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• Building a CMS in PHP: Development tools

  - by TRiG

  I'm planning to build a CMS in PHP and MySQL, mainly for my own amusement and education. (Though who knows, I may come up with something useful and cool. Anything's possible.) I'll be asking questions about code architecture etc. later. For now, I'm more interested in development tools. So far, all my playing with code has been done on a web server, and I've edited over FTP. I was thinking it might be quicker to use a localhost. Also, that way, I could use version control (which I've never done before). So, A. How do I set up a localhost server with many subdomains on an Ubuntu 9.10 computer. Is XAMPP for Linux the way to go, or should I use a standard Apache distro? (Or another webserver altogether?) For that matter, is it possible to set up more than one webserver on the same computer, and to use them for different localhost subdomains? B. How do I set up a version control thingy covering all the code (which will be on several subdomains of localhost, and in a few shared folders)? I've read Joel Spolsky's HgInt tutorial, and it makes Mercurial look good. And simple, especially if you're working on your own. C. Should I continue to use gEdit to write HTML/CSS/JS/PHP, or is there a better free editor out there for these languages?

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• How do I populate a MEF plugin with data that is not hard coded into the assembly?

  - by hjoelr

  I am working on a program that will communicate with various pieces of hardware. Because of the varied nature of the items it communicates and controls, I need to have a different "driver" for each different piece of hardware. This made me think that MEF would be a great way to make those drivers as plugins that can be added even after the product has been released. I've looked at a lot of examples of how to use MEF, but the question that I haven't been able to find an answer to is how to populate a MEF plugin with external data (eg. from a database). All the examples I can find have the "data" hard-coded into the assembly, like the following example: [Export( typeof( IRule ) )] public class RuleInstance : IRule { public void DoIt() {} public string Name { get { return "Rule Instance 3"; } } public string Version { get { return "1.1.0.0"; } } public string Description { get { return "Some Rule Instance"; } } } What if I want Name, Version and Description to come from a database? How would I tell MEF where to get that information? I may be missing something very obvious, but I don't know what it is. Thanks! Joel

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• The Implications of Modern Day Software Development Abstractions

  - by Andreas Grech

  I am currently doing a dissertation about the implications or dangers that today's software development practices or teachings may have on the long term effects of programming. Just to make it clear: I am not attacking the use abstractions in programming. Every programmer knows that abstractions are the bases for modularity. What I want to investigate with this dissertation are the positive and negative effects abstractions can have in software development. As regards the positive, I am sure that I can find many sources that can confirm this. But what about the negative effects of abstractions? Do you have any stories to share that talk about when certain abstractions failed on you? The main concern is that many programmers today are programming against abstractions without having the faintest idea of what the abstraction is doing under-the-covers. This may very well lead to bugs and bad design. So, in you're opinion, how important is it that programmers actually know what is going below the abstractions? Taking a simple example from Joel's Back to Basics, C's strcat: void strcat( char* dest, char* src ) { while (*dest) dest++; while (*dest++ = *src++); } The above function hosts the issue that if you are doing string concatenation, the function is always starting from the beginning of the dest pointer to find the null terminator character, whereas if you write the function as follows, you will return a pointer to where the concatenated string is, which in turn allows you to pass this new pointer to the concatenation function as the *dest parameter: char* mystrcat( char* dest, char* src ) { while (*dest) dest++; while (*dest++ = *src++); return --dest; } Now this is obviously a very simple as regards abstractions, but it is the same concept I shall be investigating. Finally, what do you think about the issue that schools are preferring to teach Java instead of C and Lisp ? Can you please give your opinions and your says as regards this subject? Thank you for your time and I appreciate every comment.

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• F# and statically checked union cases

  - by Johan Jonasson

  Soon me and my brother-in-arms Joel will release version 0.9 of Wing Beats. It's an internal DSL written in F#. With it you can generate XHTML. One of the sources of inspiration have been the XHTML.M module of the Ocsigen framework. I'm not used to the OCaml syntax, but I do understand XHTML.M somehow statically check if attributes and children of an element are of valid types. We have not been able to statically check the same thing in F#, and now I wonder if someone have any idea of how to do it? My first naive approach was to represent each element type in XHTML as a union case. But unfortunately you cannot statically restrict which cases are valid as parameter values, as in XHTML.M. Then I tried to use interfaces (each element type implements an interface for each valid parent) and type constraints, but I didn't manage to make it work without the use of explicit casting in a way that made the solution cumbersome to use. And it didn't feel like an elegant solution anyway. Today I've been looking at Code Contracts, but it seems to be incompatible with F# Interactive. When I hit alt + enter it freezes. Just to make my question clearer. Here is a super simple artificial example of the same problem: type Letter = | Vowel of string | Consonant of string let writeVowel = function | Vowel str -> sprintf "%s is a vowel" str I want writeVowel to only accept Vowels statically, and not as above, check it at runtime. How can we accomplish this? Does anyone have any idea? There must be a clever way of doing it. If not with union cases, maybe with interfaces? I've struggled with this, but am trapped in the box and can't think outside of it.

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• How does Amazon's Statistically Improbable Phrases work?

  - by ??iu

  How does something like Statistically Improbable Phrases work? According to amazon: Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, or "SIPs", are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book. SIPs are not necessarily improbable within a particular book, but they are improbable relative to all books in Search Inside!. For example, most SIPs for a book on taxes are tax related. But because we display SIPs in order of their improbability score, the first SIPs will be on tax topics that this book mentions more often than other tax books. For works of fiction, SIPs tend to be distinctive word combinations that often hint at important plot elements. For instance, for Joel's first book, the SIPs are: leaky abstractions, antialiased text, own dog food, bug count, daily builds, bug database, software schedules One interesting complication is that these are phrases of either 2 or 3 words. This makes things a little more interesting because these phrases can overlap with or contain each other.

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• Refactoring or Rewriting Monolithic PHP Spaghetti Codebase

  - by nategood

  I've inherited a really poorly designed PHP spaghetti code project. It's been gaining a good bit of traffic recently and is starting to have performance issues on top of the poor monolithic code base. Its maxing out performance on a chunky 16GB dedicated machine when it really shouldn't be. I'm planning on doing some performance tweaks right off the bat to help the performance issue, but this still won't really help the horrible code base. The team is small but expecting to grow very soon. I've read Joel's article on the troubles of doing a complete rewrite and see the concerns. But how bad does the code base have to be before you consider a rewrite? There is PHP handling logic interjected into what one would usually consider a "view". Even worse, in some places SQL statements are in these same files! The only real separation of presentation and logic are a few PHP scripts that serve as function libraries. These scripts do most of the ORM stuff... if you can even call it that. Trying to slowly refractor this seems like a nightmare. Open to your thoughts and opinions... however not interested in hearing, "Run away, Run away!".

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• UML diagrams that are actually pretty?

  - by Borek

  I'm looking for a diagramming software that would produce good looking output. It doesn't need to support everything (or even much) from UML, is doesn't need to have code engineering functions or anything, it just needs to produce visually interesting output. Here is a couple of samples of products that I consider ugly / not good enough: Visio with default UML stencils (didn't find better looking ones), Enterprise Architect, Dia, ArgoUML and many other "professional" UML tools. A couple of visually compelling tools that I considered (but found issues with): Visual Studio class diagrams - just for .NET classes but the output is miles better than what UML tools typically produce NClass - similar to VS's class diagrams but I could not find the "pretty", blue skin anywhere yuml.me - very nice but lacking some advanced layout options. I have to say that I find their style almost ideal for high-level diagrams - they look sketchy which is good. Balsamiq - I think Joel used this for hginit.com and I liked it. However, it's not suited for creating software diagrams so I can imagine it would be quite a lot of work MS Word has actually quite a good graphics engine but I'd rather leave this as a choice of the last resort I'd be grateful for any good tips.

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• Should developers *really* have private offices?

  - by Aron Rotteveel

  We will probably be moving within a year, so we have to make some decisions regarding office layout. At the moment, our company is basically one big office. When our developers can't bother to be disturbed at all, we all have our own headphones to mute the outside world. Still, it seems a lot of people feel that private offices are no doubt the way to go. From Joel's article Private Offices Redux: Not every programmer in the world wants to work in a private office. In fact quite a few would tell you unequivocally that they prefer the camaradarie and easy information sharing of an open space. Don't fall for it. They also want M&Ms for breakfast and a pony. Open space is fun but not productive. Even though I can understand the benefit on productivity, does having a private office really result in more net productivity? There seem to be plenty of companies that create wide open spaces and still maintain good productivity. Or so it seems. (I should mention many of them use cubicles, though) What is your opinion on this? What does your company do? Is there some middle ground in this? Some more related information on this matter: Private Offices Redux The new Fog Creek office A Field Guide to Developers Gmail recruitment page. Found this last one somewhat remarkable since the Gmail recruitment page promotes the "wide open space" idea.

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• Short snippet summarizing a webpage?

  - by Legend

  Is there a clean way of grabbing the first few lines of a given link that summarizes that link? I have seen this being done in some online bookmarking applications but have no clue on how they were implemented. For instance, if I give this link, I should be able to get a summary which is roughly like: I'll admit it, I was intimidated by MapReduce. I'd tried to read explanations of it, but even the wonderful Joel Spolsky left me scratching my head. So I plowed ahead trying to build decent pipelines to process massive amounts of data Nothing complex at first sight but grabbing these is the challenging part. Just the first few lines of the actual post should be fine. Should I just use a raw approach of grabbing the entire html and parsing the meta tags or something fancy like that (which obviously and unfortunately is not generalizable to every link out there) or is there a smarter way to achieve this? Any suggestions? Update: I just found InstaPaper do this but am not sure if it is getting the information from RSS feeds or some other way.

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• Is "tip-of-the-day" good?

  - by Jonta

  Many programs (often large ones, like MS Office, The GIMP, Maxthon) have a feature called "tip-of-the-day". It explains a small part of the program, like this one in Maxthon: "You can hide/show the main menu bar by pressing Ctrl+F11" You can usually browse through them by clicking next. And other options provided are "Previous", "Close", "Do not show at startup". I think I like the way Maxthon used to handle this; in the browser's statusbar (down at the bottom usually, together with "Done", the progress-bar etc), there would sometimes be a small hint or tip on what else you could do with it. As Joel Spolsky wrote in his article-series "User Interface Design for Programmers", people don't like reading manuals. But we still want them to use the program, and the features they could benefit from, don't we? Therefore, I think it is useful to have such a feature, without the annoyance of the pop-up on startup. What do you think? Pop-up? Maxthonstyle? No way?

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• Bad idea to force creation of Mercurial remote heads (ie. branches)?

  - by Chad Johnson

  I am developing a centralized web application, and I have a centralized Mercurial repository. Locally I created a branch in my repository hg branch my_branch I then made some changes and committed. Then when I try to push, I get abort: push creates new remote branch 'my_branch'! (did you forget to merge? use push -f to force) I've just been using push -f. Is this bad? I WANT multiple branches in my central, remote repository, as I want to 1) back up my work and 2) allow other developers to develop with me on that branch. Is it bad or something to have branches in my remote repository or something? Should I not be doing push -f (and if not, what should I do?)? Why does Joel say this in his tutorial: Occasionally I've made a change in a branch, pushed, switched to another branch, and changes I had made in that branch I switch to were mysteriously reverted to a previous version from several commits ago. Maybe this is a symptom of forcing a push?

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• Basic CSS trouble

  - by user310108

  I guess this is fairly simple for you but i cant wrap my head around it. I ripped out the important part. I got text inside #content so i cant change it and i dont want to use !important tag. The css is presented in the order it is placed in my css file. How come the "#content h2 a, #content h2 a:visited" overrides the .post-header h2 a? <html> <head> ..... </head> <div id="content"> ..... <div class="post-header"> <a href="#">my text</a> </div> </div> </html> #content h2 a, #content h2 a:visited { font-family:"arial black","lucida console",sans-serif; } .post-header h2 a { font-family:Arial,sans-serif; } /Joel

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• Choose 'better' or more familiar technologies for a new project?

  - by John

  I am looking to start work on a brand-new project, something I've been thinking about for a while as my first independent sellable project. It's broadly speaking a web-based service application, and my first choice, server-language is quite easy... I know Java pretty well from working on Java web-apps in the past. However my experience doing web-apps involved JSP, Servlets and JSTL... I know the ideas behind newer technologies like Hibernate/Spring but have never used them. So we wrote our own DAOs, handled AJAX by writing special mini-JSP pages that generated XML/JSON pages, etc. I'm not hugely into the idea that Spring/Hibernate are the 'only' or 'right' way to do any Java web-project, but they are widely used. On the other hand, not only would trying to learn these increase initial development time, but I'd be using my learning attempts to build a production system. I remember one of Joel's early articles said (I'll paraphrase since I can't find it) "regardless what's cool, always use the technologies that the lead developer (or dev team?) knows best" I wondered what people thought about that? ps: should this be CW?

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• Run Flyff without elevating user to Admin or requiring Admin Password

  - by AnonJr

  Bottom Line: I need to set up one game on my little sister's laptop to run without requiring an admin password/account. Its the only game that seems to insist on it... so far. Detailed Version: I set up my 14-year-old sister as a regular user on her Windows 7 Home Premium laptop, and almost everything has been fine - until she found a new game (Flyff) that doesn't seem to want to run without an Admin Password (or being logged in as an Admin). For what should be obvious reasons, I'm not going to make her an Admin. or give her the Admin password (which she swears she'll only use to run this game... anyone else buying that? Bueller?) Also, the parents aren't admins on her laptop (they are on their own, but that's another discussion for another day) and I'm not going to set them up as one as I know from past experience that the 3rd time my sister asks them to put in their password, they'll just tell her what it is - at which point I might as well as have just set her up as an admin from the outset. This is a Win7 Home Premium (64-bit, but I doubt that makes a difference) laptop, so using GPEdit is out. I also tried an answer provided in a related (but less specific) question. The app has read/write permissions for its folder in Program Files (x86), yet that doesn't seem to make a difference. I have not yet dug through the registry as mentioned in another answer to the aforementioned question. Just to be thorough, I have checked the "Run as Admin" option on the shortcut's properties to no avail. Am I missing something? Addendum 2010-11-11: Re-Checked permissions as per Joel's answer, and it didn't make a difference. Followed Jane T's suggestion (and Aeo's second) and created a "Games" folder outside Program Files, installing the game there - and making sure regular users had all the permissions they would need. No joy. After the latter of the above two changes, it occurred to me that it may be a UAC issue, so for kicks I turned off UAC - still the damn message. Last item noted: could it be a result of the publisher not being specified/verified? I've been taking a closer look at the error message and it occurred to me that the missing/unverified publisher info could have been the problem all along... Correct me if I'm wrong, but if that's the case, that means there's nothing I can do short of giving her some sort of Admin privileges (i.e. elevating her account, or giving her the password to a separate Admin account) or giving Mom an Admin account.

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• WSS 3.0 to SharePoint 2010: Tips for delaying the Visual Upgrade

  - by Kelly Jones

  My most recent project has been to migrate a bunch of sites from WSS 3.0 (SharePoint 2007) to SharePoint Server 2010.  The users are currently working with WSS 3.0 and Office 2003, so the new ribbon based UI in 2010 will be completely new.  My client wants to avoid the new SharePoint 2010 look and feel until they’ve had time to train their users, so we’ve been testing the upgrades by keeping them with the 2007 user interface. Permission to perform the Visual Upgrade One of the first things we noticed was the default permissions for who was allowed to switch the UI from 2007 to 2010.  By default, site collection administrators and site owners can do this.  Since we wanted to more tightly control the timing of the new UI, I added a few lines to the PowerShell script that we are using to perform the migration.  This script creates the web application, sets the User Policy, and then does a Mount-SPDatabase to attach the old 2007 content database to the 2010 farm.  I added the following steps after the Mount-SPDatabase step: #Remove the visual upgrade option for site owners # it remains for Site Collection administrators foreach ($sc in $WebApp.Sites){ foreach ($web in $sc.AllWebs){ #Visual Upgrade permissions for the site/subsite (web) $web.UIversionConfigurationEnabled = $false; $web.Update(); } } These script steps loop through each Site Collection in a particular web application ($WebApp) and then it loops through each subsite ($web) in the Site Collection ($sc) and disables the Site Owner’s permission to perform the Visual Upgrade. This is equivalent to going to the Site Collection administrator settings page –> Visual Upgrade and selecting “Hide Visual Upgrade”. Since only IT people have Site Collection administrator privileges, this will allow IT to control the timing of the new 2010 UI rollout. Newly created subsites Our next issue was brought to our attention by SharePoint Joel’s blog post last week (http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=524 ).  In it, he lists some updates about the 2010 upgrade, and his fourth point was one that I hadn’t seen yet: 4. If a 2007 upgraded site has not been visually upgraded, the sites created underneath it will look like 2010 sites – While this is something I’ve been aware of, I think many don’t realize how this impacts common look and feel for master pages, and how it impacts good navigation and UI. As well depending on your patch level you may see hanging behavior in the list picker. The site and list creation Silverlight control in Internet Explorer is looking for resources that don’t exist in the galleries in the 2007 site, and hence it continues to spin and spin and eventually time out. The work around is to upgrade to SP1, or use Chrome or Firefox which won’t attempt to render the Silverlight control. When the root site collection is a 2007 site and has it’s set of galleries and the children are 2010 sites there is some strange behavior linked to the way that the galleries work and pull from the parent. Our production SharePoint 2010 Farm has SP1 installed, as well as the December 2011 Cumulative Update, so I think the “hanging behavior” he mentions won’t affect us. However, since we want to control the roll out of the UI, we are concerned that new subsites will have the 2010 look and feel, no matter what the parent site has. Ok, time to dust off my developer skills. I first looked into using feature stapling, but I couldn’t get that to work (although I’m pretty sure I had everything wired up correctly).  Then I stumbled upon SharePoint 2010’s web events – a great way to handle this. Using Visual Studio 2010, I created a new SharePoint project and added a Web Event Receiver: In the Event Receiver class, I used the WebProvisioned method to check if the parent site is a 2007 site (UIVersion = 3), and if so, then set the newly created site to 2007:   /// <summary> /// A site was provisioned. /// </summary> public override void WebProvisioned(SPWebEventProperties properties) { base.WebProvisioned(properties);   try { SPWeb curweb = properties.Web;   if (curweb.ParentWeb != null) {   //check if the parent website has the 2007 look and feel if (curweb.ParentWeb.UIVersion == 3) { //since parent site has 2007 look and feel // we'll apply that look and feel to the current web curweb.UIVersion = 3; curweb.Update(); } } } catch (Exception) { //TODO: Add logging for errors } }   This event is part of a Feature that is scoped to the Site Level (Site Collection).  I added a couple of lines to my migration PowerShell script to activate the Feature for any site collections that we migrate. Plan Going Forward The plan going forward is to perform the visual upgrade after the users for a particular site collection have gone through 2010 training. If we need to do several site collections at once, we’ll use a PowerShell script to loop through each site collection to update the sites to 2010.  If it’s just one or two, we’ll be using the “Update All Sites” button on the Visual Upgrade page for Site Collection Administrators. The custom code for newly created sites won’t need to be changed, since it relies on the UI version of the parent site.  If the parent is 2010, then the new site will look 2010.

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• Can I read an Outlook (2003/2007) PST file in C#?

  - by Andy May

  Is it possible to read a .PST file using C#? I would like to do this as a standalone application, not as an Outlook addin (if that is possible). If have seen other SO questions similar to this mention MailNavigator but I am looking to do this programmatically in C#. I have looked at the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook namespace but that appears to be just for Outlook addins. LibPST appears to be able to read PST files, but this is in C (sorry Joel, I didn't learn C before graduating). Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks! EDIT: Thank you all for the responses! I accepted Matthew Ruston's response as the answer because it ultimately led me to the code I was looking for. Here is a simple example of what I got to work (You will need to add a reference to Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook): using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook; namespace PSTReader { class Program { static void Main () { try { IEnumerable<MailItem> mailItems = readPst(@"C:\temp\PST\Test.pst", "Test PST"); foreach (MailItem mailItem in mailItems) { Console.WriteLine(mailItem.SenderName + " - " + mailItem.Subject); } } catch (System.Exception ex) { Console.WriteLine(ex.Message); } Console.ReadLine(); } private static IEnumerable<MailItem> readPst(string pstFilePath, string pstName) { List<MailItem> mailItems = new List<MailItem>(); Application app = new Application(); NameSpace outlookNs = app.GetNamespace("MAPI"); // Add PST file (Outlook Data File) to Default Profile outlookNs.AddStore(pstFilePath); MAPIFolder rootFolder = outlookNs.Stores[pstName].GetRootFolder(); // Traverse through all folders in the PST file // TODO: This is not recursive, refactor Folders subFolders = rootFolder.Folders; foreach (Folder folder in subFolders) { Items items = folder.Items; foreach (object item in items) { if (item is MailItem) { MailItem mailItem = item as MailItem; mailItems.Add(mailItem); } } } // Remove PST file from Default Profile outlookNs.RemoveStore(rootFolder); return mailItems; } } } Note: This code assumes that Outlook is installed and already configured for the current user. It uses the Default Profile (you can edit the default profile by going to Mail in the Control Panel). One major improvement on this code would be to create a temporary profile to use instead of the Default, then destroy it once completed.

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• Volunteer for a potential employer?

  - by EoRaptor013

  I've been looking for work since March, and haven't had much luck. Recently, however, I interviewed with a small company near my home for a C#, .NET, SQL development position. I hit it off very well with the hiring manager during the phone screen, and even more so during the face to face. Unfortunately, I failed the practical test: wiring up a web form, creating a couple of SQL stored procedures, saving new data with validation, and creating a minimal search screen. I knew what I was doing, but I was too slow to meet their standards as all the work needed to be done within an hour. Nevertheless, I really liked the place, the environment, the people who I would have been working with, and the boss. (I gave the company an 11 on Joel's 12 point scale.) So, the obvious next step was to scrape the rust off. I've been trying to create little projects for myself, but I don't know that I've been effective in getting any faster. What with all that goes into creating a project, I'm not heads-down coding as much as I think I need. Now, with all that introduction, here's the question. I have been thinking about calling the hiring manager at that place, and asking him to let me volunteer for three or four weeks, with no strings attached. I think it would benefit me, and wouldn't cost him anything (as long as I didn't slow the existing people down!). At the end of that period, he might, or might not, be inclined to hire me, but even if not, I would have had as much as 160 hours of in the trenches development. Maybe not all shiny, but no more rust, I would think. Does this plan make any sense at all? I certainly don't want to sound desperate (although, I'm not far from being there), and I very much need the tuneup, lube, and change the oil. What's the downside, if any, to me doing this? Do any of you see red flags going up—either from the prerspective of the hiring manager, or from the perspective of a developer?

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• C# Working with Linq binding

  - by Isuru

  I have designed Types as follow: class Cricket { string type; Team tm; public Team Team { get { return tm; } set { tm = value; } } public string Type { get { return type; } set { type = value; } } } class Team { string country; Players plr; public Players Players { get {return plr; } set { plr = value; } } public string Country { get { return country; } set { country = value; } } } class Players { string name; DateTime dob; int run; public string Name { get { return name; } set { name = value; } } public DateTime DOB { get { return dob; } set { dob = value; } } public int Run { get { return run; } set { run = value; } } } I have to get the following using LINQ techniques. 1) Youngest all data of the youngest player among all teams 2) Oldest Player of each team 3) The highest run scorer will receive Gold Medal,rest of the players of all team will receive Silver medal. (Please look at the GetPlayer() i have declared var Medal=new String[] {"Gold","Silver"} to associate the Medal ) public void GetPlayer() { var TeamMatrix = new Cricket[] { new Cricket{ Type="Twenty20", Team=new Team{ Country="England", Players=new Players{ DOB=Convert.ToDateTime("01/Jan/1989"), Name="Russel", Run=45}}}, new Cricket{ Type="Twenty20", Team=new Team{ Country="England", Players=new Players{ DOB=Convert.ToDateTime("01/Jan/1991"), Name="Joel", Run=56}}}, new Cricket{ Type="Twenty20", Team=new Team{ Country="Australia", Players=new Players{ DOB=Convert.ToDateTime("01/Jan/1990"), Name="Clark", Run=145}}}, new Cricket{ Type="Twenty20", Team=new Team{ Country="Australia", Players=new Players{ DOB=Convert.ToDateTime("01/Jan/1971"), Name="Bevan", Run=156}}} }; var Medal = new string[] { "Gold", "Silver" }; var tm = (from mat in TeamMatrix select new { mat.Team.Players.DOB }).Max(); Console.WriteLine("Youngest Age={0}",tm); } When I declare var tm = (from mat in TeamMatrix select new { mat.Team.Players.DOB }).Max(); I receive error atleast one object must implement IComparable. What is the actual way to complete the above three tasks? ( Tasks 1 ,2 ,3 are explained above). Thanks to all.

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• What are some things you'd like fresh college grads to know?

  - by bradhe

  So I proposed this to the Reddit community and I'd like to get SO's perspective on this. This is pretty much the copypasta of what I put there. I was thinking about this last night and thought it would be neat to compile a list. I'm still a pretty fresh college grad -- been in industry for 2 years -- but I think that I might have a few interesting things to lend. You don't know as much as you think you do. Somehow, college students think they know a lot more than they do (or maybe that was just me). Likewise, they think they can do more than they actually can. You should fairly assess your skills. QA people are not out to get you. Humans introduce bugs to code. It's not (nescessarily) a personal reflection on you and your skills if your code has a bug and it's caught by the QA/testing team. Listen to your senior (developers). They are not actually fuddy duddies who don't know about the new L337 hax in Ruby (okay, sometimes they are, but still...). They have a wealth of knowledge that you can learn from and it's in your best interest to do so. You will most likely not be doing what you want to for a while. This is mostly true in the corporate world -- startups are a different matter. Also, this is due to more than just the economy, man! Junior devs need to earn their keep, so to speak. Everyone wants to be lead dev on the next project and there are a lot of people in line ahead of you! For every elite developer there are 100 average developers. Joel Spolsky, I'm looking at you. Somehow this concept of ninja coders has really ingrained itself in our culture. While I encourage you to be the best you can be don't be disappointed if people aren't writing blog posts about you in the near future. Anyone else have anything they would see added to this list?

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• How to setup Lucene/Solr for a B2B web app?

  - by Bill Paetzke

  Given: 1 database per client (business customer) 5000 clients Clients have between 2 to 2000 users (avg is ~100 users/client) 100k to 10 million records per database Users need to search those records often (it's the best way to navigate their data) Possibly relevant info: Several new clients each week (any time during business hours) Multiple web servers and database servers (users can login via any web server) Let's stay agnostic of language or sql brand, since Lucene (and Solr) have a breadth of support For Example: Joel Spolsky said in Podcast #11 that his hosted web app product, FogBugz On-Demand, uses Lucene. He has thousands of on-demand clients. And each client gets their own database. They use an index per client and store it in the client's database. I'm not sure on the details. And I'm not sure if this is a serious mod to Lucene. The Question: How would you setup Lucene search so that each client can only search within its database? How would you setup the index(es)? Where do you store the index(es)? Would you need to add a filter to all search queries? If a client cancelled, how would you delete their (part of the) index? (this may be trivial--not sure yet) Possible Solutions: Make an index for each client (database) Pro: Search is faster (than one-index-for-all method). Indices are relative to the size of the client's data. Con: I'm not sure what this entails, nor do I know if this is beyond Lucene's scope. Have a single, gigantic index with a database_name field. Always include database_name as a filter. Pro: Not sure. Maybe good for tech support or billing dept to search all databases for info. Con: Search is slower (than index-per-client method). Flawed security if query filter removed. One last thing: I would also accept an answer that uses Solr (the extension of Lucene). Perhaps it's better suited for this problem. Not sure.

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• 2 Days of Share &amp; Point

  - by Mark Rackley

  Groovy man… SharePoint Saturday Ozarks is back for 2010, bigger and better than before. Join us for a far out time and learn more about SharePoint in one day than you could in a year from the man… Yes! SharePoint Saturday Ozarks is back! SharePoint Saturday Ozarks is the largest SharePoint conference in Arkansas, Southern Missouri, and the very north east tip of Oklahoma. Last year we had a great turn out with 20 speakers, 5 MVPs, and attendees coming from Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Indiana, Ohio, Alabama, Michigan, and Washington. Hey Man… what’s SharePoint Saturday anyway? Sounds like a conspiracy man… Not to worry, SharePoint Saturday is not an arm of the government bent on mind control or any attempt what-so-ever to bring you down man. SharePoint Saturday is grass roots effort started by Michael Lotter (http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/pages/about.aspx). It is a FREE one day event where the best SharePoint speakers gather to present their love, hatred, and frustrations of SharePoint to those lucky individuals who attend. Lessons are learned, contacts are made, prizes are won, food is eaten, assorted beverages are consumed until wee hours of the morning. SharePoint Saturday started with just a few sporadic one day events here and there. However, over the past year SharePoint Saturday has exploded and it’s hard to find a weekend where there is NOT a SharePoint Saturday event happing in some corner of the globe. There are even occasions where there are two SharePoint Saturdays on the same day! Many people are pleasantly surprised at the caliber of speakers at these SharePoint Saturday events. For the most part, these speakers are more eloquent, practiced, and practical than those speakers you find at the major multi-day conferences. These guys aren’t even paid to speak.. they do it out of love man… SharePoint Saturday Ozarks 2009 Alumni We had a star studded cast last year with many returning this year! Just check out the fun that they had… John Ferringer – Admin rockstar… I can still sense the awesomeness   SharePoint poster children Mike Watson & Laura Rogers     Lori Gowin spreading the SharePoint Love Eric Shupps is a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll       Cathy Dew, Sean McDonough, and JD Wade relaxing between gigs Actually, you can see real photos from last year’s SharePoint Saturday ozarks here:  picasaweb.google.com/mrackley/SharePointSaturdayOzarks#    What’s new for SharePoint Saturday Ozarks 2010 SharePoint Saturday Ozarks 2010 will totally blow your mind man. We’re getting the band back to together with many returning speakers and few new faces. Joel Oleson will be speaking this year, maybe he’ll grace us with his song stylings. Sadly, once again, Andrew Connell will not be able to attend SharePoint Saturday Ozarks, however he did feel the need to show his support in his own way. Prizes this year currently include books, software, a Zune HD, and much more! Wait Man… You said 2 days? I thought it was a one day event? Correct you are my herbal smelling friend… SharePoint Saturday Ozarks 2010 will spread the love an additional day this year. The first day will be all about the SharePoint love, on day 2 we will be taking a leisurely float down the Buffalo National River for those interested in a truly unique experience (no banjos allowed please).   Here are the details: WHAT 4 – 5 hour float down the Buffalo National River WHEN & WHERE Sunday June 13th. We will be leaving at 10am from the Parking Lot of: Gordon’s Motel & Canoe Rental Old Highway 7 Jasper, AR 72641 (870) 446-5252 Jasper is about 30 minutes south of Harrison, AR on Highway 7 South. You are responsible for bumming a ride to/from Gordon’s Motel, but they will be shuttling us to/from the river and providing canoes and a boxed lunch. WHAT ELSE? The float trip is dependent on the weather of course, we won’t be floating down the river in a thunderstorm, however I planned SPS Ozarks around a time of year ideal for floating. We aren’t talking class 5 rapids here, you don’t need any real skill, but you need to be okay with possibly tipping your canoe over once or twice. You can bring your own assorted beverages with you, but glass containers are not allowed on the river. I suggest a small cooler with extra snacks and drinks. Also bring clothing you can get wet in (these SharePoint people can get ornery). HOW DO I SIGN UP? When you register for SharePoint Saturday Ozarks, you will have the option to also sign up for the float trip. Seats are limited though! If you do not intend to go, please do not take someone else’s place.  The cost for the float trip will be about $35 dollars per person (which you are responsible for unless we find a sponsor). The price includes shuttle to/from river, canoe, life jackets, paddles, and boxed lunch. Far out man… how do I register??? You can register for SharePoint Saturday Ozarks by going to http://spsozarks.eventbrite.com/ We are limited to 200 people for the conference and 50 people for the float trip, so register today before we are sold out. Lodging for SharePoint Saturday Ozarks will once again take place at the Hotel Seville: Annex Suites are available for $103.20 This is So Groovy.. How can I help? I’m glad you asked! We are still looking for a few sponsors and one or two more speakers. If you are interested please let me know!  You can find out more information at http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/ozarks Hey… wait a minute…. what exactly IS SharePoint man??? Come to SharePoint Saturday Ozarks and find out!!  See you guys there!

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• Invalid assignment left hand side

  - by JoelM

  I'm getting an invalid assignment left hand side. What I'm trying to do is, to use jscolor http://jscolor.com to define the color of polygons im drawing via Mapbender http://mapbender.org. What I do: Select a polygon by clicking on it, then open the options dialog (seperate window) where I have several options including the color. MyCode: if (isTransactional) {str += "\t\t<tr>\n"; var options = ["insert", "update", "delete", "abort", "pick"]; for (var i = 0 ; i < options.length ; i++) { var onClickText = "this.disabled=true;var result = window.opener.formCorrect(document, '"+featureTypeElementFormId+"');"; onClickText += "if (result.isCorrect) {"; onClickText += "window.opener.dbGeom('"+options[i]+"', "+memberIndex+"); "; // onClickText += "window.close();"; onClickText += "}"; onClickText += "else {"; onClickText += "alert(result.errorMessage);this.disabled=false;" onClickText += "}"; if (options[i] == "insert" && hasGeometryColumn && (!fid || showSaveButtonForExistingGeometries)) { str += "\t\t\t<td><input type='button' name='saveButton' value='"+msgObj.buttonLabelSaveGeometry+"' onclick=\""+onClickText+"\" /></td>\n"; } if (!featureTypeMismatch && fid) { if (options[i] == "update" && hasGeometryColumn) { str += "\t\t\t<td><input type='button' name='updateButton' value='"+msgObj.buttonLabelUpdateGeometry+"' onclick=\""+onClickText+"\"/></td>\n"; } if (options[i] == "delete"){ var deleteOnClickText = "var deltrans = confirm('"+msgObj.messageConfirmDeleteGeomFromDb+"');"; deleteOnClickText += "if (deltrans){"; deleteOnClickText += onClickText + "}"; str += "\t\t\t<td><input type='button' name='deleteButton' value='"+msgObj.buttonLabelDeleteGeometry+"' onclick=\""+deleteOnClickText+"\"/></td>\n"; }} if (options[i] == "abort") { str += "\t\t\t<td><input type='button' name='abortButton' value='"+msgObj.buttonLabelAbort+"' onclick=\"window.close();\" /></td>\n"; } if (options[i] == "pick") { var color; str += "<td><input class='color' name='color' id='cPick' onchange="+color+"></td>"; str += "<td><input type='text' id='text' value="+color+"></td>"; //color = document.getElementById('cPick').value; //var color2 = color; //alert(color2); } }str += "\t\t</tr>\n";}str += "\t</table>\n";str += "<input type='hidden' id='fid' value='"+fid+"'>"; //str += "<input type='text' name='mb_wfs_conf'>"; str += "</form>\n";}return str;} The Application: It is a Mapbender application to display maps and draw on it. You can draw points, lines and polygons also merge and split them. You can also select the polygons that you have drawn to alter them. Using: PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Mapbender, jQuery, Geoserver, PostgreSQL, WMS, WFS-T Sorry guys, but I think I'm wasting your time. Will ask this question in GIS specified Q&A. Thank you for the input. Greetings Joël

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• Evidence-Based-Scheduling - are estimations only as accurate as the work-plan they're based on?

  - by Assaf Lavie

  I've been using FogBugz's Evidence Based Scheduling (for the uninitiated, Joel explains) for a while now and there's an inherent problem I can't seem to work around. The system is good at telling me the probability that a given project will be delivered at some date, given the detailed list of tasks that comprise the project. However, it does not take into account the fact that during development additional tasks always pop up. Now, there's the garbage-can approach of creating a generic task/scheduled-item for "last minute hacks" or "integration tasks", or what have you, but that clearly goes against the idea of aggregating the estimates of many small cases. It's often the case that during the development stage of a project you realize that there's a whole area your planning didn't cover, because, well, that's the nature of developing stuff that hasn't been developed before. So now your ~3 month project may very well turn into a 6 month project, but not because your estimations were off (you could be the best estimator in the world, for those task the comprised your initial work plan); rather because you ended up adding a whole bunch of new tasks that weren't there to begin with. EBS doesn't help you with that. It could, theoretically (I guess). It could, perhaps, measure the amount of work you add to a project over time and take that into consideration when estimating the time remaining on a given project. Just a thought. In other words, EBS works on a task basis, but not on a project/release basis - but the latter is what's important. It's what your boss typically cares about - delivery date, not the time it takes to finish each task along the way, and not the time it would have taken, if your planning was perfect. So the question is (yes, there's a question here, don't close it): What's your methodology when it comes to using EBS in FogBugz and how do you solve the problem above, which seems to be a main cause of schedule delays and mispredictions? Edit Some more thoughts after reading a few answers: If it comes down to having to choose which delivery date you're comfortable presenting to your higher-ups by squinting at the delivery-probability graph and choosing 80%, or 95%, or 60% (based on what, exactly?) then we've resorted to plain old buffering/factoring of our estimates. In which case, couldn't we have skipped the meticulous case by case hour-sized estimation effort step? By forcing ourselves to break down tasks that take more than a day into smaller chunks of work haven't we just deluded ourselves into thinking our planning is as tight and thorough as it could be? People may be consistently bad estimators that do not even learn from their past mistakes. In that respect, having an EBS system is certainly better than not having one. But what can we do about the fact that we're not that good in planning as well? I'm not sure it's a problem that can be solved by a similar system. Our estimates are wrong because of tendencies to be overly optimistic/pessimistic about certain tasks, and because of neglect to account for systematic delays (e.g. sick days, major bug crisis) - and usually not because we lack knowledge about the work that needs to be done. Our planning, on the other hand, is often incomplete because we simply don't have enough knowledge in this early stage; and I don't see how an EBS-like system could fill that gap. So we're back to methodology. We need to find a way to accommodate bad or incomplete work plans that's better than voodoo-multiplication.

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• Building the Ultimate SharePoint 2010 Development Environment

  - by Manesh Karunakaran

  It’s been more than a month since SharePoint 2010 RTMed. And a lot of people have downloaded and set up their very own SharePoint 2010 development rigs. And quite a few people have written blogs about setting up good development environments, there is even an MSDN article on it. Two of the blogs worth noting are from MVPs Sahil Malik and Wictor Wilén. Make sure that you check these out as well. Part of the bad side-effects of being a geek is the need to do the technical stuff the best way possible (pragmatic or otherwise), but the problem with this is that what is considered “best” is relative. Precisely the reason why you are reading this post now. Most of the posts that I read are out dated/need updations or are using the wrong OS’es or virtualization solutions (again, opinions vary) or using them the wrong way. Here’s a developer’s view of Building the Ultimate SharePoint 2010 Development Rig. If you are a sales guy, it’s time to close this window. Confusion 1: Which Host Operating System and Virtualization Solution to use? This point has been beaten to death in numerous blog posts in the past, if you have time to invest, read this excellent post by our very own SharePoint Joel on this subject. But if you are planning to build the Ultimate Development Rig, then Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V is the option that you should be looking at. I have been using this as my primary OS for about 6-7 months now, and I haven’t had any Driver issue or Application compatibility issue. In my experience all the Windows 7 drivers work fine with WIN2008 R2 also. You can enable Aero for eye candy (and the Windows 7 look and feel) and except for a few things like the Hibernation support (which a can be enabled if you really want it), Windows Server 2008 R2, is the best Workstation OS that I have used till date. But frankly the answer to this question of which OS to use depends primarily on one question - Are you willing to change your primary OS? If the answer to that is ‘Yes’, then Windows 2008 R2 with Hyper-V is the best option, if not look at vmWare or VirtualBox, both are equally good. Those who are familiar with a Virtual PC background might prefer Sun VirtualBox. Besides, these provide support for running 64 bit guest machines on 32 bit hosts if the underlying hardware is truly 64 bit. See my earlier post on this. Since we are going to make the ultimate rig, we will use Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V, for reasons mentioned above. Confusion 2: Should I use a multi-(virtual) server set up? A lot of people use multiple servers for their development environments - like Wictor Wilén is suggesting - one server hosting the Active directory, one hosting SharePoint Server and another one for SQL Server. True, this mimics the production environment the best possible way, but as somebody who has fallen for this set up earlier, I can tell you that you don’t really get anything by doing this. Microsoft has done well to ensure that if you can do it on one machine, you can do it in a farm environment as well. Besides, when you run multiple Server class machine instances in parallel, there are a lot of unwanted processor cycles wasted for no good use. In my personal experience, as somebody who needs to switch between MOSS 2007/SharePoint 2010 environments from time to time, the best possible solution is to Make the host Windows Server 2008 R2 machine your Domain Controller (AD Server) Make all your Virtual Guest OS’es join this domain. Have each Individual Guest OS Image have it’s own local SQL Server instance. The advantages are that you can reuse the users and groups in each of the Guest operating systems, you can manage the users in one place, AD is light weight and doesn't take too much resources on your host machine and also having separate SQL instances for each of the Development images gives you maximum flexibility in terms of configuration, for example your SharePoint rigs can have simpler DB configurations, compared to your MS BI blast pits. Confusion 3: Which Operating System should I use to run SharePoint 2010 Now that’s a no brainer. Use Windows 2008 R2 as your Guest OS. When you are building the ultimate rig, why compromise? If you are planning to run Windows Server 2008 as your Guest OS, there are a few patches that you need to install at different times during the installation, for that follow the steps mentioned here Okay now that we have made our choices, let’s get to the interesting part of building the rig, Step 1: Prepare the host machine – Install Windows Server 2008 R2 Install Windows Server 2008 R2 on your best Desktop/Laptop. If you have read this far, I am quite sure that you are somebody who can install an OS on your own, so go ahead and do that. Make sure that you run the compatibility wizard before you go ahead and nuke your current OS. There are plenty of blogs telling you how to make a good Windows 2008 R2 Workstation that feels and behaves like a Windows 7 machine, follow one and once you are done, head to Step 2. Step 2: Configure the host machine as a Domain Controller Before we begin this, let me tell you, this step is completely optional, you don’t really need to do this, you can simply use the local users on the Guest machines instead, but if this is a much cleaner approach to manage users and groups if you run multiple guest operating systems.  This post neatly explains how to configure your Windows Server 2008 R2 host machine as a Domain Controller. Follow those simple steps and you are good to go. If you are not able to get it to work, try this. Step 3: Prepare the guest machine – Install Windows Server 2008 R2 Open Hyper-V Manager Choose to Create a new Guest Operating system Allocate at least 2 GB of Memory to the Guest OS Choose the Windows 2008 R2 Installation Media Start the Virtual Machine to commence installation. Once the Installation is done, Activate the OS. Step 4: Make the Guest operating systems Join the Domain This step is quite simple, just follow these steps below, Fire up Hyper-V Manager, open your Guest OS Click on Start, and Right click on ‘Computer’ and choose ‘Properties’ On the window that pops-up, click on ‘Change Settings’ On the ‘System Properties’ Window that comes up, Click on the ‘Change’ button Now a window named ‘Computer Name/Domain Changes’ opens up, In the text box titled Domain, type in the Domain name from Step 2. Click Ok and windows will show you the welcome to domain message and ask you to restart the machine, click OK to restart. If the addition to domain fails, that means that you have not set up networking in Hyper-V for the Guest OS to communicate with the Host. To enable it, follow the steps I had mentioned in this post earlier. Step 5: Install SQL Server 2008 R2 on the Guest Machine SQL Server 2008 R2 gets installed with out hassle on Windows Server 2008 R2. SQL Server 2008 needs SP2 to work properly on WIN2008 R2. Also SQL Server 2008 R2 allows you to directly add PowerPivot support to SharePoint. Choose to install in SharePoint Integrated Mode in Reporting Server Configuration. Step 6: Install KB971831 and SharePoint 2010 Pre-requisites Now install the WCF Hotfix for Microsoft Windows (KB971831) from this location, and SharePoint 2010 Pre-requisites from the SP2010 Installation media. Step 7: Install and Configure SharePoint 2010 Install SharePoint 2010 from the installation media, after the installation is complete, you are prompted to start the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard. If you are using a local instance of Microsoft SQL Server 2008, install the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 KB 970315 x64 before starting the wizard. If your development environment uses a remote instance of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 or if it has a pre-existing installation of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 on which KB 970315 x64 has already been applied, this step is not necessary. With the wizard open, do the following: Install SQL Server 2008 KB 970315 x64. After the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 KB 970315 x64 installation is finished, complete the wizard. Alternatively, you can choose not to run the wizard by clearing the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard check box and closing the completed installation dialog box. Install SQL Server 2008 KB 970315 x64, and then manually start the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard by opening a Command Prompt window and executing the following command: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared Debug\Web Server Extensions\14\BIN\psconfigui.exe The SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard may fail if you are using a computer that is joined to a domain but that is not connected to a domain controller. Step 8: Install Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010 SDK Install Visual Studio 2010 Download and Install the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 SDK Step 9: Install PowerPivot for SharePoint and Configure Reporting Services Pop-In the SQLServer 2008 R2 installation media once again and install PowerPivot for SharePoint. This will get added as another instance named POWERPIVOT. Configure Reporting Services by following the steps mentioned here, if you need to get down to the details on how the integration between SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2 works, see Working Together: SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services Integration in SharePoint 2010 an excellent article by Alan Le Marquand Step 10: Download and Install Sample Databases for Microsoft SQL Server 2008R2 SharePoint 2010 comes with a lot of cool stuff like PerformancePoint Services and BCS, if you need to try these out, you need to have data in your databases. So if you want to save yourself the trouble of creating sample data for your PerformancePoint and BCS experiments, download and install Sample Databases for Microsoft SQL Server 2008R2 from CodePlex. And you are done! Fire up your Visual Studio 2010 and Start Coding away!!

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• Special thanks to everyone that helped me in 2010.

  - by mbcrump

  2010 has been a very good year for me and I wanted to create a list and thank everyone for what they have done for me.  I also wanted to thank everyone for reading and subscribing to my blog. It is hard to believe that people actually want to read what I write. I feel like I owe a huge thanks to everyone listed below. Looking back upon 2010, I feel that I’ve grown as a developer and you are part of that reason. Sometimes we get caught up in day to day work and forget to give thanks to those that helped us along the way. The list below is mine, it includes people and companies. This list is obviously not going to include everyone that has helped, just those that have stood out in my mind. When I think back upon 2010, their names keep popping up in my head. So here goes, in no particular order.  People Dave Campbell – For everything he has done for the Silverlight Community with his Silverlight Cream blog. I can’t think of a better person to get recognition at the Silverlight FireStarter event. I also wanted to thank him for spending several hours of his time helping me track down a bug in my feedburner account. Victor Gaudioso – For his large collection of video tutorials on his blog and the passion and enthusiasm he has for Silverlight. We have talked on the phone and I’ve never met anyone so fired up for Silverlight. Kunal Chowdhury – Kunal has always been available for me to bounce ideas off of. Kunal has also answered a lot of questions that stumped me. His blog and CodeProject article have green a great help to me and the Silverlight Community. Glen Gordon – I was looking frantically for a Windows Phone 7 several months before release and Glen found one for me. This allowed me to start a blog series on the Windows Phone 7 hardware and developing an application from start to finish that Scott Guthrie retweeted.  Jeff Blankenburg – For listening to my complaints in the early stages of Windows Phone 7. Jeff was always very polite and gave me his cell phone number to talk it over. He also walked me through several problems that I was having early on. Pete Brown – For writing Silverlight 4 in Action. This book is definitely a labor of love. I followed Pete on Twitter as he was writing it and he spent a lot of late nights and weekends working on it. I felt a lot smarter after reading it the first time. The second time was even better. John Papa – For all of his work on the Silverlight Firestarter and the Silverlight community in general. He has also helped me on a personal level with several things. Daniel Heisler – For putting up with me the past year while we worked on many .NET projects together in 2010. Alvin Ashcraft – For publishing a daily blog post on the best of .NET links. He has linked to my site many times and I really appreciate what he does for the community. Chris Alcock – For publishing the Morning Brew every weekday. I remember when I first appeared on his site, I started getting hundreds of hits on my site and wondered if I was getting a DOS attack or something. It was great to find out that Chris had linked to one of my articles. Joel Cochran – For spending a week teaching “Blend-O-Rama”. This was my one of my favorite sessions of this year. I learned a lot about Expression Blend from it and the best part was that it was free and during lunchtime. Jeremy Likness – Jeremy is smart – very smart. I have learned a lot from Jeremy over the past year. He is also involved in the Silverlight community in every way possible, from forums to blog post to screencast to open source. It goes on and on. The people that I met at VSLive Orlando 2010. I had a great time chatting with Walt Ritscher, Wallace McClure, Tim Huckabee and David Platt. Also a special thanks to all of my friends on Twitter like @wilhil, @DBVaughan, @DataArtist, @wbm, @DirkStrauss and @rsringeri and many many more. Software Companies / Events / May of gave me FREE stuff. =) Microsoft (3) – I was sent a free coupon code by Microsoft to take the Silverlight 4 Beta Exam. I jumped on the offer and took the exam. It was great being selected to try out the exam before it goes public even though Microsoft eventually published a universal coupon code for everyone. I am still waiting to find out if I passed the exam. My fingers are crossed. Microsoft reaching out to me with some questions regarding the .NET Community. I’ve never had a company contact me with such interest in the community. Having a contest where 75 people could win a $100 gift certificate and a T-Shirt for submitting a Windows Phone 7 app. I submitted my app and won. All of the free launch events this year (Windows Phone 7, Visual Studio 2010, ASP.NET MVC). Wintellect – For providing an awesome day of free technical training called T.E.N. Where else can you get free training from some of the best programmers in the world? I also won a contest from them that included a NETAdvantage Ultimate License from Infragistics. VSLive – I attended the Orlando 2010 Conference and it was the best developer’s conference that I have ever attended. I got to know a lot of people at this conference and hang out with many wonderful speakers. I live tweeted the event and while it may have annoyed some, the organizers of VSLive loved it. I won the contest on Twitter and they invited me back to the 2011 session of my choice. This is a very nice gift and I really appreciate the generosity. BarcodeLib.com – For providing free barcode generating tools for a Non-Profit ASP.NET project that I was working on. Their third party controls really made this a breeze compared to my existing solution. NDepend – It is absolutely the best tool to improve code quality. The product is extremely large and I would recommend heading over to their site to check it out. Silverlight Spy – I was writing a blog post on Silverlight Spy and Koen Zwikstra provided a FREE license to me. If you ever wanted to peek inside of a Silverlight Application then this is the tool for you. He is also working on a version that will support OOB and Windows Phone 7. I would recommend checking out his site. Birmingham .NET Users Group / Silverlight Nights User Group – It takes a lot of time to put together a user group meeting every month yet it always seems to happen. I don’t want to name names for fear of leaving someone out but both of these User Groups are excellent if you live in the Birmingham, Alabama area. Publishing Companies Manning Publishing – For giving me early access to Silverlight 4 in Action by Pete Brown. It was really nice to be able to read this awesome book while Pete was writing it. I was also one of the first people to publish a review of the book. Sams Publishing and DZone – For providing a copy of Silverlight 4 Unleashed by Laurent Bugnion for me to review for their site. The review is coming in January 2011. Special Shoutout to the following 3rd Party Silverlight Controls It has been a great pleasure to work with the following companies on 3rd Party Control Giveaways every month. It always amazes me how every 3rd Party Control company is so eager to help out the community. I’ve never been turned down by any of these companies! These giveaways have sparked a lot of interest in Silverlight and hopefully I can continue giving away a new set every month. If you are a 3rd Party Control company and are interested in participating in these giveaways then please email me at mbcrump29[at]gmail[d0t].com. The companies below have already participated in my giveaways: Infragistics (December 2010) - Win a set of Infragistics Silverlight Controls with Data Visualization!  Mindscape (November 2010) - Mindscape Silverlight Controls + Free Mega Pack Contest Telerik (October 2010) - Win Telerik RadControls for Silverlight! ($799 Value) Again, I just wanted to say Thanks to everyone for helping me grow as a developer.  Subscribe to my feed

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