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Expression Studio 4 Community Launch Event

- by Timmy Kokke

Event On June 7th Expression Studio 4 will be launched at the Internet Week in New York. One day later, on June 8th, the Dutch Silverlight and Expression User Group SIXIN organizes the Dutch Community Launch in collaboration with Microsoft and Centric at Centric's office in IJsselstein. To celebrate the 4 Expression release we have two interesting speakers. In addition, we give three packages Expression Studio and more great gifts away. Program The preliminary program for the evening is as follows: 5:45 p.m. - Food, drinks and networking 6:45 p.m. - Reception and Introduction by Koen Zwikstra, co-founder of SIXIN and Silverlight MVP 7:00 p.m. - Phone 7 Building a Windows application using the new features of Expression Blend by Loek van den Ouweland, founder and web designer for Magic Studio 8:00 p.m. - Break 8:30 p.m. - Tour Encoder and Expression Web by Antoni Dol, senior designer at Macaw 9:30 p.m. - Networking while enjoying a drink Ask your question to one of the speakers If you have a question to one of the speakers, then you can by email ([email protected]) or thru Twitter. Send an email with subject # expression4 or send a tweet @ sixinUG and use it to hashtag # expression4. Register To register for this event or to get more information you can go to the SIXIN meetings page here. Special thanks to our sponsors:

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Uganda .NET Usergroup April meeting

- by Malisa L. Ncube

Our April meeting was presented by Wilson Kutegeka on the topic of Building the Data Access a layer. In his presentation he showed a tool which he has developed to generate the entities, stores procedures that would be used to reduce having to retype the same boilerplate code for each entity. He uses visual basic samples to demonstrate access to the data from the database and inherits his classes from an abstract class which contains common properties including connection strings, save and delete methods. A number of questions emerged from the group, mostly those that use a business model based approaches. Some of the questions are on unit testing and mocking the models without using the database, the use of IoCs and loose coupled patterns. Some of the questions were on caching, Linq support and data annotations based validation. The presentation details can be found here. Intellisense LTD agreed to sponsor our website and we are glad to have that as we really need to have a website running. We would like to thank the following companies for supporting our community activities: Apress, Telerik, Manning, DevExpress (CodeRush), Ncover, and Intellisense. Technorati Tags: Uganda .NET Usergroup

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Casing of COM-Interop registered components

- by Marko Apfel

During a refactoring i realized that renaming of components, which will be registered for COM-Interop, must be done carefully. In my case i changed the casing of XyzToolbar to XyzToolBar. At the developing machine everything works fine. But after installing the modified stuff at the production machine, the toolbar was not visible. Using regasm with the new assemblies helped. So this was the hint: we use WIX to build the setup. And during setup-development the heat-tool extracted the needed registry-keys. And in these keys still was the old name XyzToolbar. Refreshing the names corrected the problem.

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Powershell variables to string

- by Mike Koerner

I'm new to powershell. I'm trying to write an error handler to wrap around my script. Part of the error handler is dumping out some variable settings. I spent a while trying to do this and couldn't google a complete solution so I thought I'd post something. I want to display the $myinvocation variable. In powershell you can do this PS C:\> $myInvocation for my purpose I want to create a stringbuilder object and append the $myinvocation info. I tried this $sbOut = new-object System.Text.Stringbuilder $sbOut.appendLine($myinvocation) $sbOut.ToString() This produces Capacity MaxCapacity Length -------- ----------- ------ 86 2147483647 45 System.Management.Automation.InvocationInfo This is not what I wanted so I tried $sbOut.appendLine(($myinvocation|format-list *)) This produced Capacity MaxCapacity Length -------- ----------- ------ 606 2147483647 305 Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.Internal.Format.FormatStartData Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.Internal.Format.GroupStartData Micros oft.PowerShell.Commands.Internal.Format.FormatEntryData Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.Internal.Format.GroupEndData Microsoft.Powe rShell.Commands.Internal.Format.FormatEndData Finally I figured out how to produce what I wanted: $sbOut = new-object System.Text.Stringbuilder [void]$sbOut.appendLine(($myinvocation|out-string)) $sbOut.ToString() MyCommand : $sbOut = new-object System.Text.Stringbuilder [void]$sbOut.appendLine(($myinvocation|out-string)) $sbOut.ToString() BoundParameters : {} UnboundArguments : {} ScriptLineNumber : 0 OffsetInLine : 0 HistoryId : 13 ScriptName : Line : PositionMessage : InvocationName : PipelineLength : 2 PipelinePosition : 1 ExpectingInput : False CommandOrigin : Runspace Note the [void] in front of the stringbuilder variable doesn't show the Capacity,MaxCapacity of the stringbuilder object. The pipe to out-string makes the output a string. It's not pretty but it works.

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Adventures in MVVM – My ViewModel Base – Silverlight Support!

- by Brian Genisio's House Of Bilz

More Adventures in MVVM In my last post, I outlined the powerful features that are available in the ViewModelSupport. It takes advantage of the dynamic features of C# 4.0 (as well as some 3.0 goodies) to help eliminate the plumbing that often comes with writing ViewModels. If you are interested in learning about the capabilities, please take a look at that post and look at the code on CodePlex. When I wrote about the ViewModel base class, I complained that the features did not work in Silverlight because as of 4.0, it does not support binding to dynamic properties. Although I still think this is a bummer, I am happy to say that I have come up with a workaround. In the Silverlight version of my base class, I include a PropertyCollectionConverter that lets you bind to dynamic properties in the ViewModelBase, especially the convention-based commands that the base class supports. To take advantage of any properties that are not statically defined, you can bind to the Properties property of the ViewModel and pass in a converter parameter for the name of the property you want to bind. For example, a ViewModel that looks like this: public class ExampleViewModel : ViewModelBase { public void Execute_MyCommand() { Set("Text", "Foo"); } } Can bind to the dynamic property and the convention-based command with the following XAML. <TextBlock Text="{Binding Properties, Converter={StaticResource PropertiesConverter}, ConverterParameter=Text}" Margin="5" /> <Button Content="Execute MyCommand" Command="{Binding Properties, Converter={StaticResource PropertiesConverter}, ConverterParameter=MyCommand}" Margin="5" /> Of course, it is not as pretty as binding to Text and MyCommand like you can in WPF. But, it is better than having a failed feature. This allows you to share your ViewModels between WPF and Silverlight very easily. <BeatDeadHorse>Hopefully, in Silverlight 5.0, we will see binding to dynamic properties more directly????</BeatDeadHorse>

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Taking a screenshot from within a Silverlight #WP7 application

- by Laurent Bugnion

Often times, you want to take a screenshot of an application’s page. There can be multiple reasons. For instance, you can use this to provide an easy feedback method to beta testers. I find this super invaluable when working on integration of design in an app, and the user can take quick screenshots, attach them to an email and send them to me directly from the Windows Phone device. However, the same mechanism can also be used to provide screenshots are a feature of the app, for example if the user wants to save the current status of his application, etc. Caveats Note the following: The code requires an XNA library to save the picture to the media library. To have this, follow the steps: In your application (or class library), add a reference to Microsoft.Xna.Framework. In your code, add a “using” statement to Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Media. In the Properties folder, open WMAppManifest.xml and add the following capability: ID_CAP_MEDIALIB. The method call will fail with an exception if the device is connected to the Zune application on the PC. To avoid this, either disconnect the device when testing, or end the Zune application on the PC. While the method call will not fail on the emulator, there is no way to access the media library, so it is pretty much useless on this platform. This method only prints Silverlight elements to the output image. Other elements (such as a WebBrowser control’s content for instance) will output a black rectangle. The code public static void SaveToMediaLibrary( FrameworkElement element, string title) { try { var bmp = new WriteableBitmap(element, null); var ms = new MemoryStream(); bmp.SaveJpeg( ms, (int)element.ActualWidth, (int)element.ActualHeight, 0, 100); ms.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin); var lib = new MediaLibrary(); var filePath = string.Format(title + ".jpg"); lib.SavePicture(filePath, ms); MessageBox.Show( "Saved in your media library!", "Done", MessageBoxButton.OK); } catch { MessageBox.Show( "There was an error. Please disconnect your phone from the computer before saving.", "Cannot save", MessageBoxButton.OK); } } This method can save any FrameworkElement. Typically I use it to save a whole page, but you can pass any other element to it. On line 7, we create a new WriteableBitmap. This excellent class can render a visual tree into a bitmap. Note that for even more features, you can use the great WriteableBitmapEx class library (which is open source). On lines 9 to 16, we save the WriteableBitmap to a MemoryStream. The only format supported by default is JPEG, however it is possible to convert to other formats with the ImageTools library (also open source). Lines 18 to 20 save the picture to the Windows Phone device’s media library. Using the image To retrieve the image, simply launch the Pictures library on the phone. The image will be in Saved Pictures. From here, you can share the image (by email, for instance), or synchronize it with the PC using the Zune software. Saving to other platforms It is of course possible to save to other platforms than the media library. For example, you can send the image to a web service, or save it to the isolated storage on the device. To do this, instead of using a MemoryStream, you can use any other stream (such as a web request stream, or a file stream) and save to that instead. Hopefully this code will be helpful to you! Happy coding, Laurent Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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SBUG --> UK Connected Systems User Group

- by Michael Stephenson

Following a recent user group meeting we have decided that the UK SOA/BPM User Group will be renamed to the UK Connected Systems User Group. The reasons for this are as follows: 1. Other user groups who cover the same topics as us are all called something similar 2. We feel the name change will help to increase user group membership The focus and topics of the user group will remain the same.

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Day 5 - Tada! My Game Menu Screen Graphics

- by dapostolov

So, tonight I took some time to mash up some graphics for my game menu screen. My artistic talent sucks...but here goes nothing...voila, my menu screen!! The Menu Screen The screen above is displaying 4 sprites, even though it looks like maybe 7... I guess one of the first things for me to test in the future is ... is it more memory efficient (and better frame rate) to draw one big background image OR tp paint the screen black, and place each sprite in set locations? To display the 4 sprites above, I borrowed my code from yesterday ... I know, tacky, but...I wanted to see it, feel it. Do you feel it? FEEL IT! (homer voice & shakes fist) Note: the menu items won't scale properly as it stands with this code, well pretty much they do nothing except look pretty... Paint.Net & Google Fun So how did I create that image above? Well, to create the background and 3 menu items I used Paint.Net. Basically, I scoured Google images for: a stone doorway, a stone pillar, an old book, a wizards hat, and...that's it pretty much it! I'll let you type in those searches and see if you can locate the images I used. I know, bad developer...but I figured since I modified the images considerably it doesn't count...well for a personal project it shouldn't count...*shrug* Anyhow, I extracted each key assest I wanted from each image and applied lots of matting, blurring, color changes, glow effects and such. Then, using my vivid imagination I placed / composed each of the layered assets into the mashed up the "scene" above. Pretty cool, eh? Hey, did you know, the cool mist effect is actually a fire rendition in Paint.net? I set it to black & white with opacity set next to nothing. I'm also very proud of the yellow "light" in the stone doorway. I drew that in and then applied gausian blur to it to give it the effect of light creeping out around the door and into the room...heheh. So did I achieve the dark, mysterious ritual as I stated in my design doc? I think I had a great stab at it! Maybe down the road I can get a real artist to crank out some quality graphics for the game... =) So, What's Next? Well, I don't have that animated brazier yet...however, I thought it would be even cooler if I can get that door pulsing that yellow light and it would be extremely cool to have the smoke / mist moving across the screen! Make the creative ideas stop!! (clutches head) haha! I'm having great fun working on this project =) I recommend others giving something like this a try, it's really fulfilling. OK. Tomorrow... I think I'm going to start creating some game / menu objects as per the design doc, maybe even get a custom mouse cursor up on the screen and handle a couple of mouse events, and lastly, maybe a feature to toggle a framerate display... D.

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It was a figure of speech!

- by Ratman21

Yesterday I posted the following as attention getter / advertisement (as well as my feelings). In the groups, (I am in) on the social networking site, LinkedIn and boy did I get responses. I am fighting mad about (a figure of speech, really) not having a job! Look just because I am over 55 and have gray hair. It does not mean, my brain is dead or I can no longer trouble shoot a router or circuit or LAN issue. Or that I can do “IT” work at all. And I could prove this if; some one would give me at job. Come on try me for 90 days at min. wage. I know you will end up keeping me (hope fully at normal pay) around. Is any one hearing me…come on take up the challenge! This was the responses I got. I hear you. We just need to retrain and get our skills up to speed is all. That is what I am doing. I have not given up. Just got to stay on top of the game. Experience is on our side if we have the credentials and we are reasonable about our salaries this should not be an issue. Already on it, going back to school and have got three certifications (CompTIA A+, Security+ and Network+. I am now studying for my CISCO CCNA certification. As to my salary, I am willing to work at very reasonable rate. You need to re-brand yourself like a product, market and sell yourself. You need to smarten up, look and feel a million dollars, re-energize yourself, regain your confidents. Either start your own business, or re-write your CV so it stands out from the rest, get the template off the internet. Contact every recruitment agent in your town, state, country and overseas, and on the web. Apply to every job you think you could do, you may not get it but you will make a contact for your network, which may lead to a job at the end of the tunnel. Get in touch with everyone you know from past jobs. Do charity work. I maintain the IT Network, stage electrical and the Telecom equipment in my church, Again already on it. I have email the world is seems with my resume and cover letters. So far, I have rewritten or had it rewrote, my resume and cover letters; over seven times so far. Re-energize? I never lost my energy level or my self-confidents in my work (now if could get some HR personal to see the same). I also volunteer at my church, I created and maintain the church web sit. I share your frustration. Sucks being over 50 and looking for work. Please don't sell yourself short at min wage because the employer will think that’s your worth. Keep trying!! I never stop trying and min wage is only for 90 days. If some one takes up the challenge. Some post asked if I am keeping up technology. Do you keep up with the latest technology and can speak the language fluidly? Yep to that and as to speaking it also a yep! I am a geek you know. I heard from others over the 50 year mark and younger too. I'm with you! I keep getting told that I don't have enough experience because I just recently completed a Masters level course in Microsoft SQL Server, which gave me a project-intensive equivalent of between 2 and 3 years of experience. On top of that training, I have 19 years as an applications programmer and database administrator. I can normalize rings around experienced DBAs and churn out effective code with the best of them. But my 19 years is worthless as far as most recruiters and HR people are concerned because it is not the specific experience for which they're looking. HR AND RECRUITERS TAKE NOTE: Experience, whatever the language, translates across platforms and technology! By the way, I'm also over 55 and still have "got it"! I never lost it and I also can work rings round younger techs. I'm 52 and female and seem to be having the same issues. I have over 10 years experience in tech support (with a BS in CIS) and can't get hired either. Ow, I only have an AS in computer science along with my certifications. Keep the faith, I have been unemployed since August of 2008. I agree with you...I am willing to return to the beginning of my retail career and work myself back through the ranks, if someone will look past the grey and realize the knowledge I would bring to the table. I also would like some one to look past the gray. Interesting approach, volunteering to work for minimum wage for 90 days. I'm in the same situation as you, being 55 & balding w/white hair, so I know where you're coming from. I've been out of work now for a year. I'm in Michigan, where the unemployment rate is estimated to be 15% (the worst in the nation) & even though I've got 30+ years of IT experience ranging from mainframe to PC desktop support, it's difficult to even get a face-to-face interview. I had one prospective employer tell me flat out that I "didn't have the energy required for this position". Mostly I never get any feedback. All I can say is good luck & try to remain optimistic. He said WHAT! Yes remaining optimistic is key. Along with faith in God. Then there was this (for lack of better word) jerk. Give it up already. You were too old to work in high tech 10 years ago. Scratch that, 20 years ago! Try selling hot dogs in front of Fry's Electronics. At least you would get a chance to eat lunch with your previous colleagues.... You know funny thing on this person is that I checked out his profile. He is older than I am.

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Associating your MentionNotifier subscriptions with OAuth

- by Tim Hibbard

We recently added OAuth to MentionNotifier so that users can quickly view and edit their subscriptions without needed an additional login. This is enabled by default for new users, but existing users will need to do the following steps to associate their subscriptions with OAuth: 1) Go to http://software.engraph.com/ManageMentionNotifier 2) Click “Sign in with Twitter” 3) Verify that your twittername and email are correct 4) Click "Associate with OAuth" This will also allow you to reply to notification emails and MentionNotifier will tweet on your behalf. This is made possible by @sidePop written by @ferventcoder Note that the reply by email is new and buggy, so make sure that what was tweeted is correct and as expected. If you run into any issues, sent me a reply to @timhibbard. You can also join the MentionNotifier fan page on facebook, or follow @MentionNotifier on twitter.

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2 min video about the SQL_Compare

- by CatherineRussell

It is nice to start blogging again! I am working on new project in a small company now. We do not have a full time database admin. I have to cover multiple roles: getting requirements, writing docs and creating diagrams, designing app, writing code, testing and DBA role. I am not a DBA. But, I have to do day to day database changes: adding new new columns and tables. Check out 2 min video about the SQL_Compare. This tool saves time by automatically comparing and synchronizing database schemas; eliminate mistakes migrating database changes from dev, to test, to production; speed up the deployment of new database schema updates; generate T-SQL scripts to update one database to match the schema of another; find and fix errors caused by differences between databases; keeps an accurate history of all previous database records. http://www.red-gate.com/products/SQL_Compare/index.htm

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New SQL Azure Development Accelerator Core promotional offer announced

- by Eric Nelson

This is (almost) a straight copy and paste but represents an important announcement worthy of a little more “exposure” :-) Starting August 1, 2010, we will release a new SQL Azure Development Accelerator Core promotional offer. This new offer will give you the flexibility to purchase commitment quantities of SQL Azure Business Edition databases independent of other Windows Azure platform services at a deeply discounted monthly price. The offer is valid only for a six month term. You may purchase in 10 GB increments the amount of our Business Edition relational database that you require (each Business Edition database is capable of storing up to 50 GB). The offer price will be $74.95 per 10 GB per month. This promotional offer represents 25% off of our normal consumption rates. Monthly Business Edition relational database usage exceeding the purchased commitment amount and usage for other Windows Azure platform services for this offer will be charged at our normal consumption rates. Please click here for full details of our new SQL Azure Development Accelerator Core offer. Related Links: Details of 5GB and 50GB databases have been released http://ukazure.ning.com UK community site Getting started with the Windows Azure Platform

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Presenting BI with SharePoint 2010

- by Leonard Mwangi

I will be presenting BI with SharePoint 2010 at Kansas City SharePoint Users group. See ya there http://hugkc.org/dnn49/SharePoint/tabid/56/Default.aspx

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Presenting BI with SharePoint 2010

- by Leonard Mwangi

I will be presenting BI with SharePoint 2010 at Kansas City SharePoint Users group. See ya there http://hugkc.org/dnn49/SharePoint/tabid/56/Default.aspx

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Caching of toolbar names in ArcMap

- by Marko Apfel

For little GUI-changes in own ArcMap-customizations normally it is enough to start the application and look that every entry is visible. Especially for refactoring of an own toolbar it was still enough to verify that the toolbar is already shown in the choice-list. But this is a fallacy: the entries there comes from a cache. You could verify this by dumping informations in the toolbar constructor. The constructor is only called if the toolbar is activated! Otherwise you see the toolbar name, but this name comes out of a cache. The cache is stored in the registry under: HKCU\Software\ESRI\ArcMap\Settings\CommandBarNameCache

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Twitter Integration in Windows 8

- by Joe Mayo

Glenn Versweyveld, @Depechie, blogged about Twitter Integration in Windows 8. The post describes how to use WinRtAuthorizer to perform OAuth authentication with LINQ to Twitter. If you’re using LINQ to Twitter with Windows 8, the WinRtAuthorizer is definitely the way to go. It lets you perform the entire OAuth dance with a single method call, which is a huge time savings and simplification of your code. In addition to Glenn’s excellent post, I’ve posted a sample app named MetroWinRtAuthorizerDemo.zip on the LINQ to Twitter Samples Page. @JoeMayo

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Book Review: Professional WCF 4

- by Sam Abraham

My Investigation of WCF internals have set the right stage to revisit Professional WCF 4 by Pablo Cibraro, Kurt Claeys, Fabio Cozzolino and Johann Grabner. In this book, the authors dive deep into all aspects of the WCF API in a reading targeted towards intermediate and advanced developers. Book quality so far as presentation, code completeness, content clarity and organization was superb. The authors have taken a hands-on approach to thoroughly covering the WCF 4.0 API with three chapters totaling 100+ pages completely dedicated to business cases with downloadable source code readily available. Chapter 1 outlines SOA best-practice considerations. Next three chapters take a top-down approach to the WCF API covering service and data contracts, bindings, clients, instancing and Workflow Services followed by another carefully-thought three chapters covering the security options available via the WCF API. In conclusion, Professional WCF 4.0 provides a thorough coverage of the WCF API and is a recommended read for anybody looking to reinforce their understanding of the various features available in the WCF framework. Many thanks to the Wiley/Wrox User Group Program for their support of our West Palm Beach Developers’ Group. All the best, --Sam

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App_Offline.htm, taking site down for maintenance

- by Vipin

There is much simpler and graceful way to shut down a site while doing upgrade to avoid the problem of people accessing site in the middle of a content update. Basically, if you place file with name 'app_offline.htm' with below contents in the root of a web application directory, ASP.NET will shut-down the application, and stop processing any new incoming requests for that application. ASP.NET will also then respond to all requests for dynamic pages in the application by sending back the content of the app_offline.htm file (for example: you might want to have a “site under construction” or “down for maintenance” message). Then after upgrade, just rename/delete app_offline.htm file…and the site would be back to normal. Just remember that the size of the file should be greater than 512 bytes, doesn't matter even if you add some comments to it to push the byte size as long as it's of the size greater than 512 - it'll work fine. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"><html http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" ><head> <title>Maintenance Mode - Outage Message</title></head><body> <h1>Maintenance Mode</h1> <p>We're currently undergoing scheduled maintenance. We will come back very shortly.</p> <p>Sorry for the inconvenience!</p> </body></html>

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Windows8, JavaScript and HTML5 - A good thing?

- by Albers

Most of us have seen the Windows 8 news regarding support for native HTML5/JavaScript applications. The press has pushed this as a potential threat to the .NET developer community because JavaScript and HTML5 were called "our new developer platform". The press release refers to "Web-connected and Web-powered apps built using HTML5 and JavaScript that have access to the full power of the PC.".Microsoft has also been hush on details related to these comments. Before we buy the hype and start worrying about a world where we drop our Visual Studio licenses and buy DreamWeaver - let's think about how Windows 8 HTML/JavaScript applications would be implemented. The HTML5 spec offers support for offline applications, but this won't offer the OS-integrated experience the press release refers to. MS has to be planning a way to extend access beyond the traditional JavaScript feature set. Microsoft has a similar option today: HTML Applications or HTAs. They come close to required features, but HTAs need ActiveX or Java integration to provide the promised OS-level access. I'm guessing that Microsoft's future OS strategy isn't built on developers cranking out ActiveX controls or Java applets. So where is Microsoft headed? One possibility is that MS builds a new JavaScript framework from the ground up outside their current APIs. Another idea would be for Microsoft to add support for JavaScript as a first class .NET language using the Dynamic Language Runtime. A solution based on the DLR could be integrated into an HTA-like model to provide the promised access, along with the full range of features in .NET Framework. Security comes included in the Framework. And the work necessary to support this integration would tie in nicely with the effort MS has recently made providing better JavaScript and HTML5 support in Visual Studio 2010. As a bonus, a full-fledged JavaScript DLR implementation would allow single language web solutions across client and server (think node.js) and would appeal to developers who are familiar with JavaScript but have less experience with the Microsoft tech stack. We will all get a better picture after the Build conference in September. But in the mean time we know that Microsoft has a reputation for providing strong developer support. We might want to reserve our harshest judgement and consider that the press release could hint at new opportunities for .NET development.

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Refactoring Part 1 : Intuitive Investments

- by Wes McClure

Fear, it’s what turns maintaining applications into a nightmare. Technology moves on, teams move on, someone is left to operate the application, what was green is now perceived brown. Eventually the business will evolve and changes will need to be made. The approach to those changes often dictates the long term viability of the application. Fear of change, lack of passion and a lack of interest in understanding the domain often leads to a paranoia to do anything that doesn’t involve duct tape and bailing twine. Don’t get me wrong, those have a place in the short term viability of a project but they don’t have a place in the long term. Add to it “us versus them” in regards to the original team and those that maintain it, internal politics and other factors and you have a recipe for disaster. This results in code that quickly becomes unmanageable. Even the most clever of designs will eventually become sub optimal and debt will amount that exponentially makes changes difficult. This is where refactoring comes in, and it’s something I’m very passionate about. Refactoring is about improving the process whereby we make change, it’s an exponential investment in the process of change. Without it we will incur exponential complexity that halts productivity. Investments, especially in the long term, require intuition and reflection. How can we tackle new development effectively via evolving the original design and paying off debt that has been incurred? The longer we wait to ask and answer this question, the more it will cost us. Small requests don’t warrant big changes, but realizing when changes now will pay off in the long term, and especially in the short term, is valuable. I have done my fair share of maintaining applications and continuously refactoring as needed, but recently I’ve begun work on a project that hasn’t had much debt, if any, paid down in years. This is the first in a series of blog posts to try to capture the process which is largely driven by intuition of smaller refactorings from other projects. Signs that refactoring could help: Testability How can decreasing test time not pay dividends? One of the first things I found was that a very important piece often takes 30+ minutes to test. I can only imagine how much time this has cost historically, but more importantly the time it might cost in the coming weeks: I estimate at least 10-20 hours per person! This is simply unacceptable for almost any situation. As it turns out, about 6 hours of working with this part of the application and I was able to cut the time down to under 30 seconds! In less than the lost time of one week, I was able to fix the problem for all future weeks! If we can’t test fast then we can’t change fast, nor with confidence. Code is used by end users and it’s also used by developers, consider your own needs in terms of the code base. Adding logic to enable/disable features during testing can help decouple parts of an application and lead to massive improvements. What exactly is so wrong about test code in real code? Often, these become features for operators and sometimes end users. If you cannot run an integration test within a test runner in your IDE, it’s time to refactor. Readability Are variables named meaningfully via a ubiquitous language? Is the code segmented functionally or behaviorally so as to minimize the complexity of any one area? Are aspects properly segmented to avoid confusion (security, logging, transactions, translations, dependency management etc) Is the code declarative (what) or imperative (how)? What matters, not how. LINQ is a great abstraction of the what, not how, of collection manipulation. The Reactive framework is a great example of the what, not how, of managing streams of data. Are constants abstracted and named, or are they just inline? Do people constantly bitch about the code/design? If the code is hard to understand, it will be hard to change with confidence. It’s a large undertaking if the original designers didn’t pay much attention to readability and as such will never be done to “completion.” Make sure not to go over board, instead use this as you change an application, not in lieu of changes (like with testability). Complexity Simplicity will never be achieved, it’s highly subjective. That said, a lot of code can be significantly simplified, tidy it up as you go. Refactoring will often converge upon a simplification step after enough time, keep an eye out for this. Understandability In the process of changing code, one often gains a better understanding of it. Refactoring code is a good way to learn how it works. However, it’s usually best in combination with other reasons, in effect killing two birds with one stone. Often this is done when readability is poor, in which case understandability is usually poor as well. In the large undertaking we are making with this legacy application, we will be replacing it. Therefore, understanding all of its features is important and this refactoring technique will come in very handy. Unused code How can deleting things not help? This is a freebie in refactoring, it’s very easy to detect with modern tools, especially in statically typed languages. We have VCS for a reason, if in doubt, delete it out (ok that was cheesy)! If you don’t know where to start when refactoring, this is an excellent starting point! Duplication Do not pray and sacrifice to the anti-duplication gods, there are excellent examples where consolidated code is a horrible idea, usually with divergent domains. That said, mediocre developers live by copy/paste. Other times features converge and aren’t combined. Tools for finding similar code are great in the example of copy/paste problems. Knowledge of the domain helps identify convergent concepts that often lead to convergent solutions and will give intuition for where to look for conceptual repetition. 80/20 and the Boy Scouts It’s often said that 80% of the time 20% of the application is used most. These tend to be the parts that are changed. There are also parts of the code where 80% of the time is spent changing 20% (probably for all the refactoring smells above). I focus on these areas any time I make a change and follow the philosophy of the Boy Scout in cleaning up more than I messed up. If I spend 2 hours changing an application, in the 20%, I’ll always spend at least 15 minutes cleaning it or nearby areas. This gives a huge productivity edge on developers that don’t. Ironically after a short period of time the 20% shrinks enough that we don’t have to spend 80% of our time there and can move on to other areas. Refactoring is highly subjective, never attempt to refactor to completion! Learn to be comfortable with leaving one part of the application in a better state than others. It’s an evolution, not a revolution. These are some simple areas to look into when making changes and can help get one started in the process. I’ve often found that refactoring is a convergent process towards simplicity that sometimes spans a few hours but often can lead to massive simplifications over the timespan of weeks and months of regular development.

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Notes from a short presentation on NodeJs

- by Aligned

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Aligned/archive/2014/05/30/notes-from-a-short-presentation-on-nodejs.aspxI volunteered myself to give a short 30 minute presentation at a work lunch and learn on NodeJs. With my limited experience I see using Node as a great tool for build process improvement, scaffolding with yeoman, and running tests with Karma. I haven’t looked into using as a full server or development stack. I guess I’m too stuck on IIS and Visual Studio :-). Here are my notes, that aren’t very well formatted, but I wanted to share it anyways. What is it? "Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices." Why should you be interested? another popular tool that can help you get the job done you can use the command prompt! can be run at build or release time to automate tasks What are some uses? https://www.npmjs.org/ - NuGet for Node packages http://bower.io/ - NuGet for UI JavaScript libraries (jQuery, Bootstrap, Angular, etc) http://yeoman.io/ "Our workflow is comprised of three tools for improving your productivity and satisfaction when building a web app: yo (the scaffolding tool), grunt (the build tool) and bower (for package management)." -> yeoman asks which components you want alternative - http://joakimbeng.eu01.aws.af.cm/slush-replacing-yeoman-with-gulp/ https://www.npmjs.org/package/generator-cg-angular - phantom js, less, // git is needed for bower http://git-scm.com/ run installer in Windows before you can use bower // select Run Git from the Windows Command Prompt in the installer // requires a reboot http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20069297/bower-git-not-in-the-path-error npm install -g git npm install -g yo npm install -g generator-cg-angular mkdir myapp cd myapp yo cg-angular npm install -g bower npm install -g grunt-cli yo bower grunt serve grunt test grunt build // there are many generators (generator-angular) is another one // I like the Nuget HotTowel-Angular from John Papa myself // needed IIS Node for Express -> prompt from WebMatrix Karma bat to startup Karma - see below image compression - https://www.npmjs.org/search?q=optimize+images, https://github.com/heldr/node-smushit - do it from the command line LESS compiling js and css combine and minification at build with Gulp for requireJS apps quick lightweight HTTP server - "Express" Build pipeline with Grunt or Gulp http://www.johnpapa.net/gulp-and-grunt-at-anglebrackets/ Gulp is the newer and improved over Grunt. Supposed to be easier to use, but Grunt is more established. https://github.com/johnpapa/ng-demos/tree/master/grunt-gulp https://github.com/assetgraph/assetgraph-builder Does a lot of the minimizing, combining, image optimization etc using Node. Looks interesting.... http://nodejs.org http://nodeschool.io/ http://sub.watchmecode.net/getting-started-with-nodejs-installing-and-writing-your-first-code/ https://stormpath.com/blog/build-a-killer-node-dot-js-client-for-your-rest-plus-json-api/ https://codio.com/ http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ItsJustASoftwareIssueEdgejsBringsNodeAndNETTogetherOnThreePlatforms.aspx run unit tests - Karma in msBuild karma-start.bat @echo off cd %~dp0\.. REM 604800 is to make sure we only update once every 7 days call npm install --cache-min 604800 -g grunt-cli call npm install --cache-min 604800 call npm install --cache-min 604800 -g karma-cli karma start UnitTests\karma.conf.js REM karma start UnitTests\karma.conf.js --single-run REM see karma-start.bat and karam.config.js REM jsHint comes from Nuget

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If not now, then when?

- by Chris Gardner

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/freestylecoding/archive/2013/10/25/if-not-now-then-when.aspx The time has been flying by this year. It seems like only yesterday that I mentioned the gorillagator, a simple construct of confusion to try to draw attention to my message. In reality, that message was sent over a month ago. During that time, the hours slipped to days and days to weeks. Many exciting things have happened to myself; I'm sure many exciting things have happened to you. I'm also sure that many terrifying things have happened to children and their families. 62 children enter treatment at a Children's Miracle Network Hospital every minute. That's nearly 60,000 children since I sent the last email. To put that number in perspective, that is more than the population of Greenland. If we expand that to the past year, they have been nearly 550,000 children treated. That is almost the population of Huntsville, Decatur, and all their suburbs combined. Over the past 4 years, I have raised a little more than $3,000 for Children's Hospital of Alabama. As a result, I received a call from the organizers of Extra Life thanking me for my dedicated work and informing me that I was the top supporters for Children's Hospital of Alabama ... with my measly three grand. We can do much better than that. It may sound like I'm trying to have fun by playing games for 24 hours. It is more than that. It is me using my time and body as a catalyst. It is me putting my passion to work for a cause. It is me turning my love into something tangible. I have been campaigning and fighting to give these children a chance for years. I have been asking you to help me support these children and families. I've been putting in countless hours of talking to people, impassioned emails, and carefully constructed tweets. I have been fighting with cutting edge, and sometimes expensive, technology to try to provide live streams of my marathons. I yearly put my body through 24 (and, this year, 25) hours of no sleep. I do this to represent the countless hours these families sit awake at their children's side. All I ask is a few minutes on a website and a few dollars. These few minutes and few dollars go a long way help people that are experiencing circumstances that only occur in our nightmares. I also ask that you take one extra step. Forward this plea to those that you know. I can only reach a small fraction of a percentage of the people that may be able to help. Together, we can reach the world. I raise money for Children's Hospital of Alabama. As this message branches out, people may wish to support a hospital closer to their area. I have included a link to the list of people that have dedicated their time and have received no donations. Find someone on the list supporting your local hospital and give them a donation. Let them know that their time and effort are appreciated. Together, we can do something great. Together, we can make a difference. Together, we all stand tall. Thank you. You can get more information at http://www.extra-life.org and http://childrensmiraclenetworkhospitals.org/" My donation page is http://www.extra-life.org/participant/cgardner The list of participants without donations is http://www.extra-life.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=donorDrive.eventParticipantList&page=629&eventID=512

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Silverlight ProgressBar issues with Binding

- by Chris Skardon

The ProgressBar pretty much does what it says on the tin, displays progress, in a bar form (well, by default anyhow). It’s pretty simple to use: <ProgressBar Minimum="0" Maximum="100" Value="50"/> Gives you a progress bar with 50% of it filled: Easy! But of course, we’re wanting to use binding to change the value, again, pretty easy, have a ViewModel with a ‘Value’ in it, and bind: <ProgressBar Minimum="0" Maximum="100" Value="{Binding Value}"/> Spiffy, and whilst we’re at it, why not bind the Maximum value as well – after all, we can’t be sure of the size of the progress, and it’s a pain to have to work out the percentage (when the progress bar can do it for us): <ProgressBar Minimum="0" Maximum="MaximumValue" Value="{Binding Value}"/> Right, this will work absolutely fine. Or will it??? On the face of it, it looks good, and testing it shows no issues, until at one point we go from: Maximum = 100; Value = 90; to Maximum=60; Value=50; On the face of it not unreasonable. The problem is more obvious if we look at the states of the properties after each set (initially Maximum is set at 1, Value = 0): Code Maximum Value Value < Maximum Maximum = 100; 100 0 True Value = 90; 100 90 True Maximum = 60; 60 90 False Value = 50; 60 50 True Everything is good until the Value is less than the Maximum, at this point the Progress Bar breaks. That’s right, it no longer updates itself, it will always look 100% full. The simple solution – always ensuring you set Value before Maximum is fine unless you’re using a ProgressBar in a less controlled environment – where for example you’re setting a ‘container’ with both values at the same time. The example I have is in a DataTemplate, I have a DataTemplate for a BusyIndicator, (specifically the BusyContentTemplate). The binding works this way: <BusyIndicator BusyContent="{Binding BusyContent}" BusyContentTemplate="{Binding ProgressTemplate}"/> With the template as the ProgressBar defined above… I was setting my BusyContent like this: BusyContent = content; aaaaaand finally, ‘content’ is a class: public class ContentClass : INotifyPropertyChanged { //Obviously this is properly implemented… public double Maximum { get;set;} public double Value { get;set;} } Soooo… As I was replacing the BusyContent wholesale, the order of the binding being set was outside of my control, so – how to go about it? Basically? Fudge it. Modify the ContentClass to include a method: public void Update(double value, double max) { Value = value; Maximum = max; } and change where the setting is to be: BusyContent.Update(content.Value, content.Maximum); Thereby getting the order correct.. Obvious really. Meh :|

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Many Different Things Rolled into a Ball

- by MOSSLover

Yeah I know I don’t blog much anymore, because life has taken me places that don’t involve the interwebs unfortunately. I am in the midst of planning two events, starting a non for profit, creating more sessions for various conferences, submitting to various conferences, working a 40 hour a week job, attempting to hang out with boyfriend/friends/family. So you can see that list does not include this blog sadly that’s how it goes sometimes. The bottom piece very important over any of the top pieces. I haven’t seen St. Louis in a while and I get to go back. I was gone from home for MVP Summit and Best Practices Conference, so the boyfriend and cat didn’t get to see me either for a bit. Then you have to add in the whole toilet being broken fiasco this week. Maintenance really thought it would be cool to turn off the ability to flush. I mean who does that? Then when we call the owner he comes by turns it on and we figure it was an accident, because well the next day no one came by to tell us there was a leak. It was all kinds of strangeness and involved me running to other people’s toilets. As Dan Usher would say, I was a sad panda for a few days. So I guess I wanted to post a few thoughts here just because I can. I do not like multiple content editor webparts embedded with html files in numerous pages doing the same thing. I will tell you why I don’t like these particular webparts and the way they are being used. First off if you have a bunch of pages with script includes it’s about time you should just dump them into the masterpage. Why bother finding all 20 pages and changing those pages when you can just use a single masterpage that already exists? The other thing that is bothering me days is screen scraping. Just don’t do it, because in 2010 you will find the UI is substantially slower. I understand you are new and you have no idea what to do. You are also using 2007 am I right? So then you need to go to codeplex.com and type in a search for SPServices. Download it, use it, love it and then have it’s babies (well maybe don’t go so far this is not the GRID in Tron). If you have a ton of constants in your code why did you not go in and create a webpart with a bunch of properties and/or link to a configuration list hidden in the browser? This type of property and list could help you out in the long run. The power users and administrators can now change the control without you having to compile it over and over again. It’s good stuff. Also, you can change the control without compiling it, especially in 2007 where you have to do a farm solution. In 2010 you can do a sandbox solution I guess, but shouldn’t you make it as easy and supportable as possible for other users? In conclusion I’m an angry person when it comes to viewing something repeatedly and analyzing it in a system. Now we will move on to the next topic…MVP Summit…So yeah I can’t really talk about particulars, but I can talk about my experience as a person. Don’t build something up to be cooler than it is only to be dropped from your 10,000 foot perch. My experience was great, but the content overall was something to be desired. It’s ok I got to meet a lot of people I would not have met if I had not gone. Some of it was surreal, such as product group members showing up and talking to us. It was pretty neat. Plus I never had the chance to get to that mythical MS Office in Redmond. Prior to Summit it was like Rainbow Brites unicorn trying taunting me on television when I was a kid. So I guess with all that said I give it a B. It was awesome in some way, but lacking in other ways. The cool part is that I got to go. Would I have lived without going? Yes, but it was still cool. I could prattle on about other things and make this post massive, but I’m going to pass and give myself a piece of Sunday to play Rockband and do 800 other things. I hope the two of you who read this blog are well. I’ll catch you all at another juncture. Have a good weekend and varying holidays in between. Technorati Tags: SharePoint,MVP Summit,JQuery,Javascript

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WCF Operations and Multidimensional Arrays

- by JoshReuben

You cant pass MultiD arrays accross the wire using WCF - you need to pass jagged arrays. heres 2 extension methods that will allow you to convert prior to serialzation and convert back after deserialization: public static T[,] ToMultiD<T>(this T[][] jArray) { int i = jArray.Count(); int j = jArray.Select(x => x.Count()).Aggregate(0, (current, c) => (current > c) ? current : c); var mArray = new T[i, j]; for (int ii = 0; ii < i; ii++) { for (int jj = 0; jj < j; jj++) { mArray[ii, jj] = jArray[ii][jj]; } } return mArray; } public static T[][] ToJagged<T>(this T[,] mArray) { var cols = mArray.GetLength(0); var rows = mArray.GetLength(1); var jArray = new T[cols][]; for (int i = 0; i < cols; i++) { jArray[i] = new T[rows]; for (int j = 0; j < rows; j++) { jArray[i][j] = mArray[i, j]; } } return jArray; } enjoy!

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