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• Architecture Forum in the North 2010 - Hosted by Black Marble

  - by Stuart Brierley

  On Thursday the 8th of December I attended the "Architecture Forum in the North 2010" hosted by Black Marble. The third time this annual event has been held, it was pitched as featuring Black Marble and Microsoft UK architecture experts focusing on “Tools and Methods for Architects.... a unique opportunity to provide IT Managers, IT and software architects from Northern businesses the chance to learn about the latest technologies and best practices from Microsoft in the field of Architecture....insightful information about the latest techniques, demonstrating how with Microsoft’s architecture tools and technologies you can address your current business needs." Following a useful overview of the Architecture features of Visual Studio 2010, the rest of the day was given over to various features and ways to make use of Microsoft's Azure offerings.  While I did feel that a wider spread of technologies could have been covered (maybe a bit of Sharepoint or BizTalk even), the technological and architectural overviews of the Azure platform were well presented, informative and useful. The day was well organised and all those involved were friendly and approachable for questions and discussions.  If you are in "the North" and get a chance to attend next year I would highly recommend it.

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• A Semantic Model For Html: TagBuilder and HtmlTags

  - by Ryan Ohs

  In this post I look into the code smell that is HTML literals and show how we can refactor these pesky strings into a friendlier and more maintainable model.   The Problem When I started writing MVC applications, I quickly realized that I built a lot of my HTML inside HtmlHelpers. As I did this, I ended up moving quite a bit of HTML into string literals inside my helper classes. As I wanted to add more attributes (such as classes) to my tags, I needed to keep adding overloads to my helpers. A good example of this end result is the default html helpers that come with the MVC framework. Too many overloads make me crazy! The problem with all these overloads is that they quickly muck up the API and nobody can remember exactly what order the parameters go in. I've seen many presenters (including members of the ASP.NET MVC team!) stumble before realizing that their view wasn't compiling because they needed one more null parameter in the call to Html.ActionLink(). What if instead of writing Html.ActionLink("Edit", "Edit", null, new { @class = "navigation" }) we could do Html.LinkToAction("Edit").Text("Edit").AddClass("navigation") ? Wouldn't that be much easier to remember and understand?  We can do this if we introduce a semantic model for building our HTML.   What is a Semantic Model? According to Martin Folwer, "a semantic model is an in-memory representation, usually an object model, of the same subject that the domain specific language describes." In our case, the model would be a set of classes that know how to render HTML. By using a semantic model we can free ourselves from dealing with strings and instead output the HTML (typically via ToString()) once we've added all the elements and attributes we desire to the model. There are two primary semantic models available in ASP.NET MVC: MVC 2.0's TagBuilder and FubuMVC's HtmlTags.   TagBuilder TagBuilder is the html builder that is available in ASP.NET MVC 2.0. I'm not a huge fan but it gets the job done -- for simple jobs.  Here's an overview of how to use TagBuilder. See my Tips section below for a few comments on that example. The disadvantage of TagBuilder is that unless you wrap it up with our own classes, you still have to write the actual tag name over and over in your code. eg. new TagBuilder("div") instead of new DivTag(). I also think it's method names are a little too long. Why not have AddClass() instead of AddCssClass() or Text() instead of SetInnerText()? What those methods are doing should be pretty obvious even in the short form. I also don't like that it wants to generate an id attribute from your input instead of letting you set it yourself using external conventions. (See GenerateId() and IdAttributeDotReplacement)). Obviously these come from Microsoft's default approach to MVC but may not be optimal for all programmers.   HtmlTags HtmlTags is in my opinion the much better option for generating html in ASP.NET MVC. It was actually written as a part of FubuMVC but is available as a stand alone library. HtmlTags provides a much cleaner syntax for writing HTML. There are classes for most of the major tags and it's trivial to create additional ones by inheriting from HtmlTag. There are also methods on each tag for the common attributes. For instance, FormTag has an Action() method. The SelectTag class allows you to set the default option or first option independent from adding other options. With TagBuilder there isn't even an abstraction for building selects! The project is open source and always improving. I'll hopefully find time to submit some of my own enhancements soon.   Tips 1) It's best not to have insanely overloaded html helpers. Use fluent builders. 2) In html helpers, return the TagBuilder/tag itself (not a string!) so that you can continue to add attributes outside the helper; see my first sample above. 3) Create a static entry point into your builders. I created a static Tags class that gives me access all the HtmlTag classes I need. This way I don't clutter my code with "new" keywords. eg. Tags.Div returns a new DivTag instance. 4) If you find yourself doing something a lot, create an extension method for it. I created a Nest() extension method that reads much more fluently than the AddChildren() method. It also accepts a params array of tags so I can very easily nest many children.   I hope you have found this post helpful. Join me in my war against HTML literals! I’ll have some more samples of how I use HtmlTags in future posts.

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• Page_BlockSubmit - reset it to False, if there is a scenario when page doesn't postback on validation error

  - by Vipin

  Recently, I was facing a problem where if there was a validation error, and if I changed the state of checkbox it won't postback on first attempt. But when I uncheck and check again , it postbacks on second attempt...this is some quirky behaviour in .ASP.Net platform. The solution was to reset Page_BlockSubmit flag to false and it works fine. The following explanation is from http://lionsden.co.il/codeden/?p=137&cpage=1#comment-143   Submit button on the page is a member of vgMain, so automatically it will only run the validation on that group. A solution is needed that will run validation on multiple groups and block the postback if needed. Solution Include the following function on the page: function DoValidation() { //validate the primary group var validated = Page_ClientValidate('vgPrimary ');   //if it is valid if (validated) { //valid the main group validated = Page_ClientValidate('vgMain'); }   //remove the flag to block the submit if it was raised Page_BlockSubmit = false;   //return the results return validated; } Call the above function from the submit button’s OnClientClick event. <asp:Button runat="server" ID="btnSubmit" CausesValidation="true" ValidationGroup="vgMain" Text="Next" OnClick="btnSubmit_Click" OnClientClick="return DoValidation();" /> What is Page_BlockSubmit When the user clicks on a button causing a full post back, after running Page_ClientValidate ASP.NET runs another built in function ValidatorCommonOnSubmit. Within Page_ClientValidate, Page_BlockSubmit is set based on the validation. The postback is then blocked in ValidatorCommonOnSubmit if Page_BlockSubmit is true. No matter what, at the end of the function Page_BlockSubmit is always reset back to false. If a page does a partial postback without running any validation and Page_BlockSubmit has not been reset to false, the partial postback will be blocked. In essence the above function, RunValidation, acts similar to ValidatorCommonOnSubmit. It runs the validation and then returns false to block the postback if needed. Since the built in postback is never run, we need to reset Page_BlockSubmit manually before returning the validation result.

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• How to create Checkboxes that act like Radio buttons with Jquery

  - by hmloo

  I have a post here to show code examples for check/uncheck all checkbox with Jquery. This time I will implement another request that the user should only be able to check at most one of the checkboxes, it's behave like radio buttons. There are 2 cases. Case 1 shows function that has little difference with radio button. It allows the user to deselect checkbox. Case 2 is same as radio button. Case 1 <head id="Head1" runat="server"> <title></title> <script src="Scripts/jquery-1.4.1.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <style type="text/css"> .cbRowItem {display:block;} </style> <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function() { var $chk = $('input:checkbox .cbRowItem'); $chk.click(function() { $chk.not(this).removeAttr('checked'); }); }); </script> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div style="display:block;"> <asp:CheckBox id="CheckBox1" runat="server" class="cbRowItem" Text = "CheckBox 1"/> <asp:CheckBox id="CheckBox2" runat="server" class="cbRowItem" Text = "CheckBox 2"/> <asp:CheckBox id="CheckBox3" runat="server" class="cbRowItem" Text = "CheckBox 3"/> <asp:CheckBox id="CheckBox4" runat="server" class="cbRowItem" Text = "CheckBox 4"/> </div> </form> </body> </html> Case 2 <head id="Head1" runat="server"> <title></title> <script src="Scripts/jquery-1.4.1.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <style type="text/css"> .cbRowItem {display:block;} </style> <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function() { var $chk = $('input:checkbox .cbRowItem'); $chk.click(function() { $chk.removeAttr('checked'); $(this).attr('checked', 'checked'); }); }); </script> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div style="display:block;"> <asp:CheckBox id="CheckBox1" runat="server" class="cbRowItem" Text = "CheckBox 1"/> <asp:CheckBox id="CheckBox2" runat="server" class="cbRowItem" Text = "CheckBox 2"/> <asp:CheckBox id="CheckBox3" runat="server" class="cbRowItem" Text = "CheckBox 3"/> <asp:CheckBox id="CheckBox4" runat="server" class="cbRowItem" Text = "CheckBox 4"/> </div> </form> </body> </html>

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• FAQ: Highlight GridView Row on Click and Retain Selected Row on Postback

  - by Vincent Maverick Durano

  A couple of months ago I’ve written a simple demo about “Highlighting GridView Row on MouseOver”. I’ve noticed many members in the forums (http://forums.asp.net) are asking how to highlight row in GridView and retain the selected row across postbacks. So I’ve decided to write this post to demonstrate how to implement it as reference to others who might need it. In this demo I going to use a combination of plain JavaScript and jQuery to do the client-side manipulation. I presumed that you already know how to bind the grid with data because I will not include the codes for populating the GridView here. For binding the gridview you can refer this post: Binding GridView with Data the ADO.Net way or this one: GridView Custom Paging with LINQ. To get started let’s implement the highlighting of GridView row on row click and retain the selected row on postback.  For simplicity I set up the page like this: <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> <h2>You have selected Row: (<asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server" />)</h2> <asp:HiddenField ID="hfCurrentRowIndex" runat="server"></asp:HiddenField> <asp:HiddenField ID="hfParentContainer" runat="server"></asp:HiddenField> <asp:Button ID="Button1" runat="server" onclick="Button1_Click" Text="Trigger Postback" /> <asp:GridView ID="grdCustomer" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="false" onrowdatabound="grdCustomer_RowDataBound"> <Columns> <asp:BoundField DataField="Company" HeaderText="Company" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Name" HeaderText="Name" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Title" HeaderText="Title" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Address" HeaderText="Address" /> </Columns> </asp:GridView> </asp:Content>   Note: Since the action is done at the client-side, when we do a postback like (clicking on a button) the page will be re-created and you will lose the highlighted row. This is normal because the the server doesn't know anything about the client/browser not unless if you do something to notify the server that something has changed. To persist the settings we will use some HiddenFields control to store the data so that when it postback we can reference the value from there. Now here’s the JavaScript functions below: <asp:content id="Content1" runat="server" contentplaceholderid="HeadContent"> <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript">       var prevRowIndex;       function ChangeRowColor(row, rowIndex) {           var parent = document.getElementById(row);           var currentRowIndex = parseInt(rowIndex) + 1;                 if (prevRowIndex == currentRowIndex) {               return;           }           else if (prevRowIndex != null) {               parent.rows[prevRowIndex].style.backgroundColor = "#FFFFFF";           }                 parent.rows[currentRowIndex].style.backgroundColor = "#FFFFD6";                 prevRowIndex = currentRowIndex;                 $('#<%= Label1.ClientID %>').text(currentRowIndex);                 $('#<%= hfParentContainer.ClientID %>').val(row);           $('#<%= hfCurrentRowIndex.ClientID %>').val(rowIndex);       }             $(function () {           RetainSelectedRow();       });             function RetainSelectedRow() {           var parent = $('#<%= hfParentContainer.ClientID %>').val();           var currentIndex = $('#<%= hfCurrentRowIndex.ClientID %>').val();           if (parent != null) {               ChangeRowColor(parent, currentIndex);           }       }          </script> </asp:content>   The ChangeRowColor() is the function that sets the background color of the selected row. It is also where we set the previous row and rowIndex values in HiddenFields.  The $(function(){}); is a short-hand for the jQuery document.ready event. This event will be fired once the page is posted back to the server that’s why we call the function RetainSelectedRow(). The RetainSelectedRow() function is where we referenced the current selected values stored from the HiddenFields and pass these values to the ChangeRowColor() function to retain the highlighted row. Finally, here’s the code behind part: protected void grdCustomer_RowDataBound(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e) { if (e.Row.RowType == DataControlRowType.DataRow) { e.Row.Attributes.Add("onclick", string.Format("ChangeRowColor('{0}','{1}');", e.Row.ClientID, e.Row.RowIndex)); } } The code above is responsible for attaching the javascript onclick event for each row and call the ChangeRowColor() function and passing the e.Row.ClientID and e.Row.RowIndex to the function. Here’s the sample output below:   That’s it! I hope someone find this post useful! Technorati Tags: jQuery,GridView,JavaScript,TipTricks

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• Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework - Day 2 Part 2 of MIX 2010

  - by GeekAgilistMercenary

  I went to the session on Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework (MSAF) today while here at MIX 2010.  It was a great walk through the features, ideas, and what the end goal is.  Michael Scherotter did a great job of lining up the ideas, intentions, and the functional ideas behind the framework. The framework is built around the Silverlight Behaviors.  If you aren't sure what behaviors are, check out these entries from Nikhilk.net Silverlight Behaviors, Silverlight 3 Drag Behavior, An Introduction to Behaviors, Triggers, and Actions, and of course the MSDN Documentation on the matter. Some of the key features of the framework is to support out-of-browser scenarios, which works perfectly with out Webtrends DX Web Services.  Offline scenarios, which again, we have worked toward supporting at Webtrends DC Web Services via caching and other criteria as needed.  Another feature that I was really stoked about is the Microsoft Expression Blend integration that removes the need for coding, thus simplifying the addition of analytics components based on events or other actions within a Silverlight Application.  This framework also easily supports A/B Testing (again, something we do quit a bit of at Webtrends with Webtrends Optimize. The last thing I really wanted to point out was the control support that this framework has support in already from Telerik RadControls, Smooth Streaming Media Element, and Microsoft Silverlight Media Framework Player 1.0.  These are implemented with behaviors and handlers exposed via MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework). All in all, great second day, great analytics framework for Silverlight, and great presentation.  Until tomorrow, adieu. For this original entry and all sorts of other technical gibberish I write, check out my other blog Agilist Mercenary.

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• Getting your bearings and defining the project objective

  - by johndoucette

  I wrote this two years ago and thought it was worth posting… Some may think this is a daunting task and some may even say “what a waste of time” and want to open MS Project and start typing out tasks because someone asked for an estimate and a task list. Hell, maybe you even use Excel and pump out a spreadsheet with some real scientific formula for guessing how long it will take to code a bunch of classes. However, this short exercise will provide the basis for the entire project, whether small or large and be a great friend when communicating to anyone on your team or even your client. I call this the Project Brief. If you find yourself going beyond a single page, then you must decompose the sections and summarize your findings so there is a complete and clear picture of the project you are working on in a relatively short statement. Here is a great quote from the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) relative to what a project is;   A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result. With this in mind, the project brief should encompass the entirety (objective) of the endeavor in its explanation and what it will take (goals) to create the product, service or result (deliverables). Normally the process of identifying the project objective is done during the first stage of a project called the Project Kickoff, but you can perform this very important step anytime to help you get a bearing. There are many more parts to helping a project stay on course, but this is usually the foundation where it can be grounded on. Through a series of 3 exercises, you should be able to come up with the objective, goals and deliverables on your project. Follow these steps, and in no time (about &frac12; hour), you will have the foundation of your project plan. (See examples below) Exercise 1 – Objectives Begin with the end in mind. Think about your project in business terms with a couple things to help you understand the objective; Reference the business benefit in terms of cost, speed and / or quality, Provide a higher level of what the outcome will look like (future sense) It should be non-measurable, that’s what the goals are all about The output should be a single paragraph with three sentences and take 10 minutes to write. *Typically, agreement must be reached on the objectives of the project before you would proceed to the next steps of the project. Exercise 2 – Goals A project goal is a statement that answers questions about who, what, why, where and when. A good project goal statement; Answers the five “W” questions for the project Is measurable in each of its parts Is published and agreed on by all the owners This helps the Project Manager receive confirmation on defining the project target. Using the established project objective done in the first exercise, think about the things it will take to get the job done. Think about tangible activities which are the top level tasks in a typical Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). The overall goal statement plus all the deliverables (next exercise) can be seen as the project team’s contract with the project owners. Write 3 - 5 goals in about 10 minutes. You should not write the words “Who, what, why, where and when, but merely be able to answer the questions when you read a goal. Exercise 3 – Deliverables Every project creates some type of output and these outputs are called deliverables. There are two classes of deliverables; Internal – produced for project team members to meet their goals External – produced for project owners to meet their expectations The list you enter here provides a checklist for the team’s delivery and/or is a statement of all the expectations of the project owners. Here are some typical project deliverables; Product and product documentation End product/system Requirements/feature documents Installation guides Demo/prototype System design documents User guides/help files Plans Project plan Training plan Conversion/installation/delivery plan Test plans Documentation plan Communication plan Reports and general documentation Progress reports System acceptance tests Outstanding bug list Procedures Risk and issue logs Project history Deliverables should go with each of the goals. Have 3-5 deliverables for each goal. When you are done, you will have established a great foundation for the clarity of your project. This exercise can take some time, but with practice, you should be able to whip this one out in 10 minutes as well, especially if you are intimate with an ongoing project. Samples  Objective [Client] is implementing a series of MOSS sites to support external public (Internet), internal employee (Intranet) and an external secure (password protected Internet) applications. This project will focus on the public-facing web site and will provide [Client] with architectural recommendations based on the current design being done by their design partner [Partner] and the internal Content Team. In addition, it will provide [Client] with a development plan and confidence they need to deploy a world class public Internet website. Goals 1.  [Consultant] will provide technical guidance and set project team expectations for the implementation of the MOSS Internet site based on provided features/functions within three weeks. 2.  [Consultant] will understand phase 2 secure password-protected Internet site design and provide recommendations.   Deliverables 1.1  Public Internet (unsecure) Architectural Recommendation Plan 1.2  Physical Site construction Work Breakdown Structure and plan (Time, cost and resources needed) 2.1  Two Factor authentication recommendation document   Objective [Client] is currently using an application developed by [Consultant] many years ago called "XXX". This application, although functional, does not meet their new updated business requirements and contains a few defects which [Client] has developed work-around processes. [Client] would like to have a "new and improved" system to support their membership management needs by expanding membership and subscription capabilities, provide accounting integration with internal (GL) and external (VeriSign) systems, and implement hooks to the current CRM solution. This effort will take place through a series of phases, beginning with envisioning. Goals 1. Through discussions with users, [Consultant] will discover current issues/bugs which need to be resolved which must meet the current functionality requirements within three weeks. 2. [Consultant] will gather requirements from the users about what is "needed" vs. "what they have" for enhancements and provide a high level document supporting their needs. 3. [Consultant] will meet with the team members through a series of meetings and help define the overall project plan to deliver a new and improved solution. Deliverables 1.1 Prioritized list of Current application issues/bugs that need to be resolved 1.2 Provide a resolution plan on the issues/bugs identified in the current application 1.3 Risk Assessment Document 2.1 Deliver a Requirements Document showing high-level [Client] needs for the new XXX application. · New feature functionality not in the application today · Existing functionality that will remain in the new functionality 2.2 Reporting Requirements Document 3.1 A Project Plan showing the deliverables and cost for the next (second) phase of this project. 3.2 A Statement of Work for the next (second) phase of this project. 3.3 An Estimate of any work that would need to follow the second phase.

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• Azure Diagnostics: The Bad, The Ugly, and a Better Way

  - by jasont

  If you’re a .Net web developer today, no doubt you’ve enjoyed watching Windows Azure grow up over the past couple of years. The platform has scaled, stabilized (mostly), and added on a slew of great (and sometimes overdue) features. What was once just an endpoint to host a solution, developers today have tremendous flexibility and options in the platform. Organizations are building new solutions and offerings on the platform, and others have, or are in the process of, migrating existing applications out of their own data centers into the Azure cloud. Whether new application development or migrating legacy, every development shop and IT organization needs to monitor their applications in the cloud, the same as they do on premises. Azure Diagnostics has some capabilities, but what I constantly hear from users is that it’s either (a) not enough, or (b) too cumbersome to set up. Today, Stackify is happy to announce that we fully support Azure deployments, just the same as your on-premises deployments. Let’s take a look below and compare and contrast the options. Azure Diagnostics Let’s crack open the Windows Azure documentation on Azure Diagnostics and see just how easy it is to use. The high level steps are:   Step 1: Import the Diagnostics Oh, I’ve already deployed my app without the diagnostics module. Guess I can’t do anything until I do this and re-deploy. Step 2: Configure the Diagnostics (and multiple sub-steps) Do I want it all? Or just pieces of it? Whoops, forgot to include a specific performance counter, I guess I’ll have to deploy again. Wait a minute… I have to specifically code these performance counters into my role’s OnStart() method, compile and deploy again? And query and consume it myself? Step 3: (Optional) Permanently store diagnostic data Lucky for me, Azure storage has gotten pretty cheap. But how often should I move the data into storage? I want to see real-time data, so I guess that’s out now as well. Step 4: (Optional) View stored diagnostic data Optional? Of course I want to see it. Conveniently, Microsoft recommends 3 tools to do this with. Un-conveniently, none of these are web based and they all just give you access to raw data, and very little charting or real-time intelligence. Just….. data. Nevermind that one product seems to have gotten stale since a recent acquisition, and doesn’t even have screenshots!   So, let’s summarize: lots of diagnostics data is available, but think realistically. Think Dev Ops. What happens when you are in the middle of a major production performance issue and you don’t have the diagnostics you need? You are redeploying an application (and thankfully you have a great branching strategy, so you feel perfectly safe just willy-nilly launching code into prod, don’t you?) to get data, then shipping it to storage, and then digging through that data to find a needle in a haystack. Would you like to be able to troubleshoot a performance issue in the middle of the night, or on a weekend, from your iPad or home computer’s web browser? Forget it: the best you get is this spark line in the Azure portal. If it’s real pointy, you probably have an issue; but since there is no alert based on a threshold your customers have likely already let you know. And high CPU, Memory, I/O, or Network doesn’t tell you anything about where the problem is. The Better Way – Stackify Stackify supports application and server monitoring in real time, all through a great web interface. All of the things that Azure Diagnostics provides, Stackify provides for your on-premises deployments, and you don’t need to know ahead of time that you’ll need it. It’s always there, it’s always on. Azure deployments are essentially no different than on-premises. It’s a Windows Server (or Linux) in the cloud. It’s behind a different firewall than your corporate servers. That’s it. Stackify can provide the same powerful tools to your Azure deployments in two simple steps. Step 1 Add a startup task to your web or worker role and deploy. If you can’t deploy and need it right now, no worries! Remote Desktop to the Azure instance and you can execute a Powershell script to download / install Stackify.   Step 2 Log in to your account at www.stackify.com and begin monitoring as much as you want, as often as you want and see the results instantly. WMI? It’s there Event Viewer? You’ve got it. File System Access? Yes, please! Would love to make sure my web.config is correct.   IIS / App Pool Info? Yep. You can even restart it. Running Services? All of them. Start and Stop them to your heart’s content. SQL Database access? You bet’cha. Alerts and Notification? Of course! You should know before your customers let you know. … and so much more.   Conclusion Microsoft has shown, consistently, that they love developers, developers, developers. What every developer needs to realize from this is that they’ve given you a canvas, which is exactly what Azure is. It’s great infrastructure that is readily available, easy to manage, and fairly cost effective. However, the tooling is your responsibility. What you get, at best, is bare bones. App and server diagnostics should be available when you need them. While we, as developers, try to plan for and think of everything ahead of time, there will come times where we need to get data that just isn’t available. And having to go through a lot of cumbersome steps to get that data, and then have to find a friendlier way to consume it…. well, that just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I’d rather spend my time writing and developing features and completing bug fixes for my applications, than to be writing code to monitor and diagnose.

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• ASP.NET Hosting :: ASP.NET File Upload Control

  - by mbridge

  The asp.net FileUpload control allows a user to browse and upload files to the web server. From developers perspective, it is as simple as dragging and dropping the FileUpload control to the aspx page. An extra control, like a Button control, or some other control is needed, to actually save the file. <asp:FileUploadID="FileUpload1"runat="server"/> <asp:ButtonID="B1"runat="server"Text="Save"OnClick="B1_Click"/> By default, the FileUpload control allows a maximum of 4MB file to be uploaded and the execution timeout is 110 seconds. These properties can be changed from within the web.config file’s httpRuntime section. The maxRequestLength property determines the maximum file size that can be uploaded. The executionTimeout property determines the maximum time for execution. <httpRuntimemaxRequestLength="8192"executionTimeout="220"/> From code behind, the mime type, size of the file, file name and the extension of the file can be obtained. The maximum file size that can be uploaded can be obtained and modified using the System.Web.Configuration.HttpRuntimeSection class. Files can be alternatively saved using the System.IO.HttpFileCollection class. This collection class can be populated using the Request.Files property. The collection contains HttpPostedFile class which contains a reference to the class. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Web.UI; using System.Web.UI.WebControls; using System.IO; using System.Configuration; using System.Web.Configuration;   namespace WebApplication1 {     public partial class WebControls : System.Web.UI.Page     {         protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)         {         }           //Using FileUpload control to upload and save files         protected void B1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)         {             if (FileUpload1.HasFile && FileUpload1.PostedFile.ContentLength > 0)             {                 //mime type of the uploaded file                 string mimeType = FileUpload1.PostedFile.ContentType;                   //size of the uploaded file                 int size = FileUpload1.PostedFile.ContentLength; // bytes                   //extension of the uploaded file                 string extension = System.IO.Path.GetExtension(FileUpload1.FileName);                                  //save file                 string path = Server.MapPath("path");                                 FileUpload1.SaveAs(path + FileUpload1.FileName);                              }             //maximum file size allowed             HttpRuntimeSection rt = new HttpRuntimeSection();             rt.MaxRequestLength = rt.MaxRequestLength * 2;             int length = rt.MaxRequestLength;                     //execution timeout             TimeSpan ts = rt.ExecutionTimeout;             double secomds = ts.TotalSeconds;           }           //Using Request.Files to save files         private void AltSaveFile()         {             HttpFileCollection coll = Request.Files;             for (int i = 0; i < coll.Count; i++)             {                 HttpPostedFile file = coll[i];                   if (file.ContentLength > 0)                     ;//do something             }         }     } }

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• Adding Output Caching and Expire Header in IIS7 to improve performance

  - by Renso

  The problem: Images and other static files will not be cached unless you tell it to. In IIS7 it is remarkably easy to do this. Web pages are becoming increasingly complex with more scripts, style sheets, images, and Flash on them. A first-time visit to a page may require several HTTP requests to load all the components. By using Expires headers these components become cacheable, which avoids unnecessary HTTP requests on subsequent page views. Expires headers are most often associated with images, but they can and should be used on all page components including scripts, style sheets, and Flash. Every time a page is loaded, every image and other static content like JavaScript files and CSS files will be reloaded on every page request. If the content does not change frequently why not cache it and avoid the network traffic?! The solution: In IIS7 there are two ways to cache content, using the web.config file to set caching for all static content, and in IIS7 itself setting aching by file extension that gives you that extra level of granularity. Web.config: In IIS7, Expires Headers can be enabled in the system.webServer section of the web.config file:   <staticContent>     <clientCache cacheControlMode="UseMaxAge" cacheControlMaxAge="1.00:00:00" />   </staticContent> In the above example a cache expiration of 1 day was added. It will be a full day before the content is downloaded from the web server again. To expire the content on a specific date:   <staticContent>     <clientCache cacheControlMode="UseExpires" httpExpires="Sun, 31 Dec 2011 23:59:59 UTC" />   </staticContent> This will expire the content on December 31st 2011 one second before midnight. Issues/Challenges: Once the file has been set to be cached it wont be updated on the user's browser for the set cache expiration. So be careful here with content that may change frequently, like during development. Typically in development you don't want to cache at all for testing purposes. You could also suffix files with timestamp or versions to force a reload into the user's browser cache. IIS7 Expire Web Content Open up your web app in IIS. Open up the sub-folders until you find the folder or file you want to ad an expiration date to. In IIS6 you used to right-click and select properties, no such luck in IIS7, double click HTTP Response. Once the window loads for the HTTP Response Headers, look to the Actions navigation bar to the right, all the way at the top select SET COMMON HEADERS. The Enable HTTP keep-alive will already be pre-selected. Go ahead and add the appropriate expiration header to the file or folder. Note that if you selected a folder, it will apply that setting to all images inside that folder and all nested content, even subfolders. So, two approaches, depending on what level or granularity you need.

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• regarding the Windows Phone 7 series, XNA and Visual Basic

  - by Chris Williams

  as long as we're talking about VB... I figured I would share this as well. Hi everyone, I'm about to express a sentiment that might ruffle a few feathers, but I think most of you know me well enough to know I love like accept VB for what it is and that what I'm about to say is with good intentions. (The rest of you, who don't know me, please take my word for it.) The world is full of VB developers, I was one of them for a long time. I think it's safe to assume that none of us are ignorant people who require handholding. We're working professionals, making a living by using our skills as developers. I'm also willing to bet that quite a few of us are fluent in C# as well as VB. It may not be your preferred language, but many of you can do it and you prove that nearly every day. Honestly, I don't know ANY developers or consultants that have only known ONE language ever. So it pains me greatly when I see the word "CAN'T" being tossed around like a crutch... as in "we CAN'T develop for the windows phone or we CAN'T develop XNA games." At MIX, Microsoft hath decreed that C# is the language of choice for developing for the Windows Phone 7. I think it's a safe bet that you won't see VB support if it isn't there already. (Just like XNA... which is up to version 4.0 by now.)  So what? (Yeah... I said it.) I think everyone here can agree that actual coding is only one part of software design and development. There is nothing stopping ANY of you from beginning the process of designing your killer phone app, writing up specs, requirements, doing UI design, workflow, mockups, storyboards, art, etc.... None of these things are language dependent. IF by the time you've got that stuff out of the way, and there's still no VB support, then start doing some rapid prototyping of your app in C# (I know, I know... heresy!)  You still have to spend time learning how the phone does things, what UI tricks do what, what paradigms make sense, how to use to accelerometer and the tilt and the multitouch functionality. I can guarantee you that time spent doing this is a great investment, no matter WHAT extension your code files have. Eventually, you may have a working prototype. IF by this time, there's STILL no VB support... fret not, you've made significant progress on your app. You've designed it, prototyped it, figured out how to use the phone specific features... so you might as well finish it and pat yourself on the back for learning something new... and possibly being first to market with your new app. I'll be happy to argue any and all of these points online or off with anyone who cares to do so, but there is one undeniable point that you simply can't argue:  Your potential customers do not care AT ALL what programming language you used to write the app they are about to purchase. They care that it works. If your biggest concern is being first to market, than stop complaining and get busy because you're running out of time and the 3000+ people who were at MIX certainly aren't waiting for you. They've already started working on their apps.

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• wynapse.com down last night, SC tonight

  - by Dave Campbell

  In an industry segment that nobody is ever 'asleep', I suppose no time is a good time to take SQL Server down for upgrades, and I had forgotten that my host was going to be doing that. Last night about 9pm (Arizona), in the middle of working on a blog post, things started going wonky and I finally realized everything was ok except for SQL Server. I turned in a ticket on it and was reminded about the maintenance schedule... guess I file those away in memory and just assume they'll happen while I'm asleep :) So, looking at the schedule, it appears that SQL Server for SilverlightCream is going to be down tonight. Minimum is 9-12pm Arizona time... mileage and time may vary. Since all the posts are run through SC to get the Skim count, having SQL down sucks, but I'd rather we got maintenance than have to react to a crash because of something that wasn't maintained. I'll try to get the next 'Cream post out early so that the bulk of folks can dig through it prior to the outage. Meanwhile, for those of you in Phoenix, tonight is our Phoenix Silverlight User Group April meeting, and Joel Neubeck is going to be giving us the run-through on Windows Phone 7! We're not as advanced as those MVP rock-stars in California like Victor Gaudioso who streams his user group meeting, so you'll just have to show up for the goodness! And for anyone that's interested, here's some WP7 bling for your desktop... I want some of this real bad for my laptop! Get the full image in the post by Ozymandias:

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• IASA ITARC &ndash; Denver May 6th

  - by Jeff Certain

  The Denver chapter of the International Association of Software Architects (IASA) is holding an IT Architect Regional Conference (ITARC) in Denver on May 6th. The speaker list for this conference is amazing. Paul Rayner, Dave McComb, Randy Kahle, Peter Provost, Randy Stafford, George Fairbanks – all great speakers, and from Colorado. Brandon Satrom (who also happens to be the president of the IASA Austin chapter) will also be speaking, as will some other heavy hitters (for example, Ted Farrell, Chief Architect and Senior VP of Oracle). This is an amazing line-up, and the conference is quite reasonably priced ($150 for IASA members until April 10th, including a catered lunch). I also have the privilege of being a presenter at this conference. If you’ve ever heard any of the previously named speakers, you know that they set the bar quite high. Sounds like I’m going to have to step up my game. What I get to talk about is really cool stuff. The company I work for – Colorado CustomWare – brought me on board nearly two years ago. To say there was some technical debt is somewhat… understated. Equally understated would be that management is committed to doing the right thing. Over the past two years, we’ve done significant architectural refactoring – including an effort that took the entire team offline for most of a month. We’ve reduced the application size by 50% without losing functionality. As you can imagine, this has reduced the complexity of the application, making development faster and less prone to bugs. We’ve made many other changes – moving to an agile process, training developers, moving towards a more OO architecture. The changes we’ve made reveal, in some ways, just how far afield we were.. and there are still more changes to be made. Amazingly enough, our leadership team is eager for me to share these experiences with other architects. I’m really looking forward to being able to do so.

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• Using SSIS to send a HTML E-Mail Message with built-in table of Counts.

  - by Kevin Shyr

  For the record, this can be just as easily done with a .NET class with a DLL call.  The two major reasons for this ending up as a SSIS package are: There are a lot of SQL resources for maintenance, but not as many .NET developers. There is an existing automated process that links up SQL Jobs (more on that in the next post), and this is part of that process.   To start, this is what the SSIS looks like: The first part of the control flow is just for the override scenario.   In the Execute SQL Task, it calls a stored procedure, which already formats the result into XML by using "FOR XML PATH('Row'), ROOT(N'FieldingCounts')".  The result XML string looks like this: <FieldingCounts>   <Row>     <CellId>M COD</CellId>     <Mailed>64</Mailed>     <ReMailed>210</ReMailed>     <TotalMail>274</TotalMail>     <EMailed>233</EMailed>     <TotalSent>297</TotalSent>   </Row>   <Row>     <CellId>M National</CellId>     <Mailed>11</Mailed>     <ReMailed>59</ReMailed>     <TotalMail>70</TotalMail>     <EMailed>90</EMailed>     <TotalSent>101</TotalSent>   </Row>   <Row>     <CellId>U COD</CellId>     <Mailed>91</Mailed>     <ReMailed>238</ReMailed>     <TotalMail>329</TotalMail>     <EMailed>291</EMailed>     <TotalSent>382</TotalSent>   </Row>   <Row>     <CellId>U National</CellId>     <Mailed>63</Mailed>     <ReMailed>286</ReMailed>     <TotalMail>349</TotalMail>     <EMailed>374</EMailed>     <TotalSent>437</TotalSent>   </Row> </FieldingCounts>  This result is saved into an internal SSIS variable with the following settings on the General tab and the Result Set tab:   Now comes the trickier part.  We need to use the XML Task to format the XML string result into an HTML table, and I used Direct input XSLT And here is the code of XSLT: <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:output method="html" indent="yes"/>   <xsl:template match="/ROOT">         <table border="1" cellpadding="6">           <tr>             <td></td>             <td>Mailed</td>             <td>Re-mailed</td>             <td>Total Mail (Mailed, Re-mailed)</td>             <td>E-mailed</td>             <td>Total Sent (Mailed, E-mailed)</td>           </tr>           <xsl:for-each select="FieldingCounts/Row">             <tr>               <xsl:for-each select="./*">                 <td>                   <xsl:value-of select="." />                 </td>               </xsl:for-each>             </tr>           </xsl:for-each>         </table>   </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet>    Then a script task is used to send out an HTML email (as we are all painfully aware that SSIS Send Mail Task only sends plain text) Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 using System; using System.Data; using Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime; using System.Windows.Forms; using System.Net.Mail; using System.Net;   namespace ST_b829a2615e714bcfb55db0ce97be3901.csproj {     [System.AddIn.AddIn("ScriptMain", Version = "1.0", Publisher = "", Description = "")]     public partial class ScriptMain : Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Tasks.ScriptTask.VSTARTScriptObjectModelBase     {           #region VSTA generated code         enum ScriptResults         {             Success = Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime.DTSExecResult.Success,             Failure = Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime.DTSExecResult.Failure         };         #endregion           public void Main()         {             String EmailMsgBody = String.Format("<HTML><BODY><P>{0}</P><P>{1}</P></BODY></HTML>"                                                 , Dts.Variables["Config_SMTP_MessageSourceText"].Value.ToString()                                                 , Dts.Variables["InternalStr_CountResultAfterXSLT"].Value.ToString());             MailMessage EmailCountMsg = new MailMessage(Dts.Variables["Config_SMTP_From"].Value.ToString().Replace(";", ",")                                                         , Dts.Variables["Config_SMTP_Success_To"].Value.ToString().Replace(";", ",")                                                         , Dts.Variables["Config_SMTP_SubjectLinePrefix"].Value.ToString() + " " + Dts.Variables["InternalStr_FieldingDate"].Value.ToString()                                                         , EmailMsgBody);             //EmailCountMsg.From.             EmailCountMsg.CC.Add(Dts.Variables["Config_SMTP_Success_CC"].Value.ToString().Replace(";", ","));             EmailCountMsg.IsBodyHtml = true;               SmtpClient SMTPForCount = new SmtpClient(Dts.Variables["Config_SMTP_ServerAddress"].Value.ToString());             SMTPForCount.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultNetworkCredentials;               SMTPForCount.Send(EmailCountMsg);               Dts.TaskResult = (int)ScriptResults.Success;         }     } } Note on this code: notice the email list has Replace(";", ",").  This is only here because the list is configurable in the SQL Job Step at Set Values, which does not react well with colons as email separator, but system.Net.Mail only handles comma as email separator, hence the extra replace in the string. The result is a nicely formatted email message with count information:

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• Presenting Windows Phone 8 at Microsoft Store in Orlando, FL

  - by Nikita Polyakov

  Want to see Windows Phone 8 in person yourself? Want see me present a few features live? Want to come chat in person after? Come by Microsoft Store at The Florida Mall in Orlando, FL on Saturday Nov 17th 2012 at 6-7PM. I will be presenting the Windows Phone 8 OS (no developer content) If you come see this presentation and fill out a survey after you get to be in the drawing for Asus VivoTab RT (see official rules) Let me know if you are coming by! Would love to chat :) Event is also posted on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/167104910079987

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• Corrupted Views when migrating document libraries from SharePoint 2003 to 2007

  - by Kelly Jones

  A coworker of mine ran into this error recently, while migrating a document library from SharePoint 2003 to 2007: “A WebPartZone can only exist on a page which contains a SPWebPartManager. The SPWebPartManager must be placed before any WebPartZones on the page.” He saw this when he tried to see the All Documents view for the library. After looking into it, we figured out what had happened.  He was migrating documents using the Explorer View in SharePoint.  He had copied the contents of the library from one server (a remote server that we didn’t have administrative access to) to his desktop.  He then opened an Explorer View of the new library and copied the files to it.  Well, it turns out he had copied the hidden “Forms” folder, which contained the files necessary to display the different views for the library. (He had set his explorer to show hidden files, which made them visible.) So, he had copied the 2003 forms to the 2007 library, which are incompatible. We fixed it, by simply deleting the new document library, recreating it, and then copied everything except that hidden Forms folder.  Another option might have been to create a new document library on 2007, and copy the Forms folder from it to the broken library.  Since we didn’t need to save anything in the broken BTW, I confirmed my suspicion with this blog post: http://palmettotq.com/blog/?p=54

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The Nullable static class

  - by James Michael Hare

  Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. Today we’re going to look at an interesting Little Wonder that can be used to mitigate what could be considered a Little Pitfall.  The Little Wonder we’ll be examining is the System.Nullable static class.  No, not the System.Nullable<T> class, but a static helper class that has one useful method in particular that we will examine… but first, let’s look at the Little Pitfall that makes this wonder so useful. Little Pitfall: Comparing nullable value types using <, >, <=, >= Examine this piece of code, without examining it too deeply, what’s your gut reaction as to the result? 1: int? x = null; 2:  3: if (x < 100) 4: { 5: Console.WriteLine("True, {0} is less than 100.", 6: x.HasValue ? x.ToString() : "null"); 7: } 8: else 9: { 10: Console.WriteLine("False, {0} is NOT less than 100.", 11: x.HasValue ? x.ToString() : "null"); 12: } Your gut would be to say true right?  It would seem to make sense that a null integer is less than the integer constant 100.  But the result is actually false!  The null value is not less than 100 according to the less-than operator. It looks even more outrageous when you consider this also evaluates to false: 1: int? x = null; 2:  3: if (x < int.MaxValue) 4: { 5: // ... 6: } So, are we saying that null is less than every valid int value?  If that were true, null should be less than int.MinValue, right?  Well… no: 1: int? x = null; 2:  3: // um... hold on here, x is NOT less than min value? 4: if (x < int.MinValue) 5: { 6: // ... 7: } So what’s going on here?  If we use greater than instead of less than, we see the same little dilemma: 1: int? x = null; 2:  3: // once again, null is not greater than anything either... 4: if (x > int.MinValue) 5: { 6: // ... 7: } It turns out that four of the comparison operators (<, <=, >, >=) are designed to return false anytime at least one of the arguments is null when comparing System.Nullable wrapped types that expose the comparison operators (short, int, float, double, DateTime, TimeSpan, etc.).  What’s even odder is that even though the two equality operators (== and !=) work correctly, >= and <= have the same issue as < and > and return false if both System.Nullable wrapped operator comparable types are null! 1: DateTime? x = null; 2: DateTime? y = null; 3:  4: if (x <= y) 5: { 6: Console.WriteLine("You'd think this is true, since both are null, but it's not."); 7: } 8: else 9: { 10: Console.WriteLine("It's false because <=, <, >, >= don't work on null."); 11: } To make matters even more confusing, take for example your usual check to see if something is less than, greater to, or equal: 1: int? x = null; 2: int? y = 100; 3:  4: if (x < y) 5: { 6: Console.WriteLine("X is less than Y"); 7: } 8: else if (x > y) 9: { 10: Console.WriteLine("X is greater than Y"); 11: } 12: else 13: { 14: // We fall into the "equals" assumption, but clearly null != 100! 15: Console.WriteLine("X is equal to Y"); 16: } Yes, this code outputs “X is equal to Y” because both the less-than and greater-than operators return false when a Nullable wrapped operator comparable type is null.  This violates a lot of our assumptions because we assume is something is not less than something, and it’s not greater than something, it must be equal.  So keep in mind, that the only two comparison operators that work on Nullable wrapped types where at least one is null are the equals (==) and not equals (!=) operators: 1: int? x = null; 2: int? y = 100; 3:  4: if (x == y) 5: { 6: Console.WriteLine("False, x is null, y is not."); 7: } 8:  9: if (x != y) 10: { 11: Console.WriteLine("True, x is null, y is not."); 12: } Solution: The Nullable static class So we’ve seen that <, <=, >, and >= have some interesting and perhaps unexpected behaviors that can trip up a novice developer who isn’t expecting the kinks that System.Nullable<T> types with comparison operators can throw.  How can we easily mitigate this? Well, obviously, you could do null checks before each check, but that starts to get ugly: 1: if (x.HasValue) 2: { 3: if (y.HasValue) 4: { 5: if (x < y) 6: { 7: Console.WriteLine("x < y"); 8: } 9: else if (x > y) 10: { 11: Console.WriteLine("x > y"); 12: } 13: else 14: { 15: Console.WriteLine("x == y"); 16: } 17: } 18: else 19: { 20: Console.WriteLine("x > y because y is null and x isn't"); 21: } 22: } 23: else if (y.HasValue) 24: { 25: Console.WriteLine("x < y because x is null and y isn't"); 26: } 27: else 28: { 29: Console.WriteLine("x == y because both are null"); 30: } Yes, we could probably simplify this logic a bit, but it’s still horrendous!  So what do we do if we want to consider null less than everything and be able to properly compare Nullable<T> wrapped value types? The key is the System.Nullable static class.  This class is a companion class to the System.Nullable<T> class and allows you to use a few helper methods for Nullable<T> wrapped types, including a static Compare<T>() method of the. What’s so big about the static Compare<T>() method?  It implements an IComparer compatible comparison on Nullable<T> types.  Why do we care?  Well, if you look at the MSDN description for how IComparer works, you’ll read: Comparing null with any type is allowed and does not generate an exception when using IComparable. When sorting, null is considered to be less than any other object. This is what we probably want!  We want null to be less than everything!  So now we can change our logic to use the Nullable.Compare<T>() static method: 1: int? x = null; 2: int? y = 100; 3:  4: if (Nullable.Compare(x, y) < 0) 5: { 6: // Yes! x is null, y is not, so x is less than y according to Compare(). 7: Console.WriteLine("x < y"); 8: } 9: else if (Nullable.Compare(x, y) > 0) 10: { 11: Console.WriteLine("x > y"); 12: } 13: else 14: { 15: Console.WriteLine("x == y"); 16: } Summary So, when doing math comparisons between two numeric values where one of them may be a null Nullable<T>, consider using the System.Nullable.Compare<T>() method instead of the comparison operators.  It will treat null less than any value, and will avoid logic consistency problems when relying on < returning false to indicate >= is true and so on. Tweet   Technorati Tags: C#,C-Sharp,.NET,Little Wonders,Little Pitfalls,Nulalble

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• Visual Studio 2010 plus Help Index : have your cake and eat it too

  - by Adrian Hara

  Although the team's intentions might have been good, the new help system in Visual Studio 2010  is a huge step backwards (more like a cannonball-shot-kind-of-leap really) from the one we all know (and love?) in Visual Studio 2008 and 2005 (and heck, even VS6). Its biggest problem, from my point of view, is the total and complete lack of the Help Index feature: you know...the thing where you just go and type in what you're looking for and it filters down the list of results automatically. For me this was the number one productivity feature in the "old" help system, allowing me to find stuff very quickly. Number two is that it's entirely web based and runs, by default, in the browser. So imagine, when you press F1, a new tab opens in your default browser pointing to the help entry. While this is wrong in many ways, it's also extremely annoying, cleaning up tabs in the browser becomes a chore which represents a serious productivity hit. These and many other problems were discussed extensively (and rather vocally) on connect but it seems MS seemed to ignore it and opt to release the new help system anyway, with the promise that more features will be added in a later release. Again, it kind of amazes me that they chose to ship a product with LESS features that the previous one and, what's worse, missing KEY features, just so it's "standards based" and "extensible". To be honest, I couldn't care less about the help system's implementation, I just want it to be usable and I would've thought that by now the software community and especially MS would've learned this lesson. In the end, what kind of saddens me is that MS regards these basic features as ones for the "power help user". I mean, come on! I mean a) it's not like my aunt's using Visual Studio 2010 and she represents the regular user, b) all software developers are, by definition, power users and c) it's a freakin help, not rocket science! As you can tell, I'm pretty pissed. Even more so because I really feel that the VS2010 & co. release really is a great one, with a lot of effort going into the various platforms and frameworks, most (if not all) of them being really REALLY good products. And then they go and screw up the help! How lame is that?!   Anyway, it's not all gloom-and-doom. Luckily there is a desktop app which presents a UI over the new help system that's very close to what was there in VS2008, by Robert Chandler (to which I hereby declare eternal gratitude). It still has some minor issues but I'll take it over the browser version of the help any day. It's free, pretty quick (on my machine ;)) and nicely usable. So, if you hate the new help system (passionately) like I do, download H3Viewer now.

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• Free training at Northwest Cadence

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Even though I have only been at Northwest Cadence for a short time I have already done so much. What I really wanted to do was let you guys know about a bunch of FREE training that NWC offers. These sessions are at a fantastic time for the UK as 9am PST (Seattle time) is around 5pm GMT. Its a fantastic way to finish off your Fridays and with the lack of love for developers in the UK set to continue I would love some of you guys to get some from the US instead. There are really two offerings. The first is something called Coffee talks that take you through an hours worth of detail in a specific category. Coffee Talks These coffee talks have some superb topics and you can get excellent interaction with the presenter as they are kind of informal. Date Day Time Topic Register Here 01/04/11 Tuesday 8:30AM – 9:30AM PST Real World Business and Technical Benefits of ALM with TFS 2010 150656 01/28/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST The Full Testing Experience Professional Quality Assurance with Visual Studio 2010 152810 02/11/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST Visual Source Safe to Team Foundation Server 152844 02/25/11 Friday 2:00PM - 3:00PM PST The Full Testing Experience Professional Quality Assurance with Visual Studio 2010 152816 03/11/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST Lab Manager The Ultimate “No More No Repro” Tool 152809 03/25/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST The Full Testing Experience Professional Quality Assurance with Visual Studio 2010 152838 04/08/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST Visual Source Safe to Team Foundation Server 152846 04/22/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST The Full Testing Experience Professional Quality Assurance with Visual Studio 2010 152839 05/06/11 Friday 2:00PM - 3:00PM PST Real World Business and Technical Benefits of ALM with TFS 2010 150657 05/20/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST The Full Testing Experience Professional Quality Assurance with Visual Studio 2010 152842 06/03/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST Visual Source Safe to Team Foundation Server 152847 06/17/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST The Full Testing Experience Professional Quality Assurance with Visual Studio 2010 152843   ALM Training Engagement Program Microsoft has released a new program to bring free Visual Studio 2010 Training Sessions to select customers on Microsoft Visual Studio products and how Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions can help drive greater business impact. For more details on this program, please see the process chart below.  To get started send an email to us; This training is paid for by Microsoft and you would need to commit to 4 sessions in order to get accepted into the program. So these have more hoops to jump through to get them, but the content is much more formal and centres around adoption.

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• Get to Know a Candidate (8 of 25): Rocky Anderson&ndash;Justice Party

  - by Brian Lanham

  DISCLAIMER: This is not a post about “Romney” or “Obama”. This is not a post for whom I am voting. Information sourced for Wikipedia. Ross Carl “Rocky” Anderson served two terms as the 33rd mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah, between 2000 and 2008.  He is the Executive Director of High Road for Human Rights.  Prior to serving as Mayor, he practiced law for 21 years in Salt Lake City, during which time he was listed in Best Lawyers in America, was rated A-V (highest rating) by Martindale-Hubbell, served as Chair of the Utah State Bar Litigation Section[4] and was Editor-in-Chief of, and a contributor to, Voir Dire legal journal. As mayor, Anderson rose to nationwide prominence as a champion of several national and international causes, including climate protection, immigration reform, restorative criminal justice, LGBT rights, and an end to the "war on drugs". Before and after the invasion by the U.S. of Iraq in 2003, Anderson was a leading opponent of the invasion and occupation of Iraq and related human rights abuses. Anderson was the only mayor of a major U.S. city who advocated for the impeachment of President George W. Bush, which he did in many venues throughout the United States. Anderson's work and advocacy led to local, national, and international recognition in numerous spheres, including being named by Business Week as one of the top twenty activists in the world on climate change,serving on the Newsweek Global Environmental Leadership Advisory Board, and being recognized by the Human Rights Campaign as one of the top ten straight advocates in the United States for LGBT equality. He has also received numerous awards for his work, including the EPA Climate Protection Award, the Sierra Club Distinguished Service Award, the Respect the Earth Planet Defender Award, the National Association of Hispanic Publications Presidential Award, The Drug Policy Alliance Richard J. Dennis Drugpeace Award, the Progressive Democrats of America Spine Award, the League of United Latin American Citizens Profile in Courage Award, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee Patriot Award, the Code Pink (Salt Lake City) Pink Star honor, the Morehouse University Gandhi, King, Ikeda Award, and the World Leadership Award for environmental programs. Formerly a member of the Democratic Party, Anderson expressed his disappointment with that Party in 2011, stating, “The Constitution has been eviscerated while Democrats have stood by with nary a whimper. It is a gutless, unprincipled party, bought and paid for by the same interests that buy and pay for the Republican Party." Anderson announced his intention to run for President in 2012 as a candidate for the newly-formed Justice Party. Although founded by Rocky Anderson of Utah, the Justice Party was first recognized by Mississippi and describes itself as advocating economic justice through measures such as green jobs and a right to organize, environment justice through enforcing employee safeguards in trade agreements, and social and civic justice through universal health care. In its first press release, the Utah Justice Party set forth its goals for justice in the economic, environmental, social and civic realms, along with a call to rid the corrupting influence of big money from government, to reverse the erosion of rights guaranteed by the Constitution, and to stop draining American resources to support illegal wars of aggression. Its press release says its grassroots supporters believe that now is the time for all to "shed their skeptical view that their voices don't matter", that "our 2-party system is a 'duopoly' controlled by the same corporate and military interests", and that the people must act to ensure "that our nation will achieve a brighter, sustainable future.” Anderson has ballot access in CO, CT, FL, ID, LA, MI, MN, MS, NJ, NM, OR, RI, TN, UT, VT, WA (152 electoral votes) and has write-in access in AL, AK, DE, GA, IL, IO, KS, MD, MO, NE, NH, NY, PA, TX Learn more about Rocky Anderson and Justice Party on Wikipedia.

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• BizTalk 2009 - The Community ODBC Adapter: Schema Generation with Input Parameters

  - by Stuart Brierley

  As previsouly noted in my post on Schema Generation using the Community ODBC Adapter, I ran into a problem when trying to generate a schema to represent a MySQL stored procedure that had input parameters.  After a bit of investigation and a few deadends I managed to figure out a way around this issue - detailed below are both the problem and solution in case you ever run into this yourself. The Problem Imagine a stored procedure that is coded as follows in MySQL: StuTest(in DStr varchar(80)) BEGIN   Declare GRNID int;   Select grn_id into GRNID from grn_header where distribution_number = DStr;   Select GRNID; END This is quite a simple stored procedure but can be used to illustrate the issue with parameters quite niceley. When generating the schema using the Add Generated Items wizard, I tried selecting "Stored Procedure" and then in the Statement Information window typing the stored procedure name: StuTest Pressing generate then gives the following error: "Incorrect Number of arguments for Procedure StuTest; expected 1, got 0" If you attempt to supply a value for the parameter you end up with a schema that will only ever supply the parameter value that you specify.  For example supplying StuTest('123') will always call the procedure with a parameter value of 123. The Solution   I tried contacting Two Connect about this, but their experience of testing the adapter with MySQL was limited. After looking through the code for the ODBC adapter myself and trying a few things out, I was eventually able to use the ODBC adapter to call a test stored procedure using a two way send port. In the generate schema wizard instead of selecting Stored Procedure I had to choose SQL Script instead, detailing the following script: Call StuTest(@InputParameter) By default this would create a request schema with an attribute called InputParameter, with a SQL type of NVarChar(1).  In most cases this is not going to be correct for the stored procedure being called. To change the type from the default that is applied you need to select the "Override default query processing" check box when specifying the script in the wizard.  This then opens the BizTalk ODBC Override window which lets you change the properties of the parameters and also test out the query script.  Once I had done this I was then able to generate the correct schema, which included an attribute representing the parameter.  By deploying the schema assembly I was then able to try the ODBC adapter out on a two way send port. When supplied with an appropriate message instance (for the generated request schema) this send port successfully returned the expected response.

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• Changing Platform

  - by Liam McLennan

  From time to time a developer makes a break from their platform of choice (.NET, Java, VB, Access, COBOL) and moves to perceived greener pastures. Zed Shaw did it, jumping from Ruby to Python, and Mike Gunderloy went from .NET to Rails. But it can be difficult to change platform. My clients don’t come to me looking for  a software developer, they come looking for a .NET developer. This is a tragic side effect of big software companies marketing. If your village is under attack by bandits, would you turn away the first seven samurai who offered to help because you didn’t like their swords? What matters is how effectively they can defend your village. You should not tell your carpenter what sort of hammer to use and you should not tell your software developer what platform to use.

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• Get to Know a Candidate (2 of 25): Merlin Miller&ndash;American Third Position Party

  - by Brian Lanham

  DISCLAIMER: This is not a post about “Romney” or “Obama”. This is not a post for whom I am voting. Information sourced for Wikipedia. Meet Merlin Miller of American Third Position Party In addition to being American Third Position Party nominee, Miller is an independent film maker.  He is a graduate of West Point and has commanded two units in the United States Army.  After military service he worked as an industrial engineering manager for Michelin Tire.  He learned about film making by earning an MFA from the University of Southern California. Mr. Miller is on the ballot in: CO, NJ, and TN. In the 2000’s, Miller began taking an increasingly paleoconservative political stance.  He claimed that Hollywood “ surreptitiously seeks to destroy our European-American heritage and our Christian-based traditional values, and replace them with values that debase these traditional values and elevate minorities as paragons of virtue and wisdom....Today’s motion pictures, in concert with other forms of mass media entertainment, are the greatest enemies to the well-being of our progeny and the future of our country.” Miller states that he "doesn't like" interracial marriage; however, he does not support outlawing interracial marriage, either.  Miller has denied being anti-Semitic, instead claiming that he merely opposes "favoritism" granted to Jews in the film industry.  He also opposes illegal immigration and what he refers to as "wide open borders" in the United States. The American Third Position Party (A3P) is a third positionist American political party which promotes white supremacy.  It was officially launched in January 2010 (although in November 2009 it filed papers to get on a ballot in California) partially to channel the right-wing populist resentment engendered by the financial crisis of 2007–2010 and the policies of the Obama administration and defines its principal mission as representing the political interests of white Americans. The party takes a strong stand against immigration and globalization, and strongly supports an anti-interventionist foreign policy. Although the party does not support labor unions, they do strongly support the labor rights of the American working class on a platform of placing American workers first over illegal immigrant workers and banning of overseas corporate relocation of American industry and technology Third Position or Third Alternative refers to a revolutionary nationalist political position that emphasizes its opposition to both communism and capitalism. Advocates of Third Position politics typically present themselves as "beyond left and right", instead claiming to syncretize radical ideas from both ends of the political spectrum Learn more about Merlin Miller and American Third Position Party on Wikipedia.

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• It's intellisense for SQL Server

  - by Nick Harrison

  It's intellisense for SQL Server Anyone who has ever worked with me, heard me speak, or read any of writings knows that I am a HUGE fan of Reflector.    By extension,  I am a big fan of Red - Gate   I have recently begun exploring some of their other offerings and came across this jewel. SQL Prompt is a plug in for Visual Studio and SQL Server Management Studio.    It provides several tools to make dealing with SQL a little easier for your friendly neighborhood developer. When you a query window in a database, the plugin kicks in and gathers the metadata for the database that you are in.    As you type a query, you get handy feedback like a list of tables after you type select.    You can select one of the tables, specify * and then tab to expand the select clause to include all of the columns from the selected table.    As you are building up the where clause, you are prompted by the names of columns in the selected tables. If you spend any time writing ad hoc queries or building stored procedures by hand, this can save you substantial time. If you are learning a new data model, this can greatly cut down on your frustration level. The other really cool thing here is Format SQL.   I have searched all over the place for a really good SQL formatter.    Badly formatted  SQL is so much harder to read than well formatted SQL.   Unfortunately, management studio offers no support for keeping your SQL well formatted.    There are many tools available to format your SQL.   Some work better than others.    Some don't work that well at all.   Most will give you some measure of control over how the formatted SQL looks.    SQL Prompt produces good results and is easy to configure. Sadly no tool is perfect, and what would we be without a wish list.    There are some features that I would like to see: Make it easier to paste SQL in and out of code.    Strip off string builder, etc Automate replacing hard coded values with bind variables or parameters In addition to reformatting SQL, which is a huge refactor, support for other SQL refactors would be nice.    Convert join to sub query and vice versa come to mind Wish list a side, this is a wonderful tool that easily saves me an hour or more on most weeks.

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• Windows 8 Camp&ndash;Ways to Prepare

  - by Lori Lalonde

  When Windows 8 was announced at the BUILD conference back in September, it created quite a buzz among the developer community. By the spring of 2012,  Windows 8 Developer Camps started popping up everywhere imaginable. I received a lot of questions from CTTDNUG members about whether or not we would be hosting one locally. If you recall my post about the Windows Phone/Azure Developer Workshop that CTTDNUG hosted back in March, you’ll remember that the biggest hurdle to overcome when planning this type of event was finding the right venue. It took some time, but I finally found a venue that was available and provided the prerequisites needed to ensure this camp is a success. I am very excited that CTTDNUG will be hosting a Windows 8 Camp this summer in the Kitchener/Waterloo area. In fact, it’s coming up in less than 2 weeks. Clearly other developers are excited as well, because our registration numbers show that the event is already 70% full! On top of that, I was fortunate enough to also book two well-known evangelists to present and teach at this full day developer camp: Andrei Marukovich and Atley Hunter. This was the icing on the cake. With the content provided by Microsoft, and two local experts that live and breathe Windows 8 development, I know that I, along with other developers that attend this event, will have the opportunity to maximize our learning potential and hit the ground running. If you plan on attending a Windows 8 Developer Camp soon, and want to ensure you get the most “bang for your buck” (figuratively speaking, since these camps are free), there are some things you can do to prepare before the big day: 1) Install the prerequisites on your own device before the big day I can’t stress this enough. Otherwise, you will be spending valuable time during the hands-on period downloading and installing what is needed, rather than digging into the development and using that time to ask the experts on-hand about programming challenges, issues, questions you may have with respect to your development. Prerequisites: Windows 8 Release Preview Visual Studio 2012 RC Download the Windows 8 SDK Samples 2) Purchase, download, and read Charles Petzold’s newest book:  Programming Windows 6th Edition This is a great introduction to the type of content you will be learning about during the camp. Doing some light reading beforehand might raise some questions about the concepts discussed in the book, which will give you the opportunity to write them down and bring them with you to the camp. The experts on hand will be able to answer them for you. 3) Make use of the freebies that are available Telerik has recently released a preview of their RadControls for Metro. You can sign up to receive a license code to give you access to install the preview for free and start playing around with it. Syncfusion also offers a free download of their Metro Studio package, which is a collection of metro style icons that you can customize and use in your own applications. Last but not least, once you’ve installed the Windows 8 Release Preview on your own device, go to the Windows 8 Store and download a handful of the free apps that are available. Testing out other Metro apps may give you ideas of what you can do in your own apps and analyze what features you like: application flow, type of animations used, concepts that were leveraged, how live tiles were used, etc. I hope you found these tips to be useful as you embark on a new development journey! Although this post focused on how to prepare for a Windows 8 camp, the same ideas are there whichever developer camp/workshop/event you attend. Learning does not begin and end on the day of the event. Attending a developer camp is just one step of many to master whatever technology you are interested in. It is a continuous process, which is fully maximized when you do your homework beforehand, actively participate during,  and follow up by putting what you learned to practice afterwards. Happy coding!

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