Search Results

Search found 4879 results on 196 pages for 'geeks'.

Page 60/196 | < Previous Page | 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67  | Next Page >

• MCP 70-536 Acquired

  - by dave

  Yeah...   Today I passed the 70-536 exam, so my way to 70-562 (ASP.NET 3.5) is open. Points: 815 Points needed for pass:700 Strarting to read new book :)

  Read the article

• Visual Studio 2010 Type or namespace &lsquo;xyz&rsquo; does not exist in&hellip;

  - by Mike Huguet

  It pains me to write this post as I feel like an idiot for having wasted my time on this “problem.”  Hopefully in posting this, I can keep some other poor lost soul working at 4 AM in the morning from spending wasteful minutes scratching his head and getting frustrated.  The Visual Studio designer will work fine in resolving namespaces, but when you build you will get the “Type or namespace ‘xyz’ does not exist error.  If you see this error please take a look at your Errors List window and ensure that you have the “Warnings” option enabled.  It is very likely that you will see that there is a missing dependent reference.  Technorati Tags: Visual Studio

  Read the article

• Hyper-V for Developers - presentation from London .NET Users and VBUG Bracknell

  - by Liam Westley

  Thanks to both London .NET User group and VBUG Bracknell for allowing me to present my Hyper-V for Developers talk last week.  A weekend at DDD Scotland followed by two user group presentations means I'm a bit late getting the presentations uploaded to the blog, so many apologies if you've been waiting.   LDNUG - www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/LDNUG-HyperV4Devs.zip   VBUG - www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/VBUG-HyperV4Devs.zip Also, at VBUG Bracknell I was asked if you could configure a Hyper-V server to user wireless networking (which might be useful if you have a laptop for demonstrations).  Well here's the post from Ben Armstrong (Virtual PC Guy) which details how that can be configured,   http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2008/01/09/using-hyper-v-with-a-wireless-network-adapter.aspx ... and it's also detailed on the TechNet wiki as part of running Hyper-V on a laptop,   social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/hyper-v-how-to-run-hyper-v-on-a-laptop.aspx

  Read the article

• Bluetooth drivers for Dell Latitude D830

  - by blomqvist

  I haven’t been using Bluetooth on my D830 before but now I got myself a Bluetooth mouse in order to get rid of the receiver for a wireless mouse. And then I discovered that Bluetooth did not work anymore after I installed Win7. Browsing Dell support pages for a a driver found me one (browsing by computer model etc..). But that drivers does not work. Installation looks ok and everything but no devices are found. i kept looking and found this driver, also at Dells site: http://support.us.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&releaseid=R231570&formatcnt=1&libid=0&typeid=-1&dateid=-1&formatid=-1&fileid=333170 And that one worked!  Problem solved an I am now happily using my Bluetooth mouse instead.

  Read the article

• Visual Studio Little Wonders: Box Selection

  - by James Michael Hare

  So this week I decided I’d do a Little Wonder of a different kind and focus on an underused IDE improvement: Visual Studio’s Box Selection capability. This is a handy feature that many people still don’t realize was made available in Visual Studio 2010 (and beyond).  True, there have been other editors in the past with this capability, but now that it’s fully part of Visual Studio we can enjoy it’s goodness from within our own IDE. So, for those of you who don’t know what box selection is and what it allows you to do, read on! Sometimes, we want to select beyond the horizontal… The problem with traditional text selection in many editors is that it is horizontally oriented.  Sure, you can select multiple rows, but if you do you will pull in the entire row (at least for the middle rows).  Under the old selection scheme, if you wanted to select a portion of text from each row (a “box” of text) you were out of luck.  Box selection rectifies this by allowing you to select a box of text that bounded by a selection rectangle that you can grow horizontally or vertically.  So let’s think a situation that could occur where this comes in handy. Let’s say, for instance, that we are defining an enum in our code that we want to be able to translate into some string values (possibly to be stored in a database, output to screen, etc.). Perhaps such an enum would look like this: 1: public enum OrderType 2: { 3: Buy, // buy shares of a commodity 4: Sell, // sell shares of a commodity 5: Exchange, // exchange one commodity for another 6: Cancel, // cancel an order for a commodity 7: } 8:  Now, let’s say we are in the process of creating a Dictionary<K,V> to translate our OrderType: 1: var translator = new Dictionary<OrderType, string> 2: { 3: // do I really want to retype all this??? 4: }; Yes the example above is contrived so that we will pull some garbage if we do a multi-line select. I could select the lines above using the traditional multi-line selection: And then paste them into the translator code, which would result in this: 1: var translator = new Dictionary<OrderType, string> 2: { 3: Buy, // buy shares of a commodity 4: Sell, // sell shares of a commodity 5: Exchange, // exchange one commodity for another 6: Cancel, // cancel an order for a commodity 7: }; But I have a lot of junk there, sure I can manually clear it out, or use some search and replace magic, but if this were hundreds of lines instead of just a few that would quickly become cumbersome. The Box Selection Now that we have the ability to create box selections, we can select the box of text to delete!  Most of us are familiar with the fact we can drag the mouse (or hold [Shift] and use the arrow keys) to create a selection that can span multiple rows: Box selection, however, actually allows us to select a box instead of the typical horizontal lines: Then we can press the [delete] key and the pesky comments are all gone! You can do this either by holding down [Alt] while you select with your mouse, or by holding down [Alt+Shift] and using the arrow keys on the keyboard to grow the box horizontally or vertically. So now we have: 1: var translator = new Dictionary<OrderType, string> 2: { 3: Buy, 4: Sell, 5: Exchange, 6: Cancel, 7: }; Which is closer, but we still need an opening curly, the string to translate to, and the closing curly and comma. Fortunately, again, this is easy with box selections due to the fact box selection can even work for a zero-width selection! That is, hold down [Alt] and either drag down with no width, or hold down [Alt+Shift] and arrow down and you will define a selection range with no width, essentially, a vertical line selection: Notice the faint selection line on the right? So why is this useful? Well, just like with any selected range, we can type and it will replace the selection. What does this mean for box selections? It means that we can insert the same text all the way down on each line! If we have the same selection above, and type a curly and a space, we’d get: Imagine doing this over hundreds of lines and think of what a time saver it could be! Now make a zero-width selection on the other side: And type a curly and a comma, and we’d get: So close! Now finally, imagine we’ve already defined these strings somewhere and want to paste them in: 1: const private string BuyText = "Buy Shares"; 2: const private string SellText = "Sell Shares"; 3: const private string ExchangeText = "Exchange"; 4: const private string CancelText = "Cancel"; We can, again, use our box selection to pull out the constant names: And clicking copy (or [CTRL+C]) and then selecting a range to paste into: And finally clicking paste (or [CTRL+V]) to get the final result: 1: var translator = new Dictionary<OrderType, string> 2: { 3: { Buy, BuyText }, 4: { Sell, SellText }, 5: { Exchange, ExchangeText }, 6: { Cancel, CancelText }, 7: };   Sure, this was a contrived example, but I’m sure you’ll agree that it adds myriad possibilities of new ways to copy and paste vertical selections, as well as inserting text across a vertical slice. Summary: While box selection has been around in other editors, we finally get to experience it in VS2010 and beyond. It is extremely handy for selecting columns of information for cutting, copying, and pasting. In addition, it allows you to create a zero-width vertical insertion point that can be used to enter the same text across multiple rows. Imagine the time you can save adding repetitive code across multiple lines!  Try it, the more you use it, the more you’ll love it! Technorati Tags: C#,CSharp,.NET,Visual Studio,Little Wonders,Box Selection

  Read the article

• IIS Logfile Visualization with XNA

  - by BobPalmer

  In my office, I have a wall mounted monitor who's whole purpose in life is to display perfmon stats from our various servers.  And on a fairly regular basis, I have folks walk by asking what the lines mean.    After providing the requisite explaination about CPU utilization, disk I/O bottlenecks, etc. this is usually followed by some blank stares from the user in question, and a distillation of all of our engineering wizardry down to the phrase 'So when the red line goes up that's bad then?'   This of course would not do.  So I talked to my friends and our network admin about an option to show something more eye catching and visual, with which we could catch at a glance a feel for what was up with our site.    He initially pointed me out to a video showing GLTail and Chipmunk done in Ruby.  Realizing this was both awesome, and that I needed an excuse to do something in XNA, I decided to knock out a proof of concept for something very similar, but with a few tweaks.   Here's a link to a video of the current prototype:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM_PWZbtH2I   Essentially this app opens up a log file (even an active one) and begins pulling out the lines of text.  (Here's a good Code Project link that covers how to do tail reading from an active text file: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/files/tail.aspx).   As new data is added, a bubble is generated in the application - a GET statement comes from the left, and a POST from the right.  I then run it through a series of expression checkers, and based on the kind of statement and the pattern, a bubble of an appropriate color is generated.   For example, if I get a 500, a huge red bubble pops out.  Others are based on the part of the system the page is from - i.e. green bubbles are from our claims management subsystem, and blue bubbles are from the pages our scheduling staff use to schedule patients.  Others include the purple bubbles for security and login, and yellow bubbles for some miscellaneous pages.   The little grey bubbles represent things like images, JS, CSS, etc - and their small size makes them work like grease to keep the larger page bubbles moving.   The app is also smart enough that if it is starting to bog down with handling the physics and interactions, it will suspend new bubbles until enough have dropped off that performance can resume (you can see this slight stuttering in the sample video).   The net result is that anyone will be able to look up on the wall monitor, and instantly get a quick feel for how things are going on the floor.  Website slow?  You can get a feel for both volume and utilized modules with one glance.  Website crashing?  Look for a wall of giant red bubbles.  No activity at all?  Maybe the site is down.  Now couple this with utilization within a farm, and cross referenced with a second app showing the same kind of data from your SQL database...   As for the app itself, it's a windows XNA project with the code in C#.   The physics are handled by the Farseer physicis eingine for XNA (http://www.codeplex.com/FarseerPhysics) which is just pure goodness.  The samples are great, and I had the app up and working in two evenings (half of that was fine tuning, and the other was me coding with a kid in my lap).   My next steps include wiring this to SQL (I have some ideas...), and adding a nice configuration module.  For example, you could use polygons, etc to tie to your regex - or more entertaining things like having a little human ragdoll to represent a user login.     Once that's wrapped up and I have a chance to complete some hardening, I will be releasing the whole thing into the wild as opensource.     Feel free to ping me if you have any questions! -Bob

  Read the article

• OCS 2007 Access Edge Server Certificate issue

  - by BWCA

  We are currently building additional OCS 2007 R2 Access Edge Servers to handle additional capacity.  We ran into a SSL certificate issue when we were setting up the servers. Before running the steps to Deploy an Edge Server, we successfully imported our SSL certificate that we use for external access on all of the new servers.  After successfully completing the first three Deploy Edge Server steps one one of the new servers, we started working on Step 4: Configure Certificates for the Edge Server.  After selecting Assign an existing certificate from the common tasks list and clicking Next to select a certificate, there were no certificates listed as shown below.   The first thing we did was to use the Certificates mmc snap-in to review the SSL certificate information.  We noticed in the General tab that Windows does not have enough information to verify this certificate and in the Certification Path that the issuer of this certificate could not be found for the SSL certificate that we imported successfully earlier.     While troubleshooting, we learned that we could not access the URL for the certificate’s CRL to download the CRL file due to restrictive firewall rules between the new OCS 2007 R2 Access Edge Servers and the Internet. After modifying the firewall rules, we were able to download the CRL file and when we reran Step 4 to assign an existing certificate, the certificate was listed.

  Read the article

• VirtualBox

  - by DesigningCode

  I was wanting to play around with something in a VM the other day.  I was curious what was available for free, if anything, for windows.   I quickly came across Virtual Box  ( http://www.virtualbox.org/ ).   Downloaded, Installed. No Problem!  Works really nicely.   It was commercial software (by sun (now oracle)) that turned open source.   In terms of a license it says :- In summary, the VirtualBox PUEL allows you to use VirtualBox free of charge for personal use or, alternatively, for product evaluation. An interesting feature it has is built in RDP.   Which is useful if you have a guest OS that doesn’t support RDP.   Speaking of RDP…..  which I will in my next blog post… I learnt something REALLY useful the other day.

  Read the article

• Pondering New Technology

  - by MOSSLover

  So I have been standing at the end of a fork for a year peering down a corner looking at this way and that way trying to figure out where I fit in.  I was so enthusiastic and excited about Silverlight when it came out.  It was this amazing awesome technology that had this really cool animation and webcam/multimedia piece.  I thought if I put my money on Silverlight it’s going somewhere, then HTML 5 came out and the wind shifted.  I realized times were changing. I have been working with web technologies since I was 15 years old.  Playing with html and javascript and even css back when it first came out.  In tech years 15 years is forever.  Things change so quickly and so often.  So I guess the question is where am I heading?  The answer is mobile technology.  For some reason I was resisting change and I have no idea why.  I guess I really wanted to see more than one player.  I didn’t quite feel that Microsoft was ready with Windows Phone 7.  It was a great start, but it just didn’t feel like they went all the way.  Now with Windows 8 it feels like they are at version 2.0.  It’s like hitting Silverlight 2.0 where they finally added the .Net bits.  The path is paved, but we don’t know where it’s leading.  Then we had 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0 to mature the technology into what it is today (man I’m hoping they are going to roll some of the cool bits into other tech if they don’t exist). Anyway, I’m on board, but I’m not buying a Windows Tablet just yet.  I was hoping for a 7 inch screen from Apple around $300 or just above and a 7 inch screen from the MS side around the same price.  What I got was the Apple side, but nothing from Microsoft.  I was pretty disappointed with the $500 market price on the RT version.  I realized Microsoft is close, but not quite where Apple is today.  Yes the devices have Office that they are offering, but the sticker is just too much for a first generation device.  If you guys remember correctly the first generation iPad was quite expensive.  I guess for a 1st generation device $500 is pretty good. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that I am shifting my focus entirely away from Silverlight and more towards mobile.  I will be doing a lot of postings on iOS, Windows 8, and Windows Phone 8 with SharePoint 2013.  Since I don’t have a tablet and don’t foresee myself buying one just yet it might be mostly on the phones for right now.  I want to do a bunch of testing on various devices on what needs to be done in apps on each device.  I might add a bit on porting code from one to the other.  I think it’s going to be a lot of fun and make things flow a little better for me.  In a way it’s kind of like Star Trek 6 where they talk about the Undiscovered Country.  I’m going to jump forward completely and see where I land. Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2013,Mobile,Windows 8,iOS

  Read the article

• My Expert F# Book has now arrived!

  - by MarkPearl

  So it has finally arrived from Amazon. Expert F# by Don Syme, Adam Granicz & Antonio Cisternino. I got a note from the post office yesterday that I needed to collect a package from their offices. After paying a 10% customs fee (that I wasn’t expecting) I had my new Yellow & Black F# Book… it’s so shinny. Trust my luck though – I have a few university assignments due this week as well as a crazy week of work so it has been sitting on my desk for a day and I haven’t managed to get into it. Eventually I managed to take a few minutes this evening to page through it and it looks really good. I can’t wait! So my goal this week is to cover Chapter 2 (by the end of the weekend) and put the appropriate posts up. F# is slowly working on me but I am keen to get a deeper understanding of the language which I am hoping this book will help me achieve.

  Read the article

• Migrating Databases from SQL Server 2008 to SqlAzure

  - by kaleidoscope

  Connect SQL Azure through SSMS. (It will get connected, only if you have port 1433 open.) Create required databases on SQL Azure. Create and execute schema scripts for databases.(Make sure you have written scripts which are 100% compatible with SQL Azure. Tool called SQL Azure migration tool by CodePlex helps with doing this.) Create and execute insert scripts for databases. (One can use SSMS for generating insert scripts.) For further details refer to the Windows Azure Platform Kit Nov 2009.   Anish

  Read the article

• Microsoft TechDays Canada 2010

  - by David Nudelman

  John Oxley announced that TechDays is returning to Canada in more cities then ever in 2010. Vancouver – September 14/15 at the Vancouver Convention Centre Edmonton – October 5/6 at the Shaw Conference Centre Toronto – October 27/28 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre Halifax – November 2/3 at the World Trade & Convention Centre Ottawa – November 9/10 at the Hampton Inn & Conference Centre Montreal – November 23/24 at the Palais de Congres Winnipeg – December 7/8 at the Winnipeg Convention Centre Calgary – December 14/15 at the Calgary Stampede Get all the info here Regards, David Nudelman

  Read the article

• APress Deal of the Day 10/August/2014 - Pro ASP.NET Web API Security

  - by TATWORTH

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TATWORTH/archive/2014/08/10/apress-deal-of-the-day-10august2014---pro-asp.net-web.aspxToday’s $10 Deal of the Day from APress at http://www.apress.com/9781430257820 is Pro ASP.NET Web API Security. “ASP.NET Web API is a key part of ASP.NET MVC 4. It has become the platform of choice for building RESTful services. Securing ASP.NET Web API applications requires a move away from traditional WCF-based techniques in favor of new SOAP-less methods. The evaluation, selection and analysis of these new techniques is the focus of this book.”

  Read the article

• Microsoft MVP Award Nomination

  - by Mark A. Wilson

  I am extremely honored to announce that I have been nominated to receive the Microsoft MVP Award for my contributions in C#! Hold on; I have not won the award yet. But to be nominated is really humbling. Thank you very much! For those of you who may not know, here is a high-level summary of the MVP award: The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Program recognizes and thanks outstanding members of technical communities for their community participation and willingness to help others. The program celebrates the most active community members from around the world who provide invaluable online and offline expertise that enriches the community experience and makes a difference in technical communities featuring Microsoft products. MVPs are credible, technology experts from around the world who inspire others to learn and grow through active technical community participation. While MVPs come from many backgrounds and a wide range of technical communities, they share a passion for technology and a demonstrated willingness to help others. MVPs do this through the books and articles they author, the Web sites they manage, the blogs they maintain, the user groups they participate in, the chats they host or contribute to, the events and training sessions where they present, as well as through the questions they answer in technical newsgroups or message boards. - Microsoft MVP Award Nomination Email I guess I should start my nomination acceptance speech by profusely thanking Microsoft as well as everyone who nominated me. Unfortunately, I’m not completely certain who those people are. While I could guess (in no particular order: Bill J., Brian H., Glen G., and/or Rob Z.), I would much rather update this post accordingly after I know for certain who to properly thank. I certainly don’t want to leave anyone out! Please Help My next task is to provide the MVP Award committee with information and descriptions of my contributions during the past 12 months. For someone who has difficulty remembering what they did just last week, trying to remember something that I did 12 months ago is going to be a real challenge. (Yes, I should do a better job blogging about my activities. I’m just so busy!) Since this is an award about community, I invite and encourage you to participate. Please leave a comment below or send me an email. Help jog my memory by listing anything and everything that you can think of that would apply and/or be important to include in my reply back to the committee. I welcome advice on what to say and how to say it from previous award winners. Again, I greatly appreciate the nomination and welcome any assistance you can provide. Thanks for visiting and till next time, Mark A. Wilson      Mark's Geekswithblogs Blog Enterprise Developers Guild Technorati Tags: Community,Way Off Topic

  Read the article

• Get Current QuarterEnd for a given FYE Date

  - by Rohit Gupta

  Here is the code to get the Current Quarter End for a Given FYE Date: 1: public static DateTime ThisQuarterEnd(this DateTime date, DateTime fyeDate) 2: { 3: IEnumerable<DateTime> candidates = 4: QuartersInYear(date.Year, fyeDate.Month).Union(QuartersInYear(date.Year + 1, fyeDate.Month)); 5: return candidates.Where(d => d.Subtract(date).Days >= 0).First(); 6: } 7:  8: public static IEnumerable<DateTime> QuartersInYear(int year, int q4Month) 9: { 10: int q1Month = 3, q2Month = 6, q3Month = 9; 11: int q1year = year, q2year = year, q3year = year; 12: int q1Day = 31, q2Day = 31, q3Day = 31, q4Day = 31; 13:  14: 15: q3Month = q4Month - 3; 16: if (q3Month <= 0) 17: { 18: q3Month = q3Month + 12; 19: q3year = year - 1; 20: } 21: q2Month = q4Month - 6; 22: if (q2Month <= 0) 23: { 24: q2Month = q2Month + 12; 25: q2year = year - 1; 26: } 27: q1Month = q4Month - 9; 28: if (q1Month <= 0) 29: { 30: q1Month = q1Month + 12; 31: q1year = year - 1; 32: } 33:  34: q1Day = new DateTime(q1year, q1Month, 1).AddMonths(1).AddDays(-1).Day; 35: q2Day = new DateTime(q2year, q2Month, 1).AddMonths(1).AddDays(-1).Day; 36: q3Day = new DateTime(q3year, q3Month, 1).AddMonths(1).AddDays(-1).Day; 37: q4Day = new DateTime(year, q4Month, 1).AddMonths(1).AddDays(-1).Day; 38:  39: return new List<DateTime>() { 40: new DateTime(q1year, q1Month, q1Day), 41: new DateTime(q2year, q2Month, q2Day), 42: new DateTime(q3year, q3Month, q3Day), 43: new DateTime(year, q4Month, q4Day), 44: }; 45:  46: } The code to get the NextQuarterEnd is simple, just Change the Where clause to read d.Subtract(date).Days > 0 instead of d.Subtract(date).Days >= 0 1: public static DateTime NextQuarterEnd(this DateTime date, DateTime fyeDate) 2: { 3: IEnumerable<DateTime> candidates = 4: QuartersInYear(date.Year, fyeDate.Month).Union(QuartersInYear(date.Year + 1, fyeDate.Month)); 5: return candidates.Where(d => d.Subtract(date).Days > 0).First(); 6: } Also if you need to get the Quarter Label for a given Date, given a particular FYE date then following is the code to use: 1: public static string GetQuarterLabel(this DateTime date, DateTime fyeDate) 2: { 3: int q1Month = fyeDate.Month - 9, q2Month = fyeDate.Month - 6, q3Month = fyeDate.Month - 3; 4:  5: int year = date.Year, q1Year = date.Year, q2Year = date.Year, q3Year = date.Year; 6: 7: if (q1Month <= 0) 8: { 9: q1Month += 12; 10: q1Year = year + 1; 11: } 12: if (q2Month <= 0) 13: { 14: q2Month += 12; 15: q2Year = year + 1; 16: } 17: if (q3Month <= 0) 18: { 19: q3Month += 12; 20: q3Year = year + 1; 21: } 22:  23: string qtr = ""; 24: if (date.Month == q1Month) 25: { 26: qtr = "Qtr1"; 27: year = q1Year; 28: } 29: else if (date.Month == q2Month) 30: { 31: qtr = "Qtr2"; 32: year = q2Year; 33: } 34: else if (date.Month == q3Month) 35: { 36: qtr = "Qtr3"; 37: year = q3Year; 38: } 39: else if (date.Month == fyeDate.Month) 40: { 41: qtr = "Qtr4"; 42: year = date.Year; 43: } 44:  45: return string.Format("{0} - {1}", qtr, year.ToString()); 46: }

  Read the article

• 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

  Read the article

• 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.

  Read the article

• Build Your Own CE6 Kernel

  - by Kate Moss' Big Fan

  The Share Source Program in Windows CE provides many modules in %_WINCEROOT%\Private\ tree, and the kernel is one of them! Although it is not full source of kernel but it is good enough for tracing it, even tweak the kernel. Tracing the kernel and see how it works is lots of fun, but it is fascinated to modify and verify the change you made. So first comes first, where is the source of kernel? It's in your %_WINCEROOT%\private\winceos\COREOS\nk\ And next question will be "How do I build it?", Some of you may say just "build -c" there and it should be good. If you are the owner of kernel and got full source, that is definitely the right answer, but none of them are applied to our case though. So what should I do? Let's dig deeper into the coreos\nk folder, there are a couples of subfolder, CELOG, KDSTUB, KERNEL and etc. KERNEL\ is the main component of kernel.dll, in the other word, most of the modify to kernel is going to happen here. And the good thing is, you could "build -c" in %_WINCEROOT%\private\winceos\COREOS\nk\kernel\ with no error at all. But before doing that, remember to backup eveything you are going to modify, including the source and binaries; remember, this is not something belong to you, and if you didn't restore them back later, it could end up confuse the subsequence QFE updates! Here is the steps Backup the source code, I will suggest the whole %_WINCEROOT%\private\winceos\COREOS\nk\ Backup the binaries in common\oak\lib\, and again if you are not sure which files, backup the whole %_WINCEROOT%\common\oak\lib\ is the safest way. Do whatever modification you want in %_WINCEROOT%\private\winceos\COREOS\nk\kernel\ build -c in %_WINCEROOT%\private\winceos\COREOS\nk\kernel If everything went well so far, you should get a new nkmain.lib,nkmain.pdb, nkprmain.lib and nkprmain.pdb in %_WINCEROOT%\public\common\oak\lib\%_TGTCPU%\%WINCEDEBUG%\ Basically, you just rebuild your new kernel, the rest is to "blddemo clean -q" to have your new kernel SYSGEN'd and include in your OS Image. Or just "set WINCEREL=1" then "sysgen -p common nk nkprof" and "makeimg" if you can't wait another minutes for "blddemo clean -q" Tat sounds good, but some of you may not like the idea to alter any code in private folder, and not to mention how annoying to backup/restore files every time. Better idea? Yes, Microsoft provides a tool SYSGEN_CAPTURE (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee504678.aspx for detail and usage) to creates Sources files for public drivers that you want to modify and build in your platform directory. In fact, not only public drivers, virtually anything in the %_WINCEROOT%\public\<project name>\cesysgen\makefile can be captured, and of course including kernel. So I am going to introduce a second way to build your own kernel by using SYSGEN_CAPTURE tool. Again the steps Create a folder in your BSP for building kernel, says %_TARGETPLATROOT%\SRC\Kernel. Use "SYSGEN_CAPTURE -p common nk" and then you will get a SOURCES.KERN, you could also "SYSGEN_CAPTURE -p common nkprof" to generate profiler enabled kernel. rename the SOURCE.KERN to SOURCES and copy one of the sample makefile into your kernel directory. For example the one in PRIVATE\WINCEOS\COREOS\NK\KERNEL\NKNORMAL. Copy the source files you want to modify from private\winceos\coreos\nk\kernel\ into your kernel directory. Modifying the SOURCES= macro to the source files you addes in step 4. For example, if you copied the vm.c, it is going to be SOURCES=vm.c Refer to the private\winceos\COREOS\nk\kernel\sources.inc and add macro defines and proper include path in your SOURCES file. "set WINCEREL=1", "build -c" in your kernel directory and "makeimg", voila! Here is an example for the MACROS you need to add in x86 Here are the macros for x86 CDEFINES=$(CDEFINES) -DIN_KERNEL -DWINCEMACRO -DKERN_CORE # Machine independent defines CDEFINES=$(CDEFINES) -DDBGSUPPORT _COREOSROOT=$(_WINCEROOT)\private\winceos\coreos INCLUDES=$(_COREOSROOT)\inc;$(_COREOSROOT)\nk\inc !IFDEF DP_SETTINGS CDEFINES=$(CDEFINES) -DDP_SETTINGS=$(DP_SETTINGS) !ENDIF ASM_SAFESEH=1 CDEFINES=$(CDEFINES) -Gs100000 -DENCODE_GS_COOKIE

  Read the article

• UK Connected Systems User Group - Udi Dahan Event Topic change

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Hi Just wanted to get the word out about a change to the may user group event.  Udi Dahan will present a new topic which he has not presented in the UK before.  Details below. To register for this event please refer to: http://ukconnectedsystemsusergroup.org/UpcomingEvents.aspx Title: High Availability - A Contrarian View   Abstract: Many developers are aware of the importance of high availability, critically analyzing any single points of failure in the infrastructure. Those same developers rarely give a second thought to the periods of time when a system is being upgraded. Even if all the servers are running, most systems cannot function in-between versions. Yet with the increased pace of business, users are demanding ever more frequent releases. The poor maintenance programmers and system administrators are left holding the bag long after the architecture that sealed their fate was formulated. Join Udi for some different perspectives on high availability - architecture and methodology for the real world.

  Read the article

• 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.

  Read the article

• A Good .NET Quiz ...

  - by lavanyadeepak

  A Good .NET Quiz ... Whilst casually surfing today afternoon I came across a good .NET quiz in one of the indian software company website. It is rather a general technology quiz than just a .NET quiz because it also contains options for the following technologies.   .NET PHP Javascript MySql Testing QTP English Aptitude General Knowledge Science HTML CSS All It also has the following levels for the Quiz:   Easy Medium Hard All   The URL of the quiz is as below: http://www.qualitypointtech.net/quiz/listing_sub_level.php

  Read the article

• 10 Best Programming Podcast 2010 Edition

  - by mbcrump

  This list is in no particular order. Just the 10 best programming podcast that I have found so far. Stack Overflow Podcast -  Jeff Atwood (of codinghorror.com) and Joel Spolsky (of joelonsoftware.com) discuss the development of their new programming community, StackOverflow.com. [This Podcast hasn’t been updated in a while, but its always great to hear more from Jeff Atwood] Hanselminutes - Hanselminutes is a weekly audio talk show with noted web developer and technologist Scott Hanselman and hosted by Carl Franklin. Scott discusses utilities and tools, gives practical how-to advice, and discusses ASP.NET or Windows issues and workarounds. [This Podcast has recently started talking about random topics like diabetes, plane travel and geek relationship tips.  I am not sure if Scott is trying to move to a more mainstream audience or not] Herding Code - A weekly discussion featuring K. Scott Allen (odetocode.com), Kevin Dente, Scott Koon (lazycoder.com), and Jon Galloway. [Great all all-around podcast that I would recommend to all] Deep Fried Bytes - Deep Fried Bytes is an audio talk show with a Southern flavor hosted by technologists and developers Keith Elder and Chris Woodruff. The show discusses a wide range of topics including application development, operating systems and technology in general. Anything is fair game if it plugs into the wall or takes a battery. [This is one that just keeps getting better] Dot Net Rocks - .NET Rocks! is an Internet Audio Talk Show for Microsoft .NET Developers. [One of the first and usually very high quality content] Connected Show - Connected Show Podcast! A podcast covering new Microsoft technology for the developer community. The show is hosted by Dmitry Lyalin and Peter Laudati. [This and Polymorphic are one of my favorite podcast – Dmitry is a great host and would recommend this to all] Polymorphic Podcast - Object oriented development, architecture and best practices in .NET [Craig is a ASP.NET MVP and a great presenter. His podcast is great and it could only be better if he recorded it more often] ASP.NET Podcast - Wallace B. (Wally) McClure presents interviews and short technical talks on .NET Technologies. [Has great information on ASP.NET of course as well as iPhone Dev] Ruby on Rails Podcast - News and interviews about the Ruby language and the Rails website framework. [Even though I am not a Ruby programmer, I’ve found this podcast very interesting] Software Engineering Radio - Software Engineering Radio is a podcast targeted at the professional software developer. The goal is to be a lasting educational resource, not a newscast. Every ten days, a new episode is published that covers all topics software engineering. Episodes are either tutorials on a specific topic, or an interview with a well-known character from the software engineering world. All SE Radio episodes are original content ? we do not record conferences or talks given in other venues. Each episode comprises two speakers to ensure a lively listening experience. SE Radio is an independent and non-commercial organization. [Another excellent podcast – I would recommend any programmer add this to his/her drive home] If I have missed something, please feel free to email me and it might make the 2011 list. =)

  Read the article

• Pimp my Silverlight Firestarter

  - by mbcrump

  So Silverlight Firestarter is over and your sitting on your couch thinking… what now? Well its time to So how exactly can you pimp the Silverlight Firestarter? Well read below and you will find out: 1) Pimp the videos: First we are going to use a program named Juice to download all of the Silverlight Firestarter videos. Go ahead and point your browser to http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/ and download the application. It works on Mac, Linux and PC. After it is downloaded you are going to want to add an RSS feed by clicking the button highlighted below. At this point you are going to want to add the following URL inside the textbox and hit Save: http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Silverlight-Firestarter/RSS This RSS feed includes all the Silverlight Firestarter Labs and Presentations located below. The Future of Silverlight Data Binding Strategies with Silverlight and WP7 Building Compelling Apps with WCF using REST and LINQ Building Feature Rich Business Apps Today with RIA Services MVVM: Why and How? Tips and Patterns using MVVM and Service Patterns with Silverlight and WP7 Tips and Tricks for a Great Installation Experience Tune Your Application: Profiling and Performance Tips Performance Tips for Silverlight Windows Phone 7 Select all the videos and click the Download button located below (has blue arrow): Once all the videos are downloaded you will have about 4.64GB of Silverlight fun. You can now move these videos to your MediaServer and watch them with whatever device you want. Put it on an iPad, iPhone.. emm wait I mean WP7 or WMC7.  2) Pimp the Training Material – Download the offline installer for the labs here. This will give you almost a gig of free training materials. Here is the topics covered: Level 100: Getting Started Lab 01 - WinForms and Silverlight Lab 02 - ASP.NET and Silverlight Lab 03 - XAML and Controls Lab 04 - Data Binding Level 200: Ready for More Lab 05 - Migrating Apps to Out-of-Browser Lab 06 - Great UX with Blend Lab 07 - Web Services and Silverlight Lab 08 - Using WCF RIA Services Level 300: Take me Further Lab 09 - Deep Dive into Out-of-Browser Lab 10 - Silverlight Patterns: Using MVVM Lab 11 - Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 You will notice that it install Firestarter to the default of C:\Firestarter. So you will have to navigate to that folder and double click on Default.htm to get started. Now if you followed part one of the pimping guide then you will already have all the videos on your pc. You will notice that once you go into the lab you will get a Lab Document and Source at the bottom of the article. Now instead of opening the Source Folder in a web browser you can just copy the folder C:\Firestarter\Labs into your Visual Studio 2010 Project Folder. This will save a lot of time later.   3) Pimp my Silverlight 5 Knowledge – Always keep reading as much as possible and remember that the Silverlight 5 Beta should come Q1 of 2011 and the final release at the end of 2011. Here are 5 great blog post on Silverlight 5. Scott Gu’s Blog Mary Jo’s Article on Silverlight 5 The Future of Silverlight (Official) Kunal Chowdhury Blog Tim Heuer’s Blog Thats all that I got for now. Have fun with all the new Silverlight content.  Subscribe to my feed

  Read the article

• Using Node.js as an accelerator for WCF REST services

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Node.js is a server-side JavaScript platform "for easily building fast, scalable network applications". It's built on Google's V8 JavaScript engine and uses an (almost) entirely async event-driven processing model, running in a single thread. If you're new to Node and your reaction is "why would I want to run JavaScript on the server side?", this is the headline answer: in 150 lines of JavaScript you can build a Node.js app which works as an accelerator for WCF REST services*. It can double your messages-per-second throughput, halve your CPU workload and use one-fifth of the memory footprint, compared to the WCF services direct.   Well, it can if: 1) your WCF services are first-class HTTP citizens, honouring client cache ETag headers in request and response; 2) your services do a reasonable amount of work to build a response; 3) your data is read more often than it's written. In one of my projects I have a set of REST services in WCF which deal with data that only gets updated weekly, but which can be read hundreds of times an hour. The services issue ETags and will return a 304 if the client sends a request with the current ETag, which means in the most common scenario the client uses its local cached copy. But when the weekly update happens, then all the client caches are invalidated and they all need the same new data. Then the service will get hundreds of requests with old ETags, and they go through the full service stack to build the same response for each, taking up threads and processing time. Part of that processing means going off to a database on a separate cloud, which introduces more latency and downtime potential.   We can use ASP.NET output caching with WCF to solve the repeated processing problem, but the server will still be thread-bound on incoming requests, and to get the current ETags reliably needs a database call per request. The accelerator solves that by running as a proxy - all client calls come into the proxy, and the proxy routes calls to the underlying REST service. We could use Node as a straight passthrough proxy and expect some benefit, as the server would be less thread-bound, but we would still have one WCF and one database call per proxy call. But add some smart caching logic to the proxy, and share ETags between Node and WCF (so the proxy doesn't even need to call the servcie to get the current ETag), and the underlying service will only be invoked when data has changed, and then only once - all subsequent client requests will be served from the proxy cache.   I've built this as a sample up on GitHub: NodeWcfAccelerator on sixeyed.codegallery. Here's how the architecture looks:     The code is very simple. The Node proxy runs on port 8010 and all client requests target the proxy. If the client request has an ETag header then the proxy looks up the ETag in the tag cache to see if it is current - the sample uses memcached to share ETags between .NET and Node. If the ETag from the client matches the current server tag, the proxy sends a 304 response with an empty body to the client, telling it to use its own cached version of the data. If the ETag from the client is stale, the proxy looks for a local cached version of the response, checking for a file named after the current ETag. If that file exists, its contents are returned to the client as the body in a 200 response, which includes the current ETag in the header. If the proxy does not have a local cached file for the service response, it calls the service, and writes the WCF response to the local cache file, and to the body of a 200 response for the client. So the WCF service is only troubled if both client and proxy have stale (or no) caches.   The only (vaguely) clever bit in the sample is using the ETag cache, so the proxy can serve cached requests without any communication with the underlying service, which it does completely generically, so the proxy has no notion of what it is serving or what the services it proxies are doing. The relative path from the URL is used as the lookup key, so there's no shared key-generation logic between .NET and Node, and when WCF stores a tag it also stores the "read" URL against the ETag so it can be used for a reverse lookup, e.g:   Key Value /WcfSampleService/PersonService.svc/rest/fetch/3 "28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6" "28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6" /WcfSampleService/PersonService.svc/rest/fetch/3    In Node we read the cache using the incoming URL path as the key and we know that "28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6" is the current ETag; we look for a local cached response in /caches/28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6.body (and the corresponding .header file which contains the original service response headers, so the proxy response is exactly the same as the underlying service). When the data is updated, we need to invalidate the ETag cache – which is why we need the reverse lookup in the cache. In the WCF update service, we don't need to know the URL of the related read service - we fetch the entity from the database, do a reverse lookup on the tag cache using the old ETag to get the read URL, update the new ETag against the URL, store the new reverse lookup and delete the old one.   Running Apache Bench against the two endpoints gives the headline performance comparison. Making 1000 requests with concurrency of 100, and not sending any ETag headers in the requests, with the Node proxy I get 102 requests handled per second, average response time of 975 milliseconds with 90% of responses served within 850 milliseconds; going direct to WCF with the same parameters, I get 53 requests handled per second, mean response time of 1853 milliseconds, with 90% of response served within 3260 milliseconds. Informally monitoring server usage during the tests, Node maxed at 20% CPU and 20Mb memory; IIS maxed at 60% CPU and 100Mb memory.   Note that the sample WCF service does a database read and sleeps for 250 milliseconds to simulate a moderate processing load, so this is *not* a baseline Node-vs-WCF comparison, but for similar scenarios where the  service call is expensive but applicable to numerous clients for a long timespan, the performance boost from the accelerator is considerable.     * - actually, the accelerator will work nicely for any HTTP request, where the URL (path + querystring) uniquely identifies a resource. In the sample, there is an assumption that the ETag is a GUID wrapped in double-quotes (e.g. "28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6") – which is the default for WCF services. I use that assumption to name the cache files uniquely, but it is a trivial change to adapt to other ETag formats.

  Read the article

• Prevent your Silverlight XAP file from caching in your browser.

  - by mbcrump

  If you work with Silverlight daily then you have run into this problem. Your XAP file has been cached in your browser and you have to empty your browser cache to resolve it. If your using Google Chrome then you typically do the following: Go to Options –> Clear Browsing History –> Empty the Cache and finally click Clear Browsing data. As you can see, this is a lot of unnecessary steps. It is even worse when you have a customer that says, “I can’t see the new features you just implemented!” and you realize it’s a cached xap problem.  I have been struggling with a way to prevent my XAP file from caching inside of a browser for a while now and decided to implement the following solution. If the Visual Studio Debugger is attached then add a unique query string to the source param to force the XAP file to be refreshed. If the Visual Studio Debugger is not attached then add the source param as Visual Studio generates it. This is also in case I forget to remove the above code in my production environment. I want the ASP.NET code to be inline with my .ASPX page. (I do not want a separate code behind .cs page or .vb page attached to the .aspx page.) Below is an example of the hosting code generated when you create a new Silverlight project. As a quick refresher, the hard coded param name = “source” specifies the location of your XAP file.  <form id="form1" runat="server" style="height:100%"> <div id="silverlightControlHost"> <object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2" width="100%" height="100%"> <param name="source" value="ClientBin/SilverlightApplication2.xap"/> <param name="onError" value="onSilverlightError" /> <param name="background" value="white" /> <param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="4.0.50826.0" /> <param name="autoUpgrade" value="true" /> <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=149156&v=4.0.50826.0" style="text-decoration:none"> <img src="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=161376" alt="Get Microsoft Silverlight" style="border-style:none"/> </a> </object><iframe id="_sl_historyFrame" style="visibility:hidden;height:0px;width:0px;border:0px"></iframe></div> </form> We are going to use a little bit of inline ASP.NET to generate the param name = source dynamically to prevent the XAP file from caching. Lets look at the completed solution: <form id="form1" runat="server" style="height:100%"> <div id="silverlightControlHost"> <object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2" width="100%" height="100%"> <% string strSourceFile = @"ClientBin/SilverlightApplication2.xap"; string param; if (System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached) //Debugger Attached - Refresh the XAP file. param = "<param name=\"source\" value=\"" + strSourceFile + "?" + DateTime.Now.Ticks + "\" />"; else { //Production Mode param = "<param name=\"source\" value=\"" + strSourceFile + "\" />"; } Response.Write(param); %> <param name="onError" value="onSilverlightError" /> <param name="background" value="white" /> <param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="4.0.50826.0" /> <param name="autoUpgrade" value="true" /> <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=149156&v=4.0.50826.0" style="text-decoration:none"> <img src="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=161376" alt="Get Microsoft Silverlight" style="border-style:none"/> </a> </object><iframe id="_sl_historyFrame" style="visibility:hidden;height:0px;width:0px;border:0px"></iframe></div> </form> We add the location to our XAP file to strSourceFile and if the debugger is attached then it will append DateTime.Now.Ticks to the XAP file source and force the browser to download the .XAP. If you view the page source of your Silverlight Application then you can verify it worked properly by looking at the param name = “source” tag as shown below. <param name="source" value="ClientBin/SilverlightApplication2.xap?634299001187160148" /> If the debugger is not attached then it will use the standard source tag as shown below. <param name="source" value="ClientBin/SilverlightApplication2.xap"/> At this point you may be asking, How do I prevent my XAP file from being cached on my production app? Well, you have two easy options: 1) I really don’t recommend this approach but you can force the XAP to be refreshed everytime with the following code snippet.  <param name="source" value="ClientBin/SilverlightApplication2.xap?<%=Guid.NewGuid().ToString() %>"/> NOTE: You could also substitute the “Guid.NewGuid().ToString() for anything that create a random field. (I used DateTime.Now.Ticks earlier). 2) Another solution that I like even better involves checking the XAP Creation Date and appending it to the param name = source. This method was described by Lars Holm Jenson. <% string strSourceFile = @"ClientBin/SilverlightApplication2.xap"; string param; if (System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached) param = "<param name=\"source\" value=\"" + strSourceFile + "\" />"; else { string xappath = HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(@"") + @"\" + strSourceFile; DateTime xapCreationDate = System.IO.File.GetLastWriteTime(xappath); param = "<param name=\"source\" value=\"" + strSourceFile + "?ignore=" + xapCreationDate.ToString() + "\" />"; } Response.Write(param); %> As you can see, this problem has been solved. It will work with all web browsers and stubborn proxy servers that are caching your .XAP. If you enjoyed this article then check out my blog for others like this. You may also want to subscribe to my blog or follow me on Twitter.   Subscribe to my feed

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67  | Next Page >