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• Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition

  - by PearlFactory

  Have got a new kickn server as new DEV machine It has got two 3ware 9650 Cached Controllers with 8 x 300gig Velociraptor Drives First Problem was the 9.5.1.1 drivers Had to press F8 as soon as the Win 2008 r2 server cd started to load. Once in Adavanced Startup options Disable Driver Signing options Next Issue was I got everything running and accidently selected wrong raid part to do install once I restarted All I would get after waiting the 10 mins for the reboot to start & loading the driver was "setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition"  Finally after about 1 hour I removed all drives apart from the 2 needed for system part on cont 0 deleted system part and recreated this RAID1 mirror. (ALso make sure all USB drives are out on boot..only add them when browsing  the driver to be added )  Restarted loaded driver selected install and Once system is up I will go back and add drives and new parts on both controllers AT least I did not get stuck for a day as is the norm..lol

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• Ambiguous in the namespace problem

  - by Agha Usman Ahmed

  From the last few days, I was ignoring an error that keep coming at the compile time. I spent some two hours on it before but didn’t get it work. The error is quit confusing and of course difficult to manage. 'ApplicationSettingsBase' is ambiguous in the namespace 'System.Configuration' 'MailMessage' is ambiguous in the namespace 'System.Net.Mail' And there are couple of other similar errors that is pointing to some ambiguous references in my project.  The confusing part is that the MailMessage object throws similar error when you are importing the old and new email namespace. For example, Imports System.Web.Mail Imports System.Net.Mail So if you are only encountering ambiguous problem in MailMessage object. It is more possible that you have define both the namespaces in your code behind which is actually confusing the compiler about your referencing object. The quick solve for this problem is that remove Imports System.Web.Mail and it should work smooth. But with me, I never used the old asp.net mail namespace in my project. Then I start looking at my references and luckily I found the problem there. Follow the steps below to investigate the issue 1. Go to your project 2. Then references 3. Right click on “System” and see properties. it should point to the following path x:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\System.dll Where x is name of your operating system directory. This was the problem with my project. I had my operating system install on “D” drive and some how it is pointing to “C” drive which is the root cause of this problem. After that I verify all my references and found 5 –6 assemblies that are pointing to wrong path and get it worked. Also note, the problem can occur in any type of project either it is website , web application etc.

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• List of Commonly Used Value Types in XNA Games

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  Most XNA programmers are concerned about generating garbage. More specifically about allocating GC-managed memory (GC stands for “garbage collector” and is both the name of the class that provides access to the garbage collector and an acronym for the garbage collector (as a concept) itself). Two of the major target platforms for XNA (Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360) use variants of the .NET Compact Framework. On both variants, the GC runs under various circumstances (Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360). Of concern to XNA programmers is the fact that it runs automatically after a fixed amount of GC-managed memory has been allocated (currently 1MB on both systems). Many beginning XNA programmers are unaware of what constitutes GC-managed memory, though. So here’s a quick overview. In .NET, there are two different “types” of types: value types and reference types. Only reference types are managed by the garbage collector. Value types are not managed by the garbage collector and are instead managed in other ways that are implementation dependent. For purposes of XNA programming, the important point is that they are not managed by the GC and thus do not, by themselves, increment that internal 1 MB allocation counter. (n.b. Structs are value types. If you have a struct that has a reference type as a member, then that reference type, when instantiated, will still be allocated in the GC-managed memory and will thus count against the 1 MB allocation counter. Putting it in a struct doesn’t change the fact that it gets allocated on the GC heap, but the struct itself is created outside of the GC’s purview). Both value types and reference types use the keyword ‘new’ to allocate a new instance of them. Sometimes this keyword is hidden by a method which creates new instances for you, e.g. XmlReader.Create. But the important thing to determine is whether or not you are dealing with a value types or a reference type. If it’s a value type, you can use the ‘new’ keyword to allocate new instances of that type without incrementing the GC allocation counter (except as above where it’s a struct with a reference type in it that is allocated by the constructor, but there are no .NET Framework or XNA Framework value types that do this so it would have to be a struct you created or that was in some third-party library you were using for that to even become an issue). The following is a list of most all of value types you are likely to use in a generic XNA game: AudioCategory (used with XACT; not available on WP7) AvatarExpression (Xbox 360 only, but exposed on Windows to ease Xbox development) bool BoundingBox BoundingSphere byte char Color DateTime decimal double any enum (System.Enum itself is a class, but all enums are value types such that there are no GC allocations for enums) float GamePadButtons GamePadCapabilities GamePadDPad GamePadState GamePadThumbSticks GamePadTriggers GestureSample int IntPtr (rarely but occasionally used in XNA) KeyboardState long Matrix MouseState nullable structs (anytime you see, e.g. int? something, that ‘?’ denotes a nullable struct, also called a nullable type) Plane Point Quaternion Ray Rectangle RenderTargetBinding sbyte (though I’ve never seen it used since most people would just use a short) short TimeSpan TouchCollection TouchLocation TouchPanelCapabilities uint ulong ushort Vector2 Vector3 Vector4 VertexBufferBinding VertexElement VertexPositionColor VertexPositionColorTexture VertexPositionNormalTexture VertexPositionTexture Viewport So there you have it. That’s not quite a complete list, mind you. For example: There are various structs in the .NET framework you might make use of. I left out everything from the Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics.PackedVector namespace, since everything in there ventures into the realm of advanced XNA programming anyway (n.b. every single instantiable thing in that namespace is a struct and thus a value type; there are also two interfaces but interfaces cannot be instantiated at all and thus don’t figure in to this discussion). There are so many enums you’re likely to use (PlayerIndex, SpriteSortMode, SpriteEffects, SurfaceFormat, etc.) that including them would’ve flooded the list and reduced its utility. So I went with “any enum” and trust that you can figure out what the enums are (and it’s rare to use ‘new’ with an enum anyway). That list also doesn’t include any of the pre-defined static instances of some of the classes (e.g. BlendState.AlphaBlend, BlendState.Opaque, etc.) which are already allocated such that using them doesn’t cause any new allocations and therefore doesn’t increase that 1 MB counter. That list also has a few misleading things. VertexElement, VertexPositionColor, and all the other vertex types are structs. But you’re only likely to ever use them as an array (for use with VertexBuffer or DynamicVertexBuffer), and all arrays are reference types (even arrays of value types such as VertexPositionColor[ ] or int[ ]). * So that’s it for now. The note below may be a bit confusing (it deals with how the GC works and how arrays are managed in .NET). If so, you can probably safely ignore it for now but feel free to ask any questions regardless. * Arrays of value types (where the value type doesn’t contain any reference type members) are much faster for the GC to examine than arrays of reference types, so there is a definite benefit to using arrays of value types where it makes sense. But creating arrays of value types does cause the GC’s allocation counter to increase. Indeed, allocating a large array of a value type is one of the quickest ways to increment the allocation counter since a .NET array is a sequential block of memory. An array of reference types is just a sequential block of references (typically 4 bytes each) while an array of value types is a sequential block of instances of that type. So for an array of Vector3s it would be 12 bytes each since each float is 4 bytes and there are 3 in a Vector3; for an array of VertexPositionNormalTexture structs it would typically be 32 bytes each since it has two Vector3s and a Vector2. (Note that there are a few additional bytes taken up in the creation of an array, typically 12 but sometimes 16 or possibly even more, which depend on the implementation details of the array type on the particular platform the code is running on).

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• Copy TFS Build Definitions between Projects and Collections

  - by Jakob Ehn

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/jakob/archive/2014/06/05/copy-tfs-build-definitions-between-projects-and-collections.aspxThe last couple of years it has become apparent that using multiple team projects in TFS is generally a bad idea. There are of course exceptions to this, but there are a lot ot things that becomes much easier to do when you put all of your projects and team in the same team project. Fellow ALM MVP Martin Hinshelwood has blogged about this several times, as well as other people in the community. In particular, using the backlog and portfolio management tools makes much more sense when everything is located in the same team project. Consolidating multiple team projects into one is not that easy unfortunately, it involves migrating source code, work items, reports etc.  Another thing that also need to be migrated is build definitions. It is possible to clone build definitions within the same team project using the TFS power tools. The Community TFS Build Manager also lets you clone build definitions to other team projects. But there is no tool that allows you to clone/copy a build definition to another collection. So, I whipped up a simple console application that let you do this. The tool can be downloaded from https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=EE034C9F620CD58D!8162&authkey=!ACTr56v1QVowzuE&ithint=file%2c.zip   Using CopyTFSBuildDefinitions You use the tool like this: CopyTFSBuildDefinitions  SourceCollectionUrl  SourceTeamProject  BuildDefinitionName  DestinationCollectionUrl  DestinationTeamProject [NewDefinitionName] Arguments SourceCollectionUrl The URL to the TFS collection that contains the team project with the build definition that you want to copy SourceTeamProject The name of the team project that contains the build definition BuildDefinitionName Name of the build definition DestinationCollectionUrl The URL to the TFS collection that contains the team project that you want to copy your build definition to DestinationTeamProject The name of the team project in the destination collection NewDefinitionName (Optional) Use this to override the name of the new build definition. If you don’t specify this, the name will the same as the original one Example: CopyTFSBuildDefinitions  https://jakob.visualstudio.com DemoProject  WebApplication.CI https://anotheraccount.visualstudio.com     Notes Since we are (potentially) create a build definition in a new collection, there is no guarantee that the various paths that are defined in the build definition exist in the new collection. For example, a build definition refers to server paths in TFVC or repos + branches in TFGit. It also refers to build controllers that definitely don’t exist in the new collection. So there will be some cleanup to do after you copy your build definitions. You can fix some of these using the Community TFS Build Manager, for example it is very easy to apply the correct build controller to a set of build definitions The problem stated above also applies to build process templates. However, the tool tries to find a build process template in the new team project with the same file name as the one that existed in the old team project. If it finds one, it will be used for the new build definition. Otherwise is will use the default build template If you want to run the tool for many build definitions, you can use this SQL scripts, compliments of Mr. Scrum/ALM MVP Richard Hundhausen to generate the necessary commands: USE Tfs_Collection GO SELECT 'CopyTFSBuildDefinitions.exe http://SERVER:8080/tfs/collection "' + P.ProjectName + '" "' + REPLACE(BD.DefinitionName,'\','') + '" http://NEWSERVER:8080/tfs/COLLECTION TEAMPROJECT'   FROM tbl_Project P        INNER JOIN tbl_BuildGroup BG on BG.TeamProject = P.ProjectUri        INNER JOIN tbl_BuildDefinition BD on BD.GroupId = BG.GroupId   ORDER BY P.ProjectName, BD.DefinitionName   Hope that helps, let me know if you have any problems with the tool or if you find it useful

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• Windows Azure Evolution - Web Sites (aka Antares) Part 1

  - by Shaun

  This is the 3rd post of my Windows Azure Evolution series, focus on the new features and enhancement which was alone with the Windows Azure Platform Upgrade June 2012, announced at the MEET Windows Azure event on 7th June. In the first post I introduced the new preview developer portal and how to works for the existing features such as cloud services, storages and SQL databases. In the second one I talked about the Windows Azure .NET SDK 1.7 on the latest Visual Studio 2012 RC on Windows 8. From this one I will begin to introduce some new features. Now let’s have a look on the first one of them, Windows Azure Web Sites.   Overview Windows Azure Web Sites (WAWS), as known as Antares, was a new feature still in preview stage in this upgrade. It allows people to quickly and easily deploy websites to a highly scalable cloud environment, uses the languages and open source apps of the choice then deploy such as FTP, Git and TFS. It also can be integrated with Windows Azure services like SQL Database, Caching, CDN and Storage easily. After read its introduction we may have a question: since we can deploy a website from both cloud service web role and web site, what’s the different between them? So, let’s have a quick compare.   CLOUD SERVICE WEB SITE OS Windows Server Windows Server Virtualization Windows Azure Virtual Machine Windows Azure Virtual Machine Host IIS IIS Platform ASP.NET WebForm, ASP.NET MVC, WCF ASP.NET WebForm, ASP.NET MVC, PHP Language C#, VB.NET C#, VB.NET, PHP Database SQL Database SQL Database, MySQL Architecture Multi layered, background worker, message queuing, etc.. Simple website with backend database. VS Project Windows Azure Cloud Service ASP.NET Web Form, ASP.NET MVC, etc.. Out-of-box Gallery (none) Drupal, DotNetNuke, WordPress, etc.. Deployment Package upload, Visual Studio publish FTP, Git, TFS, WebMatrix Compute Mode Dedicate VM Shared Across VMs, Dedicate VM Scale Scale up, scale out Scale up, scale out As you can see, there are many difference between the cloud service and web site, but the main point is that, the cloud service focus on those complex architecture web application. For example, if you want to build a website with frontend layer, middle business layer and data access layer, with some background worker process connected through the message queue, then you should better use cloud service, since it provides full control of your code and application. But if you just want to build a personal blog or a  business portal, then you can use the web site. Since the web site have many galleries, you can create them even without any coding and configuration. David Pallmann have an awesome figure explains the benefits between the could service, web site and virtual machine.   Create a Personal Blog in Web Site from Gallery As I mentioned above, one of the big feature in WAWS is to build a website from an existing gallery, which means we don’t need to coding and configure. What we need to do is open the windows azure developer portal and click the NEW button, select WEB SITE and FROM GALLERY. In the popping up windows there are many websites we can choose to use. For example, for personal blog there are Orchard CMS, WordPress; for CMS there are DotNetNuke, Drupal 7, mojoPortal. Let’s select WordPress and click the next button. The next step is to configure the web site. We will need to specify the DNS name and select the subscription and region. Since the WordPress uses MySQL as its backend database, we also need to create a MySQL database as well. Windows Azure Web Sites utilize ClearDB to host the MySQL databases. You cannot create a MySQL database directly from SQL Databases section. Finally, since we selected to create a new MySQL database we need to specify the database name and region in the last step. Also we need to accept the ClearDB’s terms as well. Then windows azure platform will download the WordPress codes and deploy the MySQL database and website. Then it will be ready to use. Select the website and click the BROWSE button, the WordPress administration page will be shown. After configured the WordPress here is my personal web blog on the cloud. It took me no more than 10 minutes to establish without any coding.   Monitor, Configure, Scale and Linked Resources Let’s click into the website I had just created in the portal and have a look on what we can do. In the website details page where are five sections. - Dashboard The overall information about this website, such as the basic usage status, public URL, compute mode, FTP address, subscription and links that we can specify the deployment credentials, TFS and Git publish setting, etc.. - Monitor Some status information such as the CPU usage, memory usage etc., errors, etc.. We can add more metrics by clicking the ADD METRICS button and the bottom as well. - Configure Here we can set the configurations of our website such as the .NET and PHP runtime version, diagnostics settings, application settings and the IIS default documents. - Scale This is something interesting. In WAWS there are two compute mode or called web site mode. One is “shared”, which means our website will be shared with other web sites in a group of windows azure virtual machines. Each web site have its own process (w3wp.exe) with some sandbox technology to isolate from others. When we need to scaling-out our web site in shared mode, we actually increased the working process count. Hence in shared mode we cannot specify the virtual machine size since they are shared across all web sites. This is a little bit different than the scaling mode of the cloud service (hosted service web role and worker role). The other mode called “dedicate”, which means our web site will use the whole windows azure virtual machine. This is the same hosting behavior as cloud service web role. In web role it will be deployed on the virtual machines we specified and all of them are only used by us. In web sites dedicate mode, it’s the same. In this mode when we scaling-out our web site we will use more virtual machines, and each of them will only host our own website. And we can specify the virtual machine size in this mode. In the developer portal we can select which mode we are using from the scale section. In shared mode we can only specify the instance count, but in dedicate mode we can specify the instance size as well as the instance count. - Linked Resource The MySQL database created alone with the creation of our WordPress web site is a linked resource. We can add more linked resources in this section.   Pricing For the web site itself, since this feature is in preview period if you are using shared mode, then you will get free up to 10 web sites. But if you are using dedicate mode, the price would be the virtual machines you are using. For example, if you are using dedicate and configured two middle size virtual machines then you will pay $230.40 per month. If there is SQL Database linked to your web site then they will be charged separately based on the Pay-As-You-Go price. For example a 1GB web edition database costs $9.99 per month. And the bandwidth will be charged as well. For example 10GB outbound data transfer costs $1.20 per month. For more information about the pricing please have a look at the windows azure pricing page.   Summary Windows Azure Web Sites gives us easier and quicker way to create, develop and deploy website to window azure platform. Comparing with the cloud service web role, the WAWS have many out-of-box gallery we can use directly. So if you just want to build a blog, CMS or business portal you don’t need to learn ASP.NET, you don’t need to learn how to configure DotNetNuke, you don’t need to learn how to prepare PHP and MySQL. By using WAWS gallery you can establish a website within 10 minutes without any lines of code. But in some cases we do need to code by ourselves. We may need to tweak the layout of our pages, or we may have a traditional ASP.NET or PHP web application which needed to migrated to the cloud. Besides the gallery WAWS also provides many features to download, upload code. It also provides the feature to integrate with some version control services such as TFS and Git. And it also provides the deploy approaches through FTP and Web Deploy. In the next post I will demonstrate how to use WebMatrix to download and modify the website, and how to use TFS and Git to deploy automatically one our code changes committed.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Brainless Backups

  - by Jesse

  I’m a software developer by trade which means to my friends and family I’m just a “computer guy”. It’s assumed that I know everything about every facet of computing from removing spyware to replacing hardware. I also can do all of this blindly over the phone or after hearing a five to ten word description of the problem over dinner ;-) In my position as CIO of my friends and families I’ve been in the unfortunate position of trying to recover music, pictures, or documents off of failed hard drives on more than one occasion. It’s not a great situation for anyone, and it’s always at these times that the importance of backups becomes so clear. Several months back a friend of mine found himself in this situation. The hard drive on his 8 year old laptop failed and took a good number of his digital photos with it. I think most folks can deal with losing some of their music and even some of their documents, but it really stings to lose pictures of past events and loved ones. After ordering a new laptop, my friend went out and bought an external hard drive so that he could start keeping a backup of his data. As fate would have it, several months later the drive in his new laptop failed and he learned the hard way that simply buying the external hard drive isn’t enough… you actually have to copy your stuff over every once in awhile! The importance of backup and recovery plans is (hopefully) well known in IT organizations. Well executed backup plans are in place, and hopefully the backup and recovery process is tested regularly. When you’re talking about users at home, however, the need for these backups is often understood far too late. Most typical users can’t be expected to remember to backup their data regularly and also don’t always have the know-how to setup automated backups. For my friends and family members in this situation I recommend tools like Dropbox, Carbonite, and Mozy. Here’s why I like them: They’re affordable: Dropbox and Mozy both have free offerings, though most people with lots of music and/or photos to backup will probably exceed the storage limitations of those free plans pretty quickly. Still, all three offer pretty affordable monthly or yearly plans. In my opinion, Carbonite’s unlimited storage plan for $50-$60 per year is the best value around. They’re easy to setup: Both Dropbox and Carbonite are very easy to get setup and start using. I’ve never used Mozy, but I imagine it’s similarly painless to get up and running. Backups are automatically “off-site”: A backup that is sitting on an external hard drive right next to your computer is great, but might not protect against flood damage, a power surge, or other disasters in that single location. These services exist “in the cloud” so to speak, helping mitigate those concerns. Granted, this kind of backup scheme requires some trust in the 3rd party to protect your data from both malicious people and disastrous events. This truly is a bit of a double edged sword, but I sleep well at night knowing that my data is being backed up and secured by a company made up of engineers that focus on the business of doing backups right. Backups are “brainless”: What I like most about services like these is that they work “automagically” in the background, watching for files to be updated and automatically backing up those changes. There’s no need to remember to plug in that external drive and copy your data over. Since starting to recommend these services to my friends and family I find myself wearing my “data recovery” hat far less often. The only way backups are effective for your standard computer user is if they’re completely automatic. Backups need to be brainless, or they just won’t work.

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• Silverlight 4 on Visual Studio 2010 RC

  - by Sayre Collado

  Hello Guys, The default silverlight on VS 2010 RC is silverlight 3. Why there's no SL4?

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• Using the RSSBus Salesforce Excel Add-In From Excel Macros (VBA)

  - by dataintegration

  The RSSBus Salesforce Excel Add-In makes it easy to retrieve and update data from Salesforce from within Microsoft Excel. In addition to the built-in wizards that make data manipulation possible without code, the full functionality of the RSSBus Excel Add-Ins is available programmatically with Excel Macros (VBA) and Excel Functions. This article shows how to write an Excel macro that can be used to perform bulk inserts into Salesforce. Although this article uses the Salesforce Excel Add-In as an example, the same process can be applied to any of the Excel Add-Ins available on our website. Step 1: Download and install the RSSBus Excel Add-In available on our website. Step 2: Open Excel and create place holder cells for the connection details that are needed from the macro. In this article, a spreadsheet will be created for batch inserts, and these cells will store the connection details, and will be used to report the job Id, the batch Id, and the batch status. Step 3: Switch to the Developer tab in Excel. Add a new button on the spreadsheet, and create a new macro associated with it. This macro will contain the code needed to insert a batch of rows into Salesforce. Step 4: Add a reference to the Excel Add-In by selecting Tools --> References --> RSSBus Excel Add-In. The macro functions of the Excel Add-In will be available once the reference has been added. The following code shows how to call a Stored Procedure. In this example, a job is created to insert Leads by calling the CreateJob stored procedure. CreateJob returns a jobId that can be used to upload a large number of Leads in one transaction. Note the use of cells B1, B2, B3, and B4 that were created in Step 2 to read the connection settings from the Excel SpreadSheet and to write out the status of the procedure. methodName = "CreateJob" module.SetProviderName ("Salesforce") nameArray = Array("ObjectName", "Action", "ConcurrencyMode") valueArray = Array("Lead", "insert", "Serial") user = Range("B1").value pass = Range("B2").value atoken = Range("B3").value If (Not user = "" And Not pass = "" And Not atoken = "") Then module.SetConnectionString ("User=" + user + ";Password=" + pass + ";Access Token=" + atoken + ";") If module.CallSP(methodName, nameArray, valueArray) Then Dim ColumnCount As Integer ColumnCount = module.GetColumnCount Dim idIndex As Integer For Count = 0 To ColumnCount - 1 Dim colName As String colName = module.GetColumnName(Count) If module.GetColumnName(Count) = "id" Then idIndex = Count End If Next While (Not module.EOF) Range("B4").value = module.GetValue(idIndex) module.MoveNext Wend Else MsgBox "The CreateJob query failed." End If Exit Sub Else MsgBox "Please specify the connection details." Exit Sub End If Error: MsgBox "ERROR: " & Err.Description Step 5: Add the code to your macro. If you use the code above, you can check the results at Salesforce.com. They can be seen at Administration Setup -> Monitoring -> Bulk Data Load Jobs. Download the attached sample file for a more complete demo. Distributing an Excel File With Macros An Excel file with macros is saved using the .xlms extension. The code for the macro remains in the Excel file, and you can distribute your Excel file to any machine where the RSSBus Salesforce Excel Add-In is already installed. Macro Sample File Please download the fully functional sample excel file that includes the code referenced here. You will also need the RSSBus Excel Add-In to make the connection. You can download a free trial here. Note: You may get an error message stating: "Can't find project or library." in Excel 2007, since this example is made using Excel 2010. To resolve this, navigate to Tools -> References and uncheck the "MISSING: RSSBus Excel Add-In", then scroll down and check the "RSSBus Excel Add-In" listed below it.

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• Windows Azure Virtual Machine Test Drive Kit

  - by Clint Edmonson

  The public preview of hosted Virtual Machines in Windows Azure is now available to the general public. This platform preview enables you to evaluate our new IaaS and Enterprise Networking capabilities. Once you have registered for the 90 Day Free Trial and created a new account, you can access the preview directly at this link: https://account.windowsazure.com/PreviewFeatures If you’ve been to any of my presentations lately, you’ll know that I’m fired up about these new offerings. As I’ve worked through some scenarios for myself and with my customers, I’ve been collecting the resources that helped me to ramp up. Here’s a collection of links to the items I’ve found most useful: Core Resources Digital Chalk Talk Videos – detailed technical overviews of the new Windows Azure services and supporting technologies as announced June 7, including Virtual Machines (IaaS Windows and Linux), Storage, Command Line Tools http://www.meetwindowsazure.com/DigitalChalkTalks Scenarios Videos on You Tube – “how to” guides, including “Create and Manage Virtual Networks”, “Create & Manage SQL Database”, and many more http://www.youtube.com/user/windowsazure Windows Azure Trust Center - provides a comprehensive of view of Windows Azure and security and compliance practices http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/trust-center/ MSDN Forums for Windows Azure http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/preview-support/ Microsoft Knowledge Base article Microsoft server software support for Windows Azure Virtual Machines Videos Deep Dive into Running Virtual Machines on Windows Azure Windows Azure Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks Windows Azure IaaS and How It Works Deep Dive into Windows Azure Virtual Machines: From the Cloud Vendor and Enterprise Perspective An Overview of Managing Applications, Services, and Virtual Machines in Windows Azure Monitoring and Managing Your Windows Azure Applications and Services Overview of Windows Azure Networking Features Hybrid Will Rule: Options to Connect, Extend and Integrate Applications in Your Data Center and Windows Azure Business Continuity in the Windows Azure Cloud Linux on Windows Azure Blogs Understanding Windows Azure Virtual Machines An Overview of Windows Azure Virtual Network Virtual Machines and Windows Running SQL Server in a Windows Azure Virtual Machine Support for Linux Virtual Machines on Windows Azure

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• Cross-language Extension Method Calling

  - by Tom Hines

  Extension methods are a concise way of binding functions to particular types. In my last post, I showed how Extension methods can be created in the .NET 2.0 environment. In this post, I discuss calling the extensions from other languages. Most of the differences I find between the Dot Net languages are mainly syntax.  The declaration of Extensions is no exception.  There is, however, a distinct difference with the framework accepting excensions made with C++ that differs from C# and VB.  When calling the C++ extension from C#, the compiler will SOMETIMES say there is no definition for DoCPP with the error: 'string' does not contain a definition for 'DoCPP' and no extension method 'DoCPP' accepting a first argument of type 'string' could be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?) If I recompile, the error goes away. The strangest problem with calling the C++ extension from C# is that I first must make SOME type of reference to the class BEFORE using the extension or it will not be recognized at all.  So, if I first call the DoCPP() as a static method, the extension works fine later.  If I make a dummy instantiation of the class, it works.  If I have no forward reference of the class, I get the same error as before and recompiling does not fix it.  It seems as if this none of this is supposed to work across the languages. I have made a few work-arounds to get the examples to compile and run. Note the following examples: Extension in C# using System; namespace Extension_CS {    public static class CExtension_CS    {  //in C#, the "this" keyword is the key.       public static void DoCS(this string str)       {          Console.WriteLine("CS\t{0:G}\tCS", str);       }    } } Extension in C++ /****************************************************************************\  * Here is the C++ implementation.  It is the least elegant and most quirky,  * but it works. \****************************************************************************/ #pragma once using namespace System; using namespace System::Runtime::CompilerServices;     //<-Essential // Reference: System.Core.dll //<- Essential namespace Extension_CPP {        public ref class CExtension_CPP        {        public:               [Extension] // or [ExtensionAttribute] /* either works */               static void DoCPP(String^ str)               {                      Console::WriteLine("C++\t{0:G}\tC++", str);               }        }; } Extension in VB ' Here is the VB implementation.  This is not as elegant as the C#, but it's ' functional. Imports System.Runtime.CompilerServices ' Public Module modExtension_VB 'Extension methods can be defined only in modules.    <Extension()> _       Public Sub DoVB(ByVal str As String)       Console.WriteLine("VB" & Chr(9) & "{0:G}" & Chr(9) & "VB", str)    End Sub End Module   Calling program in C# /******************************************************************************\  * Main calling program  * Intellisense and VS2008 complain about the CPP implementation, but with a  * little duct-tape, it works just fine. \******************************************************************************/ using System; using Extension_CPP; using Extension_CS; using Extension_VB; // vitual namespace namespace TestExtensions {    public static class CTestExtensions    {       /**********************************************************************\        * For some reason, this needs a direct reference into the C++ version        * even though it does nothing than add a null reference.        * The constructor provides the fake usage to please the compiler.       \**********************************************************************/       private static CExtension_CPP x = null;   // <-DUCT_TAPE!       static CTestExtensions()       {          // Fake usage to stop compiler from complaining          if (null != x) {} // <-DUCT_TAPE       }       static void Main(string[] args)       {          string strData = "from C#";          strData.DoCPP();          strData.DoCS();          strData.DoVB();       }    } }   Calling program in VB  Imports Extension_CPP Imports Extension_CS Imports Extension_VB Imports System.Runtime.CompilerServices Module TestExtensions_VB    <Extension()> _       Public Sub DoCPP(ByVal str As String)       'Framework does not treat this as an extension, so use the static       CExtension_CPP.DoCPP(str)    End Sub    Sub Main()       Dim strData As String = "from VB"       strData.DoCS()       strData.DoVB()       strData.DoCPP() 'fake    End Sub End Module  Calling program in C++ // TestExtensions_CPP.cpp : main project file. #include "stdafx.h" using namespace System; using namespace Extension_CPP; using namespace Extension_CS; using namespace Extension_VB; void main(void) {        /*******************************************************\         * Extension methods are called like static methods         * when called from C++.  There may be a difference in         * syntax when calling the VB extension as VB Extensions         * are embedded in Modules instead of classes        \*******************************************************/     String^ strData = "from C++";     CExtension_CPP::DoCPP(strData);     CExtension_CS::DoCS(strData);     modExtension_VB::DoVB(strData); //since Extensions go in Modules }

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• Camtasia Studio

  - by Andy Morrison

  Have you heard about this tool? This is a capture tool that records your actions as you perform them on your workstation, remote desktop, etc.  It's made by the same company that makes SnagIt, etc. http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp I have used this at several customers to record our install and configurations of BizTalk and more - this can come in very handy to help reduce differences in environments (because you can go back and review exactly what you did in the previous environment) as well as to supplement your installation docs.   The product also includes an editing studio and various media types for export. I haven't been paid to write this - I just think the tool is very nice.

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• BUILD 2013&ndash;Day 2 Summary

  - by Tim Murphy

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tmurphy/archive/2013/06/28/build-2013ndashday-2-summary.aspx Day 1 rocked.  So how could they top that?  By having more goodies to give away!  During the keynote they announced that attendees would get one year of Office 365, 100 GB of SkyDrive and one year of Adobe Cloud Service.  Overall they key note was long with more information shot at you than you could possibly absorb.  They went about 20 minutes over time which made me think that they could have split it to a 3rd keynote and given us a better idea on some of these topics and perhaps addressed the one open question that was floating around Twitter.  That is, what is going to happen with XBox development.  It sounded like there was a quick side mention of that, but I missed it. The rest of the day was packed with great sessions full of Windows 8, Azure and Windows Phone goodness.  I had planned on attending Scott Hanselman’s talk, but they had so many people this they had to push to an overflow room.  Stay tuned from session summaries later. The day was topped off by an attendee party across from the San Francisco Giant’s ball park.  It was kind of quirky and and fun.  They set it up on one of the piers in the bay and had food served by food trucks.  You would be surprised how good the food was.  Add in some pool tables, fooseball, video games, a DJ, a comedian/musician and plenty of spirits and it was a great way to end day 2. del.icio.us Tags: BUILD 2013

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• Announcement: Employee Info Starter Kit (v5.0) is Released

  - by Mohammad Ashraful Alam

  Ever wanted to have a simple jQuery menu bound with ASP.NET web site map file? Ever wanted to have cool css design stuffs implemented on your ASP.NET data bound controls? Ever wanted to let Visual Studio generate logical layers for you, which can be easily tested, customized and bound with ASP.NET data controls? If your answers with respect to above questions are ‘yes’, then you will probably happy to try out latest release (v5.0) of Employee Starter Kit, which is intended to address different types of real world challenges faced by web application developers when performing common CRUD operations. Using a single database table ‘Employee’, the current release illustrates how to utilize Microsoft ASP.NET 4.0 Web Form Data Controls, Entity Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 effectively in that context. Employee Info Starter Kit is an open source ASP.NET project template that is highly influenced by the concept ‘Pareto Principle’ or 80-20 rule, where it is targeted to enable a web developer to gain 80% productivity with 20% of effort with respect to learning curve and production. This project template is titled as “Employee Info Starter Kit”, which was initially hosted on Microsoft Code Gallery and been downloaded 1, 50,000+ of copies afterword.  The latest version of this starter kit is hosted in Codeplex. Release Highlights User End Functional Specification The user end functionalities of this starter kit are pretty simple and straight forward that are focused in to perform CRUD operation on employee records as described below. Creating a new employee record Read existing employee records Update an existing employee record Delete existing employee records Architectural Overview Simple 3 layer architecture (presentation, business logic and data access layer) ASP.NET web form based user interface Built-in code generators for logical layers, implemented in Visual Studio default template engine (T4) Built-in Entity Framework entities as business entities (aka: data containers) Data Mapper design pattern based Data Access Layer, implemented in C# and Entity Framework Domain Model design pattern based Business Logic Layer, implemented in C# Object Model for Cross Cutting Concerns (such as validation, logging, exception management) Minimum System Requirements Visual Studio 2010 (Web Developer Express Edition) or higher Sql Server 2005 (Express Edition) or higher Technology Utilized Programming Languages/Scripts Browser side: JavaScript Web server side: C# Code Generation Template: T-4 Template Frameworks .NET Framework 4.0 JavaScript Framework: jQuery 1.5.1 CSS Framework: 960 grid system .NET Framework Components .NET Entity Framework .NET Optional/Named Parameters (new in .net 4.0) .NET Tuple (new in .net 4.0) .NET Extension Method .NET Lambda Expressions .NET Anonymous Type .NET Query Expressions .NET Automatically Implemented Properties .NET LINQ .NET Partial Classes and Methods .NET Generic Type .NET Nullable Type ASP.NET Meta Description and Keyword Support (new in .net 4.0) ASP.NET Routing (new in .net 4.0) ASP.NET Grid View (CSS support for sorting - (new in .net 4.0)) ASP.NET Repeater ASP.NET Form View ASP.NET Login View ASP.NET Site Map Path ASP.NET Skin ASP.NET Theme ASP.NET Master Page ASP.NET Object Data Source ASP.NET Role Based Security Getting Started Guide To see Employee Info Starter Kit in action is pretty easy! Download the latest version. Extract the file. From the extracted folder click the C# project file (Eisk.Web.csproj) to open it in Visual Studio 2010 Hit Ctrl+F5! The current release (v5.0) of Employee Info Starter Kit is properly packaged, fully documented and well tested. If you want to learn more about it in details, just check the following links: Release Home Page Installation Walkthrough Hand on Coding Walkthrough Technical Reference Enjoy!

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• Silverlight Cream for November 20, 2011 -- #1169

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Andrea Boschin, Michael Crump, Michael Sync, WindowsPhoneGeek, Jesse Liberty, Derik Whittaker, Sumit Dutta, Jeff Blankenburg(-2-), and Beth Massi. Above the Fold: WP7: "Silver VNC 1.0 for Windows Phone "Mango"" Andrea Boschin Metro/WinRT/W8: "Lighting up your C# Metro apps by being a Share Source" Derik Whittaker LightSwitch: "Using the Save and Query Pipeline to “Archive” Deleted Records" Beth Massi Shoutouts: Michael Palermo's latest Desert Mountain Developers is up Michael Washington's latest Visual Studio #LightSwitch Daily is up From SilverlightCream.com: Silver VNC 1.0 for Windows Phone "Mango" Andrea Boschin published the first release of his "Silver VNC" version 1.0 on CodePlex. Check out the video on the blog post to see the capabilities, then go grab it from CodePlex. Fixing a broken toolbox (In Visual Studio 2010 SP1) Not Silverlight or Metro, but near to us all is Visual Studio... read how Michael Crump resolves the 'broken' toolbox that we all get now and then Windows Phone 7 – USB Device Not Recognized Error Michael Sync is looking for ideas about an error he gets any time he updates his phone. Windows Phone Toolkit MultiselectList in depth| Part2: Data Binding WindowsPhoneGeek has up the second part of his tutorial series on the MultiselectList from the Windows Phone Toolkit... this part is about data binding, complete with lots of code, discussion, pictures, and project to download New Mini-Tutorial Video Series Jesse Liberty started a new video series based on his Mango Mini tutorials. They will be on Channel 9, and he has a link on this post to the index. The firs of the series is on animation without code Lighting up your C# Metro apps by being a Share Source Derik Whittaker continues investigating Metro with this post about how to set your app up to share its content with other apps Part 21 - Windows Phone 7 - Toast Push Notification Sumit Dutta has part 21 of his WP7 series up and is talking about Toast Notification by creating a Windows form app for sending notifications to the WP7 app for viewing 31 Days of Mango | Day #6: Motion Jeff Blankenburg's Day 6 in his Mango series is about the Motion class which combines the data we get from the Accelerometer, Compass, and Gyroscope of the last couple days of posts 31 Days of Mango | Day #7: Raw Camera Data In Day 7, Jeff Blankenburg talks about the Camera on the WP7 and how to use the raw data in your own application Using the Save and Query Pipeline to “Archive” Deleted Records Beth Massi's latest LightSwith post is this one on tapping into the Save and Query pipelines to perform some data processing prior to saving or pulling data Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• SilverlightShow for Jan 3-9, 2011

  - by Dave Campbell

  Check out the Top Five most popular news at SilverlightShow for Jan 3-9, 2011. SilverlightShow's review of their top 10 visited articles in 2010 got most hits last week. MicrosoftFeed's review of the Facebook application Picturize.me got the second place. Among the top5 is also an interesting review of the top Silverlight books for 2010 by Michael Crump. Here is SilverlightShow's weekly top 5: Top 10 SilverlightShow Articles for Year 2010 Picturize.me - a Silverlight Based Facebook application Face detection in Windows Phone 7 MVVM Navigation with MEF What is the best book on Silverlight 4 Visit and bookmark SilverlightShow. Stay in the 'Light

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• AJAX Control Toolkit - Globalization (Language)

  - by Guilherme Cardoso

  For those who use AjaxToolKit controls presenting a language-dependent data (the CalendarExternder with the names of the months and weeks, for example) you can change the language to be presented in a simple way. In Web.Config let's define the primary culture as follows: < system . web > <System. Web> < globalization uiCulture = "pt-pt" culture = "pt-pt" /> <Globalization UICulture = "en-us" culture = "en-us" /> ... ...  In this example I'm using Portuguese. To finish it is necessary to change our ScriptManager. Be it the ToolScriptManager AjaxToolKit or belonging to the ScriptManager's framework. NET, the properties as a vibrant and true are the EnableScriptGlobalization EnableScriptLocalization. < cc1 : ToolkitScriptManager ID = "ToolkitScriptManager1" runat = "server" EnableScriptGlobalization = "true" EnableScriptLocalization = "true" > <Cc1: ToolkitScriptManager ID = "ToolkitScriptManager1" runat = "server" EnableScriptGlobalization = "true" EnableScriptLocalization = "true"> </ cc1 : ToolkitScriptManager > </ Cc1: ToolkitScriptManager> or < asp : ScriptManager ID = "ScriptManager1" runat = "server" EnableScriptGlobalization = "true" EnableScriptLocalization = "true" > <Asp: ScriptManager ID = "ScriptManager1" runat = "server" EnableScriptGlobalization = "true" EnableScriptLocalization = "true"> </ asp : ScriptManager > </ Asp: ScriptManager>   Like hus we use the controls on AjaxToolKit, always using the Portuguese language. It is important that AjaxTookKit is updated to avoid shortages or errors in translation, though I have not updated by this error in the ModalPopup the latest version, and any controls that I have used are translated correctly.

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• Operation MVC

  - by Ken Lovely, MCSE, MCDBA, MCTS

  It was time to create a new site. I figured VS 2010 is out so I should write it using MVC and Entity Framework. I have been very happy with MVC. My boss has had me making an administration web site in MVC2 but using 2008. I think one of the greatest features of MVC is you get to work with root of the app. It is kind of like being an iron worker; you get to work with the metal, mold it from scratch. Getting my articles out of my database and onto web pages was by far easier with MVC than it was with regular ASP.NET. This code is what I use to post the article to that page. It's pretty straightforward. The link in the menu is passes the id which is simply the url to the page. It looks for that url in the database and returns the rest of the article.   DataResults dr = new DataResults(); string title = string.Empty; string article = string.Empty; foreach (var D in dr.ReturnArticle(ViewData["PageName"].ToString())) { title = D.Title; article = D.Article; } public   List<CurrentArticle> ReturnArticle(string id) { var resultlist = new List<CurrentArticle>(); DBDataContext context = new DBDataContext(); var results = from D in context.MyContents where D.MVCURL.Contains(id) select D;foreach (var result in results) { CurrentArticle ca = new CurrentArticle(); ca.Title = result.Title; ca.Article = result.Article; ca.Summary = result.Summary; resultlist.Add(ca); } return resultlist;}

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• Silverlight Cream for May 22, 2010 -- #867

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Michael Washington, Xianzhong Zhu, Jim Lynn, Laurent Bugnion, and Kyle McClellan. A ton of Shoutouts this time: Cigdem Patlak (CrocusGirl) is interviewed about Silverlight 4 on Channel 9: Silverlight discussion with Cigdem Patlak Timmy Kokke has material up from a presentation he did, and check out the SilverAmp project he's got going: Code & Slides – SDE – What’s new in Silverlight 4 Graham Odds at ScottLogic has an interesting post up: Contextual cues in user interface design Einar Ingebrigtsen is discussing Balder licensing and is asking for input: Balder - Licensing SilverLaw has updated two of his stylings at the Expression Gallery to Silverlight 4: ChildWindow and Accordion Styling Silverlight 4 Keep this page bookmarked -- it's the only page you'll need for Silverlight and Expression links.. well, that and my blog :) .. from Adam Kinney: Silverlight and Expression Blend Jeremy Boyd and John-Daniel Trask have some sweet-looking controls in their new release: Introducing Silverlight Elements 1.1 Matthias Shapiro entered the Design for America competition with his Recovery Review: A Silverlight Sunlight Foundation Visualization Project be sure to check out his blog post about it -- there's a link at the bottom. Koen Zwikstra announed a new release: Document Toolkit 2 Beta 1 available ... built for SL4 and lots of features -- check out the blog post. From SilverlightCream.com: Simple Example To Secure WCF Data Service OData Methods Michael Washington has a follow-on tutorial up on WCF Data Security with OData -- essentially this is the 'securing the data' part ... the Silverlight part was in the previous post... all code is available. Developing Freecell Game Using Silverlight 3 Part 1 Xianzhong Zhu has the first of a two-part tutorial up on building Freecell in Silverlight 3 ... yeah... SL3 -- oh, can you say WP7?? :) Silverlight Top Tip: Startup page for Navigation Apps Jim Lynn has detailed how to go straight to a specific page you're working on in a complex Silverlight app say for debug purposes rather than page/page/page ... I was just thinking yesterday about putting a shortcut on my taskbar for something similar in .NET :) Handling DataGrid.SelectedItems in an MVVM-friendly manner Laurent Bugnion responded with code to a question about getting a DataGrid's SelectedItems into the ViewModel in MVVMLight. Demo code available too. RIA Services and Windows Live ID Kyle McClellan has a post up discussing using LiveID and RIA Services and Silverlight. Lots of external links sprinkled around. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Employee Info Starter Kit: Project Mission

  - by Mohammad Ashraful Alam

  Employee Info Starter Kit is an open source ASP.NET project template that is intended to address different types of real world challenges faced by web application developers when performing common CRUD operations. Using a single database table ‘Employee’, it illustrates how to utilize Microsoft ASP.NET 4.0, Entity Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 effectively in that context. Employee Info Starter Kit is highly influenced by the concept ‘Pareto Principle’ or 80-20 rule. where it is targeted to enable a web developer to gain 80% productivity with 20% of effort with respect to learning curve and production. User Stories The user end functionalities of this starter kit are pretty simple and straight forward that are focused in to perform CRUD operation on employee records as described below. Creating a new employee record Read existing employee record Update an existing employee record Delete existing employee records Key Technology Areas ASP.NET 4.0 Entity Framework 4.0 T-4 Template Visual Studio 2010 Architectural Objective There is no universal architecture which can be considered as the best for all sorts of applications around the world. Based on requirements, constraints, environment, application architecture can differ from one to another. Trade-off factors are one of the important considerations while deciding a particular architectural solution. Employee Info Starter Kit is highly influenced by the concept ‘Pareto Principle’ or 80-20 rule, where it is targeted to enable a web developer to gain 80% productivity with 20% of effort with respect to learning curve and production. “Productivity” as the architectural objective typically also includes other trade-off factors as well as, such as testability, flexibility, performance etc. Fortunately Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 includes lots of great features that have been implemented cleverly in this project to reduce these trade-off factors in the minimum level. Why Employee Info Starter Kit is Not a Framework? Application frameworks are really great for productivity, some of which are really unavoidable in this modern age. However relying too many frameworks may overkill a project, as frameworks are typically designed to serve wide range of different usage and are less customizable or editable. On the other hand having implementation patterns can be useful for developers, as it enables them to adjust application on demand. Employee Info Starter Kit provides hundreds of “connected” snippets and implementation patterns to demonstrate problem solutions in actual production environment. It also includes Visual Studio T-4 templates that generate thousands lines of data access and business logic layer repetitive codes in literally few seconds on the fly, which are fully mock testable due to language support for partial methods and latest support for mock testing in Entity Framework. Why Employee Info Starter Kit is Different than Other Open-source Web Applications? Software development is one of the rapid growing industries around the globe, where the technology is being updated very frequently to adapt greater challenges over time. There are literally thousands of community web sites, blogs and forums that are dedicated to provide support to adapt new technologies. While some are really great to enable learning new technologies quickly, in most cases they are either too “simple and brief” to be used in real world scenarios or too “complex and detailed” which are typically focused to achieve a product goal (such as CMS, e-Commerce etc) from "end user" perspective and have a long duration learning curve with respect to the corresponding technology. Employee Info Starter Kit, as a web project, is basically "developer" oriented which actually considers a hybrid approach as “simple and detailed”, where a simple domain has been considered to intentionally illustrate most of the architectural and implementation challenges faced by web application developers so that anyone can dive into deep into the corresponding new technology or concept quickly. Roadmap Since its first release by 2008 in MSDN Code Gallery, Employee Info Starter Kit gained a huge popularity in ASP.NET community and had 1, 50,000+ downloads afterwards. Being encouraged with this great response, we have a strong commitment for the community to provide support for it with respect to latest technologies continuously. Currently hosted in Codeplex, this community driven project is planned to have a wide range of individual editions, each of which will be focused on a selected application architecture, framework or platform, such as ASP.NET Webform, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ASP.NET MVC, jQuery Ajax (RIA), Silverlight (RIA), Azure Service Platform (Cloud), Visual Studio Automated Test etc. See here for full list of current and future editions.

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• Visual Studio, .NET Framework, and language versions

  - by Scott Dorman

  Every so often a question comes up about how Visual Studio, the .NET Framework, and a .NET programming language relate to each other. Mostly, these questions have to do with versions. The reality is that these are actually three different “products” that are versioned independently of each other but are related. Looking at how Visual Studio, the .NET Framework version, and the CLR versions relate to each other results in the following: Visual Studio CLR .NET Framework Visual Studio .NET (Ranier) 1.0.3705 1.0 Visual Studio 2003 (Everett) 1.1.4322 1.1 Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey) 2.0.50727 2.0 Visual Studio 2005 with .NET 3.0 Extensions 2.0.50727 2.0, 3.0 Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) 2.0.50727 2.0 SP1, 3.0 SP1, 3.5 Visual Studio 2008 SP1 2.0.50727 2.0 SP2, 3.0 SP2, 3.5 SP1 Visual Studio 2010 (Hawaii) 4.0.30319 4.0 The actual Visual Studio version numbers are: Product Name Version Ship Date Visual Studio .NET 7.0.???? 02/2002 Visual Studio .NET 2002 SP1 7.0.????   Visual Studio 2003 7.1.???? 04/2003 Visual Studio 2003 SP1 7.1.6030 09/13/2006 Visual Studio 2005 8.0.5072   Visual Studio 2005 SP1   12/14/2006 Visual Studio 2008 9.0.21022.8 11/19/2007 Visual Studio 2008 SP1 9.0.30729.1   Visual Studio 2010 10.0.30319.1 04/12/2010 (For those entries that are missing information, it simply means that I didn’t already know it and/or couldn’t easily find it online.) So far, everything seems fairly reasonable and isn’t terribly difficult to keep coordinated. However, when you start trying to find language versions and how those relate to .NET Framework, CLR, or Visual Studio releases it becomes more difficult. The breakdown for the programming languages that are part of Visual Studio are: Framework CLR Language     C# VB F# 1.0 1.0.3705 1.0 7.0 - 1.1 1.1.4322 1.1 7.1 - 2.0 2.0.50727 2.0 8.0 - 3.0 2.0.50727 2.0 8.0 - 3.5 2.0.50727 2.0 9.0 - 4.0 4.0.30319 4.0 10.0 2.0   Technorati Tags: Visual Studio,.NET

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• TechEd 2012 - day 3

  - by Stefan Barrett

  The content has got more useful for me as a developer, and I've now seen 2 things which I think will make a big difference: Fake in vs2012 - allows me to stub or fake out libraries making unit testing easier/possible. C++ AMP & auto - auto might get me to start using c++ again (it makes code like for each much nicer/easier to write), while AMP is something I want to play with (moves the processing onto the GPU) The food got a little better, while there was less sign of the snacks.

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• Going Paperless

  - by Jesse

  One year ago I came to work for a company where the entire development team is 100% “remote”; we’re spread over 3 time zones and each of us works from home. This seems to be an increasingly popular way for people to work and there are many articles and blog posts out there enumerating the advantages and disadvantages of working this way. I had read a lot about telecommuting before accepting this job and felt as if I had a pretty decent idea of what I was getting into, but I’ve encountered a few things over the past year that I did not expect. Among the most surprising by-products of working from home for me has been a dramatic reduction in the amount of paper that I use on a weekly basis. Hoarding In The Workplace Prior to my current telecommute job I worked in what most would consider pretty traditional office environments. I sat in cubicles furnished with an enormous plastic(ish) modular desks, had a mediocre (at best) PC workstation, and had ready access to a seemingly endless supply of legal pads, pens, staplers and paper clips. The ready access to paper, countless conference room meetings, and abundance of available surface area on my desk and in drawers created a perfect storm for wasting paper. I brought a pad of paper with me to every meeting I ever attended, scrawled some brief notes, and then tore that sheet off to keep next to my keyboard to follow up on any needed action items. Once my immediate need for the notes was fulfilled, that sheet would get shuffled off into a corner of my desk or filed away in a drawer “just in case”. I would guess that for all of the notes that I ever filed away, I might have actually had to dig up and refer to 2% of them (and that’s probably being very generous). That said, on those rare occasions that I did have to dig something up from old notes, it was usually pretty important and I ended up being very glad that I saved them. It was only when I would leave a job or move desks that I would finally gather all those notes together and take them to shredding bin to be disposed of. When I left my last job the amount of paper I had accumulated over my three years there was absurd, and I knew coworkers who had substance-abuse caliber paper wasting addictions that made my bad habit look like nail-biting in comparison. A Product Of My Environment I always hated using all of this paper, but simply couldn’t bring myself to stop. It would look bad if I showed up to an important conference room meeting without a pad of paper. What if someone said something profound! Plus, everyone else always brought paper with them. If you saw someone walking down the hallway with a pad of paper in hand you knew they must be on their way to a conference room meeting. Some people even had fancy looking portfolio notebook sheaths that gave their legal pads all the prestige of a briefcase. No one ever worried about running out of fresh paper because there was an endless supply, and there certainly was no shortage of places to store and file used paper. In short, the traditional office was setup for using tons and tons of paper; it’s baked into the culture there. For that reason, it didn’t take long for me to kick the paper habit once I started working from home. In my home office, desk and drawer space are at a premium. I don’t have the budget (or the tolerance) for huge modular office furniture in my spare bedroom. I also no longer have access to a bottomless pit of office supplies stock piled in cabinets and closets. If I want to use some paper, I have to go out and buy it. Finally (and most importantly), all of the meetings that I have to attend these days are “virtual”. We use instant messaging, VOIP, video conferencing, and e-mail to communicate with each other. All I need to take notes during a meeting is my computer, which I happen to be sitting right in front of all day. I don’t have any hard numbers for this, but my gut feeling is that I actually take a lot more notes now than I ever did when I worked in an office. The big difference is I don’t have to use any paper to do so. This makes it far easier to keep important information safe and organized. The Right Tool For The Job When I first started working from home I tried to find a single application that would fill the gap left by the pen and paper that I always had at my desk when I worked in an office. Well, there are no silver bullets and I’ve evolved my approach over time to try and find the best tool for the job at hand. Here’s a quick summary of how I take notes and keep everything organized. Notepad++ – This is the first application I turn to when I feel like there’s some bit of information that I need to write down and save. I use Launchy, so opening Notepad++ and creating a new file only takes a few keystrokes. If I find that the information I’m trying to get down requires a more sophisticated application I escalate as needed. The Desktop – By default, I save every file or other bit of information to the desktop. Anyone who has ever had to fix their parents computer before knows that this is a dangerous game (any file my mother has ever worked on is saved directly to the desktop and rarely moves anywhere else). I agree that storing things on the desktop isn’t a great long term approach to keeping organized, which is why I treat my desktop a bit like my e-mail inbox. I strive to keep both empty (or as close to empty as I possibly can). If something is on my desktop, it means that it’s something relevant to a task or project that I’m currently working on. About once a week I take things that I’m not longer working on and put them into my ‘Notes’ folder. The ‘Notes’ Folder – As I work on a task, I tend to accumulate multiple files associated with that task. For example, I might have a bit of SQL that I’m working on to gather data for a new report, a quick C# method that I came up with but am not yet ready to commit to source control, a bulleted list of to-do items in a .txt file, etc. If the desktop starts to get too cluttered, I create a new sub-folder in my ‘Notes’ folder. Each sub-folder’s name is the current date followed by a brief description of the task or project. Then all files related to that task or project go into that sub folder. By using the date as the first part of the folder name, these folders are automatically sorted in reverse chronological order. This means that things I worked on recently will generally be near the top of the list. Using the built-in Windows search functionality I now have a pretty quick and easy way to try and find something that I worked on a week ago or six months ago. Dropbox – Dropbox is a free service that lets you store up to 2GB of files “in the cloud” and have those files synced to all of the different computers that you use. My ‘Notes’ folder lives in Dropbox, meaning that it’s contents are constantly backed up and are always available to me regardless of which computer I’m using. They also have a pretty decent iPhone application that lets you browse and view all of the files that you have stored there. The free 2GB edition is probably enough for just storing notes, but I also pay $99/year for the 50GB storage upgrade and keep all of my music, e-books, pictures, and documents in Dropbox. It’s a fantastic service and I highly recommend it. Evernote – I use Evernote mostly to organize information that I access on a fairly regular basis. For example, my Evernote account has a running grocery shopping list, recipes that my wife and I use a lot, and contact information for people I contact infrequently enough that I don’t want to keep them in my phone. I know some people that keep nearly everything in Evernote, but there’s something about it that I find a bit clunky, so I tend to use it sparingly. Google Tasks – One of my biggest paper wasting habits was keeping a running task-list next to my computer at work. Every morning I would sit down, look at my task list, cross off what was done and add new tasks that I thought of during my morning commute. This usually resulted in having to re-copy the task list onto a fresh sheet of paper when I was done. I still keep a running task list at my desk, but I’ve started using Google Tasks instead. This is a dead-simple web-based application for quickly adding, deleting, and organizing tasks in a simple checklist style. You can quickly move tasks up and down on the list (which I use for prioritizing), and even create sub-tasks for breaking down larger tasks into smaller pieces. Balsamiq Mockups – This is a simple and lightweight tool for creating drawings of user interfaces. It’s great for sketching out a new feature, brainstorm the layout of a interface, or even draw up a quick sequence diagram. I’m terrible at drawing, so Balsamiq Mockups not only lets me create sketches that other people can actually understand, but it’s also handy because you can upload a sketch to a common location for other team members to access. I can honestly say that using these tools (and having limited resources at home) have lead me to cut my paper usage down to virtually none. If I ever were to return to a traditional office workplace (hopefully never!) I’d try to employ as many of these applications and techniques as I could to keep paper usage low. I feel far less cluttered and far better organized now.

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• Monitoring almost anything with BizTalk 360

  - by Michael Stephenson

  When you work in an integration environment it is common that you will find yourself in a situation where you integrate with some unusual applications or have some unusual dependencies. That is the nature of integration. When you work with BizTalk one of the common problems is that BizTalk often is the place where problems with applications you integrate with are highlighted and these external applications may have poor monitoring solutions. Fortunately if you are a working with a customer who uses BizTalk 360 then it contains a feature called the "Web Endpoint Manager". Typically the web endpoint manager is used to monitor web services that you integrate with and will ping them at appropriate times to make sure they return the expected HTTP status code. When you have an usual situation where you want to monitor something which is key to the success to your solution but you find yourself having to consider a significant custom solution to monitor the external dependency then the Web Endpoint Manager could be your friend. The endpoint manager monitors a url and checks for a certain status code. This means that you can create your own aspx web page and then make BizTalk 360 monitor this web page. Behind the web page you could write any code you wished. An example of this is architecture is shown in the below diagram.     In the custom web page you would implement some custom code to do whatever it is that you want to monitor. In the below code snippet you can see how the Page_Load default method is doing some kind of check then depending on the result of the check it returns a certain HTTP code. protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { var result = CheckSomething();   if (result == "Success") Response.StatusCode = 202; else if (result == "DatabaseError") Response.StatusCode = 510; else if (result == "SystemError") Response.StatusCode = 512; else Response.StatusCode = 513;   }   In BizTalk 360 you would go into the Monitor and Notify tab and then to BizTalk Environment which gives you access to the Web Endpoint Manager. You need an alarm setup which configures how the endpoint will be checked. I'm not going to go through the details of creating the alarm as this is already documented in the BizTalk 360 documentation. One point to note is that in the example I am using I setup a threshold alarm which means that the url is checked about every minute and if there is an error that persists for a period of time then the alarm will raise the alert notification. In my example I configured the alarm to fire if the error persisted for 3 minutes. The below picture shows accessing the endpoint manager.   In the web endpoint manager you would then configure your endpoint to monitor and the HTTP response code which indicates all is working fine. The below picture shows this. I now have my endpoint monitoring setup and BizTalk 360 should be checking my custom endpoint to see that it is available. If I wanted to manually sanity check that the endpoints I have registered are working fine then clicking the Refresh button will show if they are all good or not. If my custom ASP.net page which is checking my dependency gets a problem you will see in the endpoint manager that the status code does not match the expected return code and your endpoints will display in red and you can see the problem. The below picture shows this. If I use specific HTTP response codes for the errors the custom ASP.net page might encounter I can easily interpret these to know what the problem is. Using the alarms and notifications with BizTalk 360 it means when your endpoint goes into an error state you can easily configure email or SMS notifications from BizTalk 360 to tell you that your endpoint is having problems and you can use BizTalk 360 to help correlate what the problem is to allow you to investigate further. Below you can see the email which tells me my endpoint is not working.   When everything returns to normal you will see the status is now fixed and you will see a situation like below where you can see the WebEndpoints are now green and the return code matches what is expected.   Conclusion As you can see it is really easy to plug your own custom ASP.net page into the BizTalk 360 web endpoint monitoring feature. This extension then gives you the power to really extend the monitoring to almost anything you want as long as you can write some .net code to check that the dependency is available and working. It would be interesting to hear of any ideas people have around things they would monitor with this extension. More details on the end point monitor can be found on the following link: http://www.biztalk360.com/tour/monitoring_notifications

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• Do NOT remove the reference to System.Core from your VS2010 Project

  - by Lee Brandt

  One of the things I routinely do when adding a new class library project, is remove all references and just add them back in as I need them. That is NOT a good idea for Visual Studio 2010. When I DID need System.Core, and went to add it back, this is what I got: "A reference to 'System.Core' could not be added. This component is automatically referenced..." After some Googling I found this article: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/525663/cannot-remove-system-core-dll-reference-from-a-vs2010-project It tells you to add it back manually. Here is the part that needs back in the project file. After the last PropertyGroup node, add this node:   <ItemGroup>     <Reference Include="System.Core" />   </ItemGroup> You should be good to go again. Hope this helps.

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• Welcome to www.badapi.net, a REST API with badly-behaved endpoints

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2014/08/14/welcome-to-www.badapi.net-a-rest-api-with-badly-behaved-endpoints.aspxI've had a need in a few projects for a REST API that doesn't behave well - takes a long time to respond, or never responds, returns unexpected status codes etc.That can be very useful for testing that clients cope gracefully with unexpected responses.Till now I've always coded a stub API in the project and run it locally, but I've put a few 'misbehaved' endpoints together and published them at www.badapi.net, and the source is on GitHub here: sixeyed/badapi.net.You can browse to the home page and see the available endpoints. I'll be adding more as I think of them, and I may give the styling of the help pages a bit more thought...As of today's release, the misbehaving endpoints available to you are:GET longrunning?between={between}&and={and} - Waits for a (short) random period before returningGET verylongrunning?between={between}&and={and} -Waits for a (long) random period before returningGET internalservererror    - Returns 500: Internal Server ErrorGET badrequest - Returns 400: BadRequestGET notfound - Returns 404: Not FoundGET unauthorized - Returns 401: UnauthorizedGET forbidden - Returns 403: ForbiddenGET conflict -Returns 409: ConflictGET status/{code}?reason={reason} - Returns the provided status code Go bad.

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