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  • Building a database installer with WiX, datadude and Visual Studio 2010

    - by jamiet
    Today I have been using Windows Installer XML (WiX) to build an installer (.msi file) that would install a SQL Server database on a server of my choosing; the source code for that database lives in datadude (a tool which you may know by one of quite a few other names). The basis for this work was a most excellent blog post by Duke Kamstra entitled Implementing a WIX installer that calls the GDR version of VSDBCMD.EXE which coves the delicate intricacies of doing this – particularly how to call Vsdbcmd.exe in a CustomAction. Unfortunately there are a couple of things wrong with Duke’s post: Searching for “datadude wix” didn’t turn it up in the first page of search results and hence it took me a long time to find it. And I knew that it existed. If someone else were after a post on using WiX with datadude its likely that they would never have come across Duke’s post and that would be a great shame because its the definitive post on the matter. It was written in October 2009 and had not been updated for Visual Studio 2010. Well, this blog post is an attempt to solve those problems. Hopefully I’ve solved the first one just by following a few of my blogging SEO tips while writing this blog post, in the rest of it I will explain how I took Duke’s code and updated it to work in Visual Studio 2010. If you need to build a database installer using WiX, datadude and Visual Studio 2010 then you still need to follow Duke’s blog post so go and do that now. Below are the amendments that I made that enabled the project to get built in Visual Studio 2010: In VS2010 datadude’s output files have changed from being called Database.<suffix> to <ProjectName>_Database.<suffix>. Duke’s code was referencing the old file name formats. Duke used $(var.SolutionDir) and relative paths to point to datadude artefacts I have replaced these with Votive Project References http://wix.sourceforge.net/manual-wix3/votive_project_references.htm I commented out all references to MicrosoftSqlTypesDbschema in DatabaseArtifacts.wxi. I don't think this is produced in VS2010 (I may be wrong about that but it wasn't in the output from my project) Similarly I commented out component MicrosoftSqlTypesDbschema in VsdbcmdArtifacts.wxi. It wasn't where Duke's code said it should have been so am assuming/hoping it isn't needed. Duke's ?define block to work out appropriate SrcArchPath actually wasn't working for me (i.e. <?if $(var.Platform)=x64 ?> was evaluating to false)  so I just took out the conditional stuff and declared the path explicitly to the “Program Files (x86)” path. The old code is still there though if you need to put it back. None of the <RegistrySearch> stuff is needed for VS2010 - so I commented it all out! Changed to use /manifest option rather than /model option on vsdbcmd.exe command-line. Personal preference is all! Added a new component in order to bundle along the vsdbcmd.exe.config file Made the install of the Custom Action dependent on the relevant feature being selected for install. This one is actually really important – deselecting the database feature for installation does not, by default, stop the CustomAction from executing and so would cause an error - so that scenario needs to be catered for I have made my amended solution available for download at: http://cid-550f681dad532637.office.live.com/self.aspx/Public/BlogShare/20110210/InstallMyDatabase.zip It contains two projects: the WiX project and the datadude project that is the source to be deployed (for demo purposes it only contains one table). I have also made the .msi available although in order that it gets through file blockers I changed the name from InstallMyDatabase.msi to InstallMyDatabase.ms_ – simply rename the file back once you have downloaded it from: http://cid-550f681dad532637.office.live.com/self.aspx/Public/BlogShare/20110210/InstallMyDatabase.ms%5E_ .You can try it out for yourself – the only thing it does is dump the files into %Program Files%\MyDatabase and uses them to install a database onto a server of your choosing with a name of your choosing - no damaging side-affects. I will caveat this by saying “it works on my machine” and, not having access to a plethora of different machines, I haven’t tested it anywhere else. One potential issue that I know of is that Vsdbcmd.exe has a dependency on SQL Server CE although if you have SQL Server tools or Visual Studio installed you should be fine. Unfortunately its not possible to bundle along the SQL Server CE installer in the .msi because Windows will not allow you to call one installer from inside another – the recommended way to get around this problem is to build a bootstrapper to bundle the whole lot together but doing that is outside the scope of this blog post. If you discover any other issues then please let me know. Here are the screenshots from the installer: And once installed…. Hope this is useful! @jamiet 

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  • Tales from the Trenches – Building a Real-World Silverlight Line of Business Application

    - by dwahlin
    There's rarely a boring day working in the world of software development. Part of the fun associated with being a developer is that change is guaranteed and the more you learn about a particular technology the more you realize there's always a different or better way to perform a task. I've had the opportunity to work on several different real-world Silverlight Line of Business (LOB) applications over the past few years and wanted to put together a list of some of the key things I've learned as well as key problems I've encountered and resolved. There are several different topics I could cover related to "lessons learned" (some of them were more painful than others) but I'll keep it to 5 items for this post and cover additional lessons learned in the future. The topics discussed were put together for a TechEd talk: Pick a Pattern and Stick To It Data Binding and Nested Controls Notify Users of Successes (and failures) Get an Agent – A Service Agent Extend Existing Controls The first topic covered relates to architecture best practices and how the MVVM pattern can save you time in the long run. When I was first introduced to MVVM I thought it was a lot of work for very little payoff. I've since learned (the hard way in some cases) that my initial impressions were dead wrong and that my criticisms of the pattern were generally caused by doing things the wrong way. In addition to MVVM pros the slides and sample app below also jump into data binding tricks in nested control scenarios and discuss how animations and media can be used to enhance LOB applications in subtle ways. Finally, a discussion of creating a re-usable service agent to interact with backend services is discussed as well as how existing controls make good candidates for customization. I tried to keep the samples simple while still covering the topics as much as possible so if you’re new to Silverlight you should definitely be able to follow along with a little study and practice. I’d recommend starting with the SilverlightDemos.View project, moving to the SilverlightDemos.ViewModels project and then going to the SilverlightDemos.ServiceAgents project. All of the backend “Model” code can be found in the SilverlightDemos.Web project. Custom controls used in the app can be found in the SivlerlightDemos.Controls project.   Sample Code and Slides

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  • Building and Deploying Windows Azure Web Sites using Git and GitHub for Windows

    - by shiju
    Microsoft Windows Azure team has released a new version of Windows Azure which is providing many excellent features. The new Windows Azure provides Web Sites which allows you to deploy up to 10 web sites  for free in a multitenant shared environment and you can easily upgrade this web site to a private, dedicated virtual server when the traffic is grows. The Meet Windows Azure Fact Sheet provides the following information about a Windows Azure Web Site: Windows Azure Web Sites enable developers to easily build and deploy websites with support for multiple frameworks and popular open source applications, including ASP.NET, PHP and Node.js. With just a few clicks, developers can take advantage of Windows Azure’s global scale without having to worry about operations, servers or infrastructure. It is easy to deploy existing sites, if they run on Internet Information Services (IIS) 7, or to build new sites, with a free offer of 10 websites upon signup, with the ability to scale up as needed with reserved instances. Windows Azure Web Sites includes support for the following: Multiple frameworks including ASP.NET, PHP and Node.js Popular open source software apps including WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, Umbraco and DotNetNuke Windows Azure SQL Database and MySQL databases Multiple types of developer tools and protocols including Visual Studio, Git, FTP, Visual Studio Team Foundation Services and Microsoft WebMatrix Signup to Windows and Enable Azure Web Sites You can signup for a 90 days free trial account in Windows Azure from here. After creating an account in Windows Azure, go to https://account.windowsazure.com/ , and select to preview features to view the available previews. In the Web Sites section of the preview features, click “try it now” which will enables the web sites feature Create Web Site in Windows Azure To create a web sites, login to the Windows Azure portal, and select Web Sites from and click New icon from the left corner  Click WEB SITE, QUICK CREATE and put values for URL and REGION dropdown. You can see the all web sites from the dashboard of the Windows Azure portal Set up Git Publishing Select your web site from the dashboard, and select Set up Git publishing To enable Git publishing , you must give user name and password which will initialize a Git repository Clone Git Repository We can use GitHub for Windows to publish apps to non-GitHub repositories which is well explained by Phil Haack on his blog post. Here we are going to deploy the web site using GitHub for Windows. Let’s clone a Git repository using the Git Url which will be getting from the Windows Azure portal. Let’s copy the Git url and execute the “git clone” with the git url. You can use the Git Shell provided by GitHub for Windows. To get it, right on the GitHub for Windows, and select open shell here as shown in the below picture. When executing the Git Clone command, it will ask for a password where you have to give password which specified in the Windows Azure portal. After cloning the GIT repository, you can drag and drop the local Git repository folder to GitHub for Windows GUI. This will automatically add the Windows Azure Web Site repository onto GitHub for Windows where you can commit your changes and publish your web sites to Windows Azure. Publish the Web Site using GitHub for Windows We can add multiple framework level files including ASP.NET, PHP and Node.js, to the local repository folder can easily publish to Windows Azure from GitHub for Windows GUI. For this demo, let me just add a simple Node.js file named Server.js which handles few request handlers. 1: var http = require('http'); 2: var port=process.env.PORT; 3: var querystring = require('querystring'); 4: var utils = require('util'); 5: var url = require("url"); 6:   7: var server = http.createServer(function(req, res) { 8: switch (req.url) { //checking the request url 9: case '/': 10: homePageHandler (req, res); //handler for home page 11: break; 12: case '/register': 13: registerFormHandler (req, res);//hamdler for register 14: break; 15: default: 16: nofoundHandler (req, res);// handler for 404 not found 17: break; 18: } 19: }); 20: server.listen(port); 21: //function to display the html form 22: function homePageHandler (req, res) { 23: console.log('Request handler home was called.'); 24: res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/html'}); 25: var body = '<html>'+ 26: '<head>'+ 27: '<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; '+ 28: 'charset=UTF-8" />'+ 29: '</head>'+ 30: '<body>'+ 31: '<form action="/register" method="post">'+ 32: 'Name:<input type=text value="" name="name" size=15></br>'+ 33: 'Email:<input type=text value="" name="email" size=15></br>'+ 34: '<input type="submit" value="Submit" />'+ 35: '</form>'+ 36: '</body>'+ 37: '</html>'; 38: //response content 39: res.end(body); 40: } 41: //handler for Post request 42: function registerFormHandler (req, res) { 43: console.log('Request handler register was called.'); 44: var pathname = url.parse(req.url).pathname; 45: console.log("Request for " + pathname + " received."); 46: var postData = ""; 47: req.on('data', function(chunk) { 48: // append the current chunk of data to the postData variable 49: postData += chunk.toString(); 50: }); 51: req.on('end', function() { 52: // doing something with the posted data 53: res.writeHead(200, "OK", {'Content-Type': 'text/html'}); 54: // parse the posted data 55: var decodedBody = querystring.parse(postData); 56: // output the decoded data to the HTTP response 57: res.write('<html><head><title>Post data</title></head><body><pre>'); 58: res.write(utils.inspect(decodedBody)); 59: res.write('</pre></body></html>'); 60: res.end(); 61: }); 62: } 63: //Error handler for 404 no found 64: function nofoundHandler(req, res) { 65: console.log('Request handler nofound was called.'); 66: res.writeHead(404, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'}); 67: res.end('404 Error - Request handler not found'); 68: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } If there is any change in the local repository folder, GitHub for Windows will automatically detect the changes. In the above step, we have just added a Server.js file so that GitHub for Windows will detect the changes. Let’s commit the changes to the local repository before publishing the web site to Windows Azure. After committed the all changes, you can click publish button which will publish the all changes to Windows Azure repository. The following screen shot shows deployment history from the Windows Azure portal.   GitHub for Windows is providing a sync button which can use for synchronizing between local repository and Windows Azure repository after making any commit on the local repository after any changes. Our web site is running after the deployment using Git Summary Windows Azure Web Sites lets the developers to easily build and deploy websites with support for multiple framework including ASP.NET, PHP and Node.js and can easily deploy the Web Sites using Visual Studio, Git, FTP, Visual Studio Team Foundation Services and Microsoft WebMatrix. In this demo, we have deployed a Node.js Web Site to Windows Azure using Git. We can use GitHub for Windows to publish apps to non-GitHub repositories and can use to publish Web SItes to Windows Azure.

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  • Building services with the .NET framework Cont’d

    - by Allan Rwakatungu
    In my previous blog I wrote an introductory post on services and how you can build services using the .NET frameworks Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) In this post I will show how to develop a real world application using WCF The problem During the last meeting we realized developers in Uganda are not so cool – they don’t use twitter so may not get the latest news and updates from the technology world. We also noticed they mostly use kabiriti phones (jokes). With their kabiriti phones they are unable to access the twitter web client or alternative twitter mobile clients like tweetdeck , twirl or tweetie. However, the kabiriti phones support SMS (Yeeeeeeei). So what we going to do to make these developers cool and keep them updated is by enabling them to receive tweets via SMS. We shall also enable them to develop their own applications that can extend this functionality Analysis Thanks to services and open API’s solving our problem is going to be easy.  1. To get tweets we can use the twitter service for FREE 2. To send SMS we shall use www.clickatell.com/ as they can send SMS to any country in the world. Besides we could not find any local service that offers API's for sending SMS :(. 3. To enable developers to integrate with our application so that they can extend it and build even cooler applications we use WCF. In addittion , because connectivity might be an issue we decided to use WCF because if has a inbuilt queing features. We also choose WCF because this is a post about .NET and WCF :). The Code Accessing the tweets To consume twitters REST API we shall use the WCF REST starter kit. Like it name indicates , the REST starter kit is a set of .NET framework classes that enable developers to create and access REST style services ( like the twitter service). Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Microsoft.Http; using System.Net; using System.Xml.Linq;   namespace UG.Demo {     public class TwitterService     {         public IList<TwitterStatus> SomeMethodName()         {             //Connect to the twitter service (HttpClient is part of the REST startkit classes)             HttpClient cl = new HttpClient("http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/friends_timeline.xml");             //Supply your basic authentication credentials             cl.TransportSettings.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("ourusername", "ourpassword");             //issue an http             HttpResponseMessage resp = cl.Get();             //ensure we got reponse 200             resp.EnsureStatusIsSuccessful();             //use XLinq to parse the REST XML             var statuses = from r in resp.Content.ReadAsXElement().Descendants("status")                            select new TwitterStatus                            {                                User = r.Element("user").Element("screen_name").Value,                                Status = r.Element("text").Value                            };             return statuses.ToList();         }     }     public class TwitterStatus     {         public string User { get; set; }         public string Status { get; set; }     } }  Sending SMS Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} public class SMSService     {         public void Send(string phone, string message)         {                         HttpClient cl1 = new HttpClient();              //the clickatell XML format for sending SMS             string xml = String.Format("<clickAPI><sendMsg><api_id>3239621</api_id><user>ourusername</user><password>ourpassword</password><to>{0}</to><text>{1}</text></sendMsg></clickAPI>",phone,message);             //Post form data             HttpUrlEncodedForm form = new HttpUrlEncodedForm();             form.Add("data", xml);             System.Net.ServicePointManager.Expect100Continue = false;             string uri = @"http://api.clickatell.com/xml/xml";             HttpResponseMessage resp = cl1.Post(uri, form.CreateHttpContent());             resp.EnsureStatusIsSuccessful();         }     }

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  • Building The Right SharePoint Team For Your Organization

    - by Mark Rackley
    I see the question posted fairly often asking what kind SharePoint team an organization should have. How many people do I need? What roles do I need to fill? What is best for my organization? Well, just like every other answer in SharePoint, the correct answer is “it depends”. Do you ever get sick of hearing that??? I know I do… So, let me give you my thoughts and opinions based upon my experience and what I’ve seen and let you come to your own conclusions. What are the possible SharePoint roles? I guess the first thing you need to understand are the different roles that exist in SharePoint (and their are LOTS). Remember, SharePoint is a massive beast and you will NOT find one person who can do it all. If you are hoping to find that person you will be sorely disappointed. For the most part this is true in SharePoint 2007 and 2010. However, generally things are improved in 2010 and easier for junior individuals to grasp. SharePoint Administrator The absolutely positively only role that you should not be without no matter the size of your organization or SharePoint deployment is a SharePoint administrator. These guys are essential to keeping things running and figuring out what’s wrong when things aren’t running well. These unsung heroes do more before 10 am than I do all day. The bad thing is, when these guys are awesome, you don’t even know they exist because everything is running so smoothly. You should definitely invest some time and money here to make sure you have some competent if not rockstar help. You need an admin who truly loves SharePoint and will go that extra mile when necessary. Let me give you a real world example of what I’m talking about: We have a rockstar admin… and I’m sure she’s sick of my throwing her name around so she’ll just have to live with remaining anonymous in this post… sorry Lori… Anyway! A couple of weeks ago our Server teams came to us and said Hi Lori, I’m finalizing the MOSS servers and doing updates that require a restart; can I restart them? Seems like a harmless request from your server team does it not? Sure, go ahead and apply the patches and reboot during our scheduled maintenance window. No problem? right? Sounded fair to me… but no…. not to our fearless SharePoint admin… I need a complete list of patches that will be applied. There is an update that is out there that will break SharePoint… KB973917 is the patch that has been shown to cause issues. What? You mean Microsoft released a patch that would actually adversely affect SharePoint? If we did NOT have a rockstar admin, our server team would have applied these patches and then when some problem occurred in SharePoint we’d have to go through the fun task of tracking down exactly what caused the issue and resolve it. How much time would that have taken? If you have a junior SharePoint admin or an admin who’s not out there staying on top of what’s going on you could have spent days tracking down something so simple as applying a patch you should not have applied. I will even go as far to say the only SharePoint rockstar you NEED in your organization is a SharePoint admin. You can always outsource really complicated development projects or bring in a rockstar contractor every now and then to make sure you aren’t way off track in other areas. For your day-to-day sanity and to keep SharePoint running smoothly, you need an awesome Admin. Some rockstars in this category are: Ben Curry, Mike Watson, Joel Oleson, Todd Klindt, Shane Young, John Ferringer, Sean McDonough, and of course Lori Gowin. SharePoint Developer Another essential role for your SharePoint deployment is a SharePoint developer. Things do start to get a little hazy here and there are many flavors of “developers”. Are you writing custom code? using SharePoint Designer? What about SharePoint Branding?  Are all of these considered developers? I would say yes. Are they interchangeable? I’d say no. Development in SharePoint is such a large beast in itself. I would say that it’s not so large that you can’t know it all well, but it is so large that there are many people who specialize in one particular category. If you are lucky enough to have someone on staff who knows it all well, you better make sure they are well taken care of because those guys are ready-made to move over to a consulting role and charge you 3 times what you are probably paying them. :) Some of the all-around rockstars are Eric Shupps, Andrew Connell (go Razorbacks), Rob Foster, Paul Schaeflein, and Todd Bleeker SharePoint Power User/No-Code Solutions Developer These SharePoint Swiss Army Knives are essential for quick wins in your organization. These people can twist the out-of-the-box functionality to make it do things you would not even imagine. Give these guys SharePoint Designer, jQuery, InfoPath, and a little time and they will create views, dashboards, and KPI’s that will blow your mind away and give your execs the “wow” they are looking for. Not only can they deliver that wow factor, but they can mashup, merge, and really help make your SharePoint application usable and deliver an overall better user experience. Before you hand off a project to your SharePoint Custom Code developer, let one of these rockstars look at it and show you what they can do (in probably less time). I would say the second most important role you can fill in your organization is one of these guys. Rockstars in this category are Christina Wheeler, Laura Rogers, Jennifer Mason, and Mark Miller SharePoint Developer – Custom Code If you want to really integrate SharePoint into your legacy systems, or really twist it and make it bend to your will, you are going to have to open up Visual Studio and write some custom code.  Remember, SharePoint is essentially just a big, huge, ginormous .NET application, so you CAN write code to make it do ANYTHING, but do you really want to spend the time and effort to do so? At some point with every other form of SharePoint development you are going to run into SOME limitation (SPD Workflows is the big one that comes to mind). If you truly want to knock down all the walls then custom development is the way to go. PLEASE keep in mind when you are looking for a custom code developer that a .NET developer does NOT equal a SharePoint developer. Just SOME of the things these guys write are: Custom Workflows Custom Web Parts Web Service functionality Import data from legacy systems Export data to legacy systems Custom Actions Event Receivers Service Applications (2010) These guys are also the ones generally responsible for packaging everything up into solution packages (you are doing that, right?). Rockstars in this category are Phil Wicklund, Christina Wheeler, Geoff Varosky, and Brian Jackett. SharePoint Branding “But it LOOKS like SharePoint!” Somebody call the WAAAAAAAAAAAAHMbulance…   Themes, Master Pages, Page Layouts, Zones, and over 2000 styles in CSS.. these guys not only have to be comfortable with all of SharePoint’s quirks and pain points when branding, but they have to know it TWICE for publishing and non-publishing sites.  Not only that, but these guys really need to have an eye for graphic design and be able to translate the ramblings of business into something visually stunning. They also have to be comfortable with XSLT, XML, and be able to hand off what they do to your custom developers for them to package as solutions (which you are doing, right?). These rockstars include Heater Waterman, Cathy Dew, and Marcy Kellar SharePoint Architect SharePoint Architects are generally SharePoint Admins or Developers who have moved into more of a BA role? Is that fair to say? These guys really have a grasp and understanding for what SharePoint IS and what it can do. These guys help you structure your farms to meet your needs and help you design your applications the correct way. It’s always a good idea to bring in a rockstar SharePoint Architect to do a sanity check and make sure you aren’t doing anything stupid.  Most organizations probably do not have a rockstar architect on staff. These guys are generally brought in at the deployment of a farm, upgrade of a farm, or for large development projects. I personally also find architects very useful for sitting down with the business to translate their needs into what SharePoint can do. A good architect will be able to pick out what can be done out-of-the-box and what has to be custom built and hand those requirements to the development Staff. Architects can generally fill in as an admin or a developer when needed. Some rockstar architects are Rick Taylor, Dan Usher, Bill English, Spence Harbar, Neil Hodgkins, Eric Harlan, and Bjørn Furuknap. Other Roles / Specialties On top of all these other roles you also get these people who specialize in things like Reporting, BDC (BCS in 2010), Search, Performance, Security, Project Management, etc... etc... etc... Again, most organizations will not have one of these gurus on staff, they’ll just pay out the nose for them when they need them. :) SharePoint End User Everyone else in your organization that touches SharePoint falls into this category. What they actually DO in SharePoint is determined by your governance and what permissions you give these guys. Hopefully you have these guys on a fairly short leash and are NOT giving them access to tools like SharePoint Designer. Sadly end users are the ones who truly make your deployment a success by using it, but are also your biggest enemy in breaking it.  :)  We love you guys… really!!! Okay, all that’s fine and dandy, but what should MY SharePoint team look like? It depends! Okay… Are you just doing out of the box team sites with no custom development? Then you are probably fine with a great Admin team and a great No-Code Solution Development team. How many people do you need? Depends on how busy you can keep them. Sorry, can’t answer the question about numbers without knowing your specific needs. I can just tell you who you MIGHT need and what they will do for you. I’ll leave you with what my ideal SharePoint Team would look like for a particular scenario: Farm / Organization Structure Dev, QA, and 2 Production Farms. 5000 – 10000 Users Custom Development and Integration with legacy systems Team Sites, My Sites, Intranet, Document libraries and overall company collaboration Team Rockstar SharePoint Administrator 2-3 junior SharePoint Administrators SharePoint Architect / Lead Developer 2 Power User / No-Code Solution Developers 2-3 Custom Code developers Branding expert With a team of that size and skill set, they should be able to keep a substantial SharePoint deployment running smoothly and meet your business needs. This does NOT mean that you would not need to bring in contract help from time to time when you need an uber specialist in one area. Also, this team assumes there will be ongoing development for the life of your SharePoint farm. If you are just going to be doing sporadic custom development, it might make sense to partner with an awesome firm that specializes in that sort of work (I can give you the name of a couple if you are interested).  Again though, the size of your team depends on the number of requests you are receiving and how much active deployment you are doing. So, don’t bring in a team that looks like this and then yell at me because they are sitting around with nothing to do or are so overwhelmed that nothing is getting done. I do URGE you to take the proper time to asses your needs and determine what team is BEST for your organization. Also, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not skimp on the talent. When it comes to SharePoint you really do get what you pay for when it comes to employees, contractors, and software.  SharePoint can become absolutely critical to your business and because you skimped on hiring a developer he created a web part that brings down the farm because he doesn’t know what he’s doing, or you hire an admin who thinks it’s fine to stick everything in the same Content Database and then can’t figure out why people are complaining. SharePoint can be an enormous blessing to an organization or it’s biggest curse. Spend the time and money to do it right, or be prepared to spending even more time and money later to fix it.

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  • Building a Windows Phone 7 Twitter Application using Silverlight

    On Monday I had the opportunity to present the MIX 2010 Day 1 Keynote in Las Vegas (you can watch a video of it here).  In the keynote I announced the release of the Silverlight 4 Release Candidate (well ship the final release of it next month) and the VS 2010 RC tools for Silverlight 4.  I also had the chance to talk for the first time about how Silverlight and XNA can now be used to build Windows Phone 7 applications. During my talk I did two quick Windows Phone 7 coding demos using...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Building a Store Locator ASP.NET Application Using Google Maps API (Part 3)

    Over the past two weeks I've showed how to build a store locator application using ASP.NET and the free Google Maps API and Google's geocoding service. Part 1 looked at creating the database to record the store locations. This database contains a table named Stores with columns capturing each store's address and latitude and longitude coordinates. Part 1 also showed how to use Google's geocoding service to translate a user-entered address into latitude and longitude coordinates, which could then be used to retrieve and display those stores within (roughly) a 15 mile area. At the end of Part 1, the results page listed the nearby stores in a grid. In Part 2 we used the Google Maps API to add an interactive map to the search results page, with each nearby store displayed on the map as a marker. The map added in Part 2 certainly improves the search results page, but the way the nearby stores are displayed on the map leaves a bit to be desired. For starters, each nearby store is displayed on the map using the same marker icon, namely a red pushpin. This makes it difficult to match up the nearby stores listed in the grid with those displayed on the map. Hovering the mouse over a marker on the map displays the store number in a tooltip, but ideally a user could click a marker to see more detailed information about the store, such as its address, phone number, a photo of the storefront, and so forth. This third and final installment shows how to enhance the map created in Part 2. Specifically, we'll see how to customize the marker icons displayed in the map to make it easier to identify which marker corresponds to which nearby store location. We'll also look at adding rich popup windows to each marker, which includes detailed store information and can be updated further to include pictures and other HTML content. Read on to learn more! Read More >

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  • Building a Store Locator ASP.NET Application Using Google Maps API (Part 3)

    Over the past two weeks I've showed how to build a store locator application using ASP.NET and the free <a href="http://code.google.com/apis/maps/">Google Maps API</a> and Google's geocoding service. <a href="http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/051910-1.aspx">Part 1</a> looked at creating the database to record the store locations. This database contains a table named <code>Stores</code> with columns capturing each store's address and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latitude">latitude</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude">longitude</a> coordinates. Part 1 also showed how to use Google's geocoding service to translate a user-entered address

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  • Building a Store Locator ASP.NET Application Using Google Maps API (Part 3)

    Over the past two weeks I've showed how to build a store locator application using ASP.NET and the free Google Maps API and Google's geocoding service. Part 1 looked at creating the database to record the store locations. This database contains a table named Stores with columns capturing each store's address and latitude and longitude coordinates. Part 1 also showed how to use Google's geocoding service to translate a user-entered address into latitude and longitude coordinates, which could then be used to retrieve and display those stores within (roughly) a 15 mile area. At the end of Part 1, the results page listed the nearby stores in a grid. In Part 2 we used the Google Maps API to add an interactive map to the search results page, with each nearby store displayed on the map as a marker. The map added in Part 2 certainly improves the search results page, but the way the nearby stores are displayed on the map leaves a bit to be desired. For starters, each nearby store is displayed on the map using the same marker icon, namely a red pushpin. This makes it difficult to match up the nearby stores listed in the grid with those displayed on the map. Hovering the mouse over a marker on the map displays the store number in a tooltip, but ideally a user could click a marker to see more detailed information about the store, such as its address, phone number, a photo of the storefront, and so forth. This third and final installment shows how to enhance the map created in Part 2. Specifically, we'll see how to customize the marker icons displayed in the map to make it easier to identify which marker corresponds to which nearby store location. We'll also look at adding rich popup windows to each marker, which includes detailed store information and can be updated further to include pictures and other HTML content. Read on to learn more! Read More >Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Building a Distributed Commerce Infrastructure in the Cloud using Azure and Commerce Server

    - by Lewis Benge
    One of the biggest questions I routinely get asked is how scalable Commerce Server is. Of course the text book answer is the product has been around for 10 years, powers some of the largest e-Commerce websites in the world, so it scales horizontally extremely well. One argument however though is what if you can't predict the growth of demand required of your Commerce Platform, or need the ability to scale up during busy seasons such as Christmas for a retail environment but are hesitant on maintaining the infrastructure on a year-round basis? The obvious answer is to utilise the many elasticated cloud infrastructure providers that are establishing themselves in the ever-growing market, the problem however is Commerce Server is still product which has a legacy tightly coupled dependency on Windows and IIS components. Commerce Server 2009 codename "R2" however introduced to the concept of an n-tier deployment of Microsoft Commerce Server, meaning you are no longer tied to core objects API but instead have serializable Commerce Entity objects, and business logic allowing for Commerce Server to now be built into a WCF-based SOA architecture. Presentation layers no-longer now need to remain on the same physical machine as the application server, meaning you can now build the user experience into multiple-technologies and host them in multiple places – leveraging the transport benefits that a WCF service may bring, such as message queuing, security, and multiple end-points. All of this logic will still need to remain in your internal infrastructure, for two reasons. Firstly cloud based computing infrastructure does not support PCI security requirements, and secondly even though many of the legacy Commerce Server dependencies have been abstracted away within this version of the application, it is still not a fully supported to be deployed exclusively into the cloud. If you do wish to benefit from the scalability of the cloud however, you can still achieve a great Commerce Server and Azure setup by utilising both the Azure App Fabric in terms of the service bus, and authentication services and Windows Azure to host any online presence you may require. The architecture would be something similar to this: This setup would allow you to construct your Commerce Services as part of your on-site infrastructure. These services would contain all of the channels custom business logic, and provide the overall interface back into the underlying Commerce Server components. It would be recommended that services are constructed around the specific business domain of the application, which based on your business model would usually consist of separate services around Catalogue, Orders, Search, Profiles, and Marketing. The App Fabric service bus is then used to abstract and aggregate further the services, making them available to the cloud and subsequently secured by App Fabrics authentication services. These services are now available for consumption by any client, using any supported technology – not just .NET. Thus meaning you are now able to construct apps for IPhone, integrate with Java based POS Devices, and any many other potential uses. This aggregation is useful, and forms the basis of the further strategy around diversifying and enhancing the e-Commerce experience, but also provides the foundation for the scalability we want to gain from utilising a cloud-based application platform. The Windows Azure application platform is Microsoft solution to benefiting from the true economies of scale in terms of the elasticity of the cloud. Just before the launch of the Azure Platform – Domino's pizza actually managed to run their whole SuperBowl operation from the scalability of Windows Azure, and simply switching back to their traditional operation the next day with no residual infrastructure costs. The platform also natively can subscribe to services and messages exposed within the AppFabric service bus, making it an ideal solution to build and deploy a presentation layer which will need to support of scalable infrastructure – such as a high demand public facing e-Commerce portal, or a promotion element of a brand. Windows Azure has excellent support for ASP.NET, including its own caching providers meaning expensive operations such as catalogue queries can persist in memory on the application server, reducing the demand on internal infrastructure and prioritising it for more business critical operations such as receiving orders and processing payments. Windows Azure also supports other languages too, meaning utilising this approach you can technically build a Commerce Server presentation layer in Java, PHP, or Ruby – or equally in ASP.NET or Silverlight without having to change any of the underlying business or Commerce Server implementation. This SOA-style architecture is one of the primary differentiators for Commerce Server as a product in the e-Commerce market, and now with the introduction of a WCF capability in Commerce Server 2009/2009 R2 the opportunities for extensibility of the both the user experience, and integration into third parties, are drastically increased, all with no effect to the underlying channel logic. So if you are looking at deployment options for your e-Commerce application to help support demand in a cost effective way. I would highly recommend you consider looking at Windows Azure, and if you have any questions in-particular about this style of deployment, please feel free to get in touch!

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  • Enterprise 2.0 Conference: Building Social Business

    - by kellsey.ruppel
    The way we work is changing rapidly, offering an enormous competitive advantage to those who embrace the new tools that enable contextual, agile and simplified information exchange and collaboration to distributed workforces and networks of partners and customers. As many of you are aware, Enterprise 2.0 is the term for the technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email. It provides business managers with access to the right information at the right time through a web of inter-connected applications, services and devices. Enterprise 2.0 makes accessible the collective intelligence of many, translating to a huge competitive advantage in the form of increased innovation, productivity and agility. The Enterprise 2.0 Conference takes a strategic perspective, emphasizing the bigger picture implications of the technology and the exploration of what is at stake for organizations trying to change not only tools, but also culture and process. Beyond discussion of the "why", there will also be in-depth opportunities for learning the "how" that will help you bring Enterprise 2.0 to your business.You won't want to miss this opportunity to learn and hear from leading experts in the fields of technology for business, collaboration, culture change and collective intelligence. Oracle is a proud Gold sponsor of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, taking place this week in Boston. Come and learn about Oracle at the following panel sessions and Market Leaders Theater Sessions. Tuesday, June 19, 2012 at 1:30 p.m. Market Theater Presentation Into the Activity Stream, and Beyond! Introducing Oracle Social Network Oracle Speaker: Christian Finn, Senior Director of Evangelism, Oracle WebCenter Tuesday, June 19, 2012 at 2:30 p.m.  Panel Session Innovation versus Integration Oracle Panel Speaker: Christian Finn, Senior Director of Evangelism, Oracle WebCenter Wednesday, June 20, 2012 at 1:30 p.m. Business Leadership Roundtable Oracle Panel Speaker: Christian Finn, Senior Director of Evangelism, Oracle WebCenter Wednesday, June 20, 2012 at 3:00 p.m. Market Theater Presentation Into the Activity Stream, and Beyond! Introducing Oracle Social Network Oracle Speaker: Christian Finn, Senior Director of Evangelism, Oracle WebCenter Thursday, June 21, 2012 at 8:30 a.m. Panel Session Collecting and Processing Big Data: Architecting Systems that Scale Oracle Panel Speaker: Ashok Joshi, Senior Director, Berkeley DB Development Thursday, June 21, 2012 at 11:00 a.m. Panel Session The Future of Big Data: What's Next Oracle Panel Speaker: Ashok Joshi, Senior Director, Berkeley DB Development Be sure to stop by and visit Oracle booth #501, to see live demonstrations of Oracle Social Network and Oracle WebCenter!

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  • Building a Mafia&hellip;TechFest Style

    - by David Hoerster
    It’s been a few months since I last blogged (not that I blog much to begin with), but things have been busy.  We all have a lot going on in our lives, but I’ve had one item that has taken up a surprising amount of time – Pittsburgh TechFest 2012.  After the event, I went through some minutes of the first meetings for TechFest, and I started to think about how it all came together.  I think what inspired me the most about TechFest was how people from various technical communities were able to come together and build and promote a common event.  As a result, I wanted to blog about this to show that people from different communities can work together to build something that benefits all communities.  (Hopefully I've got all my facts straight.)  TechFest started as an idea Eric Kepes and myself had when we were planning our next Pittsburgh Code Camp, probably in the summer of 2011.  Our Spring 2011 Code Camp was a little different because we had a great infusion of some folks from the Pittsburgh Agile group (especially with a few speakers from LeanDog).  The line-up was great, but we felt our audience wasn’t as broad as it should have been.  We thought it would be great to somehow attract other user groups around town and have a big, polyglot conference. We started contacting leaders from Pittsburgh’s various user groups.  Eric and I split up the ones that we knew about, and we just started making contacts.  Most of the people we started contacting never heard of us, nor we them.  But we all had one thing in common – we ran user groups who’s primary goal is educating our members to make them better at what they do. Amazingly, and I say this because I wasn’t sure what to expect, we started getting some interest from the various leaders.  One leader, Greg Akins, is, in my opinion, Pittsburgh’s poster boy for the polyglot programmer.  He’s helped us in the past with .NET Code Camps, is a Java developer (and leader in Pittsburgh’s Java User Group), works with Ruby and I’m sure a handful of other languages.  He helped make some e-introductions to other user group leaders, and the whole thing just started to snowball. Once we realized we had enough interest with the user group leaders, we decided to not have a Fall Code Camp and instead focus on this new entity. Flash-forward to October of 2011.  I set up a meeting, with the help of Jeremy Jarrell (Pittsburgh Agile leader) to hold a meeting with the leaders of many of Pittsburgh technical user groups.  We had representatives from 12 technical user groups (Python, JavaScript, Clojure, Ruby, PittAgile, jQuery, PHP, Perl, SQL, .NET, Java and PowerShell) – 14 people.  We likened it to a scene from a Godfather movie where the heads of all the families come together to make some deal.  As a result, the name “TechFest Mafia” was born and kind of stuck. Over the next 7 months or so, we had our starts and stops.  There were moments where I thought this event would not happen either because we wouldn’t have the right mix of topics (was I off there!), or enough people register (OK, I was wrong there, too!) or find an appropriate venue (hmm…wrong there, too) or find enough sponsors to help support the event (wow…not doing so well).  Overall, everything fell into place with a lot of hard work from Eric, Jen, Greg, Jeremy, Sean, Nicholas, Gina and probably a few others that I’m forgetting.  We also had a bit of luck, too.  But in the end, the passion that we had to put together an event that was really about making ourselves better at what we do really paid off. I’ve never been more excited about a project coming together than I have been with Pittsburgh TechFest 2012.  From the moment the first person arrived at the event to the final minutes of my closing remarks (where I almost lost my voice – I ended up being diagnosed with bronchitis the next day!), it was an awesome event.  I’m glad to have been part of bringing something like this to Pittsburgh…and I’m looking forward to Pittsburgh TechFest 2013.  See you there!

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  • Building a better .NET Application Configuration Class - revisited

    - by Rick Strahl
    Managing configuration settings is an important part of successful applications. It should be easy to ensure that you can easily access and modify configuration values within your applications. If it's not - well things don't get parameterized as much as they should. In this post I discuss a custom Application Configuration class that makes it super easy to create reusable configuration objects in your applications using a code-first approach and the ability to persist configuration information into various types of configuration stores.

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  • Building Web Applications with ACT and jQuery

    - by dwahlin
    My second talk at TechEd is focused on integrating ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery features into websites (if you’re interested in Silverlight you can download code/slides for that talk here). The content starts out by discussing ScriptManager features available in ASP.NET 3.5 and ASP.NET 4 and provides details on why you should consider using a Content Delivery Network (CDN).  If you’re running an external facing site then checking out the CDN features offered by Microsoft or Google is definitely recommended. The talk also goes into the process of contributing to the Ajax Control Toolkit as well as the new Ajax Minifier tool that’s available to crunch JavaScript and CSS files. The extra fun starts in the next part of the talk which details some of the work Microsoft is doing with the jQuery team to donate template, globalization and data linking code to the project. I go into jQuery templates, data linking and a new globalization option that are all being worked on. I want to thank Stephen Walther, Dave Reed and James Senior for their thoughts and contributions since some of the topics covered are pretty bleeding edge right now.The slides and sample code for the talk can be downloaded below.     Download Slides and Samples

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  • Building Interactive User Interfaces with Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX: Refreshing An UpdatePanel With Jav

    The ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel provides a quick and easy way to implement a snappier, AJAX-based user interface in an ASP.NET WebForm. In a nutshell, UpdatePanels allow page developers to refresh selected parts of the page (instead of refreshing the entire page). Typically, an UpdatePanel contains user interface elements that would normally trigger a full page postback - controls like Buttons or DropDownLists that have their AutoPostBack property set to True. Such controls, when placed inside an UpdatePanel, cause a partial page postback to occur. On a partial page postback only the contents of the UpdatePanel are refreshed, avoiding the "flash" of having the entire page reloaded. (For a more in-depth look at the UpdatePanel control, refer back to the Using the UpdatePanel installment in this article series.) Triggering a partial page postback refreshes the contents within an UpdatePanel, but what if you want to refresh an UpdatePanel's contents via JavaScript? Ideally, the UpdatePanel would have a client-side function named something like Refresh that could be called from script to perform a partial page postback and refresh the UpdatePanel. Unfortunately, no such function exists. Instead, you have to write script that triggers a partial page postback for the UpdatePanel you want to refresh. This article looks at how to accomplish this using just a single line of markup/script and includes a working demo you can download and try out for yourself. Read on to learn more! Read More >Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Learning Link Building Tactics

    If you ask search engine optimization professionals about most vital factors to get good ranking in SE results, almost all of them will say that it is "backlinks". Backlinks are like votes from other sites to yours and the more votes your site has, the better would be your site's ranking.

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