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• APress Deal of the Day 26/Jul/2013 - Pro Windows Embedded Compact 7

  - by TATWORTH

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TATWORTH/archive/2013/07/26/apress-deal-of-the-day-26jul2013---pro-windows-embedded.aspxToday's $10 deal of the day from APress at http://www.apress.com/9781430241799 is Pro Windows Embedded Compact 7"This book is the natural choice for developers who want to create sophisticated small-footprint devices for both consumer and enterprise use. After significant upgrades from Microsoft, Windows Embedded Compact 7 is more powerful than ever, as you'll discover in this carefully focused deep-dive."

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• How to add a permanent redirect (301) for an htm file in IIS 7

  - by bconlon

  Looking in Web Analytics I could see several external sites pointing at an old .htm file on my web server that no longer existed, so I thought I would get IIS to redirect to the new .aspx replacement. How hard could it be? This has annoyed me for quite a while today so here is the answer. 1. Install the Http Redirection module - this is not installed by default!! Windows 7 Start->Control Panel->Programs and Features->Turn Windows Features on or off. Internet Information Services->World Wide Web Services->Common Http Features->HTTP Redirection. Windows Server 2008 Start->Administrative Tools->Server Manager. Roles->Web Server (IIS). Role Services->Add Role Services. Common Http Features->HTTP Redirection. 2. Edit your web.config file <configuration>     .....     <location path="oldfile.htm">         <system.webServer>             <httpRedirect enabled="true" destination="/newfile.aspx" exactDestination="true" childOnly="true" httpResponseStatus="Permanent" />         </system.webServer>     </location>     ..... </configuration> When a user clicks or Google crawls ‘oldfile.htm’ it will get a permanent redirect to ‘/newfile.aspx’ - and should take any Page Rank to the new file.  #

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• FormatDate in Display Item Form Webpart

  - by H(at)Ni

  I've faced an issue that I wanted to display the date in the format of ('MMMM dd') that is retrieved from a sharepoint list in an arabic site collection. So, after googling this issue, I've found out that a possible solution to my poblem is using the function ddwrt:FormatDateTime that can be used as long as you'll include the following namespace xmlns:ddwrt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v2/DataView/runtime" My purpose was solved by writing this line of code in my xsl code behind for the webpart : ddwrt:FormatDateTime(string(@StartDate),3073,'MMMM dd') but that worked only if the webpart is inserted into an English site . After trying to search but in vain, I started to use my guesses that ended up doing something like that: ddwrt:FormatDateTime(ddwrt:FormatDateTime(string(@StartDate),3073,'dd/MM/yyyy'), 3073, 'MMMM dd') And the cause of the problem was that sharepoint parses the date as 'MM/dd/yyyy' which I think could be related to server regional settings, so I had to force it to parse the date in arabic-Egypt format as 'dd/MM/yyyy' in order to get the correct 'Month Day' format as expected.

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• The Solution

  - by Patrick Liekhus

  So I recently attended a class about time management as well as read the book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey.  Both have been instrumental in helping me get my priorities aligned as well as keep me focused. The reason I bring this up is that it gave me a great idea for a small application with which to create a great technical stack solution that would be easy to demo and explain.  Therefore, the project from this point forward with be the Liekhus.TimeTracker application which will bring some the time management skills that I have acquired into a technical implementation.  The idea is rather simple, but leverages some of the basic principles of Covey along with some of the worksheets that I garnered from class.  The basics are as such: 1) a plan is a must have and 2) write it down!  A plan not written down is just an idea.  How many times have you had an idea that didn’t materialize?  Exactly.  Hence why I am writing it all down now! The worksheet consists of a few simple columns that I will outline below as well as some modifications that I made according to the Covey habits.  The worksheet looks like the following: Status Issue Area CQ Notes P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   The idea is really simple and straightforward; you write down all your tasks and keep track of them along the way.  The status stands for (P)ending, (F)inished or (L)ater.  You write a quick title for the issue and select the CQ (Covey Quadrant) with which the issue occurs.  The notes section is for things that happen while you are working through the issue.  And last, but not least, is the Area column that I added as a way to identify the Role or Area of your life that this task falls within based upon Covey’s teachings. The second part of this application is a simple phone log that allows you to track your phone conversations throughout the day.  All of this is currently done on a sheet of paper, but being involved in technology, I want it to have bells and whistles.  Therefore, this is my simple idea for a project that will allow me to test my theories about coding and implementations.  Stay tuned as the next session will be flushing out the concept and coming up with user stories to begin the SCRUM process. Thanks

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• Using PreApplicationStartMethod for ASP.NET 4.0 Application to Initialize assemblies

  - by ChrisD

  Sometimes your ASP.NET application needs to hook up some code before even the Application is started. Assemblies supports a custom attribute called PreApplicationStartMethod which can be applied to any assembly that should be loaded to your ASP.NET application, and the ASP.NET engine will call the method you specify within it before actually running any of code defined in the application. Lets discuss how to use it using Steps : 1. Add an assembly to an application and add this custom attribute to the AssemblyInfo.cs. Remember, the method you speicify for initialize should be public static void method without any argument. Lets define a method Initialize. You need to write : [assembly:PreApplicationStartMethod(typeof(MyInitializer.InitializeType), "InitializeApp")] 2. After you define this to an assembly you need to add some code inside InitializeType.InitializeApp method within the assembly. public static class InitializeType {     public static void InitializeApp()     {           // Initialize application     } } 3. You must reference this class library so that when the application starts and ASP.NET starts loading the dependent assemblies, it will call the method InitializeApp automatically. Warning Even though you can use this attribute easily, you should be aware that you can define these kind of method in all of your assemblies that you reference, but there is no guarantee in what order each of the method to be called. Hence it is recommended to define this method to be isolated and without side effect of other dependent assemblies. The method InitializeApp will be called way before the Application_start event or even before the App_code is compiled. This attribute is mainly used to write code for registering assemblies or build providers. Read Documentation I hope this post would come helpful.

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• Unable to Sign in to the Microsoft Online Services Signin application from Windows 7 client located behind ISA firewall

  - by Ravindra Pamidi

  A while ago i helped a customer troubleshoot authentication problem with Microsoft Online Services Signin application.  This customer was evaluating Microsoft BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services) and was having trouble using the single sign on application behind ISA 2004 firewall.The network structure is fairly simple with single Windows 2003 Active Directory domain and Windows 7 clients. On a successful logon to the Microsoft Online Services Signin application, this application provides single signon functionality to all of Microsoft online services in the BPOS package. Symptoms:When trying to signin it fails with error "The service is currently unavailable. Please try again later. If problems continue, contact your service administrator". If ISA 2004 firewall is removed from the picture the authentication succeeds.Troubleshooting: Enabled ISA Server firewall logging along with Microsoft Network Monitor tool on the Windows 7 Client while reproducing the issue. Analysis of the ISA Server Firewall logs and Microsoft Network capture revealed that the Microsoft Online Services Sign In application when sending request to ISA Server does not send the domain credentials and as a result ISA Server responds with an error code of HTTP 407 Proxy authentication required listing out the supported authentication mechanisms.  The application in question is expected to send the credentials of the domain user in response to this request. However in this case, it fails to send the logged on user's domain credentials. Bit of researching on the Internet revealed that The "Microsoft Online Services Sign In" application by default does not support Outbound Internet Proxy authentication. In order for it to send the logged on user's domain credentials we had to make  changes to its configuration file "SignIn.exe.config" located under "Program Files\Microsoft Online Services\Sign In" folder. Step by Step details to configure the configuration file are documented on Microsoft TechNet website given below.  Configure your outbound authenticating proxy serverhttp://www.microsoft.com/online/help/en-us/helphowto/cc54100d-d149-45a9-8e96-f248ecb1b596.htm After the above problem was addressed we were still not able to use the "Microsoft Online Services Sign In" application and it failed with the same error.  Analysis of another network capture revealed that the application in question is now sending the required credentials and the connection seems to terminate at a later stage. Enabled verbose logging for the "Microsoft Online Services Sign In" application and then reproduced the problem. Analysis of the logs revealed a time difference between the local client and Microsoft Online services server of around seven minutes which is above the acceptable time skew of five minutes. Excerpt from Microsoft Online Services Sign In application verbose log:  1/26/2012 1:57:51 PM Verbose SingleSignOn.GetSSOGenericInterface SSO Interface URL: https://signinservice.apac.microsoftonline.com/ssoservice/UID1/26/2012 1:57:52 PM Exception SSOSignIn.SignIn The security timestamp is invalid because its creation time ('2012-01-26T08:34:52.767Z') is in the future. Current time is '2012-01-26T08:27:52.987Z' and allowed clock skew is '00:05:00'.1/26/2012 1:57:52 PM Exception SSOSignIn.SignIn  Although the Windows 7 Clients successfully synchronized time to the domain controller for the domain, the domain controller was not configured to synchronize time with external NTP servers. This caused a gradual drift in time on the network thus resulting in the above issue. Reconfigured the domain controller holding the PDC FSMO role to synchronize time with external time source ( time.nist.gov ) and edited the system policy on the ISA server firewall to allow NTP traffic to time.nist.gov Configure the time source for the forest:Windows Time Servicehttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc794937(WS.10).aspx Forced synchronization of Windows time using the command w32tm /resync on the domain controller and later on the clients each of which had corrected the seven minutes difference. This resolved the problem with logon to Microsoft Online Services Sign In.

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• Hello NHibernate! Quickstart with NHibernate (Part 1)

  - by BobPalmer

  When I first learned NHibernate, I could best describe the experience as less of a learning curve and more like a learning cliff.  A large part of that was the availability of tutorials.  In this first of a series of articles, I will be taking a crack at providing people new to NHibernate the information they need to quickly ramp up with NHibernate. For the first article, I've decided to address the gap of just giving folks enough code to get started.  No UI, no fluff - just enough to connect to a database and do some basic CRUD operations.  In future articles, I will discuss a repository pattern for NHibernate, parent-child relationships, and other more advanced topics. You can find the entire article via this Google Docs link: http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AUP-rKyyUMKhZGczejdxeHZfOGMydHNqdGc0&hl=en Enjoy! -Bob

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• Think before you animate

  - by David Paquette

  Animations are becoming more and more common in our applications.  With technologies like WPF, Silverlight and jQuery, animations are becoming easier for developers to use (and abuse).  When used properly, animation can augment the user experience.  When used improperly, animation can degrade the user experience.  Sometimes, the differences can be very subtle. I have recently made use of animations in a few projects and I very quickly realized how easy it is to abuse animation techniques.  Here are a few things I have learned along the way. 1) Don’t animate for the sake of animating We’ve all seen the PowerPoint slides with annoying slide transitions that animate 20 different ways.  It’s distracting and tacky.  The same holds true for your application.  While animations are fun and becoming easy to implement, resist the urge to use the technology just because you think the technology is amazing.   2) Animations should (and do) have meaning I recently built a simple Windows Phone 7 (WP7) application, Steeped (download it here).  The application has 2 pages.  The first page lists a number of tea types.  When the user taps on one of the tea types, the application navigates to the second page with information about that tea type and some options for the user to choose from.       One of the last things I did before submitting Steeped to the marketplace was add a page transition between the 2 pages.  I choose the Slide / Fade Out transition.  When the user selects a tea type, the main page slides to the left and fades out.  At the same time, the details page slides in from the right and fades in.  I tested it and thought it looked great so I submitted the app.  A few days later, I asked a friend to try the app.  He selected a tea type, and I was a little surprised by how he used the app.  When he wanted to navigate back to the main page, instead of pressing the back button on the phone, he tried to use a swiping gesture.  Of course, the swiping gesture did nothing because I had not implemented that feature.  After thinking about it for a while, I realized that the page transition I had chosen implied a particular behaviour.  As a user, if an action I perform causes an item (in this case the page) to move, then my expectation is that I should be able to move it back.  I have since added logic to handle the swipe gesture and I think the app flows much better now. When using animation, it pays to ask yourself:  What story does this animation tell my users?   3) Watch the replay Some animations might seem great initially but can get annoying over time.  When you use an animation in your application, make sure you try using it over and over again to make sure it doesn’t get annoying.  When I add an animation, I try watch it at least 25 times in a row.  After watching the animation repeatedly, I can make a more informed decision whether or not I should keep the animation.  Often, I end up shortening the length of the animations.   4) Don’t get in the users way An animation should never slow the user down.  When implemented properly, an animation can give a perceived bump in performance.  A good example of this is a the page transitions in most of the built in apps on WP7.  Obviously, these page animations don’t make the phone any faster, but they do provide a more responsive user experience.  Why?  Because most of the animations begin as soon as the user has performed some action.  The destination page might not be fully loaded yet, but the system responded immediately to user action, giving the impression that the system is more responsive.  If the user did not see anything happen until after the destination page was fully loaded, the application would feel clumsy and slow.  Also, it is important to make sure the animation does not degrade the performance (or perceived performance) of the application.   Jut a few things to consider when using animations.  As is the case with many technologies, we often learn how to misuse it before we learn how to use it effectively.

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• Event notifications for Reporting Systems

  - by Marc Schluper

  The last couple of months I have been working on an application that allows people to browse a data mart. Nice, but nothing new. In this context I have an idea that I want to publish before anyone else patents it: event notifications. You see, reporting systems are not used as much as we’d like. Typically, users don’t know where to look for reports that might interest them. At best, there are some standard reports that people generate every so often, i.e. based on a time trigger. Or some reporting systems can be configured to send monthly reports around, for convenience. But apart from that, the reporting system is just sitting there, waiting for the rare curious user who makes the effort to dig a bit for treasures to be found. Wouldn’t it be great if there were data triggers? Imagine we could configure the reporting system to let us know when something interesting has happened. It would send us a message containing a link that would take us to the relevant section of the reporting system, showing a report with all the data pertaining to that event, preparing us for proper actions. Here in the North West this would really be great. You see, it rains here most of the time from October to June, so why even check the weather forecast? But sometimes, sometimes it snows. And sometimes the sun shines. So rather than me going to the weather site and seeing over and over again that it will be raining, making me think “why bother?” I’d like to configure the weather site so that it lets me know when the rain stops. Now, hopefully nobody has patented this idea already. Let me know.

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• SilverlightShow for 20-26 Dec 2010

  - by Dave Campbell

  Check out the Top Five most popular news at SilverlightShow for last week (20 - 26 Dec 2010). The most popular news for last week is Ryan Alford's solution on handling an error in Silverlight 4 when using Entity Framework 4, followed by Jeremy Likness' video on building an RSS Feed Reader in Silverlight. Here is SilverlightShow's weekly top 5: Silverlight 4 - Productivity Power Tools and EF4 A Silverlight MVVM Feed Reader from Scratch in 30 Minutes Resizable Grid Using Thumb Controls A Simplified Grid Markup for Silverlight and WPF Announcing the Winner of Telerik Silverlight controls in SilverlightShow Post-webinar Survey Visit and bookmark SilverlightShow. Stay in the 'Light

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• Something about Property Management or &hellip; the understanding of SharePoint Admins/roles ?!?

  - by Enrique Lima

  When I talk about SharePoint, for some reason it comes to my mind as if it were property management and all the tasks associated with it. So, imagine you have a lot ( a piece of land of sorts), you then decide there is something you want to do with it.  So, you make the choice of having a building built.  Now, in order to go forward with your plan, you need to check what the rules/regulations are.  Has is it been zoned residential, commercial, industrial … you get the idea.  This to me sounds like Governance.  The what am I to do given a defined set of rules. We keep on moving forward based on those rules.  And with this we start the process of building, the building process takes us to survey the land, identify what our boundaries are.  And as we go along we start getting the idea in our head as to what we will do as far as the building goes.  We identify the essentials of the building, basic services and such.  All in all, we plan.  And as with many things we do, we like solid foundations.  What a solid foundation looks like will depend on where and what we build.  The way buildings are built depends in many ways in being able to foresee the potential for natural disasters or to try to leverage the lay of the land.  Sound familiar?  We have done our Requirements Gathering. We have the building in place, we have followed the zoning rules, we have implemented services.  But we need someone to manage the building, now we move on to the human side of the story.  We want to establish a means to normalcy in the building, someone that can be the monitoring agent as to the “what’s going on?” of it.  This person will be tasked with making sure all basic services are functional, that measures are taken if there is an issue and so on.  Enter the Farm Administrator. In a way, we establish an extension of the rules to make sure the building and the apartments/offices build follow a standard set of rules too. Now, in turn you will have people leasing or buying the apartments/offices, they will be the keepers of that space.  So, now we are building sites, we have moved from having the building (farm) ready, to leasing/selling offices/apartments (site collections).  There will be someone assuming responsibility for those offices, that person will authorize or be informed about activities and also who not only gets a code into the building, but perhaps a key to the office.  Enter Site Collection Administrator.  And then perhaps we move on to the person that would be responsible for specifics within the office, for example a Human Resources Manager or Coordinator.  They will have specific control and knowledge about people.  A facilities coordinator, and so on.  I would translate that into Site Administrators. With that said then, we identify the following: Role Name Responsibility (but not limited to) Farm Administrator Infrastructure Site Collection Admin Policies for Content, Hierarchy, Recycle Bin, Security and Access Site Owner (Site Admin) Security and Access, Training, Guidance, Manage Templates All in all there are different levels of responsibility to be handled, but it is very important to understand what they are and what they mean. Here is a link to very well laid out explanation on this … http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2009/08/11/site-managers-and-end-user-expectations-roles-and-responsibilities/

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• BizTalk 2009 - Error when Testing Map with Flat File Source Schema

  - by StuartBrierley

  I have recently been creating some flat file schemas using the BizTalk Server 2009 Flat File Schema Wizard.  I have then been mapping these flat file schemas to a "normal" xml schema format. I have not previsouly had any cause to map flat files and ran into some trouble when testing the first of these flat file maps; with an instance of the flat file as the source it threw an XSL transform error: Test Map.btm: error btm1050: XSL transform error: Unable to write output instance to the following <file:///C:\Documents and Settings\sbrierley\Local Settings\Temp\_MapData\Test Mapping\Test Map_output.xml>. Data at the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 1. Due to the complexity of the map in question I decided to created a small test map using the same source and destination schemas to see if I could pinpoint the problem.  Although the source message instance vaildated correctly against the flat file schema, when I then tested this simplified map I got the same error. After a time of fruitless head scratching and some serious google time I figured out what the problem was. Looking at the map properties I noticed that I had the test map input set to "XML" - for a flat file instance this should be set to "native".

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• .NET Code Evolution

  - by Alois Kraus

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

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• A quick hello to the Western Kentucky .NET User Group

  - by Muljadi Budiman

  A few days back, I got a chance to speak at the Western Kentucky .NET User Group meeting in Murray, Kentucky.  The opportunity came up because the original speaker, Jeff Blankenburg, had another obligation and was thus unable to come to this meeting.  I volunteered to deliver his presentation, which is an overview of MIX10 conference. It was a great experience for me; got to drive around and do a little bit of sight-seeing – can’t say I’ve ever been to Kentucky before, so first trip ever there.  I got to meet the user group’s current lead, Tom Turner and got to chat and discuss about all kinds of stuff with the other members.  Cheers to Matt Gawarecki and Brandon Sharp! The presentation itself mostly covers new features in Visual Studio 2010, which was recently released on April 12 – got to demonstrate Historical Debugging in IntelliTrace, Parallel Stacks, View Call Hierarchy and show some Extensions.  We also covered some of the new functionalities in Silverlight 4 (using webcams, drag & drop support among others) and I got to show off Scott Guthrie’s Windows Phone 7 Twitter app.  Altogether, it was quite a bit to cover in 70 minutes or so, but I think everyone enjoyed it. Jeff provided me with the presentation slides (which I modify a bit) and demo applications; so I’m putting it up here for those that may be interested in downloading them.  Please keep in mind that all the demos were made with VS2010 RC, so there may be slight tweaks to get it to work on the RTM version.

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• I Clobbered a Leopard with a Window Last Night

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  I’ve had my 15” Mac Book Pro for a little over a year now, and its hands-down the best laptop I’ve ever owned…hardware wise. And I tried, I really really tried, to like OSX. I even bought Parallels so I could run Windows 7 and all my development tools while still trying to live in an OSX world. But in the end, I missed Windows too much. There were just too many shortcomings with OSX that kept me from being productive. For one thing, Office for Mac is *not* Office for Windows. The applications are written by different teams, and Excel on the Mac is just different enough to be painful. The VM experience was adequate, but my MBP would heat up like crazy when running it and the experience trying to get Windows apps to interact with an OSX file system was awkward. And I found I was in the VM more than I thought I’d be. iMovie is not as easy to use for doing simple movie editing as Windows Movie Maker. There’s no free blog editing software for OSX that’s on par with Windows Live Writer. And really, all I was using OSX for was Twitter (which I can use a Windows client for) and web browsing (also something Windows can provide obviously). So I had to ask myself – why am I forcing myself to use an operating system I don’t like, on a laptop that can support Windows 7? And so I paved my MBP and am happily running Windows 7 on it…and its fantastic! All the good stuff with the hardware is still there with the goodness of Win 7. Happy happy. I did run into some snags doing this though, and that’s really what this blog post is about – things to be aware of if you want to install Win 7 directly on your MBP metal. First, Ensure You Have Your Original Mac Install Disk This was a warning my buddy Dylan, who’s been running Win 7 on his MBP for a while now, gave me early on. The reason you need that original disk is that the hardware drivers you need are all located there. Apparently you can’t easily download them, so make sure you have them ahead of time. Second, Forget BootCamp The only reason you need BootCamp is if you still want the option to boot into OSX. If you don’t, then you don’t need BootCamp. In fact, you don’t even need BootCamp to install Win 7. What you *will* need though is a DVD with Win 7 burnt on it. Apple doesn’t support bootable USB drives. Well, actually they do for Mac Book Airs which don’t come with optical drives…but to get it working you’ll need to edit a system file of BootCamp so your make of MBP is included in an XML document, and even then you *still* are using BootCamp meaning you’ll be making an OSX partition. So don’t worry about BootCamp, just burn a Windows 7 disc, put it into the DVD drive, and restart your MBP. Third, Know The Secret Commands So after putting in the Windows 7 DVD and restarting your MBP, you’ll want to hold down the ‘C’ key during boot up. This tells the MBP that it should boot from the DVD drive instead of the hard drive. Interestingly, it appears you don’t have to do this if its the Mac OSX install disc (more on that in a second), but regardless – hold down C and Windows will start the install process. Next up is the partition process. You’ll notice that there’s a partition called ETI or something like that. This has to do with the drive format that Apple uses and how they partition their system drives. What I did – I blew it away! At first I didn’t, but I was told I couldn’t install Windows on the remaining space due to the different drive format. Blowing away the ETI partition (and all other partitions) allowed me to continue the Windows install. *REMEMBER –  No warranty is provided or implied, just telling you what I did and how I got it to work. Ok, so now Windows is installed and I’m rebooting. Everything looks good, but I need drivers! So I put in the OSX install DVD and run the BootCamp assistant which installs all the Windows drivers I need. Fantastic! Oh, I need to restart – no problem. OH NO, PROBLEM! I left the OSX install DVD in the drive and now the MBP wants to boot from the drive and install OSX! I’m not holding down the C key, what the heck?! Ok, well there must be a way to eject this disk…hmm…no physical button on the side…the eject button doesn’t seem to work on the keyboard…no little pin hole to insert something to force the disc out…well what the…?! It turns out, if you want to eject a disc at boot up, you need (and I kid you not) to plug a mouse into the laptop and hold down the right-click button while its booting. This ejected the disc for me. Seriously. Finally, Things You Should Be Aware Of Once you have Windows up and running there’s a few things you need to be aware of, mainly new keyboard shortcuts. For instance, on the Mac keyboard there is no Home, End, PageUp or PageDown. There’s also no obvious way to do something like select large amounts of text (like you would by holding Shift-Home at the end of a line of text for instance). So here’s some shortcuts you need to know: Home – fn + left arrow End – fn + right arrow Select a line of text as you would with the Home key – Shift + fn + left arrow Select a line of text as you would with the End key – Shift + fn + right arrow Page Up – fn + up arrow Page Down – fn + down arrow Also, you’ll notice that the awesome Mac track pad doesn’t respond to taps as clicks. No fear, this is just a setting that needs to be altered in the BootCamp control panel (that controls the Mac Hardware-specific settings within Windows, you can access it easily from the system tray icon) One other thing, battery life seems a bit lower than with OSX, but then again I’m also doing more than Twitter or web browsing on this thing now. Conclusion My laptop runs awesome now that I have Windows 7 on there. It’s obviously up to individual taste, but for me I just didn’t see benefits to living in an OSX world when everything I needed lived in Windows. And also, I finally am back to an operating system that doesn’t require me to eject a USB drive before physically removing it! It’s 2012 folks, how has this not been fixed?! D

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• Dallas First Regionals 2012&ndash; For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology

  - by T

  Wow!  That is all I have to say after the last 3 days. Three full fun filled days in a world that fed the geek, sparked the competitor, inspired the humanitarian, encouraged the inventor, and continuously warmed my heart.  As part of the Dallas First Regionals, I was awed by incredible students who teach as much as they learn, inventive and truly caring mentors that make mentoring look easy, and completely passionate and dedicated volunteers that bring meaning to giving all that you have and making events fun and safe for all.  If you have any interest in innovation, robotics, or highly motivated students, I can’t recommend anything any higher than visiting a First Robotics event. This is my third year with First and I was honored enough to serve the Dallas First Regionals as both a Web Site evaluator and as the East Field Volunteer Coordinator.  This was also the first year my daughter volunteered with me.  My daughter and I both recognize how different the First program is from other team events.  The difference with First is that everyone is a first class citizen.   It is a difference we can feel through experiencing and observing interactions between executives, respected engineers, students, and event staff.  Even with a veracious competition, you still find a lot of cooperation and we never witnessed any belittling between teams or individuals. First Robotics coined the term “Gracious Professionalism”.   It's a way of doing things that encourages high-quality work, emphasizes the value of others, and respects individuals and the community.1 I was introduced to this term as the Volunteer Coordinator when I was preparing the volunteer instructional speech.  Through the next few days, I discovered it is truly core to everything that First does.  One of the ways First accomplishes Gracious Professionalism is by utilizing another term they came up with which is “CoopertitionTM”. At FIRST, CoopertitionTM is displaying unqualified kindness and respect in the face of fierce competition.1   One of the things I never liked about sports was the need to “destroy” the other team.  First has really found a way to integrate CoopertitionTM  into the rules so teams can be competitive and part of that competition rewards cooperation. Oh and did I mention it has ROBOTS!!!  This year it had basket ball playing Kinect connected, remote controlled, robots!  There are not words for how exciting these games are.  You HAVE to check out this years game, Rebound Rumble, on youtube or you can view live action on Dallas First Video (as of this posting, the recording haven’t posted yet but should be there soon).  There are also some images below. Whatever it is, these students get it and exemplify it and these mentors ooze with it.  I am glad that First supports these events so we can all learn and be inspired by these exceptional students and mentors.  I know that no matter how much I give, it will never compare to what I gain volunteering at First.  Even if you don’t have time to volunteer, you owe it to yourself to go check out one of these events.  See what the future holds, be inspired, be encouraged, take some knowledge, leave some knowledge and most of all, have FUN.  That is what First is all about and thanks to First, I get it.   First Dallas Regionals 2012 VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL 1.  USFirst http://www.usfirst.org/aboutus/gracious-professionalism

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• Embedded Spark 2010 Summer Challenge

  - by Valter Minute

  If you have a good idea for a cool embedded device based on Windows Embedded 7 and some free time to work on it you can partecipate to the Embedded Spark 2010 Summer Challenge. Just submit a short paper describing your idea and, if your idea is one of the 75 selected by the judges, you’ll receive some hardware to put your idea in practice and a chance to attend ESC Boston for free and win 15.000 dollars. The latest challenge has been won by Marco Bodoira, a fellow Italian embedded developer, so I hope to see many Italian developers (and non developers) presenting their ideas and project for this new challenge! You can find rules, ideas, forums and all the information you need at the challenge web site: http://www.embeddedspark.com/

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• MySQL - Configuration

  - by Stuart Brierley

  Having previously detailed how to install MySQL Server, the next step is configuring MySQL. The MySQL configuration wizard can either be run immediately following installation from the MySQL installation wizard or manually from the Start Menu. Following the splash screen you can then choose whether to run a detailed or standard configuration. The detailed configuration allows you to create the optimal configuration for your specific machine, whereas the standard configuration creates a general configuration that can then be manually tuned. I chose detailed.   You are then asked to choose the type of server instance that is being configured. In this case it is a developer machine. Following this you are asked to choose the type of database usage that you expect on the server. I opted for multifunctional. You must then specify the location of the InnoDB tablespace.   Next specify the number of concurent connections to the server.   Now you must configure the networking options. I left the Strict mode enabled as this is the recommended option, but I disabled TCP/IP networking as I wanted to restrict this MySQL installation to the local machine only.   Set the character set that is best suited to your use - for me this was the default standard character set. Next up is the option to run MySQL as a service and whether or not to include the mysql dircetories in the windows PATH. I kept the install as a windows service option enabled, but unchecked the Launch MySQL server automatically option. This is because I only wanted MySQL running when I specifically want to use it. I also enabled the include in windows PATH option.   You can then change the security settings for the mysql installation. I opted to change the root password, disable root from local machines and disable annoymous access.   You are now ready to execute the configuration.   Once completed you should hopefully see the completed screen with lots of nice ticks against the various configuration tasks.

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• SharePoint 2010 Diagnostic Studio Remote Diag

  - by juanlarios

  I have had some time this week to try out some tools that I have been meaning to try out. This week I am trying out the SP 2010 Diagnostic Studio. I installed it successfully and tried it on my development evironment. I was able to build a report and a snapshot of the environment. I decided to turn my attention to my Employer's intranet environment. This would allow me to analyze it and measure it against benchmarks. I didn't want to install the Diagnostic studio on the Production Envorinment, lucky for me, the Diagnostic studio can be run remotely, well...kind of. Issue My development environment is a stand alone, full installation of SharePoint 2010 Server. It has Office 2010, SQL 2008 Enterprise, a DC...well you get the point, it's jammed packed! But more importantly it's a stand alone, self contained VM environment. Well Microsoft has instructions as to how to connect remotely with Diagnostic Studio here. The deciving part of this is that the SP2010DS prompts you for credentails. So I thought I was getting the right account to run the reports. I tried all the Power Shell commands in the link above but I still ended up getting the following errors: 06/28/2011 12:50:18    Connecting to remote server failed with the following error message : The WinRM client cannot process the request...If the SPN exists, but CredSSP cannot use Kerberos to validate the identity of the target computer and you still want to allow the delegation of the user credentials to the target computer, use gpedit.msc and look at the following policy: Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System -> Credentials Delegation -> Allow Fresh Credentials with NTLM-only Server Authentication.  Verify that it is enabled and configured with an SPN appropriate for the target computer. For example, for a target computer name "myserver.domain.com", the SPN can be one of the following: WSMAN/myserver.domain.com or WSMAN/*.domain.com. Try the request again after these changes. For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic. 06/28/2011 12:54:47    Access to the path '\\<targetserver>\C$\Users\<account logging in>\AppData\Local\Temp' is denied. You might also get an error message like this: The WinRM client cannot process the request. A computer policy does not allow the delegation of the user credentials to the target computer. Explanation After looking at the event logs on the target environment, I noticed that there were a several Security Exceptions. After looking at the specifics around who was denied access, I was able to see the account that was being denied access, it was the client machine administrator account. Well of course that was never going to work!!! After some quick Googling, the last error message above will lead you to edit the Local Group Policy on the client server. And although there are instructions from microsoft around doing this, it really will not work in this scenario. Notice the Description and how it only applices to authentication mentioned? Resolution I can tell you what I did, but I wish there was a better way but I simply don't know if it's duable any other way. Because my development environment had it's own DC, I didn't really want to mess with Kerberos authentication. I would also not be smart to connect that server to the domain, considering it has it's own DC. I ended up installing SharePoint 2010 Diagnostic Studio on another Windows 7 Dev environment I have, and connected the machien to the domain. I ran all the necesary remote credentials commands mentioned here. Those commands add the group policy for you! Once I did this I was able to authenticate properly and I was able to get the reports. Conclusion   You can run SharePoint 2010 Diagnostic Studio Remotely but it will require some specific scenarions. A couple of things I should mention is that as far as I understand, SP2010 DS, will install agents on your target environment to run tests and retrieve the data. I was a Farm Administrator, and also a Server Admin on SharePoint Server. I am not 100% sure if you need all those permissions but I that's just what I have to my internal intranet.   I deally I would like to have a machine that I can have SharePoint 2010 DIagnostic Studio installed and I can run that against client environments. It appears that I will not be able to do that, unless I enable Kerberos on my Windows 7 Machine now. If you have it installed in the same way I would like to have it, please let me know, I'll keep trying to get what I'm after. Hope this helps someone out there doing the same.

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• JSCompress fails to compress my js file - why?

  - by Renso

  Issue: You use the online compression utility jscompress.com to compress your js file but it fails with an error. Why this may be happening and how to fix it. Possible causes: Apparently not using open and closing curly brackets in an IF statement would cause this. Well turns out this is not the case. Look at the following example and see if you can figure out what the issue is :-)   function SetupDeliveredVPRecontactNotes($item, id) {     var theData;     $.ajax({         data: { deliveredVPId: id },         url: $('#ajaxGetDeliveredVPRecontactNotesUrl').val(),         type: "GET",         async: false,         dataType: "html",         success: function(data, result) {             $item.empty();             var input = '<textarea class="recontactNote" rows="4" name="DeliveredVPRecontactNotes_' + id + '" id="DeliveredVPRecontactNotes_' + id + '" cols="115">' + data + '</textarea>';             $item.append(input);             theData = data;         },         error: function(XMLHttpRequest, textStatus, errorThrown) {             $item.empty();             alert("An error occurred: The operation to retrieve the DeliveredVP's Recontact Notes has failed");         }     });                  //ajax     return theData; }     Solution: The name of the method/function is the same as the message in the ALERT message when the spaces are removed: " DeliveredVP Recontact Notes" becomes " DeliveredVPRecontactNotes" and mathes that of the function. So I changed it to " DeliveredVP's Recontact Notes"

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• Building Enterprise Smartphone App &ndash; Part 4: Application Development Considerations

  - by Tim Murphy

  This is the final part in a series of posts based on a talk I gave recently at the Chicago Information Technology Architects Group.  Feel free to leave feedback. Application Development Considerations Now we get to the actual building of your solutions.  What are the skills and resources that will be needed in order to develop a smartphone application in the enterprise? Language Knowledge One of the first things you need to consider when you are deciding which platform language do you either have the most in house skill base or can you easily acquire.  If you already have developers who know Java or C# you may want to use either Android or Windows Phone.  You should also take into consideration the market availability of developers.  If your key developer leaves how easy is it to find a knowledgeable replacement? A second consideration when it comes to programming languages is the qualities exposed by the languages of a particular platform.  How well does that development language and its associated frameworks support things like security and access to the features of the smartphone hardware?  This will play into your overall cost of ownership if you have to create this infrastructure on your own. Manage Limited Resources Everything is limited on a smartphone: battery, memory, processing power, network bandwidth.  When developing your applications you will have to keep your footprint as small as possible in every way.  This means not running unnecessary processes in the background that will drain the battery or pulling more data over the airwaves than you have to.  You also want to keep your on device in as compact a format as possible. Mobile Design Patterns There are a number of design patterns that have either come to life because of smartphone development or have been adapted for this use.  The main pattern in the Windows Phone environment is the MVVM (Model-View-View-Model).  This is great for overall application structure and separation of concerns.  The fun part is trying to keep that separation as pure as possible.  Many of the other patterns may or may not have strict definitions, but some that you need to be concerned with are push notification, asynchronous communication and offline data storage. Real estate is limited on smartphones and even tablets. You are also limited in the type of controls that can be represented in the UI. This means rethinking how you modularize your application. Typing is also much harder to do so you want to reduce this as much as possible.  This leads to UI patterns.  While not what we would traditionally think of as design patterns the guidance each platform has for UI design is critical to the success of your application.  If user find the application difficult navigate they will not use it. Development Process Because of the differences in development tools required, test devices and certification and deployment processes your teams will need to learn new way of working together.  This will include the need to integrate service contracts of back-end systems with mobile applications.  You will also want to make sure that you present consistency across different access points to corporate data.  Your web site may have more functionality than your smartphone application, but it should have a consistent core set of functionality.  This all requires greater communication between sub-teams of your developers. Testing Process Testing of smartphone apps has a lot more to do with what happens when you lose connectivity or if the user navigates away from your application. There are a lot more opportunities for the user or the device to perform disruptive acts.  This should be your main testing concentration aside from the main business requirements.  You will need to do things like setting the phone to airplane mode and seeing what the application does in order to weed out any gaps in your handling communication interruptions. Need For Outside Experts Since this is a development area that is new to most companies the need for experts is a lot greater. Whether these are consultants, vendor representatives or just development community forums you will need to establish expert contacts. Nothing is more dangerous for your project timelines than a lack of knowledge.  Make sure you know who to call to avoid lengthy delays in your project because of knowledge gaps. Security Security has to be a major concern for enterprise applications. You aren't dealing with just someone's game standings. You are dealing with a companies intellectual property and competitive advantage. As such you need to start by limiting access to the application itself.  Once the user is in the app you need to ensure that the data is secure at all times.  This includes both local storage and across the wire.  This means if a platform doesn’t natively support encryption for these functions you will need to find alternatives to secure your data.  You also need to keep secret (encryption) keys obfuscated or locked away outside of the application. People can disassemble the code otherwise and break your encryption. Offline Capabilities As we discussed earlier one your biggest concerns is not having connectivity.  Because of this a good portion of your code may be dedicated to handling loss of connection and reconnection situations.  What do you do if you lose the network?  Back up all your transactions and store of any supporting data so that operations can continue off line. In order to support this you will need to determine the available flat file or local data base capabilities of the platform.  Any failed transactions will need to support a retry mechanism whether it is automatic or user initiated.  This also includes your services since they will need to be able to roll back partially completed transactions.  What ever you do, don’t ignore this area when you are designing your system. Deployment Each platform has different deployment capabilities. Some are more suited to enterprise situations than others. Apple's approach is probably the most mature at the moment. Prior to the current generation of smartphone platforms it would have been Windows CE. Windows Phone 7 has the limitation that the app has to be distributed through the same network as public facing applications. You mark them as private which means that they are only accessible by a direct URL. Unfortunately this does not make them undiscoverable (although it is very difficult). This will change with Windows Phone 8 where companies will be able to certify their own applications and distribute them.  Given this Windows Phone applications need to be more diligent with application access in order to keep them restricted to the company's employees. My understanding of the Android deployment schemes is that it is much less standardized then either iOS or Windows Phone. Someone would have to confirm or deny that for me though since I have not yet put the time into researching this platform further. Given my limited exposure to the iOS and Android platforms I have not been able to confirm this, but there are varying degrees of user involvement to install and keep applications updated. At one extreme the user just goes to a website to do the install and in other case they may need to download files and perform steps to install them. Future Bluetooth Today we use Bluetooth for keyboards, mice and headsets.  In the future it could be used to interrogate car computers or manufacturing systems or possibly retail machines by service techs.  This would open smartphones to greater use as a almost a Star Trek Tricorder.  You would get you all your data as well as being able to use it as a universal remote for just about any device or machine. Better corporation controlled deployment At least in the Windows Phone world the upcoming release of Windows Phone 8 will include a private certification and deployment option that is currently not available with Windows Phone 7 (Mango). We currently have to run the apps through the Marketplace certification process and use a targeted distribution method. Platform independent approaches HTML5 and JavaScript with Web Service has become a popular topic lately for not only creating flexible web site, but also creating cross platform mobile applications.  I’m not yet convinced that this lowest common denominator approach is viable in most cases, but it does have it’s place and seems to be growing.  Be sure to keep an eye on it. Summary From my perspective enterprise smartphone applications can offer a great competitive advantage to many companies.  They are not cheap to build and should be approached cautiously.  Understand the factors I have outlined in this series, do you due diligence and see if there is a portion of your business that can benefit from the mobile experience. del.icio.us Tags: Architecture,Smartphones,Windows Phone,iOS,Android

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• The gestures of Windows 8 (Consumer preview): part 2, More about Search

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  This is part 2 of a multipart blog post about the gestures and shortcuts in Windows 8 consumer preview. Part 1 can be found here! More about the Search charm In the first installment of this series, we talked about the charms and mentioned a few gestures to display the Search charm. Search is a very central and powerful feature in Windows 8, and allows you to search in Apps, Settings, Files and within Metro applications that support the Search contract. There are a few cool features around the Search, and especially the applications associated to it. I already mentioned the keyboard shortcuts you can use: Win-C shows the Charms bar (same as swiping from the right bevel towards the center of the screen). Win-Q open the Search fly out with Apps preselected. Win-W open the Search fly out with Settings preselected. Win-F open the Search fly out with Files preselected. Searching in Metro apps In addition to these three search domains, you can also search a Metro app, as long as it supports the Search contract (check this Build video to learn more about the Search contract). These apps show up in the Search flyout as shown here: Notice the list of apps below the Files button? That’s what we are talking about. First of all, the list order changes when you search in some applications. For instance, in the image above, I had used the Store with the Search charm. This is why the store shows up as the first app. I am not 100% what algorithm is used here (sorting according to number of searches is my guess), but try it out and try to figure it out Applications that have never been searched are sorted alphabetically. Does it mean we will see cool app names like ___AAA_MyCoolApp? I certainly hope not!! Pinning You can also pin often used apps to the Search flyout. To pin an app with the mouse, right click on it in the Search flyout and select Pin from the context menu. With the keyboard, use the arrow keys to go down to the selected app, and then open the context menu. With the finger, simply tap and hold until you see a semi transparent rectangle indicating that the context menu will be shown, then release. The context menu opens up and you can select Pin. Pin context menu Pinned apps Unpinning, Hiding Using the same technique as for pinning here above, you can also unpin a pinned application. Finally, you can also choose to hide an app from the Search flyout altogether. This is a convenient way to clean up and make it easy to find stuff. Note: At this point, I am not sure how to re-add a hidden app to the Search flyout. If anyone knows, please mention it in the comments, thanks! Reordering You can also reorder pinned apps. To do this, with the finger, tap, hold and pull the app to the side, then pull it vertically to reorder it. You can also reorder with the mouse, simply by clicking on an app and pulling it vertically to the place you want to put it. I don’t think there is a way to do that with the keyboard though. That’s it for now More gestures will follow in a next installment! Have fun with Windows 8   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• There is No Scrum without Agile

  - by John K. Hines

  It's been interesting for me to dive a little deeper into Scrum after realizing how fragile its adoption can be.  I've been particularly impressed with James Shore's essay "Kaizen and Kaikaku" and the Net Objectives post "There are Better Alternatives to Scrum" by Alan Shalloway.  The bottom line: You can't execute Scrum well without being Agile. Personally, I'm the rare developer who has an interest in project management.  I think the methodology to deliver software is interesting, and that there are many roles whose job exists to make software development easier.  As a project lead I've seen Scrum deliver for disciplined, highly motivated teams with solid engineering practices.  It definitely made my job an order of magnitude easier.  As a developer I've experienced huge rewards from having a well-defined pipeline of tasks that were consistently delivered with high quality in short iterations.  In both of these cases Scrum was an addition to a fundamentally solid process and a huge benefit to the team. The question I'm now facing is how Scrum fits into organizations withot solid engineering practices.  The trend that concerns me is one of Scrum being mandated as the single development process across teams where it may not apply.  And we have to realize that Scurm itself isn't even a development process.  This is what worries me the most - the assumption that Scrum on its own increases developer efficiency when it is essentially an exercise in project management. Jim's essay quotes Tobias Mayer writing, "Scrum is a framework for surfacing organizational dysfunction."  I'm unsure whether a Vice President of Software Development wants to hear that, reality nonwithstanding.  Our Scrum adoption has surfaced a great deal of dysfunction, but I feel the original assumption was that we would experience increased efficiency.  It's starting to feel like a blended approach - Agile/XP techniques for developers, Scrum for project managers - may be a better fit.  Or at least, a better way of framing the conversation. The blended approach. Technorati tags: Agile Scrum

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• Using jQuery to Make a Field Read Only in SharePoint

  - by Mark Rackley

  Okay… this will be my shortest blog post EVER. Very little rambling.. I promise, and I’m sure this has been blogged more than once, so I apologize for adding to the noise, but like I always say, I blog for myself so I have a global bookmark. So,let’s say you have a field on a SharePoint Form and you want to make it read only. You COULD just open it up in SPD and easily make it read only, but some people are purists and don’t like use SPD or modify the default new/edit/disp forms. Put me in the latter camp, I try to avoid modifying these forms and it seemed like such a simple task that I didn’t want to create a new un-ghosted form.  So.. how do you do it? It’s only one line of jQuery. All you need to do is find the id for your input field and capture the keypress on it so that it cannot be modified (you should probably capture clicks for dropdowns/checkboxes/etc. but I didn’t need to).  Anyway, here’s the entire script: <script src="jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> jQuery(document).ready(function($){ //capture keypress on our read only field and return false $('#idOfInputField').keypress(function() { return false; }); }) </script>   You can find the ID of your input field by viewing the source, this ID stays consistent as long as you don’t muck with the list or form in the wrong way.  Please note, you CANNOT disable the input field as an alternative to capturing the keypress. If you do this and save the form, any data in the disabled fields will be wiped out. There are probably a dozen ways to make a field read-only and if all you are using jQuery for is to make a field read-only, then you might want to question your use of adding the overhead (although it’s really not that much). Hey.. it’s another tool for your tool belt.

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• Application Integration Future &ndash; BizTalk Server &amp; Windows Azure (TechEd 2012)

  - by SURESH GIRIRAJAN

  I am really excited to see lot of new news around BizTalk in TechEd 2012. I was recently watching the session presented by Sriram and Rajesh on “Application Integration Futures: The Road Map and What's Next on Windows Azure”. It was great session and lot of interesting stuff about the feature updates for BizTalk and Azure integration. I have highlighted them below, definitely customers who haven’t started using Microsoft BizTalk ESB Toolkit should start using them which is going to be part of the core BizTalk product in future release, which is cool… BizTalk Server feature enhancements Manageability: ESB Tool Kit is going to be part of the core BizTalk product and Setup. Visualize BizTalk artifact dependencies in BizTalk administration console. HIS administration using configuration files. Performance: Improvements in ordered send port scenarios Improved performance in dynamic send ports and ESB, also to configure BizTalk host handler for dynamic send ports. Right now it runs under default host, which does not enable to scale. MLLP adapter enhancements and DB2 client transaction load balancing / client bulk insert. Platform Support: Visual Studio 2012, Windows 8 Server, SQL Server 2012, Office 15 and System Center 2012. B2B enhancements to support latest industry standards natively. Connectivity Improvements: Consume REST service directly in BizTalk SharePoint integration made easier. Improvements to SMTP adapter, to add macros for sending same email with different content to different parties. Connectivity to Azure Service Bus relay, queues and topics. DB2 client connectivity to SQL Server and SQL Server connectivity to Informix. CICS Http client connectivity to Windows. Azure: Use Azure as IaaS/PaaS for BizTalk environment. Use Azure to provision BizTalk environment for test environment / development. Later move to On-premises or build a Hybrid cloud approach. Eliminate HW procurement for BizTalk environment for testing / demos / development etc. Enable to create BizTalk farm easily and remove/add more servers as needed. EAI Service: EAI Bridge Protocol transformation Message Transformation Running custom code Message Enrichment Hybrid Connectivity LOB Applications On-premises Application On-premises Connectivity to Applications in the cloud Queues/ Topics Ftp Devices Web Services Bridge can be customized based on the service needs to provide different capabilities needed as part of the bridge. Look at the sample for EDI bridge for EDI service sample. Also with Tracking enabled through the portal. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh674490 Adapters: Service Bus Messaging adapter - New adapter added. WebHttp adapter - For REST services. NetTcpRelay adapter - New adapter added. I will start posting more and once I start playing with this…

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