitriq, you just need to update the location of Nitriq in the config: Then add the nitriq project files at the root of your source. Please refer to the Nitriq documentation on how these are created. UppercuT v1.1 Obfuscation One thing I started looking into was an easy way to obfuscate my code. I came across EazFuscator, which is both free and awesome. Plus the GUI for it is super simple to use. How do you make obfuscation even easier? Make it a convention and a configurable property in the UC config file! And the code gets obfuscated! Closing Definitely get out and look at the new release. It contains lots of chocolaty (sp?) goodness. And remember, the upgrade path is almost as simple as drag and drop!

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• Future Of F# At Jazoon 2011

  - by Alois Kraus

  I was at the Jazoon 2011 in Zurich (Switzerland). It was a really cool event and it had many top notch speaker not only from the Microsoft universe. One of the most interesting talks was from Don Syme with the title: F# Today/F# Tomorrow. He did show how to use F# scripting to browse through open databases/, OData Web Services, Sharepoint, …interactively. It looked really easy with the help of F# Type Providers which is the next big language feature in a future F# version. The object returned by a Type Provider is used to access the data like in usual strongly typed object model. No guessing how the property of an object is called. Intellisense will show it just as you expect. There exists a range of Type Providers for various data sources where the schema of the stored data can somehow be dynamically extracted. Lets use e.g. a free database it would be then let data = DbProvider(http://.....); data the object which contains all data from e.g. a chemical database. It has an elements collection which contains an element which has the properties: Name, AtomicMass, Picture, …. You can browse the object returned by the Type Provider with full Intellisense because the returned object is strongly typed which makes this happen. The same can be achieved of course with code generators that use an input the schema of the input data (OData Web Service, database, Sharepoint, JSON serialized data, …) and spit out the necessary strongly typed objects as an assembly. This does work but has the downside that if the schema of your data source is huge you will quickly run against a wall with traditional code generators since the generated “deserialization” assembly could easily become several hundred MB. *** The following part contains guessing how this exactly work by asking Don two questions **** Q: Can I use Type Providers within C#? D: No. Q: F# is after all a library. I can reference the F# assemblies and use the contained Type Providers? D: F# does annotate the generated types in a special way at runtime which is not a static type that C# could use. The F# type providers seem to use a hybrid approach. At compilation time the Type Provider is instantiated with the url of your input data. The obtained schema information is used by the compiler to generate static types as usual but only for a small subset (the top level classes up to certain nesting level would make sense to me). To make this work you need to access the actual data source at compile time which could be a problem if you want to keep the actual url in a config file. Ok so this explains why it does work at all. But in the demo we did see full intellisense support down to the deepest object level. It looks like if you navigate deeper into the object hierarchy the type provider is instantiated in the background and attach to a true static type the properties determined at run time while you were typing. So this type is not really static at all. It is static if you define as a static type that its properties shows up in intellisense. But since this type information is determined while you are typing and it is not used to generate a true static type and you cannot use these “intellistatic” types from C#. Nonetheless this is a very cool language feature. With the plotting libraries you can generate expressive charts from any datasource within seconds to get quickly an overview of any structured data storage. My favorite programming language C# will not get such features in the near future there is hope. If you restrict yourself to OData sources you can use LINQPad to query any OData enabled data source with LINQ with ease. There you can query Stackoverflow with The output is also nicely rendered which makes it a very good tool to explore OData sources today.

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• Clear for take off - Azure account setup and ready to go

  - by Rainer

  I completed today the Azure account setup and started working on a project to really test drive the Azure Platform and Azure SQL. Cool stuff! Ready for takeoff into the clear blue sky, where are the clouds?

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• New DataCenter Options for Windows Azure

  - by ScottKlein

  Effective immediately, new compute and storage resource options are now available when selecting data center options in the Windows Azure Portal. "West US" and "East US" options are now available, for Compute and Storage. SQL Azure options for these two data centers will be available in the next few months. The official announcement can be found here.In terms of geo-replication:US East and West are paired together for Windows Azure Storage geo-replicationUS North and South are paired together for Windows Azure Storage geo-replicationThese two new data centers are now visible in the Windows Azure Management Portal effective immediately. Compute and Storage pricing remains the same across all data centers. Get started with Windows Azure through the free 90 day trial.

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• Ranking - Part II

  - by PointsToShare

  © 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved   Ranking Part II In my introduction to ranking I also introduced the Ranking Game. This is actually a much more sophisticated program than the one we need to simply rate an item, but it introduced you to the sophisticated results that you may achieve by a bit of code and accompanying CSS. In this installment, I am going to handle simple rating with 5 stars. The extra sophistication will come in the form of creating new elements in run time. Why do I need this? I like to be able to extend the SharePoint New and Update forms and put the starts in them simply by using the code shown here. We do not even need to go into SPD. We may achieve this simply by adding a content editor web part; more about this in the next installment. I have created a new page – Rank the Author – in which you may praise me in 5 different ways, but not immediately. The ranking mechanism – the 5 stars – has to be created first. To achieve that, click the “Add Element” button on the screen and then proceed in giving me the appropriate number of stars. Now view the source and see how this extra 5 start element was added. Also see how the ranking is achieved. This, obviously, is not any different in principle than what we did in the Ranking game. We create some sophisticated HTML, Add some style and create the element by: var divString = "<div id="rateMe" title="Rate Me...">    <a onclick="rateIt(this)" id="_1" title="ehh..." onmouseover="rating(this)" onmouseout="off(this)"></a>    <a onclick="rateIt(this)" id="_2" title="So So" onmouseover="rating(this)" onmouseout="off(this)"></a>    <a onclick="rateIt(this)" id="_3" title="Passable" onmouseover="rating(this)" onmouseout="off(this)"></a>    <a onclick="rateIt(this)" id="_4" title="Not too Bad" onmouseover="rating(this)" onmouseout="off(this)"></a>    <a onclick="rateIt(this)" id="_5" title="Not Bad" onmouseover="rating(this)" onmouseout="off(this)"></a></div>";m = document.createElement("p");m.innerHTML = divString;m.className = "blah";function AddElement(){    y = document.getElementById("Rest");    y.parentNode.insertBefore(m, y);} When you look into the full code, you’ll notice that I have added an empty <div id=”Rest”> into the form. A div element, like p, creates a line break, but the main purpose here was to mark the place above which I wanted to add the stars. Now you may hover over the stars, see how they behave and click on one of them to see that the program can react to your selection. That’s all folks!

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