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• How to Troubleshoot TFS Build Server Failure?

  - by Tarun Arora

  Ever found your self in this helpless situation where you think you have tried every possible suggestion on the internet to bring the build server back but it just won’t work. Well some times before hunting around for a solution it is important to understand what the problem is, if the error messages in the build logs don’t seem to help you can always enable tracing on the build server to get more information on what could possibly be the root cause of failure. In this blog post today I’ll be showing you how to enable tracing on, - TFS 2010/11 Server - Build Server - Client Enable Tracing on Team Foundation Server 2010/2011 On the Team Foundation Server navigate to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Application Tier\Web Services, right click web.config and from the context menu select edit.          Search for the <appSettings> node in the config file and set the value of the key ‘traceWriter’ to true.          In the <System.diagnostics> tag set the value of switches from 0 to 4 to set the trace level to maximum to write diagnostics level trace information.          Restart the TFS Application pool to force this change to take effect. The application pool restart will impact any one using the TFS server at present. Note - It is recommended that you do not make any changes to the TFS production application server, this can have serious consequences and can even jeopardize the installation of your server.          Download the Debug view tool from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896647.aspx and set it to capture “Global Events”. Perform any actions in the Team Explorer on the client machine, you should be able to see a series of trace data in the debug view tool now.         Enable Tracing on Build Controller/Agents Log on to the Build Controller/Agent and Navigate to the directory C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Tools         Look for the configuration file ‘TFSBuildServiceHost.exe.config’ if it is not already there create a new text file and rename it to ‘TFSBuildServiceHost.exe.config’         To Enable tracing uncomment the <system.diagnostics> and paste the snippet below if it is not already there. <configuration> <system.diagnostics> <switches> <add name="BuildServiceTraceLevel" value="4"/> </switches> <trace autoflush="true" indentsize="4"> <listeners> <add name="myListener" type="Microsoft.TeamFoundation.TeamFoundationTextWriterTraceListener, Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" initializeData="c:\logs\TFSBuildServiceHost.exe.log" /> <remove name="Default" /> </listeners> </trace> </system.diagnostics> </configuration> The highlighted path above is where the Log file will be created. If the folder is not already there then create the folder, also, make sure that the account running the build service has access to write to this folder.         Restart the build Controller/Agent service from the administration console (or net stop tfsbuildservicehost & net start tfsbuildservicehost) in order for the new setting to be picked up.         Enable TFS Tracing on the Client Machine On the client machine, shut down Visual Studio, navigate to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common 7\IDE          Search for devenv.exe.config, make a backup copy of the config file and right click the file and from the context menu select edit. If its not already there create this file.          Edit devenv.exe.config by adding the below code snippet before the last </configuration> tag <system.diagnostics> <switches> <add name="TeamFoundationSoapProxy" value="4" /> <add name="VersionControl" value="4" /> </switches> <trace autoflush="true" indentsize="3"> <listeners> <add name="myListener" type="Microsoft.TeamFoundation.TeamFoundationTextWriterTraceListener,Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" initializeData="c:\tf.log" /> <add name="perfListener" type="Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.PerfTraceListener, Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a"/> </listeners> </trace> </system.diagnostics> The highlighted path above is where the Log file will be created. If the folder is not already there then create the folder. Start Visual Studio and after a bit of activity you should be able to see the new log file being created on the folder specified in the config file. Other Resources Below are some Key resource you might like to review. I would highly recommend the documentation, walkthroughs and videos available on MSDN.   Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Have you come across an interesting one to one with the build server, please share your experience here. Questions/Feedback/Suggestions, etc please leave a comment. Thank You! Share this post : CodeProject

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• Force.com presents Database.com SQL Azure/Amazon RDS unfazed

  - by Sarang

  At the DreamForce 2010 event in San Francisco Force.com unveiled their next big thing in the Fat SaaS portfolio "Database.com".  I am still wondering how would they would've shelled out for that domain name. Now why would a already established SaaS player foray into a key building block like Database? Potentially allowing enterprises to build apps that do not utilize the Force.com stack! One key reason is being seen as the Fat SaaS player with evey trick in the SaaS space under his belt. You want CRM come hither, want a custom development PaaS like solution welcome home (VMForce), want all your apps to talk to a cloud DB and minimize latency by having it reside closer to you cloud apps? You've come to the right place sire! Other is potentially killing foray of smaller DB players like Oracle (Not surprisingly, the Database.com offering is a highly customized and scalable Oracle database) from entering the lucrative SaaS db marketplace. The feature set promised looks great out of the box for someone who likes to visualize cool new architectures. The ground realities are certainly going to be a lot different considering the SOAP/REST style access patterns in lieu of the comfortable old shoe of SQL. Microsoft suffered heavily with SDS (SQL Data Services) offering in early 2009 and had to pull the plug on the product only to reintroduce as a simple SQL Server in the cloud, SQL Windows Azure. Though MSFT is playing cool by providing OData semantics to work with SQL Windows Azure satisfying atleast some needs of the Web-Style to a DB. The other features like Social data models including Profiles, Status updates, feeds seem interesting as well. (Although I beleive social is just one of the aspects of large scale collaborative computing). All these features start "Free" for devs its a good news but the good news stops here. The overall pricing model of $ per Users per Transactions / Month is highly disproportionate compared to Amazon RDS (Based on MySQL) or SQL Windows Azure (Based on MSSQL). Roger Jennigs of Oakleaf did an interesting comparo based on 3, 10, 100, 500 users and it turns out that Database.com going by current understanding is way too expensive for the services on offer. The offering may not impact the decision for DotNet shops mulling their cloud stategy or even some Java/MySQL shops thinking about Amazon RDS, however for enterprises having already invested in other force.com offerings this could be a very important piece in the cloud strategy jigsaw. One which would address a key cloud DB issue of "Latency" for them at least it will help having the DB in the neighborhood. The tooling and "SQL like" access provider drivers (Think ODBC/JDBC) will be available later this year. Progress Software has already announced their JDBC driver stack for Database.com. It remains to be seen how effective the overall solutions proves to be in the longer run but for starts its a important decision towards consolidating Force.com's already strong positioning in the SaaS space. As always contrasting views are welcome! :)

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• O&rsquo;Reilly Deal of the Day 7/August/2014 - Windows PowerShell for Developers

  - by TATWORTH

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TATWORTH/archive/2014/08/07/orsquoreilly-deal-of-the-day-7august2014---windows-powershell-for.aspxToday’s half-price Deal of the Day from O’Reilly at http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920024491.do?code=MSDEAL is Windows PowerShell for Developers. “Want to perform programming tasks better, faster, simpler, and make them repeatable? Take a deep dive into Windows PowerShell and discover what this distributed automation platform can do. Whether you’re a .NET developer or IT pro, this concise guide will show you how PowerShell’s scripting language can help you be more productive on everyday tasks.”

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• Scott Guthrie in Glasgow

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Last week Scott Guthrie was in Glasgow for his new Guathon tour, which was a roaring success. Scott did talks on the new features in Visual Studio 2010, Silverlight 4, ASP.NET MVC 2 and Windows Phone 7. Scott talked from 10am till 4pm, so this can only contain what I remember and I am sure lots of things he discussed just went in one ear and out another, however I have tried to capture at least all of my Ohh’s and Ahh’s. Visual Studio 2010 Right now you can download and install Visual Studio 2010 Candidate Release, but soon we will have the final product in our hands. With it there are some amazing improvements, and not just in the IDE. New versions of VB and C# come out of the box as well as Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010 integration. The new Intellisense features allow inline support for Types and Dictionaries as well as being able to type just part of a name and have the list filter accordingly. Even better, and my personal favourite is one that Scott did not mention, and that is that it is not case sensitive so I can actually find things in C# with its reasonless case sensitivity (Scott, can we please have an option to turn that off.) Another nice feature is the Routing engine that was created for ASP.NET MVC is now available for WebForms which is good news for all those that just imported the MVC DLL’s to get at it anyway. Another fantastic feature that will need some exploring is the ability to add validation rules to your entities and have them validated automatically on the front end. This removes the need to add your own validators and means that you can control an objects validation rules from a single location, the object. A simple command “GridView.EnableDynamicData(gettype(product))“ will enable this feature on controls. What was not clear was wither there would be support for this in WPF and WinForms as well. If there is, we can write our validation rules once and use everywhere. I was disappointed to here that there would be no inbuilt support for the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) with VS2010, but I think it will be there for .vNext. Because I have been concentrating on the Visual Studio ALM enhancements to VS2010 I found this section invaluable as I now know at least some of what I missed. Silverlight 4 I am not a big fan of Silverlight. There I said it, and I will probably get lynched for it. My big problem with Silverlight is that most of the really useful things I leaned from WPF do not work. I am only going to mention one thing and that is “x:Type”. If you are a WPF developer you will know how much power these 6 little letters provide; the ability to target templates at object types being the the most magical and useful. But, and this is a massive but, if you are developing applications that MUST run on platforms other than windows then Silverlight is your only choice (well that and Flash, but lets just not go there). And Silverlight has a huge install base as well.. 60% of all internet connected devices have Silverlight. Can Adobe say that? Even though I am not a fan of it my current project is a Silverlight one. If you start your XAML experience with Silverlight you will not be disappointed and neither will the users of the applications you build. Scott showed us a fantastic application called “Silverface” that is a Silverlight 4 Out of Browser application. I have looked for a link and can’t find one, but true to form, here is a fantastic WPF version called Fish Bowl from Microsoft. ASP.NET MVC 2 ASP.NET MVC is something I have played with but never used in anger. It is definitely the way forward, but WebForms is not dead yet. there are still circumstances when WebForms are better. If you are starting from greenfield and you are using TDD, then MVC is ultimately the only way you can go. New in version 2 are Dynamic Scaffolding helpers that let you control how data is presented in the UI from the Entities. Adding validation rules and other options that make sense there can help improve the overall ease of developing the UI. Also the Microsoft team have heard the cries of help from the larger site builders and provided “Areas” which allow a level of categorisation to your Controllers and Views. These work just like add-ins and have their own folder, but also have sub Controllers and Views. Areas are totally pluggable and can be dropped onto existing sites giving the ability to have boxed products in MVC, although what you do with all of those views is anyone's guess. They have been listening to everyone again with the new option to encapsulate UI using the Html.Action or Html.ActionRender. This uses the existing  .ascx functionality in ASP.NET to render partial views to the screen in certain areas. While this was possible before, it makes the method official thereby opening it up to the masses and making it a standard. At the end of the session Scott pulled out some IIS goodies including the IIS SEO Toolkit which can be used to verify your own site is “good” for search engine consumption. Better yet he suggested that you run it against your friends sites and shame them with how bad they are. note: make sure you have fixed yours first. Windows Phone 7 Series I had already seen the new UI for WP7 and heard about the developer story, but Scott brought that home by building a twitter application in about 20 minutes using the emulator. Scott’s only mistake was loading @plip’s tweets into the app… And guess what, it was written in Silverlight. When Windows Phone 7 launches you will be able to use about 90% of the codebase of your existing Silverlight application and use it on the phone! There are two downsides to the new WP7 architecture: No, your existing application WILL NOT work without being converted to either a Silverlight or XNA UI. NO, you will not be able to get your applications onto the phone any other way but through the Marketplace. Do I think these are problems? No, not even slightly. This phone is aimed at consumers who have probably never tried to install an application directly onto a device. There will be support for enterprise apps in the future, but for now enterprises should stay on Windows Phone 6.5.x devices. Post Event drinks At the after event drinks gathering Scott was checking out my HTC HD2 (released to the US this month on T-Mobile) and liked the Windows Phone 6.5.5 build I have on it. We discussed why Microsoft were not going to allow Windows Phone 7 Series onto it with my understanding being that it had 5 buttons and not 3, while Scott was sure that there was more to it from a hardware standpoint. I think he is right, and although the HTC HD2 has a DX9 compatible processor, it was never built with WP7 in mind. However, as if by magic Saturday brought fantastic news for all those that have already bought an HD2: Yes, this appears to be Windows Phone 7 running on a HTC HD2. The HD2 itself won't be getting an official upgrade to Windows Phone 7 Series, so all eyes are on the ROM chefs at the moment. The rather massive photos have been posted by Tom Codon on HTCPedia and they've apparently got WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth and other bits working. The ROM isn't online yet but according to the post there's a beta version coming soon. Leigh Geary - http://www.coolsmartphone.com/news5648.html  What was Scott working on on his flight back to the US?   Technorati Tags: VS2010,MVC2,WP7S,WP7 Follow: @CAMURPHY, @ColinMackay, @plip and of course @ScottGu

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• It&rsquo;s All About Expectation Management

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  I saw this tweet from Gerald Weinberg today: I’d expand on this – its not just managers, its our clients as well. With so much focus on “agile” and reducing the amount of wasteful documentation created, those that typically consume traditional deliverables haven’t caught up. For many, there still is a correlation between seeing a mountain of paper, or a 30 page Word document, or a 40 slide PowerPoint, and feeling like some “work” was done. The “Value Driven Development” movement is still in its infancy, even with the adoption and success stories. So, we have two options – we can complain about it, or we can learn how to live with it while continuing to evangelize about the benefits of value over bloat. The reality is that perceived value is still value, so what’s important – especially in a situation as Gerald mentions where management or clients don’t understand the work – is to find out what the manager/client values and deliver to that. That doesn’t mean you don’t discuss it. That doesn’t mean that if you see risks being represented in what a manager/client is asking you don’t question it and provide alternatives. But it does mean that you don’t slam the door on it – you don’t just toss it aside and ignore what their perceived value is. The world isn’t perfect, primarily because its filled with imperfect people. The only way to get better is to engage and not dismiss each other, even if we disagree on value.

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• Quartz.Net Windows Service Configure Logging

  - by Tarun Arora

  In this blog post I’ll be covering, Logging for Quartz.Net Windows Service 01 – Why doesn’t Quartz.Net Windows Service log by default 02 – Configuring Quartz.Net windows service for logging to eventlog, file, console, etc 03 – Results: Logging in action If you are new to Quartz.Net I would recommend going through, A brief Introduction to Quartz.net Walkthrough of Installing & Testing Quartz.Net as a Windows Service Writing & Scheduling your First HelloWorld job with Quartz.Net   01 – Why doesn’t Quartz.Net Windows Service log by default If you are trying to figure out why… The Quartz.Net windows service isn’t logging The Quartz.Net windows service isn’t writing anything to the event log The Quartz.Net windows service isn’t writing anything to a file How do I configure Quartz.Net windows service to use log4Net How do I change the level of logging for Quartz.Net Look no further, This blog post should help you answer these questions. Quartz.NET uses the Common.Logging framework for all of its logging needs. If you navigate to the directory where Quartz.Net Windows Service is installed (I have the service installed in C:\Program Files (x86)\Quartz.net, you can find out the location by looking at the properties of the service) and open ‘Quartz.Server.exe.config’ you’ll see that the Quartz.Net is already set up for logging to ConsoleAppender and EventLogAppender, but only ‘ConsoleAppender’ is set up as active. So, unless you have the console associated to the Quartz.Net service you won’t be able to see any logging. <log4net> <appender name="ConsoleAppender" type="log4net.Appender.ConsoleAppender"> <layout type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout"> <conversionPattern value="%d [%t] %-5p %l - %m%n" /> </layout> </appender> <appender name="EventLogAppender" type="log4net.Appender.EventLogAppender"> <layout type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout"> <conversionPattern value="%d [%t] %-5p %l - %m%n" /> </layout> </appender> <root> <level value="INFO" /> <appender-ref ref="ConsoleAppender" /> <!-- uncomment to enable event log appending --> <!-- <appender-ref ref="EventLogAppender" /> --> </root> </log4net> Problem: In the configuration above Quartz.Net Windows Service only has ConsoleAppender active. So, no logging will be done to EventLog. More over the RollingFileAppender isn’t setup at all. So, Quartz.Net will not log to an application trace log file. 02 – Configuring Quartz.Net windows service for logging to eventlog, file, console, etc Let’s change this behaviour by changing the config file… In the below config file, I have added the RollingFileAppender. This will configure Quartz.Net service to write to a log file. (<appender name="GeneralLog" type="log4net.Appender.RollingFileAppender">) I have specified the location for the log file (<arg key="configFile" value="Trace/application.log.txt"/>) I have enabled the EventLogAppender and RollingFileAppender to be written to by Quartz. Net windows service Changed the default level of logging from ‘Info’ to ‘All’. This means all activity performed by Quartz.Net Windows service will be logged. You might want to tune this back to ‘Debug’ or ‘Info’ later as logging ‘All’ will produce too much data to the logs. (<level value="ALL"/>) Since I have changed the logging level to ‘All’, I have added applicationSetting to remove logging log4Net internal debugging. (<add key="log4net.Internal.Debug" value="false"/>) <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration> <configSections> <section name="quartz" type="System.Configuration.NameValueSectionHandler, System, Version=1.0.5000.0,Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" /> <section name="log4net" type="log4net.Config.Log4NetConfigurationSectionHandler, log4net" /> <sectionGroup name="common"> <section name="logging" type="Common.Logging.ConfigurationSectionHandler, Common.Logging" /> </sectionGroup> </configSections> <common> <logging> <factoryAdapter type="Common.Logging.Log4Net.Log4NetLoggerFactoryAdapter, Common.Logging.Log4net"> <arg key="configType" value="INLINE" /> <arg key="configFile" value="Trace/application.log.txt"/> <arg key="level" value="ALL" /> </factoryAdapter> </logging> </common> <appSettings> <add key="log4net.Internal.Debug" value="false"/> </appSettings> <log4net> <appender name="ConsoleAppender" type="log4net.Appender.ConsoleAppender"> <layout type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout"> <conversionPattern value="%d [%t] %-5p %l - %m%n" /> </layout> </appender> <appender name="EventLogAppender" type="log4net.Appender.EventLogAppender"> <layout type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout"> <conversionPattern value="%d [%t] %-5p %l - %m%n" /> </layout> </appender> <appender name="GeneralLog" type="log4net.Appender.RollingFileAppender"> <file value="Trace/application.log.txt"/> <appendToFile value="true"/> <maximumFileSize value="1024KB"/> <rollingStyle value="Size"/> <layout type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout"> <conversionPattern value="%d{HH:mm:ss} [%t] %-5p %c - %m%n"/> </layout> </appender> <root> <level value="ALL" /> <appender-ref ref="ConsoleAppender" /> <appender-ref ref="EventLogAppender" /> <appender-ref ref="GeneralLog"/> </root> </log4net> </configuration>   Note – Please ensure you restart the Quartz.Net Windows service for the config changes to be picked up by the service   03 – Results: Logging in action Once you start the Quartz.Net Windows Service up, the logging should be initiated to write all activities in the Console, EventLog and File… See screen shots below… Figure – Quartz.Net Windows Service logging all activity to the event log Figure – Quartz.Net Windows Service logging all activity to the application log file Where is the output from log4Net ConsoleAppender? As a default behaviour, the console isn't available in windows services, web services, windows forms. The output will simply be dismissed. Unless you are running the process interactively. Which you can do by firing up Quartz.Server.exe –i to see the output   This was fourth in the series of posts on enterprise scheduling using Quartz.net, in the next post I’ll be covering troubleshooting why a scheduled task hasn’t fired on Quartz.net windows service. All Quartz.Net specific blog posts can listed here. Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Stay tuned!

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• How to: Check which table is the biggest, in SQL Server

  - by AngelEyes

  The company I work with had it's DB double its size lately, so I needed to find out which tables were the biggest. I found this on the web, and decided it's worth remembering! Taken from http://www.sqlteam.com/article/finding-the-biggest-tables-in-a-database, the code is from http://www.sqlteam.com/downloads/BigTables.sql   /************************************************************************************** * *  BigTables.sql *  Bill Graziano (SQLTeam.com) *  [email protected] *  v1.1 * **************************************************************************************/ DECLARE @id INT DECLARE @type CHARACTER(2) DECLARE @pages INT DECLARE @dbname SYSNAME DECLARE @dbsize DEC(15, 0) DECLARE @bytesperpage DEC(15, 0) DECLARE @pagesperMB DEC(15, 0) CREATE TABLE #spt_space   (      objid    INT NULL,      ROWS     INT NULL,      reserved DEC(15) NULL,      data     DEC(15) NULL,      indexp   DEC(15) NULL,      unused   DEC(15) NULL   ) SET nocount ON -- Create a cursor to loop through the user tables DECLARE c_tables CURSOR FOR   SELECT id   FROM   sysobjects   WHERE  xtype = 'U' OPEN c_tables FETCH NEXT FROM c_tables INTO @id WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0   BEGIN       /* Code from sp_spaceused */       INSERT INTO #spt_space                   (objid,                    reserved)       SELECT objid = @id,              SUM(reserved)       FROM   sysindexes       WHERE  indid IN ( 0, 1, 255 )              AND id = @id       SELECT @pages = SUM(dpages)       FROM   sysindexes       WHERE  indid < 2              AND id = @id       SELECT @pages = @pages + Isnull(SUM(used), 0)       FROM   sysindexes       WHERE  indid = 255              AND id = @id       UPDATE #spt_space       SET    data = @pages       WHERE  objid = @id       /* index: sum(used) where indid in (0, 1, 255) - data */       UPDATE #spt_space       SET    indexp = (SELECT SUM(used)                        FROM   sysindexes                        WHERE  indid IN ( 0, 1, 255 )                               AND id = @id) - data       WHERE  objid = @id       /* unused: sum(reserved) - sum(used) where indid in (0, 1, 255) */       UPDATE #spt_space       SET    unused = reserved - (SELECT SUM(used)                                   FROM   sysindexes                                   WHERE  indid IN ( 0, 1, 255 )                                          AND id = @id)       WHERE  objid = @id       UPDATE #spt_space       SET    ROWS = i.ROWS       FROM   sysindexes i       WHERE  i.indid < 2              AND i.id = @id              AND objid = @id       FETCH NEXT FROM c_tables INTO @id   END SELECT TOP 25 table_name = (SELECT LEFT(name, 25)                             FROM   sysobjects                             WHERE  id = objid),               ROWS = CONVERT(CHAR(11), ROWS),               reserved_kb = Ltrim(Str(reserved * d.low / 1024., 15, 0) + ' ' + 'KB'),               data_kb = Ltrim(Str(data * d.low / 1024., 15, 0) + ' ' + 'KB'),               index_size_kb = Ltrim(Str(indexp * d.low / 1024., 15, 0) + ' ' + 'KB'),               unused_kb = Ltrim(Str(unused * d.low / 1024., 15, 0) + ' ' + 'KB') FROM   #spt_space,        MASTER.dbo.spt_values d WHERE  d.NUMBER = 1        AND d.TYPE = 'E' ORDER  BY reserved DESC DROP TABLE #spt_space CLOSE c_tables DEALLOCATE c_tables

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• Silverlight Cream for April 29, 2010 -- #851

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Carlos Figueira(-2-), Subodh Pushpak, Gergely Orosz, John Papa, Mike Snow(-2-), Rishi, Tim Heuer, Stefan Olson, and David Anson. Shoutouts: Josh Holmes blogged about a cool app the City of Miami has up: Miami 311: Built on Windows Azure Gergely Orosz reports on the state of a bug he found pre SL4: Silverlight 4 still displays large elements incorrectly Laura Foy and Charlie Kindel discuss WP7 on Channel 9: Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools Refresh Announced Charlie Kindel has an announcement, good instructions, and what's new notes on the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh! Tim Heuer mentioned the workaround for this in his post (below), but I thought you might like to read Brandon Watson's debrief of what it's all about: Signed Assemblies Bug in the Windows Phone Tools CTP Refresh Laurent Bugnion posted about interrelations between versions of Blend and WP7 code... read it closely: Be careful when installing the Blend Windows Phone 7 Add-In From SilverlightCream.com: Consuming REST/POX services in Silverlight 4 Carlos Figueira has a pair of posts up about consuming services in Silverlight 4. This first one is about consuming REST/POX services. He provides a Service Contract that can be used with either and the full project code is available as well. Consuming REST/JSON services in Silverlight 4 In the second post, Carlos Figueira provides the code to allow WCF and Silverlight 4 to consume strongly-typed REST/JSON... and again, all the code is available. Silverlight and WCF caching Subodh Pushpak has a post up discussing caching in WCF, and has code demonstrating turning caching on at run-time. Detecting Silverlight Version Installed Gergely Orosz said it right when he said "Detecting the Silverlight version installed on a client machine isn’t entirely straightforward." ... and after reading this post, if you take the link to his ScottLogic blog, you'll get a full break-out of how it's done. Silverlight TV 22: Tim Heuer on Extending the SMF It's Thursday, and that means Silverlight TV! ... this week, John Papa has on Tim Heuer who has always been out there pushing media... and he's talking about SMF or Silverlight Media Framework for the uninitiated, and also extending it. Silverlight Tip of the Day #7 – Localized Resources Mike Snow has Tip Number 7 up and it's about localization... good end-to-end discussion and demonstration. Just thought I should use that to prove to my daughter that the tatoo she had put on the back of her neck actually reads "Eat More Broccoli" :) Silverlight Tip of the Day #8 – Detecting Alt, Shift, Control, Window & Apple Keys Combinations I just realized Mike Snow's site logo reads "Silverlight Tips of the Day" (bolding mine) ... that answers why I'm seeing more than one -- sorry Mike, couldn't pass it up :) ... Mike's second tip today and number 8 in the series is on detecting all the mouse button and ctl/alt/shift combinations in Silverlight. nRoute: More Wholesomeness, with SL 4 and .NET 4.0 Rishi has a post up announcing a new nRoute release for Silverlight 4 and .NET 4.0 He's tweaked the code to take advantages of enhancements in the new platforms, so check it out. Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools April 2010 Refresh Booya... Tim Heuer announced the release of the next drop in the WP7 tools ... dang wish I was at home today :) ... be sure to read the post for info such as the notes about Authenticode Assemblies and the release notes. Updates to Silverlight Multi-binding support Stefan Olson points up a SL4 change to Multi-binding support that he had previously blogged about. He shows the previous non-working example, and what you have to do to make it work now. Using XAML to create a custom wallpaper image for your mobile device David Anson has a solution for those pesky lost devices, and let me go on the record right now saying if anyone finds a WP7 phone laying around, just call me, it's mine :) [think that'd work??] ... ok, David's solution is a WPF app "MobileDeviceHomeScreenMaker" that you get the info set and it produces a png you then put on your device. But seriously about that lost phone... Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Building services with the .NET framework Cont’d

  - by Allan Rwakatungu

  In my previous blog I wrote an introductory post on services and how you can build services using the .NET frameworks Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) In this post I will show how to develop a real world application using WCF The problem During the last meeting we realized developers in Uganda are not so cool – they don’t use twitter so may not get the latest news and updates from the technology world. We also noticed they mostly use kabiriti phones (jokes). With their kabiriti phones they are unable to access the twitter web client or alternative twitter mobile clients like tweetdeck , twirl or tweetie. However, the kabiriti phones support SMS (Yeeeeeeei). So what we going to do to make these developers cool and keep them updated is by enabling them to receive tweets via SMS. We shall also enable them to develop their own applications that can extend this functionality Analysis Thanks to services and open API’s solving our problem is going to be easy.  1. To get tweets we can use the twitter service for FREE 2. To send SMS we shall use www.clickatell.com/ as they can send SMS to any country in the world. Besides we could not find any local service that offers API's for sending SMS :(. 3. To enable developers to integrate with our application so that they can extend it and build even cooler applications we use WCF. In addittion , because connectivity might be an issue we decided to use WCF because if has a inbuilt queing features. We also choose WCF because this is a post about .NET and WCF :). The Code Accessing the tweets To consume twitters REST API we shall use the WCF REST starter kit. Like it name indicates , the REST starter kit is a set of .NET framework classes that enable developers to create and access REST style services ( like the twitter service). Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Microsoft.Http; using System.Net; using System.Xml.Linq;   namespace UG.Demo {     public class TwitterService     {         public IList<TwitterStatus> SomeMethodName()         {             //Connect to the twitter service (HttpClient is part of the REST startkit classes)             HttpClient cl = new HttpClient("http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/friends_timeline.xml");             //Supply your basic authentication credentials             cl.TransportSettings.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("ourusername", "ourpassword");             //issue an http             HttpResponseMessage resp = cl.Get();             //ensure we got reponse 200             resp.EnsureStatusIsSuccessful();             //use XLinq to parse the REST XML             var statuses = from r in resp.Content.ReadAsXElement().Descendants("status")                            select new TwitterStatus                            {                                User = r.Element("user").Element("screen_name").Value,                                Status = r.Element("text").Value                            };             return statuses.ToList();         }     }     public class TwitterStatus     {         public string User { get; set; }         public string Status { get; set; }     } }  Sending SMS Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} public class SMSService     {         public void Send(string phone, string message)         {                         HttpClient cl1 = new HttpClient();              //the clickatell XML format for sending SMS             string xml = String.Format("<clickAPI><sendMsg><api_id>3239621</api_id><user>ourusername</user><password>ourpassword</password><to>{0}</to><text>{1}</text></sendMsg></clickAPI>",phone,message);             //Post form data             HttpUrlEncodedForm form = new HttpUrlEncodedForm();             form.Add("data", xml);             System.Net.ServicePointManager.Expect100Continue = false;             string uri = @"http://api.clickatell.com/xml/xml";             HttpResponseMessage resp = cl1.Post(uri, form.CreateHttpContent());             resp.EnsureStatusIsSuccessful();         }     }

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• Software Testing Humor

  - by mbcrump

  I usually don’t share these kind of things unless it really makes me laugh. At least, I can provide a link to a free eBook on the Pablo’s S.O.L.I.D principles eBook. S.O.L.I.D. is a collection of best-practice object-oriented design principles that you can apply to your design to accomplish various desirable goals like loose-coupling, higher maintainability, intuitive location of interesting code, etc You may also want to check out the Pablo’s 31 Days of Refactoring eBook as well.

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• Are you cashing in on the MVP complimentary subscriptions ?

  - by Tarun Arora

  The two most asked questions in the Microsoft technology communities around the Microsoft MVP program are, 1. How do I become a Microsoft MVP? 2. What benefits do I get as an MVP? The answer to the first question has been well answered here. In this blog post, I’ll try and answer the second question.           Please find a comprehensive list of Not for Resale personal subscriptions of various products that Microsoft MVP’s are eligible for Product Description Details JetBrains Resharper, dotTrace, dotCover & WebStorm  https://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/buy/mvp.html RedGate Sql server development, database administration, .net development, azure development (merged with Cerebrata), mySQL development, Oracle development http://www.red-gate.com/community/mvp-program Pluralsight Pluralsight on demand training http://blog.pluralsight.com/2011/02/28/pluralsight-for-mvp/ Cerebrata Cloud storage studio and Azure Diagnostic Manager (part of redgate now) https://www.cerebrata.com/Offers/mvp.aspx Telerik Telerik Ultimate collection & Telerik TeamPulse http://blogs.telerik.com/blogs/posts/11-03-01/telerik-gift-for-microsoft-mvps.aspx Developer Express DevEx controls http://www.devexpress.com/Home/Community/mvp.xml InnerWorking 600 hours of .net training catalogue http://www.innerworkings.com/mvp Typemock Typemock Isolator, Typemock Isolator for Sharepoint developers, Typemock Isolator for web developers, TestDriven.NET http://www.typemock.com/mvp SpeakFlow A suite of tools for creating, managing, and delivering non-linear presentations http://www.speakflow.com/ TechSmith Camtasia Studio, SnagIt, screen cast http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.html Altova Altova XML spy http://www.altova.com/xml-editor/ Visual SVN VisualSVN Subversion integration plug-in for Visual Studio http://www.visualsvn.com/visualsvn/purchase/mvp/ PreEmptive Solution Professional PreEmptive Analytics, Dotfuscator http://www.preemptive.com/landing/mvp Armadillo Armadillo Adaptive Bug Prevention http://www.armadilloverdrive.com/ IS Decisions NFR license to Userlock, RemoteExec, FileAudit & WinReporter http://www.isdecisions.com/download/mvp-mct-program.htm Idera SQL tools http://www.idera.com/Content/Home.aspx West Wind Help Builder Help builder solution http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/2005/Mar/09/Are-you-a-Microsoft-MVP-Get-a-FREE-copy-of-West-Wind-Html-Help-Builder Bamboo Sharepoint tools http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/partner-advantage-program/archive/2008/08/01/partner-advantage-program-mvp.aspx Nitriq Nitriq code analysis http://blog.nitriq.com/FreeLicensesForMicrosoftMVPs.aspx ByteScout Components, Libraries and Developer Tools http://bytescout.com/buy/purchase_nfr_for_mvp.html YourKit Java and .net Profiler http://yourkit.com/.net/profiler/index.jsp Aspose .NET components http://www.aspose.com/corporate/community/2012_05_08_nfr-licenses-for-community-leaders.aspx Apart from google bing fu; stackoverflow and breathtech were a great help in compiling the above list. If you know of any other benefits, offers or complimentary subscriptions on offer for MVPs not cover in the list above, please add to the comment thread and I’ll have it updated in the list. Enjoy

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• Resolving TFS_SCHEMA_VERSION Errors In Team Foundation Server 2010 Collection Databases

  - by Jeff Ferguson

  I recently backed up a Team Foundation Server 2010 project collection database and restored it onto another server. All of that went well, until I tried to use the restored database on the new server. As it turns out, the old server was running the Release Candidate of TFS 2010 and the new server is running the RTM version of TFS 2010. I ended up with an error message shown on the new server's Team Web Access site about the project collection's TFS_SCHEMA_VERSION property not containing the appropriate value. As it turns out, TFS_SCHEMA_VERSION is an extended property on the project collection database. I ran the following SQL script against the project collection database restored onto the new server: EXEC [Tfs_DefaultCollection].sys.sp_dropextendedproperty @name=N'TFS_PRODUCT_VERSION' GO EXEC [Tfs_DefaultCollection].sys.sp_addextendedproperty @name=N'TFS_PRODUCT_VERSION', @value=N'10.0.30319.1' GO EXEC [Tfs_DefaultCollection].sys.sp_dropextendedproperty @name=N'TFS_SCHEMA_VERSION' GO EXEC [Tfs_DefaultCollection].sys.sp_addextendedproperty @name=N'TFS_SCHEMA_VERSION', @value=N'Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 (RTM)' GO Now, all is well. I can now navigate to http://newserver:8080/tfs/ and see the restored project collection and its contents.

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• Remote Desktop to Your Azure Virtual Machine

  - by Shaun

  The Windows Azure Team had just published their new development portal this week and the SDK 1.3. Within this new release there are a lot of cool feature available. The one I’m looking forward to is Remote Desktop Access to your running Windows Azure Virtual Machine.   Configuration Remote Desktop Access It would be very simple to make the azure service enable the remote desktop access. First of all let’s create a new windows azure project from the Visual Studio. In this example I just created a normal MVC 2 web role without any modifications. Then we right-click the azure project node in the solution explorer window and select “Publish”. Then let’s select the “Deploy your Windows Azure project to Windows Azure” on the top radio button. And then select the credential, deployment service/slot, storage and label as susal. You must have the Management API Certificates uploaded to your Windows Azure account, and install the certification on you machine before in order to use this one-click deployment feature. If you are familiar with this dialog you will notice that there’s a linkage named “Configure Remote Desktop connections”. Here is where you need to make this service enable the remote desktop feature. After clicked this link we will set the configuration of the remote desktop access authorization information. There are 4 steps we need to do to configure our access. Certificates: We need either create or select a certificate file in order to encypt the access cerdenticals. In this example I will use the certificate file for my Management API. Username: The remote desktop user name to access the virtual machine. Password: The password for the access. Expiration: The access cerdentals would be expired after 1 month by default but we can amend here. After that we clicked the OK button to back to the publish dialog.   The next step is to back to the new windows azure portal and navigate to the hosted services list. I created a new hosted service and upload the certificate file onto this service. The user name and password access to the azure machine must be encrypted from the local machine, and then send to the windows azure platform, then decrypted on the azure side by the same file. This is why we need to upload the certificate file onto azure. We navigated to the “Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN"” from the left panel and created a new hosted service named “SDK13” and selected the “Certificates” node. Then we clicked the “Add Certificates” button. Then we select the local certificate file and the password to install it into this azure service.   The final step would be back to our Visual Studio and in the pulish dialog just click the OK button. The Visual Studio will upload our package and the configuration into our service with the remote desktop settings.   Remote Desktop Access to Azure Virtual Machine All things had been done, let’s have a look back on the Windows Azure Development Portal. If I selected the web role that I had just published we can see on the toolbar there’s a section named “Remote Access”. In this section the Enable checkbox had been checked which means this role has the Remote Desktop Access feature enabled. If we want to modify the access cerdentals we can simply click the Configure button. Then we can update the user name, password, certificates and the expiration date.   Let’s select the instance node under the web role. In this case I just created one instance for demo. We can see that when we selected the instance node, the Connect button turned enabled. After clicked this button there will be a RDP file downloaded. This is a Remote Desctop configuration file that we can use to access to our azure virtual machine. Let’s download it to our local machine and execute. We input the user name and password we specified when we published our application to azure and then click OK. There might be some certificates warning dislog appeared. This is because the certificates we use to encryption is not signed by a trusted provider. Just select OK in these cases as we know the certificate is safty to us. Finally, the virtual machine of Windows Azure appeared.   A Quick Look into the Azure Virtual Machine Let’s just have a very quick look into our virtual machine. There are 3 disks available for us: C, D and E. Disk C: Store the local resource, diagnosis information, etc. Disk D: System disk which contains the OS, IIS, .NET Frameworks, etc. Disk E: Sotre our application code. The IIS which hosting our webiste on Azure. The IP configuration of the azure virtual machine.   Summary In this post I covered one of the new feature of the Azure SDK 1.3 – Remote Desktop Access. We can set the access per service and all of the instances of this service could be accessed through the remote desktop tool. With this feature we can deep into the virtual machines of our instances to see the inner information such as the system event, IIS log, system information, etc. But we should pay attention to modify the system settings. 2 reasons from what I know for now: 1. If we have more than one instances against our service we should ensure that all system settings we modifed are applied to all instances/virtual machines. Otherwise, as the machines are under the azure load balance proxy our application process may doesn’t work due to the defferent settings between the instances. 2. When the virtual machine encounted some problem and need to be translated to another physical machine all settings we made would be disappeared.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Multiple Monitors

  - by mroberts

  At my workplace .Net developers get pretty much the same equipment. A decent Dell workstation / Desktop, mine is a Dell Precision 390. One dual core 2.40 GHz. Eight GB RAM. Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit. Two Dell 20.1 Monitors. I'm happy with this.  The machine is about 3 years old but still runs with some decent speed. New developers are getting a Dell workstation with dual quad processors. I just put in a request for myself and three other developers for an upgraded video card and two additional monitors, for a total of four monitors per person.  We suggested this card, BTW, mainly for the cost.  The move from one monitor to two was fantastic (one might even say life (or work) changing) and truly did increase productivity. Now what about going from 2 monitors to 4?  I'm sure the change is not as dramatic as one to two, but I can't help but to think four monitors is better than two.  But if four is better than two, should we have asked for six?!? Also what about mixing monitor types?  Right now my monitors are the older square type vs. wide-screen.  It's been rumored that we will be getting monitors out of current stock and they will be 22 inch wide-screens.  I understand this, recession and all.  2-20 inch square monitors with 2-22 inch wide-screen monitors...hmmmmm.  I'm thinking I'd rather get 2 additional 17 inch square monitors to put on each side of my 20's. Also, a question was raised about the layout of four monitors. By default, my thought was I'll just put them all on my desk, kinda in a line. I've heard others say they want to stack them in a 2 x 2 square. BTW, loving multi monitor support in Visual studio 2010! I’d love some comments on your experience with one, two, four, or however many monitors from a developers perspective.

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• My Interview with Microsoft

  - by Victor Hurdugaci

  This post is for those who want to apply or have already applied (but not finished the interview) for a Microsoft Job. The recruitment process is quite similar for everyone and consists of a few steps. Application E-Mail Interview Phone Interview On Site Interview I will tell you my story and how I went through the four phases. 1. Application My blog's title (Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit) means "Nothing Comes Out of Nothing". You can't get a job at Microsoft by not doing anything - this is true for anything else. The first step you need to complete is the application process. For this, many options are available. You can... ... apply online on Microsoft's Careers website as I did ... send your CV to different e-mail addresses (there are some dedicated e-mails for different positions) ... apply through some 3rd party organization (job shop, campus recruitment, job agency, etc) On MS Careers you just have to post your CV and choose the job you want. That's all! No recommendation letter, no cover letter, no nothing. Of course, not every CV passes the selection process. Here are some tips for improving your resume (worked for me): Don't write it just before applying! Write a draft version, wait a few days and then review it. This way you will find a lot of mistakes and stupid things you wrote initially. If you review it immediately after writing, your mind will not be criticism oriented and will just ignore mistakes. Repeat the write-wait-review process as many times as necessary, until you find that the review revealed no mistakes. After you did the final review and the CV is bullet-proof, ask others to review it. They will definitely find inconsistencies and mistakes and this will make you feel stupid. This is good because will open your eyes will make you go into an 'I want to improve' mode. You'll try to correct everything. After you come up with a modified version go again through steps 1 and 2. Repeat this as many times as necessary. [Special thanks to Lucian Sasu, Nadia Comanici, Andrei Ciobanu, Monica Balan and Lavinia Tanase for reviewing my CV!] Make it short and give only relevant facts. Initially, I come up with a 5 pages CV because I wrote every single technology with which I worked. There were a lot irrelevant things, I wrote Windows Workflow Foundation just because I played with it for a few days. I added extensive descriptions for every project, made a personal details section (name, birth date, address, etc) of 1/2 page. Others suggested to cut everything that was not necessary. You don't need to give extensive descriptions, just add a few words. For example, I wrote "VS Image Visualizer - Visual Studio 2008 debug visualizer for images" and added a link to the project's page - you submit formatted andcan embed links. Add something that makes it different. I don't know if this makes a difference, but I added some lines to separate items just like in the picture below. Definitely Microsoft gets thousands of CVs per day. You need something special. Don't lie! Tell exactly what you did and what is the proficiency level of your skills. For example, don't write "Advanced" for UML if you don't know the difference between composition and aggregation. Be realistic and don't under/over estimate yourself. Use the spell chick. Make sure everything is written in correct English and there are no grammar/spelling mistakes. Noddy likes a WC with grammar mi takes. You mght fail just because of that. Once you completed your CV, choose the job that suits best your needs, apply and wait... The waiting is a problem because all these big companies like Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Apple, etc. will contact you only if they find something interesting in your application. If you're not suitable, then no rejection is sent. I applied for an Intern Software Development Engineer position at Microsoft Redmond. I cannot apply for a full time position because I want to finish the master program on time, in the next summer - an internship is just what I need. 2. E-Mail Interview January 20, 2010. Two months since I submitted the CV. I wasn't hoping anymore that MS will contact me, when I got an e-mail titled: "Victor Hurdugaci ES DK" from Holly Peterson saying: Read more >>

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• Revisiting ANTS Performance Profiler 7.4

  - by James Michael Hare

  Last year, I did a small review on the ANTS Performance Profiler 6.3, now that it’s a year later and a major version number higher, I thought I’d revisit the review and revise my last post. This post will take the same examples as the original post and update them to show what’s new in version 7.4 of the profiler. Background A performance profiler’s main job is to keep track of how much time is typically spent in each unit of code. This helps when we have a program that is not running at the performance we expect, and we want to know where the program is experiencing issues. There are many profilers out there of varying capabilities. Red Gate’s typically seem to be the very easy to “jump in” and get started with very little training required. So let’s dig into the Performance Profiler. I’ve constructed a very crude program with some obvious inefficiencies. It’s a simple program that generates random order numbers (or really could be any unique identifier), adds it to a list, sorts the list, then finds the max and min number in the list. Ignore the fact it’s very contrived and obviously inefficient, we just want to use it as an example to show off the tool: 1: // our test program 2: public static class Program 3: { 4: // the number of iterations to perform 5: private static int _iterations = 1000000; 6: 7: // The main method that controls it all 8: public static void Main() 9: { 10: var list = new List<string>(); 11: 12: for (int i = 0; i < _iterations; i++) 13: { 14: var x = GetNextId(); 15: 16: AddToList(list, x); 17: 18: var highLow = GetHighLow(list); 19: 20: if ((i % 1000) == 0) 21: { 22: Console.WriteLine("{0} - High: {1}, Low: {2}", i, highLow.Item1, highLow.Item2); 23: Console.Out.Flush(); 24: } 25: } 26: } 27: 28: // gets the next order id to process (random for us) 29: public static string GetNextId() 30: { 31: var random = new Random(); 32: var num = random.Next(1000000, 9999999); 33: return num.ToString(); 34: } 35: 36: // add it to our list - very inefficiently! 37: public static void AddToList(List<string> list, string item) 38: { 39: list.Add(item); 40: list.Sort(); 41: } 42: 43: // get high and low of order id range - very inefficiently! 44: public static Tuple<int,int> GetHighLow(List<string> list) 45: { 46: return Tuple.Create(list.Max(s => Convert.ToInt32(s)), list.Min(s => Convert.ToInt32(s))); 47: } 48: } So let’s run it through the profiler and see what happens! Visual Studio Integration First, let’s look at how the ANTS profilers integrate with Visual Studio’s menu system. Once you install the ANTS profilers, you will get an ANTS menu item with several options: Notice that you can either Profile Performance or Launch ANTS Performance Profiler. These sound similar but achieve two slightly different actions: Profile Performance: this immediately launches the profiler with all defaults selected to profile the active project in Visual Studio. Launch ANTS Performance Profiler: this launches the profiler much the same way as starting it from the Start Menu. The profiler will pre-populate the application and path information, but allow you to change the settings before beginning the profile run. So really, the main difference is that Profile Performance immediately begins profiling with the default selections, where Launch ANTS Performance Profiler allows you to change the defaults and attach to an already-running application. Let’s Fire it Up! So when you fire up ANTS either via Start Menu or Launch ANTS Performance Profiler menu in Visual Studio, you are presented with a very simple dialog to get you started: Notice you can choose from many different options for application type. You can profile executables, services, web applications, or just attach to a running process. In fact, in version 7.4 we see two new options added: ASP.NET Web Application (IIS Express) SharePoint web application (IIS) So this gives us an additional way to profile ASP.NET applications and the ability to profile SharePoint applications as well. You can also choose your level of detail in the Profiling Mode drop down. If you choose Line-Level and method-level timings detail, you will get a lot more detail on the method durations, but this will also slow down profiling somewhat. If you really need the profiler to be as unintrusive as possible, you can change it to Sample method-level timings. This is performing very light profiling, where basically the profiler collects timings of a method by examining the call-stack at given intervals. Which method you choose depends a lot on how much detail you need to find the issue and how sensitive your program issues are to timing. So for our example, let’s just go with the line and method timing detail. So, we check that all the options are correct (if you launch from VS2010, the executable and path are filled in already), and fire it up by clicking the [Start Profiling] button. Profiling the Application Once you start profiling the application, you will see a real-time graph of CPU usage that will indicate how much your application is using the CPU(s) on your system. During this time, you can select segments of the graph and bookmark them, giving them mnemonic names. This can be useful if you want to compare performance in one part of the run to another part of the run. Notice that once you select a block, it will give you the call tree breakdown for that selection only, and the relative performance of those calls. Once you feel you have collected enough information, you can click [Stop Profiling] to stop the application run and information collection and begin a more thorough analysis. Analyzing Method Timings So now that we’ve halted the run, we can look around the GUI and see what we can see. By default, the times are shown in terms of percentage of time of the total run of the application, though you can change it in the View menu item to milliseconds, ticks, or seconds as well. This won’t affect the percentages of methods, it only affects what units the times are shown. Notice also that the major hotspot seems to be in a method without source, ANTS Profiler will filter these out by default, but you can right-click on the line and remove the filter to see more detail. This proves especially handy when a bottleneck is due to a method in the BCL. So now that we’ve removed the filter, we see a bit more detail: In addition, ANTS Performance Profiler gives you the ability to decompile the methods without source so that you can dive even deeper, though typically this isn’t necessary for our purposes. When looking at timings, there are generally two types of timings for each method call: Time: This is the time spent ONLY in this method, not including calls this method makes to other methods. Time With Children: This is the total of time spent in both this method AND including calls this method makes to other methods. In other words, the Time tells you how much work is being done exclusively in this method, and the Time With Children tells you how much work is being done inclusively in this method and everything it calls. You can also choose to display the methods in a tree or in a grid. The tree view is the default and it shows the method calls arranged in terms of the tree representing all method calls and the parent method that called them, etc. This is useful for when you find a hot-spot method, you can see who is calling it to determine if the problem is the method itself, or if it is being called too many times. The grid method represents each method only once with its totals and is useful for quickly seeing what method is the trouble spot. In addition, you can choose to display Methods with source which are generally the methods you wrote (as opposed to native or BCL code), or Any Method which shows not only your methods, but also native calls, JIT overhead, synchronization waits, etc. So these are just two ways of viewing the same data, and you’re free to choose the organization that best suits what information you are after. Analyzing Method Source If we look at the timings above, we see that our AddToList() method (and in particular, it’s call to the List<T>.Sort() method in the BCL) is the hot-spot in this analysis. If ANTS sees a method that is consuming the most time, it will flag it as a hot-spot to help call out potential areas of concern. This doesn’t mean the other statistics aren’t meaningful, but that the hot-spot is most likely going to be your biggest bang-for-the-buck to concentrate on. So let’s select the AddToList() method, and see what it shows in the source window below: Notice the source breakout in the bottom pane when you select a method (from either tree or grid view). This shows you the timings in this method per line of code. This gives you a major indicator of where the trouble-spot in this method is. So in this case, we see that performing a Sort() on the List<T> after every Add() is killing our performance! Of course, this was a very contrived, duh moment, but you’d be surprised how many performance issues become duh moments. Note that this one line is taking up 86% of the execution time of this application! If we eliminate this bottleneck, we should see drastic improvement in the performance. So to fix this, if we still wanted to maintain the List<T> we’d have many options, including: delay Sort() until after all Add() methods, using a SortedSet, SortedList, or SortedDictionary depending on which is most appropriate, or forgoing the sorting all together and using a Dictionary. Rinse, Repeat! So let’s just change all instances of List<string> to SortedSet<string> and run this again through the profiler: Now we see the AddToList() method is no longer our hot-spot, but now the Max() and Min() calls are! This is good because we’ve eliminated one hot-spot and now we can try to correct this one as well. As before, we can then optimize this part of the code (possibly by taking advantage of the fact the list is now sorted and returning the first and last elements). We can then rinse and repeat this process until we have eliminated as many bottlenecks as possible. Calls by Web Request Another feature that was added recently is the ability to view .NET methods grouped by the HTTP requests that caused them to run. This can be helpful in determining which pages, web services, etc. are causing hot spots in your web applications. Summary If you like the other ANTS tools, you’ll like the ANTS Performance Profiler as well. It is extremely easy to use with very little product knowledge required to get up and running. There are profilers built into the higher product lines of Visual Studio, of course, which are also powerful and easy to use. But for quickly jumping in and finding hot spots rapidly, Red Gate’s Performance Profiler 7.4 is an excellent choice. Technorati Tags: Influencers,ANTS,Performance Profiler,Profiler

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• Tykie

  - by Brian

  Here’s the obituary my mother wrote for Tykie, I still miss the little guy quite a bit. Anyone who’s interested in further information on hearing dogs should check out the IHDI website. I cannot begin to express how helpful a hearing dog can be for the hearing impaired. If you feel so inclined, please make a donation. In Memoriam, Tykie 1993-2010 The American Legion Post 401, South Wichita, KS, supported one of its members and commander by sponsoring a service dog for him. Unlike most service dogs this one was for the hearing impaired. Both Ocie and Betty Sims had hearing loss – Ocie more than Betty. The Post and Auxilliary had garage sales, auctions and other fund-raising endeavors to get donations for the dog. Betty made Teddy bears with growlers that were auctioned for donations to bring a hearing dog from International Hearing Dog, Henderson, Colorado. Tykie, a small wiry, salt and pepper terrier, arrived September 1, 1994 to begin his work that included attending Post 401 meetings and celebrations as well as raising more money to be donated to IHD to help others have hearing dogs. Tykie was a young dog less than a year old when he came to Wichita. He was always anxious to please and seldom barked, though he did put out a kind of cry when he was giving his urgent announcement that someone was at the door or the telephone was ringing. He also enjoyed chasing squirrels in the backyard garden that Ocie prized. In 1995, Betty almost died of a lung infection. Tykie was at the hospital with Ocie when he could visit. Several weeks after she was able to come home after a miraculous recovery, Tykie and Ocie went to a car show in downtown Wichita. Ocie’s retina tore loose in the only eye he could see out of and he almost blind was in great pain. How Ocie and Tykie got home is still a mystery, but the family legend goes that Tykie added seeing eye dog to his repertoire and helped drive him home. Health problems continued for Ocie and when he was placed in a nursing home, Tykie was moved to be Betty’s hearing dog. No problem for Tykie, he still saw his friends at the post and continued to help with visitors at the door. The night of May 3, 1999, Betty and Tykie were in the bedroom watching TV when Tykie began hitting her with both front paws as he would if something were urgent. She said later she thought he wanted to go out. As she and the dog walked down the hall towards the back of the house, Tykie hit her again with his front paws with such urgency that she fell into a small coat closet. That small 2-by-2 closet became their refuge as that very second the roof of her house went off as the f4 tornado raced through the city. Betty acquired one small wound on her hand from a piece of flying glass as she pulled Tykie into the closet with her. Tykie was a hero that day and a lot of days after. He kept Betty going as she rebuilt her home and after her husband died April 15, 2000. Tykie had to be cared for so she had to take him outside and bring him inside. He attended weddings of grandchildren and funerals of Post friends. When Betty died February 17, 2002 Tykie’s life changed again. IHD gave approval for his transfer and retirement to Betty and Ocie’s grandson, Brian Laird, who has a similar hearing loss to his grandfather. A few days after the funeral Tykie flew to his new home in Rutherford, NJ where he was able to take long walks for a couple of years before moving back to the Kansas City area. He was still full of adventure. He was written up in a book about service dogs and his story of the tornado and his picture appeared. He spent weekends at Brian’s mother’s farm to get muddy and be afraid of cats and chickens. He also took on an odyssey as he slipped from his fenced yard in Lenexa one day and walked more than seven miles in Overland Park traffic before being found by a good Samaritan who called IHD to find out where he belonged. Tykie was deaf for about the last two years of his long life and became blind as well, but he continued to strive to please. Tykie was 16 years and 4 months when he was cremated. His ashes were scattered on the graves of Betty and Ocie Sims at Greenwood Cemetery west of Wichita on the afternoon of March 21, 2010, with about a dozen family and Post 401 members. It is still the rule. Service dogs are the only dogs allowed inside the Post home. Submitted by Linda Laird, daughter of Betty and Ocie and mother of Brian Laird.

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• West Palm Beach .Net User Group Meeting - April 27th 2010 - Ted Neward - MVP & INETA Speaker

  - by Sam Abraham

  Ted Neward, MVP & INETA Speaker spoke to us at the West Palm Beach .Net User Group meeting at CompTec about Microsoft OSLO and DSLs on Tuesday April 27th 2010. Ted kept the audience well engaged throughout his presentation and shared his experience with DSLs in a humorous and fun setting. At the conclusion of the talk, we had our free raffle and concluded the evening with networking while enjoying the pizza and soda brought to us by Sherlock Technology (www.sherstaff.com) This meeting was also Vishal Shukla's last appearance at the West Palm Beach .Net User Group as he will be leaving for India in mid-May. Vishal has worked hard side-by-side with the Fladotnet leadership to run the West Palm Beach Group and will sure be missed by all of us. On behalf of the group, I would like to wish Vishal best of luck on his future endeavors and we are all looking forward to seeing him again soon. Thank you Ted for making such a long trip from Redmond to FL to share with us your expertise and knowledge of DSLs and thank you INETA for making this happen with your support of user groups. You can get in touch with Ted through his website (www.tedneward.com)

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• Print SSRS Report / PDF automatically from SQL Server agent or Windows Service

  - by Jeremy Ramos

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/JeremyRamos/archive/2013/10/22/print-ssrs-report--pdf-from-sql-server-agent-or.aspxI have turned the Web upside-down to find a solution to this considering the least components and least maintenance as possible to achieve automated printing of an SSRS report. This is for the reason that we do not have a full software development team to maintain an app and we have to minimize the support overhead for the support team.Here is my setup:SQL Server 2008 R2 in Windows Server 2008 R2PDF format reports generated by SSRS Reports subscriptions to a Windows File ShareNetwork printerColoured reports with logo and brandingI have found and tested the following solutions to no avail:ProsConsCalling Adobe Acrobat Reader exe: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Reader 11.0\Reader\acroRd32.exe" /n /s /o /h /t "C:\temp\print.pdf" \\printserver\printername"Very simple optionAdobe Acrobat reader requires to launch the GUI to send a job to a printer. Hence, this option cannot be used when printing from a service.Calling Adobe Acrobat Reader exe as a process from a .NET console appA bit harder than above, but still a simple solutionSame as cons abovePowershell script(Start-Process -FilePath "C:\temp\print.pdf" -Verb Print)Very simple optionUses default PDF client in quiet mode to Print, but also requires an active session.    Foxit ReaderVery simple optionRequires GUI same as Adobe Acrobat Reader Using the Reporting Services Web service to run and stream the report to an image object and then passed to the printerQuite complexThis is what we're trying to avoid  After pulling my hair out for two days, testing and evaluating the above solutions, I ended up learning more about printers (more than ever in my entire life) and how printer drivers work with PostScripts. I then bumped on to a PostScript interpreter called GhostScript (http://www.ghostscript.com/) and then the solution starts to get clearer and clearer.I managed to achieve a solution (maybe not be the simplest but efficient enough to achieve the least-maintenance-least-components goal) in 3-simple steps:Install GhostScript (http://www.ghostscript.com/download/) - this is an open-source PostScript and PDF interpreter. Printing directly using GhostScript only produces grayscale prints using the laserjet generic driver unless you save as BMP image and then interpret the colours using the imageInstall GSView (http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/)- this is a GhostScript add-on to make it easier to directly print to a Windows printer. GSPrint automates the above  PDF -> BMP -> Printer Driver.Run the GSPrint command from SQL Server agent or Windows Service:"C:\Program Files\Ghostgum\gsview\gsprint.exe" -color -landscape -all -printer "printername" "C:\temp\print.pdf"Command line options are here: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/gsprint.htmAnother lesson learned is, since you are calling the script from the Service Account, it will not necessarily have the Printer mapped in its Windows profile (if it even has one). The workaround to this is by adding a local printer as you normally would and then map this printer to the network printer. Note that you may need to install the Printer Driver locally in the server.So, that's it! There are many ways to achieve a solution. The key thing is how you provide the smartest solution!

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• Visual Studio RTM, Silverlight 4 RTM and WCF RIA Services download links

  - by Harish Ranganathan

  Its been a long time since I blogged.  Primarily due to Tech Ed India, the ongoing Great Indian Developer Summit (GIDS 2010) and the related travels.  However, here is a quick post with a few updates.  Visual Studio 2010 RTMed in India during Tech Ed.  We had the privilege of having Soma our Senior VP launch VS 2010 RTM in Bangalore, India, during Tech Ed India 2010.   With that we also had Silverlight 4 getting RTMed during the same week. Earlier I had written posts around using the VS 2010 Beta, RC and the corresponding Silverlight, WCF RIA bits etc., and getting them all to work together.  Now that, both VS 2010 and Silverlight have RTMed, I wanted to post a quick update on the necessary downloads. Visual Studio 2010 RTM can be downloaded from MSDN Visual Studio site  If you are doing Silverlight 4 development with Visual studio, then you can download the Silverlight 4 Tools RC2 for Visual Studio  Then, if you are developing with WCF RIA Services, you can download the WCF RIA Services RC 2 for SL4 and VS 2010 And finally, if you want to use WCF RIA Services in ASP.NET you would require the Domain DataSource control.  Also, to use some of the additional Service Utility tools, you would require the WCF RIA Services Toolkit.  You can download the same from WCF RIA Services Toolkit April 2010 Once you have installed all the above, you should be able to see the following in your add-remove programs WCF RIA Services v1.0 for Visual Studio 2010 (Version 4.0.50401.0) WCF RIA Services Toolkit (Version 4.0.50401.0) Microsoft Silverlight (Version 4.0.50401.0) Microsoft Silverlight 4 SDK (Version 4.0.50401.0) Also, you would need the Expression Blend 4 for designing the apps for Silverlight 4.  You can download the release candidate from here Thats it.  You are all set for development with Visual Studio 2010 and Silverlight 4, WCF RIA Services. Cheers !!!

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• Build Explorer version 1.1 for Visual Studio Team Explorer is released

  - by terje

  Our free extension to Visual Studio , the folder based Build Explorer Version 1.1 has now been released, and uploaded to the Visual Studio Gallery and Codeplex. We have collected up a few changes and some bugs, as follows: Changes: Queue Default Builds can now be optionally fully enabled, fully disabled or enabled just for leaf nodes (=disabled for folders).  If you got a large number of builds it was pretty scary to be able to launch all of them with just one click.  However, it is nice to avoid having the dialog box up when you want to just run off a single build.  That’s the reasoning between the 3rd choice here. Auto fill-in of the builds at start up and refresh  This was a request that came up a lot, and which was also irritating to us.  When the Team Project is opened, the Build explorer will start by itself and fill up it’s tree. So you don’t need to click the node anymore. There was also quite a bit of flashing when the tree filled up, this has been reduced to just a single top level fill before it collapses the node. The speed of the buildup of the tree has also been increased. The “All Build Definitions” node is now shown on top of the list Login box appeared in certain cross domain situations. This was a fix for the TF30063 authentication problem we had in the beginning.  Hopefully the new code has that fixed properly so that both the login box and the TF30063 are gone forever.  Our testing so far seems to indicate it works.  If anyone gets a real problem here there are two workarounds: 1) Turn off the auto refresh to reduce the issue. If this doesn’t fix it, then 2) please reinstall the former version (go to the codeplex download site if you don’t have it anymore)  Write a comment to this blog post with a description of what happens, and I will send a temporary fix asap. Bug fixes: The folder name matching was case sensitive, so “Application.CI” and “application.CI” created two different folders.  View all builds not shown for leaf odes, and view builds didn’t work in all cases.  There was some inconsistencies here which have been fixed. Partly fixed:  The context menu to queue a new build for disabled builds should be removed, but that was a difficult one, and is still on the list, but the command will not do anything for a disabled build. Using the Queue Default Builds on a folder, and if it had some disabled builds below an error box appeared and ruined the whole experience. As a result of these fixes there has been introduced some new options, as shown below:   The two first settings, the Separator symbol and the options for how to handle Queuing of default builds are set per Team Project, and is stored in the TFS source control under the BuildProcessTemplates folder, with the name Inmeta.VisualStudio.BuildExplorer.Settings.xml The next two settings need some explanations.  They handle the behavior for the auto update of the build folders.  First, these are stored in the local registry per user, at the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software\Inmeta\BuildExplorer. The first option Use Timed Refresh at Startup, if turned off, you will need to click the node as it is done in Version 1.0.  The second option is a timed value, the time after the Build explorer node is created and until the scanning of the Build folders start.  It is assumed that this is enough, and the tests so far indicates this.  If you have very many builds and you see that the explorer don’t get them all, try to increase this value, and of course, notify me of your case, either here or on the Visual Gallery site.

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• BizTalk Cross Reference Data Management Strategy

  - by charlie.mott

  Article Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/charliemott This article describes an approach to the management of cross reference data for BizTalk.  Some articles about the BizTalk Cross Referencing features can be found here: http://home.comcast.net/~sdwoodgate/xrefseed.zip http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2006/12/24/101995.aspx http://geekswithblogs.net/charliemott/archive/2009/04/20/value-vs.id-cross-referencing-in-biztalk.aspx Options Current options to managing this data include: Maintaining xml files in the format that can be used by the out-of-the-box BTSXRefImport.exe utility. Use of user interfaces that have been developed to manage this data: BizTalk Cross Referencing Tool XRef XML Creation Tool However, there are the following issues with the above options: The 'BizTalk Cross Referencing Tool' requires a separate database to manage.  The 'XRef XML Creation' tool has no means of persisting the data settings. The 'BizTalk Cross Referencing tool' generates integers in the common id field. I prefer to use a string (e.g. acme.country.uk). This is more readable. (see naming conventions below). Both UI tools continue to use BTSXRefImport.exe.  This utility replaces all xref data. This can be a problem in continuous integration environments that support multiple clients or BizTalk target instances.  If you upload the data for one client it would destroy the data for another client.  Yet in TFS where builds run concurrently, this would break unit tests. Alternative Approach In response to these issues, I instead use simple SQL scripts to directly populate the BizTalkMgmtDb xref tables combined with a data namepacing strategy to isolate client data. Naming Conventions All data keys use namespace prefixing.  The pattern will be <companyName>.<data Type>.  The naming conventions will be to use lower casing for all items.  The data must follow this pattern to isolate it from other company cross-reference data.  The table below shows some sample data. (Note: this data uses the 'ID' cross-reference tables.  the same principles apply for the 'value' cross-referencing tables). Table.Field Description Sample Data xref_AppType.appType Application Types acme.erp acme.portal acme.assetmanagement xref_AppInstance.appInstance Application Instances (each will have a corresponding application type). acme.dynamics.ax acme.dynamics.crm acme.sharepoint acme.maximo xref_IDXRef.idXRef Holds the cross reference data types. acme.taxcode acme.country xref_IDXRefData.CommonID Holds each cross reference type value used by the canonical schemas. acme.vatcode.exmpt acme.vatcode.std acme.country.usa acme.country.uk xref_IDXRefData.AppID This holds the value for each application instance and each xref type. GBP USD SQL Scripts The data to be stored in the BizTalkMgmtDb xref tables will be managed by SQL scripts stored in a database project in the visual studio solution. File(s) Description Build.cmd A sqlcmd script to deploy data by running the SQL scripts below.  (This can be run as part of the MSBuild process).   acme.purgexref.sql SQL script to clear acme.* data from the xref tables.  As such, this will not impact data for any other company. acme.applicationInstances.sql   SQL script to insert application type and application instance data.   acme.vatcode.sql acme.country.sql etc ...  There will be a separate SQL script to insert each cross-reference data type and application specific values for these types.

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• Surface development: it&rsquo;s just like software development

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  Surface is magic. Everyone using it seems to think that way. And I have to be honest, after working for almost 2 years with the platform I still get that special feeling the moment I turn on the unit to do some more work. The whole user experience, the rich environment of the SDK, the touch, even the look and feel of the Surface environment is so much different from the stuff I’ve been working on all my career that I am still bewildered by it. But… and this is a big but.. in the end we’re still talking about a computer and that needs software to become useful. Deep down the magic of the Surface unit there is a PC somewhere, running Windows Vista and the .net framework 3.5. When you write that magic software that makes the platform come alive you’re still working with .net, WPF/XNA, C#, VB.Net and all those other tools and technologies you know so well. Sure, the whole user experience is different from what you’ve known. And the way of thinking about users, their interaction and the positioning of screen elements requires a whole new paradigm. And that takes time. It took me about half a year before I had the feeling I got it nailed down. But when that moment came (about 18 months ago…) I realized that everything I had learned so far on software development still is true when it comes to Surface. The last 6 months I have been working with some people with a different background to start a new company. The idea was that the new company would be focussing on Surface and Surface only. These people come from a marketing background and had some good ideas for some applications. And I have to admit: their ideas were good. Very good. Where it all fell down of course is that these ideas need to be implemented in a piece of software. And creating great software takes skilled developers and a lot of time and money. That’s where things went wrong: the marketing guys didn’t realize and didn’t want to realize that software development is a job that takes skill. You can’t just hire a bunch of developers and expect them to deliver the best sort of software, especially not when it comes to Surface. I tried to explain that yes, their User Interface in Photoshop looked great, but no: I couldn’t develop an application like that in a weeks time. Even worse: the while backend of the software (WCF for communications, SQL Server for the database, etc) would take a lot more time than the frontend. They didn’t understand. It took them a couple of days to drawn the UI in Photoshop so in Blend I should be able to build the software in about the same amount of time. Well, you and I know that it doesn’t work that way. Software is hard to write, and even harder to write well, and it takes skill and dedication. It’s not something you can do as fast as you can draw a mock up for a Surface application in Photohop. The same holds true for web applications of course. A lot of designers there fail to appreciate the hard work that goes into writing the plumbing for a good web app that can handle thousands of users. Although the UI is very important, it’s not all there is to it. And in Surface development this is the same. The UI should create the feeling of magic, but the software behind it is what makes it come alive. And that takes time. A lot of time. So brush of you skills and don’t throw them away if you start developing for Surface. Because projects (and colaborations) can fail there as hard as they can in any other area of software development. On a side note: we decided to stop the colaboration (something the other parties involved didn’t appreciate and were very angry about) and decided to hire a designer for the Surface projects. The focus is back where it belongs: on the software development we know so well and have been doing very well for 13 years. UI is just a part of the whole project and not the end product. So my company Detrio is still going strong when it comes to develivering Surface solutions but once again from a technological background, not a marketing background.

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• Easily use google maps, openstreet maps etc offline.

  - by samkea

  I did it and i am going to explain step by step. The explanatination may appear long but its simple if you follow. Note: All the softwares i have used are the latest and i have packaged them and provided them in the link below. I use Nokia N96 1) RootSign smartComGPS and install it on your phone(i havent provided the signer so that u wuld do some little work. i used Secman' rootsign). 2) Install Universal Maps Downloader, SmartCom OGF2 converter and OziExplorer 3.95.4s on my PC. a) UMD is used to download map tiles from any map source like googlemaps,opensourcemaps etc... and also combine the tiles into an image file like png,jpg,bmp etc... b) SmartCom OGF2 converter is used to convert the image file into a format usable on your mobile phone. c) OziExplorer will help you to calibrate the usable map file so that it can be used with GPS on your mobile phone without the use of internet. 3) Go to google maps or where u pick your maps and pan to the area of your interest. Zoom the map to at least 15 or 16 zoom level where you can see your area clearly and the streets. 4) copy this script in a notepad file and save it on your desktop: javascript:void(prompt('',gApplication.getMap().ge tCenter())); 5) Open the universal maps downloader. You will notice that you are required to add the: left longitude, right longitude,top latitude, bottom latitude. 6) On your map in google maps, doubleclick on the your prefered to most middle point. you will notice that the map will center in that area. 7) copy the script and paste it in the address bar then press enter. You will notice that a dialog with your (top latitude) and longitude respectively pops up. 8) copy the top latitude ONLY and paste it in the corresponding textbox in the UMD. 9) repeat steps 6-7 for the botton latitude. 10)repeat steps 6-7 for left longitude and right longitude too, but u have to copy the longitudes here. (***BTW record these points in the text file as they may be needed later in calibration) 11) Give the zoom level to the same zoom level that you prefered in google maps. 12) Dont forget to choose a path to save your files and under options set the proxy connection settings in UMD if you are using so. 13) Click on start and bingo! there you have your image tiles and a file with an extension .umd will be saved in the same folder. 14) On the UMD, go to tools, click on MapViewer and choose the .umd file. you will now see your map in one piece....and you will smile! 15) Still go to tools and click on map combiner. A dialog will popup for you to choose the .umd file and to enter the IMAGE file name. u can use another extension for the image file like png, jpg etc...i usually use png. 16) Combine.....bingo! there u go! u have an IMAGE file for your map. *I SUGGEST THAT CREATE A .BMP FILE and A .PNG file* 17) Close UMD and open SmartCom OGF2 converter. 18) Choose your .png image and create an ogf2 file. 19) Connect your phone to your PC in Mass Memory mode and transfer the file to the smartComGPS\Maps folder. 20) Now disconnect your phone and load smartComGPS. it will load the map and propt you to add a calibration point. Go ahead and add one calibration point with dummy coordinates. You will notice that it will add another file with extension .map in the smartComGPS\Maps folder. 21) Connect yiur ohone and copy that file and paste it in your working folder on your PC. Delete that .map file from the phone too because you are going to edit it from your PC and put it back. 22) Now Open the OziExplorer, go to file-->Load and Calibrate Map Image. 23) Choose the .bmp image and bingo! it will load with your map in the same zoom level. 24) Now you are going to calibrate. Use the MapView window and take the small box locater to all the 4 cornners of the map. You will notice that the map in the back ground moves to that area too. 25)On the right side, select the Point1 tab. Now you are in calibration mode. Now move the red box in mapview in the left upper corner to calibrate point1. 26) out of mapview go to the the left upper corner of the background map and choose poit (0,0) and your 1st calibration point. You will notice that these X,Y cordinated will be reflected in the Point1 image cordinates. 27) now go back to the text file where you saved your coordibates and enter the top latitude and the left longitude in the corresponding places. 28) Repeat steps 25-27 for point2,point3,point4 and click on save. Thats it, you have calibrated your image and you are about to finish. 29) Go to save and a dilaog which prompts you to save a .map file will poop up. Do save the map file in your working folder. 30) Right click that .map file and edit the filename in the .map file to remove the pc's directory structure. Eg. Change C\OziExplorer\data\Kampala.bmp to Kampala.ogf2. 31) Save the .map file in the smartComGPS\Maps folder on your phone. 32) now open smartComGPS on your phone and bingo! there is your map with GPS capability and in the same zoom level. 33) In smartComGPS options, choose connect and simulate. By now you should be smiling. Whoa! Hope i was of help. i case you get a problem, please inform me Below is the link to the software. regards. http://rapidshare.com/files/230296037/Utilities_Used.rar.html Ok, the Rapidshare files i posted are gone, so you will have to download as described in the solution. If you need more help, go here: http://www.dotsis.com/mobile_phone/sitemap/t-160491.html Some months later, someone else gave almost the same kind of solution here. http://www.dotsis.com/mobile_phone/sitemap/t-180123.html Note: the solutions were mean't to help view maps on Symbian phones, but i think now they ca even do for Windows Phones, iphones and others so read, extract what you want and use it. Hope it helps. Sam Kea

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• Getting Started with Employee Info Starter Kit (v4.0.0)

  - by Mohammad Ashraful Alam

  The new release of Employee Info Starter Kit contains lots of exciting features available in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. To get started with the new version, you will need less than 5 minutes. Minimum System Requirements Before getting started, please make sure you have installed Visual Studio 2010 RC (or higher) and Sql Server 2005 Express edition (or higher installed on your machine. Running the Starter Kit for First Time 1. Download the starter kit 4.0.0 version form here and extract it. 2. Go to <extraction folder>\Source\Eisk.Solution and click the solution file 3. From the solution explorer, right click the “Eisk.Web” web site project node and select “Set as Startup Project” and hit Ctrl + F5   4. You will be prompted to install database, just follow the instruction. That’s it! You are ready to use this starter kit. Running the Tests Employee Info Starter Kit contains a infrastructure for Integration and Unit Testing, by utilizing cool test tools in Visual Studio 2010. Once you complete the steps, mentioned above, take a minute to run the test cases on the fly. 1. From the solution explorer, to go “Solution Items\e-i-s-k-2010.vsmdi” and click it. You will see the available Tests in the Visual Studio Test Lists. Select all, except the “Load Tests” node (since Load Tests takes a bit time) 2. Click “Run Checked Tests” control from the upper left corner. You will see the tests running and finally the status of the tests, which indicates the current health of you application from different scenarios. Technorati Tags: asp.net,architecture,starter kit,employee info starter kit,visual studio 2010,.net 4.0,entity framework

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