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• Adding PostSharp to new projects, when it's installed for some projects in solution.

  - by Michael Freidgeim

  Recently I've posted my experience with installation of PostSharp Once PostSharp  is installed in  solution's packages folder for some project(s), I often need to add PostSharp to another project in the same solutionSection "Adding PostSharp to your project using PostSharp HQ" of documentation described the process quite well.I only want to add that the  actual location of  PostSharp HQ ( if it was installed from NuGet) is[solution root ]packages\PostSharp.2.1.7.15\tools\Release\PostSharp.HQ.exe.Also you need to ensure that the project is checked out,i.e. not readOnly.

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• Thread.Interrupt Is Evil

  - by Alois Kraus

  Recently I have found an interesting issue with Thread.Interrupt during application shutdown. Some application was crashing once a week and we had not really a clue what was the issue. Since it happened not very often it was left as is until we have got some memory dumps during the crash. A memory dump usually means WindDbg which I really like to use (I know I am one of the very few fans of it).  After a quick analysis I did find that the main thread already had exited and the thread with the crash was stuck in a Monitor.Wait. Strange Indeed. Running the application a few thousand times under the debugger would potentially not have shown me what the reason was so I decided to what I call constructive debugging. I did create a simple Console application project and try to simulate the exact circumstances when the crash did happen from the information I have via memory dump and source code reading. The thread that was  crashing was actually MS code from an old version of the Microsoft Caching Application Block. From reading the code I could conclude that the main thread did call the Dispose method on the CacheManger class which did call Thread.Interrupt on the cache scavenger thread which was just waiting for work to do. My first version of the repro looked like this   static void Main(string[] args) { Thread t = new Thread(ThreadFunc) { IsBackground = true, Name = "Test Thread" }; t.Start(); Console.WriteLine("Interrupt Thread"); t.Interrupt(); } static void ThreadFunc() { while (true) { object value = Dequeue(); // block until unblocked or awaken via ThreadInterruptedException } } static object WaitObject = new object(); static object Dequeue() { object lret = "got value"; try { lock (WaitObject) { } } catch (ThreadInterruptedException) { Console.WriteLine("Got ThreadInterruptException"); lret = null; } return lret; } I do start a background thread and call Thread.Interrupt on it and then directly let the application terminate. The thread in the meantime does plenty of Monitor.Enter/Leave calls to simulate work on it. This first version did not crash. So I need to dig deeper. From the memory dump I did know that the finalizer thread was doing just some critical finalizers which were closing file handles. Ok lets add some long running finalizers to the sample. class FinalizableObject : CriticalFinalizerObject { ~FinalizableObject() { Console.WriteLine("Hi we are waiting to finalize now and block the finalizer thread for 5s."); Thread.Sleep(5000); } } class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { FinalizableObject fin = new FinalizableObject(); Thread t = new Thread(ThreadFunc) { IsBackground = true, Name = "Test Thread" }; t.Start(); Console.WriteLine("Interrupt Thread"); t.Interrupt(); GC.KeepAlive(fin); // prevent finalizing it too early // After leaving main the other thread is woken up via Thread.Abort // while we are finalizing. This causes a stackoverflow in the CLR ThreadAbortException handling at this time. } With this changed Main method and a blocking critical finalizer I did get my crash just like the real application. The funny thing is that this is actually a CLR bug. When the main method is left the CLR does suspend all threads except the finalizer thread and declares all objects as garbage. After the normal finalizers were called the critical finalizers are executed to e.g. free OS handles (usually). Remember that I did call Thread.Interrupt as one of the last methods in the Main method. The Interrupt method is actually asynchronous and does wake a thread up and throws a ThreadInterruptedException only once unlike Thread.Abort which does rethrow the exception when an exception handling clause is left. It seems that the CLR does not expect that a frozen thread does wake up again while the critical finalizers are executed. While trying to raise a ThreadInterrupedException the CLR goes down with an stack overflow. Ups not so nice. Why has this nobody noticed for years is my next question. As it turned out this error does only happen on the CLR for .NET 4.0 (x86 and x64). It does not show up in earlier or later versions of the CLR. I have reported this issue on connect here but so far it was not confirmed as a CLR bug. But I would be surprised if my console application was to blame for a stack overflow in my test thread in a Monitor.Wait call. What is the moral of this story? Thread.Abort is evil but Thread.Interrupt is too. It is so evil that even the CLR of .NET 4.0 contains a race condition during the CLR shutdown. When the CLR gurus can get it wrong the chances are high that you get it wrong too when you use this constructs. If you do not believe me see what Patrick Smacchia does blog about Thread.Abort and List.Sort. Not only the CLR creators can get it wrong. The BCL writers do sometimes have a hard time with correct exception handling as well. If you do tell me that you use Thread.Abort frequently and never had problems with it I do suspect that you do not have looked deep enough into your application to find such sporadic errors.

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• The Alienware M11xR3 has arrived

  - by Enrique Lima

  A week or so ago, I mentioned my gear was evolving.  The newest member of my gear arrived yesterday, an Alienware M11xR3. Here are the specs: Intel Core i7-2617M 1.5GHz (2.6GHz Turbo Mode, 4MB Cache) NVIDIA GeForce GT540 graphics with 2.0GB Video Memory and Optimus 16GB Dual Channel DDR3 at 1333MHz 11.6in High Def (720p/1366x768) with WLED backlight 750GB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s Soundblaster X-Fi Hi Def Audio - Software Enabled Intel Advanced-N WiFi Link 6250 a/g/n 2x2 MIMO Technology with WiMax Gobi Mobile Broadband with GPS - supports ATT with contract Internal Bluetooth 3.0   Some pics from the unboxing event:

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• .NET Code Evolution

  - by Alois Kraus

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/akraus1/archive/2013/07/24/153504.aspxAt my day job I do look at a lot of code written by other people. Most of the code is quite good and some is even a masterpiece. And there is also code which makes you think WTF… oh it was written by me. Hm not so bad after all. There are many excuses reasons for bad code. Most often it is time pressure followed by not enough ambition (who cares) or insufficient training. Normally I do care about code quality quite a lot which makes me a (perceived) slow worker who does write many tests and refines the code quite a lot because of the design deficiencies. Most of the deficiencies I do find by putting my design under stress while checking for invariants. It does also help a lot to step into the code with a debugger (sometimes also Windbg). I do this much more often when my tests are red. That way I do get a much better understanding what my code really does and not what I think it should be doing. This time I do want to show you how code can evolve over the years with different .NET Framework versions. Once there was  time where .NET 1.1 was new and many C++ programmers did switch over to get rid of not initialized pointers and memory leaks. There were also nice new data structures available such as the Hashtable which is fast lookup table with O(1) time complexity. All was good and much code was written since then. At 2005 a new version of the .NET Framework did arrive which did bring many new things like generics and new data structures. The “old” fashioned way of Hashtable were coming to an end and everyone used the new Dictionary<xx,xx> type instead which was type safe and faster because the object to type conversion (aka boxing) was no longer necessary. I think 95% of all Hashtables and dictionaries use string as key. Often it is convenient to ignore casing to make it easy to look up values which the user did enter. An often followed route is to convert the string to upper case before putting it into the Hashtable. Hashtable Table = new Hashtable(); void Add(string key, string value) { Table.Add(key.ToUpper(), value); } This is valid and working code but it has problems. First we can pass to the Hashtable a custom IEqualityComparer to do the string matching case insensitive. Second we can switch over to the now also old Dictionary type to become a little faster and we can keep the the original keys (not upper cased) in the dictionary. Dictionary<string, string> DictTable = new Dictionary<string, string>(StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase); void AddDict(string key, string value) { DictTable.Add(key, value); } Many people do not user the other ctors of Dictionary because they do shy away from the overhead of writing their own comparer. They do not know that .NET has for strings already predefined comparers at hand which you can directly use. Today in the many core area we do use threads all over the place. Sometimes things break in subtle ways but most of the time it is sufficient to place a lock around the offender. Threading has become so mainstream that it may sound weird that in the year 2000 some guy got a huge incentive for the idea to reduce the time to process calibration data from 12 hours to 6 hours by using two threads on a dual core machine. Threading does make it easy to become faster at the expense of correctness. Correct and scalable multithreading can be arbitrarily hard to achieve depending on the problem you are trying to solve. Lets suppose we want to process millions of items with two threads and count the processed items processed by all threads. A typical beginners code might look like this: int Counter; void IJustLearnedToUseThreads() { var t1 = new Thread(ThreadWorkMethod); t1.Start(); var t2 = new Thread(ThreadWorkMethod); t2.Start(); t1.Join(); t2.Join(); if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception("Hmm " + Counter + " != " + 2 * Increments); } const int Increments = 10 * 1000 * 1000; void ThreadWorkMethod() { for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { Counter++; } } It does throw an exception with the message e.g. “Hmm 10.222.287 != 20.000.000” and does never finish. The code does fail because the assumption that Counter++ is an atomic operation is wrong. The ++ operator is just a shortcut for Counter = Counter + 1 This does involve reading the counter from a memory location into the CPU, incrementing value on the CPU and writing the new value back to the memory location. When we do look at the generated assembly code we will see only inc dword ptr [ecx+10h] which is only one instruction. Yes it is one instruction but it is not atomic. All modern CPUs have several layers of caches (L1,L2,L3) which try to hide the fact how slow actual main memory accesses are. Since cache is just another word for redundant copy it can happen that one CPU does read a value from main memory into the cache, modifies it and write it back to the main memory. The problem is that at least the L1 cache is not shared between CPUs so it can happen that one CPU does make changes to values which did change in meantime in the main memory. From the exception you can see we did increment the value 20 million times but half of the changes were lost because we did overwrite the already changed value from the other thread. This is a very common case and people do learn to protect their  data with proper locking.   void Intermediate() { var time = Stopwatch.StartNew(); Action acc = ThreadWorkMethod_Intermediate; var ar1 = acc.BeginInvoke(null, null); var ar2 = acc.BeginInvoke(null, null); ar1.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(); ar2.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(); if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception(String.Format("Hmm {0:N0} != {1:N0}", Counter, 2 * Increments)); Console.WriteLine("Intermediate did take: {0:F1}s", time.Elapsed.TotalSeconds); } void ThreadWorkMethod_Intermediate() { for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { lock (this) { Counter++; } } } This is better and does use the .NET Threadpool to get rid of manual thread management. It does give the expected result but it can result in deadlocks because you do lock on this. This is in general a bad idea since it can lead to deadlocks when other threads use your class instance as lock object. It is therefore recommended to create a private object as lock object to ensure that nobody else can lock your lock object. When you read more about threading you will read about lock free algorithms. They are nice and can improve performance quite a lot but you need to pay close attention to the CLR memory model. It does make quite weak guarantees in general but it can still work because your CPU architecture does give you more invariants than the CLR memory model. For a simple counter there is an easy lock free alternative present with the Interlocked class in .NET. As a general rule you should not try to write lock free algos since most likely you will fail to get it right on all CPU architectures. void Experienced() { var time = Stopwatch.StartNew(); Task t1 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Experienced); Task t2 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Experienced); t1.Wait(); t2.Wait(); if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception(String.Format("Hmm {0:N0} != {1:N0}", Counter, 2 * Increments)); Console.WriteLine("Experienced did take: {0:F1}s", time.Elapsed.TotalSeconds); } void ThreadWorkMethod_Experienced() { for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { Interlocked.Increment(ref Counter); } } Since time does move forward we do not use threads explicitly anymore but the much nicer Task abstraction which was introduced with .NET 4 at 2010. It is educational to look at the generated assembly code. The Interlocked.Increment method must be called which does wondrous things right? Lets see: lock inc dword ptr [eax] The first thing to note that there is no method call at all. Why? Because the JIT compiler does know very well about CPU intrinsic functions. Atomic operations which do lock the memory bus to prevent other processors to read stale values are such things. Second: This is the same increment call prefixed with a lock instruction. The only reason for the existence of the Interlocked class is that the JIT compiler can compile it to the matching CPU intrinsic functions which can not only increment by one but can also do an add, exchange and a combined compare and exchange operation. But be warned that the correct usage of its methods can be tricky. If you try to be clever and look a the generated IL code and try to reason about its efficiency you will fail. Only the generated machine code counts. Is this the best code we can write? Perhaps. It is nice and clean. But can we make it any faster? Lets see how good we are doing currently. Level Time in s IJustLearnedToUseThreads Flawed Code Intermediate 1,5 (lock) Experienced 0,3 (Interlocked.Increment) Master 0,1 (1,0 for int[2]) That lock free thing is really a nice thing. But if you read more about CPU cache, cache coherency, false sharing you can do even better. int[] Counters = new int[12]; // Cache line size is 64 bytes on my machine with an 8 way associative cache try for yourself e.g. 64 on more modern CPUs void Master() { var time = Stopwatch.StartNew(); Task t1 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Master, 0); Task t2 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Master, Counters.Length - 1); t1.Wait(); t2.Wait(); Counter = Counters[0] + Counters[Counters.Length - 1]; if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception(String.Format("Hmm {0:N0} != {1:N0}", Counter, 2 * Increments)); Console.WriteLine("Master did take: {0:F1}s", time.Elapsed.TotalSeconds); } void ThreadWorkMethod_Master(object number) { int index = (int) number; for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { Counters[index]++; } } The key insight here is to use for each core its own value. But if you simply use simply an integer array of two items, one for each core and add the items at the end you will be much slower than the lock free version (factor 3). Each CPU core has its own cache line size which is something in the range of 16-256 bytes. When you do access a value from one location the CPU does not only fetch one value from main memory but a complete cache line (e.g. 16 bytes). This means that you do not pay for the next 15 bytes when you access them. This can lead to dramatic performance improvements and non obvious code which is faster although it does have many more memory reads than another algorithm. So what have we done here? We have started with correct code but it was lacking knowledge how to use the .NET Base Class Libraries optimally. Then we did try to get fancy and used threads for the first time and failed. Our next try was better but it still had non obvious issues (lock object exposed to the outside). Knowledge has increased further and we have found a lock free version of our counter which is a nice and clean way which is a perfectly valid solution. The last example is only here to show you how you can get most out of threading by paying close attention to your used data structures and CPU cache coherency. Although we are working in a virtual execution environment in a high level language with automatic memory management it does pay off to know the details down to the assembly level. Only if you continue to learn and to dig deeper you can come up with solutions no one else was even considering. I have studied particle physics which does help at the digging deeper part. Have you ever tried to solve Quantum Chromodynamics equations? Compared to that the rest must be easy ;-). Although I am no longer working in the Science field I take pride in discovering non obvious things. This can be a very hard to find bug or a new way to restructure data to make something 10 times faster. Now I need to get some sleep ….

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• SO-Aware @ TechReady (Microsoft Event)

  - by SURESH GIRIRAJAN

  A session on SO-Aware is presented at Microsoft TechReady event this week check here for more details : http://tellagostudios.com/blog/so-aware-highlighted-microsoft-techready Check here for more details on SO-Aware and how to leverage within your enterprise if you’re using BizTalk Server, WCF Services and services build on Azure. It provides lot of capability such as: o    Centralized service repository o    Centralized configuration management o    Service testing o    Monitoring o    Transparent integration with technologies such as Visual Studio, BizTalk Server, Windows Server & Azure AppFabric among many others o    SO-Aware Test Workbench provides developers with a visually rich environment to model and control the execution of load and functional tests in a SOA infrastructure. This tool includes the first native WCF load testing engine allowing developers to transparently load test applications built on Microsoft's service oriented technologies such as WCF, BizTalk Server or the Windows Server or Azure AppFabric.

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• TellagoStudio's presenting SOA Governance on the Microsoft platform using SO-Aware at Microsoft TechReady.

  - by Vishal

  Hi there, Microsoft is hosting the first edition of their annual TechReddy conference. TechReady is an internal Microsoft conference but Microsoft invited Tellago Studios to present a session about how to enable Agile SOA Governance on the Microsoft platform using our recently release product: SO-Aware. As part of our session, we will take a look at the current challenges that organizations face when enabling SOA governance capabilities on the Microsoft platform and how organizations can benefit from  more agile, lightweight and modern SOA governance models. The session will provide a practical view to the role of Tellago Studios' SO-Aware as an essential technology to enable native SOA governance on the Microsoft platform. We will explore in detail important capabilities of SO-Aware such as Centralized service repository Centralized configuration management Service testing Monitoring Transparent integration with technologies such as Visual Studio, BizTalk Server, Windows Server & Azure AppFabric among many others But the fun doesn't stop there..... As part of this session, we will showcase for the first time our upcoming SO-Aware Test Workbench product which enables load and functional web service testing capabilities on the Microsoft technology stack. SO-Aware Test Workbench provides developers with a visually rich environment to model and control the execution of load and functional tests in a SOA infrastructure. This tool includes the first native WCF load testing engine allowing developers to transparently load test applications built on Microsoft's service oriented technologies such as WCF, BizTalk Server or the Windows Server or Azure AppFabric.

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• 5 Lessons learnt in localization / multi language support in WPF

  - by MarkPearl

  For the last few months I have been secretly working away at the second version of an application that we initially released a few years ago. It’s called MaxCut and it is a free panel/cut optimizer for the woodwork, glass and metal industry. One of the motivations for writing MaxCut was to get an end to end experience in developing an application for general consumption. From the early days of v1 of MaxCut I would get the odd email thanking me for the software and then listing a few suggestions on how to improve it. Two of the most dominant suggestions that we received were… Support for imperial measurements (the original program only supported the metric system) Multi language support (we had someone who volunteered to translate the program into Japanese for us). I am not going to dive into the Imperial to Metric support in todays blog post, but I would like to cover a few brief lessons we learned in adding support for multi-language functionality in the software. I have sectioned them below under different lessons. Lesson 1 – Build multi-language support in from the start So the first lesson I learnt was if you know you are going to do multi language support – build it in from the very beginning! One of the power points of WPF/Silverlight is data binding in XAML and so while it wasn’t to painful to retro fit multi language support into the programing, it was still time consuming and a bit tedious to go through mounds and mounds of views and would have been a minor job to have implemented this while the form was being designed. Lesson 2 – Accommodate for varying word lengths using Grids The next lesson was a little harder to learn and was learnt a bit further down the road in the development cycle. We developed everything in English, assuming that other languages would have similar character length words for equivalent meanings… don’t!. A word that is short in your language may be of varying character lengths in other languages. Some language like Dutch and German allow for concatenation of nouns which has the potential to create really long words. We picked up a few places where our views had been structured incorrectly so that if a word was to long it would get clipped off or cut out. To get around this we began using the WPF grid extensively with column widths that would automatically expand if they needed to. Generally speaking the grid replacement got round this hurdle, and if in future you have a choice between a stack panel or a grid – think twice before going for the easier option… often the grid will be a bit more work to setup, but will be more flexible. Lesson 3 – Separate the separators Our initial run through moving the words to a resource dictionary led us to make what I thought was one potential mistake. If we had a label like the following… “length : “ In the resource dictionary we put it as a single entry. This is fine until you start using a word more than once. For instance in our scenario we used the word “length’ frequently. with different variations of the word with grammar and separators included in the resource we ended up having what I would consider a bloated dictionary. When we removed the separators from the words and put them as their own resources we saw a dramatic reduction in dictionary size… so something that looked like this… “length : “ “length. “ “length?” Was reduced to… “length” “:” “?” “.” While this may not seem like a reduction at first glance, consider that the separators “:?.” are used everywhere and suddenly you see a real reduction in bloat. Lesson 4 – Centralize the Language Dictionary This lesson was learnt at the very end of the project after we had already had a release candidate out in the wild. Because our translations would be done on a volunteer basis and remotely, we wanted it to be really simple for someone to translate our program into another language. As a common design practice we had tiered the application so that we had a business logic layer, a ui layer, etc. The problem was in several of these layers we had resource files specific for that layer. What this resulted in was us having multiple resource files that we would need to send to our translators. To add to our problems, some of the wordings were duplicated in different resource files, which would result in additional frustration from our translators as they felt they were duplicating work. Eventually the workaround was to make a separate project in VS2010 with just the language translations. We then exposed the dictionary as public within this project and made it as a reference to the other projects within the solution. This solved out problem as now we had a central dictionary and could remove any duplication's. Lesson 5 – Make a dummy translation file to test that you haven’t missed anything The final lesson learnt about multi language support in WPF was when checking if you had forgotten to translate anything in the inline code, make a test resource file with dummy data. Ideally you want the data for each word to be identical. In our instance we made one which had all the resource key values pointing to a value of test. This allowed us point the language file to our test resource file and very quickly browse through the program and see if we had missed any linking. The alternative to this approach is to have two language files and swap between the two while running the program to make sure that you haven’t missed anything, but the downside of dual language file approach is that it is much a lot harder spotting a mistake if everything is different – almost like playing Where’s Wally / Waldo. It is much easier spotting variance in uniformity – meaning when you put the “test’ keyword for everything, anything that didn’t say “test” stuck out like a sore thumb. So these are my top five lessons learnt on implementing multi language support in WPF. Feel free to make any suggestions in the comments section if you feel maybe something is more important than one of these or if I got it wrong!

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• TechEd 2010 Twitter Book Give Away

  - by Scott Dorman

  If you’re going to TechEd North America this year, Sams Publishing will be giving away 9 advanced reader copies. In order to win a copy, be sure to follow the InformIT Twitter account and the #TechEd hash tag. Sporadically throughout the day a tweet will be sent out stating that the first person who comes to the booth and mentions my book will get a copy. The give away will probably occur over multiple days, so be sure to keep an eye on Twitter. Technorati Tags: Books,Sams Teach Yourself C# 2010

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• US Government moving to the cloud and saving $

  - by Dave Noderer

  Good to see that government is getting more responsive to current technology. This is a good article by Vivek Kundra, US Chief Information Officer and some examples of how the government is using cloud services. http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/05/13/moving-cloud

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• CMAP Spring Code Camp

  - by Steve Michelotti

  This Saturday is the CMAP Spring Code Camp. I’ll be presenting “Top 10 Ways MVC 2 Will Boost Your Productivity.” You can register here. I hope to see you there!

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• UppercuT and Mercurial (hg)

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  I mentioned this awhile back on twitter, but UppercuT (UC) has support for Mercurial for versioning your assemblies. In the settings file, all you need to do it tell UC to use hg. When you build your assemblies, they will use the changeset number in the version, and in the informational version, you get the hash, just like you do when using Git. Pretty sweet. By the way, UC also supports .NET 4.0 as of last week. With this knowledge you shall build.

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• What&rsquo;s in your wallet, er&hellip;Inbox?

  - by johndoucette

  Since my first UUCP operation in UNIX to deliver and receive an email, I have always been challenged to find the ultimate email organizer. About a year ago, I switched to a very simple process of managing email and have found the ultimate in organization. On the craziest of days with 250+ emails, I keep my inbox empty. Here is how I do it; First, start with the following folders in your mailbox; Inbox    Archive    FollowUp    Hold Of course, all inbound emails will start in the Inbox. As you work throughout the day, follow these steps to keep your inbox empty; Read the email. Are you responsible for any action? If you are and can do it immediately, then do it. If you need to do it later, move the email to the “FollowUp” folder If you are not responsible for any action, move it to the archive folder. Use Outlook’s search to find them when you need them. If you will need to reference the email later in the week or for a short term (week or two), then move the email to the “Hold” folder As your day progresses, frequently review the FollowUp folder and accomplish the task *Notes: If I am waiting for someone to do something for me, I keep it in the FollowUp folder. As I review the folder, I am constantly reminded that there is something I am waiting on – and can send a simple reminder by forwarding the original email. I sometimes send myself a “todo” email and park it in the FollowUp folder I like to know how many emails are in the folders so I set the “Show total number of items” property on the folder to show the amount of emails.

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• October 2012 Chicago IT Architects Group Meeting Recap

  - by Tim Murphy

  It seemed very ironic that the day we have a presentation on the architecture of building applications for Windows 8 the Surface tablet is opened for pre-order.  Tom Benton started the evening enlightening the attendees on the user experience for those who had not seen it yet.  He even passed around his table from last year’s Build conference for everyone to play with.  This was followed with a tour of the capabilities and structures that make up a Windows Store App on Windows 8.  Taking it to its conclusion, he rounded out the discussion by covering the certification and deployment process. As usual it was great to see a lot of familiar faces last night.  We are always looking for more people to join in our discussions.  Stay tuned here for announcements up upcoming meetings and topics.  Also, if you have a topic you would like to present or see presented feel free to contact me through this blog. del.icio.us Tags: Chicago Information Technology Architects Group,CITAG,Winodws 8,Windows Store,Tom Benton

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• MSDN / TechNet Key Importer for KeePass 2

  - by Stacy Vicknair

  If you have an MSDN account and, like me, systematically claim keys just as well as you systematically forget which keys you’ve used in which test environments! Well, in a meager attempt to help myself track my keys I created an importer for KeePass 2 that takes in the XML document that you can export from MSDN and TechNet. The source is available at https://github.com/svickn/MicrosoftKeyImporterPlugin.   How do I get my KeysExport.xml from MSDN or TechNet? Easy! First, in MSDN, go to your product keys. From there, at the top right select Export to XML. This will let you download an XML file full of your Microsoft Keys.   How do I import it into KeePass 2? The instructions are simple and available in the GitHub ReadMe.md, so I won’t repeat them. Here is a screenshot of what the imported result looks like:   As you can see, the import process creates a group called Microsoft Product Keys and creates a subgroup for each product. The individual entries each represent an individual key, stored in the password field. The importer decides if a key is new based on the key stored in the password, so you can edit the notes or title for the individual entries however you please without worrying about them being overwritten or duplicated if you re-import an updated KeysExport.xml from MSDN! This lets you keep track of where those pesky keys are in use and have the keys available anywhere you can access your KeePass database!   Technorati Tags: KeePass,KeePass 2,MSDN,TechNet

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• Building an MVC application using QuickBooks

  - by dataintegration

  RSSBus ADO.NET Providers can be used from many tools and IDEs. In this article we show how to connect to QuickBooks from an MVC3 project using the RSSBus ADO.NET Provider for QuickBooks. Although this example uses the QuickBooks Data Provider, the same process can be used with any of our ADO.NET Providers. Creating the Model Step 1: Download and install the QuickBooks Data Provider from RSSBus. Step 2: Create a new MVC3 project in Visual Studio. Add a data model to the Models folder using the ADO.NET Entity Data Model wizard. Step 3: Create a new RSSBus QuickBooks Data Source by clicking "New Connection", specify the connection string options, and click Next. Step 4: Select all the tables and views you need, and click Finish to create the data model. Step 5: Right click on the entity diagram and select 'Add Code Generation Item'. Choose the 'ADO.NET DbContext Generator'. Creating the Controller and the Views Step 6: Add a new controller to the Controllers folder. Give it a meaningful name, such as ReceivePaymentsController. Also, make sure the template selected is 'Controller with empty read/write actions'. Before adding new methods to the Controller, create views for your model. We will add the List, Create, and Delete views. Step 7: Right click on the Views folder and go to Add -> View. Here create a new view for each: List, Create, and Delete templates. Make sure to also associate your Model with the new views. Step 10: Now that the views are ready, go back and edit the RecievePayment controller. Update your code to handle the Index, Create, and Delete methods. Sample Project We are including a sample project that shows how to use the QuickBooks Data Provider in an MVC3 application. You may download the C# project here or download the VB.NET project here. You will also need to install the QuickBooks ADO.NET Data Provider to run the demo. You can download a free trial here. To use this demo, you will also need to modify the connection string in the 'web.config'.

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• C# Simple Twitter Update

  - by mroberts

  For what it's worth a simple twitter update. using System; using System.IO; using System.Net; using System.Text; namespace Server.Actions { public class TwitterUpdate { public string Body { get; set; } public string Login { get; set; } public string Password { get; set; } public override void Execute() { try { //encode user name and password string creds = Convert.ToBase64String(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(string.Format("{0}:{1}", this.Login, this.Password))); //encode tweet byte[] tweet = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes("status=" + this.Body); //setup request HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml"); request.Method = "POST"; request.ServicePoint.Expect100Continue = false; request.Headers.Add("Authorization", string.Format("Basic {0}", creds)); request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"; request.ContentLength = tweet.Length; //write to stream Stream reqStream = request.GetRequestStream(); reqStream.Write(tweet, 0, tweet.Length); reqStream.Close(); //check response HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse(); //... } catch (Exception e) { //... } } } }

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• 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

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• Good Customer Service Example

  - by MightyZot

  Here’s another good customer service example for you! My wife purchased a Galaxy last week and she loves the phone.  She asked me to add it to our AT&T Microcell last night. I purchased the AT&T Microcell a couple of years ago, because cell signal out where I live sucks! Since microcells are managed on the AT&T web site, I went to the site and tried to sign in. Naturally, having not managed that microcell in a couple of years…and much to my chagrin…I discovered that I didn’t know my password OR my user ID. So, I decided to call and see if I could get my account reset that late in the day (we’re talking last night, so it was well after 7pm.) I called the technical support line, touched the appropriate numbers to navigate to microcell support, turned on my speaker phone, and prepared for the long wait. After about 45 seconds I was delighted to hear “Jeffrey” break in and ask what he could help me with. I explained that I have not managed my microcell for some time and had forgotten the user name and password.  “No problem”, he replied, and he asked me for the line I used to register the microcell. After confirming the last four digits of my IMEI number, he asked me for my wife’s number. I gave him my wife’s number and he said, “I’ve taken care of it Mr Pope. Just have her reboot her phone and you should see your microcell.” We rebooted her phone, it connected to the microcell, and voila, she was online! “Is there anything else I can help you with while I’ve got you on the line”, he said. “Nope”, I replied. “Ok, have a great night.” What made this a great customer service experience for me was that “Jeffrey” didn’t stop at giving me my user account and password, which I would probably forget anyway after setting up my wife’s new phone. Instead, he solved the real problem for me – adding my wife’s new phone to my microcell. Great job Jeffrey!

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• TouchDevelop: The Fast Path to Windows 8 and Phone Apps

  - by Clint Edmonson

  Are you looking for a little extra cash for the upcoming holidays? Then you might be interested in creating some cool apps to sell in the Windows Store. Or maybe you’re simply curious and want to try your hand at developing for Windows 8 and Windows Phone. In either case, the newly released TouchDevelop Web App is for you. TouchDevelop Web App is a development environment to create apps on your tablet or smartphone, without requiring a separate PC. Scripts written by using TouchDevelop can access data, media, and sensors on the phone, tablet, and PC. The script can interact with cloud services, including storage, computing, and social networks. TouchDevelop lets you quickly create fun games and useful tools, turning your scripts into true Windows Phone and Windows 8 apps. A year ago, Microsoft Research released TouchDevelop for Windows Phone, which is being used by enthusiasts, students, and researchers to program their phones in fun, inventive, and interesting ways. These scripts are available at TouchDevelop for anyone to download and use. Ever since we released TouchDevelop, we’ve been eyeing the tablet form factor and working on a version for the browser. Now, with the release of TouchDevelop Web App, the wait is over: the tablet version is ready, so go play around with it. All TouchDevelop scripts that are developed on the smartphone can be downloaded to the tablet and run (if hardware allows). Any script that is developed on the tablet can also be accessed on the phone. And scripts can be converted to Windows Phone or Windows 8 apps and submitted to the Windows Phone Store or Windows Store, respectively. TouchDevelop Web App’s editor and programming language have been designed for tablet devices with touchscreens, but you can also use a keyboard and a mouse. So grab your web-enabled device and give the TouchDevelop Web App a try. It’s fun and easy, and could even put a little cash in your holiday-depleted wallet. Or at least give you bragging rights at family get-togethers. Are you interested in further tips on Windows 8 development?  Sign up for the 30 to launch program which will help you build a Windows Store application in 30 days.  You will receive a tip per day for 30 days, along with potential free design consultations and technical support from a Windows 8 expert. As always, stay tuned to my twitter feed for Windows 8, Windows Azure and other Microsoft announcements, updates, and links: @clinted

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• Who could ask for more with LESS CSS? (Part 3 of 3&ndash;Clrizr)

  - by ToString(theory);

  Welcome back!  In the first two posts in this series, I covered some of the awesome features in CSS precompilers such as SASS and LESS, as well as how to get an initial project setup up and running in ASP.Net MVC 4. In this post, I will cover an actual advanced example of using LESS in a project, and show some of the great productivity features we gain from its usage. Introduction In the first post, I mentioned two subjects that I will be using in this example – constants, and color functions.  I’ve always enjoyed using online color scheme utilities such as Adobe Kuler or Color Scheme Designer to come up with a scheme based off of one primary color.  Using these tools, and requesting a complementary scheme you can get a couple of shades of your primary color, and a couple of shades of a complementary/accent color to display. Because there is no way in regular css to do color operations or store variables, there was no way to accomplish something like defining a primary color, and have a site theme cascade off of that.  However with tools such as LESS, that impossibility becomes a reality!  So, if you haven’t guessed it by now, this post is on the creation of a plugin/module/less file to drop into your project, plugin one color, and have your primary theme cascade from it.  I only went through the trouble of creating a module for getting Complementary colors.  However, it wouldn’t be too much trouble to go through other options such as Triad or Monochromatic to get a module that you could use off of that. Step 1 – Analysis I decided to mimic Adobe Kuler’s Complementary theme algorithm as I liked its simplicity and aesthetics.  Color Scheme Designer is great, but I do believe it can give you too many color options, which can lead to chaos and overload.  The first thing I had to check was if the complementary values for the color schemes were actually hues rotated by 180 degrees at all times – they aren’t.  Apparently Adobe applies some variance to the complementary colors to get colors that are actually more aesthetically appealing to users.  So, I opened up Excel and began to plot complementary hues based on rotation in increments of 10: Long story short, I completed the same calculations for Hue, Saturation, and Lightness.  For Hue, I only had to record the Complementary hue values, however for saturation and lightness, I had to record the values for ALL of the shades.  Since the functions were too complicated to put into LESS since they aren’t constant/linear, but rather interval functions, I instead opted to extrapolate the HSL values using the trendline function for each major interval, onto intervals of spacing 1. For example, using the hue extraction, I got the following values: Interval Function 0-60 60-140 140-270 270-360 Saturation and Lightness were much worse, but in the end, I finally had functions for all of the intervals, and then went the route of just grabbing each shades value in intervals of 1.  Step 2 – Mapping I declared variable names for each of these sections as something that shouldn’t ever conflict with a variable someone would define in their own file.  After I had each of the values, I extracted the values and put them into files of their own for hue variables, saturation variables, and lightness variables…  Example: /*HUE CONVERSIONS*/@clrizr-hue-source-0deg: 133.43;@clrizr-hue-source-1deg: 135.601;@clrizr-hue-source-2deg: 137.772;@clrizr-hue-source-3deg: 139.943;@clrizr-hue-source-4deg: 142.114;.../*SATURATION CONVERSIONS*/@clrizr-saturation-s2SV0px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV1px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV2px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV3px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV4px: 0;.../*LIGHTNESS CONVERSIONS*/@clrizr-lightness-s2LV0px: 30;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV1px: 31;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV2px: 32;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV3px: 33;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV4px: 34;...   In the end, I have 973 lines of mapping/conversion from source HSL to shade HSL for two extra primary shades, and two complementary shades. The last bit of the work was the file to compose each of the shades from these mappings. Step 3 – Clrizr Mapper The final step was the hardest to overcome as I was still trying to understand LESS to its fullest extent.  Imports As mentioned previously, I had separated the HSL mappings into different files, so the first necessary step is to import those for use into the Clrizr plugin: @import url("hue.less");@import url("saturation.less");@import url("lightness.less"); Extract Component Values For Each Shade Next, I extracted the necessary information for each shade HSL before shade composition: @clrizr-input-saturation: 1px+floor(saturation(@clrizr-input))-1;@clrizr-input-lightness: 1px+floor(lightness(@clrizr-input))-1; @clrizr-complementary-hue: formatstring("clrizr-hue-source-{0}", ceil(hue(@clrizr-input))); @clrizr-primary-2-saturation: formatstring("clrizr-saturation-s2SV{0}",@clrizr-input-saturation);@clrizr-primary-1-saturation: formatstring("clrizr-saturation-s1SV{0}",@clrizr-input-saturation);@clrizr-complementary-1-saturation: formatstring("clrizr-saturation-c1SV{0}",@clrizr-input-saturation); @clrizr-primary-2-lightness: formatstring("clrizr-lightness-s2LV{0}",@clrizr-input-lightness);@clrizr-primary-1-lightness: formatstring("clrizr-lightness-s1LV{0}",@clrizr-input-lightness);@clrizr-complementary-1-lightness: formatstring("clrizr-lightness-c1LV{0}",@clrizr-input-lightness); Here, you can see a couple of odd things…  On the first line, I am using operations to add units to the saturation and lightness.  This is due to some limitations in the operations that would give me saturation or lightness in %, which can’t be in a variable name.  So, I use first add 1px to it, which casts the result of the following functions as px instead of %, and then at the end, I remove that pixel.  You can also see here the formatstring method which is exactly what it sounds like – something like String.Format(string str, params object[] obj). Get Primary & Complementary Shades Now that I have components for each of the different shades, I can now compose them into each of their pieces.  For this, I use the @@ operator which will look for a variable with the name specified in a string, and then call that variable: @clrizr-primary-2: hsl(hue(@clrizr-input), @@clrizr-primary-2-saturation, @@clrizr-primary-2-lightness);@clrizr-primary-1: hsl(hue(@clrizr-input), @@clrizr-primary-1-saturation, @@clrizr-primary-1-lightness);@clrizr-primary: @clrizr-input;@clrizr-complementary-1: hsl(@@clrizr-complementary-hue, @@clrizr-complementary-1-saturation, @@clrizr-complementary-1-lightness);@clrizr-complementary-2: hsl(@@clrizr-complementary-hue, saturation(@clrizr-input), lightness(@clrizr-input)); That’s is it, for the most part.  These variables now hold the theme for the one input color – @clrizr-input.  However, I have one last addition… Perceptive Luminance Well, after I got the colors, I decided I wanted to also get the best font color that would go on top of it.  Black or white depending on light or dark color.  Now I couldn’t just go with checking the lightness, as that is half the story.  You see, the human eye doesn’t see ALL colors equally well but rather has more cells for interpreting green light compared to blue or red.  So, using the ratio, we can calculate the perceptive luminance of each of the shades, and get the font color that best matches it! @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-primary-2) ) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-primary-2) ) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-primary-2)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-primary-1) ) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-primary-1) ) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-primary-1)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-primary) ) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-primary) ) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-primary)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-complementary-1)) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-complementary-1)) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-complementary-1)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-complementary-2)) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-complementary-2)) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-complementary-2)))/255)*255; @clrizr-col-font-on-primary-2: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2);@clrizr-col-font-on-primary-1: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1);@clrizr-col-font-on-primary: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps);@clrizr-col-font-on-complementary-1: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1);@clrizr-col-font-on-complementary-2: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2); Conclusion That’s it!  I have posted a project on clrizr.codePlex.com for this, and included a testing page for you to test out how it works.  Feel free to use it in your own project, and if you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please feel free to leave them here as a comment, or on the contact page!

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• Bing Maps WPF Hack

  - by Chris Gardner

  I've spent the past couple of days adding the Bing Maps WFP Control to an application I'm developing. I kept running into a strange thing that was driving me crazy. I have the control in the bottom of a StackPanel, under a Grid. No matter how hard I tried, setting the Height of the Bing control to Auto would cause the ActualHeight to always be 60.93. Now, I still don't know why this is happening. Truth be told, I'm not too sure I care. I did, however, find a reasonable hack around the problem. I do know the size of everything else. As such, I tied into the SizeChanged Event of the StackPanel. Using this, I could set the Height to the correct size based on the new size of the panel. private void ResizeMap( object sender, SizeChangedEventArgs e ) { myMap.Height = ((StackPanel)sender).ActualHeight - 75.0; } The hard-coded number is was because I had a fixed height of controls above my map. If you have dynamic elements, you could easily iterate through them and delete out the portions. So, there you have it. It's not much, but it annoyed the Smurf out of me for a brief period of time. Since I never found an answer, I figured I'd share.

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• Step-by-Step: Implementing Hyper-V Network Virtualization with Windows Server 2012

  - by KeithMayer

  True network and virtual machine portability - that's the ultimate goal of Hyper-V Network Virtualization - allowing you, as an IT Pro, to align changing business needs with the best physical resource locations to run your VMs and network services - easily, without the sweeping network, router, switch, firewall and DNS changes with which we'd traditionally be plagued when merely attempting the feat of relocating VMs to a new rack, subnet or data center ... WOW!

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• Topeka Dot Net User Group (DNUG) Meeting &ndash; April 6, 2010

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Topeka DNUG is free for anyone to attend! Mark your calendars now! SPEAKER: Troy Tuttle is a self-described pragmatic agilist, and Kanban practitioner, with more than a decade of experience in delivering software in the finance and health industries and as a consultant. He advocates teams improve their performance through pursuit of better practices like continuous integration and automated testing. Troy is the founder of the Kansas City Limited WIP Society and is a speaker at local area groups on team related topics. He currently works as a Project Lead Consultant with AdventureTech Group of Kansas City, KS. TOPIC: Why Kanban? Kanban is receiving a large amount of attention recently. What does it offer compared to other approaches? Answering that question may require you to hit the “reset” button on previously held biases and assumptions. Kanban blends Lean thought with ideas from first generation agile methodologies. To get started with Kanban, we will examine what steps are necessary to establish a transparent, work-limited, pull system. We will highlight the perils of allowing too much work-in-progress and how it affects development performance. Once established, Kanban teams need only a few metrics and tools to monitor their performance and improvement. WHERE: Federal Home Loan Bank Topeka on the Security Benefit Campus – Directions? WHEN: 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM on April 6th, 2010 REGISTER: http://topekadotnet.wufoo.com/forms/topeka-dnug-meeting-attendance/ ADDITIONAL INFO: As always, please sign in and out of FHLBank to help them with their accountability. Please park in the visitors section at the front of the building when you arrive. If  there are no spots in visitors you may park in the overflow lot at the far east end of the facility.  Lunch will be provided and we will have some great door prizes!

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• Computer Arithmetic - Binary for Decimal Numbers

  - by MarkPearl

  This may be of use to someone else doing this course… The Problem In the section on Computer Arithmetic it gives an example of converting -7.6875 to IEEE floating point format. I understand all the steps except for the first one, where it does the following... 7.6875 (base 10) = 111.1011 (base 2) I don't understand the conversion - I realize that 111 (base 2) = 7 (base 10), but how does the .6875 part relate to the .1011? Or am I totally off track with this? The Solution The fractional part of the decimal to binary conversion is done as follows: 0.6875 x 2 = 1.375 = 0.375 + 1 (Keep the 1 separate) 0.375 x 2   = 0.75   = 0.75    + 0 0.75 x 2    = 1.5      = 0.5      + 1 0.5 x 2     = 1.0       = 0.0       + 1 The bit pattern of 0s and 1s on the right-hand side gives you the fractional part. So 0.6875 (base 10) = .1011 (Base 2) See also Stallings, chapter 19.

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• Do you know about the Visual Studio ALM Rangers Guidance?

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  I have been tasked with investigating the Guidance available around Visual Studio 2010 for one of our customers and it makes sense to make this available to everyone. The official guidance around Visual Studio 2010 has been created by the Visual Studio ALM Rangers and is a brew of a bunch of really clever guys experiences working with the tools and customers. I will be creating a series of posts on the different guidance options as many people still do not know about them even though Willy-Peter Schaub has done a fantastic job of making sure they get the recognition they deserve. There is a full list of all of the Rangers Solutions and Projects on MSDN, but I wanted to add my own point of view to the usefulness of each one. If you don’t know who the rangers are you should have a look at the Visual Studio ALM Rangers Index to see the full breadth of where the rangers are. All of the Rangers Solutions are available on Codeplex where you can download them and add reviews… Rangers Solutions and Projects Do you know about the Visual Studio 2010 Architecture Guidance? More coming soon… These solutions took a very long time to put together and I wanted to make sure that we all understand the value of the free time that member of The Product Team, Visual Studio ALM MVP’s and partners put in to make them happen.

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