geeks with blogs - Page 131

Great opportunity to try Windows Azure over the next 7 days if you are a UK developer – act to

- by Eric Nelson

Are you a UK based developer who has been put off from trying out the Windows Azure Platform? Were you concerned that you needed to hand over credit card details even to use the introductory offer? Or concerned about how many charges you might run up as you played with “elastic computing”. Then we might have just what you need. 7 Days of access to the Windows Azure Platform – for FREE (expires June 6th 2010) If you are accepted, you will be given a Windows Azure Platfom subscription that will enable you to create Windows Azure hosted services and storage accounts, SQL Azure databases and AppFabric services without any fear of being charged between now and Sunday the 6th of June 2010. No credit card is required. Important: At the end of Sunday your subscription and all your code and data you have uploaded will be deleted. It is your responsibility to keep local copies of your code and data. Apply now To apply for this offer you need to: email ukdev AT microsoft.com with a subject line that starts “UKAZURETRAIL:” (This must be present) In the email you need to demonstrate you are UK based (.uk email alias or address or… be creative) And you must include 30 to 100 words explaining What your interest is in the Windows Azure Platform and Cloud Computing What you would use the 7 days to explore Some notes (please read!): We have a limited number of these offers to give away on a first come, first served basis (subject to meeting the above criteria). We plan to process all request asap – but there is a UK bank holiday weekend looming. We will do our best to process all by Tues afternoon (which would still give you 5 days of access) There will be no specific support for this offer. We will not be processing any requests that arrive after Tuesday 1st. In case you were wondering, there is no equivalent offer for developer outside of the UK. This offer is a direct result of UK based training we are currently doing which has some spare Azure capacity which we wanted to make best use of. Sorry in advance if you based outside of the UK. Related Links: If you are UK based, you should also join the UK Windows Azure Platform community http://ukazure.ning.com Microsoft UK Windows Azure Platform page

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Building apps that work Together

- by Tim Murphy

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tmurphy/archive/2013/07/03/building-apps-that-work-together.aspx Writing apps that stand alone will only get yon so far. If your app can allow the user to leverage other applications and share data you Can have a real winner on your hands. Jake Sabulsky started off by explaining that you should be concentrating on the core functionality of your app and letting the framework take care of the features that users require these days. This is implemented be leveraging contracts. When Windows 8 was released it included the File, Share and Pickers contracts. With the release of Windows 8.1 they have added the Contacts and Calendar contracts. There have been a number of improvements to the original contracts. The File URI contract will now automatically detect the size that a new windows should be opened and will also allow you to programmatically influence new window size. The Share contract has been enhanced by allowing apps to always share screenshots and links to the app in the store. To my thinking the contracts are one of the most powerful features of Windows 8. Take the time view this session and learn how to leverage them. Technorati Tags: BUILD 2013,Windows 8,Live tiles

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Satellite now think for themselves, Skynet becomes self-aware

- by iamjames

From the movies-become-reality department comes this little gem: New control system will allow satellites to 'think for themselves' "...engineers from the University of Southampton have developed what they say is the world’s first control system for programing satellites to think for themselves. It’s a cognitive software agent called sysbrain, and it allows satellites to read English-language technical documents, which in turn instruct the satellites on how to do things such as autonomously identifying and avoiding obstacles." Gee, why does this sound so incredibly familiar? Skynet (Terminator) "In the Terminator storyline, Skynet was originally installed into the U.S. military mainframe to control the national arsenal on August 4, 1997. On August 29 it gained self-awareness[1] and the panicking operators, realizing the extent of its abilities, attempted to shut it down. Skynet perceived the attempt to deactivate it as an attack and came to the conclusion that all of humanity would attempt to destroy it. To defend itself, it determined that humanity should be exterminated." Alright so it's not in control of the national arsenal, but it's only a matter of time before one of these satellites read Snooki's book and convinces a military satellite that we need to be exterminated.

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Turn your laptop into a wireless Access Point with Windows 7!

- by David Nudelman

Windows 7 offers a very cool feature where you can connect multiple devices to any wired and wireless network connection (hotel, cable, 3G, UMTS, EDGE, WIFI, RJ45, Ethernet, etc.) by turning your own laptop into a wireless AP (Access Point) to relay those devices not directly connected to the internet. For this just enter these two commands to an elevated (right click on CMD.EXE, run as administrator): netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid=YOURFRIENDLYSSID key=SOMEPASSWORD netsh wlan start hostednetwork At this point, if Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) is setup, anyone can connect to your SoftAP (if they know the PWD of course) and the traffic will be sent through whatever adapter you want. You can actually bridge it across an entirely different adapter... or the same on a different Wifi LAN. A GUI to set this up can be downloaded for free here: http://www.connectify.me/

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Special Event: Microsoft C++ team comes to Ft Lauderdale

- by Rainer

Microsoft C++ team comes to Ft Lauderdale Microsoft Office! Working effectively with Distributed Team - 05/04/2010 - 6:30 PM - Ft Lauderdale Microsoft Office - Terry Leeper - VC++ Program Manager ++ two C++ team members. Sign up at http://www.fladotnet.com/Reg.aspx?EventID=461

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Moving from Tortoise to TFS

- by MarkPearl

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

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Introducing Deep Fried Devcast

- by Matt Christian

I've been working on a new podcast for the game development community called the Deep Fried Devcast. Currently we are in pre-production but should have some episodes up in the near future. Here is a quick FAQ about the show: What is the Deep Fried Devcast? The Deep Fried Devcast is a bi-weekly show all about game development. The show will feature developer interviews, a focus on the technical aspects of game development (programming, technical design), the business of team game development (time management, project management), and other areas focused around the actual development of games. Wait, no game design? No game discussions?! Calm down, calm down. Although the focus of the podcast is on the technical aspects of game dev, there will be episodes and content focused on all areas of the gaming industry, including discussion on design, story, recent game releases, games we've been playing, etc... Anything could show up in the Deep Fried Devcast and nothing is off limits. How can I help? We're always looking for new content ideas, emails, and anything you want to send us (within some kind of reason!). You can even be a guest host if you want! Email us at: deepfrieddevcast [AT] gmail [DOT] com Where's the podcast?! We're still recording it! Don't worry, it will be up soon. Keep an eye on www.deepfrieddevcast.com for the latest updates (that will be up soon too!).

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New features in TFS Demo Setup 1.0.0.2

- by Tarun Arora

Release Notes – http://tfsdemosetup.codeplex.com/ | Download | Source Code | Report a Bug | Ideas Just pushed out the 2nd release of the TFS Demo setup on CodePlex, below a quick look at some of the new features/improvements in the tool… Details of the existing features can be found here. Feature 1 – Set up Work Items Queries as Team Favorites The task board looks cooler when the team favourite work item queries show up on the task board. The demo setup console application now has the ability to set up the work item queries as team favorites for you. If you want to see how you can add Team Favorites programmatically, refer to this blogpost here. Image 1 – Task board without Team Favorites Let’s see how the TFS Demo Setup application sets-up team favorites as part of the run… Open up the DemoDictionary.xml and you should be able to see the new node <TeamFavorites> this accepts multiple <TeamFavorite>. You simply need to specify the <Type> as Query and in the <Name> specify the name of the work item query that you would like added as a favorite. Image 2 – Highlighting the TeamFavorites block in DemoDictionary.xml So, when the demo set up application is run with the above config, work item queries “Blocked Tasks” and “Open Impediments” are added as team favorites. They then show up on the task board, as highlighted in the screen shot below. Image 3 – Team Favorites setup during the TFS demo setup app execution Feature 2 – Choose what you want to setup and exclude the rest I had a great feature request come in requesting the ability to exclude parts of the setup at the sole discretion of the executioner. To accommodate this, I have added an attribute with each block, the attribute “Run” accepts “true” or “false”. If you set the flag to true then at the time of execution that block would be considered for setup and if you set the flag to false, the block will be ignored during the setup. So, lets look at an example below… The attribute "Run” is set to true for TeamSettings, Team Favorites, TeamMembers and WorkItems. So, all of these would be setup as part of the demo setup application execution. Image 4 – New Attribute Run added to all blocks in DemoDictionary.xml If I did not want to recreate the team and did not want to add new work items but only wanted to add favorites and team members to the existing team “AgileChamps1” then I could simple run the application with below DemoDictionary.xml. Note – TeamSettings Run=”false” and WorkItems Run=”false”. Image 5 – TeamFavorites and TeamMembers set as true and others set to false Feature 3 – Usability Improvement If you try and assign a work item to a team member that does not exist then the application throws a nasty exception. This behaviour has now been changed, upon adding such a work item, the work items will be created and not assigned to any user. The work item id will be printed to the console making it simple for you to assign the work item manually. As you can see in the screen shot below, I am trying to assign the work item to a user “Tarun” and a user “v2” both are *not valid users in my team project collection* so the tool creates the work items and provides me the work item id and lets me know that since the user is invalid the work item could not be assigned to the user. Better user experience ae Image 6 – Behaviour if work item assigned to users are in valid users in team project That’s about it for the current release. I have some new features planned for the next release. Mean while if you have any ideas/comments please feel free to leave a comment. Stay tuned for more… Enjoy! Other posts on TFS Demo Setup can be found here.

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I’m back, now with Windows Live Writer goodness

- by Dave Yasko

I’ve reimaged my home laptop. I’m trying to populate it with as much free goodness as possible to see if the free way is as good as the old pay way. Turns out, I’ve got access to Windows Live Writer. I’m not sure where that came from, maybe with Vista Ultimate. I don’t know. Either way, it makes my blog posting a whole lot easier. So, maybe, just maybe, it will make me more likely to post. We’ll see. Later.

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Differences by pasting formatted text in Word and OneNote

- by Marko Apfel

By pasting formatted text in Word and OneNote both applications act a little bit different. Meanwhile Word supports RTF-formatting OneNote does not. OneNote could only handle HTML-formatting. In combination with presenting source code for Visual Studio the Add-in CopySourceAsHtml is available. During copying with Edit > Copy As HTML some option must set – notably Include RTF should be deactivated:

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Welcome to new blog!! Agile.NAV

- by ssmantha

I am quite ecstatic to announce a new blog, to which I am also a co-author. http://agilenav.wordpress.com. Agile.NAV brings in a vast amount of information of the work I did together with my colleague on bringing Microsoft Dynamics NAV under the hood of Team Foundation Server. For the past couple of years we have been working on creating development tools (more on integration side) for Microsoft Dynamics NAV which includes, Version Control, Automated Build system and our new automation testing integration with Dynamics NAV 2013. To start of with we got very good initial responses from community’s distinguished members like Luc van Vugt (see here). The idea is to drive the shift in mind-set for the Microsoft Dynamics NAV developer community. We share the same passion as people like Luc, about creating software in a professional manner.

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Microsoft JScript runtime error in Visual studio 2010

- by anirudha

There is many tool exist to debug JavaScript visual studio , firebug and some other great plugin are one of them. here I show you solution for Microsoft JScript runtime error: Object doesn't support this property or method if you search on Google for how to debug Javascript in Visual studio. all of them told you to follow this instruction :- go to Internet option in IE > advanced tab > Browsing section > uhcheck the both option disable script debugging for IE (internet explorer) disable script debugging (others). that’s the information you read are outdate or not true these days. in visual studio you can play with JavaScript debugging even these option is check or unchecked. off-course you can try these step in express version of visual studio. I found a little problem that my code [based on jQuery plugin] try to call some function. some of them not implement in browser so they call other so that’s fine and work in every browser. when visual studio found some function they trying to call and not implemented in browser I use to debug they tell me Microsoft JScript runtime error: Object doesn't support this property or method they tell me again whenever I put refresh [f5] in browser. so the thing they do you never like that. see error window first whenever code is not buggy and see everytime before see the page you want to see. this behavior harsh you. there is no problem whenever you not commonly used IE but whenever you really want to debugging you got some pain too from the behavior of this. well I have some patch for that if you really like the debugging in Visual studio with IE. so if you sure that code is not buggy or you really not want to see that’s window here is trick. when you debug the JavaScript in IE choose the compact mode and they never force you to see window first who tell the thing you not want to see. How to do that for reliefs from this pain in visual studio after debug the project or website IE gone automatically launch. go to Developer tool by pressing f12 > you see window something like this:- by the way they give you document mode IE 7 as default or browser mode based on your settings. first thing is that you need to set the compact view [any ] in browser mode. and next time the error window never come again who tell you Microsoft JScript runtime error: Object doesn't support this property or method

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HOWTO Turn off SPARC T4 or Intel AES-NI crypto acceleration.

- by darrenm

Since we released hardware crypto acceleration for SPARC T4 and Intel AES-NI support we have had a common question come up: 'How do I test without the hardware crypto acceleration?'. Initially this came up just for development use so developers can do unit testing on a machine that has hardware offload but still cover the code paths for a machine that doesn't (our integration and release testing would run on all supported types of hardware anyway). I've also seen it asked in a customer context too so that we can show that there is a performance gain from the hardware crypto acceleration, (not just the fact that SPARC T4 much faster performing processor than T3) and measure what it is for their application. With SPARC T2/T3 we could easily disable the hardware crypto offload by running 'cryptoadm disable provider=n2cp/0'. We can't do that with SPARC T4 or with Intel AES-NI because in both of those classes of processor the encryption doesn't require a device driver instead it is unprivileged user land callable instructions. Turns out there is away to do this by using features of the Solaris runtime loader (ld.so.1). First I need to expose a little bit of implementation detail about how the Solaris Cryptographic Framework is implemented in Solaris 11. One of the new Solaris 11 features of the linker/loader is the ability to have a single ELF object that has multiple different implementations of the same functions that are selected at runtime based on the capabilities of the machine. The alternate to this is having the application coded to call getisax() and make the choice itself. We use this functionality of the linker/loader when we build the userland libraries for the Solaris Cryptographic Framework (specifically libmd.so, and the unfortunately misnamed due to historical reasons libsoftcrypto.so) The Solaris linker/loader allows control of a lot of its functionality via environment variables, we can use that to control the version of the cryptographic functions we run. To do this we simply export the LD_HWCAP environment variable with values that tell ld.so.1 to not select the HWCAP section matching certain features even if isainfo says they are present. For SPARC T4 that would be: export LD_HWCAP="-aes -des -md5 -sha256 -sha512 -mont -mpul" and for Intel systems with AES-NI support: export LD_HWCAP="-aes" This will work for consumers of the Solaris Cryptographic Framework that use the Solaris PKCS#11 libraries or use libmd.so interfaces directly. It also works for the Oracle DB and Java JCE. However does not work for the default enabled OpenSSL "t4" or "aes-ni" engines (unfortunately) because they do explicit calls to getisax() themselves rather than using multiple ELF cap sections. However we can still use OpenSSL to demonstrate this by explicitly selecting "pkcs11" engine using only a single process and thread. $ openssl speed -engine pkcs11 -evp aes-128-cbc ... type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes aes-128-cbc 54170.81k 187416.00k 489725.70k 805445.63k 1018880.00k $ LD_HWCAP="-aes" openssl speed -engine pkcs11 -evp aes-128-cbc ... type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes aes-128-cbc 29376.37k 58328.13k 79031.55k 86738.26k 89191.77k We can clearly see the difference this makes in the case where AES offload to the SPARC T4 was disabled. The "t4" engine is faster than the pkcs11 one because there is less overhead (again on a SPARC T4-1 using only a single process/thread - using -multi you will get even bigger numbers). $ openssl speed -evp aes-128-cbc ... type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes aes-128-cbc 85526.61k 89298.84k 91970.30k 92662.78k 92842.67k Yet another cool feature of the Solaris linker/loader, thanks Rod and Ali. Note these above openssl speed output is not intended to show the actual performance of any particular benchmark just that there is a significant improvement from using hardware acceleration on SPARC T4. For cryptographic performance benchmarks see the http://blogs.oracle.com/BestPerf/ postings.

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How to Waste Your Marketing Budget

- by Mike Stiles

Philosophers have long said if you find out where a man’s money is, you’ll know where his heart is. Find out where money in a marketing budget is allocated, and you’ll know how adaptive and ready that company is for the near future. Marketing spends are an investment. Not unlike buying stock, the money is placed in areas the marketer feels will yield the highest return. Good stock pickers know the lay of the land, the sectors, the companies, and trends. Likewise, good marketers should know the media available to them, their audience, what they like & want, what they want their marketing to achieve…and trends. So what are they doing? And how are they doing? A recent eTail report shows nearly half of retailers planned on focusing on SEO, SEM, and site research technologies in the coming months. On the surface, that’s smart. You want people to find you. And you’re willing to let the SEO tail wag the dog and dictate the quality (or lack thereof) of your content such as blogs to make that happen. So search is prioritized well ahead of social, multi-channel initiatives, email, even mobile - despite the undisputed explosive growth and adoption of it by the public. 13% of retailers plan to focus on online video in the next 3 months. 29% said they’d look at it in 6 months. Buying SEO trickery is easy. Attracting and holding an audience with wanted, relevant content…that’s the hard part. So marketers continue to kick the content can down the road. Pretty risky since content can draw and bind customers to you. Asked to look a year ahead, retailers started thinking about CRM systems, customer segmentation, and loyalty, (again well ahead of online video, social and site personalization). What these investors are missing is social is spreading across every function of the enterprise and will be a part of CRM, personalization, loyalty programs, etc. They’re using social for engagement but not for PR, customer service, and sales. Mistake. Allocations are being made seemingly blind to the trends. Even more peculiar are the results of an analysis Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins made. She looked at how much time people spend with media types and how marketers are investing in those media. 26% of media consumption is online, marketers spend 22% of their ad budgets there. 10% of media time is spent with mobile, but marketers are spending 1% of their ad budgets there. 7% of media time is spent with print, but (get this) marketers spend 25% of their ad budgets there. It’s like being on Superman’s Bizarro World. Mary adds that of the online spending, most goes to search while spends on content, even ad content, stayed flat. Stock pickers know to buy low and sell high. It means peering with info in hand into the likely future of a stock and making the investment in it before it peaks. Either marketers aren’t believing the data and trends they’re seeing, or they can’t convince higher-ups to acknowledge change and adjust their portfolios accordingly. Follow @mikestilesImage via stock.xchng

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Visual Studio 2010: Fun with extensions

- by BizTalk Visionary

One of the powerful things that has come into Visual Studio over the last few years has been joy of extensions. With 2010 there seems to be even more!! Of course teaching old dogs like myself new tricks always takes time but interestingly enough some of the rules I learnt early in my working life over 30 years ago still hold true!! A derivation of one that was knocked into during my engineering apprenticeship and associated exams was RTFQ! Read the ‘flippin’ question. (I replaced the original ‘F’ with a more palatable version here!). Today I forgot that rule and didn’t RTFI (I being instructions) and spent a fruitless hour wondering why my Entity Framework POCO generator never appeared in the new project template list when I wanted to add it!! It was simple of course – I had only installed the Entity Framework POCO generator for web sites and not building a web project meant it would never appear!!! A quick look again I found the ‘other’ extension that supported my project type! So RTFI!!

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WCF Operations and Multidimensional Arrays

- by JoshReuben

You cant pass MultiD arrays accross the wire using WCF - you need to pass jagged arrays. heres 2 extension methods that will allow you to convert prior to serialzation and convert back after deserialization: public static T[,] ToMultiD<T>(this T[][] jArray) { int i = jArray.Count(); int j = jArray.Select(x => x.Count()).Aggregate(0, (current, c) => (current > c) ? current : c); var mArray = new T[i, j]; for (int ii = 0; ii < i; ii++) { for (int jj = 0; jj < j; jj++) { mArray[ii, jj] = jArray[ii][jj]; } } return mArray; } public static T[][] ToJagged<T>(this T[,] mArray) { var cols = mArray.GetLength(0); var rows = mArray.GetLength(1); var jArray = new T[cols][]; for (int i = 0; i < cols; i++) { jArray[i] = new T[rows]; for (int j = 0; j < rows; j++) { jArray[i][j] = mArray[i, j]; } } return jArray; } enjoy!

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Build 2012, some thoughts..

- by Dennis Vroegop

I think you probably read my rant about the logistics at Build 2012, as posted here, so I am not going into that anymore. Instead, let’s look at the content. (BTW If you did read that post and want some more info then read Nia Angelina’s post about Build. I have nothing to add to that.) As usual, there were good speakers and some speakers who could benefit from some speaker training. I find it hard to understand why Microsoft allows certain people on stage, people who speak English with such strong accents it’s hard for people, especially from abroad, to understand. Some basic training might be useful for some of them. However, it is nice to see that most speakers are project managers, program managers or even devs on the teams that build the stuff they talk about: there was a lot of knowledge on stage! And that means when you ask questions you get very relevant information. I realize I am not the average audience member here, I am regular speaker myself so I tend to look for other things when I am in a room than most audience members so my opinion might differ from others. All in all the knowledge of the speakers was above average but the presentation skills were most of the times below what I would describe as adequate. But let us look at the contents. Since the official name of the conference is Build Windows 2012 it is not surprising most of the talks were focused on building Windows 8 apps. Next to that, there was a lot of focus on Azure and of course Windows Phone 8 that launched the day before Build started. Most sessions dealt with C# and JavaScript although I did see a tendency to use C++ more. Touch. Well, that was the focus on a lot of sessions, that goes without saying. Microsoft is really betting on Touch these days and being a Touch oriented developer I can only applaud this. The term NUI is getting a bit outdated but the principles behind it certainly aren’t. The sessions did cover quite a lot on how to make your applications easy to use and easy to understand. However, not all is touch nowadays; still the majority of people use keyboard and mouse to interact with their machines (or, as I do, use keyboard, mouse AND touch at the same time). Microsoft understands this and has spend some serious thoughts on this as well. It was all about making your apps run everywhere on all sorts of devices and in all sorts of scenarios. I have seen a couple of sessions focusing on the portable class library and on sharing code between Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. You get the feeling Microsoft is enabling us devs to write software that will be ubiquitous. They want your stuff to be all over the place and they do anything they can to help. To achieve that goal they provide us with brilliant SDK’s, great tooling, a very, very good backend in the form of Windows Azure (I was particularly impressed by the Mobility part of Azure) and some fantastic hardware. And speaking of hardware: the partners such as Acer, Lenovo and Dell are making hardware that puts Apple to a shame nowadays. To illustrate: in Bellevue (very close to Redmond where Microsoft HQ is) they have the Microsoft Store located very close to the Apple Store, so it’s easy to compare devices. And I have to say: the Microsoft offerings are much, much more appealing that what the Cupertino guys have to offer. That was very visible by the number of people visiting the stores: even on the day that Apple launched the iPad Mini there were more people in the Microsoft store than in the Apple store. So, the future looks like it’s going to be fun. Great hardware (did I mention the Nokia Lumia 920? No? It’s brilliant), great software (Windows 8 is in a league of its own), the best dev tools (Visual Studio 2012 is still the champion here) and a fantastic backend (Azure.. need I say more?). It’s up to us devs to fill up the stores with applications that matches this. To summarize: it is great to be a Windows developer. PS. Did I mention Surface RT? Man….. People were drooling all over it wherever I went. It is fantastic :-) Technorati Tags: Build,Windows 8,Windows Phone,Lumia,Surface,Microsoft

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Disabling Navigation Flicks in WPF

- by Brian Genisio's House Of Bilz

I am currently working on a multi-touch application using WPF. One thing that has been irritating me with this development is an automatic navigation forward/back command that is bound to forward and backwards flicks. Many of my touch-based interactions were being thwarted by gestures picked up by WPF as navigation. I just wanted to disable this behavior. My programmatic back/forward calls are not affected by this change, which is nice. Here is how I did it: In my main window, I added the following command bindings:<NavigationWindow.CommandBindings> <CommandBinding Command="NavigationCommands.BrowseBack" Executed="DoNothing" /> <CommandBinding Command="NavigationCommands.BrowseForward" Executed="DoNothing" /> </NavigationWindow.CommandBindings> Then, the DoNothing method in the code-behind does nothing:private void DoNothing(object sender, ExecutedRoutedEventArgs e) { } There may be a better way to do this, but I haven’t found one.

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SharePoint 2010 and Windows Server Backup

- by Enrique Lima

A couple of months ago, a friend found a bit of information on TechNet that has proven to be quite useful. See, I am of the opinion SharePoint allows for smaller deployments to be made, and with that said, I am talking about SharePoint Foundation 2010 being used for the most part. But truly the point here is not to discuss whether or not a deployment of SharePoint Foundation 2010 or SharePoint Server 2010 is right or not. The fact is they do take place and happen. And information will reside there. Now, the point of this post is to raise awareness on options available for companies that have implemented it and maybe are a bit “iffy” on how to protect the information being placed in libraries and lists. In many cases I have found SharePoint comes first and business continuity becomes an afterthought. The documentation piece from TechNet states: “You can register SharePoint Server 2010 with Windows Server Backup by using the stsadm.exe -o -registerwsswriter operation to configure the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) writer for SharePoint Server. Windows Server Backup then includes SharePoint Server 2010 in server-wide backups. When you restore from a Windows Server backup, you can select Microsoft SharePoint Foundation (no matter which version of SharePoint 2010 Products is installed), and all components reported by the VSS writer forSharePoint Server 2010 on that server at the time of the backup will be restored. Windows Server Backup is recommended only for use with for single-server deployments.” Even in the event of single-server deployments you will have options to safeguard your data. The process will require that after you have executed the stsadm command above, you will then use Windows Server Backup to do a Full Server Backup. Then when the restore operation is needed you will be able to select specifically the section that has the SharePoint technologies backup. The restore process: Hope you find this to be a helpful post. I have found this to be specially handy in SharePoint deployments that are part of a Team Foundation Server deployment and that are isolated from any other SharePoint farm and such. Credits: Sean McDonough for passing along the information available on TechNet.

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Force Blank TextBox with ASP.Net MVC Html.TextBox

- by Doug Lampe

I recently ran into a problem with the following scenario: I have data with a parent/child data with a one-to-many relationship from the parent to the child. I want to be able to update parent and existing child data AND add a new child record all in a single post. I don't want to create a model just to store the new values. One of the things I LOVE about MVC is how flexible it is in dealing with posted data. If you have data that isn't in your model, you can simply use the non-strongly-typed HTML helper extensions and pass the data into your actions as parameters or use the FormCollection. I thought this would give me the solution I was looking for. I simply used Html.TextBox("NewChildKey") and Html.TextBox("NewChildValue") and added parameters to my action to take the new values. So here is what my action looked like: [HttpPost] public ActionResult EditParent(int? id, string newChildKey, string newChildValue, FormCollection forms) { Model model = ModelDataHelper.GetModel(id ?? 0); if (model != null) { if (TryUpdateModel(model)) { if (ModelState.IsValid) { model = ModelDataHelper.UpdateModel(model); } string[] keys = forms.GetValues("ChildKey"); string[] values = forms.GetValues("ChildValue"); ModelDataHelper.UpdateChildData(id ?? 0, keys, values); ModelDataHelper.AddChildData(id ?? 0, newChildKey, newChildValue); model = ModelDataHelper.GetModel(id ?? 0); } return View(report); } return new EmptyResult(); } The only problem with this is that MVC is TOO smart. Even though I am not using a model to store the new child values, MVC still passes the values back to the text boxes via the model state. The fix for this is simple but not necessarily obvious, simply remove the data from the model state before returning the view: ModelState.Remove("NewChildKey"); ModelState.Remove("NewChildValue"); Two lines of code to save a lot of headaches.

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Twin Cities Code Camp 8 (EIGHT?!?)

- by Chris Williams

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

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Sams Teach Yourself Windows Phone 7 Application Development in 24 Hours

- by Nikita Polyakov

I am extremely proud to announce that book I helped author is now out and available nationwide and online! Sams Teach Yourself Windows Phone 7 Application Development in 24 Hours It’s been a a great journey and I am honored to have worked with Scott Dorman, Joe Healy and Kevin Wolf on this title. Also worth mentioning the great work that editors from Sams and our technical reviewer Richard Bailey have put into this book! Thank you to everyone for support and encouragement! You can pick up the book from: http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0672335395 http://www.amazon.com/Teach-Yourself-Windows-Application-Development/dp/0672335395 Here is the cover to look for in the stores: Description: Covers Windows Phone 7.5 In just 24 sessions of one hour or less, you’ll learn how to develop mobile applications for Windows Phone 7! Using this book’s straightforward, step-by-step approach, you’ll learn the fundamentals of Windows Phone 7 app development, how to leverage Silverlight or the XNA Framework, and how to get your apps into the Windows Marketplace. One step at a time, you’ll master new features ranging from the new sensors to using launchers and choosers. Each lesson builds on what you’ve already learned, helping you get the job done fast—and get it done right! Step-by-step instructions carefully walk you through the most common Windows Phone 7 app development tasks. Quizzes and exercises at the end of each chapter help you test your knowledge. By the Way notes present interesting information related to the discussion. Did You Know? tips offer advice or show you easier ways to perform tasks. Watch Out! cautions alert you to possible problems and give you advice on how to avoid them. Learn how to... Choose an application framework Use the sensors Develop touch-friendly apps Utilize push notifications Consume web data services Integrate with Windows Phone hubs Use the Bing Map control Get better performance out of your apps Work with data Localize your apps Use launchers and choosers Market and sell your apps Thank you!

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Copy diagram with swimlanes in Enterprise Architect

- by blomqvist

This is a post mostly to myself, so that when I forget this I can come here and check it out :) (I forget about ctrl-b from time to time) When copying diagrams from Enterprise Architect you can use ctrl-B to include the swim-lanes. A normal ctrl-c will not give you the swim-lanes. A side effect is that ctrl—b gives you a copy of the whole diagram, you cannot select what objects to copy. So marking objects first or pressing ctrl-A to selects all is both unnecessary and meaningless since ctrl-b seems to mean: “copy the whole diagram now and include all the stuff in there, even the swimlanes” (which ctrl-A, ctrl-C does not).

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Workaround: build FBX in XNA raise OutOfMemoryException

- by Vitus

If you try to add large FBX 3D model to the XNA project, and build it, you can get an OutOfMemoryException build error like following: Error 1 Building content threw OutOfMemoryException: Exception of type 'System.OutOfMemoryException' was thrown. at System.Collections.Generic.List`1.set_Capacity(Int32 value) at System.Collections.Generic.List`1.EnsureCapacity(Int32 min) at System.Collections.Generic.List`1.InsertRange(Int32 index, IEnumerable`1 collection) at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.Graphics.VertexChannel`1.InsertRange(Int32 index, Int32 count) at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.Graphics.VertexContent.InsertRange(Int32 index, IEnumerable`1 positionIndexCollection) at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.Graphics.MeshBuilder.AddTriangleVertex(Int32 indexIntoVertexCollection) at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.MeshConverter.FillNodeWithInfoFromMesh(KFbxNode* fbxNode, String name, KFbxGeometryConverter* geometryConverter) at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.FbxImporter.ProcessInformationInNode(KFbxNode* fbxNode, String name, Boolean* partOfMainSkeleton, Boolean* warnIfBoneButNotChild) at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.FbxImporter.ProcessNode(ValueType parentAbsoluteTransform, NodeContent potentialParent, KFbxNode* fbxNode, Boolean partOfMainSkeleton, Boolean warnIfBoneButNotChild) at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.FbxImporter.ProcessNode(ValueType parentAbsoluteTransform, NodeContent potentialParent, KFbxNode* fbxNode, Boolean partOfMainSkeleton, Boolean warnIfBoneButNotChild) at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.FbxImporter.Import(String filename, ContentImporterContext context) at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.ContentImporter`1.Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.IContentImporter.Import(String filename, ContentImporterContext context) //additional calls here … My desktop PC have 8Gb RAM, and Visual Studio’s process devenv.exe use under 2Gb of it while build process (about 3.5-4Gb of RAM is always free). It’s obvious, that VS can’t address more than 2Gb of RAM, and when that limit is over, build process is fail. OS on my PC is Win x64, so I “charge” devenv.exe by using editbin.exe utility – in the VS Command prompt I run following: editbin "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" /LARGEADDRESSAWARE This command edits the image to indicate that the application can handle addresses larger than 2 gigabytes. After that FBX file successfully built! Of course, you must put proper path to devenv.exe, depend on your installation path. If you are on Win x86, you need to do additional action – more info here. P.S.: although now you can build a bigger files, than usual, keep in mind, that XNA have some restrictions on vertex buffer size etc., depend on your current XNA project profile (Reach or HiDef). And if your model’s vertexbuffer size more than 64Mb (with Reach profile), that model can’t be built and raise an error.

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Retrieving a list of eBay categories using the .NET SDK and GetCategoriesCall

- by Bill Osuch

eBay offers a .Net SDK for its Trading API - this post will show you the basics of making an API call and retrieving a list of current categories. You'll need the category ID(s) for any apps that post or search eBay. To start, download the latest SDK from https://www.x.com/developers/ebay/documentation-tools/sdks/dotnet and create a new console app project. Add a reference to the eBay.Service DLL, and a few using statements: using eBay.Service.Call; using eBay.Service.Core.Sdk; using eBay.Service.Core.Soap; I'm assuming at this point you've already joined the eBay Developer Network and gotten your app IDs and user tokens. If not: Join the developer program Generate tokens Next, add an app.config file that looks like this: <?xml version="1.0"?> <configuration> <appSettings> <add key="Environment.ApiServerUrl" value="https://api.ebay.com/wsapi"/> <add key="UserAccount.ApiToken" value="YourBigLongToken"/> </appSettings> </configuration> And then add the code to get the xml list of categories: ApiContext apiContext = GetApiContext(); GetCategoriesCall apiCall = new GetCategoriesCall(apiContext); apiCall.CategorySiteID = "0"; //Leave this commented out to retrieve all category levels (all the way down): //apiCall.LevelLimit = 4; //Uncomment this to begin at a specific parent category: //StringCollection parentCategories = new StringCollection(); //parentCategories.Add("63"); //apiCall.CategoryParent = parentCategories; apiCall.DetailLevelList.Add(DetailLevelCodeType.ReturnAll); CategoryTypeCollection cats = apiCall.GetCategories(); using (StreamWriter outfile = new StreamWriter(@"C:\Temp\EbayCategories.xml")) { outfile.Write(apiCall.SoapResponse); } GetApiContext() (provided in the sample apps in the SDK) is required for any call: static ApiContext GetApiContext() { //apiContext is a singleton, //to avoid duplicate configuration reading if (apiContext != null) { return apiContext; } else { apiContext = new ApiContext(); //set Api Server Url apiContext.SoapApiServerUrl = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["Environment.ApiServerUrl"]; //set Api Token to access eBay Api Server ApiCredential apiCredential = new ApiCredential(); apiCredential.eBayToken = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["UserAccount.ApiToken"]; apiContext.ApiCredential = apiCredential; //set eBay Site target to US apiContext.Site = SiteCodeType.US; return apiContext; } } Running this will give you a large (4 or 5 megs) XML file that looks something like this: <soapenv:Envelope xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"> <soapenv:Body> <GetCategoriesResponse > <Timestamp>2012-06-06T16:03:46.158Z</Timestamp> <Ack>Success</Ack> <CorrelationID>d02dd9e3-295a-4268-9ea5-554eeb2e0e18</CorrelationID> <Version>775</Version> <Build>E775_CORE_BUNDLED_14891042_R1</Build> - <CategoryArray> <Category> <BestOfferEnabled>true</BestOfferEnabled> <AutoPayEnabled>true</AutoPayEnabled> <CategoryID>20081</CategoryID> <CategoryLevel>1</CategoryLevel> <CategoryName>Antiques</CategoryName> <CategoryParentID>20081</CategoryParentID> </Category> <Category> <BestOfferEnabled>true</BestOfferEnabled> <AutoPayEnabled>true</AutoPayEnabled> <CategoryID>37903</CategoryID> <CategoryLevel>2</CategoryLevel> <CategoryName>Antiquities</CategoryName> <CategoryParentID>20081</CategoryParentID> </Category> (etc.) You could work with this, but I wanted a nicely nested view, like this: <CategoryArray> <Category Name='Antiques' ID='20081' Level='1'> <Category Name='Antiquities' ID='37903' Level='2'/> </CategoryArray> ...so I transformed the xml: private void TransformXML(CategoryTypeCollection cats) { XmlElement topLevelElement = null; XmlElement childLevelElement = null; XmlNode parentNode = null; string categoryString = ""; XmlDocument returnDoc = new XmlDocument(); XmlElement root = returnDoc.CreateElement("CategoryArray"); returnDoc.AppendChild(root); XmlNode rootNode = returnDoc.SelectSingleNode("/CategoryArray"); //Loop through CategoryTypeCollection foreach (CategoryType category in cats) { if (category.CategoryLevel == 1) { //Top-level category, so we know we can just add it topLevelElement = returnDoc.CreateElement("Category"); topLevelElement.SetAttribute("Name", category.CategoryName); topLevelElement.SetAttribute("ID", category.CategoryID); rootNode.AppendChild(topLevelElement); } else { // Level number will determine how many Category nodes we are deep categoryString = ""; for (int x = 1; x < category.CategoryLevel; x++) { categoryString += "/Category"; } parentNode = returnDoc.SelectSingleNode("/CategoryArray" + categoryString + "[@ID='" + category.CategoryParentID[0] + "']"); childLevelElement = returnDoc.CreateElement("Category"); childLevelElement.SetAttribute("Name", category.CategoryName); childLevelElement.SetAttribute("ID", category.CategoryID); parentNode.AppendChild(childLevelElement); } } returnDoc.Save(@"C:\Temp\EbayCategories-Modified.xml"); } Yes, there are probably much cleaner ways of dealing with it, but I'm not an xml expert… Keep in mind, eBay categories do not change on a regular basis, so you should be able to cache this data (either in a file or database) for some time. The xml returns a CategoryVersion node that you can use to determine if the category list has changed. Technorati Tags: Csharp, eBay

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