Search Results

Search found 4879 results on 196 pages for 'geeks'.

Page 110/196 | < Previous Page | 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117  | 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

• New article on preventing multiple concurrent use in asp.net

  - by Frez

  I have posted up an article today entitled Preventing a User From Having Multiple Concurrent Sessions

  Read the article

• Game-a-Week One

  - by Matt Christian

  Anyone who chats with me on a semi-regular basis knows I am absolutely horrible at completing something from beginnning to end.  Often times I'll begin something, lose interest at some point, and end up moving onto the next thing.  For example, I have 1/2 a full game created, 1/3 of a novel written, and half of a model set created.  Needless to say, unless I have some sort of pressure to finish something I don't stick to it. Recently however one of my online buddies challenged me to create a simple game.  The start date was last Thursday and the final game needed to be delivered by this next Sunday (giving me just over a week).  However, I am going out of town this Friday so will need to deliver it by Thursday, giving me exactly 1 week to develop a game.  Here is what the game needed to include: The player should be able to shoot Shooting things should score points Sounds very simple, but given a single week to produce all art assets plus the game isn't an easy task.  So far I've developed: An animated Main Menu that loads via script files, allows the user to start a new game or exit the game The game is 3D and the player can move around the play area with an 'over-the-shoulder' camera HUD elements are drawn to display the player's current score When the player presses Esc they are shown a pause menu where they can resume the game by pressing Esc again, or quit the game by pressing Space There are also 2 items implemented that don't work perfectly: JigLibX physics library implementation On the main menu there is an arrow symbol that rotates to always point at your mouse I've got 2 days of development left so hopefully I can get collision working, some of the art cleaned up, and some more of the camera functionality working.  Also, I'll need to take some time to package the game up which hopefully shouldn't take too long.

  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

• 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

• 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

• UDDI vs SO-Aware: Why SO-Aware is the More Efficient and Interoperable Alternative

  - by Vishal

  Hello folks,   If you are implementing a service oriented architecture, and are unsure of the best governance approach to follow, then this webinar is a must-attend event for you.  We will discuss why SO-Aware is the more efficient and interoperable alternative to traditional UDDI-based SOA-governance.   Specifically, we will address the differences between UDDI and SO-Aware in terms of service discovery, configuration, and policy resolution.  Finally, we will address why the REST/Odata based model implemented by SO-Aware enables the most efficient governance not only for WCF but for BizTalk, the Windows Server AppFabric and the Windows Azure AppFabric as well.   Join us on January 26th at 2:00 ET - to register, click here    Thanks,   Vishal

  Read the article

• How to Change System Application Pages (Like AccessDenied.aspx, Signout.aspx etc)

  - by Jayant Sharma

  An advantage of SharePoint 2010 over SharePoint 2007 is, we can programatically change the URL of System Application Pages. For Example, It was not very easy to change the URL of AccessDenied.aspx page in SharePoint 2007 but in SharePoint 2010 we can easily change the URL with just few lines of code. For this purpose we have two methods available: GetMappedPage UpdateMappedPage: returns true if the custom application page is successfully mapped; otherwise, false. You can override following pages. Member name Description None AccessDenied Specifies AccessDenied.aspx. Confirmation Specifies Confirmation.aspx. Error Specifies Error.aspx. Login Specifies Login.aspx. RequestAccess Specifies ReqAcc.aspx. Signout Specifies SignOut.aspx. WebDeleted Specifies WebDeleted.aspx. ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.administration.spwebapplication.spcustompage.aspx ) So now Its time to implementation, using (SPSite site = new SPSite(http://testserver01)) {   //Get a reference to the web application.   SPWebApplication webApp = site.WebApplication;   webApp.UpdateMappedPage(SPWebApplication.SPCustomPage.AccessDenied, "/_layouts/customPages/CustomAccessDenied.aspx");   webApp.Update(); } Similarly, you can use  SPCustomPage.Confirmation, SPCustomPage.Error, SPCustomPage.Login, SPCustomPage.RequestAccess, SPCustomPage.Signout and SPCustomPage.WebDeleted to override these pages. To  reset the mapping, set the Target value to Null like webApp.UpdateMappedPage(SPWebApplication.SPCustomPage.AccessDenied, null);webApp.Update();One restricted to location in the /_layouts folder. When updating the mapped page, the URL has to start with “/_layouts/”. Ref: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg512103.aspx#bk_spcustapp http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.administration.spwebapplication.updatemappedpage.aspx

  Read the article

• Interfaces and Virtuals Everywhere????

  - by David V. Corbin

  First a disclaimer; this post is about micro-optimization of C# programs and does not apply to most common scenarios - but when it does, it is important to know. Many developers are in the habit of declaring member virtual to allow for future expansion or using interface based designs1. Few of these developers think about what the runtime performance impact of this decision is. A simple test will show that this decision can have a serious impact. For our purposes, we used a simple loop to time the execution of 1 billion calls to both non-virtual and virtual implementations of a method that took no parameters and had a void return type: Direct Call:     1.5uS Virtual Call:   13.0uS The overhead of the call increased by nearly an order of magnitude! Once again, it is important to realize that if the method does anything of significance then this ratio drops quite quickly. If the method does just 1mS of work, then the differential only accounts for a 1% decrease in performance. Additionally the method in question must be called thousands of times in order to produce a meaqsurable impact at the application level. Yet let us consider a situation such as the per-pixel processing of a graphics processing application. Here we may have a method which is called millions of times and even the slightest increase in overhead can have significant ramification. In this case using either explicit virtuals or interface based constructs is likely to be a mistake. In conclusion, good design principles should always be the driving force behind descisions such as these; but remember that these decisions do not come for free.   1) When a concrete class member implements an interface it does not need to be explicitly marked as virtual (unless, of course, it is to be overriden in a derived concerete class). Nevertheless, when accessed via the interface it behaves exactly as if it had been marked as virtual.

  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

• IE9 and the Mystery of the Broken Video Tag

  - by David Wesst

  I was very excited when Microsoft released the Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate. As far as I was concerned, this was another nail in the coffin for IE6 and step in the right direction for us .NET web developers as our base camp was finally starting to support the latest and greatest future-web standards. Unfortunately, my celebration was short lived as I soon hit a snag while loading up an HTML5 site I was building in Visual Studio 2010. The Mystery After updating Internet Explorer, I ran my HTML5 site that had the oh-so-lovely HTML5 video tag showing a video. Even though this worked in IE9 Beta, it appeared that IE9 RC could not load the same file. I figured that it was the video codec. Maybe IE9 RC no longer supported the video codec I used to encode my video. Here's the code I used: <video width="854" height="480" id="myOtherVideo" autoplay="" controls=""> <source src="/DemoSite1/Media/big_buck_bunny.mp4"/> <div> <p>Your browser does not support HTML5 Video.</p> </div> </video> As you can see from the code, I had the "fail-safe" code inside the video tag. The idea there being that if the video tag, or the video files themselves, are not supported by the browser my video should fail gracefully. What was even more strange was the fact that it worked in all the other HTML5 browsers that supported video. The Investigation Whoa! DJ stop the music. How can any of that make sense? Would the IE team really take such huge strides forward only to forget to include a feature that was already in the beta? I don't think so. I did plenty of searching on the web and asking around on the web, but could not seem to find anyone else having the same problem. Eventually I came across this post talking about declaring the MIME type in the .htaccess file. That got me thinking: does my web server support the video MIME type? I was using VS2010, so how do I know what kind of MIME types are supported by default? Still, my page hosted in Cassini (the web development server in VS2010) works on the other browsers. Why wouldn't it work with IE9 RC? To answer that, it was time to open up the upgraded toolbox known as the Developer's Tools in IE9 and use the new Network Tab. The Conclusion If you take a closer look at the results displayed from the Network tab, you can see that IE9 RC has interpreted the video file as text/html rather than video/mp4. To make this work, I decided to use IIS to debug my HTML5 web application by setting the web project's properties. Then, I added the MIME types that I want to support (i.e. video/mp4, video/ogg, video/webm). Et voila! The Mystery of the Broken Video Tag is solved. After Thoughts After solving the mystery, I still had the question about why my site worked in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox 3.6. After asking around, the best answer that I received was from my colleague Tyler Doerksen. He said that IE9 likely depends on the server telling it what kind of file it is downloading rather than trying to read the metadata about the data it is trying to download before doing anything. I have no facts to back this up, but it makes sense to me. In a browser war where milliseconds can make your browser fall back a few places in the race for supremacy, maybe the IE team opted to depend on the server knowing what kind of content it is serving up. Makes sense to me. In any case, that is just an educated guess. If you have any comments, feel free to post on them below. This post also appears at http://david.wes.st

  Read the article

• Get to Know a Candidate (19-25 of 25): Independent Candidates

  - by Brian Lanham

  DISCLAIMER: This is not a post about “Romney” or “Obama”. This is not a post for whom I am voting.  Information sourced for Wikipedia. The following independent candidates have gained access to at least one state ballot. Richard Duncan, of Ohio; Vice-presidential nominee: Ricky Johnson Candidate Ballot Access: Ohio - (18 Electoral)  Write-In Candidate Access: Alaska, Florida, Indiana, Maryland Randall Terry, of West Virginia; Vice-presidential nominee: Missy Smith Candidate Ballot Access: Kentucky, Nebraska, West Virginia - (18 Electoral)  Write-In Candidate Access: Colorado, Indiana Sheila Tittle, of Texas; Vice-presidential nominee: Matthew Turner Candidate Ballot Access: Colorado, Louisiana - (17 Electoral) Jeff Boss, of New Jersey; Vice-presidential nominee: Bob Pasternak Candidate Ballot Access: New Jersey - (14 Electoral) Dean Morstad, of Minnesota; Vice-presidential nominee: Josh Franke-Hyland Candidate Ballot Access: Minnesota - (10 Electoral)  Write-In Candidate Access: Utah Jill Reed, of Wyoming; Vice-presidential nominee: Tom Cary Candidate Ballot Access: Colorado - (9 Electoral)  Write-In Candidate Access: Indiana, Florida Jerry Litzel, of Iowa; Vice-presidential nominee: Jim Litzel Candidate Ballot Access: Iowa - (6 Electoral) That wraps it up people. We have reviewed 25 presidential candidates in the 2012 U.S. election. Look for more blog posts about the election to come.

  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

• MIX 2010 Covert Operations Day 3

  - by GeekAgilistMercenary

  I rolled over to the Mandalay for breakfast.  There I met a couple guys that were really excited about the new Windows 7 Phone.  They, as I, are also hopeful that the phone really gets a big push and some penetration into the market.  Not because we don’t like any other of the phones, but because this phone is so much better in many ways.  From a developer's perspective creating applications in Windows 7 Mobile will be vastly superior in ease, capabilities, and other aspects.  The architectural, existing code base, examples, and provisions to create things on the 7 Mobile Device are already existing as of RIGHT NOW.  There is no reason, except for fickle market conditions, for this phone to not just explode onto the market.  But alas, I won't hold my breath. Day three keynote had a whole new slew of things provided.  It also seemed that things got a lot more technical on this second keynote.  The oData was one of the very technical bits, yet it included almost no code.  Starting with a Netflix example and all the way to the Codename "Dallas" effort the oData Services provide some expansive possibilities. A mash up going 4 ways was then shown for finding a movie, finding local places to have a viewing, and information about the movie and were to prospectively find and buy additional movie bits.  The display was of course, in a Windows 7 Mobile device with literally a click to view each set of data.  The backend and the front end of this was beautifully smooth. The Dallas Project has a lot of potential for analytics in dashboard and scorecard creation also.  If there is a need or reason to provide data to a vast and wide range of clients, Dallas is a prime example of how to do that. Azure Clouds After the main keynote I checked out (while developing a working WPF & Silverlight Application for work) the session on deploying ASP.NET Applications, services, etc, into the cloud.  The session was pretty good, but I'll admit I got a little unfocused from it a few times.  It is after all hard to do two things at one time. I did take note that the cloud still is a multiple step process for deploying to.  This is a good thing and a bad thing.  There needs to be more checks and verifications when deploying something into the cloud just for technical reasons.  However, I feel that there should be some streamlining to the process.  Going back and forth between web and Visual Studio as the interface also seems kind of clunky.  Deployment should be able to be completed from within Visual Studio in my perspective.  Overall, the cloud is getting more and more impressive in function as well as theory. That's it from me so far on the third day of MIX.  I'll be note taking and studying hard to have more good tidbits to provide. Thanks for reading, if you're curious about more of my writing, check out this original entry at my other blog Agilist Mercenary.

  Read the article

• Sample Browser Visual Studio Extension is localized and introduced to Japan

  - by Jialiang

  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/codefx/archive/2012/10/14/sample-browser-visual-studio-extension-is-localized-and-introduced-to-japan.aspx  ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????From: Japan MVP   "The Sample Browser is very easy to use thanks to the refined interface.  The categorized menu enables faster search. Highly acclaimed.  But it need localization. It may not be a problem for those who can understand English, but I think localizing Sample Browser into Japanese will promote its use in Japan further." This is a prominent feedback collected from the Japan MVP community since we released the last version of Sample Browser, which was only available in English.  Japan developers like the Sample Browser, but they want localized code samples, localized Sample Browser UI, and the localized search experience.  The Japan MVP lead, Satoru Kitabata, observed these needs and expectations.  He started to engage with all local developer MVPs to translate the UI elements in the Sample Browser.  Lots of MVPs signed up to participate in this work.  They had roundtables and newsletters to track the progress.  In short three weeks, every control, every tooltip, every font on every label, was beautifully tuned for Japanese.  The sample search experience was also optimized for Japan developers - they can directly type Japanese query to search for code samples.  Together with Microsoft Japan MVPs, the sample use experience is localized and improved to a new level!    The Japan MVP Lead, Satoru Kitabata, further worked with MSDN Japan site manager and Japan DPE to introduce the good news of localized Sample Browser to Japan Sample Browser  http://msdn.microsoft.com/ja-jp/jj730399 Sample Browser?????? http://msdn.microsoft.com/ja-jp/jj730398     Thanks to the joint effort and Japan MVPs’ feedback and contributions, the Sample Browser gets the chance to benefit the broader Japan developer audience.

  Read the article

• Quicktips 1: Windows 7 Libraries; New website

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  I’m working on several large posts right now. So in the interim, I’ve decided to do shorter posts that contain something I find very helpful. This is the first. I’ve been using Windows 7 since April 2010. It’s the first OS I’ve ever worked with that I actually enjoy. I’ve used many over the years (KERNAL; PC DOS; MS-DOS 3.x+; Windows 3.0, 3.11, 95, 98, 98 SE, Me, NT 3.51, NT 4, 2000, XP, Vista, 7; various GNU/Linux distros starting with Debian 1.2 – most recently Ubuntu 10.04; ProDOS, Mac OS 9.X, Mac OS X (through 10.4); SunOS, Solaris; AIX, z/OS; OpenVMS). Some were frustrating. Some tolerable. Some were “nice except for…”. OS X actually started out as seemingly “nice” until every single release contained a breaking change to some major API and they then decided to flip-off everyone who had bought a Mac as little as two years earlier with the release of Snow Leopard without PPC support. Windows 7 is the first one that’s just “nice” without any qualifiers. There are so many little features that add up to make it nice. Today’s Quicktip is one of them. Quicktip 1: Create a Library for your Code One thing I particularly like about Windows 7 is the Libraries feature in Explorer. Specifically the fact that you can create custom ones. I used to spend a lot of time opening new Explorer windows and navigating my various Visual Studio projects folders. Custom libraries allowed me to simplify that whole process. I now simply go to my “Code” library and there it all is. Adding a new library is easy. Open an Explorer window. If you aren’t in your Libraries when it opens, navigate to Libraries. Click the “New library” button. Give it a name. Then right click on the new library you created and go to “Properties”. Click the “Include a folder…” button. Choose the folder you want and press “Include folder”. Voilà! If you wish to add more, simply click “Include a folder…” again and repeat. It’s true that this is just a small time saver. But it’s one of those things that just adds a really nice touch. ------------------------ In a separate note, just before Christmas I finally finished and published my new website: http://www.bobtacoindustries.com/ . I waited to post here about it until I found time to incorporate a few things I hadn’t had the time to do when I pushed it out for its “soft open”. Most of them are now done and so my site is now formally open. I have no plans or intentions of moving my blog ( http://blog.bobtacoindustries.com/ points here). I quite like it here, both in terms of the interface and also in terms of the concept (and realization thereof) of pooling geek bloggers to create a pool of knowledge and helpful tips, tricks, techniques, and advice. I created it simply because I felt that it was time to have a website as I venture further into my return to the land of software development. The “For Devs” section should hopefully be useful to developers, particularly the links section. It’s my curated list of sites that I regularly visit to solve problems, to help answer questions on Twitter and the AppHub forums, and to learn new things. I’ll be adding links to it periodically and will be including topic areas as I become acquainted with them enough to form a proper list. WPF will likely be the first topic area added. If there are any links you think I should add to the existing topics, let me know! I warn in advance that I’m less inclined to add blogs; there are simply too many good blogs and I do not want to have hundreds per topic area. So blogs are limited primarily, though not exclusively, to acknowledged experts in the subject area who generally blog regularly about it and who usually are part of the team that develops the product or technology in question. I’m much more amenable to including individual blogs posts in the techniques subcategory in the appropriate topic area. Ultimately, it’s a collection of things I find interesting and helpful. So please no hard feelings if I don’t add a link you think is awesome. I may well think it’s awesome too, but conclude that it doesn’t fit with my goals for the dev links area.

  Read the article

• Investing in Servers by Intel

  - by Koushal Deshpande

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/BizTalkAndOtherTechs/archive/2013/10/31/investing-in-servers-by-intel.aspxA nice article reference from Intel, refer here. Referees to cloud as well. Choose correctly what you need. 1 Do determine right server for your company. There is no use getting a server that has redundant services but still add to the costs. 2 Do get servers that can be upgraded. A server with limited memory and storage may not be able to keep up with your business growth. The basic memory and storage options might not be sufficient. Consider at least 8GB of RAM and 1 terabyte of hard disk space. 3 Do check the server has at least one Gigabit Ethernet port. This allows high speed transferring of files and increases productivity for your employees. USB and Firewire ports may not be enough as their transfer speed is too low and will affect the productivity of your company. Infinite Technologies is ready to help perform this upgrade. Contact Infinite Technologies now View our other resellers » 4 Do verify that the server comes with documentation. Documentation allows you to make a claim when your server breaks down and is supported by a warranty. 6 Do check the support options for the server from the manufacturer. Different manufacturer has different support options such as maintenance plans and software upgrades. 5 Do always look into the warranty. Get an enhanced warranty that guarantees response and repair time to avoid disruption. 7 Do get server management tools that can be used on any computer. Server management tools should be cross compatible across different operating systems to take into account future PC replacements. 8 Do check the power usage of the servers. Get the right power supply to avoid damaging server hardware and consider the Intel® Xeon® E3 processor to help save on your electricity bills. 9 Do check what built-in security packages are available. Ensure that your server is protected. Built-in security1 helps you save on getting add on security packages.

  Read the article

• Puppet: Getting Started On Windows

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/robz/archive/2014/08/07/puppet-getting-started-on-windows.aspxNow that we’ve talked a little about Puppet. Let’s see how easy it is to get started. Install Puppet Let’s get Puppet Installed. There are two ways to do that: With Chocolatey: Open an administrative/elevated command shell and type: choco install puppet Download and install Puppet manually - http://puppetlabs.com/misc/download-options Run Puppet Let’s make pasting into a console window work with Control + V (like it should): choco install wincommandpaste If you have a cmd.exe command shell open, (and chocolatey installed) type: RefreshEnv The previous command will refresh your environment variables, ala Chocolatey v0.9.8.24+. If you were running PowerShell, there isn’t yet a refreshenv for you (one is coming though!). If you have to restart your CLI (command line interface) session or you installed Puppet manually open an administrative/elevated command shell and type: puppet resource user Output should look similar to a few of these: user { 'Administrator': ensure => 'present', comment => 'Built-in account for administering the computer/domain', groups => ['Administrators'], uid => 'S-1-5-21-some-numbers-yo-500', } Let's create a user: puppet apply -e "user {'bobbytables_123': ensure => present, groups => ['Users'], }" Relevant output should look like: Notice: /Stage[main]/Main/User[bobbytables_123]/ensure: created Run the 'puppet resource user' command again. Note the user we created is there! Let’s clean up after ourselves and remove that user we just created: puppet apply -e "user {'bobbytables_123': ensure => absent, }" Relevant output should look like: Notice: /Stage[main]/Main/User[bobbytables_123]/ensure: removed Run the 'puppet resource user' command one last time. Note we just removed a user! Conclusion You just did some configuration management /system administration. Welcome to the new world of awesome! Puppet is super easy to get started with. This is a taste so you can start seeing the power of automation and where you can go with it. We haven’t talked about resources, manifests (scripts), best practices and all of that yet. Next we are going to start to get into more extensive things with Puppet. Next time we’ll walk through getting a Vagrant environment up and running. That way we can do some crazier stuff and when we are done, we can just clean it up quickly.

  Read the article

• Complimentary Refills

  - by onefloridacoder

  My son and I were out to dinner and right after we sat down, he combs the menu to locate the soda  selection.  Then he looks up at me and says “Looks like we get free refills here, sweet!”  While we were sitting there I was thinking where that statement came from and I remember one time where he was helping to figure out the tip and saw that were we charged for six sodas, but there were only four of us at the table.  I would say that’s when this started for eateries he’s not familiar with. I was talking a friend of mine this week and this thought came to me, why can’t we manage expectations like my son – find out before the order is placed.  Find out what’s expected first then use the other bits of guidance to move forward.  But how many times have we all paid way to much for something we thought was free on a project – me, plenty.  This quote is going up in my work space, next to one I picked up Corey Haines’ Software Craftsmanship talk at Open Agile Romania - “Work != Practice”.  So if anyone else has gotten burnt, maybe check the menu, it will be in the area where the customer will pick two from the list of “Price, Quality, or Speed”.  Refills will be listed just beneath that.

  Read the article

• Visual Studio 2012 Launch Winnipeg&ndash;Slides

  - by Dylan Smith

  The Winnipeg .Net User Group hosted a VS 2012 Launch Event at the Imax in Winnipeg on Thursday, Dec 6.  Doing presentations on the giant Imax screen is always fun, and I did the first 2 sessions on: End-To-End Application Lifecycle Management with TFS 2012 Improving Developer Productivity with Visual Studio 2012 Thanks to everybody that came out, and if anybody is interested my slide decks can be downloaded here: TFS 2012 Slides VS 2012 Slides Also the Virtual Machine that I used to do my demo’s can be downloaded from Brian Keller’s blog here: VS 2012 ALM Virtual Machine

  Read the article

• GWB | Captchas For Everyone

  - by Geekswithblogs Administrator

  We have been getting hit very hard with comment spam as of late. As mentioned in the last post, this is something we typically deal with on a regular basis for the past 6 years, but some weeks are like this week where it is just crazy. Because of the way things are right now, I have disabled the ability to toggle on or off the CAPTCHA controls for comments. I know some bloggers are going to get mad, but we need to see if the lack of CAPTCHA on some blogs is the key cause of SPAM or if they are manually entering the data and filling in the CAPTCHA. I will report back on what we are seeing, but for a few weeks we are just going to require CAPTCHA controls on comments.This has been a public service announcement for Geekswithblogs.net :D Related Tags:

  Read the article

• Disneyland Inside Out on iPhone and Android

  - by Ryan Cain

  It's hard to believe October was the last time I was over here on my blog.  Ironically after getter the developer phone from Microsoft I have been knee deep in iPhone programming and for the past few weeks Android programming again.  This time I've spent all my non-working hours programming a fun project for my "other" website, Disneyland Inside Out.  Disneyland Inside Out, a vacation planning site for Disneyland in California, has been around in various forms since June 1996.  It has always been a place for me to explore new technologies and learn about some of the new trends on the web.  I recently migrated the site over to DotNetNuke and have been building out custom modules for DNN.  I've also been hacking things together w/ the URLRewrite module in IIS 7.5 to provide strong SEO optimized URLs.  I can't say all that has really stuck within the DNN model of doing things, but it has worked pretty well. As part of my learning process, I spent most of the Fall bringing Disneyland Inside Out to the iPhone.  I will post more details on my development experiences later.  But this project gave me a really great opportunity to get a good feel for Objective-C development.  After 3 months I actually feel somewhat competent in the language and iPhone SDK, instead of just floundering around getting things to work.  The project also gave me a chance to play with some new frameworks on the iPhone and really dig into the Facebook SDK.  I also dug into some of the Gowalla REST api's as well.  We've been live with the app in iTunes for just about 10 days now, and have been sitting in the top 200 of free travel apps for the past few days.  You can get more info and the direct iTunes download link on our site: Disneyland Inside Out for iPhone Since launching the iPhone version I have gotten back into Android development, porting the Disneyland Inside Out app over to Android.  As I said in my first review of iPhone vs. Android, coming from a managed code background, Android is much easier to get going with.  I just about 3 weeks total I will have about 85 - 90% of the functionality up and running in the Android app, that took probably 1.5 - 2x's that time for iPhone.  That isn't a totally fair comparison as I am much more comfortable w/ Xcode and Objective-C today and can get some of the basic stuff done much faster than I could in the fall.  Though I'd say some of the hardest code to debug is still the null pointer issues on objects that were dealloc'd too early in Objective-C.  This isn't too bad with the NSZoombies enabled for synchronous code, but when you have a lot of async, which my app does, it can be hairy at times to track exactly what was causing the issue.   I will post more details later, as I am trying to wrap up a beta of the Android app today.  But in the meantime, if you have an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad head on over to the site and take a look at my app.

  Read the article

• Goodbye my beloved Nexus One, hello Windows Phone 7

  - by George Clingerman

  Last night my wife’s Nexus One finally bit the dust. You may not know but I’ve been nursing her Nexus One one along for quite a while after her screen shattered. I was able to replace it on my own (go me!) but little quirks have been popping up and the phone was quickly deteriorating. Lately it’s been the power button. Wifey would often have to press the power button several times to get her phone to turn on and last night it just wouldn’t wake up again. I took it apart and tried my best to see if I could somehow make it live once again but no luck this time. It was finally ready to retire. We looked at first for a replacement phone for her but she wasn’t really seeing anything she liked. So I decided to make the ultimate sacrifice and offer up my much loved Nexus One and I would then get a new Windows Phone 7 device. I love T-Mobile for my service so my choices were immediately limited to basically just a single phone. The HTC HD7. I read reviews and they were all over the board from people loving to people hating the phone but I decided, hey, why not, let’s take this plunge. And I did. I’ve only had the phone for about two days now so below is my list of first reaction pros/cons. These are basically things I’ve missed or things I’ve noticed that I really like about my new Windows Phone. Cons: * No Google Talk – I used this a LOT on my Nexus. I’ve found an application called “Flory” but it’s just an ok substitute, not the same as the full featured GTalk I had on my Nexus. * Seesmic is limited– I loved the way Seesmic worked on my Nexus. It was my mobile twitter client of choice. Everything about it worked really well. On Windows Phone 7 it’s just ok. I don’t get notification of new tweets, it’s several clicks to even see a new tweet. It’s definitely got some more development before it has the same features as it did on my Nexus. * Buttons don’t give great feedback – I’d read this on the reviews about the HTC HD7 and I’m finding it true myself. Pressing the buttons on the side of the phone and the power button on the top is finicky and I have to be looking at my phone to make sure I actually got them to press. * Web browsing is slow – I’m not sure what’s up with this, I’m connected to my wireless network at my house but it’s noticeably slower on my WP7 device than my Nexus. I even switched back to verify and it’s definitely true. Retrieving tweets, hitting up the XNA forums and just general web activities are all much slower on my WP7. I can’t think of any reason this would be true but it almost seems like it’s not using my wireless for everything.   Pros: * It’s pretty – the phone is really gorgeous. I loved the form of my Nexus One by the HTC HD7 is just as pretty, maybe even prettier! It’s got a nice large, bright screen. It feels good in my hand. And it even has a little kickstand to set the phone up for movie watching. Definitely a gorgeous phone. * LIVE integration – I lost a lot of nice integration with Google services but I gained a lot of integration with LIVE services that I also use. Now I can see when I get new GMail messages AND Hotmail messages. And having the Xbox LIVE integration is admittedly cool as well. * Tile notification rock – The Windows Phone 7 commercials are TRYING to get this message out but they’re doing a really poor job of this. Tile notifications really do save you from your phone. I have a whole little mini-informational dashboard at a glance. I unlock my phone and at a glace I can see new IMs, new mail messages, software updates etc. All just letting me know in the tiles I have arranged. That’s pretty cool. * The interface works really well – I feel super hip and cool swiping and sliding things around on my Windows Phone 7. Everything works that way and it’s great and fast and really good looking. I’m all about me feeling cool. * I’m gaming more – I had gotten a few games on my Nexus One but there really weren’t a lot of good developers flocking to the service. Just browsing through the Windows Phone 7 marketplace I’m already seeing a ton of games I want to try and buy. And I sat down and bet Pixel Man 0 just yesterday on my phone. I’m already gaming more than I did on my Nexus One. * Netflix integration is fantastic - It works just like it does on my Xbox 360 and I love having this feature on my phone. * It’s basically a Zune – I’ve been taking my Zune to work and listening to music off of that while I code. I no longer need to take it with me, now I just sync songs onto my phone and it’s my new Zune. I freaking love that. One less device to carry around.   All in all my cons have really little to do with the phone (just the buttons and the web browsing) and more to do with the applications needing to catch up a bit to what I’m used to. And the Pros are things that ARE phone specific so I’m seeing that as a good sign that I’m going to be very happy with my Windows Phone 7. So Wifey is happy having her Nexus One again, I’m happy with my new Windows Phone 7. Life is good. Now I just need to make a game to pay for it….

  Read the article

• New DataCenter Options for Windows Azure

  - by ScottKlein

  Effective immediately, new compute and storage resource options are now available when selecting data center options in the Windows Azure Portal. "West US" and "East US" options are now available, for Compute and Storage. SQL Azure options for these two data centers will be available in the next few months. The official announcement can be found here.In terms of geo-replication:US East and West are paired together for Windows Azure Storage geo-replicationUS North and South are paired together for Windows Azure Storage geo-replicationThese two new data centers are now visible in the Windows Azure Management Portal effective immediately. Compute and Storage pricing remains the same across all data centers. Get started with Windows Azure through the free 90 day trial.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117  | Next Page >