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LinqToXML removing empty xmlns attributes & adding attributes like xmlns:xsi, xsi:schemaLocation

- by Rohit Gupta

Suppose you need to generate the following XML: 1: <GenevaLoader xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 2: xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.advent.com/SchemaRevLevel401/Geneva masterschema.xsd" 3: xmlns="http://www.advent.com/SchemaRevLevel401/Geneva"> 4: <PriceRecords> 5: <PriceRecord> 6: </PriceRecord> 7: </PriceRecords> 8: </GenevaLoader> Normally you would write the following C# code to accomplish this: 1: const string ns = "http://www.advent.com/SchemaRevLevel401/Geneva"; 2: XNamespace xnsp = ns; 3: XNamespace xsi = XNamespace.Get("http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"); 4: 5: XElement root = new XElement( xnsp + "GenevaLoader", 6: new XAttribute(XNamespace.Xmlns + "xsi", xsi.NamespaceName), 7: new XAttribute( xsi + "schemaLocation", "http://www.advent.com/SchemaRevLevel401/Geneva masterschema.xsd")); 8: 9: XElement priceRecords = new XElement("PriceRecords"); 10: root.Add(priceRecords); 11: 12: for(int i = 0; i < 3; i++) 13: { 14: XElement price = new XElement("PriceRecord"); 15: priceRecords.Add(price); 16: } 17: 18: doc.Save("geneva.xml"); The problem with this approach is that it adds a additional empty xmlns arrtribute on the “PriceRecords” element, like so : 1: <GenevaLoader xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.advent.com/SchemaRevLevel401/Geneva masterschema.xsd" xmlns="http://www.advent.com/SchemaRevLevel401/Geneva"> 2: <PriceRecords xmlns=""> 3: <PriceRecord> 4: </PriceRecord> 5: </PriceRecords> 6: </GenevaLoader> The solution is to add the xmlns NameSpace in code to each child and grandchild elements of the root element like so : 1: XElement priceRecords = new XElement( xnsp + "PriceRecords"); 2: root.Add(priceRecords); 3: 4: for(int i = 0; i < 3; i++) 5: { 6: XElement price = new XElement(xnsp + "PriceRecord"); 7: priceRecords.Add(price); 8: }

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Using the ASP.NET Membership API with SQL Server / SQL Azure: The new “System.Web.Providers” namespace

- by Harish Ranganathan

The Membership API came in .NET 2.0 and was a huge enhancement in building web applications with users, managing roles, permissions etc., The Membership API by default uses SQL Express and until Visual Studio 2008, it was available only through the ASP.NET Configuration manager screen (Website – ASP.NET Configuration) or (Project – ASP.NET Configuration) and for every application, one has to manually visit this place to start using the Security and other settings. Upon doing that the default SQL Express database aspnet.mdf is created to store all the user profiles. Starting Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0, the Default Website template includes the Membership API controls as a part of the page i.e. When you create a “File – New – ASP.NET Web Application” or an “ASP.NET MVC Application”, by default the Login/Register controls are enabled in the MasterPage and they are termed under “ApplicationServices” setting in the web.config file with connection string pointed to the SQL Express database. In fact, when you run the default website and click on “Logon” –> “Register”, and enter the details for registration and click “Register”, that is the time the aspnet.mdf file is created with the tables for Users, Roles, UsersInRoles, Profile etc., Now, this uses the default SQL Express database within the App_Data folder. If you want to move your Membership information to some other database such as SQL Server, SQL CE or SQL Azure, you need to manually run the aspnet_regsql command and specify the destination database name. This would create all the Tables, Procedures and Views required to handle the Membership information. Thereafter you can change the connection string for “ApplicationServices” to point to the database where you had run all the scripts. Now, enter “System.Web.Providers” Alpha. This is available as a part of the NuGet package library. Scott Hanselman has a neat post describing the steps required to get it up and running as well as doing the basic changes at http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IntroducingSystemWebProvidersASPNETUniversalProvidersForSessionMembershipRolesAndUserProfileOnSQLCompactAndSQLAzure.aspx Pretty much, it covers what the new System.Web.Providers do. One thing I wanted to clarify is that, the new “System.Web.Providers” add a lot of new settings which are also marked as the defaults, in the web.config. Even now, they use SQL Express as the default database. But, if you change the connection string for “DefaultConnection” under connectionStrings to point to your SQL Server or SQL Azure, Membership API would now be able to create all the tables, procedures and views at the destination specified (i.e. SQL Server or SQL Azure). In my case, I modified the DefaultConneciton to point to my SQL Azure database. Next, I hit F5 to run the application. The default view loads. I clicked on “LogOn” and then “Register” since I knew there are no tables/users as of then. One thing to note is that, I had put “NewDB” as the database name in the connection string that points to SQL Azure. NewDB wasn’t existing and I would assume it would be created before the tables/views/procedures for Membership are created. Once I clicked on the “Register” to register my first username, it took a while and then registered as well as logged in me in. Also, I went to the SQL Azure Management Portal and verified that there exists “NewDB” which has just been created I could also connect to the SQL Azure database “NewDB” from Management Studio and found that the tables now don’t have the aspnet_ prefix. The tables were simply Users, Roles, UsersInRoles, Profiles etc., So, with a few clicks and configuration change, I could actually set up the user base for my application on SQL Azure and even make the SessionState, Roles, Profiles being stored in SQL Azure database. The new System.Web.Proivders also required MARS (MultipleActiveResultSets=true) setting since it uses Entity Framework for the DAL operations. Also, the “Project – ASP.NET Configuration” screen can be used to further create/manage users/roles etc., although the data is stored on the remote database. With that, a long pending request from the community to have the ability to configure and use remote databases for Application users management without having to run the scripts from SQL Express is fulfilled. Cheers !!!

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Silverlight Cream for January 30, 2011 - 2 -- #1038

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Max Paulousky, Renuka Prasad, Ollie Riches, Jesse Liberty(-2-, -3-, -4-, -5-), Medusa M, John Papa, Beth Massi, and Joost van Schaik. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Stop What You Are Doing And Learn About Reactive Programming" Jesse Liberty WP7: "Windows Phone Looping Selector for Digits " Max Paulousky Lightswitch: "How To Send HTML Email from a LightSwitch Application" Beth Massi Shoutouts: Shawn Wildermuch has niether GooNews for users of his cool WP7 app or or for the WP7 Marketplace in general: R.I.P. GooNews From SilverlightCream.com: Windows Phone Looping Selector for Digits Max Paulousky expanded on the Looping selector for some customization allowing him to display width/height metric measurement selectors... great job, Max! WP7 – How to Create a Simple Checked Listbox In Windows Phone 7 Renuka Prasad has the code for a nicely-working checked Listbox for WP7 on his blog... the post is the code... WP7Contrib: Network Connectivity Push Model Ollie Riches had a post last week that I'm just catching up to... about the 'push model' for network connectivity they produced in WP7 Contrib. Using the Camera in Windows Phone 7 Jesse Liberty has a bunch of posts up... I'm just going to bite the bullet and catch up! ... this 'From Scratch post 24 is all about the camera in your WP7 dev travails... and he makes it look so darned easy :) Linq and Fluent Programming Jesse Liberty's next post is 'From Scratch 25 and is all about Linq and Fluent Programming which started with a discussion at Codemash with Bill Wagner... wanna get a handle on fluent programming? ... check this out. Stop What You Are Doing And Learn About Reactive Programming Another item you might want to get your head around is Reactive Programming, or Rx... Jesse Liberty has a great post up discussing this, as his 'From Scratch post 26... good external links, and lots of commentary as well. Rx–Reactive Programming for Windows Phone Jesse Liberty's 'From Scratch 27 follows the previous on about Rx by taking the Rx show to the WP7 development arena. Want a solid Rx example... here ya go! Reactive Extensions–Observable Sequences are First Class Objects Finally catching up with Jesse Liberty (for now), I find this 'From Scratch number 28 which is again on Rx and WP7 dev, expanding on the example from the previous post by harnessing the power of Rx Localizing Silverlight applications Medusa M has a nice post up at dotnetslackers on localization in Silverlight. If you haven't had to do localization before, it can get to be a pain... understanding an article like this will get you part of the way to being pain-free. Silverlight TV 59: What Goes Into Baking Silverlight? Very cool presentation for those of you interested in the bits ... John Papa's Silverlight TV number 59 is up and he's chatting with Andy Rivas about the process followed getting the bits to us. How To Send HTML Email from a LightSwitch Application Beth Massi's latest Lightswitch post is on sending HTML Email via SMTP from Lightswitch, and then follows that up with sending Email via Outlook automation. ViewModel driven animations using the Visual State Manager, DataStateBehavior and Expression Blend After some good user feedback, Joost van Schaik decided to make some modifications to his WP7 app, and got involved in a Page Title collapse animation driven from the ViewModel. Check out the nice write-up, video, external links, and source... all good! 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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Winnipeg Code Camp–Session Announcement

- by D'Arcy Lussier

I’ve been updating the Winnipeg Code Camp website over the last few weeks with sessions and speakers as we’ve added them, and I’m happy to announce the full set of sessions!* We have a very interesting mix this year with new speakers and varied technologies! Remember this is a *FREE* event, so head over to our website to find out how to register for what will be a fantastic code camp! *OK, so we still have one session that needs to be have an official title, and one session that’s still TBA…but close enough. ;) What`s New in Entity Framework 4 Aaron Kowall Easy Automation Setup for Everyday Projects Amir Barylko Hackerspaces Everywhere! Winnipeg: Our Time is Now Andrew Orr C# Ninjitsu Chris Eargle Code like a Ninja:Enhance Your Productivity with VS.NET & JustCode Chris Eargle Scala Language Tour Craig Tataryn WP7 - Creating a Data Driven App D`Arcy Lussier TBA (WordPress Related) Dan Bernardic WP7 Development Foundation D'Arcy Lussier HTML5 for .NET Pros Dave Wesst Turbocharge Your Manual Testing Process with VS 2010 Dylan Smith Develop Visual Studio 2010 Extensions - Twitter Studio George Chen Functionality Driven Development with Asp .Net MVC George Chen & Sean Bennett Web Development for Mobile Devices Kelly Cassidy Intro to Nmap Security Scanner Mak Kolybabi My Personal Top 10 SQL Habits Good and Bad Mike Diehl Stupid Mistakes Made By Smart People Ron Bowes Intro to jQuery Stefan Penner Taking Your WP7 Application to the Next Level with Tombstoning Tyler Doerksen Coming Soon! Tyler Doerksen

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Silverlight User Group of Switzerland (SLUGS)

- by Laurent Bugnion

Last Thursday, the Silverlight Firestarter event took place in Redmond, and was streamed live to a large audience worldwide (around 20’000 people). Approximately 30 if them were in Wallisellen near Zurich, in Microsoft Switzerland’s offices. This was not only a great occasion to learn more about the future of Silverlight and to see great demos, but also it was the very first meeting of the Silverlight User Group of Switzerland (SLUGS). Having 30 people for a first meeting was a great success, especially if we consider that it was REALLY cold that night, that it had snowed 20 cm the night before! We all had a good time, and 3 lucky winners went back home with a prize: One LG Optimus 7 Windows Phone and two copies of Silverlight 4 Unleashed. Congratulations to the winners! After the keynote (which went in a whirlwind, shortest 90 minutes ever!), we all had pizza and beverages generously sponsored by the Swiss DPE team, of which not less than 5 guys came to the event! Thanks to Stefano, Ronnie, Sascha, Big Mike and Ken for attending! We decided to have meetings every month. Stay tuned for announcements on when and where the events will take place. We are also in the process of creating various groups online where the attendees can find more information. For instance, I created a group on Flickr where the pictures taken at events will be published. The group is public, and the pictures of the first event are already online! We also have the already known page at http://www.slugs.ch/, check it out. A national group Even though the first event was in Zurich, and that 3 of the founding members live nearby, we would like to try and be a national group. That means having events sometimes in other parts of Switzerland, collaborating with other local user groups, etc. Stay tuned for more Join! We want you, we need you If you are doing Silverlight, for a living or as a hobby, if you are interested in user experience, XAML, Expression Blend and many more topics, you should consider joining! This is a great occasion to exchange experiences, to learn from Silverlight experts, to hear sessions about various topics related to Silverlight, etc. If you want to talk about a topic that is of interest to you, If you want to propose a topic of discussion Or if you just want to hang out then go to http://www.slugs.ch and register! Cheers, Laurent Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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Formal Languages, Inductive Proofs & Regular Expressions

- by MarkPearl

So I am slogging away at my UNISA stuff. I have just finished doing the initial once non stop read through the first 11 chapters of my COS 201 Textbook - “Introduction to Computer Theory 2nd Edition” by Daniel Cohen. It has been an interesting couple of days, with familiar concepts coming up as well as some new territory. In this posting I am going to cover the first couple of chapters of the book. Let start with Formal Languages… What exactly is a formal language? Pretty much a no duh question for me but still a good one to ask – a formal language is a language that is defined in a precise mathematical way. Does that mean that the English language is a formal language? I would say no – and my main motivation for this is that one can have an English sentence that is correct grammatically that is also ambiguous. For example the ambiguous sentence: "I once shot an elephant in my pyjamas.” For this and possibly many other reasons that I am unaware of, English is termed a “Natural Language”. So why the importance of formal languages in computer science? Again a no duh question in my mind… If we want computers to be effective and useful tools then we need them to be able to evaluate a series of commands in some form of language that when interpreted by the device no confusion will exist as to what we were requesting. Imagine the mayhem that would exist if a computer misinterpreted a command to print a document and instead decided to delete it. So what is a Formal Language made up of… For my study purposes a language is made up of a finite alphabet. For a formal language to exist there needs to be a specification on the language that will describe whether a string of characters has membership in the language or not. There are two basic ways to do this: By a “machine” that will recognize strings of the language (e.g. Finite Automata). By a rule that describes how strings of a language can be formed (e.g. Regular Expressions). When we use the phrase “string of characters”, we can also be referring to a “word”. What is an Inductive Proof? So I am not to far into my textbook and of course it starts referring to proofs and different types. I have had to go through several different approaches of proofs in the past, but I can never remember their formal names , so when I saw “inductive proof” I thought to myself – what the heck is that? Google to the rescue… An inductive proof is like a normal proof but it employs a neat trick which allows you to prove a statement about an arbitrary number n by first proving it is true when n is 1 and then assuming it is true for n=k and showing it is true for n=k+1. The idea is that if you want to show that someone can climb to the nth floor of a fire escape, you need only show that you can climb the ladder up to the fire escape (n=1) and then show that you know how to climb the stairs from any level of the fire escape (n=k) to the next level (n=k+1). Does this sound like a form of recursion? No surprise then that in the same chapter they deal with recursive definitions. An example of a recursive definition for the language EVEN would the 3 rules below: 2 is in EVEN If x is in EVEN then so is x+2 The only elements in the set EVEN are those that be produced by the rules above. Nothing to exciting… So if a definition for a language is done recursively, then it makes sense that the language can be proved using induction. Regular Expressions So I am wondering to myself what use is this all – in fact – I find this the biggest challenge to any university material is that it is quite hard to find the immediate practical applications of some theory in real life stuff. How great was my joy when I suddenly saw the word regular expression being introduced. I had been introduced to regular expressions on Stack Overflow where I was trying to recognize if some text measurement put in by a user was in a valid form or not. For instance, the imperial system of measurement where you have feet and inches can be represented in so many different ways. I had eventually turned to regular expressions as an easy way to check if my parser could correctly parse the text or not and convert it to a normalize measurement. So some rules about languages and regular expressions… Any finite language can be represented by at least one if not more regular expressions A regular expressions is almost a rule syntax for expressing how regular languages can be formed regular expressions are cool For a regular expression to be valid for a language it must be able to generate all the words in the language and no other words. This is important. It doesn’t help me if my regular expression parses 100% of my measurement texts but also lets one or two invalid texts to pass as well. Okay, so this posting jumps around a bit – but introduces some very basic fundamentals for the subject which will be built on in later postings… Time to go and do some practical examples now…

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Alice In Wonderland: Good, but not Great

- by Theo Moore

We went to see Alice In Wonderland today. We both like Tim Burton a lot (the stranger the better) and like Johnny Depp very well also. After seeing all the previews and such, we were fired up to see this film. Honestly, I thought it was good but not great. I was prepared to be wow-ed, but I wasn't. Perhaps I expected too much. I did like it, but I'll not own it nor would I expect to see it again...unless someone I know decides they want to see it. I was about to say something to reassure you that I wasn't going to provide any spoilers but two things occurred to me: one, I never give spoilers and two, why worry about spoilers for a film that so closely follows a book? My comments about the film are hard to describe, but the basic gist is that it doesn't really feel like it..."works" to me. I can't get any more specific than that, much as I'd like to do so. Something about it seems sort of disjointed and not in that Alice way you'd expect. My only specific comment is that I didn't like the actor who plays Alice very well. She was very flat and just didn't sell he character to me. She seemed a bit, well, plastic. Depp was as good as you'd expect him to be, I am happy to say. Obviously Lewis Carroll couldn't have imagined this made into film, but I can't help thinking that he'd see this and say that Depp was the perfect Mad Hatter. So, I'd definitely recommend seeing it (we saw it in 3D which was cool, but not really necessary) at least once, but don't be surprised if you're kinda meh afterwards.

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ASP.NET MVC 3 Hosting :: ASP.NET MVC 3 First Look

- by mbridge

MVC 3 View Enhancements MVC 3 introduces two improvements to the MVC view engine: - Ability to select the view engine to use. MVC 3 allows you to select from any of your installed view engines from Visual Studio by selecting Add > View (including the newly introduced ASP.NET “Razor” engine”): - Support for the next ASP.NET “Razor” syntax. The newly previewed Razor syntax is a concise lightweight syntax. MVC 3 Control Enhancements - Global Filters: ASP.NET MVC 3 allows you to specify that a filter which applies globally to all Controllers within an app by adding it to the GlobalFilters collection. The RegisterGlobalFilters() method is now included in the default Global.asax class template and so provides a convenient place to do this since is will then be called by the Application_Start() method: void RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilterCollection filters) { filters.Add(new HandleLoggingAttribute()); filters.Add(new HandleErrorAttribute()); } void Application_Start() { RegisterGlobalFilters (GlobalFilters.Filters); } - Dynamic ViewModel Property : MVC 3 augments the ViewData API with a new “ViewModel” property on Controller which is of type “dynamic” – and therefore enables you to use the new dynamic language support in C# and VB pass ViewData items using a cleaner syntax than the current dictionary API. Public ActionResult Index() { ViewModel.Message = "Hello World"; return View(); } - New ActionResult Types : MVC 3 includes three new ActionResult types and helper methods: 1. HttpNotFoundResult – indicates that a resource which was requested by the current URL was not found. HttpNotFoundResult will return a 404 HTTP status code to the calling client. 2. PermanentRedirects – The HttpRedirectResult class contains a new Boolean “Permanent” property which is used to indicate that a permanent redirect should be done. Permanent redirects use a HTTP 301 status code. The Controller class includes three new methods for performing these permanent redirects: RedirectPermanent(), RedirectToRoutePermanent(), andRedirectToActionPermanent(). All of these methods will return an instance of the HttpRedirectResult object with the Permanent property set to true. 3. HttpStatusCodeResult – used for setting an explicit response status code and its associated description. MVC 3 AJAX and JavaScript Enhancements MVC 3 ships with built-in JSON binding support which enables action methods to receive JSON-encoded data and then model-bind it to action method parameters. For example a jQuery client-side JavaScript could define a “save” event handler which will be invoked when the save button is clicked on the client. The code in the event handler then constructs a client-side JavaScript “product” object with 3 fields with their values retrieved from HTML input elements. Finally, it uses jQuery’s .ajax() method to POST a JSON based request which contains the product to a /theStore/UpdateProduct URL on the server: $('#save').click(function () { var product = { ProdName: $('#Name').val() Price: $('#Price').val(), } $.ajax({ url: '/theStore/UpdateProduct', type: "POST"; data: JSON.stringify(widget), datatype: "json", contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", success: function () { $('#message').html('Saved').fadeIn(), }, error: function () { $('#message').html('Error').fadeIn(), } }); return false; }); MVC will allow you to implement the /theStore/UpdateProduct URL on the server by using an action method as below. The UpdateProduct() action method will accept a strongly-typed Product object for a parameter. MVC 3 can now automatically bind an incoming JSON post value to the .NET Product type on the server without having to write any custom binding. [HttpPost] public ActionResult UpdateProduct(Product product) { // save logic here return null } MVC 3 Model Validation Enhancements MVC 3 builds on the MVC 2 model validation improvements by adding support for several of the new validation features within the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace in .NET 4.0: - Support for the new DataAnnotations metadata attributes like DisplayAttribute. - Support for the improvements made to the ValidationAttribute class which now supports a new IsValid overload that provides more info on the current validation context, like what object is being validated. - Support for the new IValidatableObject interface which enables you to perform model-level validation and also provide validation error messages which are specific to the state of the overall model. MVC 3 Dependency Injection Enhancements MVC 3 includes better support for applying Dependency Injection (DI) and also integrating with Dependency Injection/IOC containers. Currently MVC 3 Preview 1 has support for DI in the below places: - Controllers (registering & injecting controller factories and injecting controllers) - Views (registering & injecting view engines, also for injecting dependencies into view pages) - Action Filters (locating and injecting filters) And this is another important blog about Microsoft .NET and technology: - Windows 2008 Blog - SharePoint 2010 Blog - .NET 4 Blog And you can visit here if you're looking for ASP.NET MVC 3 hosting

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The provider is not compatible with the version of Oracle Client

- by jkrebsbach

There was a recent upgrade of the Oracle client on a production web server housing serveral app pools each containing multiple web sites. The upgrade consisted of adding the 11.2 client tools on the web server, but leaving the 9.2 and 10.2 versions alone. After learning the upgrade occured, I updated Oracle.DataAccess.dll on my site to the 11.2 dll, and the web site ran smoothly. The next day I discover the site is throwing an error: Oracle.DataAccess.Client.OracleException: The provider is not compatible with the version of Oracle Client The App Pool will connect with an installed version of the Oracle client provider, and coordinate database interactions. If a request comes in for a web site configured using an earlier version of the provider, that is the version the App Pool will use for Oracle interactions. If a request is made for a site configured for a different version of the provider, the App Pool will see a conflict and throw the above error. This web site: http://splinter.com.au/blog/?p=156 described the steps to grab the DLLs for a provider and bring them local (for Oracle 11.1), but even when I brought the DLLs for the Oracle Provider into the local bin directory, the App Pool would still determine the version of the oracle client and continue to throw the exception. My only resolution for the above problem has been to have dedicated IIS app pools per version of Oracle client being leveraged.

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Silverlight Cream for March 20, 2010 -- #815

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Andy Beaulieu(-2-, -3-), Alex Golesh, Damian Schenkelman, Adam Kinney(-2-), Jeremy Likness, Laurent Bugnion, and John Papa. Shoutouts: Adam Kinney has a good summary up of where to go for all the tools and toys: Install checklist for Silverlight 4 RC, Blend 4 Beta and Windows Phone Developer tools from MIX10 ... tons of links Laurent Bugnion had a few announcements at MIX10: MVVM Light V3 released at #MIX10, and he followed that with What’s new in MVVM Light V3 ... now for Windows Phone! Laurent Bugnion also has announced Sample code for my #mix10 talk online From SilverlightCream.com: Physics Games in Silverlight on Windows Phone 7 Andy Beaulieu has the Physics Helper working for WP7 already... read his post, check out all the links and get going on something fun... was great seeing you at MIX, too, Andy! Silverlight 4: GPU Accelerated PlaneProjection Andy Beaulieu has a comparison up of Plane Projection with and without the new GPU acceleration... be sure to read his notes section. Silverlight 4 PathListBox for Motion Path Animation Have you heard of the PathListBox? Well, showing is better than telling, so check out Andy Beaulieu's post on it Silverlight at Windows Phone 7 Alex Golesh has a quick overview on developing a Windows Phone 7 app in Silverlight using the new toys, and executiting it in the emulator Prism v2.1: Creating a Region Adapter for the Accordion control Damian Schenkelman shows how to use the Accordian control from the toolkit as a region in a Prism app. Expression Blend 4 Beta Feature Overview available for download Adam Kinney announced the presence of an Expression Blend whitepaper as well... you should go grab that too .toolbox – Free online Silverlight and Expression Blend training Want to improve your Silverlight chops or gain some Expression Blend chops? Check out .toolbox post that Adam Kinney posted Introducing the Visual State Aggregator Jeremy Likness describes the basic panel A/panel B problem, describes ways he and other folks have flipped between them, then describes his Visual State Aggregator ... and it's downloadable for you to give it a dance! Multithreading in Windows Phone 7 emulator: A bug Laurent Bugnion found a bug wit multi-threading on the Windows Phone emulator. He confirmed this with the team, and has a workaround you'll be needing... thanks Laurent. Silverlight Overview - Technical Whitepaper John Papa has reiterated the existence of this Silverlight 4 whitepaper ... it was updated this week, and we all should be aware of it. 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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IASA South East Florida Chapter Meeting Recap - June 2011

- by Sam Abraham

Erik Russell and Giles Marino were our speakers for the June 2011 IASA South East Florida Chapter meeting. Attendees filled all available seats at the Microsoft office conference room where the event was held. This highlights the high interest in Enterprise Architecture as a career track and chartered project role. Also in attendance were our Board of Directors and Alex Funkhouser, President, Sherlock Technology. Rainer Habermann, Chapter President, kicked off the meeting by introducing our speakers and Board of Directors. Alex Funkhouser, President of South Florida’s staffing firm Sherlock Technology spoke briefly about available Software Architect positions in the area. Alex also congratulated and presented this week’s Sherlock Raffle winner with $500 in cash. Our speakers Giles and Erik then proceeded with their talk. Erik presented a business case in the government sector where Enterprise Architecture helped a government entity cut costs and streamline its various business operations. Technologies leveraged in Erik’s demonstrated project were Java-based. Giles then followed with a thorough demonstration of the Architecture patterns he used to migrate a complete backend system for an insurance company to the .Net Platform. Audience was very engaged with our speakers as evidenced by the large number of follow-up questions asked at the end of the talk. We greatly enjoyed Giles and Erik’s talk and look forward to having them share with us more of their adventures as Enterprise Architects in the near future. Below are some photos of the event. Sam Abraham Secretary- IASA South East Florida Chapter. http://www.iasaglobal.org/iasa/South_East_Florida.asp Chapter President - Rainer Habermann kicks off our meeting. Sherlock Technology President Alex Funkhouser holding Sherlock's weekly cash prize. Alex shares available Software Architect opportunities with our members Erik Russell addressing our membership Giles Marino sharing his architecture experience in the insurance industry In this photo: Dave Noderer, Rainer Habermann, Quent Herschelman and Alex Funkhouser. Event attracted a large audience and filled the Microsoft conference room where it was held

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Upgrading VSIX extensions from VS2012 to VS2013

- by Tarun Arora [Microsoft MVP]

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TarunArora/archive/2013/06/27/upgrading-vsix-extensions-from-vs2012-to-vs2013.aspx As consumers of your Visual Studio extensions start to move over to VS 2013, you will have to upgrade the Visual Studio extensions you build for Visual Studio 2012 to Visual Studio 2013 and republish to the Visual Studio extension gallery. Failing which, it will not be possible for your consumers to install and use your extensions on Visual Studio 2013. Objective In this blog post, I’ll show you how simple it is to upgrade your Visual Studio 2012 extension to Visual Studio 2013. There aren’t any reported breaking changes between VS 2012 SDK and VS 2013 SDK, the upgrade usually involves, rebuilding the extension against VS 2013 SDK and updating the vsix manifest file. Walkthrough Download the Visual Studio 2013 SDK - You will need to download the Visual Studio 2013 SDK in order to open up the Visual Studio extension project in Visual Studio 2013. The SDK can be downloaded from here. Install the SDK before you proceed. 2. Once the VS 2013 SDK has been installed, open up your package project. For the purposes of this blog post, I’ll open up the Avanade Extension – Software Inventory in Visual Studio 2013. You will notice that Visual Studio doesn’t load the project but let’s you know that the project needs to be Migrated. 3. Right click the project and choose the option ‘Reload Project’ from the Context Menu. 4. Choosing the Reload Project option brings up an upgrade window, telling you that the upgrade is a one way only upgrade i.e. the project will be changed to work with Visual Studio 2013 and you will not be able to open the project up in Visual Studio 2012. My recommendation would be to create a Visual Studio 2013 branch and upgrading the project in that branch only, so if you need to go back to Visual Studio 2012 project at some point, you have a handy reference in a separate branch. 5. Upon clicking Ok, the project is updated. See below, the following changes are made at the time of upgrade, - The runtime version is updated in the Resources.Designer.cs file - The Minimum version of Visual Studio in the package project file is changed from 11.0 to 12.0 6. Reference VS 2013 dll’s rather than VS 2012 dll’s. So reference Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.dll and Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Controls.dll from C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\ReferenceAssemblies\v2.0 and C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\ReferenceAssemblies\v4.5. If you have any other API references, then change the references to point to VS 2013 instead of VS 2012. 7. Rebuild your solution to ensure there are no breaking changes. Success! 8. Update VSIX Manifest file (the file source.extnsion.vsixmanifest contains the meta data for your VSIX). - Update the Install Targets from 11.0 to 12.0. This basically enforces that the extension can be installed on Visual Studio 2013 version of Visual Studio. - Update the Dependencies from Visual Studio MPF 11.0 to Visual Studio MPF 12.0 9. Rebuild the solution and open up the bin folder for the Package project and look for the file *.vsix file [Microsoft Visual Studio Extension]. - This is basically the installer for your extension. - Double click the installer to launch the installer wizard. Viola! You can see the package installation wizard opens up and gives you the option to install the extension for Visual Studio 2013. - Click Install to Continue - Note – If you run into the exception “23/06/2013 10:42:18 - Install Error : Microsoft.VisualStudio.ExtensionManager.InstallByMsiException: The InstalledByMSI element in extension Avanade Extensions cannot be 'true' when installing an extension through the Extensions and Updates Installer. The element can only be 'true' when an MSI lays down the extension manifest file.” Ensure you have the option “This VSIX is installed by Windows Installer” unchecked in the Install Targets tab. 10. Verifying that the extension has installed correctly. - Open Extension Manager and verify that the installed extension shows up in the extension manager “list of installed VSIX”. 11. First Look at the updated Extension - The links have now been moved to the context menu, so to see the navigation links, you’ll have to right click on the icon and select the option from the context menu. Note – The Avanade Extension being used in the demo has been developed by Utkarsh and Tarun. The Software Inventory Extension for Visual Studio 2012… allows you to see the list of Software installed on the hosted build server right from with in Visual Studio, the extension also allows you to export this list to excel. More details on how this has been implemented can be found here. I hope you found this useful. In case you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out on Visual Studio extensibility MSDN forums or via Microsoft Visual Studio feedback forum. 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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Final ever Virtualisation for Developer slidedeck from NxtGenUG Cambridge

- by Liam Westley

Thanks to Chris Hay, Allister Frost and the guys from NxtGenUG Cambridge for hosting an evening of virtualisation, and for their secretary Rachel Hawley for sorting out all the dates and details ;-). It was a good turnout so close to Christmas, obviously the bribe of home made mince pies got some people out on a cold wintery December evening. Big thanks to Allister for driving me to the railway station to ensure I made the 22:29 train, made all the easier by quaffing a couple of very well kept pints of Adnams Broadside in The Punter after the presentation. For those who want the last ever slide decks, they're available here in PDF and PowerPoint format, http://www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/nxtgenugcambs/Virt4DevsPdf.zip http://www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/nxtgenugcambs/Virt4DevsPowerPoint.zip And a final thanks to all the user groups who have hosted a Virtualisation or Hyper-V talk in the past two years, and gave me a chance to enthuse developers about virtualisation, Dot Net Developers Network, Bristol * (http://www.dotnetdevnet.com/) DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper 7, Reading (DDD7) NxtGenUG, Oxford * (http://www.nxtgenug.net/Region.aspx?RegionID=3) NxtGenUG, Birmingham (http://www.nxtgenug.net/Region.aspx?RegionID=2) DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Scotland 2, Glasgow (2011 event details) DevEvening, Woking (http://www.devevening.co.uk/) VistaSquad, London (R.I.P. 2010) NxtGenUG, Southampton (http://www.nxtgenug.net/Region.aspx?RegionID=9) GL.Net, Gloucester (http://www.gl-net.org.uk/) NxtGenUG, Manchester (http://www.nxtgenug.net/Region.aspx?RegionID=11) London .NET User Group, London (http://www.dnug.org.uk/) VBUG, Bracknell (http://www.vbug.co.uk/events/default.aspx?region=Reading) NEBytes, Newcastle Upon Tyne (http://www.nebytes.net/) VBUG, London (http://www.vbug.co.uk/events/default.aspx?region=London) NxtGenUG, Hereford (http://www.nxtgenug.net/Region.aspx?RegionID=10) NxtGenUG, Cambridge (http://www.nxtgenug.net/Region.aspx?RegionID=8) * twice, for both Virtualisation for Developers and Hyper-V for Developers Virtualisation for Developers 2008 - 2010 R.I.P. Hyper-V for Developers 2009 - 2010 R.I.P.

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Using NServiceBus behind a custom web service

- by Michael Stephenson

In this post I'd like to talk about an architecture scenario we had recently and how we were able to utilise NServiceBus to help us address this problem. Scenario Cognos is a reporting system used by one of my clients. A while back we developed a web service façade to allow line of business applications to be able to access reports from Cognos to support their various functions. The service was intended to provide access to reports which were quick running reports or pre-generated reports which could be accessed real-time on demand. One of the key aims of the web service was to provide a simple generic interface to allow applications to get any report without needing to worry about the complex .net SDK for Cognos. The web service also supported multi-hop kerberos delegation so that report data could be accesses under the context of the end user. This service was working well for a period of time. The Problem The problem we encountered was that reports were now also required to be available to batch processes. The original design was optimised for low latency so users would enjoy a positive experience, however when the batch processes started to request 250+ concurrent reports over an extended period of time you can begin to imagine the sorts of problems that come into play. The key problems this new scenario caused are: Users may be affected and the latency of on demand reports was significantly slower The Cognos infrastructure was not scaled sufficiently to be able to cope with these long peaks of load From a cost perspective it just isn't feasible to scale the Cognos infrastructure to be able to handle the load when it is only for a couple of hour window each night. We really needed to introduce a second pattern for accessing this service which would support high through-put scenarios. We also had little control over the batch process in terms of being able to throttle its load. We could however make some changes to the way it accessed the reports. The Approach My idea was to introduce a throttling mechanism between the Web Service Façade and Cognos. This would allow the batch processes to push reports requests hard at the web service which we were confident the web service can handle. The web service would then queue these requests and process them behind the scenes and make a call back to the batch application to provide the report once it had been accessed. In terms of technology we had some limitations because we were not able to use WCF or IIS7 where the MSMQ-Activated WCF services could have helped, but we did have MSMQ as an option and I thought NServiceBus could do just the job to help us here. The flow of how this would work was as follows: The batch applications would send a request for a report to the web service The web service uses NServiceBus to send the message to a Queue The NServiceBus Generic Host is running as a windows service with a message handler which subscribes to these messages The message handler gets the message, accesses the report from Cognos The message handler calls back to the original batch application, this is decoupled because the calling application provides a call back url The report gets into the batch application and is processed as normal This approach looks something like the below diagram: The key points are an application wanting to take advantage of the batch driven reports needs to do the following: Implement our call back contract Make a call to the service providing a call back url Provide a correlation ID so it knows how to tie each response back to its request What does NServiceBus offer in this solution So this scenario is not the typical messaging service bus type of solution people implement with NServiceBus, but it did offer the following: Simplified interaction with MSMQ Offered the ability to configure the number of processes working through the queue so we could find a balance between load on Cognos versus the applications end to end processing time NServiceBus offers retries and a way to manage failed messages NServiceBus offers a high availability setup The simple thing is that NServiceBus gave us the platform to build the solution on. We just implemented a message handler which functionally processed a message and we could rely on NServiceBus to do all of the hard work around managing the queues and all of the lower level things that would have took ages to write to any kind of robust level. Conclusion With this approach we were able to deal with a fairly significant performance issue with out too much rework. Hopefully this write up gives people some insight into ideas on how to leverage the excellent NServiceBus framework to help solve integration and high through-put scenarios.

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Silverlight Cream for March 21, 2010 -- #816

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Michael Washington, John Papa(-2-, -3-, -4-), Jonas Follesø, David Anson, Scott Guthrie, Andrej Tozon, Bill Reiss(-2-), Pete Blois, and Lee. Shoutouts: Frank LaVigne has a Mix10 Session Downloader for us all to use... thanks Frank! Read what Ward Bell has to say about MVVM, Josh Smith’s Way ... it's all good. Robby Ingebretsen posts on his 10 Favorite Open Source Fonts You Can Embed in WPF or Silverlight Mike Harsh posted Slides and Demos from my MIX10 Session . The download link at Drop.io is down for maintenance until Sunday evening, March 21. From SilverlightCream.com: Blend 4: TreeView SelectedItemChanged using MVVM Michael Washington has a post up about doing SelectedItemChanged on a TreeView with MVVM, oh and he's starting out in Blend 4... Silverlight TV 14: Developing for Windows Phone 7 with Silverlight John Papa hit Silverlight TV pretty hard at the beginning of MIX10. This first one is with Mike Harsh talking about WP7. (Hi Mike ... wondered where you'd run off to!), and you can go to the shoutout section to get Mike's session material from MIX as well. Silverlight TV 15: Announcing Silverlight 4 RC at MIX 10 In this next Silverlight TV(15), John Papa and Adam Kinney discuss Silverlight 4RC ... thank goodness it's out, we can all let go of the breath we've been holding in :) Silverlight TV 16: Tim Heuer and Jesse Liberty Talk about Silverlight 4 RC at MIX 10 Silverlight TV 16 has John Papa sharing the spotlight with Jesse Liberty and Tim Heuer ... geez... can you find 3 more kowledgable Silverlight folks to listen to? No? then go listen to this :) Silverlight TV 17: Build a Twitter Client for Windows Phone 7 with Silverlight The latest Silverlight TV has John Papa bringing Mike Harsh back to produce a Twitter Client for WP7. Simulating multitouch on the Windows Phone 7 Emulator Jonas Follesø has a great post up about simulating multi-touch on WP7 using multiple mice ... yeah, you read that right :) Using IValueConverter to create a grouped list of items simply and flexibly David Anson demonstrates grouping items in a ListBox using IValueConverter. I think I can pretty well guarantee I would NOT have thought of doing this.. :) Building a Windows Phone 7 Twitter Application using Silverlight In the MIX10 first-day keynote, Scott Guthrie did File->New Project and built a WP7 Twitter app. He has that up as a tutorial with all sorts of external links including one to the keynote itself. Named and optional parameters in Silverlight 4 Andrej Tozon delves into the optional parameters that are now available to Silverlight developers... pretty cool stuff. Space Rocks game step 4: Inheriting from Sprite Bill Reiss continues with his game development series with this one on inheriting from the Sprite class and centering objects Space Rocks game step 5: Rotating the ship Bill Reiss's episode 5 is on rotating the ship you setup in episode 4. Don't worry about the transforms, Bill gives it all to us :) Labyrinth Sample for Windows Phone Wow... check out the sample Pete Blois did for the Phone... Silverlight coolness :) PathListBox in SL4 – firstlook Lee has a post up on the PathListBox. I think this is going to catch on quick... it's just too cool not to! 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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Silverlight Cream for April 04, 2010 -- #830

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Michael Washington, Hassan, David Anson, Jeff Wilcox, UK Application Development Consulting, Davide Zordan, Victor Gaudioso, Anoop Madhusudanan, Phil Middlemiss, and Laurent Bugnion. Shoutouts: Josh Smith has a good-read post up: Design-time data is still data Shawn Hargreaves reported his MIX demo released From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight MVVM: Enabling Design-Time Data in Expression Blend When Using Web Services Michael Washington has a tutorial up on MVVM and using a web service to get design-time data that works in Blend also... lots of information and screenshots. WP7 Transition Animation Hassan has a new WP7 tutorial up that demonstrates playing media and adding transition animation between pages. Tip: For a truly read-only custom DependencyProperty in Silverlight, use a read-only CLR property instead David Anson's latest tip is in response to comments on his previous post and details one by Dr. WPF who points out that a read-only DependencyProperty doesn't actually need to be a DependencyProperty as long as the class implements INotifyPropertyChanged. Template parts and custom controls (quick tip) Jeff Wilcox has posted a set of tips and recommendations to use when developing control development in Silverlight ... this is a post to bookmark. Flexible Data Template Support in Silverlight The UK Application Development Consulting details a 'problem' in Silverlight that doesn't exist in WPF and that is data templates that vary by type... and discusses a way around it. Multi-Touch enabling Silverlight Simon using Blend behaviors and the Surface sample for Silverlight Davide Zordan brought Multi-Touch to the Silverlight Simon game on CodePlex using Blend Behaviors. New Video Tutorial: How to Use a Behavior to Fire Methods from Objects in Styles Victor Gaudioso has a video tutorial up responding to a question from a developer. He demonstrates development of a Behavior that can be attached to objects in or out of Styles that allows you to specify what Method they need to fire. Creating a Silverlight Client for @shanselman ’s Nerd Dinner, using oData and Bing Maps Anoop Madhusudanan took Scott Hanselman's post on an OData API for StackOverflow, and has created a Silverlight client for Nerd Dinner, including BingMaps. A Chrome and Glass Theme - Part 2 Phil Middlemiss has the next part of his Chrome and Glass Theme up. In this one he creates a very nice chrome-look button with visual state changes. MVVM Light Toolkit V3 SP1 for Windows Phone 7 Laurent Bugnion has released a new version of MVVM Light for WP7. Included is an installation manual and information about what was changed. 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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jQuery Datatable in MVC … extended.

- by Steve Clements

There are a million plugins for jQuery and when a web forms developer like myself works in MVC making use of them is par-for-the-course! MVC is the way now, web forms are but a memory!! Grids / tables are my focus at the moment. I don’t want to get in to righting reems of css and html, but it’s not acceptable to simply dump a table on the screen, functionality like sorting, paging, fixed header and perhaps filtering are expected behaviour. What isn’t always required though is the massive functionality like editing etc you get with many grid plugins out there. You potentially spend a long time getting everything hooked together when you just don’t need it. That is where the jQuery DataTable plugin comes in. It doesn’t have editing “out of the box” (you can add other plugins as you require to achieve such functionality). What it does though is very nicely format a table (and integrate with jQuery UI) without needing to hook up and Async actions etc. Take a look here… http://www.datatables.net I did in the first instance start looking at the Telerik MVC grid control – I’m a fan of Telerik controls and if you are developing an in-house of open source app you get the MVC stuff for free…nice! Their grid however is far more than I require. Note: Using Telerik MVC controls with your own jQuery and jQuery UI does come with some hurdles, mainly to do with the order in which all your jQuery is executing – I won’t cover that here though – mainly because I don’t have a clear answer on the best way to solve it! One nice thing about the dataTable above is how easy it is to extend http://www.datatables.net/examples/plug-ins/plugin_api.html and there are some nifty examples on the site already… I however have a requirement that wasn’t on the site … I need a grid at the bottom of the page that will size automatically to the bottom of the page and be scrollable if required within its own space i.e. everything above the grid didn’t scroll as well. Now a CSS master may have a great solution to this … I’m not that master and so didn’t! The content above the grid can vary so any kind of fixed positioning is out. So I wrote a little extension for the DataTable, hooked that up to the document.ready event and window.resize event. Initialising my dataTable ( s )… $(document).ready(function () { var dTable = $(".tdata").dataTable({ "bPaginate": false, "bLengthChange": false, "bFilter": true, "bSort": true, "bInfo": false, "bAutoWidth": true, "sScrollY": "400px" }); My extension to the API to give me the resizing…. // ********************************************************************** // jQuery dataTable API extension to resize grid and adjust column sizes // $.fn.dataTableExt.oApi.fnSetHeightToBottom = function (oSettings) { var id = oSettings.nTable.id; var dt = $("#" + id); var top = dt.position().top; var winHeight = $(document).height(); var remain = (winHeight - top) - 83; dt.parent().attr("style", "overflow-x: auto; overflow-y: auto; height: " + remain + "px;"); this.fnAdjustColumnSizing(); } This is very much is debug mode, so pretty verbose at the moment – I’ll tidy that up later! You can see the last call is a call to an existing method, as the columns are fixed and that normally involves so CSS voodoo, a call to adjust those sizes is required. Just above is the style that the dataTable gives the grid wrapper div, I got that from some firebug action and stick in my new height. The –83 is to give me the space at the bottom i require for fixed footer! Finally I hook that up to the load and window resize. I’m actually using jQuery UI tabs as well, so I’ve got that in the open event of the tabs. $(document).ready(function () { var oTable; $("#tabs").tabs({ "show": function (event, ui) { oTable = $('div.dataTables_scrollBody>table.tdata', ui.panel).dataTable(); if (oTable.length > 0) { oTable.fnSetHeightToBottom(); } } }); $(window).bind("resize", function () { oTable.fnSetHeightToBottom(); }); }); And that all there is too it. Testament to the wonders of jQuery and the immense community surrounding it – to which I am extremely grateful. I’ve also hooked up some custom column filtering on the grid – pretty normal stuff though – you can get what you need for that from their website. I do hide the out of the box filter input as I wanted column specific, you need filtering turned on when initialising to get it to work and that input come with it! Tip: fnFilter is the method you want. With column index as a param – I used data tags to simply that one.

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Entity is currently read-only

- by George Evjen

Quick post on an issue that we were having today. This fix may just be a band-aid for another issue but this fix at least got us moving again today. Since I didn’t see anything concrete online for a solution I figured I would post this as a part one fix and then post a more detailed fix later. We were getting this error earlier today in one of our projects that uses EF and WCF Ria Services. This entity is currently read-only. One of the following conditions exist: a custom method has been invoked, a submit operation is in progress, or edit operations are not supported for the entity type. The work around that we used for this is to simply do a check to see if the property is read only. Each entity has that property on it. private void SelectedInstitution_PropertyChanged(object sender, System.ComponentModel.PropertyChangedEventArgs e) { if (!_personDetailContext.CurrentPerson.IsReadOnly) { _personDetailContext.CurrentPerson.LastUpdatedDate = DateTime.Now; } } We check to see if the CurrentPerson in this situation is readonly. If its not read only we go ahead and execute some other code. Again, this got us moving today, I am sure this is just step one in resolving this issue.

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Now Available – Windows Azure SDK 1.6

- by Shaun

Microsoft has just announced the Windows Azure SDK 1.6 and the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 1.6. Now people can download the latest product through the WebPI. After you downloaded and installed the SDK you will find that The SDK 1.6 can be stayed side by side with the SDK 1.5, which means you can still using the 1.5 assemblies. But the Visual Studio Tools would be upgraded to 1.6. Different from the previous SDK, in this version it includes 4 components: Windows Azure Authoring Tools, Windows Azure Emulators, Windows Azure Libraries for .NET 1.6 and the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. There are some significant upgrades in this version, which are Publishing Enhancement: More easily connect to the Windows Azure when publish your application by retrieving a publish setting file. It will let you configure some settings of the deployment, without getting back to the developer portal. Multi-profiles: The publish settings, cloud configuration files, etc. will be stored in one or more MSBuild files. It will be much easier to switch the settings between vary build environments. MSBuild Command-line Build Support. In-Place Upgrade Support. Publishing Enhancement So let’s have a look about the new features of the publishing. Just create a new Windows Azure project in Visual Studio 2010 with a MVC 3 Web Role, and right-click the Windows Azure project node in the solution explorer, then select Publish, we will find the new publish dialog. In this version the first thing we need to do is to connect to our Windows Azure subscription. Click the “Sign in to download credentials” link, we will be navigated to the login page to provide the Live ID. The Windows Azure Tool will generate a certificate file and uploaded to the subscriptions those belong to us. Then we will download a PUBLISHSETTINGS file, which contains the credentials and subscriptions information. The Visual Studio Tool will generate a certificate and deployed to the subscriptions you have as the Management Certificate. The VS Tool will use this certificate to connect to the subscription in the next step. In the next step, I would back to the Visual Studio (the publish dialog should be stilling opened) and click the Import button, select the PUBLISHSETTINGS file I had just downloaded. Then all my subscriptions will be shown in the dropdown list. Select a subscription that I want the application to be published and press the Next button, then we can select the hosted service, environment, build configuration and service configuration shown in the dialog. In this version we can create a new hosted service directly here rather than go back to the developer portal. Just select the <Create New …> item in the hosted service. What we need to do is to provide the hosted service name and the location. Once clicked the OK, after several seconds the hosted service will be established. If we went to the developer portal we will find the new hosted service in my subscription. a) Currently we cannot select the Affinity Group when create a new hosted service through the Visual Studio Publish dialog. b) Although we can specify the hosted service name and DNS prefixing through the developer portal, we cannot do so from the VS Tool, which means the DNS prefixing would be the same as what we specified for the hosted service name. For example, we specified our hosted service name as “Sdk16Demo”, so the public URL would be http://sdk16demo.cloudapp.net/. After created a new hosted service we can select the cloud environment (production or staging), the build configuration (release or debug), and the service configuration (cloud or local). And we can set the Remote Desktop by check the related checkbox as well. One thing should be note is that, in this version when we set the Remote Desktop settings we don’t need to specify a certificate by default. This is because the Visual Studio will generate a new certificate for us by default. But we can still specify an existing certificate for RDC, by clicking the “More Options” button. Visual Studio Tool will create another certificate for the Remote Desktop connection. It will NOT use the certificate that managing the subscription. We also can select the “Advanced Settings” page to specify the deployment label, storage account, IntelliTrace and .NET profiling information, etc.. Press Next button, the dialog will display all settings I had just specified and it will save them as a new profile. The last step is to click the Publish button. Since we enabled the Remote Desktop feature, the first step of publishing was uploading the certificate. And then it will verify the storage account we specified and upload the package, then finally created the website in Windows Azure. Multi-Profiles After published, if we back to the Visual Studio we can find a AZUREPUBXML file under the Profiles folder in the Azure project. It includes all settings we specified before. If we publish this project again, we can just use the current settings (hosted service, environment, RDC, etc.) from this profile without input them again. And this is very useful when we have more than one deployment settings. For example it would be able to have one AZUREPUBXML profile for deploying to testing environment (debug building, less roles with RDC and IntelliTrace) and one for production (release building, more roles but without IntelliTrace). In-Place Upgrade Support Let’s change some codes in the MVC pages and click the Publish menu from the azure project node. No need to specify any settings, here we can use the pervious settings by loading the azure profile file (AZUREPUBXML). After clicked the Publish button the VS Tool brought a dialog to us to indicate that there’s a deployment available in the hosted service environment, and prompt to REPLACE it or not. Notice that in this version, the dialog tool said “replace” rather than “delete”, which means by default the VS Tool will use In-Place Upgrade when we deploy to a hosted service that has a deployment already exist. After click Yes the VS Tool will upload the package and perform the In-Place Upgrade. If we back to the developer portal we can find that the status of the hosted service was turned to “Updating…”. But in the previous SDK, it will try to delete the whole deployment and publish a new one. Summary When the Microsoft announced the features that allows the changing VM size via In-Place Upgrade, they also mentioned that in the next few versions the user experience of publishing the azure application would be improved. The target was trying to accomplish the whole publish experience in Visual Studio, which means no need to touch developer portal any more. In the SDK 1.6 we can see from the new publish dialog, as a developer we can do the whole process, includes creating hosted service, specifying the environment, configuration, remote desktop, etc. values without going back the the developer portal. 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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Configuration setting of HttpWebRequest.Timeout value

- by Michael Freidgeim

I wanted to set in configuration on client HttpWebRequest.Timeout.I was surprised, that MS doesn’t provide it as a part of .Net configuration.(Answer in http://forums.silverlight.net/post/77818.aspx thread: “Unfortunately specifying the timeout is not supported in current version. We may support it in the future release.”) I added it to appSettings section of app.config and read it in the method of My HttpWebRequestHelper class //The Method property can be set to any of the HTTP 1.1 protocol verbs: GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, DELETE, TRACE, or OPTIONS. public static HttpWebRequest PrepareWebRequest(string sUrl, string Method, CookieContainer cntnrCookies) { HttpWebRequest webRequest = WebRequest.Create(sUrl) as HttpWebRequest; webRequest.Method = Method; webRequest.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"; webRequest.CookieContainer = cntnrCookies; webRequest.Timeout = ConfigurationExtensions.GetAppSetting("HttpWebRequest.Timeout", 100000);//default 100sec-http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckh/archive/2005/02/01/365127.aspx) /* //try to change - from http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/ClientTicket_MSNP9.asp webRequest.AllowAutoRedirect = false; webRequest.Pipelined = false; webRequest.KeepAlive = false; webRequest.ProtocolVersion = new Version(1,0);//protocol 1.0 works better that 1.1 ?? */ //MNF 26/5/2005 Some web servers expect UserAgent to be specified //so let's say it's IE6 webRequest.UserAgent = "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"; DebugOutputHelper.PrintHttpWebRequest(webRequest, TraceOutputHelper.LineWithTrace("")); return webRequest; }Related link:http://stackoverflow.com/questions/387247/i-need-help-setting-net-httpwebrequest-timeoutv

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The new Internet Explorer 7 Tax

- by TATWORTH

An Australian online retailer, Kogan, has just announced a 6.8% tax (really a surcharge) on users of IE7. (I wonder how IE6 users would be treated?)To avoid the surcharge, all users have to do is switch to more up to date IE or switch to an alternative browser such as Chrome, Firefox, Opera or Safari.One has to admire the pluck of such a retailer. More details at http://www.kogan.com/au/blog/new-internet-explorer-7-tax/

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Inside Red Gate - Exercises in Leanness

- by simonc

There's a new movement rumbling around Red Gate Towers - the Lean Startup. At its core is the idea that you don't have to be in a company with single-digit employees to be an entrepreneur; you simply have to (being blunt) not know what you should be doing. Specifically, you accept that you don't know everything you need to know in order to create a useful, successful & profitable product. This is something that Red Gate has had problems with in the past; we've created products that weren't aimed at the correct market, or didn't solve the problem the user had (although they solved the problem we thought the users had, or the problem the users thought they had). As a result, these products weren't as successful as they could have been. The ideas at the core of the Lean Startup help to combat this tendency to build large, well-engineered products that solve the wrong problem. You need to actually test your hypotheses about what the users and the market needs, rather than just running a project based on those untested assumptions. Furthermore, these tests need to be done as fast as possible (on the order of a week) so that, if necessary, you can change the direction of the project without wasting effort going down a dead end. Over time, as more tests are done and more hypotheses are confirmed or refuted, the project moves towards something that solves users' actual problems. However, re-aligning the development teams that operate within Red Gate along these lines does itself have some issues; we've got very good at doing large, monolithic releases, with a feature set decided well in advance. Currently it takes about 2 weeks to do install & release testing before a release; this is clearly not practicable for a team doing weekly, or even daily releases. There's also many infrastructure issues to be solved; in our source control, build system, release mechanism, support pages & documentation, licensing system, update system, and download pages. All these need modifications to allow the fast releases necessary for each experiment. Not only do we have to change our infrastructure, we have to change our mindset. Doing daily releases means each release won't get nearly as much testing as 'standard' releases. As a team, we have to be prepared that there will be releases that have bugs and issues with them; not only do we have to be prepared to change direction with every experiment we do, but we have to be ready to fix any bugs that are reported very quickly as well. The SmartAssembly team is spearheading this move towards leanness within the company, using Feature Usage Reporting (FUR). We think this is a cracking feature that will really help developers learn how people use their products, but we need to confirm this hypothesis. So, over the next few weeks, we'll be running a variety of experiments on SmartAssembly to either confirm or refute our hypotheses concerning how people use SmartAssembly and apply FUR to their own products. In the rest of this series, I'll be documenting how the experiments we perform get on, and our experiences with applying the Lean Startup model to a mature product like SmartAssembly. Cross posted from Simple Talk.

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Nice Generic Example that implements an interface.

- by mbcrump

I created this quick generic example after noticing that several people were asking questions about it. If you have any questions then let me know. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Globalization; namespace ConsoleApplication4 { //New class where Type implements IConvertible interface (interface = contract) class Calculate<T> where T : IConvertible { //Setup fields public T X; NumberFormatInfo fmt = NumberFormatInfo.CurrentInfo; //Constructor 1 public Calculate() { X = default(T); } //Constructor 2 public Calculate (T x) { X = x; } //Method that we know will return a double public double DistanceTo (Calculate<T> cal) { //Remove the.ToDouble if you want to see the methods available for IConvertible return (X.ToDouble(fmt) - cal.X.ToDouble(fmt)); } } class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { //Pass value type and call DistanceTo with an Int. Calculate<int> cal = new Calculate<int>(); Calculate<int> cal2 = new Calculate<int>(10); Console.WriteLine("Int : " + cal.DistanceTo(cal2)); //Pass value type and call DistanceTo with an Double. Calculate<double> cal3 = new Calculate<double>(); Calculate<double> cal4 = new Calculate<double>(10.6); Console.WriteLine("Double : " + cal3.DistanceTo(cal4)); //Pass reference type and call DistanceTo with an String. Calculate<string> cal5 = new Calculate<string>("0"); Calculate<string> cal6 = new Calculate<string>("345"); Console.WriteLine("String : " + cal5.DistanceTo(cal6)); } } }

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Fixing my SQL Directory NTFS ACLS

- by Shawn Cicoria

I run my development server by boot to VHD (Windows Server 2008 R2 x64). In that instance, I also have an attached VHD (I attach via script at boot up time using Task Scheduler). That VHD I have my SQL instances installed. So, the other day, acting hasty, I chmod my ACLS – wow, what a day after that. So, in order to fix it I created this set of BAT commands that resets it back to operational state – not 100% of all what you get, I also didn’t want to run a “repair” – but, all operational again. setlocal SET Inst100Path=H:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100 REM GOTO SQLE SET InstanceName=MSSQLSERVER SET InstIdPath=H:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.%InstanceName% SET Group=SQLServerMSSQLUser$SCICORIA-HV1$%InstanceName% SET AgentGroup=SQLServerSQLAgentUser$SCICORIA-HV1$%InstanceName% ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL" /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)FX ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL\backup" /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)F ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL\data" /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)F ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL\FTdata" /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)F ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL\Jobs" /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)F ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL\binn" /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)RX ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL\Log" /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)F ICACLS "%Inst100Path%" /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)RX ICACLS "%Inst100Path%\shared\Errordumps" /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)RXW ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL" /T /Q /grant "%AgentGroup%":(OI)(CI)RX ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL\binn" /T /Q /grant "%AgentGroup%":(OI)(CI)F ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL\Log" /T /Q /grant "%AgentGroup%":(OI)(CI)F ICACLS "%Inst100Path%" /T /Q /grant "%AgentGroup%":(OI)(CI)RX REM THIS IS THE SQL EXPRESS INSTANCE :SQLE SET InstanceName=SQLEXPRESS SET InstIdPath=H:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.%InstanceName% SET Group=SQLServerMSSQLUser$SCICORIA-HV1$%InstanceName% SET AgentGroup=SQLServerSQLAgentUser$SCICORIA-HV1$%InstanceName% ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL" /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)FX ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL\backup" /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)F ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL\data" /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)F ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL\FTdata" /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)F ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL\Jobs" /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)F ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL\binn" /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)RX ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL\Log" /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)F ICACLS "%Inst100Path%" /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)RX ICACLS "%Inst100Path%\shared\Errordumps" /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)RXW ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL" /T /Q /grant "%AgentGroup%":(OI)(CI)RX ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL\binn" /T /Q /grant "%AgentGroup%":(OI)(CI)F ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL\Log" /T /Q /grant "%AgentGroup%":(OI)(CI)F ICACLS "%Inst100Path%" /T /Q /grant "%AgentGroup%":(OI)(CI)RX endlocal

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I’m going to have to stop using MS Virtual PC 2007

- by John Breakwell

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Plumbersmate/archive/2013/10/23/irsquom-going-to-have-to-stop-using-ms-virtual-pc.aspxFor many years now I’ve been happily chucking around Windows XP virtual hard disks and loading them with Virtual PC. Sadly I’m going to have to turn to something modern as the virtual processor is no longer up to scratch, as I found when trying to install Windows 8.1 evaluation. In the past this would have been a Blue Screen but they’re handled differently in Windows 8, usually with a frowning emoticon. 0x0000005D means UNSUPPORTED_PROCESSOR and the solution would be to enable No-Execute Memory Protection in the BIOS. Virtual PC is ancient so the AMI BIOS has no such setting on any of the menus. Off now to find a virtualisation product I like.

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