geeks - Page 72 - Developer IT

.NET Day Franken Community Conference

- by Igor Milovanovic

The call for papers for the first franconian .NET community conference is open. [1] http://www.dotnet-day-franken.de/Sprecher.html

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tmurphy/archive/2013/06/18/is-it-time-to-specialize.aspx Over my career I have made a living as a generalist. I have been a jack of all trades and a master of none. It has served me well in that I am able to move from one technology to the other quickly and make myself productive. Where it becomes a problem is deep knowledge. I am constantly digging for the things that aren’t basic knowledge. How do you make a product like WCF or Windows RT do more than just “Hello World”? As an architect I need to be a jack of all trades. This is what helps me to bring the big picture of a project into focus for developers with different skills to accomplish the goals of the project. It is a key when the mix technologies crosses Windows, Unix and Mainframe with different languages and databases. The larger the company that the project is for the more likely this scenario will arise. As a consultant and a developer I need to have specialized skills in order to get the job done efficiently. if I have a SharePoint or Windows Phone project knowing the object model details and possible roadblocks of the technology allow me to stay within budgets as well as better advise the client on technology decisions. What is the solution? Constant learning and associating with developers who specialize in a variety of technologies is the best thing you can do. You may have thought you were done with classes when you left college, but in this industry you need to constantly be learning new products and languages. The ultimate answer is you must generally specialize. Learn as many subject areas as possible, but go deep when ever you can. Sleep is overrated. Good luck. del.icio.us Tags: software development,software architecture,specialization,generalist

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JQGrdi PDF Export

- by thanigai

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/thanigai/archive/2013/06/17/jqgrdi-pdf-export.aspxJQGrid PDF Export The aim of this article is to address the PDF export from client side grid frameworks. The solution is done using the ASP.Net MVC 4 and VisualStudio 2012. The article assumes the developer to have a fair amount of knowledge on ASP.Net MVC and C#. Tools Used Visual Studio 2012 ASP.Net MVC 4 Nuget Package Manager JQGrid is one of the client grid framework built on top of the JQuery framework. It helps in building a beautiful grid with paging, sorting and exiting options. There are also other features available as extension plugins and developers can write their own if needed. You can download the JQgrid from the JQGrid homepage or as NUget package. I have given below the command to download the JQGrid through the package manager console. From the tools menu select “Library Package Manager” and then select “Package Manager Console”. I have given the screenshot below. This command will pull down the latest JQGrid package and adds them in the script folder. Once the script is downloaded and referenced in the project update the bundleconfig file to add the script reference in the pages. Bundleconfig can be found in the App_Start folder in the project structure. bundles .Add (newStyleBundle(“~/Content/jqgrid”).Include (“~/Content/ui.jqgrid.css”)); bundles.Add( newScriptBundle( “~/bundles/jquerygrid”) .Include( “~/Scripts/jqGrid/jquery.jqGrid*”)); Once added the config’s refer the bundles to the Views/Shared/LayoutPage.cshtml. Add the following lines to the head section of the page. @Styles.Render(“~/Content/jqgrid”) Add the following lines to the end of the page before html close tags. @Scripts.Render(“~/bundles/jquery”) @Scripts.Render(“~/bundles/jqueryui”) @Scripts.Render(“ ~/bundles/jquerygrid”) That’s all to be done from the view perspective. Once these steps are done the developer can start coding for the JQGrid. In this example we will modify the HomeController for the demo. The index action will be the default action. We will add an argument for this index action. Let it be nullable bool. It’s just to mark the pdf request. In the Index.cshtml we will add a table tag with an id “ gridTable “. We will use this table for making the grid. Since JQGrid is an extension for the JQUery we will initialize the grid setting at the script section of the page. This script section is marked at the end of the page to improve performance. The script section is placed just below the bundle reference for JQuery and JQueryUI. This is the one of improvement factors from “ why slow” provided by yahoo. < tableid=“gridTable”class=“scroll”></ table> < inputtype=“button”value=“Export PDF”onclick=“exportPDF();“/> @section scripts { <scripttype=“text/javascript”> $(document).ready(function(){$(“#gridTable”).jqGrid({datatype:“json”,url:‘@Url.Action(“GetCustomerDetails”)‘,mtype:‘GET’,colNames:["CustomerID","CustomerName","Location","PrimaryBusiness"],colModel:[{name:"CustomerID",width:40,index:"CustomerID",align:"center"},{name:"CustomerName",width:40,index:"CustomerName",align:"center"},{name:"Location",width:40,index:"Location",align:"center"},{name:"PrimaryBusiness",width:40,index:"PrimaryBusiness",align:"center"},],height:250,autowidth:true,sortorder:“asc”,rowNum:10,rowList:[5,10,15,20],sortname:“CustomerID”,viewrecords:true});}); function exportPDF (){ document . location = ‘ @ Url . Action ( “Index” ) ?pdf=true’ ; } </ script > } The exportPDF methos just sets the document location to the Index action method with PDF Boolean as true just to mark for download PDF. An inmemory list collection is used for demo purpose. The GetCustomerDetailsmethod is the server side action method that will provide the data as JSON list. We will see the method explanation below. [ HttpGet] publicJsonResultGetCustomerDetails(){ varresult=new { total=1, page=1, records=customerList.Count(), rows=( customerList.Select( e=>new { id=e.CustomerID, cell=newstring[]{ e.CustomerID.ToString(), e.CustomerName, e.Location, e.PrimaryBusiness}})) .ToArray()}; returnJson( result, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet); } JQGrid can understand the response data from server in certain format. The server method shown above is taking care of formatting the response so that JQGrid understand the data properly. The response data should contain totalpages, current page, full record count, rows of data with id and remaining columns as string array. The response is built using an anonymous object and will be sent as a MVC JsonResult. Since we are using HttpGet it’s better to mark the attribute as HttpGet and also the JSON requestbehavious as AllowGet. The inmemory list is initialized in the homecontroller constructor for reference. Public class HomeController : Controller{ private readonly Ilist < CustomerViewModel > customerList ; public HomeController (){ customerList=newList<CustomerViewModel>() { newCustomerViewModel{ CustomerID=100, CustomerName=“Sundar”, Location=“Chennai”, PrimaryBusiness=“Teacing”}, newCustomerViewModel{ CustomerID=101, CustomerName=“Sudhagar”, Location=“Chennai”, PrimaryBusiness=“Software”}, newCustomerViewModel{ CustomerID=102, CustomerName=“Thivagar”, Location=“China”, PrimaryBusiness=“SAP”}, }; } publicActionResultIndex( bool?pdf){ if ( !pdf.HasValue){ returnView( customerList);} else{ stringfilePath=Server.MapPath( “Content”) +“Sample.pdf”; ExportPDF( customerList, new string[]{ “CustomerID”, “CustomerName”, “Location”, “PrimaryBusiness” }, filePath); return File ( filePath , “application/pdf” , “list.pdf” ); }} The index actionmethod has a Boolean argument named “pdf”. It’s used to indicate for PDF download. When the application starts this method is first hit for initial page request. For PDF operation a filename is generated and then sent to the ExportPDF method which will take care of generating the PDF from the datasource. The ExportPDF method is listed below. Private static void ExportPDF<TSource>(IList<TSource>customerList,string [] columns, string filePath){ FontheaderFont=FontFactory.GetFont( “Verdana”, 10, Color.WHITE); Fontrowfont=FontFactory.GetFont( “Verdana”, 10, Color.BLUE); Documentdocument=newDocument( PageSize.A4); PdfWriter writer = PdfWriter . GetInstance ( document , new FileStream ( filePath , FileMode . OpenOrCreate )); document.Open(); PdfPTabletable=newPdfPTable( columns.Length); foreach ( varcolumnincolumns){ PdfPCellcell=newPdfPCell( newPhrase( column, headerFont)); cell.BackgroundColor=Color.BLACK; table.AddCell( cell); } foreach ( var item in customerList ) { foreach ( varcolumnincolumns){ stringvalue=item.GetType() .GetProperty( column) .GetValue( item) .ToString(); PdfPCellcell5=newPdfPCell( newPhrase( value, rowfont)); table.AddCell( cell5); } } document.Add( table); document.Close(); } iTextSharp is one of the pioneer in PDF export. It’s an opensource library readily available as NUget library. This command will pulldown latest available library. I am using the version 4.1.2.0. The latest version may have changed. There are three main things in this library. Document This is the document class which takes care of creating the document sheet with particular size. We have used A4 size. There is also an option to define the rectangle size. This document instance will be further used in next methods for reference. PdfWriter PdfWriter takes the filename and the document as the reference. This class enables the document class to generate the PDF content and save them in a file. Font Using the FONT class the developer can control the font features. Since I need a nice looking font I am giving the Verdana font. Following this PdfPTable and PdfPCell are used for generating the normal table layout. We have created two set of fonts for header and footer. Font headerFont=FontFactory .GetFont(“Verdana”, 10, Color .WHITE); Font rowfont=FontFactory .GetFont(“Verdana”, 10, Color .BLUE); We are getting the header columns as string array. Columns argument array is looped and header is generated. We are using the headerfont for this purpose. PdfWriter writer=PdfWriter .GetInstance(document, newFileStream (filePath, FileMode.OpenOrCreate)); document.Open(); PdfPTabletable=newPdfPTable( columns.Length); foreach ( varcolumnincolumns){ PdfPCellcell=newPdfPCell( newPhrase( column, headerFont)); cell.BackgroundColor=Color.BLACK; table.AddCell( cell); } Then reflection is used to generate the row wise details and form the grid. foreach (var item in customerList){ foreach ( varcolumnincolumns) { stringvalue=item.GetType() .GetProperty( column) .GetValue( item) .ToString(); PdfPCellcell5=newPdfPCell( newPhrase( value, rowfont)); table.AddCell( cell5); } } document . Add ( table ); document . Close (); Once the process id done the pdf table is added to the document and document is closed to write all the changes to the filepath given. Then the control moves to the controller which will take care of sending the response as a JSON result with a filename. If the file name is not given then the PDF will open in the same page otherwise a popup will open up asking whether to save the file or open file. Return File(filePath, “application/pdf”,“list.pdf”); The final result screen is shown below. PDF file opened below to show the output. Conclusion: This is how the export pdf is done for JQGrid. The problem area that is addressed here is the clientside grid frameworks won’t support PDF’s export. In that time it’s better to have a fine grained control over the data and generated PDF. iTextSharp has helped us to achieve our goal.

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Silverlight Cream for March 05, 2011 -- #1053

- by Dave Campbell

In this all-sumbittal (while I was at MVP11) Issue: Michael Washington(-2-), goldytech, JFo, Andrea Boschin, Jonathan Marbutt, Gregor Biswanger, Michael Wolf, and Peter Kuhn. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "A Simple Bindable CheckboxList Control" Jonathan Marbutt WP7: "Struggles with the Panorama Control" JFo Lightswitch: "HTML (including HTML 5) and LightSwitch at the same time?" Michael Washington From SilverlightCream.com: LightSwitch vs HTML 5 ? In his first post-MVP11 post, Michael Washington takes on HTML5 with a Lightswitch discussion. Good discussion follows in the comments also. HTML (including HTML 5) and LightSwitch at the same time? Michael Washington's 2nd post is a great tutorial on creating a re-usable business layer with Lightswitch... all good stuff, and look for more from Michael as Lightswitch matures. How to add Computed Properties in WCF Ria Services on client goldytech has a new post up about providing real-time solutions to client-side calculations with WCF RIA services. Struggles with the Panorama Control JFo details a problem he had with the Panorama control on WP7... detailing 4 problems she had and her solutions... well thought-out explanations too.. a definite good read... and another blogger to add to my list! Windows Phone 7 - Part #7: Understanding Push Notifications Andrea Boschin has part 7 of his WP7 series up at SilverlightShow, concentrating on Push Notifications this time out... great explanation of push notifications in this tutorial from the service and phone side with a working sample to boot. A Simple Bindable CheckboxList Control Jonathan Marbutt took a completely different direction than most and created his own Bindable CheckboxList by starting with ContentControl rather than a Listbox as most do... pretty cool and all the source. Own routed events in Silverlight I met Gregor Biswanger at the MVP Summit and asked him to send me his blog run through Microsoft Translator ... here's a great post on routed events he did back in November... and a discussion of his CallMethodAction Behavior... which looks like another good post subject! Creating a Silverlight Out-of-Browser Splash Screen Michael Wolf has a post up discussing OOB splash screens... I like his "White screen of Awesome" definition ... I'm very familiar with that :) ... check out his solution for getting around that white screen, and lots of external links too. XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 5 - Input (touch + gestures) Peter Kuhn has Part 5 in his tutorial series on XNA for Silverlight devs up at SilverlightShow... this time covering touch and gestures ... how to enable and read gestures, and the difference between Silverlight and XNA in the touch department. 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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Management Reporter Installation – Lessons Learned Part II - Dynamics GP

- by Ryan McBee

After feeling pretty good about my deployment skills of Management Reporter for Dynamics GP a few weeks ago, I ran into two additional lessons learned that I wanted to share. First, on another new deployment, I got the error shown below which says “An error occurred while creating the database. View the installation log for additional information.” This problem initially pointed me to KB 2406948 which did not provide resolution. After several hours of troubleshooting, I found there is an issue if the defaults database locations in SQL Server are set to the root of a drive. You will want to set the default to something like the following to get it installed; C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA. My default database locations for the data and log files were indeed sitting on the H:\ and I:\ drives. To change this property in your SQL Server Instance you need to open SQL Server Management Studio, right click on the server, and choose properties and then database settings. When I initially got the error, I briefly considered creating the ManagementReporter database by hand, but experience tells me that would have created more headaches down the road. The second problem I ran into with this particular deployment of Management Reporter happened when I started the FRx conversion utility. The errors reads “The ‘Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0’ provider is not registered on the local machine. I had a suspicion that this error was related to the fact FRx uses outdated technology and I happened to be on a new install of Server 2008 R2. A knowledge base search quickly pointed me to KB 2102486. The resolution for this Management Reporter issue was to install the Microsoft Access Database Engine Redistributable, by following the site below. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=C06B8369-60DD-4B64-A44B-84B371EDE16D&displaylang=en

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Mostrar Imagenes en ListView utilizando ImageList WinForms

- by Jason Ulloa

El día de hoy veremos como trabajar con los controles ListView e Imagelist de WindowsForms para poder leer y mostrar una serie de imágenes. Antes de ello debo decir que pueden existir otras formas de mostrar imagenes que solo requieren un control por ejemplo con un Gridview pero eso será en otro post, ahora nos centraremos en la forma de realizarlo con los controles antes mencionados. Lo primero que haremos será crear un nuevo proyecto de windows forms, en mi caso utilizando C#, luego agregaremos un Control ImageList. Este control será el que utilicemos para almacenar todas las imágenes una vez que las hemos leído. Si revisamos el control, veremos que tenemos la opción de agregar la imágenes mediante el diseñador, es decir podemos seleccionarlas manualmente o bien agregarlas mediante código que será lo que haremos. Lo segundo será agregar un control ListView al Formulario, este será el encargado de mostrar las imagenes, eso sí, por ahora será solo mostrarlas no tendrá otras funcionalidades. Ahora, vamos al codeBehind y en el Evento Load del form empezaremos a codificar: Lo primero será, crear una nueva variable derivando DirectoryInfo, a la cual le indicaremos la ruta de nuestra carpeta de imágenes. En nuestro ejemplo utilizamos Application.StartUpPath para indicarle que vamos a buscar en nuestro mismo proyecto (en carpeta debug por el momento). DirectoryInfo dir = new DirectoryInfo(Application.StartupPath + @"\images"); Una vez que hemos creado la referencia a la ruta, utilizaremos un for para obtener todas la imágenes que se encuentren dentro del Folder que indicamos, para luego agregarlas al imagelist y empezar a crear nuestra nueva colección. foreach (FileInfo file in dir.GetFiles()) { try { this.imageList1.Images.Add(Image.FromFile(file.FullName)); } catch { Console.WriteLine("No es un archivo de imagen"); } } Una vez, que hemos llenado nuestro ImageList, entonces asignaremos al ListView sus propiedades, para definir la forma en que las imágenes se mostrarán. Un aspecto a tomar en cuenta acá será la propiedad ImageSize ya que está será la que definirá el tamaño que tendrán las imágenes en el ListView cuando sean mostradas. this.listView1.View = View.LargeIcon; this.imageList1.ImageSize = new Size(120, 100); this.listView1.LargeImageList = this.imageList1; Por último y con ayuda de otro for vamos a recorrer cada uno de los elementos que ahora posee nuestro ImageList y lo agregaremos al ListView para mostrarlo for (int j = 0; j < this.imageList1.Images.Count; j++) { ListViewItem item = new ListViewItem(); item.ImageIndex = j; this.listView1.Items.Add(item); } Como vemos, a pesar de que utilizamos dos controles distintos es realmente sencillo mostrar la imagenes en el ListView al final el control ImageList, solo funciona como un “puente” que nos permite leer la imagenes para luego mostrarlas en otro control. Para terminar, los proyectos de ejemplo: C# VB

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Inevitable Corporate Bureaucracy

- by Ahsan Alam

Top executives of most smaller organizations want their companies to be different from the larger corporations. They want their organizations smaller in size; but bigger in productivity by eliminating red tapes and corporate bureaucracy. When the company is smaller, people often work like firefighters – taking on new business and technology challenges without thinking about any procedures and guidelines. People also tend to wear many hats to accomplish tasks quickly in order to integrate new businesses. For example, software developers in smaller organizations may take on responsibilities of client interactions, requirements gathering, design and development, code deployment, production support, network infrastructure support, database design and maintenance along with countless other duties. In addition, systems in smaller organizations tend to be loosely guarded. So, people often don't follow many procedures in order to setup environments and implement technical projects. It's not uncommon to change code and deploy without anyone realizing. Similarly, business requirements may also get defined in an informal manner without any type of documentation. As the company grows, everything starts to change significantly impacting people and the overall business process. Suddenly, following procedures become extremely important. Consequently, new roles, guidelines and procedures start to emerge. Everything from business process to technology implementation start to become more and more process oriented. Organizations start to define and document steps, invent procedure to track process and systems level changes, and start restricting access to various systems for security reasons. At the same time, as a growing company start doing businesses with larger clienteles, they are automatically forced to abide by all sorts of industry compliance laws. Moreover, growing companies tend to recruit experienced individuals to fill new roles who usually bring their expertise from larger and more bureaucratic organizations. Despite the best efforts from the top executives, it seems increased number of procedures and guidelines as well as new recruits automatically contribute to the evolution of corporate bureaucracy. Maybe, corporate bureaucracy is an inevitable side effect of a growing organization.

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Lorem Ipsum–Generating in Word 2010

- by Shawn Cicoria

Well, apparently I missed this hidden feature having used the Lorem Ipsum website for some time, but if you enter the following in blank Word document – you’ll get 10 paragraphs of generated text: =Lorem(10) Such as: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna. Nunc viverra imperdiet enim. Fusce est. Vivamus a tellus. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Proin pharetra nonummy pede. Mauris et orci. Aenean nec lorem. In porttitor. Donec laoreet nonummy augue. Suspendisse dui purus, scelerisque at, vulputate vitae, pretium mattis, nunc. Mauris eget neque at sem venenatis eleifend. Ut nonummy. Fusce aliquet pede non pede. Suspendisse dapibus lorem pellentesque magna. Integer nulla. Donec blandit feugiat ligula. Donec hendrerit, felis et imperdiet euismod, purus ipsum pretium metus, in lacinia nulla nisl eget sapien. Donec ut est in lectus consequat consequat. Etiam eget dui. Aliquam erat volutpat. Sed at lorem in nunc porta tristique. Proin nec augue. Quisque aliquam tempor magna. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Nunc ac magna. Maecenas odio dolor, vulputate vel, auctor ac, accumsan id, felis. Pellentesque cursus sagittis felis.

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Dude, where is my list instance?

- by MOSSLover

I saw an MSDN Forum post today, so I looked for a ListInstance Hidden property in SharePoint 2007 features. There is none, but interestingly enough there is one in 2010. I wondered what would happen if you did this: <Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/"> <ListInstance FeatureId="00bfea71-de22-43b2-a848-c05709900100" Title="Hidden List Test" Description="Testing a hidden list." TemplateType="100" Hidden="TRUE" OnQuickLaunch="FALSE" Url="Lists/TestHidden" /> </Elements> It hides the entire list from SharePoint Designer and the browser, however you can hit the list by typing in the url in internet explorer. Pretty cool stuff. Enjoy guys. Technorati Tags: Feature,List Instance,SharePoint 2010

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Using the ASP.NET Cache to cache data in a Model or Business Object layer, without a dependency on System.Web in the layer - Part One.

- by Rhames

ASP.NET applications can make use of the System.Web.Caching.Cache object to cache data and prevent repeated expensive calls to a database or other store. However, ideally an application should make use of caching at the point where data is retrieved from the database, which typically is inside a Business Objects or Model layer. One of the key features of using a UI pattern such as Model-View-Presenter (MVP) or Model-View-Controller (MVC) is that the Model and Presenter (or Controller) layers are developed without any knowledge of the UI layer. Introducing a dependency on System.Web into the Model layer would break this independence of the Model from the View. This article gives a solution to this problem, using dependency injection to inject the caching implementation into the Model layer at runtime. This allows caching to be used within the Model layer, without any knowledge of the actual caching mechanism that will be used. Create a sample application to use the caching solution Create a test SQL Server database This solution uses a SQL Server database with the same Sales data used in my previous post on calculating running totals. The advantage of using this data is that it gives nice slow queries that will exaggerate the effect of using caching! To create the data, first create a new SQL database called CacheSample. Next run the following script to create the Sale table and populate it: USE CacheSample GO CREATE TABLE Sale(DayCount smallint, Sales money) CREATE CLUSTERED INDEX ndx_DayCount ON Sale(DayCount) go INSERT Sale VALUES (1,120) INSERT Sale VALUES (2,60) INSERT Sale VALUES (3,125) INSERT Sale VALUES (4,40) DECLARE @DayCount smallint, @Sales money SET @DayCount = 5 SET @Sales = 10 WHILE @DayCount < 5000 BEGIN INSERT Sale VALUES (@DayCount,@Sales) SET @DayCount = @DayCount + 1 SET @Sales = @Sales + 15 END Next create a stored procedure to calculate the running total, and return a specified number of rows from the Sale table, using the following script: USE [CacheSample] GO SET ANSI_NULLS ON GO SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON GO -- ============================================= -- Author: Robin -- Create date: -- Description: -- ============================================= CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[spGetRunningTotals] -- Add the parameters for the stored procedure here @HighestDayCount smallint = null AS BEGIN -- SET NOCOUNT ON added to prevent extra result sets from -- interfering with SELECT statements. SET NOCOUNT ON; IF @HighestDayCount IS NULL SELECT @HighestDayCount = MAX(DayCount) FROM dbo.Sale DECLARE @SaleTbl TABLE (DayCount smallint, Sales money, RunningTotal money) DECLARE @DayCount smallint, @Sales money, @RunningTotal money SET @RunningTotal = 0 SET @DayCount = 0 DECLARE rt_cursor CURSOR FOR SELECT DayCount, Sales FROM Sale ORDER BY DayCount OPEN rt_cursor FETCH NEXT FROM rt_cursor INTO @DayCount,@Sales WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0 AND @DayCount <= @HighestDayCount BEGIN SET @RunningTotal = @RunningTotal + @Sales INSERT @SaleTbl VALUES (@DayCount,@Sales,@RunningTotal) FETCH NEXT FROM rt_cursor INTO @DayCount,@Sales END CLOSE rt_cursor DEALLOCATE rt_cursor SELECT DayCount, Sales, RunningTotal FROM @SaleTbl END GO Create the Sample ASP.NET application In Visual Studio create a new solution and add a class library project called CacheSample.BusinessObjects and an ASP.NET web application called CacheSample.UI. The CacheSample.BusinessObjects project will contain a single class to represent a Sale data item, with all the code to retrieve the sales from the database included in it for simplicity (normally I would at least have a separate Repository or other object that is responsible for retrieving data, and probably a data access layer as well, but for this sample I want to keep it simple). The C# code for the Sale class is shown below: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Data; using System.Data.SqlClient; namespace CacheSample.BusinessObjects { public class Sale { public Int16 DayCount { get; set; } public decimal Sales { get; set; } public decimal RunningTotal { get; set; } public static IEnumerable<Sale> GetSales(int? highestDayCount) { List<Sale> sales = new List<Sale>(); SqlParameter highestDayCountParameter = new SqlParameter("@HighestDayCount", SqlDbType.SmallInt); if (highestDayCount.HasValue) highestDayCountParameter.Value = highestDayCount; else highestDayCountParameter.Value = DBNull.Value; string connectionStr = System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager .ConnectionStrings["CacheSample"].ConnectionString; using(SqlConnection sqlConn = new SqlConnection(connectionStr)) using (SqlCommand sqlCmd = sqlConn.CreateCommand()) { sqlCmd.CommandText = "spGetRunningTotals"; sqlCmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure; sqlCmd.Parameters.Add(highestDayCountParameter); sqlConn.Open(); using (SqlDataReader dr = sqlCmd.ExecuteReader()) { while (dr.Read()) { Sale newSale = new Sale(); newSale.DayCount = dr.GetInt16(0); newSale.Sales = dr.GetDecimal(1); newSale.RunningTotal = dr.GetDecimal(2); sales.Add(newSale); } } } return sales; } } } The static GetSale() method makes a call to the spGetRunningTotals stored procedure and then reads each row from the returned SqlDataReader into an instance of the Sale class, it then returns a List of the Sale objects, as IEnnumerable<Sale>. A reference to System.Configuration needs to be added to the CacheSample.BusinessObjects project so that the connection string can be read from the web.config file. In the CacheSample.UI ASP.NET project, create a single web page called ShowSales.aspx, and make this the default start up page. This page will contain a single button to call the GetSales() method and a label to display the results. The html mark up and the C# code behind are shown below: ShowSales.aspx <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="ShowSales.aspx.cs" Inherits="CacheSample.UI.ShowSales" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head runat="server"> <title>Cache Sample - Show All Sales</title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div> <asp:Button ID="btnTest1" runat="server" onclick="btnTest1_Click" Text="Get All Sales" />     <asp:Label ID="lblResults" runat="server"></asp:Label> </div> </form> </body> </html> ShowSales.aspx.cs using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Web.UI; using System.Web.UI.WebControls; using CacheSample.BusinessObjects; namespace CacheSample.UI { public partial class ShowSales : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { } protected void btnTest1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch stopWatch = new System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch(); stopWatch.Start(); var sales = Sale.GetSales(null); var lastSales = sales.Last(); stopWatch.Stop(); lblResults.Text = string.Format( "Count of Sales: {0}, Last DayCount: {1}, Total Sales: {2}. Query took {3} ms", sales.Count(), lastSales.DayCount, lastSales.RunningTotal, stopWatch.ElapsedMilliseconds); } } } Finally we need to add a connection string to the CacheSample SQL Server database, called CacheSample, to the web.config file: <?xmlversion="1.0"?> <configuration> <connectionStrings> <addname="CacheSample" connectionString="data source=.\SQLEXPRESS;Integrated Security=SSPI;Initial Catalog=CacheSample" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" /> </connectionStrings> <system.web> <compilationdebug="true"targetFramework="4.0" /> </system.web> </configuration> Run the application and click the button a few times to see how long each call to the database takes. On my system, each query takes about 450ms. Next I shall look at a solution to use the ASP.NET caching to cache the data returned by the query, so that subsequent requests to the GetSales() method are much faster. Adding Data Caching Support I am going to create my caching support in a separate project called CacheSample.Caching, so the next step is to add a class library to the solution. We shall be using the application configuration to define the implementation of our caching system, so we need a reference to System.Configuration adding to the project. ICacheProvider<T> Interface The first step in adding caching to our application is to define an interface, called ICacheProvider, in the CacheSample.Caching project, with methods to retrieve any data from the cache or to retrieve the data from the data source if it is not present in the cache. Dependency Injection will then be used to inject an implementation of this interface at runtime, allowing the users of the interface (i.e. the CacheSample.BusinessObjects project) to be completely unaware of how the caching is actually implemented. As data of any type maybe retrieved from the data source, it makes sense to use generics in the interface, with a generic type parameter defining the data type associated with a particular instance of the cache interface implementation. The C# code for the ICacheProvider interface is shown below: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; namespace CacheSample.Caching { public interface ICacheProvider { } public interface ICacheProvider<T> : ICacheProvider { T Fetch(string key, Func<T> retrieveData, DateTime? absoluteExpiry, TimeSpan? relativeExpiry); IEnumerable<T> Fetch(string key, Func<IEnumerable<T>> retrieveData, DateTime? absoluteExpiry, TimeSpan? relativeExpiry); } } The empty non-generic interface will be used as a type in a Dictionary generic collection later to store instances of the ICacheProvider<T> implementation for reuse, I prefer to use a base interface when doing this, as I think the alternative of using object makes for less clear code. The ICacheProvider<T> interface defines two overloaded Fetch methods, the difference between these is that one will return a single instance of the type T and the other will return an IEnumerable<T>, providing support for easy caching of collections of data items. Both methods will take a key parameter, which will uniquely identify the cached data, a delegate of type Func<T> or Func<IEnumerable<T>> which will provide the code to retrieve the data from the store if it is not present in the cache, and absolute or relative expiry policies to define when a cached item should expire. Note that at present there is no support for cache dependencies, but I shall be showing a method of adding this in part two of this article. CacheProviderFactory Class We need a mechanism of creating instances of our ICacheProvider<T> interface, using Dependency Injection to get the implementation of the interface. To do this we shall create a CacheProviderFactory static class in the CacheSample.Caching project. This factory will provide a generic static method called GetCacheProvider<T>(), which shall return instances of ICacheProvider<T>. We can then call this factory method with the relevant data type (for example the Sale class in the CacheSample.BusinessObject project) to get a instance of ICacheProvider for that type (e.g. call CacheProviderFactory.GetCacheProvider<Sale>() to get the ICacheProvider<Sale> implementation). The C# code for the CacheProviderFactory is shown below: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using CacheSample.Caching.Configuration; namespace CacheSample.Caching { public static class CacheProviderFactory { private static Dictionary<Type, ICacheProvider> cacheProviders = new Dictionary<Type, ICacheProvider>(); private static object syncRoot = new object(); ///<summary> /// Factory method to create or retrieve an implementation of the /// ICacheProvider interface for type <typeparamref name="T"/>. ///</summary> ///<typeparam name="T"> /// The type that this cache provider instance will work with ///</typeparam> ///<returns>An instance of the implementation of ICacheProvider for type ///<typeparamref name="T"/>, as specified by the application /// configuration</returns> public static ICacheProvider<T> GetCacheProvider<T>() { ICacheProvider<T> cacheProvider = null; // Get the Type reference for the type parameter T Type typeOfT = typeof(T); // Lock the access to the cacheProviders dictionary // so multiple threads can work with it lock (syncRoot) { // First check if an instance of the ICacheProvider implementation // already exists in the cacheProviders dictionary for the type T if (cacheProviders.ContainsKey(typeOfT)) cacheProvider = (ICacheProvider<T>)cacheProviders[typeOfT]; else { // There is not already an instance of the ICacheProvider in // cacheProviders for the type T // so we need to create one // Get the Type reference for the application's implementation of // ICacheProvider from the configuration Type cacheProviderType = Type.GetType(CacheProviderConfigurationSection.Current. CacheProviderType); if (cacheProviderType != null) { // Now get a Type reference for the Cache Provider with the // type T generic parameter Type typeOfCacheProviderTypeForT = cacheProviderType.MakeGenericType(new Type[] { typeOfT }); if (typeOfCacheProviderTypeForT != null) { // Create the instance of the Cache Provider and add it to // the cacheProviders dictionary for future use cacheProvider = (ICacheProvider<T>)Activator. CreateInstance(typeOfCacheProviderTypeForT); cacheProviders.Add(typeOfT, cacheProvider); } } } } return cacheProvider; } } } As this code uses Activator.CreateInstance() to create instances of the ICacheProvider<T> implementation, which is a slow process, the factory class maintains a Dictionary of the previously created instances so that a cache provider needs to be created only once for each type. The type of the implementation of ICacheProvider<T> is read from a custom configuration section in the application configuration file, via the CacheProviderConfigurationSection class, which is described below. CacheProviderConfigurationSection Class The implementation of ICacheProvider<T> will be specified in a custom configuration section in the application’s configuration. To handle this create a folder in the CacheSample.Caching project called Configuration, and add a class called CacheProviderConfigurationSection to this folder. This class will extend the System.Configuration.ConfigurationSection class, and will contain a single string property called CacheProviderType. The C# code for this class is shown below: using System; using System.Configuration; namespace CacheSample.Caching.Configuration { internal class CacheProviderConfigurationSection : ConfigurationSection { public static CacheProviderConfigurationSection Current { get { return (CacheProviderConfigurationSection) ConfigurationManager.GetSection("cacheProvider"); } } [ConfigurationProperty("type", IsRequired=true)] public string CacheProviderType { get { return (string)this["type"]; } } } } Adding Data Caching to the Sales Class We now have enough code in place to add caching to the GetSales() method in the CacheSample.BusinessObjects.Sale class, even though we do not yet have an implementation of the ICacheProvider<T> interface. We need to add a reference to the CacheSample.Caching project to CacheSample.BusinessObjects so that we can use the ICacheProvider<T> interface within the GetSales() method. Once the reference is added, we can first create a unique string key based on the method name and the parameter value, so that the same cache key is used for repeated calls to the method with the same parameter values. Then we get an instance of the cache provider for the Sales type, using the CacheProviderFactory, and pass the existing code to retrieve the data from the database as the retrievalMethod delegate in a call to the Cache Provider Fetch() method. The C# code for the modified GetSales() method is shown below: public static IEnumerable<Sale> GetSales(int? highestDayCount) { string cacheKey = string.Format("CacheSample.BusinessObjects.GetSalesWithCache({0})", highestDayCount); return CacheSample.Caching.CacheProviderFactory. GetCacheProvider<Sale>().Fetch(cacheKey, delegate() { List<Sale> sales = new List<Sale>(); SqlParameter highestDayCountParameter = new SqlParameter("@HighestDayCount", SqlDbType.SmallInt); if (highestDayCount.HasValue) highestDayCountParameter.Value = highestDayCount; else highestDayCountParameter.Value = DBNull.Value; string connectionStr = System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager. ConnectionStrings["CacheSample"].ConnectionString; using (SqlConnection sqlConn = new SqlConnection(connectionStr)) using (SqlCommand sqlCmd = sqlConn.CreateCommand()) { sqlCmd.CommandText = "spGetRunningTotals"; sqlCmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure; sqlCmd.Parameters.Add(highestDayCountParameter); sqlConn.Open(); using (SqlDataReader dr = sqlCmd.ExecuteReader()) { while (dr.Read()) { Sale newSale = new Sale(); newSale.DayCount = dr.GetInt16(0); newSale.Sales = dr.GetDecimal(1); newSale.RunningTotal = dr.GetDecimal(2); sales.Add(newSale); } } } return sales; }, null, new TimeSpan(0, 10, 0)); } This example passes the code to retrieve the Sales data from the database to the Cache Provider as an anonymous method, however it could also be written as a lambda. The main advantage of using an anonymous function (method or lambda) is that the code inside the anonymous function can access the parameters passed to the GetSales() method. Finally the absolute expiry is set to null, and the relative expiry set to 10 minutes, to indicate that the cache entry should be removed 10 minutes after the last request for the data. As the ICacheProvider<T> has a Fetch() method that returns IEnumerable<T>, we can simply return the results of the Fetch() method to the caller of the GetSales() method. This should be all that is needed for the GetSales() method to now retrieve data from a cache after the first time the data has be retrieved from the database. Implementing a ASP.NET Cache Provider The final step is to actually implement the ICacheProvider<T> interface, and add the implementation details to the web.config file for the dependency injection. The cache provider implementation needs to have access to System.Web. Therefore it could be placed in the CacheSample.UI project, or in its own project that has a reference to System.Web. Implementing the Cache Provider in a separate project is my favoured approach. Create a new project inside the solution called CacheSample.CacheProvider, and add references to System.Web and CacheSample.Caching to this project. Add a class to the project called AspNetCacheProvider. Make the class a generic class by adding the generic parameter <T> and indicate that the class implements ICacheProvider<T>. The C# code for the AspNetCacheProvider class is shown below: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Web.Caching; using CacheSample.Caching; namespace CacheSample.CacheProvider { public class AspNetCacheProvider<T> : ICacheProvider<T> { #region ICacheProvider<T> Members public T Fetch(string key, Func<T> retrieveData, DateTime? absoluteExpiry, TimeSpan? relativeExpiry) { return FetchAndCache<T>(key, retrieveData, absoluteExpiry, relativeExpiry); } public IEnumerable<T> Fetch(string key, Func<IEnumerable<T>> retrieveData, DateTime? absoluteExpiry, TimeSpan? relativeExpiry) { return FetchAndCache<IEnumerable<T>>(key, retrieveData, absoluteExpiry, relativeExpiry); } #endregion #region Helper Methods private U FetchAndCache<U>(string key, Func<U> retrieveData, DateTime? absoluteExpiry, TimeSpan? relativeExpiry) { U value; if (!TryGetValue<U>(key, out value)) { value = retrieveData(); if (!absoluteExpiry.HasValue) absoluteExpiry = Cache.NoAbsoluteExpiration; if (!relativeExpiry.HasValue) relativeExpiry = Cache.NoSlidingExpiration; HttpContext.Current.Cache.Insert(key, value, null, absoluteExpiry.Value, relativeExpiry.Value); } return value; } private bool TryGetValue<U>(string key, out U value) { object cachedValue = HttpContext.Current.Cache.Get(key); if (cachedValue == null) { value = default(U); return false; } else { try { value = (U)cachedValue; return true; } catch { value = default(U); return false; } } } #endregion } } The two interface Fetch() methods call a private method called FetchAndCache(). This method first checks for a element in the HttpContext.Current.Cache with the specified cache key, and if so tries to cast this to the specified type (either T or IEnumerable<T>). If the cached element is found, the FetchAndCache() method simply returns it. If it is not found in the cache, the method calls the retrievalMethod delegate to get the data from the data source, and then adds this to the HttpContext.Current.Cache. The final step is to add the AspNetCacheProvider class to the relevant custom configuration section in the CacheSample.UI.Web.Config file. To do this there needs to be a <configSections> element added as the first element in <configuration>. This will match a custom section called <cacheProvider> with the CacheProviderConfigurationSection. Then we add a <cacheProvider> element, with a type property set to the fully qualified assembly name of the AspNetCacheProvider class, as shown below: <?xmlversion="1.0"?> <configuration> <configSections> <sectionname="cacheProvider" type="CacheSample.Base.Configuration.CacheProviderConfigurationSection, CacheSample.Base" /> </configSections> <connectionStrings> <addname="CacheSample" connectionString="data source=.\SQLEXPRESS;Integrated Security=SSPI;Initial Catalog=CacheSample" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" /> </connectionStrings> <cacheProvidertype="CacheSample.CacheProvider.AspNetCacheProvider`1, CacheSample.CacheProvider, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null"> </cacheProvider> <system.web> <compilationdebug="true"targetFramework="4.0" /> </system.web> </configuration> One point to note is that the fully qualified assembly name of the AspNetCacheProvider class includes the notation `1 after the class name, which indicates that it is a generic class with a single generic type parameter. The CacheSample.UI project needs to have references added to CacheSample.Caching and CacheSample.CacheProvider so that the actual application is aware of the relevant cache provider implementation. Conclusion After implementing this solution, you should have a working cache provider mechanism, that will allow the middle and data access layers to implement caching support when retrieving data, without any knowledge of the actually caching implementation. If the UI is not ASP.NET based, if for example it is Winforms or WPF, the implementation of ICacheProvider<T> would be written around whatever technology is available. It could even be a standalone caching system that takes full responsibility for adding and removing items from a global store. The next part of this article will show how this caching mechanism may be extended to provide support for cache dependencies, such as the System.Web.Caching.SqlCacheDependency. Another possible extension would be to cache the cache provider implementations instead of storing them in a static Dictionary in the CacheProviderFactory. This would prevent a build up of seldom used cache providers in the application memory, as they could be removed from the cache if not used often enough, although in reality there are probably unlikely to be vast numbers of cache provider implementation instances, as most applications do not have a massive number of business object or model types.

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Connect to Oracle with Visual Studio 2008

- by Tobias Gunn

I was stumped for a little while until running across this article. For those without a background in Oracle development, this was a nice introduction for beginners. http://blogs.msdn.com/kaevans/archive/2009/07/18/connecting-to-oracle-from-visual-studio.aspx

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Silverlight 4, MVVM and Test-Driven Development

- by Martin Hinshelwood

As part of his UK tour Microsoft's Jesse Liberty will be talking in Edinburgh for an evening on Silverlight 4. [Register Now, there are some places left] The Talk MVVM and Silverlight to build test-driven programs Understanding Refactoring and Dependency Injection A Walk through of a non-trivial application The Speaker Jesse Liberty, Silverlight Geek, is a Developer Community Program Manager for Microsoft (US). Lately he has been focused on Component-based, Test-Driven, Cross-platform line-of-business application development, and has led the development of the open source Silverlight HyperVideo Platform. Liberty is the author of over two dozen books, and his blog is a required resource for Silverlight programmers. His twenty years of programming experience include stints as a Distinguished Software Engineer at AT&T; Vice President of Human-Computer Interaction at Citibank and Software Architect at PBS/Learning Link. The Venue We are meeting at Microsoft's offices in Edinburgh in Waterloo Place. This is the building on the corner of North Bridge at the east end of Princes Street. Parking can be found at the nearby Greenside Row car park which is just off Leith Walk (used for the Omni Centre). The venue is approximately 2-3 minutes walk away from Edinburgh Waverly train station. The Agenda 18:30 Doors open 19:00 Welcome 19:10 Part 1 20:00 Break 20:10 Part 2 20:50 Feedback and Prizes 21:00 End [Register Now, there are some places left] Technorati Tags: Silverlight,MVVM,TDD

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Visual Studio 2010 and Target Framework Version

- by Scott Dorman

Almost two years ago, I wrote about a Visual Studio macro that allows you to change the Target Framework version of all projects in a solution. If you don’t know, the Target Framework version is what tells the compiler which version of the .NET Framework to compile against (more information is available here) and can be set to one of the following values: .NET Framework 2.0 .NET Framework 3.0 .NET Framework 3.5 .NET Framework 3.5 Client Profile .NET Framework 4.0 .NET Framework 4.0 Client Profile This can be easily accomplished by editing the project properties: The problem with this approach is that if you need to change a lot of projects at one time it becomes rather unwieldy. One possible solution is to edit the project files by hand in a text editor and change the <TargetFrameworkVersion /> and <TargetFrameworkProfile /> properties to the correct values. For example, for the .NET Framework 4.0 Client Profile, these values would be: <TargetFrameworkVersion>v4.0</TargetFrameworkVersion> <TargetFrameworkProfile>Client</TargetFrameworkProfile> Again, this is not only time consuming but can also be error-prone. The better solution is to automate this through the use of a Visual Studio macro. Since I had already created a macro to do this for Visual Studio 2008, I updated that macro to work with Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. It prompts you for the target framework version you want to set for all of the projects and then loops through each project in the solution and makes the change. If you select one of the Framework versions that support a Client Profile, it will ask if you want to use the Client Profile or the Full Profile. It is smart enough to skip project types that don’t support this property and projects that are already at the correct version. This version also incorporates the changes suggested by George (in the comments). The macro is available on my SkyDrive account. Download it to your <UserProfile>\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\VSMacros80\MyMacros folder, open the Visual Studio Macro IDE (Alt-F11) and add it as an existing item to the “MyMacros” project. I make no guarantees or warranties on this macro. I have tested it on several solutions and projects and everything seems to work and not cause any problems, but, as always, use with caution. Since it is a macro, you have the full source code available to investigate and see what it’s actually doing. If you find any bugs or make any useful changes, please let me know and I’ll update the macro. Technorati Tags: Macros,Visual Studio

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AWS .NET SDK v2: the message-pump pattern

- by Elton Stoneman

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2013/10/11/aws-.net-sdk-v2--the-message-pump-pattern.aspxVersion 2 of the AWS SDK for .NET has had a few pre-release iterations on NuGet and is stable, if a bit lacking in step-by-step guides. There’s at least one big reason to try it out: the SQS queue client now supports asynchronous reads, so you don’t need a clumsy polling mechanism to retrieve messages. The new approach is easy to use, and lets you work with AWS queues in a similar way to the message-pump pattern used in the latest Azure SDK for Service Bus queues and topics. I’ve posted a simple wrapper class for subscribing to an SQS hub on gist here: A wrapper for the SQS client in the AWS SDK for.NET v2, which uses the message-pump pattern. Here’s the core functionality in the subscribe method: private async void Subscribe() { if (_isListening) { var request = new ReceiveMessageRequest { MaxNumberOfMessages = 10 }; request.QueueUrl = QueueUrl; var result = await _sqsClient.ReceiveMessageAsync(request, _cancellationTokenSource.Token); if (result.Messages.Count > 0) { foreach (var message in result.Messages) { if (_receiveAction != null && message != null) { _receiveAction(message.Body); DeleteMessage(message.ReceiptHandle); } } } } if (_isListening) { Subscribe(); } } which you call with something like this: client.Subscribe(x=>Log.Debug(x.Body)); The async SDK call returns when there is something in the queue, and will run your receive action for every message it gets in the batch (defaults to the maximum size of 10 messages per call). The listener will sit there awaiting messages until you stop it with: client.Unsubscribe(); Internally it has a cancellation token which it sets when you call unsubscribe, which cancels any in-flight call to SQS and stops the pump. The wrapper will also create the queue if it doesn’t exist at runtime. The Ensure() method gets called in the constructor so when you first use the client for a queue (sending or subscribing), it will set itself up: if (!Exists()) { var request = new CreateQueueRequest(); request.QueueName = QueueName; var response = _sqsClient.CreateQueue(request); QueueUrl = response.QueueUrl; } The Exists() check has to do make a call to ListQueues on the SNS client, as it doesn’t provide its own method to check if a queue exists. That call also populates the Amazon Resource Name, the unique identifier for this queue, which will be useful later. To use the wrapper, just instantiate and go: var queueClient = new QueueClient(“ProcessWorkflow”); queueClient.Subscribe(x=>Log.Debug(x.Body)); var message = {}; //etc. queueClient.Send(message);

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APress Deal of the Day 14/August/2014 - Software Exorcism

- by TATWORTH

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TATWORTH/archive/2014/08/14/apress-deal-of-the-day-14august2014---software-exorcism.aspxToday’s $10 Deal of the Day from APress at http://www.apress.com/9781430251071 is Software Exorcism! “Software Exorcism discusses tools and techniques for effective and aggressive debugging, gives optimization strategies that appeal to all levels of programmers, and presents in-depth treatments of technical issues with honest assessments. ”

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Silverlight Cream for April 22, 2010 -- #844

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Miroslav Miroslavov, David Anson, Mike Snow, Jason Alderman, Denis Gladkikh, John Papa, Adam Kinney, and CrocusGirl. Shoutout: Mike Snow is moving his blog to Silverlight Tips of The Day... his first is a repeat of number 110 of the last list, but you'll want to bookmark the page. Falling in the 'too cool not to mention' category... Pete Brown posted another MIX10 interview: New Channel 9 Video: Josh Blake on NaturalShow Multi-touch in WPF Adam Kinney announced that the Upgrade to Expression Studio v4 for free – now in writing! From SilverlightCream.com: Visuals staring at the mouse cursor Miroslav Miroslavov at SilverlightShow has a first part post up on the design of the CompleteIT site... going through the 'follow the mouse' effect that is so cool on the main page... with source. Today's DataVisualizationDemos release includes new demos showing off stacked series behavior Falling squarly into the category of "when does he sleep"... David Anson has another Visualization post up today... adding a stacked series and Text-to-Chat sample. Silverlight: Unable to start Debugging. The Silverlight managed debugging package isn’t installed. Mike Snow has a tip up about what to do if you get an "Unable to start debugging" box when you crank up VS ... not a great solution, but it's a solution. Introducing Pillbox for Windows Phone The folks at Veracity definitely have way too much fun with technology :) ... check out the WP7 app that Jason Alderman blogged about... he has a link out to another page with screenshots... oh, AND the code... Export data to Excel from Silverlight/WPF DataGrid Denis Gladkikh demonstrates using COM Interop to export to Excel from both WPF and Silverlight. He discusses isses he had and has all the source for both platforms available. Silverlight TV 21: Silverlight 4 - A Customer's Perspective John Papa has Silverlight TV number 21 up and he's chatting with Franck Jeannin of Ormetis, Ward Bell of IdeaBlade, and Dave Wolf of Cynergy Systems, all presenters in the Keynote at DevConnections. Avatar Mosaic -Experimenting with the Artefact Animator Adam Kinney spent enough time with Artefact Animator to put up a lengthy post about it including his project. Artefact Animator itself is available on CodePlex, and Adam has the link... this looks like good stuff. Windows Phone 7 Design Notes – Part2: Metro + Adrian Frutiger CrocusGirl continues her WP7 Metro discussion with a great long post on background she's researched and some of her own work with typography... a great read. 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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Massive Silverlight Giveaway! DevExpress , Syncfusion, Crypto Obfuscator and SL Spy!

- by mbcrump

Oh my, have we grown! Maybe I should change the name to Multiple Silverlight Giveaways. So far, my Silverlight giveaways have been such a success that I’m going to be able to give away more than one Silverlight product every month. Last month, we gave away 3 great products. 1) ComponentOne Silverlight Controls 2) ComponentOne XAP Optimizer (with obfuscation) and 3) Silverlight Spy. This month, we will give away 4 great Silverlight products and have 4 different winners. This way the Silverlight community can grow with more than just one person winning all the prizes. This month we will be giving away: DevExpress Silverlight Controls – Over 50+ Silverlight Controls Syncfusion User Interface Edition - Create stunning line of business silverlight applications with a wide range of components including a high performance grid, docking manager, chart, gauge, scheduler and much more. Crypto Obfuscator – Works for all .NET including Silverlight/Windows Phone 7. Silverlight Spy – provides a license EVERY month for this giveaway. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Win a FREE developer’s license of one of the products listed above! 4 winners will be announced on April 1st, 2011! To be entered into the contest do the following things: Subscribe to my feed. – Use Google Reader, email or whatever is best for you. Leave a comment below with a valid email account (I WILL NOT share this info with anyone.) Retweet the following : I just entered to win free #Silverlight controls from @mbcrump . Register here: http://mcrump.me/fTSmB8 ! Don’t change the URL because this will allow me to track the users that Tweet this page. Don’t forget to visit each of the vendors sites because they made this possible. MichaelCrump.Net provides Silverlight Giveaways every month. You can also see the latest giveaway by bookmarking http://giveaways.michaelcrump.net . ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DevExpress Silverlight Controls Let’s take a quick look at some of the software that is provided in this giveaway. Before we get started with the Silverlight Controls, here is a couple of links to bookmark for the DevExpress Silverlight Controls: The Live Demos of the Silverlight Controls is located here. Great Video Tutorials of the Silverlight Controls are here. One thing that I liked about the DevExpress is how easy it was to find demos of each control. After you install the controls the following Program Group appears complete with “demos” that include full-source. So, the first question that you may ask is, “What is included?” Here is the official list below. I wanted to show several of the controls that I think developers will use the most. The Book – Very rich animation between switching pages. Very easy to add your own images and custom text. The Menu – This is another control that just looked great. You can easily add images to the menu items with a few lines of XAML. The Window / Dialog Box – You can use this control to make a very beautiful “Wizard” to help your users navigate between pages. This is useful in setup or installation. Calculator – This would be useful for any type of Banking app. Also a first that I’ve seen from a 3rd party Control company. DatePicker – This controls feels a lot smoother than the one provided by Microsoft. It also provides the ability to “Clear” the selection. Overall the DevExpress Silverlight Controls feature a lot of quality controls that you should check out. You can go ahead and download a trial version of it right now by clicking here. If you win the contest you can simply enter your registration key and continue using the product without reinstalling. Syncfusion User Interface Edition Before we get started with the Syncfusion User Interface Edition, here is a couple of links to bookmark. The Live Demos can be found here. You can download a demo of it now at http://www.syncfusion.com/downloads/evalstart. After you install the Syncfusion, you can view the dashboard to run locally installed samples. You may also download the documentation to your local machine if needed. Since the name of the package is “User Interface Edition”, I decided to share several samples that struck me as “awesome”. Dashboard Gauges – I was very impressed with the various gauges they have included. The digital clock also looks very impressive. Diagram – The diagrams are also very easy to build. In the sample project below you can drag/drop the shapes onto the content pane. More complex lines like the Bezier lines are also easy to create using Syncfusion. Scheduling – Another strong component was the Scheduling with built-in support for Themes. Tools – If all of that wasn’t enough, it also comes with a nice pack of essential tools. Syncfusion has a nice variety of Silverlight Controls that you should check out. You can go ahead and download a trial version of it right now by clicking here. Crypto Obfuscator The following feature set is what is important to me in an Obfuscator since I am a Silverlight/WP7 Developer: And thankfully this is what you get in Crypto Obfuscator. You can download a trial version right now if you want to go ahead and play with it. Let’s spend a few moments taking a look at the application. After you have installed Crypto Obfuscator you will see the following screen: After you click on Assemblies you have the option to add your .XAP file in: I went ahead and loaded my .xap file from a Silverlight Application. At this point, you can simply save your project and hit “Obfuscate” and your done. You don’t have to mess with any of the other settings if you don’t want too. Of course, you can change the settings and add obfuscation rules, watermarks and signing if you wish. After Obfuscation, it looks like this in .NET Reflector: I was trying to browse through methods and it actually crashed Reflector. This confirms the level of protection the obfuscator is providing. If this were a commercial application that my team built, I would have a huge smile on my face right now. Crypto Obfuscator is a great product and I hope you will spend the time learning more about it. Silverlight Spy Silverlight Spy is a runtime inspector tool that will tell you pretty much everything that is going on with the application. Basically, you give it a URL that contains a Silverlight application and you can explore the element tree, events, xaml and so much more. This has already been reviewed on MichaelCrump.net. _________________________________________________________________________________________ Thanks for reading and don’t forget to leave a comment below in order to win one of the four prizes available! Subscribe to my feed

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Data Connection Library in SharePoint Server 2010

- by Wayne

What is a Data Connection Library in SharePoint Server 2010? A Data Connection Library in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 is a library that can contain two kinds of data connections: an Office Data Connection (ODC) file or a Universal Data Connection (UDC) file. Microsoft InfoPath 2010 uses data connections that comply with the Universal Data Connection (UDC) file schema and typically have either a *.udcx or *.xml file name extension. Data sources described by these data connections are stored on the server and can be used in standard form templates and browser-enabled form templates. How to create a SharePoint Server Data Connection Library? 1. Browse to a SharePoint Server 2010 site on which you have at least Design permissions. If you are on the root site, create a new site before you continue with the next step. 2. On the Site Actions menu, click More Options. 3. On the Create page, click Library under Filter By, and then click Data Connection Library. 4. On the right side of the Create page, type a name for the library, and then click the Create button. 5. Copy the URL of the new data connection library. How to create a new data connection file in InfoPath? 1. Open InfoPath Designer 2010, click Blank Form, and then click Design Form. 2. On the Data tab, click Data Connections, and then click Add. 3. In the Data Connection Wizard, click Create a new connection to, click Receive data, and then click Next. 4. Click the kind of data source that you are connecting to, such as Database, Web service, or SharePoint library or list, and then click Next. 5. Complete the remaining steps in the Data Connection Wizard to configure your data connection, and then click Finish to return to the Data Connections dialog box. 6. In the Data Connections dialog box, click Convert to Connection File. 7. In the Convert Data Connection dialog box, enter the URL of the data connection library that you previously copied (delete "Forms/AllItems.aspx" and anything following it from the URL), enter a name for the data connection file at the end of the URL, and then click OK. It will take a few moments to convert and save the data connection file to the library. 8. Confirm that the data connection was converted successfully by examining the Details section of the Data Connections dialog box while the name of the converted data connection is selected. 9. Browse to the SharePoint data connection library, click the drop-down next to the name of the data connection, click Approve/Reject, click Approved, and then click OK. Take advantage of SharePoint Data Connection Library and other useful features of SharePoint family of products that include, SharePoint Foundation 2010, MOSS 2007 and free SharePoint templates or web parts.

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LINQ to Twitter Queries with LINQPad

- by Joe Mayo

LINQPad is a popular utility for .NET developers who use LINQ a lot. In addition to standard SQL queries, LINQPad also supports other types of LINQ providers, including LINQ to Twitter. The following sections explain how to set up LINQPad for making queries with LINQ to Twitter. LINQPad comes in a couple versions and this example uses LINQPad4, which runs on the .NET Framework 4.0. 1. The first thing you'll need to do is set up a reference to the LinqToTwitter.dll. From the Query menu, select query properties. Click the Browse button and find the LinqToTwitter.dll binary. You should see something similar to the Query Properties window below. 2. While you have the query properties window open, add the namespace for the LINQ to Twitter types. Click the Additional Namespace Imports tab and type in LinqToTwitter. The results are shown below: 3. The default query type, when you first start LINQPad, is C# Expression, but you'll need to change this to support multiple statements. Change the Language dropdown, on the Main window, to C# Statements. 4. To query LINQ to Twitter, instantiate a TwitterContext, by typing the following into the LINQPad Query window: var ctx = new TwitterContext(); Note: If you're getting syntax errors, go back and make sure you did steps #2 and #3 properly. 5. Next, add a query, but don't materialize it, like this: var tweets = from tweet in ctx.Status where tweet.Type == StatusType.Public select new { tweet.Text, tweet.Geo, tweet.User }; 6. Next, you want the output to be displayed in the LINQPad grid, so do a Dump, like this: tweets.Dump(); The following image shows the final results: That was an unauthenticated query, but you can also perform authenticated queries with LINQ to Twitter's support of OAuth. Here's an example that uses the PinAuthorizer (type this into the LINQPad Query window): var auth = new PinAuthorizer { Credentials = new InMemoryCredentials { ConsumerKey = "", ConsumerSecret = "" }, UseCompression = true, GoToTwitterAuthorization = pageLink => Process.Start(pageLink), GetPin = () => { // this executes after user authorizes, which begins with the call to auth.Authorize() below. Console.WriteLine("\nAfter you authorize this application, Twitter will give you a 7-digit PIN Number.\n"); Console.Write("Enter the PIN number here: "); return Console.ReadLine(); } }; // start the authorization process (launches Twitter authorization page). auth.Authorize(); var ctx = new TwitterContext(auth, "https://api.twitter.com/1/", "https://search.twitter.com/"); var tweets = from tweet in ctx.Status where tweet.Type == StatusType.Public select new { tweet.Text, tweet.Geo, tweet.User }; tweets.Dump(); This code is very similar to what you'll find in the LINQ to Twitter downloadable source code solution, in the LinqToTwitterDemo project. For obvious reasons, I changed the value assigned to ConsumerKey and ConsumerSecret, which you'll have to obtain by visiting http://dev.twitter.com and registering your application. One tip, you'll probably want to make this easier on yourself by creating your own DLL that encapsulates all of the OAuth logic and then call a method or property on you custom class that returns a fully functioning TwitterContext. This will help avoid adding all this code every time you want to make a query. Now, you know how to set up LINQPad for LINQ to Twitter, perform unauthenticated queries, and perform queries with OAuth. Joe

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Running Teamsite User Admin tool IWUSERADM.exe from ASP.NET

- by Narendra Tiwari

It has really been a head scratching task for me. I 've tried many options but nothing worked. Finally I found a workaround on google to achive this by TaskScheduler. PROBLEM When we run Teamsite user administration command line tool IWUSERADM.exe though ASP.Net it gives following error: Application popup: cmd.exe - Application Error : The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000142). Click on OK to terminate the application. CAUSE No specific cause, it seems to be a bug, supposed to be resolved with this Microsoft patch http://support.microsoft.com/kb/960266. and there is nothing related to permission issue, y web application is impersonated with an administrator account. off course running a bat file from dmin account is a potential secury threat but for this scenario lets conifned our discussion to run the command line tool. RESOLUTION I have not tried this patch as I have not permitted to run this patch on server. Below are the steps to achive the requirement. 1/ Create a batch file which runs the IWUSERADM.exe. echo - Add Teamsite User CD E:\Appli\GN00\iw-home\bin iwuseradm add-user %1 2/ Temporarily create a schedule task and run the .bat file by scheduled task by ASP.Net code using TaskScheduler http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/tsnewlib.aspx. 3/ Here is the function: private int AddTeamsiteUser(string strBatchFilePath, string strUser) { //Get a ScheduledTasks object for the local computer. ScheduledTasks st = new ScheduledTasks(); // Create a task Task t; try{ t = st.CreateTask("~AddTeamsiteUser"); } catch { throw new Exception("Schedule Task ~AddTeamsiteUser already exist."); } t.SetAccountInformation(yourLogin, yourPassword); //Set the account under which the task should run. t.Save(); t.Run(); Thread.Sleep(2000); //for sync issue //Remove the scheduled task st.DeleteTask("~AddTeamsiteUser"); return t.ExitCode; Below are few resources related to the above scenario:- - Task Scheduler Class Library for .NET http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/tsnewlib.aspx - Run a .BAT file from ASP.NET http://codebetter.com/blogs/brendan.tompkins/archive/2004/05/13/13484.aspx - TaskScheduler Class http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.threading.tasks.taskscheduler.aspx - Application Hangs whle running iwuseradm.exe through ASP.Net http://bytes.com/topic/asp-net/answers/733098-system-diagnostics-process-hangs t.ApplicationName = strBatchFilePath; t.Parameters = strUser; t.Comment = "Adding user to Teamsite Application"

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Links and code from session on Entity Framework 4, Parallel and C# 4.0 new features

- by Eric Nelson

Last week (12th May 2010) I did a session in the city on lot of the new .NET 4.0 Stuff. My demo code and links below. Code Parallel demos http://gist.github.com/364522 C# 4.0 new features http://gist.github.com/403826 EF4 Links Entity Framework 4 Resources http://bit.ly/ef4resources Entity Framework Team Blog http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet Entity Framework Design Blog http://blogs.msdn.com/efdesign/ Parallel Links Parallel Computing Dev Center http://msdn.com/concurrency Code samples http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ParExtSamples Managed blog http://blogs.msdn.com/pfxteam Tools blog http://blogs.msdn.com/visualizeparallel C# 4.0 New features http://bit.ly/baq3aU New in .NET 4.0 Coevolution http://bit.ly/axglst New in C# 4.0 http://bit.ly/bG1U2Y

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Kendo UI Mobile with Knockout for Master-Detail Views

- by Steve Michelotti

Lately I’ve been playing with Kendo UI Mobile to build iPhone apps. It’s similar to jQuery Mobile in that they are both HTML5/JavaScript based frameworks for buildings mobile apps. The primary thing that drew me to investigate Kendo UI was its innate ability to adaptively render a native looking app based on detecting the device it’s currently running on. In other words, it will render to look like a native iPhone app if it’s running on an iPhone and it will render to look like a native Droid app if it’s running on a Droid. This is in contrast to jQuery Mobile which looks the same on all devices and, therefore, it can never quite look native for whatever device it’s running on. My first impressions of Kendo UI were great. Using HTML5 data-* attributes to define “roles” for UI elements is easy, the rendering looked great, and the basic navigation was simple and intuitive. However, I ran into major confusion when trying to figure out how to “correctly” build master-detail views. Since I was already very family with KnockoutJS, I set out to use that framework in conjunction with Kendo UI Mobile to build the following simple scenario: I wanted to have a simple “Task Manager” application where my first screen just showed a list of tasks like this: Then clicking on a specific task would navigate to a detail screen that would show all details of the specific task that was selected: Basic navigation between views in Kendo UI is simple. The href of an <a> tag just needs to specify a hash tag followed by the ID of the view to navigate to as shown in this jsFiddle (notice the href of the <a> tag matches the id of the second view): Direct link to jsFiddle: here. That is all well and good but the problem I encountered was: how to pass data between the views? Specifically, I need the detail view to display all the details of whichever task was selected. If I was doing this with my typical technique with KnockoutJS, I know exactly what I would do. First I would create a view model that had my collection of tasks and a property for the currently selected task like this: 1: function ViewModel() { 2: var self = this; 3: self.tasks = ko.observableArray(data); 4: self.selectedTask = ko.observable(null); 5: } Then I would bind my list of tasks to the unordered list - I would attach a “click” handler to each item (each <li> in the unordered list) so that it would select the “selectedTask” for the view model. The problem I found is this approach simply wouldn’t work for Kendo UI Mobile. It completely ignored the click handlers that I was trying to attach to the <a> tags – it just wanted to look at the href (at least that’s what I observed). But if I can’t intercept this, then *how* can I pass data or any context to the next view? The only thing I was able to find in the Kendo documentation is that you can pass query string arguments on the view name you’re specifying in the href. This enabled me to do the following: Specify the task ID in each href – something like this: <a href=”#taskDetail?id=3></a> Attach an “init method” (via the “data-show” attribute on the details view) that runs whenever the view is activated Inside this “init method”, grab the task ID passed from the query string to look up the item from my view model’s list of tasks in order to set the selected task I was able to get all that working with about 20 lines of JavaScript as shown in this jsFiddle. If you click on the Results tab, you can navigate between views and see the the detail screen is correctly binding to the selected item: Direct link to jsFiddle: here. With all that being done, I was very happy to get it working with the behavior I wanted. However, I have no idea if that is the “correct” way to do it or if there is a “better” way to do it. I know that Kendo UI comes with its own data binding framework but my preference is to be able to use (the well-documented) KnockoutJS since I’m already familiar with that framework rather than having to learn yet another new framework. While I think my solution above is probably “acceptable”, there are still a couple of things that bug me about it. First, it seems odd that I have to loop through my items to *find* my selected item based on the ID that was passed on the query string - normally, with Knockout I can just refer directly to my selected item from where it was used. Second, it didn’t feel exactly right that I had to rely on the “data-show” method of the details view to set my context – normally with Knockout, I could just attach a click handler to the <a> tag that was actually clicked by the user in order to set the “selected item.” I’m not sure if I’m being too picky. I know there are many people that have *way* more expertise in Kendo UI compared to me – I’d be curious to know if there are better ways to achieve the same results.

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Silverlight Cream for May 18, 2010 -- #864

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Jesse Liberty, Chris Koenig, Kyle McClellan, Kunal Chowdhury(-2-), Tim Heuer, and Jonathan van de Veen. Shoutout: René Schulte has posted a SLARToolkit Beginner's Guide Erik Mork and the Sparkling Podcast crew posted Silverlight Week – Silverlight Android? John Papa opens up a dialog: Ask the Experts on Silverlight TV ... get your questions answered! From SilverlightCream.com: Windows Phone 7 For Silverlight Programmers Jesse Liberty's starting a series on WP7, so you obviously don't want to miss this... source, commentary, external links, how-to's... what more could you ask for?? WP7 Part 3: Navigation Chris Koenig is revamping his WP7 application to use Community Megaphone instead of Nerd Dinner and in this episode 3 he's looking into Navigation ... definitely good stuff here. RIA Services Authentication Out-Of-Browser Kyle McClellan has code up demonstrating how to get around the fact that the Browser networking stack handles cookies differently than the client networking stack used OOB, and achieve forms authentication OOB. How to work with the Silverlight BusyIndicator? Kunal Chowdhury has a post up talking about the busy indicator and how to use it to show an active indicator while disabling other content. Drag and Drop Operation in Silverlight ListBox In a second entry, Kunal Chowdhury has a nice long post displaying drag-and-drop within and between ListBox controls. Silverlight 4 Tools, WCF RIA Services and Themes Released As usual, Tim Heuer has a great post up about the new releases not only for those with 'clean' machines, but also instructions for those that have been playing along. Advanced printing in Silverlight 4 Just after a post on printing yesterday, Jonathan van de Veen has a post up at SilverlightShow on printing as well, and is demonstrating fitting the text to the page and printing multiple pages. 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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Why I’m Getting an iPad

- by andrewbrust

I have never purchased an Apple product in my life. That’s a “true fact.” And, for that matter, the last Apple product I really wanted was an Apple IIe, back in the 1980s. I couldn’t afford it though (I was in high school), so I got a Commodore 64 instead…it had the same microprocessor, after all. If the iPhone were on Verizon, I probably would have picked one up in December, when I got my Droid. And if the iPod Touch worked with my Napster subscription (which of course it does not, but my Sonos does) I might have picked on of those instead. That’s three strikes, but Apple’s not out. I’ve decided I want the iPad. Why? Well, to start with, my birthday is March 31st…the iPad comes out on April 3rd, and my wife wanted to know what to get me. Also, my house is a 7-minute walk from the Apple Store on West 14th Street in Manhattan. This makes it easy to get my pre-ordered device on launch day, and get home quickly with it. Oh, and I agreed to write an article for Redmond Magazine, the fee for which will pay for the device…that way the birthday present doesn’t have to be an extravagant expense. Plus, I’m a contrarian, so I want to buy the one device from Apple that the fanboys have actually panned. Think those are bad reasons? How about this: I want to experience iPhone and iPad development and, although my app will probably never hit the App Store and run on the actual device, I still think owning one will help me develop something better. i want to see if the slate form factor has good business usage scenarios. I want to see if Business Intelligence technology on a device like this can work. Imagine a dashboard on this thing. And, for the consumer experience, I really want a touch device on which I can surf the Web while I’m in the kitchen, or on the couch. I don’t want the small form factor of my phone, I don’t want to use my TV, and I don’t want a keyboard that will get dirty or in my way. I don’t want to watch movies on it (my TV is good for that), so I don’t care that the iPad has a 4:3 screen. I don’t want to read books on it, so I don’t care that the display is backlit LCD, rather than eInk. But really what I want is to understand, first hand, why people have such brand loyalty to Apple. I know the big reasons; I’m not detached from society. But I want to know the subtle points of what Apple does really well, and also what they do poorly. And I’d like to know, once and for all, if Microsoft can beat Apple, if Microsoft can think the right way to beat Apple and if Microsoft should even try to beat Apple. I expect to share my thoughts on these questions, as they develop.

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Tell me what’s wrong! – An XNA sample demonstrating exception handling and reporting in

- by George Clingerman

I’ve always enjoyed using Nick Gravelyn’s exception handling in all of my games. You’re always going to encounter those unhandled exception that your players are going to ferret out and having a method to display them rather than just crashing to the dashboard is definitely more of an elegant solution. But the other day I got to thinking…what if we could do more? What if instead of just displaying the error, we could encourage the players to send us the error. So I started playing with that an expanding upon Nick’s sample code to see what I could come up with. I got close to what I envisioned, but unfortunately there were some limitations to just what the XNA API could do. In my head I was picturing the players hitting “Send Message” and a 360 message would just be sent to the XBLIG developer. Unfortunately, you can only send messages in an XNA game to someone you’re currently in a network session with. Since I didn’t want to have a 360 server running all the time, virally connecting to players just to get error messages, I did the next best thing and just open up a 360 message and encourage them to manually enter the gamertag. Maybe someday we’ll be able to do that a little better, but this works for now. In the sample, players can hit the “A” button or key to generate in an exception. If the debugger is not attached, then the Exception message screen will be shown explaining what has happened and giving the player a chance to send a 360 message to the gamertag provided or maybe even just send an email. Nick’s code has been changed just a bit. It now accepts any PlayerIndex (no longer hard coded to just PlayerIndex.One) and it no longer uses a MessageBox to get the users selection. The code has also been modified so that it works both for the 360 and for the PC. Check out “Tell me what’s wrong!” and let me know if you have any thoughts or suggestions. I really do appreciate the feedback.

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