Search Results

Search found 21 results on 1 pages for 'astoria'.

Page 1/1 | 1 

• How to introduce custom primitive key types to WCF Data Services (Astoria)

  - by Artem Tikhomirov

  Hello. We use custom type to represent Identifiers in our project. It has TypeConvertor attached and it always helped with serialization. I've tried to use WCF Data Services to expose some data from our system, but faced a problem. Astoria framework do not recognize class as an entity even though I've decorated it with [DataServiceKey("Id")] attribute. If I change type of property to Guid - it totally works :(. How could teach WCF Data Services to understand this simple class?

  Read the article

• How do I add another return format to WCF data services?

  - by keithwarren7

  Out of the box WCF Data Services (aka ADO.NET Data Services aka Astoria) supports OData as a return format (xml really, but this is the structure it uses) and JSON. How do I introduce another return format?

  Read the article

• How do I interact with OData from Java?

  - by user280638

  OData is Microsoft's repackaging of its Astoria (now WCF Data Services) RESTful query/update protocol. If I want to use Java to create an OData compatible data source, how do I do that? Similarly, if I want to consume an OData data source from Java, how do I do that? http://www.odata.org/ Partial answer below. The OData website suggests that Restlet supports OData. Restlet's API documentation mentions the org.restlet.ext.odata package. www.restlet.org/ www.restlet.org/documentation/snapshot/jee/ext/org/restlet/ext/odata/package-summary.html Is this the only answer? Are there blog posts on doing this integration?

  Read the article

• How do I implement IDataServiceMetadataProvider and tell my Data Service to use that custom provider

  - by Pwninstein

  There's no obvious entry point for implementing a custom provider for an ADO.NET Data Service using IDataServiceMetadataProvider, and then telling a Data Service to use that provider. Has anyone had any luck in this area? I've tried implementing this interface on my Data Source class, but none of my breakpoints are hit. There is also no (obvious) way to set the provider from the Data Service's DataServiceConfiguration parameter passed in to the InitializeService function. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks! Data Services Providers (ADO.NET Data Services) IDataServiceMetadataProvider Members

  Read the article

• IDataServiceMetadataProvider - Entities dont show up in $metadata.

  - by TomTom

  I am trying to write our own RIA services provider to expose data from a server that I access via ODBC. I follow th eguidelines set out at http://blogs.msdn.com/alexj/archive/2010/03/02/creating-a-data-service-provider-part-9-un-typed.aspx I have written our own IDataServiceMetadataProvider / IDataServiceQueryProvider pair and get no errors on what i do. I am putting in a resource set like this: ResourceType tableType = new ResourceType( typeof(Dictionary<string, object>), ResourceTypeKind.EntityType, null, "Martini", table_name, false ); tableType.CanReflectOnInstanceType = false; var prodKey = new ResourceProperty( "Key", ResourcePropertyKind.Key | ResourcePropertyKind.Primitive, ResourceType.GetPrimitiveResourceType(typeof(int)) ); prodKey.CanReflectOnInstanceTypeProperty = false; tableType.AddProperty(prodKey); var prodName = new ResourceProperty( "Name", ResourcePropertyKind.Primitive, ResourceType.GetPrimitiveResourceType(typeof(string)) ); prodName.CanReflectOnInstanceTypeProperty = false; tableType.AddProperty(prodName); _MetaDataProvider.AddResourceType(tableType); _MetaDataProvider.AddResourceSet(new ResourceSet(table_name, tableType)); I see the requests coming in for enumerating the resource sets. I check them there in a breakpoint, and the resource set and the type is there, with all properties. Still, the output I get is: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes" ?> - <service xml:base="http://localhost:2377/MartiniData.svc/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:app="http://www.w3.org/2007/app" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2007/app"> - <workspace> <atom:title>Default</atom:title> </workspace> </service> And for the $metadata version: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes" ?> - <edmx:Edmx Version="1.0" xmlns:edmx="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/06/edmx"> - <edmx:DataServices xmlns:m="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/metadata" m:DataServiceVersion="1.0"> - <Schema Namespace="Martini" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices" xmlns:m="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/metadata" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/05/edm"> <EntityContainer Name="Martini" m:IsDefaultEntityContainer="true" /> </Schema> </edmx:DataServices> </edmx:Edmx> The actual metadata for the types never shows up, no error is shown. pretty frustrating. Anyone any idea?

  Read the article

• IDataServiceMetadataProvider / ResourceType.... what for dynamic types with no CLR type?

  - by TomTom

  Hello, I try to expose a database via ADO RIA for which we have only an ODBC based interface. The "database" is a server and new elements are developped all the time, so I would like the server to check metadata at start (using the odbc schema methods) and then expose what he finds via RIA services.... clients can the nregenerate when they need access to new elements. As such, I dont ahve any CLR types for all the tabled developped. ResourceType tableType = new ResourceType( typeof(object), ResourceTypeKind.EntityType, null, "Martini", table_name, false ); tableType.CanReflectOnInstanceType = false; I can somehow not put in NULl as CLR element type, and entering typeof(object) seems to result in reflection errors when trying to access the properties. Any documentation on how to do that? I dont really want to get into having types... though if I have to, I probably will dynamically generate some via bytecode emit.

  Read the article

• Why is my ServiceOperation method missing from my WCF Data Services client proxy code?

  - by Kev

  I have a simple WCF Data Services service and I want to expose a Service Operation as follows: [System.ServiceModel.ServiceBehavior(IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults = true)] public class ConfigurationData : DataService<ProductRepository> { // This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies. public static void InitializeService(IDataServiceConfiguration config) { config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.ReadMultiple | EntitySetRights.ReadSingle); config.SetServiceOperationAccessRule("*", ServiceOperationRights.All); config.UseVerboseErrors = true; } // This operation isn't getting generated client side [WebGet] public IQueryable<Product> GetProducts() { // Simple example for testing return (new ProductRepository()).Product; } Why isn't the GetProducts method visible when I add the service reference on the client?

  Read the article

• Running an existing LINQ query against a dynamic object (DataTable like)

  - by TomTom

  Hello, I am working on a generic OData provider to go against a custom data provider that we have here. Thsi is fully dynamic in that I query the data provider for the table it knows. I have a basic storage structure in place so far based on the OData sample code. My problem is: OData supports queries and expects me to hand in an IQueryable implementation. On the lowe rside, I dont have any query support. Not a joke - the provider returns tables and the WHERE clause is not supported. Performance is not an issue here - the tables are small. It is ok to sort them in the OData provider. My main problem is this. I submit a SQL statement to get out the data of a table. The result is some sort of ADO.NET data reader here. I need to expose an IQueryable implementation for this data to potentially allow later filtering. Any ide ahow to best touch that? .NET 3.5 only (no 4.0 planned for some time). I was seriously thinking of creating dynamic DTO classes for every table (emitting bytecode) so I can use standard LINQ. Right now I am using a dictionary per entry (not too efficient) but I see no real way to filter / sort based on them.

  Read the article

• Using Teleriks new LINQ implementation to create OData feeds

  This week Telerik released a new LINQ implementation that is simple to use and produces domain models very fast. Built on top of the enterprise grade OpenAccess ORM, you can connect to any database that OpenAccess can connect to such as: SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, SQL Azure, VistaDB, etc. While this is a separate LINQ implementation from traditional OpenAccess Entites, you can use the visual designer without ever interacting with OpenAccess, however, you can always hook into the advanced ORM features like caching, fetch plan optimization, etc, if needed. Just to show off how easy our LINQ implementation is to use, I will walk you through building an OData feed using Data Services Update for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. (Memo to Microsoft: P-L-E-A-S-E hire someone from Apple to name your products.) How easy is it? If you have a fast machine, are skilled with the mouse, and type fast, you can do this in about 60 seconds via three easy steps. (I promise in about 2-3 weeks that you can do this in less then 30 seconds. Stay tuned for that.)  Step 1 (15-20 seconds): Building your Domain Model In your web project in Visual Studio, right click on the project and select Add|New Item and select Telerik OpenAccess Domain Model as your item template. Give the file a meaningful name as well. Select your database type (SQL Server, SQL Azure, Oracle, MySQL, VistaDB, etc) and build the connection string. If you already have a Visual Studio connection string already saved, this step is trivial.  Then select your tables, enter a name for your model and click Finish. In this case I connected to Northwind and selected only Customers, Orders, and Order Details.  I named my model NorthwindEntities and will use that in my DataService. Step 2 (20-25 seconds): Adding and Configuring your Data Service In your web project in Visual Studio, right click on the project and select Add|New Item and select ADO .NET Data Service as your item template and name your service. In the code behind for your Data Service you have to make three small changes. Add the name of your Telerik Domain Model (entered in Step 1) as the DataService name (shown on line 6 below as NorthwindEntities) and uncomment line 11 and add a * to show all entities. Optionally if you want to take advantage of the DataService 3.5 updates, add line 13 (and change IDataServiceConfiguration to DataServiceConfiguration in line 9.) 1: using System.Data.Services; 2: using System.Data.Services.Common; 3:   4: namespace Telerik.RLINQ.Astoria.Web 5: { 6: public class NorthwindService : DataService<NorthwindEntities> 7: { 8: //change the IDataServiceConfigurationto DataServiceConfiguration 9: public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) 10: { 11: config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.All); 12: //take advantage of the "Astoria3.5 Update" features 13: config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; 14: } 15: } 16: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   Step 3 (~30 seconds): Adding the DataServiceKeys You now have to tell your data service what are the primary keys of each entity. To do this you have to create a new code file and create a few partial classes. If you type fast, use copy and paste from your first entity,  and use a refactoring productivity tool, you can add these 6-8 lines of code or so in about 30 seconds. This is the most tedious step, but dont worry, Ive bribed some of the developers and our next update will eliminate this step completely. Just create a partial class for each entity you have mapped and add the attribute [DataServiceKey] on top of it along with the keys field name. If you have any complex properties, you will need to make them a primitive type, as I do in line 15. Create this as a separate file, dont manipulate the generated data access classes in case you want to regenerate them again later (even thought that would be much faster.) 1: using System.Data.Services.Common; 2:   3: namespace Telerik.RLINQ.Astoria.Web 4: { 5: [DataServiceKey("CustomerID")] 6: public partial class Customer 7: { 8: } 9:   10: [DataServiceKey("OrderID")] 11: public partial class Order 12: { 13: } 14:   15: [DataServiceKey(new string[] { "OrderID", "ProductID" })] 16: public partial class OrderDetail 17: { 18: } 19:   20: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   Done! Time to run the service. Now, lets run the service! Select the svc file and right click and say View in Browser. You will see your OData service and can interact with it in the browser. Now that you have an OData service set up, you can consume it in one of the many ways that OData is consumed: using LINQ, the Silverlight OData client, Excel PowerPivot, or PhP, etc. Happy Data Servicing! Technorati Tags: Telerik,Astoria,Data Services Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

  Read the article

• WCF Data Service Pipeline

  - by Daniel Cazzulino

  For documentation purposes, I just draw the following UML sequence diagrams for the “Astoria” pipeline, using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate: For a single-entity (or non-batched) request, this is the sequence: For a batch request, this is the sequence instead: DataService component is your own DataService<T>-derived class, and DataService.ProcessingPipeline refers to its ProcessingPipeline property pipeline events.   /kzu

  Read the article

• #MIX Day 2 Keynote: Put the Phone Down and Listen

  - by andrewbrust

  MIX day 1’s keynote was all about Windows Phone 7 (WP7).  MIX day 2’s was a reminder that Microsoft has much more going on than a new mobile platform.  Steven Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie, Doug Purdy and others showed us lots of other good things coming from Microsoft, mostly in the developer stack, that we certainly shouldn’t overlook.  These included the forthcoming IE9, its new JavaScript compiling engine and support for HTML 5 that takes full advantage of the local PC resources, including the Graphics Processing Unit.  The announcements also included important additions to ASP.NET (and one subtraction, in the form of lighter-weight ViewState technology) including almost-obsessive jQuery support.  That support is so good that John Resig, creator of the jQuery project, came on stage to tell us so.  Then Scott Guthrie told us that Microsoft would be contributing code to Open Source jQuery project. This is not your father’s Microsoft, it would seem. But to me, the crown jewel in today’s keynote were the numerous announcements around the Open Data Protocol (OData).  OData is nothing more than the protocol side of “Astoria” (now known as WCF Data Services, and until recently called ADO.NET Data Services) separated out and opened up as a platform-neutral standard.  The 2009 Professional Developers Conference (PDC) was Microsoft’s vehicle for first announcing OData, as well as project “Dallas,” an Azure-based cloud platform for publishing commercial OData feeds.  And we had already known about “bridges” for Astoria (and thus OData) for PHP and Java.  We also knew that PowerPivot, Microsoft’s forthcoming self-service BI plug-in for Excel 2010, will consume OData feeds and then facilitate drill-down analysis of their data.  And we recently found out that SQL Reporting Services reports (in the forthcoming SQL Server 2008 R2) and SharePoint 2010 lists will be consumable in OData format as well. So what was left to announce?  How about OData clients for Palm webOS and Apple iPhone/Objective C?  How about the release to Open Source of .NET’s OData client?  Or the ability to publish any SQL Azure database as an OData service by simply checking a checkbox at deployment?  Maybe even a Silverlight tool (code-named “Houston”) to create SQL Azure databases (and then publish them as OData) right in the browser?  And what if you you could get at NetFlix’s entire catalog in OData format?  You can – just go to http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/ and see for yourself.  Douglas Purdy, who made these announcements said “we want OData to work on as many devices and platforms as possible.”  After all the cross-platform OData announcements made in about a half year’s time, it’s hard to dispute this. When Microsoft plays the data card, and plays it well, watch out, because data programmability is the company’s heritage.  I’ll be discussing OData at length in my April Redmond Review column.  I wrote that column two weeks ago, and was convinced then that OData was a big deal. Today upped the ante even more.  And following the Windows Phone 7 euphoria of yesterday was, I think, smart timing.  The phone, if it’s successful, will be because it’s a good developer platform play.  And developer platforms (as well as their creators) are most successful when they have a good data strategy.  OData is very Silverlight-friendly, and that means it’s WP7-friendly too.  Phone plus service-oriented data is a one-two punch.  A phone platform without data would have been a phone with no signal.

  Read the article

• Telerik Releases the Data Service Wizard

  After a great beta cycle, Telerik is proud to announce today the commercial availability of the OpenAccess Data Service Wizard. You can download it and install it with Telerik OpenAccess Q1 2010 for both Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 RTM. If you are new to the Data Service Wizard, it is a great tool that will allow you to point a wizard at your OpenAccess generated data access classes and automatically build an WCF, Astoria (WCF Data Services), REST or ATOMPub collection endpoint, complete with the CRUD methods if applicable. If you are familiar with the Data Service Wizard already, there will be two new surprises in the release version. If you generated a domain model with the new OpenAccess Visual Entity Designer, you have only one file added to your project, mydomainmodel.rlinq for example. The first surprise of the new Data Service Wizard is that if you right click on the domain model in Visual Studio, ...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

  Read the article

• 30 seconds from File|New to a new CRUD Silverlight application with Teleriks new LINQ Implementation

  Last month Telerik released its new LINQ implementation and last week we released the new Data Services Wizard for Telerik OpenAccess, which supports both traditional OpenAccess entities and the new LINQ implementation. I will a walk you through the process where you can connect to a database, add a new domain model, wrap it in a new WCF Data Services (Astoria) service, and add a CRUD enabled Silverlight application. All in 30 seconds! Step 1: Build your Domain Model (20 seconds) Open Visual Studio 2010 RTM (or 2008) and add a new ASP.NET project. Right click on the project and select Add|New Item and choose Telerk OpenAccess Domain Model from the item template list. The Visual Entity Designer wizard comes up. Select the database server you are using in the first screen (SQL Server, Oracle, SQL Azure, MySQL, etc) and then also build your database connection string. Next select the tables, views, and stored procedures you want ...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

  Read the article

• ADO.NET Data Service -- non .NET consumers

  - by SwampyFox

  Has anyone come across an example of a non .Net consumer of an ADO.NET Data Service? I am on the second day of looking at what Astoria is and how it can be used. I am also trying to answer why would I use this instead of a web service? After getting my examples running, I kind get the RESTful approach to getting data out the system. And, plugging it into a .net client is incredibly easy. But, then I wondered how a non-.NET consumer would go about it. Any ideas (pointers) definitely appreciated...

  Read the article

• Using Teleriks new LINQ implementation to connect to MySQL

  Last week Telerik released a new LINQ implementation that is simple to use and produces domain models very fast. Built on top of the enterprise grade OpenAccess ORM, you can connect to any database that OpenAccess can connect to such as: SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, SQL Azure, VistaDB, etc. Today I will show you how to build a domain model using MySQL as your back end. To get started, you have to download MySQL 5.x and the MySQL Workbench and also, as my colleague Alexander Filipov at Telerik reminded me, make sure you install the MySQL .NET Connector, which is available here.  I like to use Northwind, ok it gives me the warm and fuzzies, so I ran a script to produce Northwind on my MySQL server. There are many ways you can get Northwind on your MySQL database, here is a helpful blog to get your started. I also manipulated the first record to indicate that I am in MySQL and gave a look via the MySQL Workbench. Ok, time to build our model! Start up the Domain Model wizard by right clicking on the project in Visual Studio (I have a Web project) and select Add|New Item and choose Telerik OpenAccess Domain Model from the new item list. When the wizard comes up, choose MySQL as your back end and enter in the name of your saved MySQL connection. If you dont have a saved MySQL connection set up in Visual Studio, click on New Connection and enter in the proper connection information. *Note, this is where you need to have the MySQL .NET connector installed. After you set your connection to the MySQL database server, you have to choose which tables to include in your model. Just for fun, I will choose all of them. Give your model a name, like NorthwindEntities and click finish. That is it. Now lets consume the model with ASP .net. I created a simple page that also has a GridView on it. On my page load I wrote this code, by now it should look very familiar, a simple LINQ query filtering customers by country (Germany) and binding the results to the grid.  1: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) 2: { 3: if (!IsPostBack) 4: { 5: //a reference to the data context 6: NorthwindEntities dat = new NorthwindEntities(); 7: //LINQ Statement 8: var result = from c in dat.Customers 9: where c.Country == "Germany" 10: select c; 11: //Databinding to the Gridview 12: GridView1.DataSource = result; 13: GridView1.DataBind(); 14: } 15: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre{ font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/}.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }.csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em;}.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } F5 produces the following. Tomorrow Ill show how to take the same model and create an Astoria/OData data feed. Technorati Tags: MySQL Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

  Read the article

• IIS7 dynamic_compression_not_success Reason 12

  - by Peter Oehlert

  So, I'm a bit of an IIS7 n00b but I've used most of the old IIS systems going back to 3. I'm trying to turn on dynamic compression and it's working, mostly. It doesn't work for my ADO.Net Data Service (Astoria) requests, batched or not. I found the freb tracing which was really helpful. And what I come up with unbatched requests is that it returns Reason Code 12, NO_MATCHING_CONTENT_TYPE. OK, so I don't have the matching mime type specified, that's easy. Except this is what I have in my web.config (which I think is correct, but maybe not). <httpCompression dynamicCompressionDisableCpuUsage="100" dynamicCompressionEnableCpuUsage="100" noCompressionForHttp10="false" noCompressionForProxies="false" noCompressionForRange="false" sendCacheHeaders="true" staticCompressionDisableCpuUsage="100" staticCompressionEnableCpuUsage="100"> <dynamicTypes> <clear/> <add mimeType="*/*" enabled="true" /> </dynamicTypes> <staticTypes> <clear/> <add mimeType="*/*" enabled="true" /> </staticTypes> </httpCompression> <urlCompression doDynamicCompression="true" doStaticCompression="true" dynamicCompressionBeforeCache="false" /> Now I think that this means it should compress any request that includes the Accept:Gzip header. I'd love to know what others might think here. My fiddler trace: GET /SecurityDataService.svc/GetCurrentAccount HTTP/1.1 Accept-Charset: UTF-8 Accept-Language: en-us dataserviceversion: 1.0;Silverlight Accept: application/atom+xml,application/xml maxdataserviceversion: 1.0;Silverlight Referer: http://sdev03/apptestpage.aspx Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; OfficeLiveConnector.1.4; OfficeLivePatch.1.3) Host: sdev03 Connection: Keep-Alive Cookie: .ASPXAUTH=<snip> HTTP/1.1 200 OK Cache-Control: no-cache Content-Type: application/atom+xml;charset=utf-8 Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0 DataServiceVersion: 1.0; X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2010 22:29:06 GMT Content-Length: 2726 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?> *** <snip> removed ***

  Read the article

• Responsible BI for Excel, Even for Older Versions

  - by andrewbrust

  On Wednesday, I will have the honor of co-presenting, for both The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI) and the New York Technology Council. on the subject of Excel and BI. My co-presenter will be none other than Bill Baker, who was a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and, essentially, the father of BI at that company.  Details on the events are here and here. We'll be talking about PowerPivot, of course, but that's not all. Probably even more important than any one product, will be our discussion of whether the usual characterization of Excel as the nemesis of IT, the guilty pleasure of business users and the antithesis of formal BI is really valid and/or hopelessly intractable. Without giving away our punchline, I'll tell you that we are much more optimistic than that. There are huge upsides to Excel and while there are real dangers to using it in the BI space, there are standards and practices you can employ to ensure Excel is used responsibly. And when those practices are followed, Excel becomes quite powerful indeed. One of the keys to this is using Excel as a data consumer rather than data storage mechanism. Caching data in Excel is OK, but only if that data is (a) not modified and (b) configured for automated periodic refresh. PowerPivot meets both criteria -- it stores a read-only copy of your data in the form of a model, and once workbook containing a PowerPivot model is published to SharePoint, it can be configured for scheduled data refresh, on the server, requiring no user intervention whatsoever. Data refresh is a bit like hard drive backup: it will only happen reliably if it's automated, and super-easy to configure. PowerPivot hits a real home run here (as does Windows Home Server for PC backup, but I digress). The thing about PowerPivot is that it's an add-in for Excel 2010. What if you're not planning to go to that new version for quite a while? What if you’ve just deployed Office 2007 in your organization? What if you're still on Office 2003, or an even earlier version? What can you do immediately to share data responsibly and easily? As it turns out, there's a feature in Excel that's been around for quite a while, that can help: Web Queries.  The Web Query feature was introduced, ostensibly, to allow Excel to pull data in from Internet Web pages…for example, data in a stock quote history table will come in nicely, as will any data in a Web page that is displayed in an HTML table.  To use the feature In Excel 2007 or 2010, click the Data Tab or the ribbon and click the “From Web” button towards the left; in older versions use the corresponding option in  the menu or  toolbars.  Next, paste a URL into the resulting dialog box and tap Enter or click the Go button.  A preview of the Web page will come up, and the dialog will allow you to select the specific table within the page whose data you’d like to import.  Here’s an example: Now just click the table, click the Import button, and the Import Data dialog appears.  You can simply click OK to bring in your data or you can first click the Properties… button and configure the data import to be refreshed at an interval in minutes that you select.  Now your data’s in the spreadsheet and ready to worked with: Your data may be vulnerable to modification, but if you’ve set up the data refresh, any accidental or malicious changes will be corrected in time anyway. The thing about this feature is that it’s most useful not for public Web pages, but for pages behind the firewall.  In effect, the Web Query feature provides an incredibly easy way to consume data in Excel that’s “published” from an application.  Users just need a URL.  They don’t need to know server and database names and since the data is read-only, providing credentials may be unnecessary, or can be handled using integrated security.  If that’s not good enough, the Web Query can be saved to a special .iqy file, which can be edited to provide POST parameter data. The only requirement is that the data must be provided in an HTML table, with the first row providing the column names.  From an ASP.NET project, it couldn’t be easier: a simple bound GridView control is totally compatible.  Use a data source control with it, and you don’t even have to write any code.  Users can link to pages that are part of an application’s UI, or developers can create pages that are specially designed for the purpose of providing an interface to the Web Query import feature.  And none of this is Microsoft- or .NET-specific.  You can create pages in any language you want (PHP comes to mind) that output the result set of a query in HTML table format, and then consume that data in a Web Query.  Then build PivotTables and charts on the data, and in Excel 2007 or 2010 you can use conditional formatting to create scorecards and dashboards. This strategy allows you to create pages that function quite similarly to the OData XML feeds rendered when .NET developers create an “Astoria” WCF Data Service.  And while it’s cool that PowerPivot and Excel 2010 can import such OData feeds, it’s good to know that older versions of Excel can function in a similar fashion, and can consume data produced by virtually any Web development platform. As a final matter, instead of just telling you that “older versions” of Excel support this feature, I’ll be more specific.  To discover what the first version of Excel was to support Web queries, go to http://bit.ly/OldSchoolXL.

  Read the article

• Using jQuery and OData to Insert a Database Record

  - by Stephen Walther

  In my previous blog entry, I explored two ways of inserting a database record using jQuery. We added a new Movie to the Movie database table by using a generic handler and by using a WCF service. In this blog entry, I want to take a brief look at how you can insert a database record using OData. Introduction to OData The Open Data Protocol (OData) was developed by Microsoft to be an open standard for communicating data across the Internet. Because the protocol is compatible with standards such as REST and JSON, the protocol is particularly well suited for Ajax. OData has undergone several name changes. It was previously referred to as Astoria and ADO.NET Data Services. OData is used by Sharepoint Server 2010, Azure Storage Services, Excel 2010, SQL Server 2008, and project code name “Dallas.” Because OData is being adopted as the public interface of so many important Microsoft technologies, it is a good protocol to learn. You can learn more about OData by visiting the following websites: http://www.odata.org http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/bb931106.aspx When using the .NET framework, you can easily expose database data through the OData protocol by creating a WCF Data Service. In this blog entry, I will create a WCF Data Service that exposes the Movie database table. Create the Database and Data Model The MoviesDB database is a simple database that contains the following Movies table: You need to create a data model to represent the MoviesDB database. In this blog entry, I use the ADO.NET Entity Framework to create my data model. However, WCF Data Services and OData are not tied to any particular OR/M framework such as the ADO.NET Entity Framework. For details on creating the Entity Framework data model for the MoviesDB database, see the previous blog entry. Create a WCF Data Service You create a new WCF Service by selecting the menu option Project, Add New Item and selecting the WCF Data Service item template (see Figure 1). Name the new WCF Data Service MovieService.svc. Figure 1 – Adding a WCF Data Service Listing 1 contains the default code that you get when you create a new WCF Data Service. There are two things that you need to modify. Listing 1 – New WCF Data Service File using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Data.Services; using System.Data.Services.Common; using System.Linq; using System.ServiceModel.Web; using System.Web; namespace WebApplication1 { public class MovieService : DataService< /* TODO: put your data source class name here */ > { // This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies. public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) { // TODO: set rules to indicate which entity sets and service operations are visible, updatable, etc. // Examples: // config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("MyEntityset", EntitySetRights.AllRead); // config.SetServiceOperationAccessRule("MyServiceOperation", ServiceOperationRights.All); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; } } } First, you need to replace the comment /* TODO: put your data source class name here */ with a class that represents the data that you want to expose from the service. In our case, we need to replace the comment with a reference to the MoviesDBEntities class generated by the Entity Framework. Next, you need to configure the security for the WCF Data Service. By default, you cannot query or modify the movie data. We need to update the Entity Set Access Rule to enable us to insert a new database record. The updated MovieService.svc is contained in Listing 2: Listing 2 – MovieService.svc using System.Data.Services; using System.Data.Services.Common; namespace WebApplication1 { public class MovieService : DataService<MoviesDBEntities> { public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) { config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("Movies", EntitySetRights.AllWrite); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; } } } That’s all we have to do. We can now insert a new Movie into the Movies database table by posting a new Movie to the following URL: /MovieService.svc/Movies The request must be a POST request. The Movie must be represented as JSON. Using jQuery with OData The HTML page in Listing 3 illustrates how you can use jQuery to insert a new Movie into the Movies database table using the OData protocol. Listing 3 – Default.htm <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>jQuery OData Insert</title> <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="Scripts/json2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body> <form> <label>Title:</label> <input id="title" /> <br /> <label>Director:</label> <input id="director" /> </form> <button id="btnAdd">Add Movie</button> <script type="text/javascript"> $("#btnAdd").click(function () { // Convert the form into an object var data = { Title: $("#title").val(), Director: $("#director").val() }; // JSONify the data var data = JSON.stringify(data); // Post it $.ajax({ type: "POST", contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", url: "MovieService.svc/Movies", data: data, dataType: "json", success: insertCallback }); }); function insertCallback(result) { // unwrap result var newMovie = result["d"]; // Show primary key alert("Movie added with primary key " + newMovie.Id); } </script> </body> </html> jQuery does not include a JSON serializer. Therefore, we need to include the JSON2 library to serialize the new Movie that we wish to create. The Movie is serialized by calling the JSON.stringify() method: var data = JSON.stringify(data); You can download the JSON2 library from the following website: http://www.json.org/js.html The jQuery ajax() method is called to insert the new Movie. Notice that both the contentType and dataType are set to use JSON. The jQuery ajax() method is used to perform a POST operation against the URL MovieService.svc/Movies. Because the POST payload contains a JSON representation of a new Movie, a new Movie is added to the database table of Movies. When the POST completes successfully, the insertCallback() method is called. The new Movie is passed to this method. The method simply displays the primary key of the new Movie: Summary The OData protocol (and its enabling technology named WCF Data Services) works very nicely with Ajax. By creating a WCF Data Service, you can quickly expose your database data to an Ajax application by taking advantage of open standards such as REST, JSON, and OData. In the next blog entry, I want to take a closer look at how the OData protocol supports different methods of querying data.

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, April 19, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, April 19, 2010New Projects8085 Microprocessor simulator: This program allows you to write 8085 programs in assembly and run those programs on your PC. It comes with lots of help, plus you can put breakpo...Additional.NET framework: The Additional.Net framework extends the functionality of the .NET framework for easier application development. It is developed in C#.Astoria Contrib: A contrib project for filling the gaps in WCF Data Services, providing missing functionality or augmenting with T4 templates, helpers, etc.ClipoWeb: ClipoWeb is a web clipboard that allows you to copy text and files between computers. Users access a web page on the source and destination compute...elearning Center: Đây là một ứng dụng web viết hoàn toàn bằng Sliverlight. Ứng dụng này là một dạng elearning với đầy đủ chức năng và có khả năng tương tác tối đa v...Excel VSTO SQL Server Browser: Get Data from SQL Server and put it in Excel directly. The objective is to get more control about what do you need to pull and create automatic pro...Generic Tree Structure: Generic Base Classes that helps you to create complex tree structures without writing it again and again. Simply to use Like "var Node<Folder> fold...LAN Lordz LAN Party System: The LAN Lordz LAN Party System makes it easier for medium and large size events to track their attendance, sponsors, door prizes, tournaments, and...LiteFx: O LiteFx é um framework que ajuda na implementação de DDD (anêmico ou rico) ele foi desenvolvido por Douglas Aguiar (http://twitter.com/DouglasAgui...Managed UI Flow for ASP.NET MVC Framework: If your web application getting more complex, understanding and managing of complex UI flows(pageflow of application) getting harder and harder, If...Meus Exemplos: Meus ExemplosOrchard Blueprint Theme: Orchard BluePrint is a project that provides a WYSIWYG reference implementation of a Orchard theme to help designers get started with theme design....Outlook Social Network Connector - Avatar: Avatar 是一个开源的MS Outlook的插件，豆瓣用户可以在Outlook 2010中使用豆瓣。查看一封邮件中相关的收件人、发件人的用户广播、同城活动以及豆邮。不用上豆瓣也能方便了解好友动态。这个插件使用C#， .NET 4.0 开发。API 请求认证使用OAuth 认证。 (Avat...Quadro Tree: This is Quadri tree library.Sharepoint 2010 Alert Controller: In MOSS 2007 or Sharepoint Server 2010 if you want to see your alerts by list name you should use this tool.SharePoint Web Parts: The goal of this project is to develop a set of web parts for SharePoint.Silverlight Image Cropper: This is a silverlight 4 util that makes it easy to crop out a number images of a specific resolution screen or screens. ie. an easy way to crop ...SilverlightFTP: Silverlight ftp clientsplibex: libraries for sharepoint lists manipulationStardustExtensions: Official Extensions for StardustSwim Team Manager: Swim Team Manager is designed for managing and tracking administrative and performance information for your club, school, or swim team. Swim Tea...ToDoListWpf: A To Do List, I used it to manage my work items. I am sorry for my poor English.Trance Layer: TranceLayer is a fast and flexible logging or diagnostics framework for .Net. It allows you to plug it into an existing or new application with m...Unoficcial NeoFM.hu NowPlaying: A little windows tray program. Shows what's on neofm.hu right now.WabbitStudio Z80 Software Tools: The software suite provides all of the tools you need to create high quality Z80 software in Z80 assembly language, with a focus on TI calculators....WinToolbar: Windows.Toolbar is Silverlight library that implements common widgets that allows us to build a rich toolbar control in our applications, it incor...XP-More: XP-More is a tool that helps manage Windows 7 Virtual Machines (XP Mode and any other). Specifically, it makes duplication of VMs a no brainer - no...Yodelay .NET Framework Extensions: The Yodelay .NET Framework Extensions project provides a library of components that make many kinds of programming tasks simpler. These include bas...New ReleasesClipoWeb: ClipoWeb 1.0: First Beta release of the ClipoWeb web applicationDDDSample.Net: 0.8: This release contains all four versions of DDDSample.Net available in previous, 0.7 and a brand new one: Layered Model version. Layered Model demon...DotNetNuke Blueprint: 00.00.02: Added to this version CSS Reset Skin version including Grids This version will soon be updated with corresponding HTML version and DNN templateEsferatec.Text.RegularExpressions: 3.5.1003.1001: first stable release of the class; the assembly file is ready to use, the documentation is complete;Excel VSTO SQL Server Browser: Sample Only: Sample without Ribbon UI, if you close the TaskPane you will no longer able to open it without restart ExcelFolder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 1.5.5: This is the latest version of Folder Bookmarks (1.5.5), with the new Archive Manager and Archive Viewer. It has an installer - it will create a dir...Gardens Point LEX: Gardens Point LEX, Version 1.1.3: The main distribution is a zip file. This contains the binary executable, documentation, source code and the examples. ChangesVersion 1.1.3 corre...Gardens Point Parser Generator: Gardens Point Parser Generator V1.4.0: The distribution is a zip archive which contains the binary executables, documentation, source code and examples. ChangesVersion 1.4.0 of GPPG has...HKGolden Express: HKGoldenExpress (Build 201004181455): New features: Added rating of each topic. (Note: This feature is availabe since Build 201004172120) Bug fix: Handle invalid XML character in XML...Home Access Plus+: v4.0.0.0 Beta: v4.0.0.0 Beta Change Log: Moved to using .net 4.0 New Silverlight Uploader Various .net 4 fixes and tweaks File Changes: All fixes have changedHTML Ruby: 6.21.6: Reduced performance hit on pages with heavy DOM manipulations Fixed issue where empty tags caused it to apply invalid spacing values Stop spaci...LINQ to VFP: LinqToVfp (v1.0.17.2): Modified to allow using RecNo as a primary key. This build requires IQToolkit v0.17b.Managed UI Flow for ASP.NET MVC Framework: Preview 1: The source available on this site, does not reflect the final state of the project, it is a preview of what will be shipping in the framework in th...MVVM Light Toolkit: MVVM Light Toolkit V3 SP1 (2): Super minor update to accommodate the new Blend 4 RC. Only changes: The path to the Blend 4 templates changed to be "My Documents\Expression\Blend...N2 CMS: 2.0 rc: N2 is a lightweight CMS framework for ASP.NET. It helps you build great web sites that anyone can update. Major Changes (1.5 -> 2.0 release candid...OpenGL ES 2.0 Compact Framework Wrapper: Sample application CAB with texturing: This took some time as it was pretty hard to get the texture loaded and setup so that it would bind to the sampler2D in the fragment shader. Featu...Orchard Blueprint Theme: 00.00.01: This is the first release of this project, still in a very alpha version. Very soon this release is to be updated with the HTML version of the them...RoughJs: RoughJsSL: This is Silverlight library's CompilerSharepoint 2010 Alert Controller: Sharepoint 2010 Alert Controller: After you download WSP file you can get help from Home PageSharePoint LogViewer: SharePoint LogViewer 2.5: Minimize log viewer to tray Get popup notification of SharePoint log events from tray Redirect log entries to event log Send email notifications on...Site Directory for SharePoint 2010 (from Microsoft Consulting Services, UK): v1.1: This is a minor update which includes the following changes: Code consolidation across the whole project Additional site data captured. See solut...Stardust: Stardust 1.0: First stable version of Stardust (Build 172)StardustExtensions: Facebook Extension: Extension for stardust to upload and post images on Facebook.StardustExtensions: Facebook Extension (Source): The source code of an extension for Stardust used to post images on facebook.StardustExtensions: WPF Example: This is an example extension. Uses WPF to create a Window and say "Hello World!" Is a perfect download if want to start writing Stardust ExtensionsStardustExtensions: WPF Example Source: This is the source code of an extension that creates a Window using WPF & displays a simple text. Is great as an example of creating Stardust Exten...TFTP Server: TFTP Server 1.1 Beta installer: New MSI based installer Installs a TFTP service Supports multiple servers on different endpoints, with every server pointing to its own root di...TiledLib: TiledLib 1.1: This download is for prebuilt DLLs and a demo project. For the full source code, use the Source Code tab. Changes: Bug fixes in a few methods Ad...Trance Layer: TranceLayer Digger: Digger version is a beta. It is intended to be used as a demonstration of muscles while lacking a set of features that are in the docs. The set of ...uManage - Active Directory Self-Service Portal: uManage v1.2 (.NET 4.0 RTM): New Releasev1.2 Adds the Administrative Portal as well as the requirement of a MSSQL database (2005+). The Setup Wizard has also been updated to i...Unoficcial NeoFM.hu NowPlaying: NeoNotifier: First release. Aplha, but usable.VidCoder: 0.2.1: Changes: Added 2-pass encoding Fixed x264 options getting mangled during p-invoke Fixed intermittent crash with logging window open due to thre...WCF RIA Services Contrib: WCF RIA Services Contrib RC2 Release: This version is for the WCF RIA Services RC2 (SL4 RTM) release. The ApplyState has been modifed in this version to disable validation during proces...WiiCIS.NET: WiiCIS.NET v0.2: Changes... - Removal of WiimoteManager, connection must be done manually - Accelerometer orientation was originally in degrees, is now in radians -...WinToolbar: WinToolbar Source code plus sample: This zip file contains the current version source code and libraries plus a testrunner (sample app).XP-More: 0.9 (Beta): Most of the functionality is in place, final polishing will be done soon.Most Popular ProjectsFacebook Developer ToolkitWSPBuilder (SharePoint WSP tool)QuickGraph, Graph Data Structures And Algorithms for .NetPerformance Analysis of Logs (PAL) Toolpatterns & practices: Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation ServerTFS Integration Platformpatterns & practices: Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applicationspatterns & practices: Enterprise Library ContribJSON ViewerManaged Wifi APIMost Active ProjectsRawrpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryIndustrial DashboardIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterFarseer Physics EngineMVVM Light ToolkitjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesN2 CMSCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and SilverlightBlogEngine.NET

  Read the article

• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Released

  - by ScottGu

  The final release of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 is now available. Download and Install Today MSDN subscribers, as well as WebsiteSpark/BizSpark/DreamSpark members, can now download the final releases of Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010 through the MSDN subscribers download center.  If you are not an MSDN Subscriber, you can download free 90-day trial editions of Visual Studio 2010.  Or you can can download the free Visual Studio express editions of Visual Web Developer 2010, Visual Basic 2010, Visual C# 2010 and Visual C++.  These express editions are available completely for free (and never time out).  If you are looking for an easy way to setup a new machine for web-development you can automate installing ASP.NET 4, ASP.NET MVC 2, IIS, SQL Server Express and Visual Web Developer 2010 Express really quickly with the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (just click the install button on the page). What is new with VS 2010 and .NET 4 Today’s release is a big one – and brings with it a ton of new feature and capabilities. One of the things we tried hard to focus on with this release was to invest heavily in making existing applications, projects and developer experiences better.  What this means is that you don’t need to read 1000+ page books or spend time learning major new concepts in order to take advantage of the release.  There are literally thousands of improvements (both big and small) that make you more productive and successful without having to learn big new concepts in order to start using them.  Below is just a small sampling of some of the improvements with this release: Visual Studio 2010 IDE  Visual Studio 2010 now supports multiple-monitors (enabling much better use of screen real-estate).  It has new code Intellisense support that makes it easier to find and use classes and methods. It has improved code navigation support for searching code-bases and seeing how code is called and used.  It has new code visualization support that allows you to see the relationships across projects and classes within projects, as well as to automatically generate sequence diagrams to chart execution flow.  The editor now supports HTML and JavaScript snippet support as well as improved JavaScript intellisense. The VS 2010 Debugger and Profiling support is now much, much richer and enables new features like Intellitrace (aka Historical Debugging), debugging of Crash/Dump files, and better parallel debugging.  VS 2010’s multi-targeting support is now much richer, and enables you to use VS 2010 to target .NET 2, .NET 3, .NET 3.5 and .NET 4 applications.  And the infamous Add Reference dialog now loads much faster. TFS 2010 is now easy to setup (you can now install the server in under 10 minutes) and enables great source-control, bug/work-item tracking, and continuous integration support.  Testing (both automated and manual) is now much, much richer.  And VS 2010 Premium and Ultimate provide much richer architecture and design tooling support. VB and C# Language Features VB and C# in VS 2010 both contain a bunch of new features and capabilities.  VB adds new support for automatic properties, collection initializers, and implicit line continuation support among many other features.  C# adds support for optional parameters and named arguments, a new dynamic keyword, co-variance and contra-variance, and among many other features. ASP.NET 4 and ASP.NET MVC 2 With ASP.NET 4, Web Forms controls now render clean, semantically correct, and CSS friendly HTML markup. Built-in URL routing functionality allows you to expose clean, search engine friendly, URLs and increase the traffic to your Website.  ViewState within applications can now be more easily controlled and made smaller.  ASP.NET Dynamic Data support has been expanded.  More controls, including rich charting and data controls, are now built-into ASP.NET 4 and enable you to build applications even faster.  New starter project templates now make it easier to get going with new projects.  SEO enhancements make it easier to drive traffic to your public facing sites.  And web.config files are now clean and simple. ASP.NET MVC 2 is now built-into VS 2010 and ASP.NET 4, and provides a great way to build web sites and applications using a model-view-controller based pattern. ASP.NET MVC 2 adds features to easily enable client and server validation logic, provides new strongly-typed HTML and UI-scaffolding helper methods.  It also enables more modular/reusable applications.  The new <%: %> syntax in ASP.NET makes it easier to HTML encode output.  Visual Studio 2010 also now includes better tooling support for unit testing and TDD.  In particular, “Consume first intellisense” and “generate from usage" support within VS 2010 make it easier to write your unit tests first, and then drive your implementation from them. Deploying ASP.NET applications gets a lot easier with this release. You can now publish your Websites and applications to a staging or production server from within Visual Studio itself. Visual Studio 2010 makes it easy to transfer all your files, code, configuration, database schema and data in one complete package. VS 2010 also makes it easy to manage separate web.config configuration files settings depending upon whether you are in debug, release, staging or production modes. WPF 4 and Silverlight 4 WPF 4 includes a ton of new improvements and capabilities including more built-in controls, richer graphics features (cached composition, pixel shader 3 support, layoutrounding, and animation easing functions), a much improved text stack (with crisper text rendering, custom dictionary support, and selection and caret brush options).  WPF 4 also includes a bunch of support to enable you to take advantage of new Windows 7 features – including multi-touch and Windows 7 shell integration. Silverlight 4 will launch this week as well.  You can watch my Silverlight 4 launch keynote streamed live Tuesday (April 13th) at 8am Pacific Time.  Silverlight 4 includes a ton of new capabilities – including a bunch for making it possible to build great business applications and out of the browser applications.  I’ll be doing a separate blog post later this week (once it is live on the web) that talks more about its capabilities. Visual Studio 2010 now includes great tooling support for both WPF and Silverlight.  The new VS 2010 WPF and Silverlight designer makes it much easier to build client applications as well as build great line of business solutions, as well as integrate and bind with data.  Tooling support for Silverlight 4 with the final release of Visual Studio 2010 will be available when Silverlight 4 releases to the web this week. SharePoint and Azure Visual Studio 2010 now includes built-in support for building SharePoint applications.  You can now create, edit, build, and debug SharePoint applications directly within Visual Studio 2010.  You can also now use SharePoint with TFS 2010. Support for creating Azure-hosted applications is also now included with VS 2010 – allowing you to build ASP.NET and WCF based applications and host them within the cloud. Data Access Data access has a lot of improvements coming to it with .NET 4.  Entity Framework 4 includes a ton of new features and capabilities – including support for model first and POCO development, default support for lazy loading, built-in support for pluralization/singularization of table/property names within the VS 2010 designer, full support for all the LINQ operators, the ability to optionally expose foreign keys on model objects (useful for some stateless web scenarios), disconnected API support to better handle N-Tier and stateless web scenarios, and T4 template customization support within VS 2010 to allow you to customize and automate how code is generated for you by the data designer.  In addition to improvements with the Entity Framework, LINQ to SQL with .NET 4 also includes a bunch of nice improvements.  WCF and Workflow WCF includes a bunch of great new capabilities – including better REST, activation and configuration support.  WCF Data Services (formerly known as Astoria) and WCF RIA Services also now enable you to easily expose and work with data from remote clients. Windows Workflow is now much faster, includes flowchart services, and now makes it easier to make custom services than before.  More details can be found here. CLR and Core .NET Library Improvements .NET 4 includes the new CLR 4 engine – which includes a lot of nice performance and feature improvements.  CLR 4 engine now runs side-by-side in-process with older versions of the CLR – allowing you to use two different versions of .NET within the same process.  It also includes improved COM interop support.  The .NET 4 base class libraries (BCL) include a bunch of nice additions and refinements.  In particular, the .NET 4 BCL now includes new parallel programming support that makes it much easier to build applications that take advantage of multiple CPUs and cores on a computer.  This work dove-tails nicely with the new VS 2010 parallel debugger (making it much easier to debug parallel applications), as well as the new F# functional language support now included in the VS 2010 IDE.  .NET 4 also now also has the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) library built-in – which makes it easier to use dynamic language functionality with .NET.  MEF – a really cool library that enables rich extensibility – is also now built-into .NET 4 and included as part of the base class libraries.  .NET 4 Client Profile The download size of the .NET 4 redist is now much smaller than it was before (the x86 full .NET 4 package is about 36MB).  We also now have a .NET 4 Client Profile package which is a pure sub-set of the full .NET that can be used to streamline client application installs. C++ VS 2010 includes a bunch of great improvements for C++ development.  This includes better C++ Intellisense support, MSBuild support for projects, improved parallel debugging and profiler support, MFC improvements, and a number of language features and compiler optimizations. My VS 2010 and .NET 4 Blog Series I’ve been cranking away on a blog series the last few months that highlights many of the new VS 2010 and .NET 4 improvements.  The good news is that I have about 20 in-depth posts already written.  The bad news (for me) is that I have about 200 more to go until I’m done!  I’m going to try and keep adding a few more each week over the next few months to discuss the new improvements and how best to take advantage of them. Below is a list of the already written ones that you can check out today: Clean Web.Config Files Starter Project Templates Multi-targeting Multiple Monitor Support New Code Focused Web Profile Option HTML / ASP.NET / JavaScript Code Snippets Auto-Start ASP.NET Applications URL Routing with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms Searching and Navigating Code in VS 2010 VS 2010 Code Intellisense Improvements WPF 4 Add Reference Dialog Improvements SEO Improvements with ASP.NET 4 Output Cache Extensibility with ASP.NET 4 Built-in Charting Controls for ASP.NET and Windows Forms Cleaner HTML Markup with ASP.NET 4 - Client IDs Optional Parameters and Named Arguments in C# 4 - and a cool scenarios with ASP.NET MVC 2 Automatic Properties, Collection Initializers and Implicit Line Continuation Support with VB 2010 New <%: %> Syntax for HTML Encoding Output using ASP.NET 4 JavaScript Intellisense Improvements with VS 2010 Stay tuned to my blog as I post more.  Also check out this page which links to a bunch of great articles and videos done by others. VS 2010 Installation Notes If you have installed a previous version of VS 2010 on your machine (either the beta or the RC) you must first uninstall it before installing the final VS 2010 release.  I also recommend uninstalling .NET 4 betas (including both the client and full .NET 4 installs) as well as the other installs that come with VS 2010 (e.g. ASP.NET MVC 2 preview builds, etc).  The uninstalls of the betas/RCs will clean up all the old state on your machine – after which you can install the final VS 2010 version and should have everything just work (this is what I’ve done on all of my machines and I haven’t had any problems). The VS 2010 and .NET 4 installs add a bunch of new managed assemblies to your machine.  Some of these will be “NGEN’d” to native code during the actual install process (making them run fast).  To avoid adding too much time to VS setup, though, we don’t NGEN all assemblies immediately – and instead will NGEN the rest in the background when your machine is idle.  Until it finishes NGENing the assemblies they will be JIT’d to native code the first time they are used in a process – which for large assemblies can sometimes cause a slight performance hit. If you run into this you can manually force all assemblies to be NGEN’d to native code immediately (and not just wait till the machine is idle) by launching the Visual Studio command line prompt from the Windows Start Menu (Microsoft Visual Studio 2010->Visual Studio Tools->Visual Studio Command Prompt).  Within the command prompt type “Ngen executequeueditems” – this will cause everything to be NGEN’d immediately. How to Buy Visual Studio 2010 You can can download and use the free Visual Studio express editions of Visual Web Developer 2010, Visual Basic 2010, Visual C# 2010 and Visual C++.  These express editions are available completely for free (and never time out). You can buy a new copy of VS 2010 Professional that includes a 1 year subscription to MSDN Essentials for $799.  MSDN Essentials includes a developer license of Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, SQL Server 2008 DataCenter R2, and 20 hours of Azure hosting time.  Subscribers also have access to MSDN’s Online Concierge, and Priority Support in MSDN Forums. Upgrade prices from previous releases of Visual Studio are also available.  Existing Visual Studio 2005/2008 Standard customers can upgrade to Visual Studio 2010 Professional for a special $299 retail price until October.  You can take advantage of this VS Standard->Professional upgrade promotion here. Web developers who build applications for others, and who are either independent developers or who work for companies with less than 10 employees, can also optionally take advantage of the Microsoft WebSiteSpark program.  This program gives you three copies of Visual Studio 2010 Professional, 1 copy of Expression Studio, and 4 CPU licenses of both Windows 2008 R2 Web Server and SQL 2008 Web Edition that you can use to both develop and deploy applications with at no cost for 3 years.  At the end of the 3 years there is no obligation to buy anything.  You can sign-up for WebSiteSpark today in under 5 minutes – and immediately have access to the products to download. Summary Today’s release is a big one – and has a bunch of improvements for pretty much every developer.  Thank you everyone who provided feedback, suggestions and reported bugs throughout the development process – we couldn’t have delivered it without you.  Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

  Read the article

• Bogus InvalidOperationException (in a DataServiceRequestException)

  - by Andrei Rinea

  I am having a hard time with ADO.NET Data Services (formerly code-named Astoria) as it gives me a bogus exception when I try to insert a new entity from the silverlight client and trying in a clean project (the same code) doesn't. In both cases, however, data is correctly inserted into the database. Using Fiddler (an HTTP debugger I could see that there is no problem in the HTTP communication as I will show later in this question. The code : var ctx = new MyProject123Entities(new Uri("http://andreiri/MyProject.Data/Data.svc")); var i = new Zone() { Data = DateTime.Now, IdElement = 1 }; ctx.AddToZone(i); i.StareZone = new StareZone() { IdStareZone = 1 }; ctx.AttachTo("StareZone", i.StareZone); ctx.SetLink(i, "StareZone", i.StareZone); i.TipZone = new TipZone() { IdTipZone = 1 }; ctx.AttachTo("TipZone", i.TipZone); ctx.SetLink(i, "TipZone", i.TipZone); i.User = new User() { IdUser = 2 }; ctx.AttachTo("User", i.User); ctx.SetLink(i, "User", i.User); ctx.BeginSaveChanges(r =] ctx.EndSaveChanges(r), null); when run the last line (ctx.EndSaveChanges(r)) will throw the following exception : System.Data.Services.Client.DataServiceRequestException was unhandled by user code Message="An error occurred while processing this request." StackTrace: at System.Data.Services.Client.DataServiceContext.SaveAsyncResult.HandleBatchResponse() at System.Data.Services.Client.DataServiceContext.SaveAsyncResult.EndRequest() at System.Data.Services.Client.DataServiceContext.EndSaveChanges(IAsyncResult asyncResult) at MyProject.MainPage.[]c__DisplayClassd6.[]c__DisplayClassd8.[dashboard_PostZoneCurent]b__d5(IAsyncResult r) at System.Data.Services.Client.BaseAsyncResult.HandleCompleted() at System.Data.Services.Client.DataServiceContext.SaveAsyncResult.HandleCompleted(PerRequest pereq) at System.Data.Services.Client.DataServiceContext.SaveAsyncResult.AsyncEndRead(IAsyncResult asyncResult) at System.IO.Stream.BeginRead(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 count, AsyncCallback callback, Object state) at System.Data.Services.Client.DataServiceContext.SaveAsyncResult.AsyncEndGetResponse(IAsyncResult asyncResult) InnerException: System.InvalidOperationException Message="The context is already tracking a different entity with the same resource Uri." StackTrace: at System.Data.Services.Client.DataServiceContext.AttachTo(Uri identity, Uri editLink, String etag, Object entity, Boolean fail) at System.Data.Services.Client.MaterializeAtom.MoveNext() at System.Data.Services.Client.DataServiceContext.HandleResponsePost(ResourceBox entry, MaterializeAtom materializer, Uri editLink, String etag) at System.Data.Services.Client.DataServiceContext.SaveAsyncResult.[HandleBatchResponse]d__1d.MoveNext() InnerException: (there is no further information regarding the exception although the ADo.NET Data Service is configured to return detailed informations) However the row is inserted correctly and completely in the database. Using fiddler I can see that the request : <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?> <entry xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices" xmlns:m="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/metadata" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"> <category scheme="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/scheme" term="MyProject123Model.Zone" /> <title /> <updated>2009-09-11T13:36:46.917157Z</updated> <author> <name /> </author> <id /> <link href="http://andreiri/MyProject.Data/Data.svc/StareZone(1)" rel="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/related/StareZone" type="application/atom+xml;type=entry" /> <link href="http://andreiri/MyProject.Data/Data.svc/TipZone(4)" rel="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/related/TipZone" type="application/atom+xml;type=entry" /> <link href="http://andreiri/MyProject.Data/Data.svc/User(4)" rel="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/related/User" type="application/atom+xml;type=entry" /> <content type="application/xml"> <m:properties> <d:Data m:type="Edm.DateTime">2009-09-11T16:36:40.588951+03:00</d:Data> <d:Detalii>aslkdfjasldkfj</d:Detalii> <d:IdElement m:type="Edm.Int32">1</d:IdElement> <d:IdZone m:type="Edm.Int32">0</d:IdZone> <d:X_Post m:type="Edm.Decimal">587647.4705</d:X_Post> <d:X_Repost m:type="Edm.Decimal" m:null="true" /> <d:Y_Post m:type="Edm.Decimal">325783.077599999</d:Y_Post> <d:Y_Repost m:type="Edm.Decimal" m:null="true" /> </m:properties> </content> </entry> is well accepted and a successful response is returned : HTTP/1.1 201 Created Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:36:47 GMT Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727 DataServiceVersion: 1.0; Location: http://andreiri/MyProject.Data/Data.svc/Zone(75) Cache-Control: no-cache Content-Type: application/atom+xml;charset=utf-8 Content-Length: 2213 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?> <entry xml:base="http://andreiri/MyProject.Data/Data.svc/" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices" xmlns:m="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/metadata" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"> <id>http://andreiri/MyProject.Data/Data.svc/Zone(75)</id> <title type="text"></title> <updated>2009-09-11T13:36:47Z</updated> <author> <name /> </author> <link rel="edit" title="Zone" href="Zone(75)" /> <link rel="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/related/CenterZone" type="application/atom+xml;type=feed" title="CenterZone" href="Zone(75)/CenterZone" /> <link rel="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/related/ZoneMobil" type="application/atom+xml;type=feed" title="ZoneMobil" href="Zone(75)/ZoneMobil" /> <link rel="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/related/StareZone" type="application/atom+xml;type=entry" title="StareZone" href="Zone(75)/StareZone" /> <link rel="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/related/TipZone" type="application/atom+xml;type=entry" title="TipZone" href="Zone(75)/TipZone" /> <link rel="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/related/User" type="application/atom+xml;type=entry" title="User" href="Zone(75)/User" /> <category term="MyProject123Model.Zone" scheme="http://schemas.microsoft.com ado/2007/08/dataservices/scheme" /> <content type="application/xml"> <m:properties> <d:IdZone m:type="Edm.Int32">75</d:IdZone> <d:X_Post m:type="Edm.Decimal">587647.4705</d:X_Post> <d:Y_Post m:type="Edm.Decimal">325783.077599999</d:Y_Post> <d:X_Repost m:type="Edm.Decimal" m:null="true" /> <d:Y_Repost m:type="Edm.Decimal" m:null="true" /> <d:Data m:type="Edm.DateTime">2009-09-11T16:36:40.588951+03:00</d:Data> <d:Detalii>aslkdfjasldkfj</d:Detalii> <d:IdElement m:type="Edm.Int32">1</d:IdElement> </m:properties> </content> </entry> Why do I get an exception? And, using this in a clean project does not throw the exception..

  Read the article

1