Search Results

Search found 17192 results on 688 pages for 'geeks with blogs'.

Page 141/688 | < Previous Page | 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148  | Next Page >

  • Windows Azure BidNow Sample &ndash; definitely worth a look

    - by Eric Nelson
    [Quicklink: download new Windows Azure sample from http://bit.ly/bidnowsample] On Mondays (17th May) in the  6 Weeks of Windows Azure training (Now full) Live Meeting call, Adrian showed BidNow as a sample application built for Windows Azure. I was aware of BidNow but had not found the time to take a look at it nor seems it running before. Adrian convinced me it was worth some a further look. In brief I like it :-) It is more than Hello World, but still easy enough to follow. Bid Now is an online auction site designed to demonstrate how you can build highly scalable consumer applications using Windows Azure. It is built using Visual Studio 2008, Windows Azure and uses Windows Azure Storage. Auctions are processed using Windows Azure Queues and Worker Roles. Authentication is provided via Live Id. Bid Now works with the Express versions of Visual Studio and above. There are extensive setup instructions for local and cloud deployment You can download from http://bit.ly/bidnowsample (http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/BidNowSample) and also check out David original blog post. Related Links UK based? Sign up to UK fans of Windows Azure on ning Check out the Microsoft UK Windows Azure Platform page for further links

    Read the article

  • MDX needs a function or macro syntax

    - by Darren Gosbell
    I was having an interesting discussion with a few people about the impact of named sets on performance (the same discussion noted by Chris Webb here: http://cwebbbi.wordpress.com/2011/03/16/referencing-named-sets-in-calculations). And apparently the core of the performance issue comes down to the way named sets are materialized within the SSAS engine. Which lead me to the thought that what we really need is a syntax for declaring a non-materialized set or to take this even further a way of declaring an MDX expression as function or macro so that it can be re-used in multiple places. Because sometimes you do want the set materialised, such as when you use an ordered set for calculating rankings. But a lot of the time we just want to make our MDX modular and want to avoid having to repeat the same code over and over. I did some searches on connect and could not find any similar suggestions so I posted one here: https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/651646/mdx-macro-or-function-syntax Although apparently I did not search quite hard enough as Chris Webb made a similar suggestion some time ago, although he also included a request for true MDX stored procedures (not the .Net style stored procs that we have at the moment): https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/473694/create-parameterised-queries-and-functions-on-the-server Chris also pointed out this post that he did last year http://cwebbbi.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/iccube/ where he pointed out that the icCube product already has this sort of functionality. So if you think either or both of these suggestions is a good idea then I would encourage you to click on the links and vote for them.

    Read the article

  • Get your TFS 2012 task board demo ready in under 1 minute

    - by Tarun Arora
    Release Notes – http://tfsdemosetup.codeplex.com/  | Download | Source Code | Report a Bug | Ideas In this blog post, I’ll show you how to use the ‘TfsDemoSetup’ application to configure and setup the TFS 2012 task board for a demo in well less than 1 minute Step 1 – Note what you get with a newly created Team Project Create a new Team Project on TFS Preview         2. Click Create Project         3. The project creation has completed        4. Open the team web access and have a look at the home page Note – Since I created the project I am the only Team Member       A default Team by the name AdventureWorks Team has been created       A few sprints have been assigned to the default team but no dates for sprint start and end have been specified        A default Area Path for the team is missing       Step 2. Download the TFS Demo Setup Console application from Codeplex 1. Navigate to the TFS Demo Setup project on codeplex https://tfsdemosetup.codeplex.com/       2. Download Instructions and TFSDemo_<version>      3. Follow the steps in the Instructions.txt file      4. Unzip TFSDemo_<version> and open the target folder. Two important files in this folder, DemoDictionary.xml – This file contains the settings using which the demo environment will be setup SetupTfsDemo.exe – This will run the TFS demo environment setup application       Step 3 – Configure the setup (i.e. team name, members, sprint dates, etc) 1. Open up DemoDictionary.xml      2. Walkthrough DemoDictionary.xml             a. Basic Team Details         <Name> – Specify the name of the team         <Description> – Specify a description to go with the team         <SetAsDefaultTeam> – This accepts a value “true/false” when set to true, the newly created team will be set as the default team in the project         <BacklogIterationPath> – Specify a backlog iteration path for the team     b. Iterations – The iterations you specify here will be set as the Teams iterations        <Iterations> – Accepts multiple <Iteration> nodes.        <Iteration> – This is the most granular level of an Iteration        <Path> – The path to the sprint, sample values, Release 1\Sprint 1 or Release 2\Sprint 2        <StartDate> – The sprint start date, this accepts the format yyyy-MM-dd        <FinishDate> – The sprint finish date, this accepts the format yyyy-MM-dd     c. Team Members – Team Members that need to be added to the newly created team will be added under this section         <TeamMembers> – Accepts multiple <TeamMember> nodes.         <TeamMember> – This is the most granular level of a Team Member         <User> – This accepts the username, if you are running this against TFSPreview then the live id of the user will need to be passed. If you are running this against TFS Server then the user id i.e. Domain\UserName will need to be passed          <Team> – Specify the name of the team that you want the user to be assigned to.     d. WorkItems – This section will allow you to add work items (product backlog Items and linked tasks) to the current sprint of the team         <WorkItems> – Accepts multiple <WorkItem> nodes.         <WorkItem> – Accepts one <ProductBacklogItem> and multiple <Task> nodes         <ProductBacklogItem> – Used to create a Product Backlog Item type work item               <Title> – The title of the Product Backlog Item               <Description> – The description of the Product Backlog Type Work Item               <AssignedTo> – Used to assign the work item to a team member. The team member name or email address can be passed.               <Effort> – The total effort required to complete the Product Backlog Item         <Task> – Used to create a linked task to the Product Backlog type work item               <Title> – The title of the task type work item               <Description> – The description of the Task Type Work Item               <AssignedTo> – Used to assign the work item to a team member. The team member name or email address can be passed.               <RemainingWork> – The remaining effort to complete the task type work item Step 4 – Setup the demo environment against the newly created Team Project 1. Run SetupTfsDemo.exe    2. Enter Y or y on the prompt to continue setting up TFS Demo setup.     3. Select the newly created Team project, for this blogpost I had created the Team Project – AdventureWorks, so that is what I’ll select in the Connect to TFS Server pop up    3. Click Connect and follow the messages that are written to the console application       Step 5 – Validate that the Demo environment is set up as per the configuration 1. The team web access is all lit up You have a Sprint, a burn down chart, team members…    2. The team Demo has been added and has been set up as the default team    3. The Sprint Backlog Iteration path, Sprints and Sprint start and finish dates have been set    4. The default area path has been setup    5. Taskboard – Backlog items view    6. Taskboard – Team members view      Step 6 – Exception Handling! 1. This solution has been tested against TFS 2012 Service/Server for the Scrum 2.1 process template. 2. You are likely to run into an exception if you mess up the config file 3. If the team already exists and you run the console app to set up the team (with the same name) you will run into exceptions. Please remember this is just an alpha release, if you have any feedback please leave a comment! Didn’t I say that it would just take 1 minute, Enjoy!

    Read the article

  • Internet Explorer will not open Office files

    - by geekrutherford
    An issue was brought to my attention today at work where certain users were unable to open Office files (specifically Excel) from Internet Explorer 7.   The user would click on a button which simply generated an inline JS call to open a pop-up pointing to the .xlsx file on the server. IE would open the pop-up and then shortly thereafter the pop-up would disappear without the file ever opening.   I tweaked the security settings in the users browser...added the site to the list of trusted sites and lowered the security settings to Medium-Low. This allowed IE to at least prompt with the Save or Open message. Clicking either open resulted in "Internet Explorer Could Not Open the Site...".   Perturbed, I retreated back to Geek Central (aka my desk) and modified my application such that instead of simply pointing the browser to the file and now used Response.TransmitFile() to stream it to the browser instead. I thought to myself "this is perfect, it has to work!!!". Alas, no luck.   Bewildered and confused and returned to the lone users computer and started looking around the various IE options. I stumbled upon "Clear SSL State" under the "Content" tab. This appears to clear out all SSL certificates on the client forcing it to refresh. Doing this in concert with resetting the security levels for all zones back to their defaults seemed to do the trick.

    Read the article

  • Twin Cities Code Camp 8 (EIGHT?!?)

    - by Chris Williams
    Yep, Twin Cities Code Camp EIGHT is just around the corner (11 days from this writing.) We've got some great sessions lined up, and a mini-mountain of swag to give away. If you haven't registered yet, we're ALMOST at capacity... so don't delay. See you there...

    Read the article

  • ALMing in Hinglish 2&ndash;Windows 8-Manual Testing Metro Style Apps using MTM11

    - by Tarun Arora
    What is ALMing in Hinglish => Introduction     ????? ?????? ??? ?????? ????, ?????? ??????? ?? ?????? ?????? ?? ????? ?????? ?????? 8 ?????? ?????? ??????????? ?? ?????? ???????? ?? ???? ???. ??? ???? ???????????? ????? ??????? 2011 ?? ?????? ?? ?? ???? ????? ?????? 8 ?????? ?????? ??????????? ?? ?????? ???????? ??. ALMing in Hinglish–Windows 8 Metro Style App manual testing using MTM11   In this second in the series of videos I bring to you Shubhra Maji who is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio dev tools team in Hyderabad along with the very seasoned Aditya Agarwal & Srishti Sridhar who have been working in the Visual Studio team from past several releases. The team wonderfully walks us through manually testing Metro Style Apps in Windows 8 using Microsoft Test Manager 2011. A great thank you for watching, if you have any questions/feedback/suggestions please contact us. Stay Tuned for more… Namaste!   You might also like - ALMing in Hinglish 1-Exploratory Testing in VS11 with Nivedita Bawa

    Read the article

  • Farmyard

    - by Richard Jones
    Moooooooo     For a while now we’ve been using Apple’s enterprise device app distribution mechanism.   This allows you to have a user, click on a URL on their iOS device and it pulls down a new version of an enterprise app. of of our servers. Its really nice,  have a look at - http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#featuredarticles/FA_Wireless_Enterprise_App_Distribution/Introduction/Introduction.html   I’ve embedded this, into a check on application launch, that a web-service is called to detect a newer version of the software is available.  It then calls the URL to the App and a new version is deployed. You can alert users that a new App update is available by sending them a push notification.  See screenshot at the top. We send our push notifications out to users,  using a simple C# service.    The fun part is this.   You can instruct the push notification to play a sound (embedded in the app already). So our push notification’s play a random farmyard noise, i.e from a selection of - cow.wav dogbrk.wav duck.wav goose.wav horse.wav lamb.wav monkey.wav – left field I know rooster.wav Imagine my amusement being able to periodically send out an update and watch our office (of about 60 people) turn into farm for a few seconds. I’ve messed up a few times, with people being interrupted on customer conference calls,  but people seem good humoured about it. (so far) Simple(ish) pleasures…

    Read the article

  • How to Configure Microsoft Word 2013 to Connect to Geekswithblogs

    - by Enrique Lima
    The first step in this process is to open Word 2013. Once there, you will have the different templates available. You will select Blog Post.  Once the template for Blog Post opens, you will have a dialog popup with the option to Register a Blog Account. And click on Register Now.  The next part of the dialog will prompt you to provide the New Blog Account details, starting with the type of Blog you have (SharePoint, WordPress, TypePad and others are listed). In our case for GeeksWithBlogs, we will select Other.  Now come the juicy details! Under the New Account dialog, you will have the API set to MetaWebLog.Then provide the Blog Post URL, this needs to be http://geekswithblogs.net/<your-account>/services/metablogapi.aspx (remember to change the <your-account> part with your info).Then, enter your User Name and Password, click OK and you should be set (you will receive a dialog letting you know information will be transferred).  Hope it works for you!

    Read the article

  • Moving from Tortoise to TFS

    - by MarkPearl
    The Past A few years ago my small software company made the jump from storing code on a shared folder to source code control. At the time we had evaluated a few of the options and settled on Tortoise SVN. The main motivation for going the SVN route was that we found a great plugin for Visual Studio that allowed us to avoid the command prompt for uploading changes (like I said we are windows programmers… command prompt bad!! ) and it was free. Up to now we have been pretty happy with SVN as it removed many of the worries that I had about how safe my code was on a shared folder and also gave us the opportunity to safely have several developers work on the same project at the same time. The only times when we have been unhappy has been when we have had SVN hell days – which pretty much occur when you are doing something out of the norm and suddenly SVN just won’t resolve conflicts or something along those lines. This happens once every 4 or 5 months and is not necessarily a problem caused directly by SVN – but a problem augmented by SVN. When you have SVN hell days you want to curse SVN! With that in mind I recently have been relooking at our source code control. I have explored using GIT and was very impressed by it and have also looked at TFS. From a source code control perspective I don’t want to get into a heated discussion on which one is better – but I do want to mention that I wear two hats in my organization – software developer & manager, and with the manager hat on I tend to sway the TFS route. So when I was given a coupon to test DiscountASP.Net Team Foundation Server Service for a year, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to try TFS in a distributed environment and also make the first step towards having an integrated development management system. Some of the things that appeal to me about DiscountASP’s offering are the following… Basic management / planning facilities like to do lists inside Visual Studio Daily backup of data on the server – we are developers, not IT managers and so the more of this I could outsource the better Distributed solution – all of us work remotely and so this was a big one as well. Registering and Setting Up with DiscountASP.NET The whole registration process was simple and intuitive. The web interface is not the most visually impressive one, but it is functional and a few seconds after I clicked the last submit button a email was sitting in my inbox giving me my control panel username and suggesting that I read the “Getting Started” article. The getting started article was easy to read and understand so no complaints there either. Next to set my dev environment to work. With a few references to the getting started article I had completed the whole setup process in a matter of minutes. Ten minutes after initiating the whole thing I was logged into VS2010 and creating my first TFS project. With the service that I signed up for, I have access for 5 users – which is sufficient for my internal needs. So from what I can tell, to set the rest of us up on the system I just need to supply them with their user credentials and url. My Concerns Resolved 1) Security So, a few concerns I had about the service. First and foremost – is it secure? I would hate for someone to get access to our code and the whole idea of putting it up on the internet is a concern for me. Turning to the Knowledge Base on the DiscountASP website this is one of the first question I can see answered. According to them it is secure. I have extracted their comment below regarding this. Our TFS hosting service is secure. We only accept HTTPS connections ensuring that any client-server data transmission is encrypted. At the network level, all of our systems are protected by multiple Juniper firewalls, Tipping Point's Intrusion Detection System (see Tipping Point's case study of our use here), and we also employ DDoS mitigation to add extra layers of security. Additionally, physical access to the servers is tightly restricted. Please see the security section of this Knowledge Base article for further details. 2) Web Portal Access The other big concern I have is regarding web portal access. In the ideal world I would like to be able to give my end users access to a web portal for reporting bugs etc. When I initially read through the FAQ of the site it mentioned that there was web portal access – but from what I can see this is just for “users”. Since I am limited to 5 users for the account, it would not be practical to set up external users that we could get feedback from on bugs etc. I would be interested if this is possible – and if so if someone could post it in the comments it would be much appreciated. If this isn’t possible, it is a slight let down as we rely heavily on end user feedback to get feedback and it would have been ideal to have gotten this within the service. Other than those two items, I didn’t have any real concerns that were unresolved. So where do I go from here? So time passed by from the initial writing of this post and as work whirred in and out of my inbox I have still not had a proper opportunity to give the service a test run. Recently though things have began to slow down and then surprise surprise I had another SVN Hell day. With that experience I had a new found resolve to get our team on TFS and so today we are going to start to use the service as a team. I am hoping that I do not have TFS hell days – but if I do, I will be sure to write about them. In short - the verdict is still out on whether this service is going to be invaluable to my business or whether it will create more headaches than it is worth BUT I am hopping it will be an invaluable service. I will only really be able to determine that in a few months… till then!

    Read the article

  • XNA RenderTarget2D Sample

    - by Michael B. McLaughlin
    I remember being scared of render targets when I first started with XNA. They seemed like weird magic and I didn’t understand them at all. There’s nothing to be frightened of, though, and they are pretty easy to learn how to use. The first thing you need to know is that when you’re drawing in XNA, you aren’t actually drawing to the screen. Instead you’re drawing to this thing called the “back buffer”. Internally, XNA maintains two sections of graphics memory. Each one is exactly the same size as the other and has all the same properties (such as surface format, whether there’s a depth buffer and/or a stencil buffer, and so on). XNA flips between these two sections of memory every update-draw cycle. So while you are drawing to one, it’s busy drawing the other one on the screen. Then the current update-draw cycle ends, it flips, and the section you were just drawing to gets drawn to the screen while the one that was being drawn to the screen before is now the one you’ll be drawing on. This is what’s meant by “double buffering”. If you drew directly to the screen, the player would see all of those draws taking place as they happened and that would look odd and not very good at all. Those two sections of graphics memory are render targets. All a render target is, is a section of graphics memory to which things can be drawn. In addition to the two that XNA maintains automatically, you can also create and set your own using RenderTarget2D and GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget. Using render targets lets you do all sorts of neat post-processing effects (like bloom) to make your game look cooler. It also just lets you do things like motion blur and lets you create mirrors in 3D games. There are quite a lot of things that render targets let you do. To go along with this post, I wrote up a simple sample for how to create and use a RenderTarget2D. It’s available under the terms of the Microsoft Public License and is available for download on my website here: http://www.bobtacoindustries.com/developers/utils/RenderTarget2DSample.zip . Other than the ‘using’ statements, every line is commented in detail so that it should (hopefully) be easy to follow along with and understand. If you have any questions, leave a comment here or drop me a line on Twitter. One last note. While creating the sample I came across an interesting quirk. If you start by creating a Windows Game, and then make a copy for Windows Phone 7, the drop-down that lets you choose between drawing to a WP7 device and the WP7 emulator stays grayed-out. To resolve this, you need to right click on the Windows Phone 7 version in the Solution Explorer, and choose “Set as StartUp Project”. The bar will then become active, letting you change the target you which to deploy to. If you want another version to be the one that starts up when you press F5 to start debugging, just go and right-click on that version and choose “Set as StartUp Project” for it once you’ve set the WP7 target (device or emulator) that you want.

    Read the article

  • ASP.NET Conditionally Change ButtonField text at runTime

    - by Rodney Vinyard
    ASP.NET Conditionally Change ButtonField text at runTime   <asp:ButtonField CommandName="Edit" HeaderText="" Text="Edit" ButtonType="Link" />       protected void gvRequests_RowDataBound(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e)     {         if (e.Row.RowType == DataControlRowType.DataRow)         {             //----------------------------------------------------             // If status = "Saved", change buttonField.LinkButton.Text to "Copy"             //----------------------------------------------------             if (e.Row.Cells[(int)gCol.Status].Text == "Saved")             {                 //----------------------------------------------------                 // no !                 //----------------------------------------------------                 //string x = e.Row.Cells[(int)gCol.EditLink].Text;                 //e.Row.Cells[(int)gCol.EditLink].Text = "Copy";                   //----------------------------------------------------                 // yes !                 //----------------------------------------------------                 LinkButton linkButton = (LinkButton)e.Row.Cells[(int)gCol.EditLink].Controls[0];                 linkButton.Text = "Copy";             }         }     }

    Read the article

  • Debugging Windows Service Timeout Error 1053

    - by Joe Mayo
    If you ever receive an Error 1053 for a timeout when starting a Windows Service you've written, the underlying problem might not have anything to do with a timeout.  Here's the error so you can compare it to what you're seeing: --------------------------- Services --------------------------- Windows could not start the Service1 service on Local Computer.   Error 1053: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion. --------------------------- OK   --------------------------- Searching the Web for a solution to this error in your Windows Service will result in a lot of wasted time and advice that won't help.  Sometimes you might get lucky if your problem is exactly the same as someone else's, but this isn't always the case.  One of the solutions you'll see has to do with a known error on Windows Server 2003 that's fixed by a patch to the .NET Framework 1.1, which won't work.  As I write this blog post, I'm using the .NET Framework 4.0, which is a tad bit past that timeframe. Most likely, the basic problem is that your service is throwing an exception that you aren't handling.  To debug this, wrap your service initialization code in a try/catch block and log the exception, as shown below: using System; using System.Diagnostics; using System.ServiceProcess; namespace WindowsService { static class Program { static void Main() { try { ServiceBase[] ServicesToRun; ServicesToRun = new ServiceBase[] { new Service1() }; ServiceBase.Run(ServicesToRun); } catch (Exception ex) { EventLog.WriteEntry("Application", ex.ToString(), EventLogEntryType.Error); } } } } After you uninstall the old service, redeploy the service with modifications, and receive the same error message as above; look in the Event Viewer/Application logs.  You'll see what the real problem is, which is the underlying reason for the timeout. Joe

    Read the article

  • FREE Windows Azure Boot camp &ndash; Raleigh Wednesday June 23, 2010

    - by Jim Duffy
    Just want to be sure you don’t miss out on an opportunity to take advantage of some free Windows Azure training. Microsoft Developer Evangelist Brian Hitney and I will be presenting a one-day Windows Azure boot camp on June 23rd in Raleigh, NC at the Microsoft RTP offices. For more information on content, what to bring, directions, etc. just click here to go to the information and registration page for the Raleigh event. To find other dates and locations for the Windows Azure boot camps  head over to the Windows Azure Boot Camp page. Brian and I hope to see you there! Have a day. :-|

    Read the article

  • Wordnik Accelerator

    - by prabhpreet
    Wow, creating IE Accelerators is superbly easy. If you want to learn how to create one, go here (some MSDN blog) and the MSDN documentation (clearly written). I was fed up of dictionary.com bringing all those popups and the stupid definitions of Google's dictionary. So I decided to scratch my own itch. I randomly stumbled on the site called Wordnik and it provides with all examples plus definitions plus lots more for words and its popup-free (as far as I know). So I decided to write and accelerator. Here is the source code (Yes, this is it): <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <os:openServiceDescription xmlns:os="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0"> <os:homepageUrl>http://www.wordnik.com</os:homepageUrl> <os:display> <os:name>View on Wordnik</os:name> <os:description>Looking up words on an awesome word site called Wordnik </os:description> <os:icon>http://www.wordnik.com/favicon.ico</os:icon> </os:display> <os:activity category="Define"> <os:activityAction context="selection"> <os:execute method="get" action="http://www.wordnik.com/words/{selection}" ></os:execute> </os:activityAction> </os:activity> </os:openServiceDescription> That’s it. To get it, go here. Enjoy!

    Read the article

  • Why do we (really) program to interfaces?

    - by Kyle Burns
    One of the earliest lessons I was taught in Enterprise development was "always program against an interface".  This was back in the VB6 days and I quickly learned that no code would be allowed to move to the QA server unless my business objects and data access objects each are defined as an interface and have a matching implementation class.  Why?  "It's more reusable" was one answer.  "It doesn't tie you to a specific implementation" a slightly more knowing answer.  And let's not forget the discussion ending "it's a standard".  The problem with these responses was that senior people didn't really understand the reason we were doing the things we were doing and because of that, we were entirely unable to realize the intent behind the practice - we simply used interfaces and had a bunch of extra code to maintain to show for it. It wasn't until a few years later that I finally heard the term "Inversion of Control".  Simply put, "Inversion of Control" takes the creation of objects that used to be within the control (and therefore a responsibility of) of your component and moves it to some outside force.  For example, consider the following code which follows the old "always program against an interface" rule in the manner of many corporate development shops: 1: ICatalog catalog = new Catalog(); 2: Category[] categories = catalog.GetCategories(); In this example, I met the requirement of the rule by declaring the variable as ICatalog, but I didn't hit "it doesn't tie you to a specific implementation" because I explicitly created an instance of the concrete Catalog object.  If I want to test the functionality of the code I just wrote I have to have an environment in which Catalog can be created along with any of the resources upon which it depends (e.g. configuration files, database connections, etc) in order to test my functionality.  That's a lot of setup work and one of the things that I think ultimately discourages real buy-in of unit testing in many development shops. So how do I test my code without needing Catalog to work?  A very primitive approach I've seen is to change the line the instantiates catalog to read: 1: ICatalog catalog = new FakeCatalog();   once the test is run and passes, the code is switched back to the real thing.  This obviously poses a huge risk for introducing test code into production and in my opinion is worse than just keeping the dependency and its associated setup work.  Another popular approach is to make use of Factory methods which use an object whose "job" is to know how to obtain a valid instance of the object.  Using this approach, the code may look something like this: 1: ICatalog catalog = CatalogFactory.GetCatalog();   The code inside the factory is responsible for deciding "what kind" of catalog is needed.  This is a far better approach than the previous one, but it does make projects grow considerably because now in addition to the interface, the real implementation, and the fake implementation(s) for testing you have added a minimum of one factory (or at least a factory method) for each of your interfaces.  Once again, developers say "that's too complicated and has me writing a bunch of useless code" and quietly slip back into just creating a new Catalog and chalking any test failures up to "it will probably work on the server". This is where software intended specifically to facilitate Inversion of Control comes into play.  There are many libraries that take on the Inversion of Control responsibilities in .Net and most of them have many pros and cons.  From this point forward I'll discuss concepts from the standpoint of the Unity framework produced by Microsoft's Patterns and Practices team.  I'm primarily focusing on this library because it questions about it inspired this posting. At Unity's core and that of most any IoC framework is a catalog or registry of components.  This registry can be configured either through code or using the application's configuration file and in the most simple terms says "interface X maps to concrete implementation Y".  It can get much more complicated, but I want to keep things at the "what does it do" level instead of "how does it do it".  The object that exposes most of the Unity functionality is the UnityContainer.  This object exposes methods to configure the catalog as well as the Resolve<T> method which is used to obtain an instance of the type represented by T.  When using the Resolve<T> method, Unity does not necessarily have to just "new up" the requested object, but also can track dependencies of that object and ensure that the entire dependency chain is satisfied. There are three basic ways that I have seen Unity used within projects.  Those are through classes directly using the Unity container, classes requiring injection of dependencies, and classes making use of the Service Locator pattern. The first usage of Unity is when classes are aware of the Unity container and directly call its Resolve method whenever they need the services advertised by an interface.  The up side of this approach is that IoC is utilized, but the down side is that every class has to be aware that Unity is being used and tied directly to that implementation. Many developers don't like the idea of as close a tie to specific IoC implementation as is represented by using Unity within all of your classes and for the most part I agree that this isn't a good idea.  As an alternative, classes can be designed for Dependency Injection.  Dependency Injection is where a force outside the class itself manipulates the object to provide implementations of the interfaces that the class needs to interact with the outside world.  This is typically done either through constructor injection where the object has a constructor that accepts an instance of each interface it requires or through property setters accepting the service providers.  When using dependency, I lean toward the use of constructor injection because I view the constructor as being a much better way to "discover" what is required for the instance to be ready for use.  During resolution, Unity looks for an injection constructor and will attempt to resolve instances of each interface required by the constructor, throwing an exception of unable to meet the advertised needs of the class.  The up side of this approach is that the needs of the class are very clearly advertised and the class is unaware of which IoC container (if any) is being used.  The down side of this approach is that you're required to maintain the objects passed to the constructor as instance variables throughout the life of your object and that objects which coordinate with many external services require a lot of additional constructor arguments (this gets ugly and may indicate a need for refactoring). The final way that I've seen and used Unity is to make use of the ServiceLocator pattern, of which the Patterns and Practices team has also provided a Unity-compatible implementation.  When using the ServiceLocator, your class calls ServiceLocator.Retrieve in places where it would have called Resolve on the Unity container.  Like using Unity directly, it does tie you directly to the ServiceLocator implementation and makes your code aware that dependency injection is taking place, but it does have the up side of giving you the freedom to swap out the underlying IoC container if necessary.  I'm not hugely concerned with hiding IoC entirely from the class (I view this as a "nice to have"), so the single biggest problem that I see with the ServiceLocator approach is that it provides no way to proactively advertise needs in the way that constructor injection does, allowing more opportunity for difficult to track runtime errors. This blog entry has not been intended in any way to be a definitive work on IoC, but rather as something to spur thought about why we program to interfaces and some ways to reach the intended value of the practice instead of having it just complicate your code.  I hope that it helps somebody begin or continue a journey away from being a "Cargo Cult Programmer".

    Read the article

  • Be careful when installing the Blend Windows Phone 7 Add-In

    - by Laurent Bugnion
    There was a small issue today with the release of the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP (April 2010 Refresh) refresh. The issue is that the Expression Blend Add-in Preview for Windows Phone (April Refresh) is not compatible with Blend 4.0.20408.0, which was the public RC (release candidate). A few days ago, the Blend team released a fix for an issue that was sometimes causing a crash when Blend was starting up. This new release (V4.0.20421.0) was not very well announced however, and many people (including me) did not install it. After all, Blend did not crash at startup of either of my machines, so I didn’t deem necessary to install yet a new RC. However, it is now clear that the Windows Phone 7 Add-In needs this latest-and-greatest version to work. If you have Blend 4.0.20408.0, you won’t be able to work with Windows Phone 7 in Blend. To add to the confusion, the page where you can download V4.0.20421.0 from has an error, and the wrong version number is wrong (at least at the time of writing). Do not let this confuse you. You must download this version and install it. Hopefully this helps clarify some of the confusion… Happy WinPhone7 coding :) Laurent

    Read the article

  • A few unpleasant facts about Visual Studio 2012.

    - by Ilya Verbitskiy
    I have been playing with Visual Studio 2012 for the last couple of days. New IDE is pretty good, but, unfortunately, I found a few unpleasant facts. First of all, new release is coming without Visual Studio setup projects. I am disappointed, because I am using it for my pet project – Easy Shutdown. The tool is a small widget-like application which allows you to reboot, log out or shut down you PC. I have not done any decision yet, but I would probably migrate to WiX. The second surprise is Microsoft will not add Visual Studio macros to the next release. Since I am lazy guy, I like small hacks using macros. For example I have macros to refresh all projects or attach to IIS.  The only way how to solve the problem is to convert your macros to Visual Studio plugin. I have not tried it yet, but I will definitely do in the nearest future. The third fact, I do not like, is Visual Studio default themes. May be somebody like it, but they are hard to adopt after Visual Studio 2010. Fortunately there is a solution. Matthew Johnson released Visual Studio 2012 Color Theme Editor. It comes with a few predefined themes. I really like the Blue one.

    Read the article

  • How to fix an annoying ReSharper &ndash; NuGet error

    - by terje
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/terje/archive/2013/10/30/how-to-fix-an-annoying-resharper-ndash-nuget-error.aspxUsing NuGet in Visual Studio together with ReSharper may sometimes lead you into an annoying error where ReSharper indicates your code has an error, but the solution builds just fine. This may happen if you have a set of NuGet packages, and you either just restore them, or delete them on disk and then restore again.  Your code ends up looking like this, note the red missing functions, which comes from the Moq library - which is downloaded from NuGet:   while the Build is still fine, it compiles without any errors: This stackoverflow question gives some different approaches to solve this, but my experience have been that the Resharper Suspend-Resume trick most often solves the issue: In Visual Studio:  Go to Tools/Options/Resharper Press Suspend: When this is done the error markers disappear, since ReSharper now is inactive. Then just press Resume again: This has been submitted to Jetbrains support, ticket here: http://resharper-support.jetbrains.com/requests/3882) , if you want to follow it.

    Read the article

  • Visual Studio 2010: Custom Start Page

    - by Steve Clements
    As Visual Studio 2010 IDE has been mostly written in WPF, extending the start page has become pretty darn easy and I for one find this quite interesting as I always open with the start page and the more customisation I can have the better! There are a few things you will need to install first to get going Visual Studio 2010 SDK Start page project template, which you can either get from the New Project dialog, in the online gallery section in VS or download from here   I was going to write a blog post on how to create a custom start page, but decided that msdn have done such a good job I was pretty much wasting my time, so take a look here, it has in detail everything you need to know to get it done! :) Technorati Tags: Visual Studio 2010,Custom Start Pages

    Read the article

  • Hyper-V Live Migration across Sites!

    - by Ryan Roussel
    One of the great sessions I sat in on at Tech Ed this week was stretching a Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V  Failover Cluster across sites.  With this ability, you could actually implement a Hyper-V cluster where you could migrate or even Live Migrate VMs across sites.   With this area’s propensity for Hurricanes, this will be a very popular topic for me over the next few months. While this technology is possible today, it’s also very complicated and can be very expensive to implement.    First your WAN connection has to support the ability to trunk your VLAN across both sites in order to Live Migrate.  This means you can’t use a Layer 3 routed connection like MPLS.  It has to be a Metro Ethernet connection or "Dark Fiber”.  Dark Fiber is unused Fiber already in the ground that can be leased from  various providers. Both of these connections would allow you to trunk layer 2 across your WAN.  Cisco does have the ability to trunk layer 2 across a routed connection by muxing the traffic but this is only available in their Nexus product line which has a very steep price tag.   If you are stuck with MPLS or the like and Nexus switching is not a realistic possibility, you will have to implement a multi-subnet cluster in which case Live Migration won’t be possible.  However you can still failover VMs to the remote site with some planning and manual intervention.  The consideration here is that the VMs will be on a different subnet once migrated, so you will have to change the IP addressing of your VMs.  This also has ramifications with DNS and Name resolution to control your down time.  DHCP with Reservations for your VMs is the preferred method to achieve the IP changes as this will automate that part of the process.   Secondly, you will have to have  a mechanism to replicate your storage across both sites.  Many SAN vendors natively support hardware based synchronous and asynchronous replication.  Some even support cluster shared volumes which were introduced in 2008 R2.   If your SANs do not support this natively, there are alternative file based replication products either software based like Double Take or hardware appliance like EMC.  Be sure to check with your vendor on the support of Disk majority if you’re replicating your quorum disk between SANs.   The last consideration is the ability to maintain quorum for your cluster.  If your replication provider does not support Disk Majority through replication, you will have to explore Node Majority with File Share Witness.  This will affect your design as a 3 node cluster with 1 node at the remote site and FSW at the production site would not have the ability to maintain quorum if the production site was lost. MS best practice for this would be to implement an even node cluster with 2 nodes at  each site and the FSW at a third site.   And there you have it.  While some considerations and research goes into implementing this solution, even a multi-subnet solution would be invaluable to organizations in the implementations of “warm” DR sites.

    Read the article

  • Making your ASP.NET/HTML Websites Indic aware &ndash; accepting Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi and ot

    - by Harish Ranganathan
    Its been a month since I wrote my last post.  Much of work has been happening around planning for Tech Ed India, the upcoming Virtual TechDays this week as well as our Developer content at the Great Indian Developer Summit 2010.  Its going to be one exciting period starting this week and I am glad I would be able to meet a lot of folks who have written to me personally that they would like to catch up at Tech Ed India. For now, I had a chance to meet the Microsoft India Development Centre team that worked on the Microsoft Indic Language Input Tool (erstwhile Akshara). The team updated me that they have also released the scripts  so that the Indic input feature can be encapsulated into your own websites.  For example, if you are having a web page where you collect user information, you can pretty much make your site indic aware i.e. accept inputs in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi etc.,  All you would need to include would be a bunch of scripts onto your web pages and you are ready to make it, like I said, “indic aware” I have built a sample web page that accepts First Name, Last Name, Address and an additional field.  When it comes to accepting indic, sometimes, you may want to avoid the indic input in certain fields and accept it in English.  You can specify the MicrosoftILITWebAttach="false" attribute to the Text Boxes and Text Areas (TextMode=”Multiline” in ASP.NET) so that the particular field automatically switches over to English input.  Similarly, the moment you specify that the TextMode=”Password” to make it as a password field, it automatically ignores all indic recognition and shows the masked dots for the words entered. Note that, this is, when we are going for the Opt-out mode, where we are specifying that by default all the input controls would need indic awareness and we would specify for those controls where it is not required.  The other mode is Opt-in mode where you would need to add a different property to the script definition i.e. attachMode=”optin” .  When we do this, we need to explicitly add the MicrosoftILITWebAttach="true" attribute for every control where we need indic input. I have created a sample web page which accepts First Name, Last Name, Address and an additional input field to demonstrate the “Opt-out”.   You can copy paste this into any of your web pages to check it <form id="form1" runat="server">     <!-- Microsoft Indic Language Input Tool embed code --> <input type="hidden" id="MicrosoftILITWebEmbedInfo" attachMode="optout" value="" /> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ilit.microsoft.com/bookmarklet/script/Tamil.js" defer="defer"></script>     <div>     <h2>         Welcome to the Registration Page     </h2>     <p>         First Name: <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtFirstName" />         <br />         <br />         Last Name: <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtLastName" />         <br />         <br />         Password:         <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtPassword" TextMode="Password" />         <br />         <br />         Address: <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtAddress" TextMode="MultiLine" Height="100" Width="200" />         <br />         <br />         English Text: <asp:TextBox ID="txtEnglishText" runat="server" MicrosoftILITWebAttach="false" />     </p>     <p>         <!-- Microsoft Indic Language Input Tool attribution image link --> <a style="text-decoration: none" href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=184205&clcid=0x409"><img style="border: 0px" alt="Transliteration by Microsoft" src="http://ilit.microsoft.com/bookmarklet/images/attribution.png"></a>     </p>     </div>     </form> If you note the code snippet above, I have included the scripts in the top with the attachMode set to “optout” and for the last TextBox, I have mentioned the MicrosoftILITWebAttach="false” attribute to make it accept English input.   Additionally, you also need to add the “Microsoft Indic Language Input Tool attribution image” to your web page as a courtesy to the team that developed this feature.  It would basically add a image saying “Transliteration by Microsoft” similar to a Copy Right image.  You can see the screen shot below where I have typed it in Tamil.  In that you will notice that the password field behaves as expected and the last field accepts English Text.  You can also notice the icon that comes in the first textbox that indicates that, the field is going to accept indic text.   This sample is using Tamil, but you can pretty much do it for Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali etc.,   The website for getting the Indic script and other instructions is http://specials.msn.co.in/ilit/WebEmbed.aspx?language=Tamil You can replace the querystring value “Tamil” to other languages as mentioned above to get the respective script. This also works for plain HTML based websites and doesn’t necessarily need you to use ASP.NET to achieve the functionality. Note that, this form is not completely localized.  This is transliterated.  You can add label controls for FirstName, LastName indication etc., and use the Visual Studio tools to localize and get those values from resource files.  In the resource files, you can enter the text in different languages to make this a truly localized page.  If you just want to download the Indic Tool Desktop version (that can be used for typing in Word, Excel, pretty much any input area), you can download it from http://specials.msn.co.in/ilit/  In the same page, there is also a web version where you can type and get text then and there if you dont want to install the desktop version. So, go ahead, download / use them in your websites and enjoy the power of Indic. Cheers !!!

    Read the article

  • Function Folding in #PowerQuery

    - by Darren Gosbell
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/darrengosbell/archive/2014/05/16/function-folding-in-powerquery.aspxLooking at a typical Power Query query you will noticed that it's made up of a number of small steps. As an example take a look at the query I did in my previous post about joining a fact table to a slowly changing dimension. It was roughly built up of the following steps: Get all records from the fact table Get all records from the dimension table do an outer join between these two tables on the business key (resulting in an increase in the row count as there are multiple records in the dimension table for each business key) Filter out the excess rows introduced in step 3 remove extra columns that are not required in the final result set. If Power Query was to execute a query like this literally, following the same steps in the same order it would not be overly efficient. Particularly if your two source tables were quite large. However Power Query has a feature called function folding where it can take a number of these small steps and push them down to the data source. The degree of function folding that can be performed depends on the data source, As you might expect, relational data sources like SQL Server, Oracle and Teradata support folding, but so do some of the other sources like OData, Exchange and Active Directory. To explore how this works I took the data from my previous post and loaded it into a SQL database. Then I converted my Power Query expression to source it's data from that database. Below is the resulting Power Query which I edited by hand so that the whole thing can be shown in a single expression: let     SqlSource = Sql.Database("localhost", "PowerQueryTest"),     BU = SqlSource{[Schema="dbo",Item="BU"]}[Data],     Fact = SqlSource{[Schema="dbo",Item="fact"]}[Data],     Source = Table.NestedJoin(Fact,{"BU_Code"},BU,{"BU_Code"},"NewColumn"),     LeftJoin = Table.ExpandTableColumn(Source, "NewColumn"                                   , {"BU_Key", "StartDate", "EndDate"}                                   , {"BU_Key", "StartDate", "EndDate"}),     BetweenFilter = Table.SelectRows(LeftJoin, each (([Date] >= [StartDate]) and ([Date] <= [EndDate])) ),     RemovedColumns = Table.RemoveColumns(BetweenFilter,{"StartDate", "EndDate"}) in     RemovedColumns If the above query was run step by step in a literal fashion you would expect it to run two queries against the SQL database doing "SELECT * …" from both tables. However a profiler trace shows just the following single SQL query: select [_].[BU_Code],     [_].[Date],     [_].[Amount],     [_].[BU_Key] from (     select [$Outer].[BU_Code],         [$Outer].[Date],         [$Outer].[Amount],         [$Inner].[BU_Key],         [$Inner].[StartDate],         [$Inner].[EndDate]     from [dbo].[fact] as [$Outer]     left outer join     (         select [_].[BU_Key] as [BU_Key],             [_].[BU_Code] as [BU_Code2],             [_].[BU_Name] as [BU_Name],             [_].[StartDate] as [StartDate],             [_].[EndDate] as [EndDate]         from [dbo].[BU] as [_]     ) as [$Inner] on ([$Outer].[BU_Code] = [$Inner].[BU_Code2] or [$Outer].[BU_Code] is null and [$Inner].[BU_Code2] is null) ) as [_] where [_].[Date] >= [_].[StartDate] and [_].[Date] <= [_].[EndDate] The resulting query is a little strange, you can probably tell that it was generated programmatically. But if you look closely you'll notice that every single part of the Power Query formula has been pushed down to SQL Server. Power Query itself ends up just constructing the query and passing the results back to Excel, it does not do any of the data transformation steps itself. So now you can feel a bit more comfortable showing Power Query to your less technical Colleagues knowing that the tool will do it's best fold all the  small steps in Power Query down the most efficient query that it can against the source systems.

    Read the article

< Previous Page | 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148  | Next Page >