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• Silverlight Cream for February 13, 2011 -- #1046

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Loek van den Ouweland, Colin Eberhardt, Rudi Grobler, Joost van Schaik, Mike Taulty(-2-, -3-), Deborah Kurata, David Kelley, Peter Foot, Samuel Jack(-2-), and WindowsPhoneGeek(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight Simple MVVM Commanding" Deborah Kurata WP7: "WP7 CustomInputPrompt control with Cancel button" WindowsPhoneGeek Expression Blend: "Silverlight Templated Image Button with two images" Loek van den Ouweland Shoutouts: Dave Campbell posted a write-up about the project he's on and the use of Sterling: Sterling Object-Oriented Database for ISO 1.0 Released!... Also see Jeremy Likness' post on the 1.0 release: Sterling Object-Oriented Database 1.0 RTM Not necessarily Silverlight, but darn cool, a great control by Sasha Barber: WPF : A Weird 3d based control snoutholder announced new content: Windows Phone 7 QuickStarts Live! From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight Templated Image Button with two images Loek van den Ouweland has a video tutorial up for creating an ImageButton with a hover state... Expression Blend coolness, and check out the external links he has to their training site. Windows Phone 7 Performance Measurements – Emulator vs. Hardware Colin Eberhardt's latest is a popular post comparing performance metrics between the WP7 emulator and a real device. Mileage may vary, but I'm pretty sure the overall results are conculsive, and should help the way you view your app as you're building in the emulator. WP7: WebClient vs HttpWebRequest Rudi Grobler's latest is a discussion of WebClient and HttpWebRequest, gives coding examples of each plus discussion of why you may choose one over the other... and pay attention to his comment about mobile providers. A Blendable Windows Phone 7 / Silverlight clipping behavior Joost van Schaik posted this WP7/Silverlight clipping behavior he developed because all the other solutions were not blendable. Another really useful piece of code from Joost! Blend Bits 22–Being Stylish Mike Taulty has 3 more episodes in his Blend Bits series... first up is on one Styles... explicit, implicit, inheriting... you name it, he's covering it! Blend Bits 23–Templating Part 1 MIke Taulty then has the beginning of a series within his Blend Bits series on Templating. This is something you just have to either bite the bullet and go with Blend to do, or consume someone else's work. Mike shows us how to do it ourself by tweaking the visual aspects of a checkbox Blend Bits 24–Templating Part 2 In part 2 of the Templating series, Mike Taulty digs deeper into Blend and cracks open the Listbox control to take a bunch of the inner elements out for a spin... fun stuff and great tutorial, Mike! Silverlight Simple MVVM Commanding Deborah Kurata has another great MVVM post up... if you don't have your head wrapped around commanding yet, this is a good place to start that process... VB and C# as always. App Development for Windows Phone 7 101 David Kelley goes through the basics of producing a WP7 app both from the Silverlight and XNA side... good info and good external links to get you going. Copyable TextBlock for Windows Phone Peter Foot takes a look at the Copy/Paste functionality in WP7 and how to apply it to a TextBlock... which is NOT an out-of-the-box solution. How to deploy to, and debug, multiple instances of the Windows Phone 7 emulator Samuel Jack has a couple posts up this week... first is this clever one on running multiple copies of the emulator at once... too cool for debugging a multi-player game! Multi-player enabling my Windows Phone 7 game: Day 3 – The Server Side Samuel Jack's latest is a detailed look at his day 3 adventure of taking his multi-player game to WP7... lots of information and external links... what do you say, give him another day? :) WP7 CustomInputPrompt control with Cancel button WindowsPhoneGeek has a couple more posts up... first is this "CustomInputPrompt" control based off the InputPrompt from Coding4Fun. Implementing Windows Phone 7 DataTemplateSelector and CustomDataTemplateSelector In his latest post, WindowsPhoneGeek writes a DataTemplateSelector to allow different data templates for different list elements based on the type of the element. 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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• VS 2010: SP1

  - by xamlnotes

  I posted this yesterday but had the wrong link at the bottom. SP1 for VS 2010 just hit the web today. Check it out at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/983509/en-usHTH This should fix lots of big and little things such as startup time, bugs and more. Plus there are tons of features in there too for web, xaml, and other application types.  I am really excited about the unit testing and load testing features that were added. Theres also an update for .Net 4 framework. And check out the new Silverlight performance wizard. Lots of really cool stuff. Get it today! For now I looks like only MSDN subscribers can download it. Download it from here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/default

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• PlanetQuest and the start of a new project!

  - by TATWORTH

  At the Planet Quest http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/ web site there is an interesting page on the number of planets detected around other stars. There is a link to a page at http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/widget.cfm for an applet to poll for this information. I downloaded the applet but had no wish to install it. Instead I viewed it in Notepad++ and found that it contacted http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/atlas/xml/planetstats.cfm to get data on the latest discovery. I have amedned the CommonData project and have wrote a class in that to poll for the information. I have amended the CommonData project and have wrote a class in that to poll for the information.  That class and its unit test will form the basis for a new project.

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• VS 2010: SP1

  - by xamlnotes

  SP1 for VS 2010 just hit the web today. Check it out at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/983509/en-usHTH This should fix lots of big and little things such as startup time, bugs and more. Plus there are tons of features in there too for web, xaml, and other application types.  I am really excited about the unit testing and load testing features that were added. Theres also an update for .Net 4 framework. And check out the new Silverlight performance wizard. Lots of really cool stuff. Get it today! Download it from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=11ea69cb-cf12-4842-a3d7-b32a1e5642e2

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• Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Tips and Tricks-Part 2: Key Shortcuts

  - by ToStringTheory

  Ask anyone that knows me, and they will confirm that I hate the mouse.  This isn’t because I deny affection to objects that don’t look like their mammalian-named self, but rather for a much more simple and not-insane reason: I have terrible eyesight.  Introduction Thanks to a degenerative eye disease known as Choroideremia, I have learned to rely more on the keyboard which I can feel digital/static positions of keys relative to my fingers, than the much more analog/random position of the mouse.  Now, I would like to share some of the keyboard shortcuts with you now, as I believe that they not only increase my productivity, but yours as well once you know them (if you don’t already of course)...  I share one of my biggest tips for productivity in the conclusion at the end. Visual Studio Key Shortcuts Global Editor Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are available from almost any application running in Windows, however are many times forgotten. Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality Ctrl + X Cut This shortcut works without a selection. If nothing is selected, the entire line that the caret is on is cut from the editor. Ctrl + C Copy This shortcut works without a selection. If nothing is selected, the entire line that the caret is on is copied from the editor. Ctrl + V Paste If you copied an entire line by the method above, the data is pasted in the line above the current caret line. Ctrl + Shift + V Next Clipboard Element Cut/Copy multiple things, and then hit this combo repeatedly to switch to the next clipboard item when pasting. Ctrl + Backspace Delete Previous Will delete the previous word from the editor directly before the caret. If anything is selected, will just delete that. Ctrl + Del Delete Next Word Will delete the next word/space from the editor directly after the caret. If anything is selected, will just delete that. Shift + Del Delete Focused Line Will delete the line from the editor that the caret is on. If something is selected, will just delete that. Ctrl + ? or Ctrl + ? Left/Right by Word This will move the caret left or right by word or special character boundary. Holding Shift will also select the word. Ctrl + F Quick Find Either the Quick Find panel, or the search bar if you have the Productivity Power Tools installed. Ctrl + Shift + F Find in Solution Opens up the 'Find in Files' window, allowing you to search your solution, as well as using regex for pattern matching. F2 Rename File... While not debugging, selecting a file in the solution explorer\navigator and pressing F2 allows you to rename the selected file. Global Application Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are available from almost any application running in Windows, however are many times forgotten... Again... Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality Ctrl + N New File dialog Opens up the 'New File' dialog to add a new file to the current directory in the Solution\Project. Ctrl + O Open File dialog Opens up the 'Open File' dialog to open a file in the editor, not necessarily in the solution. Ctrl + S Save File dialog Saves the currently focused editor tab back to your HDD/SSD. Ctrl + Shift + S Save All... Quickly save all open/edited documents back to your disk. Ctrl + Tab Switch Panel\Tab Tapping this combo switches between tabs quickly. Holding down Ctrl when hitting tab will bring up a chooser window. Building Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are focused on building and running a solution. These are not usable when the IDE is in Debug mode, as the shortcut changes by context. Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality Ctrl + Shift + B Build Solution Starts a build process on the solution according to the current build configuration manager settings. Ctrl + Break Cancel a Building Solution Will cancel a build operation currently in progress. Good for long running builds when you think of one last change. F5 Start Debugging Will build the solution if needed and launch debugging according to the current configuration manager settings. Ctrl + F5 Start Without Debugger Will build the solution if needed and launch the startup project without attaching a debugger. Debugging Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are used when debugging a solution. Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality F5 Continue Execution Continues execution of code until the next breakpoint. Ctrl + Alt + Break Pause Execution Pauses the program execution. Shift + F5 Stop Debugging Stops the current debugging session. NOTE: Web apps will still continue processing after stopping the debugger. Keep this in mind if working on code such as credit card processing. Ctrl + Shift + F5 Restart Debugging Stops the current debugging session and restarts the debugging session from the beginning. F9 Place Breakpoint Toggles/Places a breakpoint in the editor on the current line. Set a breakpoint in condensed code by highlighting the statement first. F10 Step Over Statement When debugging, executes all code in methods/properties on the current line until the next line. F11 Step Into Statement When debugging, steps into a method call so you can walk through the code executed there (if available). Ctrl + Alt + I Immediate Window Open the Immediate Window to execute commands when execution is paused. Navigation Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are used for navigating in the IDE or editor panel. Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality F4 Properties Panel Opens the properties panel for the selected item in the editor/designer/solution navigator (context driven). F12 Go to Definition Press F12 with the caret on a member to navigate to its declaration. With the Productivity tools, Ctrl + Click works too. Ctrl + K Ctrl + T View Call Hierarchy View the call hierarchy of the member the caret is on. Great for going through n-tier solutions and interface implementations! Ctrl + Alt + B Breakpoint Window View the breakpoint window to manage breakpoints and their advanced options. Allows easy toggling of breakpoints. Ctrl + Alt + L Solution Navigator Open the solution explorer panel. Ctrl + Alt + O Output Window View the output window to see build\general output from Visual Studio. Ctrl + Alt + Enter Live Web Preview Only available with the Web Essential plugin. Launches the auto-updating Preview panel. Testing Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are used for running tests in the IDE. Please note, Visual Studio 2010 is all about context. If your caret is within a test method when you use one of these combinations, the combination will apply to that test. If your caret is within a test class, it will apply to that class. If the caret is outside of a test class, it will apply to all tests. Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality Ctrl + R T Run Test(s) Run all tests in the current context without a debugger attached. Breakpoints will not be stopped on. Ctrl + R Ctrl + T Run Test(s) (Debug) Run all tests in the current context with a debugger attached. This allows you to use breakpoints. Substitute A for T from the preceding combos to run/debug ALL tests in the current context. Substitute Y for T from the preceding combos to run/debug ALL impacted/covering tests for a method in the current context. Advanced Editor Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are used for more advanced editing in the editor window. Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality Shift + Alt + ? Shift + Alt + ? Multiline caret up/down Use this combo to edit multiple lines at once. Not too many uses for it, but once in a blue moon one comes along. Ctrl + Alt + Enter Insert Line Above Inserts a blank line above the line the caret is currently on. No need to be at end or start of line, so no cutting off words/code. Ctrl + K Ctrl + C Comment Selection Comments the current selection out of compilation. Ctrl + K Ctrl + U Uncomment Selection Uncomments the current selection into compilation. Ctrl + K Ctrl + D Format Document Automatically formats the document into a structured layout. Lines up nodes or code into columns intelligently. Alt + ? Alt + ? Code line up/down *Use this combo to move a line of code up or down quickly. Great for small rearrangements of code. *Requires the Productivity Power pack from Microsoft. Conclusion This list is by no means meant to be exhaustive, but these are the shortcuts I use regularly every hour/minute of the day. There are still 100s more in Visual Studio that you can discover through the configuration window, or by tooltips. Something that I started doing months ago seems to have interest in my office.. In my last post, I talked about how I hated a cluttered UI. One of the ways that I aimed to resolve that was by systematically cleaning up the toolbars week by week. First day, I removed ALL icons that I already knew shortcuts to, or would never use them (Undo in a toolbar?!). Then, every week from that point on, I make it a point to remove an icon/two from the toolbar and make an effort to remember its key combination. I gain extra space in the toolbar area, AND become more productive at the same time! I hope that you found this article interesting or at least somewhat informative.. Maybe a shortcut or two you didn't know. I know some of them seem trivial, but I often see people going to the edit menu for Copy/Paste... Thought a refresher might be helpful!

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• CoffeeScript Test Framework

  - by Liam McLennan

  Tonight the Brisbane Alt.NET group is doing a coding dojo. I am hoping to talk someone into pairing with me to solve the kata in CoffeeScript. CoffeeScript is an awesome language, half javascript, half ruby, that compiles to javascript. To assist with tonight’s dojo I wrote the following micro test framework for CoffeeScript: <html> <body> <div> <h2>Test Results:</h2> <p class='results' /> </div> <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/coffeescript"> # super simple test framework test: { write: (s) -> $('.results').append(s + '<br/>') assert: (b, message...) -> test.write(if b then "pass" else "fail: " + message) tests: [] exec: () -> for t in test.tests test.write("<br/><b>$t.name</b>") t.func() } # add some tests test.tests.push { name: "First Test" func: () -> test.assert(true) } test.tests.push { name: "Another Test" func: () -> test.assert(false, "You loose") } # run them test.exec(test.tests) </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="coffee-script.js"></script> </body> </html> It’s not the prettiest, but as far as I know it is the only CoffeeScript test framework in existence. Of course, I could just use one of the javascript test frameworks but that would be no fun. To get this example to run you need the coffeescript compiler in the same directory as the page.

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• C#/.NET &ndash; Finding an Item&rsquo;s Index in IEnumerable&lt;T&gt;

  - by James Michael Hare

  Sorry for the long blogging hiatus.  First it was, of course, the holidays hustle and bustle, then my brother and his wife gave birth to their son, so I’ve been away from my blogging for two weeks. Background: Finding an item’s index in List<T> is easy… Many times in our day to day programming activities, we want to find the index of an item in a collection.  Now, if we have a List<T> and we’re looking for the item itself this is trivial: 1: // assume have a list of ints: 2: var list = new List<int> { 1, 13, 42, 64, 121, 77, 5, 99, 132 }; 3:  4: // can find the exact item using IndexOf() 5: var pos = list.IndexOf(64); This will return the position of the item if it’s found, or –1 if not.  It’s easy to see how this works for primitive types where equality is well defined.  For complex types, however, it will attempt to compare them using EqualityComparer<T>.Default which, in a nutshell, relies on the object’s Equals() method. So what if we want to search for a condition instead of equality?  That’s also easy in a List<T> with the FindIndex() method: 1: // assume have a list of ints: 2: var list = new List<int> { 1, 13, 42, 64, 121, 77, 5, 99, 132 }; 3:  4: // finds index of first even number or -1 if not found. 5: var pos = list.FindIndex(i => i % 2 == 0);   Problem: Finding an item’s index in IEnumerable<T> is not so easy... This is all well and good for lists, but what if we want to do the same thing for IEnumerable<T>?  A collection of IEnumerable<T> has no indexing, so there’s no direct method to find an item’s index.  LINQ, as powerful as it is, gives us many tools to get us this information, but not in one step.  As with almost any problem involving collections, there are several ways to accomplish the same goal.  And once again as with almost any problem involving collections, the choice of the solution somewhat depends on the situation. So let’s look at a few possible alternatives.  I’m going to express each of these as extension methods for simplicity and consistency. Solution: The TakeWhile() and Count() combo One of the things you can do is to perform a TakeWhile() on the list as long as your find condition is not true, and then do a Count() of the items it took.  The only downside to this method is that if the item is not in the list, the index will be the full Count() of items, and not –1.  So if you don’t know the size of the list beforehand, this can be confusing. 1: // a collection of extra extension methods off IEnumerable<T> 2: public static class EnumerableExtensions 3: { 4: // Finds an item in the collection, similar to List<T>.FindIndex() 5: public static int FindIndex<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, Predicate<T> finder) 6: { 7: // note if item not found, result is length and not -1! 8: return list.TakeWhile(i => !finder(i)).Count(); 9: } 10: } Personally, I don’t like switching the paradigm of not found away from –1, so this is one of my least favorites.  Solution: Select with index Many people don’t realize that there is an alternative form of the LINQ Select() method that will provide you an index of the item being selected: 1: list.Select( (item,index) => do something here with the item and/or index... ) This can come in handy, but must be treated with care.  This is because the index provided is only as pertains to the result of previous operations (if any).  For example: 1: // assume have a list of ints: 2: var list = new List<int> { 1, 13, 42, 64, 121, 77, 5, 99, 132 }; 3:  4: // you'd hope this would give you the indexes of the even numbers 5: // which would be 2, 3, 8, but in reality it gives you 0, 1, 2 6: list.Where(item => item % 2 == 0).Select((item,index) => index); The reason the example gives you the collection { 0, 1, 2 } is because the where clause passes over any items that are odd, and therefore only the even items are given to the select and only they are given indexes. Conversely, we can’t select the index and then test the item in a Where() clause, because then the Where() clause would be operating on the index and not the item! So, what we have to do is to select the item and index and put them together in an anonymous type.  It looks ugly, but it works: 1: // extensions defined on IEnumerable<T> 2: public static class EnumerableExtensions 3: { 4: // finds an item in a collection, similar to List<T>.FindIndex() 5: public static int FindIndex<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, Predicate<T> finder) 6: { 7: // if you don't name the anonymous properties they are the variable names 8: return list.Select((item, index) => new { item, index }) 9: .Where(p => finder(p.item)) 10: .Select(p => p.index + 1) 11: .FirstOrDefault() - 1; 12: } 13: }     So let’s look at this, because i know it’s convoluted: First Select() joins the items and their indexes into an anonymous type. Where() filters that list to only the ones matching the predicate. Second Select() picks the index of the matches and adds 1 – this is to distinguish between not found and first item. FirstOrDefault() returns the first item found from the previous clauses or default (zero) if not found. Subtract one so that not found (zero) will be –1, and first item (one) will be zero. The bad thing is, this is ugly as hell and creates anonymous objects for each item tested until it finds the match.  This concerns me a bit but we’ll defer judgment until compare the relative performances below. Solution: Convert ToList() and use FindIndex() This solution is easy enough.  We know any IEnumerable<T> can be converted to List<T> using the LINQ extension method ToList(), so we can easily convert the collection to a list and then just use the FindIndex() method baked into List<T>. 1: // a collection of extension methods for IEnumerable<T> 2: public static class EnumerableExtensions 3: { 4: // find the index of an item in the collection similar to List<T>.FindIndex() 5: public static int FindIndex<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, Predicate<T> finder) 6: { 7: return list.ToList().FindIndex(finder); 8: } 9: } This solution is simplicity itself!  It is very concise and elegant and you need not worry about anyone misinterpreting what it’s trying to do (as opposed to the more convoluted LINQ methods above). But the main thing I’m concerned about here is the performance hit to allocate the List<T> in the ToList() call, but once again we’ll explore that in a second. Solution: Roll your own FindIndex() for IEnumerable<T> Of course, you can always roll your own FindIndex() method for IEnumerable<T>.  It would be a very simple for loop which scans for the item and counts as it goes.  There’s many ways to do this, but one such way might look like: 1: // extension methods for IEnumerable<T> 2: public static class EnumerableExtensions 3: { 4: // Finds an item matching a predicate in the enumeration, much like List<T>.FindIndex() 5: public static int FindIndex<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, Predicate<T> finder) 6: { 7: int index = 0; 8: foreach (var item in list) 9: { 10: if (finder(item)) 11: { 12: return index; 13: } 14:  15: index++; 16: } 17:  18: return -1; 19: } 20: } Well, it’s not quite simplicity, and those less familiar with LINQ may prefer it since it doesn’t include all of the lambdas and behind the scenes iterators that come with deferred execution.  But does having this long, blown out method really gain us much in performance? Comparison of Proposed Solutions So we’ve now seen four solutions, let’s analyze their collective performance.  I took each of the four methods described above and run them over 100,000 iterations of lists of size 10, 100, 1000, and 10000 and here’s the performance results.  Then I looked for targets at the begining of the list (best case), middle of the list (the average case) and not in the list (worst case as must scan all of the list). Each of the times below is the average time in milliseconds for one execution as computer over the 100,000 iterations: Searches Matching First Item (Best Case)   10 100 1000 10000 TakeWhile 0.0003 0.0003 0.0003 0.0003 Select 0.0005 0.0005 0.0005 0.0005 ToList 0.0002 0.0003 0.0013 0.0121 Manual 0.0001 0.0001 0.0001 0.0001   Searches Matching Middle Item (Average Case)   10 100 1000 10000 TakeWhile 0.0004 0.0020 0.0191 0.1889 Select 0.0008 0.0042 0.0387 0.3802 ToList 0.0002 0.0007 0.0057 0.0562 Manual 0.0002 0.0013 0.0129 0.1255   Searches Where Not Found (Worst Case)   10 100 1000 10000 TakeWhile 0.0006 0.0039 0.0381 0.3770 Select 0.0012 0.0081 0.0758 0.7583 ToList 0.0002 0.0012 0.0100 0.0996 Manual 0.0003 0.0026 0.0253 0.2514   Notice something interesting here, you’d think the “roll your own” loop would be the most efficient, but it only wins when the item is first (or very close to it) regardless of list size.  In almost all other cases though and in particular the average case and worst case, the ToList()/FindIndex() combo wins for performance, even though it is creating some temporary memory to hold the List<T>.  If you examine the algorithm, the reason why is most likely because once it’s in a ToList() form, internally FindIndex() scans the internal array which is much more efficient to iterate over.  Thus, it takes a one time performance hit (not including any GC impact) to create the List<T> but after that the performance is much better. Summary If you’re concerned about too many throw-away objects, you can always roll your own FindIndex() method, but for sheer simplicity and overall performance, using the ToList()/FindIndex() combo performs best on nearly all list sizes in the average and worst cases.    Technorati Tags: C#,.NET,Litte Wonders,BlackRabbitCoder,Software,LINQ,List

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• HP and Microsoft: That&rsquo;s What Friends Are For ?

  - by andrewbrust

  Today, HP pre-announced the second coming out for its recently acquired Palm webOS mobile operating system.  I happen to think webOS is quite good, and when the Palm Pre first came out, I thought it a worthwhile phone.  I was worried though that the platform would never attract the developer mindshare it needed to be competitive, and that turned out to be the case.  But then HP acquired Palm and announced it would be revamping the webOS offering, not only on phones, but also on tablets.  It later announced that it would also use webOS as an embedded solution on HP printers. The timing of this came shortly after HP had announced it would be producing a “Slate” product running Windows 7. After the Palm deal, HP became vague about whether the Windows-powered slate would actually come out.  They did, in fact, bring the Slate 500 to market, but by some accounts, they only built 5000 units. Another recent awkward moment between HP and Microsoft: HP withdrew itself from the Windows Home Server ecosystem.  That one hurt, as they were the dominant OEM there.  But Microsoft’s decision to kill Drive Extender had driven away many parties, not just HP. On Wednesday, HP came out with their TouchPad, and new phone models.  Not a nice thing for Windows Phone 7, but other OEMs are taking a wait and see attitude there too, I suppose.  There was one more zinger though, and it was bigger: HP announced they’d be porting webOS to PCs. No Windows Phone 7? OK. No Windows Home Server?  Whatcha gonna do?  But no Windows 7 either?  From HP?  What comes after that, no ink and toner? Some people think Microsoft’s been around too long to be relevant.  But HP started out making oscilloscopes!  The notion that HP is too cool for Windows school is a it far-fetched.  This is the company that bought EDS. This is the company that bought Compaq.  And Compaq was the company that bought Digital Equipment Corporation.  Somehow, I don’t think the VT 220 outclasses Windows PCs. What could possibly be going on?  My sense is that HP wants to put webOS on PCs that also have Windows, and that people will buy because they have Windows.  And for every one of those sold, HP gets to count, technically speaking, another webOS unit in the install base.  webOS is really nice, as I said.  But being good isn’t good enough when you are trying to get market share.  Number of units shipped matters.  The question is whether counting PCs with webOS installed, but dormant, is helpful to HP’s cause.  Seems like a funny way to account for market share, and a strange way to treat a big partner in Redmond.

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• Making a Case For The Command Line

  - by Jesse Taber

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/GruffCode/archive/2013/06/30/making-a-case-for-the-command-line.aspxI have had an idea percolating in the back of my mind for over a year now that I’ve just recently started to implement. This idea relates to building out “internal tools” to ease the maintenance and on-going support of a software system. The system that I currently work on is (mostly) web-based, so we traditionally we have built these internal tools in the form of pages within the app that are only accessible by our developers and support personnel. These pages allow us to perform tasks within the system that, for one reason or another, we don’t want to let our end users perform (e.g. mass create/update/delete operations on data, flipping switches that turn paid modules of the system on or off, etc). When we try to build new tools like this we often struggle with the level of effort required to build them. Effort Required Creating a whole new page in an existing web application can be a fairly large undertaking. You need to create the page and ensure it will have a layout that is consistent with the other pages in the app. You need to decide what types of input controls need to go onto the page. You need to ensure that everything uses the same style as the rest of the site. You need to figure out what the text on the page should say. Then, when you figure out that you forgot about an input that should really be present you might have to go back and re-work the entire thing. Oh, and in addition to all of that, you still have to, you know, write the code that actually performs the task. Everything other than the code that performs the task at hand is just overhead. We don’t need a fancy date picker control in a nicely styled page for the vast majority of our internal tools. We don’t even really need a page, for that matter. We just need a way to issue a command to the application and have it, in turn, execute the code that we’ve written to accomplish a given task. All we really need is a simple console application! Plumbing Problems A former co-worker of mine, John Sonmez, always advocated the Unix philosophy for building internal tools: start with something that runs at the command line, and then build a UI on top of that if you need to. John’s idea has a lot of merit, and we tried building out some internal tools as simple Console applications. Unfortunately, this was often easier said that done. Doing a “File –> New Project” to build out a tool for a mature system can be pretty daunting because that new project is totally empty.  In our case, the web application code had a lot of of “plumbing” built in: it managed authentication and authorization, it handled database connection management for our multi-tenanted architecture, it managed all of the context that needs to follow a user around the application such as their timezone and regional/language settings. In addition, the configuration file for the web application  (a web.config in our case because this is an ASP .NET application) is large and would need to be reproduced into a similar configuration file for a Console application. While most of these problems are could be solved pretty easily with some refactoring of the codebase, building Console applications for internal tools still potentially suffers from one pretty big drawback: you’d have to execute them on a machine with network access to all of the needed resources. Obviously, our web servers can easily communicate the the database servers and can publish messages to our service bus, but the same is not true for all of our developer and support personnel workstations. We could have everyone run these tools remotely via RDP or SSH, but that’s a bit cumbersome and certainly a lot less convenient than having the tools built into the web application that is so easily accessible. Mix and Match So we need a way to build tools that are easily accessible via the web application but also don’t require the overhead of creating a user interface. This is where my idea comes into play: why not just build a command line interface into the web application? If it’s part of the web application we get all of the plumbing that comes along with that code, and we’re executing everything on the web servers which means we’ll have access to any external resources that we might need. Rather than having to incur the overhead of creating a brand new page for each tool that we want to build, we can create one new page that simply accepts a command in text form and executes it as a request on the web server. In this way, we can focus on writing the code to accomplish the task. If the tool ends up being heavily used, then (and only then) should we consider spending the time to build a better user experience around it. To be clear, I’m not trying to downplay the importance of building great user experiences into your system; we should all strive to provide the best UX possible to our end users. I’m only advocating this sort of bare-bones interface for internal consumption by the technical staff that builds and supports the software. This command line interface should be the “back end” to a highly polished and eye-pleasing public face. Implementation As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, this is an idea that I’ve had for awhile but have only recently started building out. I’ve outlined some general guidelines and design goals for this effort as follows: Text in, text out: In the interest of keeping things as simple as possible, I want this interface to be purely text-based. Users will submit commands as plain text, and the application will provide responses in plain text. Obviously this text will be “wrapped” within the context of HTTP requests and responses, but I don’t want to have to think about HTML or CSS when taking input from the user or displaying responses back to the user. Task-oriented code only: After building the initial “harness” for this interface, the only code that should need to be written to create a new internal tool should be code that is expressly needed to accomplish the task that the tool is intended to support. If we want to encourage and enable ourselves to build good tooling, we need to lower the barriers to entry as much as possible. Built-in documentation: One of the great things about most command line utilities is the ‘help’ switch that provides usage guidelines and details about the arguments that the utility accepts. Our web-based command line utility should allow us to build the documentation for these tools directly into the code of the tools themselves. I finally started trying to implement this idea when I heard about a fantastic open-source library called CLAP (Command Line Auto Parser) that lets me meet the guidelines outlined above. CLAP lets you define classes with public methods that can be easily invoked from the command line. Here’s a quick example of the code that would be needed to create a new tool to do something within your system: 1: public class CustomerTools 2: { 3: [Verb] 4: public void UpdateName(int customerId, string firstName, string lastName) 5: { 6: //invoke internal services/domain objects/hwatever to perform update 7: } 8: } This is just a regular class with a single public method (though you could have as many methods as you want). The method is decorated with the ‘Verb’ attribute that tells the CLAP library that it is a method that can be invoked from the command line. Here is how you would invoke that code: Parser.Run(args, new CustomerTools()); Note that ‘args’ is just a string[] that would normally be passed passed in from the static Main method of a Console application. Also, CLAP allows you to pass in multiple classes that define [Verb] methods so you can opt to organize the code that CLAP will invoke in any way that you like. You can invoke this code from a command line application like this: SomeExe UpdateName -customerId:123 -firstName:Jesse -lastName:Taber ‘SomeExe’ in this example just represents the name of .exe that is would be created from our Console application. CLAP then interprets the arguments passed in order to find the method that should be invoked and automatically parses out the parameters that need to be passed in. After a quick spike, I’ve found that invoking the ‘Parser’ class can be done from within the context of a web application just as easily as it can from within the ‘Main’ method entry point of a Console application. There are, however, a few sticking points that I’m working around: Splitting arguments into the ‘args’ array like the command line: When you invoke a standard .NET console application you get the arguments that were passed in by the user split into a handy array (this is the ‘args’ parameter referenced above). Generally speaking they get split by whitespace, but it’s also clever enough to handle things like ignoring whitespace in a phrase that is surrounded by quotes. We’ll need to re-create this logic within our web application so that we can give the ‘args’ value to CLAP just like a console application would. Providing a response to the user: If you were writing a console application, you might just use Console.WriteLine to provide responses to the user as to the progress and eventual outcome of the command. We can’t use Console.WriteLine within a web application, so I’ll need to find another way to provide feedback to the user. Preferably this approach would allow me to use the same handler classes from both a Console application and a web application, so some kind of strategy pattern will likely emerge from this effort. Submitting files: Often an internal tool needs to support doing some kind of operation in bulk, and the easiest way to submit the data needed to support the bulk operation is in a file. Getting the file uploaded and available to the CLAP handler classes will take a little bit of effort. Mimicking the console experience: This isn’t really a requirement so much as a “nice to have”. To start out, the command-line interface in the web application will probably be a single ‘textarea’ control with a button to submit the contents to a handler that will pass it along to CLAP to be parsed and run. I think it would be interesting to use some javascript and CSS trickery to change that page into something with more of a “shell” interface look and feel. I’ll be blogging more about this effort in the future and will include some code snippets (or maybe even a full blown example app) as I progress. I also think that I’ll probably end up either submitting some pull requests to the CLAP project or possibly forking/wrapping it into a more web-friendly package and open sourcing that.

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• UppercuT &ndash; Custom Extensions Now With PowerShell and Ruby

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Arguably, one of the most powerful features of UppercuT (UC) is the ability to extend any step of the build process with a pre, post, or replace hook. This customization is done in a separate location from the build so you can upgrade without wondering if you broke the build. There is a hook before each step of the build has run. There is a hook after. And back to power again, there is a replacement hook. If you don’t like what the step is doing and/or you want to replace it’s entire functionality, you just drop a custom replacement extension and UppercuT will perform the custom step instead. Up until recently all custom hooks had to be written in NAnt. Now they are a little sweeter because you no longer need to use NAnt to extend UC if you don’t want to. You can use PowerShell. Or Ruby.   Let that sink in for a moment. You don’t have to even need to interact with NAnt at all now. Extension Points On the wiki, all of the extension points are shown. The basic idea is that you would put whatever customization you are doing in a separate folder named build.custom. Each step Let’s take a look at all we can customize: The start point is default.build. It calls build.custom/default.pre.build if it exists, then it runs build/default.build (normal tasks) OR build.custom/default.replace.build if it exists, and finally build.custom/default.post.build if it exists. Every step below runs with the same extension points but changes on the file name it is looking for. NOTE: If you include default.replace.build, nothing else will run because everything is called from default.build.    * policyChecks.step    * versionBuilder.step NOTE: If you include build.custom/versionBuilder.replace.step, the items below will not run.      - svn.step, tfs.step, or git.step (the custom tasks for these need to go in build.custom/versioners)    * generateBuildInfo.step    * compile.step    * environmentBuilder.step    * analyze.step NOTE: If you include build.custom/analyze.replace.step, the items below will not run.      - test.step (the custom tasks for this need to go in build.custom/analyzers) NOTE: If you include build.custom/analyzers/test.replace.step, the items below will not run.        + mbunit2.step, gallio.step, or nunit.step (the custom tasks for these need to go in build.custom/analyzers)      - ncover.step (the custom tasks for this need to go in build.custom/analyzers)      - ndepend.step (the custom tasks for this need to go in build.custom/analyzers)      - moma.step (the custom tasks for this need to go in build.custom/analyzers)    * package.step NOTE: If you include build.custom/package.replace.step, the items below will not run.      - deploymentBuilder.step Customize UppercuT Builds With PowerShell UppercuT can now be extended with PowerShell (PS). To customize any extension point with PS, just add .ps1 to the end of the file name and write your custom tasks in PowerShell. If you are not signing your scripts you will need to change a setting in the UppercuT.config file. This does impose a security risk, because this allows PS to now run any PS script. This setting stays that way on ANY machine that runs the build until manually changed by someone. I’m not responsible if you mess up your machine or anyone else’s by doing this. You’ve been warned. Now that you are fully aware of any security holes you may open and are okay with that, let’s move on. Let’s create a file called default.replace.build.ps1 in the build.custom folder. Open that file in notepad and let’s add this to it: write-host "hello - I'm a custom task written in Powershell!" Now, let’s run build.bat. You could get some PSake action going here. I won’t dive into that in this post though. Customize UppercuT Builds With Ruby If you want to customize any extension point with Ruby, just add .rb to the end of the file name and write your custom tasks in Ruby.  Let’s write a custom ruby task for UC. If you were thinking it would be the same as the one we just wrote for PS, you’d be right! In the build.custom folder, lets create a file called default.replace.build.rb. Open that file in notepad and let’s put this in there: puts "I'm a custom ruby task!" Now, let’s run build.bat again. That’s chunky bacon. UppercuT and Albacore.NET Just for fun, I wanted to see if I could replace the compile.step with a Rake task. Not just any rake task, Albacore’s msbuild task. Albacore is a suite of rake tasks brought about by Derick Bailey to make building .NET with Rake easier. It has quite a bit of support with developers that are using Rake to build code. In my build.custom folder, I drop a compile.replace.step.rb. I also put in a separate file that will contain my Albacore rake task and I call that compile.rb. What are the contents of compile.replace.step.rb? rake = 'rake' arguments= '-f ' + Dir.pwd + '/../build.custom/compile.rb' #puts "Calling #{rake} " + arguments system("#{rake} " + arguments) Since the custom extensions call ruby, we have to shell back out and call rake. That’s what we are doing here. We also realize that ruby is called from the build folder, so we need to back out and dive into the build.custom folder to find the file that is technically next to us. What are the contents of compile.rb? require 'rubygems' require 'fileutils' require 'albacore' task :default => [:compile] puts "Using Ruby to compile UppercuT with Albacore Tasks" desc 'Compile the source' msbuild :compile do |msb| msb.properties = { :configuration => :Release, :outputpath => '../../build_output/UppercuT' } msb.targets [:clean, :build] msb.verbosity = "quiet" msb.path_to_command = 'c:/Windows/Microsoft.NET/Framework/v3.5/MSBuild.exe' msb.solution = '../uppercut.sln' end We are using the msbuild task here. We change the output path to the build_output/UppercuT folder. The output path has “../../” because this is based on every project. We could grab the current directory and then point the task specifically to a folder if we have projects that are at different levels. We want the verbosity to be quiet so we set that as well. So what kind of output do you get for this? Let’s run build.bat custom_tasks_replace:      [echo] Running custom tasks instead of normal tasks if C:\code\uppercut\build\..\build.custom\compile.replace.step exists.      [exec] (in C:/code/uppercut/build)      [exec] Using Ruby to compile UppercuT with Albacore Tasks      [exec] Microsoft (R) Build Engine Version 3.5.30729.4926      [exec] [Microsoft .NET Framework, Version 2.0.50727.4927]      [exec] Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 2007. All rights reserved. If you think this is awesome, you’d be right!   With this knowledge you shall build.

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• Getting to grips with the stack in nasm

  - by MarkPearl

  Today I spent a good part of my day getting to grips with the stack and nasm. After looking at my notes on nasm I think this is one area for the course I am doing they could focus more on… So here are some snippets I have put together that have helped me understand a little bit about the stack… Simplest example of the stack You will probably see examples like the following in circulation… these demonstrate the simplest use of the stack… org 0x100 bits 16 jmp main main: push 42h push 43h push 44h mov ah,2h ;set to display characters pop dx    ;get the first value int 21h   ;and display it pop dx    ;get 2nd value int 21h   ;and display it pop dx    ;get 3rd value int 21h   ;and display it int 20h The output from above code would be… DCB Decoupling code using “call” and “ret” This is great, but it oversimplifies what I want to use the stack for… I do not know if this goes against the grain of assembly programmers or not, but I want to write loosely coupled assembly code – and I want to use the stack as a mechanism for passing values into my decoupled code. In nasm we have the call and return instructions, which provides a mechanism for decoupling code, for example the following could be done… org 0x100 bits 16 jmp main ;---------------------------------------- displayChar: mov ah,2h mov dx,41h int 21h ret ;---------------------------------------- main: call displayChar int 20h   This would output the following to the console A So, it would seem that call and ret allow us to jump to segments of our code and then return back to the calling position – a form of segmenting the code into what we would called in higher order languages “functions” or “methods”. The only issue is, in higher order languages there is a way to pass parameters into the functions and return results. Because of the primitive nature of the call and ret instructions, this does not seem to be obvious. We could of course use the registers to pass values into the subroutine and set values coming out, but the problem with this is we… Have a limited number of registers Are threading our code with tight coupling (it would be hard to migrate methods outside of their intended use in a particular program to another one) With that in mind, I turn to the stack to provide a loosely coupled way of calling subroutines… First attempt with the Stack Initially I thought this would be simple… we could use code that looks as follows to achieve what I want… org 0x100 bits 16 jmp main ;---------------------------------------- displayChar: mov ah,2h pop dx int 21h ret ;---------------------------------------- main: push 41h call displayChar int 20h   However running this application does not give the desired result, I want an ‘A’ to be returned, and I am getting something totally different (you will to). Reading up on the call and ret instructions a discovery is made… they are pushing and popping things onto and off the stack as well… When the call instruction is executed, the current value of IP (the address of the instruction to follow) is pushed onto the stack, when ret is called, the last value on the stack is popped off into the IP register. In effect what the above code is doing is as follows with the stack… push 41h push current value of ip pop current value of ip to dx pop 41h to ip This is not what I want, I need to access the 41h that I pushed onto the stack, but the call value (which is necessary) is putting something in my way. So, what to do? Remember we have other registers we can use as well as a thing called indirect addressing… So, after some reading around, I came up with the following approach using indirect addressing… org 0x100 bits 16 jmp main ;---------------------------------------- displayChar: mov bp,sp mov ah,2h mov dx,[bp+2] int 21h ret ;---------------------------------------- main: push 41h call displayChar int 20h In essence, what I have done here is used a trick with the stack pointer… it goes as follows… Push 41 onto the stack Make the call to the function, which will push the IP register onto the stack and then jump to the displayChar label Move the value in the stack point to the bp register (sp currently points at IP register) Move the at the location of bp minus 2 bytes to dx (this is now the value 41h) display it, execute the ret instruction, which pops the ip value off the stack and goes back to the calling point This approach is still very raw, some further reading around shows that I should be pushing the value of bp onto the stack before replacing it with sp, but it is the starting thread to getting loosely coupled subroutines. Let’s see if you get what the following output would be? org 0x100 bits 16 jmp main ;---------------------------------------- displayChar: mov bp,sp mov ah,2h mov dx,[bp+4] int 21h mov dx,[bp+2] int 21h ret ;---------------------------------------- main: push 41h push 42h call displayChar int 20h The output is… AB Where to from here? If by any luck some assembly programmer comes along and see this code and notices that I have made some fundamental flaw in my logic… I would like to know, so please leave a comment… appreciate any feedback!

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• Stir Trek: Thor Edition Registration Opens March 17th

  - by Brian Jackett

  Registration for Stir Trek: Thor Edition opens at 12:00am “Thors"day March 17th.  Stir Trek is now in its third year and this is the second year I’ve helped with planning.  For those unfamiliar the Stir Trek conference here is the description from the website. Stir Trek is an opportunity to learn about the newest advances and latest trends in Web and Mobile development. There will be 30 Sessions in six tracks, so you can pick the content that interests you the most. And the best part? At the end of the day you will be treated to a private screening of Thor on its opening day!     Last year Stir Trek: Iron Man Edition sold out well before the conference and had a long waitlist.  Based on CodeMash selling out in just 3.5 days earlier this year I highly recommend you register early.  We also have a star studded list of speakers ranging from international experts to local leaders.  This will be the best $35 you spend all year.   Easter Egg:  I originally had an idea that we should start selling tickets at 1:30am rather than 12:00am.  If you can figure out why I proposed 1:30am leave a comment below.  Any good sleuths will find this riddle elementary.         -Frog Out

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• TechEd 2012 - last day

  - by Stefan Barrett

  Miss when TechEd was 5 days long!, it's Thursday already and we are on the last day. The snacks haven't appeared, but more developer sessions have. Having access to online schedule is very important, since the new sessions are usually the more interesting ones. On the whole, I think the wifi network has been worse this year - more blank spots, and more areas where performance is bad. I do think its funny that I get better reception on my iPad than my phones (iPad & Nokia/Microsoft). There seems to be less areas for people to plug in their own laptops this year - I do wonder, since more and more people have smart phones, and since most of the attendees are from America, perhaps they are not using the wifi - but rather their own phone provider. If I was in Japan, I would probably do the same. About to attend a session on F#, something which is probably going to be important for me over the next year.

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• Upcoming events 2011 IT Camp Saturday Tampa and Orlando Code Camp 2011

  - by Nikita Polyakov

  I’ll be speaking at a few upcoming events: Saturday March 19th 2011 IT Camp Saturday Tampa http://itcampsaturday.com/tampa This is a first of it’s kind – IT Pro camp, a more topic open then many traditional Code Camp and no so much code focused. Here is just a small sample: Adnan Cartwright Administrating your Network with Group Policy Nikita Polyakov Intro to Phone 7 Development Landon Bass Enterprise Considerations for SharePoint 2010 Michael Wells Intro to SQL Server for IT Professionals Keith Kabza Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Overview Check out the full session schedule for other session, if you are in the IT Pro field – you will find many sessions of interest here: http://itcampsaturday.com/tampa/2011/03/01/schedule/   Saturday March 26th 2011 Orlando Code Camp http://www.orlandocodecamp.com/ Just a highlight of a few sessions: Design & Animation Chris G. Williams: Making Games for Windows Phone 7 with XNA 4.0 Diane Leeper: Animating in Blend: It's ALIVE Diane Leeper: Design for Developers: Bad Design Kills Good Projects Henry Lee: Windows Phone 7 Animation Konrad Neumann: Being a Designer in a Developer's World Nikita Polyakov: Rapid Prototyping with SketchFlow in Expression Blend WP7 Henry Lee: Learn to Use Accelerometer and Location Service (GPS) in Windows Phone Application Joe Healy: Consuming Services in Windows Phone 7 Kevin Wolf: Work From Anywhere = WFA (Part 1) Kevin Wolf: Work From Anywhere = WFA (Part 2) Nikita Polyakov: WP7 Marketplace Place and Monetization Russell Fustino: Making (More) Money with Phone 7

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• Useful link for Xpath Query Testing

  - by Arvind Chaudhary

  Following link is very useful to test xpath query instantly http://www.xmlme.com/XpathTool.aspx Cheers, Arvind Chaudhary

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• Wheaties Fuel = Wheaties FAIL

  - by Steve Bargelt

  Are you kidding me? What a load of nutritional CRAP. Don’t buy this product. Just don’t do it. They are just like Wheaties with more sugar and fat. Awesome just what we need more sugar!! Okay now I’m not against carbs… I’m really not. Being a cyclist I realize the importance of carbohydrates in the diet… but let’s be realistic here. Even though the commercials for Wheaties Fuel say they are for athletes you know that what General Mills is really hoping for is that kids will see Payton Manning, Albert Pujols and KG and buy this cereal and eat a ton of it for breakfast. Sad, really. I’ve watched all the videos and read all the propaganda on the Wheaties Fuel web site and no where do they talk about why they added sugar and fat the original Wheaties. There is a lot of double-speak by Dr. Ivy about “understanding the needs of athletes.” I had to laugh – in one of the videos Dr. Ivy even says that he thinks the "new Wheaties will have even more fiber! Wrong! My bad... there is 5g of fiber not 3g per serving. Just  Way more sugar. A serving of FROSTED FLAKES has less sugar per serving!!!   Wheaties Fuel Wheaties Frosted Flakes Honey Nut Cheerios Quaker Oatmeal Serving Size 3/4 cup 3/4 cup 3/4 cup 3/4 cup 3/4 cup Calories 210 100 110 110 225 Fat 3g .5g 0g 1.5g 4.5g Protein 3g 3g 1g 2g 7.5g Carbohydrates 46g 22g 27g 22g 40.5g Sugars 14g 4g 11g 9g 1.5g Fiber 5g 3g 1g 2g 6g   In reality it might not be a bad pre-workout meal but for a normal day-in-day-out breakfast is just seems to have too much sugar - especially when you bump the serving size up to 1 to 1.5 cups and add milk! I’ll stick with Oatmeal, thank you very much.

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• Menu widget - no jQuery nor Javascript required - pure CSS

  - by Renso

  Goal: Create a menu widget that does not require any javascript, extremely lightweight, very fast, soley based on CSS, compatible with FireFox and Chrome. Issues: May have some rendering issues in some versions of IE, sorry :-) Instruments: css file html with specific menu format jQuery-ui library - optional if you want to use your own images/colors Implementation Details: HTML: <div id="header">   <div id="header_Menubar">     <ul class="linkList0 ui-tabs-nav ui-helper-reset ui-helper-clearfix ui-widget-header ui-corner-all">         <li class="first more ui-state-default ui-corner-top ui-tabs-selected"><a title="Home" href="/Home">Home</a>             <ul class="linkList01 ui-tabs-nav ui-helper-reset ui-helper-clearfix ui-widget-header ui-corner-all">                 <li class="ifirst ui-state-default ui-corner-top"><abbr title="Go Home"></abbr><a title="Home" href="/Home">Home</a></li>             </ul>         </li>         <li class="more ui-state-default ui-corner-top ui-tabs-selected"><a title="Menu 2" href="/Menu2a">Menu 2</a>             <ul class="linkList01 ui-tabs-nav ui-helper-reset ui-helper-clearfix ui-widget-header ui-corner-all">                 <li class="ifirst ui-state-default ui-corner-top"><abbr title="Menu 2 a"></abbr><a title="Menu 2 a" href="/Menu2a">Menu 2 a</a></li>                 <li class="ilast ui-state-default ui-corner-top"><abbr title="Menu 2 b"></abbr><a title="Menu 2 b" href="/Menu2b">Menu 2 b</a></li>             </ul>         </li>         <li class="more red ui-state-default ui-corner-top ui-tabs-selected"><a title="Menu 3" href="/Menu3 d">Menu 3</a>             <ul class="linkList01 ui-tabs-nav ui-helper-reset ui-helper-clearfix ui-widget-header ui-corner-all">                 <li class="ifirst ui-state-default ui-corner-top"><abbr title="Menu 3 a"><a title="Menu 3 a" href="/Menu3a">Menu 3 a</a></abbr></li>                 <li class="ui-state-default ui-corner-top"><abbr title="Menu 3 b"><a title="Menu 3 b" href="/Menu3b">Menu 3 b</a></abbr></li>                 <li class="ui-state-default ui-corner-top"><abbr title="Menu 3 c"><a title="Menu 3 c" href="/Menu3c">Menu 3 c</a></abbr></li>                 <li class="ilast ui-state-default ui-corner-top"><abbr title="Menu 3 d"><a title="Menu 3 d" href="/Menu3d">Menu 3 d</a></abbr></li>             </ul>         </li>     </ul>     </div> </div> CSS: /*    =Menu     -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------    */ #header #header_Menubar {     margin: 0;     padding: 0;     border: 0;     width: 100%;     height: 22px; } #header {     background-color: #99cccc;     background-color: #aaccee;     background-color: #5BA3E0;     background-color: #006cb1; } /* Set menu bar background color     */ #header #header_Menubar {     background-attachment: scroll;     background-position: left center;     background-repeat: repeat-x; } /*    Set main (horizontal) menu typology    */ #header .linkList0 {     padding: 0 0 1em 0;     margin-bottom: 1em;     font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Grande',           Verdana, Lucida, Geneva, Helvetica,           Arial, sans-serif;     font-weight: bold;     font-size: 1.085em;     font-size: 1em; } /*    Set all ul properties    */ #header .linkList0, #header .linkList0 ul {     list-style: none;     margin: 0;     padding: 0;     list-style-position: outside; } /*    Set all li properties    */ #header .linkList0 > li {     float: left;     position: relative;     font-size: 90%;     margin: 0 0 -1px;     width: 9.7em;     padding-right: 2em;     z-index: 100;    /*IE7:    Fix for IE7 hiding drop down list behind some other page elements    */ } /*    Set all li properties    */ #header .linkList01 > li {     width: 190px; } #header .linkList0 .linkList01 li {     margin-left: 0px; } /*    Set all list background image properties    */ /*#header .linkList0 li a {     background-position: left center;     background-image: url(  '../Content/Images/VerticalButtonBarGradientFade.png' );     background-repeat: repeat-x;     background-attachment: scroll; }*/ /*    Set all A ancor properties    */ #header .linkList0 li a {     display: block;     text-decoration: none;     line-height: 22px; } /*    IE7: Fix for a bug in IE7 where the margins between list items is doubled - need to set height explicitly    */ *+html #header .linkList0 ul li {     height: auto;     margin-bottom: -.3em; } /*    Menu:    Set different borders for different nested level lists     --------------------------------------------------------------    */ #header .linkList0 > li a {     border-left: 10px solid Transparent;     border-right: none; } #header .linkList0 > li a {     border-left: 0px;     margin-left: 0px;     border-right: none; } #header .linkList0 .linkList01 > li a {     border-left: 8px solid #336699;     border-right: none;     border: 1px solid Transparent;     -moz-border-radius: 5px 5px 5px 5px;     -moz-box-shadow: 3px 3px 4px #696969; } #header .linkList0 .linkList01 .linkList001 > li a {     border-left: 6px solid #336699;     border-right: none;     border: 1px solid Transparent;     -moz-border-radius: 5px 5px 5px 5px;     -moz-box-shadow: 3px 3px 4px #696969; } #header .linkList0 .linkList01 .linkList001 .linkList0001 > li a {     border-left: 4px solid #336699;     border-right: none;     border: 1px solid Transparent;     -moz-border-radius: 5px 5px 5px 5px;     -moz-box-shadow: 3px 3px 4px #696969; }     /*    Link and Visited pseudo-class settings for all lists (ul)    */ #header .linkList0 a:link, #header .linkList0 a:visited {     display: block;     text-decoration: none;     padding-left: 1em; } /*    Hide all the nested/sub menu items    */ #header .linkList0 ul {     display: none;     padding: 0;     position: absolute;    /*Important: must not impede on other page elements when drop down opens up    */ } /*    Hide all detail popups    */ #header .detailPopup {     display: none; } /*    Set the typology of all sub-menu list items li    */ /*#header .linkList0 ul li {     background-color: #AACCEE;     background-position: left center;     background-image: url(  '../Content/Images/VerticalButtonBarGradientFade.png' );     background-repeat: repeat-x;     background-attachment: scroll; }*/ #header .linkList0 ul li.more {     background: Transparent url('../Content/Images/ArrowRight.gif') no-repeat right center; } /*    Header list's margin and padding for all list items    */ #header .linkList0 ul li {     margin: 0 0 0 1em;     padding: 0; } #header .linkList01 ul li {     margin: 0;     padding: 0;     width: 189px; } /*    Set margins for the third li sibling (Plan a Call) to display to the right of the parent menu     to avoid the sub-menu overlaying the menu items below    */ #header .linkList0 li.more .linkList01 li.more > ul.linkList001 {     margin: -1.7em 0 0 13.2em;    /*Important, must be careful, if tbe EM since gap increases too much bewteen nested lists the gap will make the nested-list collapse prematurely    */ } /*    Set right hand arrow for list items with sub-menus (class-more)    */ #header li.more {     background: Transparent url('../Content/Images/ArrowRight.gif') no-repeat right center;     padding-right: 48px; } /*    Menu:    Dynamic Behavior of menu items (hover, visted, etc)     -----------------------------------------------------------    */ #header .linkList0 li a:link, #header .linkList01 li a:link {     display: block; } #header .linkList0 li a:visited, #header .linkList01 li a:visited {     display: block; } #header .linkList0 > li:hover { } #header .linkList01 > li:hover a ,#header .linkList001 > li:hover a {     text-decoration: underline; } #header .linkList0 > li abbr:hover span.detailPopup {     display: block;     position: absolute;     top: 1em;     left: 17em;     border: double 1px #696969;     border-style: outset;     width: 120%;     height: auto;     padding: 5px;     font-weight: 100; } #header .linkList0 > li:hover ,#header .linkList0 .linkList01 > li:hover { } #header .linkList0 .linkList01 .linkList001 > li:hover { } #header .linkList0 .linkList01 .linkList001 .linkList0001 > li:hover { } /*    Display the hidden sub menu when hovering over the parent ul's li    */ #header .linkList0 li:hover > ul {     display: block; } /*    Display the hidden sub menu when hovering over the parent ul's li    */ #header .linkList0 .linkList01 li:hover > ul {     display: block;         background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #1E83CC, #619FCD);     /* Chrome, Safari:*/     background: -webkit-gradient(linear,                 center top, center bottom, from(#1E83CC), to(#619FCD)); } /*    Display the hidden sub menu when hovering over the parent ul's li    */ #header .linkList0 .linkList01 .linkList001 li:hover > ul {     display: block; } /*    Set right hand arrow for list items with sub-menus (class-more) on hover    */ #header li.more:hover { } Also some CSS for global settings that will affect this menu, you of course will have some other styling, but included it here so you can see how/why some css properties were set here: /* Neutralize styling:    Elements we want to clean out entirely: */ html, body {     margin: 0;     padding: 0;     font: 62.5%/120% Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; } /* Neutralize styling:    Elements with a vertical margin: */ h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, pre, blockquote, ul, ol, dl, address {     margin: 0;    /*    most browsers set some default value that is not shared by all browsers    */     padding: 0;        /*    some borowsers default padding, set to 0 for all    */ } /* Apply left margin:    Only to the few elements that need it: */ li, dd, blockquote {     margin-left: 1em; }

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• Nokia vs. The World

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  I’m looking forward to the launch of the Nokia Lumia 920. Why? Well, it stacks up better than the competition for one thing. Then there’s also that security problem that certain other phones have. Mostly, though, it’s because I love my Lumia 900 and the 920, with Windows Phone 8, will be even better. Before I got my Lumia 900, I just took it as given that smart phone cameras couldn’t be good. The Lumia taught me that smart phone cameras can be good if the manufacturer treats them as an important component worth spending time and money on (rather than some thing that consumers expect such that they’d better throw one in). I’m extremely pleased with the quality of pictures that my Lumia 900 gives me as well as the range of settings it provides (you can delve in to tell it a film speed, an f-stop, and a whole range of other settings). And the image stabilization features in the Lumia 920 deliver far better results than the others. Nokia has had great maps for a long time and they continue to improve. Even better, they made a deal that puts many of their excellent maps into Windows Phone 8 itself. There are still Nokia-exclusive features such as Nokia City Lens, of course. But by giving the core OS a great set of fundamental map data and technologies, they help ensure that customers know that buying a Windows Phone 8 will give them a great map experience no matter who made the phone. I’ll be getting a 920, myself, but the HTC and Samsung devices that have been announced have some compelling features, too, and it’s great to know that people who buy one of these won’t need to worry about where their maps might lead them. I’m looking forward to the NFC capabilities and Qi wireless charging my Lumia 920 will have. With the availability of DirectX and C++ programming on Windows Phone 8, I’m also excited about all the great games that will be added to the Windows Phone environment. I love my Xbox Phone. I love my Office phone. I love my Facebook phone. I love my GPS phone. I love my camera phone. I love my SkyDrive phone. In short, I love my Windows Phone!

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• International Radio Operators Alphabet in F# &amp; Silverlight &ndash; Part 1

  - by MarkPearl

  So I have been delving into F# more and more and thought the best way to learn the language is to write something useful. I have been meaning to get some more Silverlight knowledge (up to now I have mainly been doing WPF) so I came up with a really simple project that I can actually use at work. Simply put – I often get support calls from clients wanting new activation codes. One of our main app’s was written in VB6 and had its own “security” where it would require about a 45 character sequence for it to be activated. The catch being that each time you reopen the program it would require a different character sequence, which meant that when we activate clients systems we have to do it live! This involves us either referring them to a website, or reading the characters to them over the phone and since nobody in the office knows the IROA off by heart we would come up with some interesting words to represent characters… 9 times out of 10 the client would type in the wrong character and we would have to start all over again… with this app I am hoping to reduce the errors of reading characters over the phone by treating it like a ham radio. My “Silverlight” application will allow for the user to input a series of characters and the system will then generate the equivalent IROA words… very basic stuff e.g. Character Input – abc Words Generated – Alpha Bravo Charlie After listening to Anders Hejlsberg on Dot Net Rocks Show 541 he mentioned that he felt many applications could make use of F# but in an almost silo basis – meaning that you would write modules that leant themselves to Functional Programming in F# and then incorporate it into a solution where the front end may be in C# or where you would have some other sort of glue. I buy into this kind of approach, so in this project I will use F# to do my very intensive “Business Logic” and will use Silverlight/C# to do the front end. F# Business Layer I am no expert at this, so I am sure to get some feedback on way I could improve my algorithm. My approach was really simple. I would need a function that would convert a single character to a string – i.e. ‘A’ –> “Alpha” and then I would need a function that would take a string of characters, convert them into a sequence of characters, and then apply my converter to return a sequence of words… make sense? Lets start with the CharToString function let CharToString (element:char) = match element.ToString().ToLower() with | "1" -> "1" | "5" -> "5" | "9" -> "9" | "2" -> "2" | "6" -> "6" | "0" -> "0" | "3" -> "3" | "7" -> "7" | "4" -> "4" | "8" -> "8" | "a" -> "Alpha" | "b" -> "Bravo" | "c" -> "Charlie" | "d" -> "Delta" | "e" -> "Echo" | "f" -> "Foxtrot" | "g" -> "Golf" | "h" -> "Hotel" | "i" -> "India" | "j" -> "Juliet" | "k" -> "Kilo" | "l" -> "Lima" | "m" -> "Mike" | "n" -> "November" | "o" -> "Oscar" | "p" -> "Papa" | "q" -> "Quebec" | "r" -> "Romeo" | "s" -> "Sierra" | "t" -> "Tango" | "u" -> "Uniform" | "v" -> "Victor" | "w" -> "Whiskey" | "x" -> "XRay" | "y" -> "Yankee" | "z" -> "Zulu" | element -> "Unknown" Quite simple, an element is passed in, this element is them converted to a lowercase single character string and then matched up with the equivalent word. If by some chance a character is not recognized, “Unknown” will be returned… I know need a function that can take a string and can parse each character of the string and generate a new sequence with the converted words… let ConvertCharsToStrings (s:string) = s |> Seq.toArray |> Seq.map(fun elem -> CharToString(elem)) Here… the Seq.toArray converts the string to a sequence of characters. I then searched for some way to parse through every element in the sequence. Originally I tried Seq.iter, but I think my understanding of what iter does was incorrect. Eventually I found Seq.map, which applies a function to every element in a sequence and then creates a new collection with the adjusted processed element. It turned out to be exactly what I needed… To test that everything worked I created one more function that parsed through every element in a sequence and printed it. AT this point I realized the the Seq.iter would be ideal for this… So my testing code is below… let PrintStrings items = items |> Seq.iter(fun x -> Console.Write(x.ToString() + " ")) let newSeq = ConvertCharsToStrings("acdefg123") PrintStrings newSeq Console.ReadLine()   Pretty basic stuff I guess… I hope my approach was right? In Part 2 I will look into doing a simple Silverlight Frontend, referencing the projects together and deploying….

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• Salt and hash a password in .NET

  - by Jon Canning

  I endeavoured to follow the CrackStation rules: Salted Password Hashing - Doing it Right    public class SaltedHash     {         public string Hash { get; private set; }         public string Salt { get; private set; }         public SaltedHash(string password)         {             var saltBytes = new byte[32];             new RNGCryptoServiceProvider().GetNonZeroBytes(saltBytes);             Salt = ConvertToBase64String(saltBytes);             var passwordAndSaltBytes = Concat(password, saltBytes);             Hash = ComputeHash(passwordAndSaltBytes);         }         static string ConvertToBase64String(byte[] bytes)         {             return Convert.ToBase64String(bytes);         }         static string ComputeHash(byte[] bytes)         {             return ConvertToBase64String(SHA256.Create().ComputeHash(bytes));         }         static byte[] Concat(string password, byte[] saltBytes)         {             var passwordBytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(password);             return passwordBytes.Concat(saltBytes).ToArray();         }         public static bool Verify(string salt, string hash, string password)         {             var saltBytes = Convert.FromBase64String(salt);             var passwordAndSaltBytes = Concat(password, saltBytes);             var hashAttempt = ComputeHash(passwordAndSaltBytes);             return hash == hashAttempt;         }     }

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• SharePoint 2010 Hosting :: Hiding SharePoint 2010 Ribbon From Anonymous Users

  - by mbridge

  The user interface improvements in SharePoint 2010 as a whole are truly amazing. Microsoft has brought this already impressive product leaps and bounds in terms of accessibility, standards, and usability. One thing you might be aware of is the new and quite useful “ribbon” control that appears by default at the top of every SharePoint 2010 master page. Here’s a sneak peek: You’ll see this ribbon not only in the 2010 web interface, but also throughout the entire family of Office products coming out this year. Even SharePoint Designer 2010 makes use of the ribbon in a very flexible and useful way. Hiding The Ribbon In SharePoint 2010, the ribbon is used almost exclusively for content creation and site administration. It doesn’t make much sense to show the ribbon on a public-facing internet site (in fact, it can really retract from your site’s design when it appears), so you’ll probably want to hide the ribbon when users aren’t logged in. Here’s how it works: <SharePoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl PermissionsString="ManagePermissions" runat="server">     <div id="s4-ribbonrow" class="s4-pr s4-ribbonrowhidetitle">         <!-- Ribbon code appears here... -->     </div> </SharePoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl> In your master page, find the SharePoint ribbon by looking for the line of code that begins with <div id=”s4-ribbonrow”>. Place the SPSecurityTrimmedControl code around your ribbon to conditionally hide it based on user permissions. In our example, we’ve hidden the ribbon from any user who doesn’t have the ManagePermissions ability, which is going to be almost any user short of a site administrator. Other Permission Levels You can specify different permission levels for the SPSecurityTrimmedControl, allowing you to configure exactly who can see the SharePoint 2010 ribbon. Basically, this control will hide anything inside of it when users don’t have the specified PermissionString. The available options include: 1. List Permissions - ManageLists - CancelCheckout - AddListItems - EditListItems - DeleteListItems - ViewListItems - ApproveItems - OpenItems - ViewVersionsDeleteVersions - CreateAlerts - ViewFormPages 2. Site Permissions - ManagePermissions - ViewUsageData - ManageSubwebs - ManageWeb - AddAndCustomizePages - ApplyThemeAndBorder - ApplyStyleSheets - CreateGroups - BrowseDirectories - CreateSSCSite - ViewPages - EnumeratePermissions - BrowseUserInfo - ManageAlerts - UseRemoteAPIs - UseClientIntegration - Open - EditMyUserInfo 3. Personal Permissions - ManagePersonalViews - AddDelPrivateWebParts - UpdatePersonalWebParts You can use this control to hide anything in your master page or on related page layouts, so be sure to keep it in mind when you’re trying to hide/show things conditionally based on user permission. The One Catch You may notice that the login control (or welcome control) is actually inside the ribbon by default in SharePoint 2010. You’ll probably want to pull this control out of the ribbon and place it elsewhere on your page. Just look for the line of code that looks like this: <wssuc:Welcome id="IdWelcome" runat="server" EnableViewState=”false”/> Move this code out of the ribbon and into another location within your master page. Save your changes, check in and approve all files, and anonymous users will never know your site is built on SharePoint 2010!

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• SilverlightShow for Jan 24-30, 2011

  - by Dave Campbell

  Check out the Top Five most popular news at SilverlightShow for Jan 24-30, 2011. Most visited news for last week is Rudi Grobler's series on free WPF/Silverlight controls, followed by the 10 things Michael Crump suggests to be improved in Silverlight. Here's SilverlightShow top 5 news for last week: Some Free WPF/Silverlight Controls 10 things that can be improved in Silverlight Building a personal website using Silverlight Using Visual Studio LightSwitch Applications with WCF RIA Services XAP File Optimization Techniques for 2011 Visit and bookmark SilverlightShow. Stay in the 'Light

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• Monitoring almost anything with BizTalk 360

  - by Michael Stephenson

  When you work in an integration environment it is common that you will find yourself in a situation where you integrate with some unusual applications or have some unusual dependencies. That is the nature of integration. When you work with BizTalk one of the common problems is that BizTalk often is the place where problems with applications you integrate with are highlighted and these external applications may have poor monitoring solutions. Fortunately if you are a working with a customer who uses BizTalk 360 then it contains a feature called the "Web Endpoint Manager". Typically the web endpoint manager is used to monitor web services that you integrate with and will ping them at appropriate times to make sure they return the expected HTTP status code. When you have an usual situation where you want to monitor something which is key to the success to your solution but you find yourself having to consider a significant custom solution to monitor the external dependency then the Web Endpoint Manager could be your friend. The endpoint manager monitors a url and checks for a certain status code. This means that you can create your own aspx web page and then make BizTalk 360 monitor this web page. Behind the web page you could write any code you wished. An example of this is architecture is shown in the below diagram.     In the custom web page you would implement some custom code to do whatever it is that you want to monitor. In the below code snippet you can see how the Page_Load default method is doing some kind of check then depending on the result of the check it returns a certain HTTP code. protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { var result = CheckSomething();   if (result == "Success") Response.StatusCode = 202; else if (result == "DatabaseError") Response.StatusCode = 510; else if (result == "SystemError") Response.StatusCode = 512; else Response.StatusCode = 513;   }   In BizTalk 360 you would go into the Monitor and Notify tab and then to BizTalk Environment which gives you access to the Web Endpoint Manager. You need an alarm setup which configures how the endpoint will be checked. I'm not going to go through the details of creating the alarm as this is already documented in the BizTalk 360 documentation. One point to note is that in the example I am using I setup a threshold alarm which means that the url is checked about every minute and if there is an error that persists for a period of time then the alarm will raise the alert notification. In my example I configured the alarm to fire if the error persisted for 3 minutes. The below picture shows accessing the endpoint manager.   In the web endpoint manager you would then configure your endpoint to monitor and the HTTP response code which indicates all is working fine. The below picture shows this. I now have my endpoint monitoring setup and BizTalk 360 should be checking my custom endpoint to see that it is available. If I wanted to manually sanity check that the endpoints I have registered are working fine then clicking the Refresh button will show if they are all good or not. If my custom ASP.net page which is checking my dependency gets a problem you will see in the endpoint manager that the status code does not match the expected return code and your endpoints will display in red and you can see the problem. The below picture shows this. If I use specific HTTP response codes for the errors the custom ASP.net page might encounter I can easily interpret these to know what the problem is. Using the alarms and notifications with BizTalk 360 it means when your endpoint goes into an error state you can easily configure email or SMS notifications from BizTalk 360 to tell you that your endpoint is having problems and you can use BizTalk 360 to help correlate what the problem is to allow you to investigate further. Below you can see the email which tells me my endpoint is not working.   When everything returns to normal you will see the status is now fixed and you will see a situation like below where you can see the WebEndpoints are now green and the return code matches what is expected.   Conclusion As you can see it is really easy to plug your own custom ASP.net page into the BizTalk 360 web endpoint monitoring feature. This extension then gives you the power to really extend the monitoring to almost anything you want as long as you can write some .net code to check that the dependency is available and working. It would be interesting to hear of any ideas people have around things they would monitor with this extension. More details on the end point monitor can be found on the following link: http://www.biztalk360.com/tour/monitoring_notifications

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• CLR via C# 3rd Edition is out

  - by Abhijeet Patel

  Time for some book news update. CLR via C#, 3rd Edition seems to have been out for a little while now. The book was released in early Feb this year, and needless to say my copy is on it’s way. I can barely wait to dig in and chew on the goodies that one of the best technical authors and software professionals I respect has in store. The 2nd edition of the book was an absolute treat and this edition promises to be no less. Here is a brief description of what’s new and updated from the 2nd edition. Part I – CLR Basics Chapter 1-The CLR’s Execution Model Added about discussion about C#’s /optimize and /debug switches and how they relate to each other. Chapter 2-Building, Packaging, Deploying, and Administering Applications and Types Improved discussion about Win32 manifest information and version resource information. Chapter 3-Shared Assemblies and Strongly Named Assemblies Added discussion of TypeForwardedToAttribute and TypeForwardedFromAttribute. Part II – Designing Types Chapter 4-Type Fundamentals No new topics. Chapter 5-Primitive, Reference, and Value Types Enhanced discussion of checked and unchecked code and added discussion of new BigInteger type. Also added discussion of C# 4.0’s dynamic primitive type. Chapter 6-Type and Member Basics No new topics. Chapter 7-Constants and Fields No new topics. Chapter 8-Methods Added discussion of extension methods and partial methods. Chapter 9-Parameters Added discussion of optional/named parameters and implicitly-typed local variables. Chapter 10-Properties Added discussion of automatically-implemented properties, properties and the Visual Studio debugger, object and collection initializers, anonymous types, the System.Tuple type and the ExpandoObject type. Chapter 11-Events Added discussion of events and thread-safety as well as showing a cool extension method to simplify the raising of an event. Chapter 12-Generics Added discussion of delegate and interface generic type argument variance. Chapter 13-Interfaces No new topics. Part III – Essential Types Chapter 14-Chars, Strings, and Working with Text No new topics. Chapter 15-Enums Added coverage of new Enum and Type methods to access enumerated type instances. Chapter 16-Arrays Added new section on initializing array elements. Chapter 17-Delegates Added discussion of using generic delegates to avoid defining new delegate types. Also added discussion of lambda expressions. Chapter 18-Attributes No new topics. Chapter 19-Nullable Value Types Added discussion on performance. Part IV – CLR Facilities Chapter 20-Exception Handling and State Management This chapter has been completely rewritten. It is now about exception handling and state management. It includes discussions of code contracts and constrained execution regions (CERs). It also includes a new section on trade-offs between writing productive code and reliable code. Chapter 21-Automatic Memory Management Added discussion of C#’s fixed state and how it works to pin objects in the heap. Rewrote the code for weak delegates so you can use them with any class that exposes an event (the class doesn’t have to support weak delegates itself). Added discussion on the new ConditionalWeakTable class, GC Collection modes, Full GC notifications, garbage collection modes and latency modes. I also include a new sample showing how your application can receive notifications whenever Generation 0 or 2 collections occur. Chapter 22-CLR Hosting and AppDomains Added discussion of side-by-side support allowing multiple CLRs to be loaded in a single process. Added section on the performance of using MarshalByRefObject-derived types. Substantially rewrote the section on cross-AppDomain communication. Added section on AppDomain Monitoring and first chance exception notifications. Updated the section on the AppDomainManager class. Chapter 23-Assembly Loading and Reflection Added section on how to deploy a single file with dependent assemblies embedded inside it. Added section comparing reflection invoke vs bind/invoke vs bind/create delegate/invoke vs C#’s dynamic type. Chapter 24-Runtime Serialization This is a whole new chapter that was not in the 2nd Edition. Part V – Threading Chapter 25-Threading Basics Whole new chapter motivating why Windows supports threads, thread overhead, CPU trends, NUMA Architectures, the relationship between CLR threads and Windows threads, the Thread class, reasons to use threads, thread scheduling and priorities, foreground thread vs background threads. Chapter 26-Performing Compute-Bound Asynchronous Operations Whole new chapter explaining the CLR’s thread pool. This chapter covers all the new .NET 4.0 constructs including cooperative cancelation, Tasks, the aralle class, parallel language integrated query, timers, how the thread pool manages its threads, cache lines and false sharing. Chapter 27-Performing I/O-Bound Asynchronous Operations Whole new chapter explaining how Windows performs synchronous and asynchronous I/O operations. Then, I go into the CLR’s Asynchronous Programming Model, my AsyncEnumerator class, the APM and exceptions, Applications and their threading models, implementing a service asynchronously, the APM and Compute-bound operations, APM considerations, I/O request priorities, converting the APM to a Task, the event-based Asynchronous Pattern, programming model soup. Chapter 28-Primitive Thread Synchronization Constructs Whole new chapter discusses class libraries and thread safety, primitive user-mode, kernel-mode constructs, and data alignment. Chapter 29-Hybrid Thread Synchronization Constructs Whole new chapter discussion various hybrid constructs such as ManualResetEventSlim, SemaphoreSlim, CountdownEvent, Barrier, ReaderWriterLock(Slim), OneManyResourceLock, Monitor, 3 ways to solve the double-check locking technique, .NET 4.0’s Lazy and LazyInitializer classes, the condition variable pattern, .NET 4.0’s concurrent collection classes, the ReaderWriterGate and SyncGate classes.

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• ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM Available

  - by Shaun

  Shiju Varghese posted an article on his(her) blog and said that the RTM of the ASP.NET MVC 2 had been released and available to download. You can get the installation packeage and the release note here. And based on the release note there’s no breaking changes from RC2 to RTM. Let’s play with the new ASP.NET MVC and look forward the Visual Studio 2010 RTM.

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