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• Chart Control in ASP.Net 4 – Second Part

  - by sreejukg

    Couple of weeks before, I have written an introduction about the chart control available in .Net framework. In that article, I explained the basic usage of the chart control with a simple example. You can read that article from the url http://weblogs.asp.net/sreejukg/archive/2010/12/31/getting-started-with-chart-control-in-asp-net-4-0.aspx. In this article I am going to demonstrate how one can generate various types of charts that can be generated easily using the ASP.Net chart control. Let us recollect the data sample we were working in the previous sample. The following is the data I used in the previous article. id SaleAmount SalesPerson SaleType SaleDate CompletionStatus (%) 1 1000 Jack Development 2010-01-01 100 2 300 Mills Consultancy 2010-04-14 90 3 4000 Mills Development 2010-05-15 80 4 2500 Mike eMarketting 2010-06-15 40 5 1080 Jack Development 2010-07-15 30 6 6500 Mills Consultancy 2010-08-24 65 In this article I am going to demonstrate various graphical reports generated from this data with the help of chart control. The following are the reports I am going to generate 1. Representation of share of Sales by each Sales person. 2. Representation of share of sales data according to sale type 3. Representation of sales progress over time period I am going to demonstrate how to bind the chart control programmatically. In order to facilitate this, I created an aspx page named “SalesAnalysis.Aspx” to my project. In the page I added the following controls 1. Dropdownlist control – with id ddlAnalysisType, user will use this to choose the type of chart they want to see. 2. A Button control – with id btnSubmit , by clicking this button, the chart based on the dropdownlist selection will be shown to the user 3. A label Control – with id lblMessage, to display the message to the user, initially this will ask the user to select an option and click on the button. 4. Chart control – with id chrtAnalysis, by default, I set visible = false so that during the page load the chart will be hidden to the users. The following is the initial output of the page. Generating chart for salesperson share Now from Visual Studio, I have double clicked on the button; it created the event handler btnSubmit_Click. In the button Submit event handler, I am using a switch case to execute the corresponding SQL statement and bind it to the chart control. The below is the code for generating the sales person share chart using a pie chart. The above code produces the following output The steps for creating the above chart can be summarized as follows. You specify a chart area, then a series and bind the chart to some x and y values. That is it. If you want to control the chart size and position, you can set the properties for the ChartArea.Position element. For e.g. in the previous code, after instantiating the chart area, setting the below code will give you a bigger pie chart. c.Position.Width = 100; c.Position.Height = 100; The width and height values are in percentage. In this case the chart will be generated by utilizing all the width and height of the chart object. See the output updated with the width and height set to 100% each. Generate Chart for sales type share Now for generating the chart according to the sales type, you just need to change the SQL query and x and y values of the chart. The Sql query used is “SELECT SUM(saleAmount) amount, SaleType from SalesData group by SaleType” and the X-Value is amount and Y-Values is SaleType. s.XValueMember = "SaleType"; s.YValueMembers = "amount"; After modifying the above code with these, the following output is generated. Generate Chart for sales progress over time period For generating the progress of sale chart against sales amount / period, line chart is the ideal tool. In order to facilitate the line chart, you can use Chart Type as System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting.SeriesChartType.Line. Also we need to retrieve the amount and sales date from the data source. I have used the following query to facilitate this. “SELECT SaleAmount, SaleDate FROM SalesData” The output for the line chart is as follows Now you have seen how easily you can build various types of charts. Chart control is an excellent one that helps you to bring business intelligence to your applications. What I demonstrated in only a small part of what you can do with the chart control. Refer http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd456632.aspx for further reading. If you want to get the project files in zip format, post your email below. Hope you enjoyed reading this article.

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• Metro: Understanding Observables

  - by Stephen.Walther

  The goal of this blog entry is to describe how the Observer Pattern is implemented in the WinJS library. You learn how to create observable objects which trigger notifications automatically when their properties are changed. Observables enable you to keep your user interface and your application data in sync. For example, by taking advantage of observables, you can update your user interface automatically whenever the properties of a product change. Observables are the foundation of declarative binding in the WinJS library. The WinJS library is not the first JavaScript library to include support for observables. For example, both the KnockoutJS library and the Microsoft Ajax Library (now part of the Ajax Control Toolkit) support observables. Creating an Observable Imagine that I have created a product object like this: var product = { name: "Milk", description: "Something to drink", price: 12.33 }; Nothing very exciting about this product. It has three properties named name, description, and price. Now, imagine that I want to be notified automatically whenever any of these properties are changed. In that case, I can create an observable product from my product object like this: var observableProduct = WinJS.Binding.as(product); This line of code creates a new JavaScript object named observableProduct from the existing JavaScript object named product. This new object also has a name, description, and price property. However, unlike the properties of the original product object, the properties of the observable product object trigger notifications when the properties are changed. Each of the properties of the new observable product object has been changed into accessor properties which have both a getter and a setter. For example, the observable product price property looks something like this: price: { get: function () { return this.getProperty(“price”); } set: function (value) { this.setProperty(“price”, value); } } When you read the price property then the getProperty() method is called and when you set the price property then the setProperty() method is called. The getProperty() and setProperty() methods are methods of the observable product object. The observable product object supports the following methods and properties: · addProperty(name, value) – Adds a new property to an observable and notifies any listeners. · backingData – An object which represents the value of each property. · bind(name, action) – Enables you to execute a function when a property changes. · getProperty(name) – Returns the value of a property using the string name of the property. · notify(name, newValue, oldValue) – A private method which executes each function in the _listeners array. · removeProperty(name) – Removes a property and notifies any listeners. · setProperty(name, value) – Updates a property and notifies any listeners. · unbind(name, action) – Enables you to stop executing a function in response to a property change. · updateProperty(name, value) – Updates a property and notifies any listeners. So when you create an observable, you get a new object with the same properties as an existing object. However, when you modify the properties of an observable object, then you can notify any listeners of the observable that the value of a particular property has changed automatically. Imagine that you change the value of the price property like this: observableProduct.price = 2.99; In that case, the following sequence of events is triggered: 1. The price setter calls the setProperty(“price”, 2.99) method 2. The setProperty() method updates the value of the backingData.price property and calls the notify() method 3. The notify() method executes each function in the collection of listeners associated with the price property Creating Observable Listeners If you want to be notified when a property of an observable object is changed, then you need to register a listener. You register a listener by using the bind() method like this: (function () { "use strict"; var app = WinJS.Application; app.onactivated = function (eventObject) { if (eventObject.detail.kind === Windows.ApplicationModel.Activation.ActivationKind.launch) { // Simple product object var product = { name: "Milk", description: "Something to drink", price: 12.33 }; // Create observable product var observableProduct = WinJS.Binding.as(product); // Execute a function when price is changed observableProduct.bind("price", function (newValue) { console.log(newValue); }); // Change the price observableProduct.price = 2.99; } }; app.start(); })(); In the code above, the bind() method is used to associate the price property with a function. When the price property is changed, the function logs the new value of the price property to the Visual Studio JavaScript console. The price property is associated with the function using the following line of code: // Execute a function when price is changed observableProduct.bind("price", function (newValue) { console.log(newValue); }); Coalescing Notifications If you make multiple changes to a property – one change immediately following another – then separate notifications won’t be sent. Instead, any listeners are notified only once. The notifications are coalesced into a single notification. For example, in the following code, the product price property is updated three times. However, only one message is written to the JavaScript console. Only the last value assigned to the price property is written to the JavaScript Console window: // Simple product object var product = { name: "Milk", description: "Something to drink", price: 12.33 }; // Create observable product var observableProduct = WinJS.Binding.as(product); // Execute a function when price is changed observableProduct.bind("price", function (newValue) { console.log(newValue); }); // Change the price observableProduct.price = 3.99; observableProduct.price = 2.99; observableProduct.price = 1.99; Only the last value assigned to price, the value 1.99, appears in the console: If there is a time delay between changes to a property then changes result in different notifications. For example, the following code updates the price property every second: // Simple product object var product = { name: "Milk", description: "Something to drink", price: 12.33 }; // Create observable product var observableProduct = WinJS.Binding.as(product); // Execute a function when price is changed observableProduct.bind("price", function (newValue) { console.log(newValue); }); // Add 1 to price every second window.setInterval(function () { observableProduct.price += 1; }, 1000); In this case, separate notification messages are logged to the JavaScript Console window: If you need to prevent multiple notifications from being coalesced into one then you can take advantage of promises. I discussed WinJS promises in a previous blog entry: http://stephenwalther.com/blog/archive/2012/02/22/windows-web-applications-promises.aspx Because the updateProperty() method returns a promise, you can create different notifications for each change in a property by using the following code: // Change the price observableProduct.updateProperty("price", 3.99) .then(function () { observableProduct.updateProperty("price", 2.99) .then(function () { observableProduct.updateProperty("price", 1.99); }); }); In this case, even though the price is immediately changed from 3.99 to 2.99 to 1.99, separate notifications for each new value of the price property are sent. Bypassing Notifications Normally, if a property of an observable object has listeners and you change the property then the listeners are notified. However, there are certain situations in which you might want to bypass notification. In other words, you might need to change a property value silently without triggering any functions registered for notification. If you want to change a property without triggering notifications then you should change the property by using the backingData property. The following code illustrates how you can change the price property silently: // Simple product object var product = { name: "Milk", description: "Something to drink", price: 12.33 }; // Create observable product var observableProduct = WinJS.Binding.as(product); // Execute a function when price is changed observableProduct.bind("price", function (newValue) { console.log(newValue); }); // Change the price silently observableProduct.backingData.price = 5.99; console.log(observableProduct.price); // Writes 5.99 The price is changed to the value 5.99 by changing the value of backingData.price. Because the observableProduct.price property is not set directly, any listeners associated with the price property are not notified. When you change the value of a property by using the backingData property, the change in the property happens synchronously. However, when you change the value of an observable property directly, the change is always made asynchronously. Summary The goal of this blog entry was to describe observables. In particular, we discussed how to create observables from existing JavaScript objects and bind functions to observable properties. You also learned how notifications are coalesced (and ways to prevent this coalescing). Finally, we discussed how you can use the backingData property to update an observable property without triggering notifications. In the next blog entry, we’ll see how observables are used with declarative binding to display the values of properties in an HTML document.

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• A Quick Primer on SharePoint Customization

  - by PeterBrunone

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} This one goes out to all the people who have been asked to change the way a SharePoint site looks.  Management wants to know how long it will take, and you can whip that out by tomorrow, right?  If you don't have time to prepare a treatise on what's involved, or if you just want to lend some extra weight to your case by quoting a blogger who was an MVP for seven years, then dive right in; this post is for you. There are three main components of SharePoint visual customization:   1)       Theme – A theme encompasses all the standardized text formatting and coloring (borders, fonts, etc), including the background images of various sections. All told, there could be around 50 images involved, and a few hundred CSS (style) classes.  Installing a theme once it’s been created is no great feat.  Given the number of pieces, of course, creating a new theme could take anywhere from a day to a week… once decisions have been made about the desired appearance. 2)      Master Page – A master page provides the framework for page layout.  This includes all the top and side menus, where content shows up, et cetera.  Master pages have been around for a long time in ASP.NET (Microsoft’s web development platform), and they do require some .NET programming knowledge.  Beyond that, in SharePoint, there are a few dozen controls which the system expects find on a given page.  They’re not all used at once, but if they’re not there when they’re needed, chaos ensues.  Estimating a custom master page is difficult, as it depends on the level of customization.  I’ve been on projects where I was brought in simply to fix some problems and add a few finishing touches, and it took 2-3 weeks.  Master page customization requires a large amount of testing time to make sure that the HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and control placement all work well together. 3)      Individual page layout – Each page (ideally) uses a master page for its template, but within the content areas defined by the master page, web parts can be added, removed, and configured from within the browser.  The wireframe that Brent provided could most likely be completed simply by manipulating the content on the home page in this fashion, and we had allowed about a day of effort for the task.  If needed, further functionality can be provided by an experienced ASP.NET developer; custom forms are a common example.  This of course is a bit more in-depth than simple content manipulation and could take several days per page (or more; there’s really no way to quantify this without a set of requirements).   That’s basically it.  To recap:  Fonts and coloring are done with themes, and can take anywhere from a day to a week to create (not counting creative time); required technical skills include HTML, CSS, and image manipulation.  Templated layout is done with master pages, and generally requires a developer familiar with both ASP.NET and SharePoint in particular; it can have far-reaching consequences depending on the complexity of the changes, and could add weeks or months to a project.  Page layout can be as simple as content manipulation in the web browser, taking a few hours per page, or it can involve more detail, like custom forms, and can require programming expertise and significantly more development time.

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• Silverlight Cream for February 26, 2011 -- #1052

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Mark Monster, Gill Cleeren, Pencho Popadiyn, Kevin Dockx, Joost van Schaik, Jesse Liberty, John Papa, Jeremy Likness, Arik Poznanski(-2-), Page Brooks, Deborah Kurata, Mike Snow, Alfred Astort, Samuel Jack, XAMLNinja, and Shawn Wildermuth. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Asynchronous Callbacks with Rx" Jesse Liberty WP7: "Phoney Windows Phone 7 Project Now Available!" Shawn Wildermuth MVVM: "Validating our ViewModel" Mark Monster Shoutouts: Shawn Wildermuth has a video up of his FadingMessage class to show it off: Introducing Phoney's FadingMessage Class From SilverlightCream.com: Validating our ViewModel Mark Monster discusses Validation in his latest post... using INotifyDataErrorInfo and his own implementation of a ViewModel base that supports it and INPC. Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 7) Gill Cleeren hits part 7 of his series at SilverlightShow on a great walk through Silverlight and getting ready for the exam. This is the final part and concentrates on deploying apps. Windows Phone 7–Creating Custom Keyboard Pencho Popadiyn has a post at SilverlightShow discussing problems with WP7 keyboards in his native Bulgaria, and his solution to the problem... create his own. 360 Degrees Feedback by Kevin Dockx Kevin Dockx produced a white paper for his company about an employee review solution they did in Silverlight. The white paper is available, and SilverlightShow interviewd Kevin to answer questions about the app. Extended Windows Phone 7 page for handling rotation, focused element updates and back key press Looks like Joost van Schaik has a few posts I've missed... and I'm not going to get to them all today! ... this one is about the base class he uses for WP7 apps... a bunch of utilities he uses... definitely worth a look (and a take). Asynchronous Callbacks with Rx Jesse Liberty has his 8th post in the Rx series up and this one's on Asynchronous Callbacks... if you haven't seen this before, you should definitely look into it... cool stuff, Jesse! Silverlight TV 63: Exploring National Instruments' App Using Data and Business Features John Papa has Silverlight TV number 63 up and is talking to Steve Lasker about National Instruments and their Lab View product. Great demo and discussion. Jounce Part 11: Debugging MEF Jeremy Likness's latest (number 11) in his series on his MVVM framework Jounce is out, and he's discussing how to debug MEF, which Jounce handles nicely through the logging he provides... and you can use it externally to Jounce. Get Twitter Trends on Windows Phone 7 Arik Poznanski has a couple Twitter for WP7 posts up... first is one for pulling Twitter trends from whatthetrend.com... plus the code to do it. Searching Twitter on Windows Phone 7 In his next post, Arik Poznanski shows how to search twitter from your WP7 ... again with code. Tiled Background Control in Silverlight Page Brooks shows how to get a tiled background control in Silverlight ... did you know there was one in the JetPack them? Silverlight Charting: Displaying Data Above the Column Deborah Kurata continues her charting posts with this one displaying the column value above the column. I like this... it has a clean look and all the data is available at a glance. Silverlight: Tasks on the Win7 Mobile Phone Mike Snow has a list of the WP7 tasks available and an example of using them... looks like a pretty good reference! 10 of 10 - Aesthetics and alignment matter Alfred Astort discusses aesthetics and WP7 dev... looks like it's the same as any app development, but if you're not doing it, you should be. Simon Squared – We have Multi-player: Days 4, 5 and (ahem!) 6 Samuel Jack details the completion of his multi-player game for WP7 utilizing Azure, in the hour-by-hour detail he's done the rest... plus a video of the final product! Who ate all the pies!! XAMLNinja has a very good discussion/link set of Charting posts all leading up to a portrait-only version of charting for WP7 with labels that looks looks great Phoney Windows Phone 7 Project Now Available! Shawn Wildermuth has a collection of classes he always uses with WP7 dev, and he's sharing them with all of us a "Phoney" Tools project on Codeplex... and now has a NuGet project also. 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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• Verizon Wireless Supports its Mission-Critical Employee Portal with MySQL

  - by Bertrand Matthelié

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Verizon Wireless, the #1 mobile carrier in the United States, operates the nation’s largest 3G and 4G LTE network, with the most subscribers (109 millions) and the highest revenue ($70.2 Billion in 2011). Verizon Wireless built the first wide-area wireless broadband network and delivered the first wireless consumer 3G multimedia service in the US, and offers global voice and data services in more than 200 destinations around the world. To support 4.2 million daily wireless transactions and 493,000 calls and emails transactions produced by 94.2 million retail customers, Verizon Wireless employs over 78,000 employees with area headquarters across the United States. The Business Challenge Seeing the stupendous rise in social media, video streaming, live broadcasting…etc which redefined the scope of technology, Verizon Wireless, as a technology savvy company, wanted to provide a platform to its employees where they could network socially, view and host microsites, stream live videos, blog and provide the latest news. The IT team at Verizon Wireless had abundant experience with various technology platforms to support the huge number of applications in the company. However, open-source products weren’t yet widely used in the organization and the team had the ambition to adopt such technologies and see if the architecture could meet Verizon Wireless’ rigid requirements. After evaluating a few solutions, the IT team decided to use the LAMP stack for Vzweb, its mission-critical, 24x7 employee portal, with Drupal as the front end and MySQL on Linux as the backend, and for a few other internal websites also on MySQL. The MySQL Solution Verizon Wireless started to support its employee portal, Vzweb, its online streaming website, Vztube, and internal wiki pages, Vzwiki, with MySQL 5.1 in 2010. Vzweb is the main internal communication channel for Verizon Wireless, while Vztube hosts important company-wide webcasts regularly for executive-level announcements, so both channels have to be live and accessible all the time for its 78,000 employees across the United States. However during the initial deployment of the MySQL based Intranet, the application experienced performance issues. High connection spikes occurred causing slow user response time, and the IT team applied workarounds to continue the service. A number of key performance indexes (KPI) for the infrastructure were identified and the operational framework redesigned to support a more robust website and conform to the 99.985% uptime SLA (Service-Level Agreement). The MySQL DBA team made a series of upgrades in MySQL: Step 1: Moved from MyISAM to InnoDB storage engine in 2010 Step 2: Upgraded to the latest MySQL 5.1.54 release in 2010 Step 3: Upgraded from MySQL 5.1 to the latest GA release MySQL 5.5 in 2011, and leveraging MySQL Thread Pool as part of MySQL Enterprise Edition to scale better After making those changes, the team saw a much better response time during high concurrency use cases, and achieved an amazing performance improvement of 1400%! In January 2011, Verizon CEO, Ivan Seidenberg, announced the iPhone launch during the opening keynote at Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas, and that presentation was streamed live to its 78,000 employees. The event was broadcasted flawlessly with MySQL as the database. Later in 2011, Hurricane Irene attacked the East Coast of United States and caused major life and financial damages. During the hurricane, the team directed more traffic to its west coast data center to avoid potential infrastructure damage in the East Coast. Such transition was executed smoothly and even though the geographical distance became longer for the East Coast users, there was no impact in the performance of Vzweb and Vztube, and the SLA goal was achieved. “MySQL is the key component of Verizon Wireless’ mission-critical employee portal application,” said Shivinder Singh, senior DBA at Verizon Wireless. “We achieved 1400% performance improvement by moving from the MyISAM storage engine to InnoDB, upgrading to the latest GA release MySQL 5.5, and using the MySQL Thread Pool to support high concurrent user connections. MySQL has become part of our IT infrastructure, on which potentially more future applications will be built.” To learn more about MySQL Enterprise Edition, Get our Product Guide.

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• C# 4.0: Covariance And Contravariance In Generics

  - by Paulo Morgado

  C# 4.0 (and .NET 4.0) introduced covariance and contravariance to generic interfaces and delegates. But what is this variance thing? According to Wikipedia, in multilinear algebra and tensor analysis, covariance and contravariance describe how the quantitative description of certain geometrical or physical entities changes when passing from one coordinate system to another.(*) But what does this have to do with C# or .NET? In type theory, a the type T is greater (>) than type S if S is a subtype (derives from) T, which means that there is a quantitative description for types in a type hierarchy. So, how does covariance and contravariance apply to C# (and .NET) generic types? In C# (and .NET), variance applies to generic type parameters and not to the resulting generic type. A generic type parameter is: covariant if the ordering of the generic types follows the ordering of the generic type parameters: Generic<T> = Generic<S> for T = S. contravariant if the ordering of the generic types is reversed from the ordering of the generic type parameters: Generic<T> = Generic<S> for T = S. invariant if neither of the above apply. If this definition is applied to arrays, we can see that arrays have always been covariant because this is valid code: object[] objectArray = new string[] { "string 1", "string 2" }; objectArray[0] = "string 3"; objectArray[1] = new object(); However, when we try to run this code, the second assignment will throw an ArrayTypeMismatchException. Although the compiler was fooled into thinking this was valid code because an object is being assigned to an element of an array of object, at run time, there is always a type check to guarantee that the runtime type of the definition of the elements of the array is greater or equal to the instance being assigned to the element. In the above example, because the runtime type of the array is array of string, the first assignment of array elements is valid because string = string and the second is invalid because string = object. This leads to the conclusion that, although arrays have always been covariant, they are not safely covariant – code that compiles is not guaranteed to run without errors. In C#, the way to define that a generic type parameter as covariant is using the out generic modifier: public interface IEnumerable<out T> { IEnumerator<T> GetEnumerator(); } public interface IEnumerator<out T> { T Current { get; } bool MoveNext(); } Notice the convenient use the pre-existing out keyword. Besides the benefit of not having to remember a new hypothetic covariant keyword, out is easier to remember because it defines that the generic type parameter can only appear in output positions — read-only properties and method return values. In a similar way, the way to define a type parameter as contravariant is using the in generic modifier: public interface IComparer<in T> { int Compare(T x, T y); } Once again, the use of the pre-existing in keyword makes it easier to remember that the generic type parameter can only be used in input positions — write-only properties and method non ref and non out parameters. Because covariance and contravariance apply only to the generic type parameters, a generic type definition can have both covariant and contravariant generic type parameters in its definition: public delegate TResult Func<in T, out TResult>(T arg); A generic type parameter that is not marked covariant (out) or contravariant (in) is invariant. All the types in the .NET Framework where variance could be applied to its generic type parameters have been modified to take advantage of this new feature. In summary, the rules for variance in C# (and .NET) are: Variance in type parameters are restricted to generic interface and generic delegate types. A generic interface or generic delegate type can have both covariant and contravariant type parameters. Variance applies only to reference types; if you specify a value type for a variant type parameter, that type parameter is invariant for the resulting constructed type. Variance does not apply to delegate combination. That is, given two delegates of types Action<Derived> and Action<Base>, you cannot combine the second delegate with the first although the result would be type safe. Variance allows the second delegate to be assigned to a variable of type Action<Derived>, but delegates can combine only if their types match exactly. If you want to learn more about variance in C# (and .NET), you can always read: Covariance and Contravariance in Generics — MSDN Library Exact rules for variance validity — Eric Lippert Events get a little overhaul in C# 4, Afterward: Effective Events — Chris Burrows Note: Because variance is a feature of .NET 4.0 and not only of C# 4.0, all this also applies to Visual Basic 10.

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• UserAppDataPath in WPF

  - by psheriff

  In Windows Forms applications you were able to get to your user's roaming profile directory very easily using the Application.UserAppDataPath property. This folder allows you to store information for your program in a custom folder specifically for your program. The format of this directory looks like this: C:\Users\YOUR NAME\AppData\Roaming\COMPANY NAME\APPLICATION NAME\APPLICATION VERSION For example, on my Windows 7 64-bit system, this folder would look like this for a Windows Forms Application: C:\Users\PSheriff\AppData\Roaming\PDSA, Inc.\WindowsFormsApplication1\1.0.0.0 For some reason Microsoft did not expose this property from the Application object of WPF applications. I guess they think that we don't need this property in WPF? Well, sometimes we still do need to get at this folder. You have two choices on how to retrieve this property. Add a reference to the System.Windows.Forms.dll to your WPF application and use this property directly. Or, you can write your own method to build the same path. If you add a reference to the System.Windows.Forms.dll you will need to use System.Windows.Forms.Application.UserAppDataPath to access this property. Create a GetUserAppDataPath Method in WPF If you want to build this path you can do so with just a few method calls in WPF using Reflection. The code below shows this fairly simple method to retrieve the same folder as shown above. C#using System.Reflection; public string GetUserAppDataPath(){  string path = string.Empty;  Assembly assm;  Type at;  object[] r;   // Get the .EXE assembly  assm = Assembly.GetEntryAssembly();  // Get a 'Type' of the AssemblyCompanyAttribute  at = typeof(AssemblyCompanyAttribute);  // Get a collection of custom attributes from the .EXE assembly  r = assm.GetCustomAttributes(at, false);  // Get the Company Attribute  AssemblyCompanyAttribute ct =                 ((AssemblyCompanyAttribute)(r[0]));  // Build the User App Data Path  path = Environment.GetFolderPath(              Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData);  path += @"\" + ct.Company;  path += @"\" + assm.GetName().Version.ToString();   return path;} Visual BasicPublic Function GetUserAppDataPath() As String  Dim path As String = String.Empty  Dim assm As Assembly  Dim at As Type  Dim r As Object()   ' Get the .EXE assembly  assm = Assembly.GetEntryAssembly()  ' Get a 'Type' of the AssemblyCompanyAttribute  at = GetType(AssemblyCompanyAttribute)  ' Get a collection of custom attributes from the .EXE assembly  r = assm.GetCustomAttributes(at, False)  ' Get the Company Attribute  Dim ct As AssemblyCompanyAttribute = _                 DirectCast(r(0), AssemblyCompanyAttribute)  ' Build the User App Data Path  path = Environment.GetFolderPath( _                 Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData)  path &= "\" & ct.Company  path &= "\" & assm.GetName().Version.ToString()   Return pathEnd Function Summary Getting the User Application Data Path folder in WPF is fairly simple with just a few method calls using Reflection. Of course, there is absolutely no reason you cannot just add a reference to the System.Windows.Forms.dll to your WPF application and use that Application object. After all, System.Windows.Forms.dll is a part of the .NET Framework and can be used from WPF with no issues at all. NOTE: Visit http://www.pdsa.com/downloads to get more tips and tricks like this one. Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff ** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **We frequently offer a FREE gift for readers of my blog. Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for your FREE gift!

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• Analysing and measuring the performance of a .NET application (survey results)

  - by Laila

  Back in December last year, I asked myself: could it be that .NET developers think that you need three days and a PhD to do performance profiling on their code? What if developers are shunning profilers because they perceive them as too complex to use? If so, then what method do they use to measure and analyse the performance of their .NET applications? Do they even care about performance? So, a few weeks ago, I decided to get a 1-minute survey up and running in the hopes that some good, hard data would clear the matter up once and for all. I posted the survey on Simple Talk and got help from a few people to promote it. The survey consisted of 3 simple questions: Amazingly, 533 developers took the time to respond - which means I had enough data to get representative results! So before I go any further, I would like to thank all of you who contributed, because I now have some pretty good answers to the troubling questions I was asking myself. To thank you properly, I thought I would share some of the results with you. First of all, application performance is indeed important to most of you. In fact, performance is an intrinsic part of the development cycle for a good 40% of you, which is much higher than I had anticipated, I have to admit. (I know, "Have a little faith Laila!") When asked what tool you use to measure and analyse application performance, I found that nearly half of the respondents use logging statements, a third use performance counters, and 70% of respondents use a profiler of some sort (a 3rd party performance profilers, the CLR profiler or the Visual Studio profiler). The importance attributed to logging statements did surprise me a little. I am still not sure why somebody would go to the trouble of manually instrumenting code in order to measure its performance, instead of just using a profiler. I personally find the process of annotating code, calculating times from log files, and relating it all back to your source terrifyingly laborious. Not to mention that you then need to remember to turn it all off later! Even when you have logging in place throughout all your code anyway, you still have a fair amount of potentially error-prone calculation to sift through the results; in addition, you'll only get method-level rather than line-level timings, and you won't get timings from any framework or library methods you don't have source for. To top it all, we all know that bottlenecks are rarely where you would expect them to be, so you could be wasting time looking for a performance problem in the wrong place. On the other hand, profilers do all the work for you: they automatically collect the CPU and wall-clock timings, and present the results from method timing all the way down to individual lines of code. Maybe I'm missing a trick. I would love to know about the types of scenarios where you actively prefer to use logging statements. Finally, while a third of the respondents didn't have a strong opinion about code performance profilers, those who had an opinion thought that they were mainly complex to use and time consuming. Three respondents in particular summarised this perfectly: "sometimes, they are rather complex to use, adding an additional time-sink to the process of trying to resolve the existing problem". "they are simple to use, but the results are hard to understand" "Complex to find the more advanced things, easy to find some low hanging fruit". These results confirmed my suspicions: Profilers are seen to be designed for more advanced users who can use them effectively and make sense of the results. I found yet more interesting information when I started comparing samples of "developers for whom performance is an important part of the dev cycle", with those "to whom performance is only looked at in times of crisis", and "developers to whom performance is not important, as long as the app works". See the three graphs below. Sample of developers to whom performance is an important part of the dev cycle: Sample of developers to whom performance is important only in times of crisis: Sample of developers to whom performance is not important, as long as the app works: As you can see, there is a strong correlation between the usage of a profiler and the importance attributed to performance: indeed, the more important performance is to a development team, the more likely they are to use a profiler. In addition, developers to whom performance is an important part of the dev cycle have a higher tendency to use a much wider range of methods for performance measurement and analysis. And, unsurprisingly, the less important performance is, the less varied the methods of measurement are. So all in all, to come back to my random questions: .NET developers do care about performance. Those who care the most use a wider range of performance measurement methods than those who care less. But overall, logging statements, performance counters and third party performance profilers are the performance measurement methods of choice for most developers. Finally, although most of you find code profilers complex to use, those of you who care the most about performance tend to use profilers more than those of you to whom performance is not so important.

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• HDFC Bank's Journey to Oracle Private Database Cloud

  - by Nilesh Agrawal

  One of the key takeaways from a recent post by Sushil Kumar is the importance of business initiative that drives the transformational journey from legacy IT to enterprise private cloud. The journey that leads to a agile, self-service and efficient infrastructure with reduced complexity and enables IT to deliver services more closely aligned with business requirements. Nilanjay Bhattacharjee, AVP, IT of HDFC Bank presented a real-world case study based on one such initiative in his Oracle OpenWorld session titled "HDFC BANK Journey into Oracle Database Cloud with EM 12c DBaaS". The case study highlighted in this session is from HDFC Bank’s Lending Business Segment, which comprises roughly 50% of Bank’s top line. Bank’s Lending Business is always under pressure to launch “New Schemes” to compete and stay ahead in this segment and IT has to keep up with this challenging business requirement. Lending related applications are highly dynamic and go through constant changes and every single and minor change in each related application is required to be thoroughly UAT tested certified before they are certified for production rollout. This leads to a constant pressure in IT for rapid provisioning of UAT databases on an ongoing basis to enable faster time to market. Nilanjay joined Sushil Kumar, VP, Product Strategy, Oracle, during the Enterprise Manager general session at Oracle OpenWorld 2012. Let's watch what Nilanjay had to say about their recent Database cloud deployment. “Agility” in launching new business schemes became the key business driver for private database cloud adoption in the Bank. Nilanjay spent an hour discussing it during his session. Let's look at why Database-as-a-Service(DBaaS) model was need of the hour in this case  - Average 3 days to provision UAT Database for Loan Management Application Silo’ed UAT environment with Average 30% utilization Compliance requirement consume UAT testing resources DBA activities leads to $$ paid to SI for provisioning databases manually Overhead in managing configuration drift between production and test environments Rollout impact/delay on new business initiatives The private database cloud implementation progressed through 4 fundamental phases - Standardization, Consolidation, Automation, Optimization of UAT infrastructure. Project scoping was carried out and end users and stakeholders were engaged early on right from planning phase and including all phases of implementation. Standardization and Consolidation phase involved multiple iterations of planning to first standardize on infrastructure, db versions, patch levels, configuration, IT processes etc and with database level consolidation project onto Exadata platform. It was also decided to have existing AIX UAT DB landscape covered and EM 12c DBaaS solution being platform agnostic supported this model well. Automation and Optimization phase provided the necessary Agility, Self-Service and efficiency and this was made possible via EM 12c DBaaS. EM 12c DBaaS Self-Service/SSA Portal was setup with required zones, quotas, service templates, charge plan defined. There were 2 zones implemented - Exadata zone  primarily for UAT and benchmark testing for databases running on Exadata platform and second zone was for AIX setup to cover other databases those running on AIX. Metering and Chargeback/Showback capabilities provided business and IT the framework for cloud optimization and also visibility into cloud usage. More details on UAT cloud implementation, related building blocks and EM 12c DBaaS solution are covered in Nilanjay's OpenWorld session here. Some of the key Benefits achieved from UAT cloud initiative are - New business initiatives can be easily launched due to rapid provisioning of UAT Databases [ ~3 hours ] Drastically cut down $$ on SI for DBA Activities due to Self-Service Effective usage of infrastructure leading to  better ROI Empowering  consumers to provision database using Self-Service Control on project schedule with DB end date aligned to project plan submitted during provisioning Databases provisioned through Self-Service are monitored in EM and auto configured for Alerts and KPI Regulatory requirement of database does not impact existing project in queue This table below shows typical list of activities and tasks involved when a end user requests for a UAT database. EM 12c DBaaS solution helped reduce UAT database provisioning time from roughly 3 days down to 3 hours and this timing also includes provisioning time for database with production scale data (ranging from 250 G to 2 TB of data) - And it's not just about time to provision,  this initiative has enabled an agile, efficient and transparent UAT environment where end users are empowered with real control of cloud resources and IT's role is shifted as enabler of strategic services instead of being administrator of all user requests. The strong collaboration between IT and business community right from planning to implementation to go-live has played the key role in achieving this common goal of enterprise private cloud. Finally, real cloud is here and this cloud is accompanied with rain (business benefits) as well ! For more information, please go to Oracle Enterprise Manager  web page or  follow us at :  Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Linkedin | Newsletter

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• XNA Notes 005

  - by George Clingerman

  Another week and another crazy amount of activity going on in the XNA community. I’m fairly certain I missed over half of it. In fact, if I am missing things, make sure to email me and I’ll try and make sure I catch it next week! ([email protected]). Also, if you’ve got any advice, things you like/don’t like about the way these XNA Notes are going let me know. I always appreciate feedback (currently spammers are leaving me the nicest comments so you guys have work to do!) Without further ado, here’s this week’s notes! Time Critical XNA News The XNA Team Blob reminds us that February 7th is the last day to submit XNA 3.1 games to peer review! http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/01/31/7-days-left-to-submit-xna-gs-3-1-games-on-app-hub.aspx XNA MVPS Chris Williams kicks off the marketing campaign for our book http://geekswithblogs.net/cwilliams/archive/2011/01/28/143680.aspx Catalin Zima posts the comparison cheat sheet for why Angry Birds is different than Chickens Can’t Fly http://www.amusedsloth.com/2011/02/comparison-cheat-sheet-for-chickens-cant-fly-and-angry-birds/ Jim Perry congratulates the developers selected by Game Developer Magazine for Best Xbox LIVE Indie Games of 2010 http://machxgames.com/blog/?p=24 @NemoKrad posts his XNAKUUG talks for all to enjoy http://twitter.com/NemoKrad/statuses/33142362502864896 http://xna-uk.net/blogs/randomchaos/archive/2011/02/03/xblig-uk-2011-january-amp-february-talk.aspx George  (that’s me!) preps for his XNA talk coming up on the 8th http://twitter.com/clingermangw/statuses/32669550554124288 http://www.portlandsilverlight.net/Meetings/Details/15 XNA Developers FireFly posts the last tutorial in his XNA Tower Defense tutorial series http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/26442/451460.aspx#451460 http://xnatd.blogspot.com/2011/01/tutorial-14-polishing-game.html @fredericmy posts the main difference when porting a game from Windows Phone 7 to Xbox 360 http://fairyengine.blogspot.com/2011/01/main-differences-when-porting-game-from.html @ElementCy creates a pretty rad video of a MineCraft type terrain created using XNA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Waw1f7wnl9I Andrew Russel gets the first XNA badge on gamedev.stackexchange http://twitter.com/_AndrewRussell/statuses/32322877004972032 http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/badges?tab=tags And his funding for ExEn has passed $7000 only $3000 to go http://twitter.com/_AndrewRussell/statuses/33042412804771840 Subodh Pushpak blogs about his Windows Phone 7 XNA talk http://geekswithblogs.net/subodhnpushpak/archive/2011/02/01/windows-phone-7-silverlight--xna-development-talk.aspx Slyprid releases the latest version of Transmute and needs more people to test http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/32452488418299904 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/ SpynDoctorGames celebrates the 1 year anniversary of Your Doodles Are Bugged! Congrats! http://twitter.com/SpynDoctorGames/statuses/32511689068908544 Noogy (creator of Dust the Elysian Tail) prepares his conversion to XNA 4.0 http://twitter.com/NoogyTweet/statuses/32522008449253376 @philippedasilva posts about the Indiefreaks Game Framework v0.2.0.0 Input management system http://twitter.com/philippedasilva/statuses/32763393957957632 http://indiefreaks.com/2011/02/02/behind-smart-input-system-feature/ Mommy’s Best Games debates what to do about High Scores with their new update http://mommysbest.blogspot.com/2011/02/high-score-shake-up.html @BinaryTweedDeej want to know if there’s anything the community needs to make XNA games for the PC. Give him some feedback! http://twitter.com/BinaryTweedDeej/status/32895453863354368 @mikebmcl promises to write us all a book (I can’t wait to read it!) http://twitter.com/mikebmcl/statuses/33206499102687233 @werezompire is going to live, LIVE, thanks to all the generosity and support from the community! http://twitter.com/werezompire/statuses/32840147644977153 Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG) Making money in Xbox 360 indie game development. Is it possible? http://www.bitmob.com/articles/making-money-in-xbox-360-indie-game-development-is-it-possible @AlejandroDaJ posts some thoughts abut the bitmob article http://twitter.com/AlejandroDaJ/statuses/31068552165330944 http://www.apathyworks.com/blog/view.php?id=00215 Kobun gets my respect as an XBLIG champion. I’m not sure who Kobun is, but if you’ve every read through the comment sections any time Kotaku writes about XBLIGs you’ll see a lot of confusion, disinformation in there. Kobun has been waging a secret war battling that lack of knowledge and he does it well. Also he’s running a pretty kick ass site for Xbox LIVE Indie Game reviews http://xboxindies.teamkobun.com/ @radiangames releases his last Xbox LIVE Indie Game...for now http://bit.ly/gMK6lE Playing Avaglide with the Kinect controller http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqAYbHww53o http://www.joystiq.com/2011/01/30/kinect-hacks-take-to-the-skies-with-avaglide/ Luke Schneider of Radiangames interviewed in Edge magazine http://www.next-gen.biz/features/radiangames-venture Digital Quarters posts thoughts on why XBLIG’s online requirement kills certain genres http://digitalquarters.blogspot.com/2011/02/thoughts-why-xbligs-online-requirement.html Mommy’s Best Games shares the news that several XBLIGs were featured in the March 2011 issue of Famitsu 360 http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/33455/451487.aspx#451487 NaviFairy continues with his Indie-Game-A-Day http://gaygamer.net/2011/02/indie_game_a_day_epic_dungeon.html http://gaygamer.net/2011/02/indie_game_a_day_break_limit_r.html and more every day...that’s kind of the point! Keep your eye on this series! VVGTV continues with it’s awesome reviews/promotions for XBLIGs http://vvgtv.com/ http://vvgtv.com/2011/02/03/iredia-atrams-secret-xblig-review-2/ http://vvgtv.com/2011/02/02/poopocalypse-coming-soon-to-xblig/ ….and even more, you get the point. Magicka is an Indie Game doing really well on Steam AND it’s made using XNA http://www.magickagame.com/ http://twitter.com/Magickagame/statuses/32712762580799488 GameMarx reviews Antipole http://www.gamemarx.com/reviews/73/antipole-is-vvvvvvery-good.aspx Armless Octopus review Alpha Squad http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/28/xbox-indie-review-alpha-squad/ An interesting article about Kodu that Jim Perry found http://twitter.com/MachXGames/statuses/32848044105924608 http://www.develop-online.net/news/36915/10-year-old-Jordan-makes-games-The-UK-needs-more-like-her XNA Game Development Sgt. Conker posts about the Natur beta, a new book and whether you can make money with XBLIG http://www.sgtconker.com/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/a-new-book-on-the-block-and-a-new-natur-beta/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/making-money-in-xbox-360-indie-game-development-is-it-possible/ Tips for setting up SVN http://bit.ly/fKxgFh @bsimser found tons of royalty free music and soundfx for your XNA Games http://twitter.com/bsimser/statuses/31426632933711872 Post on the new features in the next Sunburn Editor http://www.synapsegaming.com/blogs/fivesidedbarrel/archive/2011/01/28/new-editor-features-prefabs-components-and-more.aspx @jasons_novaleaf posts source code for light pre-pass optimizations for #xna http://twitter.com/jasons_novaleaf/statuses/33348855403642880 http://jcoluna.wordpress.com/2011/02/01/xna-4-0-light-pre-pass-optimization-round-one/ I’ve been learning about doing an A.I. for turn based games and this article was a great resource. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1535/designing_ai_algorithms_for_.php?print=1

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• Create Orchard Module in a Separate Project

  - by Steve Michelotti

  The Orchard Project is a new OOS Microsoft project that is being developed up on CodePlex. From the Orchard home page on CodePlex, it states “Orchard project is focused on delivering a .NET-based CMS application that will allow users to rapidly create content-driven Websites, and an extensibility framework that will allow developers and customizers to provide additional functionality through modules and themes.” The Orchard Project site contains additional information including documentation and walkthroughs. The ability to create a composite solution based on a collection of modules is a compelling feature. In Orchard, these modules can just be created as simple MVC Areas or they can also be created inside of stand-alone web application projects.  The walkthrough for writing an Orchard module that is available on the Orchard site uses a simple Area that is created inside of the host application. It is based on the Orchard MIX presentation. This walkthrough does an effective job introducing various Orchard concepts such as hooking into the navigation system, theme/layout system, content types, and more.  However, creating an Orchard module in a separate project does not seem to be concisely documented anywhere. Orchard ships with several module OOTB that are in separate assemblies – but again, it’s not well documented how to get started building one from scratch. The following are the steps I took to successfully get an Orchard module in a separate project up and running. Step 1 – Download the OrchardIIS.zip file from the Orchard Release page. Unzip and open up the solution. Step 2 – Add your project to the solution. I named my project “Orchard.Widget” and used and “MVC 2 Empty Web Application” project type. Make sure you put the physical path inside the “Modules” sub-folder to the main project like this: At this point the solution should look like: Step 3 – Add assembly references to Orchard.dll and Orchard.Core.dll. Step 4 – Add a controller and view.  I’ll just create a Hello World controller and view. Notice I created the view as a partial view (*.ascx). Also add the [Themed] attribute to the top of the HomeController class just like the normal Orchard walk through shows it. Step 5 – Add Module.txt to the project root. The is a very important step. Orchard will not recognize your module without this text file present.  It can contain just the name of your module: name: Widget Step 6 – Add Routes.cs. Notice I’ve given an area name of “Orchard.Widget” on lines 26 and 33. 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Web.Mvc; 4: using System.Web.Routing; 5: using Orchard.Mvc.Routes; 6:   7: namespace Orchard.Widget 8: { 9: public class Routes : IRouteProvider 10: { 11: public void GetRoutes(ICollection<RouteDescriptor> routes) 12: { 13: foreach (var routeDescriptor in GetRoutes()) 14: { 15: routes.Add(routeDescriptor); 16: } 17: } 18:   19: public IEnumerable<RouteDescriptor> GetRoutes() 20: { 21: return new[] { 22: new RouteDescriptor { 23: Route = new Route( 24: "Widget/{controller}/{action}/{id}", 25: new RouteValueDictionary { 26: {"area", "Orchard.Widget"}, 27: {"controller", "Home"}, 28: {"action", "Index"}, 29: {"id", ""} 30: }, 31: new RouteValueDictionary(), 32: new RouteValueDictionary { 33: {"area", "Orchard.Widget"} 34: }, 35: new MvcRouteHandler()) 36: } 37: }; 38: } 39: } 40: } Step 7 – Add MainMenu.cs. This will make sure that an item appears in the main menu called “Widget” which points to the module. 1: using System; 2: using Orchard.UI.Navigation; 3:   4: namespace Orchard.Widget 5: { 6: public class MainMenu : INavigationProvider 7: { 8: public void GetNavigation(NavigationBuilder builder) 9: { 10: builder.Add(menu => menu.Add("Widget", item => item.Action("Index", "Home", new 11: { 12: area = "Orchard.Widget" 13: }))); 14: } 15:   16: public string MenuName 17: { 18: get { return "main"; } 19: } 20: } 21: } Step 8 – Clean up web.config. By default Visual Studio adds numerous sections to the web.config. The sections that can be removed are: appSettings, connectionStrings, authentication, membership, profile, and roleManager. Step 9 – Delete Global.asax. This project will ultimately be running from inside the Orchard host so this “sub-site” should not have its own Global.asax.   Now you’re ready the run the app.  When you first run it, the “Widget” menu item will appear in the main menu because of the MainMenu.cs file we added: We can then click the “Widget” link in the main menu to send us over to our view:   Packaging From start to finish, it’s a relatively painless experience but it could be better. For example, a Visual Studio project template that encapsulates aspects from this blog post would definitely make it a lot easier to get up and running with creating an Orchard module.  Another aspect I found interesting is that if you read the first paragraph of the walkthrough, it says, “You can also develop modules as separate projects, to be packaged and shared with other users of Orchard CMS (the packaging story is still to be defined, along with marketplaces for sharing modules).” In particular, I will be extremely curious to see how the “packaging story” evolves. The first thing that comes to mind for me is: what if we explored MvcContrib Portable Areas as a potential mechanism for this packaging? This would certainly make things easy since all artifacts (aspx, aspx, images, css, javascript) are all wrapped up into a single assembly. Granted, Orchard does have its own infrastructure for layouts and themes but it seems like integrating portable areas into this pipeline would not be a difficult undertaking. Maybe that’ll be the next research task. :)

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• MVVM Light V4 preview 2 (BL0015) #mvvmlight

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  Over the past few weeks, I have worked hard on a few new features for MVVM Light V4. Here is a second early preview (consider this pre-alpha if you wish). The features are unit-tested, but I am now looking for feedback and there might be bugs! Bug correction: Messenger.CleanupList is now thread safe This was an annoying bug that is now corrected: In some circumstances, an exception could be thrown when the Messenger’s recipients list was cleaned up (i.e. the “dead” instances were removed). The method is called now and then and the exception was thrown apparently at random. In fact it was really a multi-threading issue, which is now corrected. Bug correction: AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers prevents EventToCommand to work This is a particularly annoying regression bug that was introduced in BL0014. In order to allow MVVM Light to work in XBAPs too, I added the AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers attribute to the assemblies. However, we just found out that this causes issues when using EventToCommand. In order to allow EventToCommand to continue working, I reverted to the previous state by removing the AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers attribute for now. I will work with my friends at Microsoft to try and find a solution. Stay tuned. Bug correction: XML documentation file is now generated in Release configuration The XML documentation file was not generated for the Release configuration. This was a simple flag in the project file that I had forgotten to set. This is corrected now. Applying EventToCommand to non-FrameworkElements This feature has been requested in order to be able to execute a command when a Storyboard is completed. I implemented this, but unfortunately found out that EventToCommand can only be added to Storyboards in Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 4, but not in WPF or in Windows Phone 7. This obviously limits the usefulness of this change, but I decided to publish it anyway, because it is pretty damn useful in Silverlight… Why not in WPF? In WPF, Storyboards added to a resource dictionary are frozen. This is a feature of WPF which allows to optimize certain objects for performance: By freezing them, it is a contract where we say “this object will not be modified anymore, so do your perf optimization on them without worrying too much”. Unfortunately, adding a Trigger (such as EventTrigger) to an object in resources does not work if this object is frozen… and unfortunately, there is no way to tell WPF not to freeze the Storyboard in the resources… so there is no way around that (at least none I can see. In Silverlight, objects are not frozen, so an EventTrigger can be added without problems. Why not in WP7? In Windows Phone 7, there is a totally different issue: Adding a Trigger can only be done to a FrameworkElement, which Storyboard is not. Here I think that we might see a change in a future version of the framework, so maybe this small trick will work in the future. Workaround? Since you cannot use the EventToCommand on a Storyboard in WPF and in WP7, the workaround is pretty obvious: Handle the Completed event in the code behind, and call the Command from there on the ViewModel. This object can be obtained by casting the DataContext to the ViewModel type. This means that the View needs to know about the ViewModel, but I never had issues with that anyway. New class: NotifyPropertyChanged Sometimes when you implement a model object (for example Customer), you would like to have it implement INotifyPropertyChanged, but without having all the frills of a ViewModelBase. A new class named NotifyPropertyChanged allows you to do that. This class is a simple implementation of INotifyPropertyChaned (with all the overloads of RaisePropertyChanged that were implemented in BL0014). In fact, ViewModelBase inherits NotifyPropertyChanged. ViewModelBase does not implement IDisposable anymore The IDisposable interface and the Dispose method had been marked obsolete in the ViewModelBase class already in V3. Now they have been removed. Note: By this, I do not mean that IDisposable is a bad interface, or that it shouldn’t be used on viewmodels. In the contrary, I know that this interface is very useful in certain circumstances. However, I think that having it by default on every instance of ViewModelBase was sending a wrong message. This interface has a strong meaning in .NET: After Dispose has been executed, the instance should not be used anymore, and should be ready for garbage collection. What I really wanted to have on ViewModelBase was rather a simple cleanup method, something that can be executed now and then during runtime. This is fulfilled by the ICleanup interface and its Cleanup method. If your ViewModels need IDisposable, you can still use it! You will just have to implement the interface on the class itself, because it is not available on ViewModelBase anymore. What’s next? I have a couple exciting new features implemented already but that need more testing before they go live… Just stay tuned and by MIX11 (12-14 April 2011), we should see at least a major addition to MVVM Light Toolkit, as well as another smaller feature which is pretty cool nonetheless More about this later! Happy Coding Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• PRUEBAS DE ESPECIALIZACION 2013/2014

  - by agallego

  Consigue  tu Certificado de Especialista Oracle  de forma GRATUITA , 27 y 28 de Noviembre de 2013  Ahora puedes realizar los exámenes de implementación de las especializaciones de Oracle y convertirte en especialista. Podrás realizar cualquiera de los exámenes de implementación de la siguiente lista: Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management 11g Sales Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-456) Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management 11g Incentive Compensation Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-472) Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10 Implementation Developer Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-510) Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service 2012 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-465) Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service 2012 Developer Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-480) Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management 11g Human Resources Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-584) Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management 11g Talent Management Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-585) Oracle Taleo Recruiting Cloud Service 2013 Certified Implementation Specialist  (1Z0-474) Oracle Fusion Financials 11g Accounts Payable Certified Implementation Specialist(1Z0-507) Oracle Fusion Financials 11g Accounts Receivable Certified Implementation Specialist(1Z0-506) Oracle Fusion Financials 11g General Ledger Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-508) Oracle Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration 11g Essentials (1Z0-469) Oracle Documaker Standard Edition 12 Implementation Essentials (1Z0-570) Oracle Hyperion Planning 11 Essentials (1Z0-533) Oracle Hyperion Financial Management 11 Essentials (1Z0-532) Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite 11g Essentials (1Z0-591) Oracle Essbase 11 Essentials (1Z0-531) Oracle GoldenGate 10 Essentials (1Z0-539) Oracle GoldenGate 11g Certified Implementation Exam Essentials Oracle Business Intelligence Applications 7.9.6 for CRM Essentials (1Z0-524) Oracle Business Intelligence Applications 7.9.6 for ERP Essentials (1Z0-525) Oracle Oracle Endeca Information Discovery 2.3 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-461) Oracle SOA Suite 11g Essentials (1Z0-478) Oracle Service-Oriented Architecture Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-451) Oracle Unified Business Process Management Suite 11g Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-560) Oracle WebLogic Server 12c Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-599) Oracle Application Grid Certified Implementation Specialist(1Z0-523) Oracle WebCenter Content 11g Essentials (1Z0-542) Oracle WebCenter Portal 11g Essentials (1Z0-541) Oracle Application Development Framework Essentials (1Z1-554) Oracle Identity Governance Suite 11g Essentials(1z0-459) Oracle Access Management Suite Plus 11g Essentials Exam(1z0-479) M2M Platform Certified Architecture Essentials (1Z0-467) Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-462)  Oracle Cloud Application Foundation Essentials(1Z0-468) Oracle Exadata 11g Essentials (1Z0-536) Exadata Database Machine Models X3-2 and X3-8 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-485) Oracle Certified Expert, Oracle Exadata X3 Administration(1Z0-027) Exalogic Elastic Cloud X2-2 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-569) Oracle Linux System Administration (1Z0-403) Oracle Linux Fundamentals (1Z0-402) Oracle Linux 6 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-460) Oracle VM 3 for x86 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-590) Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Essentials  (1Z0-530 ) Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Essentials (1Z0-457) SPARC T4-Based Server Installation Essentials (1Z0-597) 1Z0-821 Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration 1Z0-822 Oracle Solaris 11 Advanced System Administration Oracle Solaris 11 Installation and Configuration Essentials (1Z0-580) StorageTek Tape Libraries Certified Implementation Specialist(1Z0-546) Sun ZFS Storage Appliance Certified Implementation Specialist The Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management 8 Essentials (1Z0-567) The Primavera Portfolio Management Essentials (1Z0-544) Primavera Contract Management 14 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-582) Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing 2 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-562) Oracle Policy Automation 10 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-534) Oracle User Productivity Kit 11 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-566) Oracle User Productivity Kit 11 Technical Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-583) Oracle Retail Demand Forecasting 13.3 Functional Implementer Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-463) Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server 13 Configuration Implementation Specialist (1Z0-576) Oracle Retail Merchandising System 13.2 Foundation Functional Implementer Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-453) Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server 13 Configuration Implementation Specialist (1Z0-576) Oracle Retail Point-of-Service Technical Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-572) Oracle Retail Price Management 13.2 Functional Implementer Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-454) Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server 13 Configuration Implementation Specialist (1Z0-576) Oracle Retail Store Inventory Management 13.2 Functional Implementer Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-455) Oracle Flexcube Universal Banking 11 Technical Implementation Essentials (1Z0-579) Oracle FlexCube Universal Banking 11 Basic Implementation Essentials (1Z0-561) Oracle Flexcube Universal Banking 11 Technical Implementation Essentials (1Z0-579) Oracle FLEXCUBE Direct Banking 6 Implementation Essentials (1Z0-594)   Puedes consultar la información acerca de los examenes en cada uno de los enlaces. Para prepararte los examenes sigue la Guia de estudio que encontrarás en la página de cada examen. Requisitos: ser  Partner Gold, Platinum o Diamond de Oracle y tener un usuario de Oracle Pearson Vue.  ¿Cuándo?: 27 y 28 de noviembre  a las (9:00, 12:00, 16:00)  ¿Dónde?: Core Networks, C.E.Parque Norte, Edificio Olmo, Planta 1 Serrano Galvache 56 | 28033, Madrid Para inscribirte: Create una cuenta en Pearson Vue (www.pearsonvue.com/oracle). Para Registrarte aquí. Para más información sobre el programa de especializaciones, haz clic aquí. No pierdas esta oportunidad e inscríbete hoy.  Para cualquier duda contactar con [email protected]. Ana María Gallego Partner Enablement Manager Spain and Portugal        

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• Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and things I wish were more intuitive

  - by pjohnson

  I've started using Windows Workflow Foundation, and so far ran into a few things that aren't incredibly obvious. Microsoft did a good job of providing a ton of samples, which is handy because you need them to get anywhere with WF. The docs are thin, so I've been bouncing between samples and downloadable labs to figure out how to implement various activities in a workflow. Code separation or not? You can create a workflow and activity in Visual Studio with or without code separation, i.e. just a .cs "Component" style object with a Designer.cs file, or a .xoml XML markup file with code behind (beside?) it. Absence any obvious advantage to one or the other, I used code separation for workflows and any complex custom activities, and without code separation for custom activities that just inherit from the Activity class and thus don't have anything special in the designer. So far, so good. Workflow Activity Library project type - What's the point of this separate project type? So far I don't see much advantage to keeping your custom activities in a separate project. I prefer to have as few projects as needed (and no fewer). The Designer's Toolbox window seems to find your custom activities just fine no matter where they are, and the debugging experience doesn't seem to be any different. Designer Properties - This is about the designer, and not specific to WF, but nevertheless something that's hindered me a lot more in WF than in Windows Forms or elsewhere. The Properties window does a good job of showing you property values when you hover the mouse over the values. But they don't do the same to find out what a control's type is. So maybe if I named all my activities "x1" and "x2" instead of helpful self-documenting names like "listenForStatusUpdate", then I could easily see enough of the type to determine what it is, but any names longer than those and all I get of the type is "System.Workflow.Act" or "System.Workflow.Compone". Even hitting the dropdown doesn't expand any wider, like the debugger quick watch "smart tag" popups do when you scroll through members. The only way I've found around this in VS 2008 is to widen the Properties dialog, losing precious designer real estate, then shrink it back down when you're done to see what you were doing. Really? WF Designer - This is about the designer, and I believe is specific to WF. I should be able to edit the XML in a .xoml file, or drag and drop using the designer. With WPF (at least in VS 2010 Ultimate), these are side by side, and changes to one instantly update the other. With WF, I have to right-click on the .xoml file, choose Open With, and pick XML Editor to edit the text. It looks like this is one way where WF didn't get the same attention WPF got during .NET Fx 3.0 development. Service - In the WF world, this is simply a class that talks to the workflow about things outside the workflow, not to be confused with how the term "service" is used in every other context I've seen in the Windows and .NET world, i.e. an executable that waits for events or requests from a client and services them (Windows service, web service, WCF service, etc.). ListenActivity - Such a great concept, yet so unintuitive. It seems you need at least two branches (EventDrivenActivity instances), one for your positive condition and one for a timeout. The positive condition has a HandleExternalEventActivity, and the timeout has a DelayActivity followed by however you want to handle the delay, e.g. a ThrowActivity. The timeout is simple enough; wiring up the HandleExternalEventActivity is where things get fun. You need to create a service (see above), and an interface for that service (this seems more complex than should be necessary--why not have activities just wire to a service directly?). And you need to create a custom EventArgs class that inherits from ExternalDataEventArgs--you can't create an ExternalDataEventArgs event handler directly, even if you don't need to add any more information to the event args, despite ExternalDataEventArgs not being marked as an abstract class, nor a compiler error nor warning nor any other indication that you're doing something wrong, until you run it and find that it always times out and get to check every place mentioned here to see why. Your interface and service need an event that consumes your custom EventArgs class, and a method to fire that event. You need to call that method from somewhere. Then you get to hope that you did everything just right, or that you can step through code in the debugger before your Delay timeout expires. Yes, it's as much fun as it sounds. TransactionScopeActivity - I had the bright idea of putting one in as a placeholder, then filling in the database updates later. That caused this error: The workflow hosting environment does not have a persistence service as required by an operation on the workflow instance "[GUID]". ...which is about as helpful as "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" and even more fun to debug. Google led me to this Microsoft Forums hit, and from there I figured out it didn't like that the activity had no children. Again, a Validator on TransactionScopeActivity would have pointed this out to me at design time, rather than handing me a nearly useless error at runtime. Easily enough, I disabled the activity and that fixed it. I still see huge potential in my work where WF could make things easier and more flexible, but there are some seriously rough edges at the moment. Maybe I'm just spoiled by how much easier and more intuitive development elsewhere in the .NET Framework is.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, October 01, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, October 01, 2012Popular ReleasesD3 Loot Tracker: 1.4.1: This version will automatically save a recording session on application exit if the user didn't stop the current session.CRM 2011 Visual Ribbon Editor: Visual Ribbon Editor (1.2.1001.1): Visual Ribbon Editor 1.2.1001.1 What's New: Ability to hide currently selected tab Password in the connection file is now being encrypted Esc and Enter keyboard keys are now supported in all dialogs Extended width of Prefix and Id fields in New Button and New Group dialogs Minor UI enchancements for Hide Button button Minor UI enchancements for View XML button and dialog File/assembly versioning for executable file Notes: Existing plain-text password will be automatically encrypt...Untangler: Untangler: First version of Untangler application available now.SubExtractor: Release 1029: Feature: Added option to make i and ¡ characters movie-specific for improved OCR on Spanish subs (Special Characters tab in Options) Feature: Allow switch to Word Spacing dialog directly from Spell Check dialog Fix: Added more default word spacings for accented characters Fix: Changed Word Spacing dialog to show all OCR'd characters in current sub Fix: Removed application focus grab during OCR Fix: Tightened HD subs fuzzy logic to reduce false matches in small characters Fix: Improved Arrow k...MCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.2.18: Reccomended download Changelog for 2.2.18 (32bit and 64bit) 1. Added support for checking if Showanalyzer has hung and cancelling it 2. New version of comskip, 0.81.48 3. Speeding up comskip 4. Fixed a build bug in 64bit 2.2.17 5. Added a new comkip.ini, better commercial detection for international channels and less aggressive. Old one has been retained as comskip_old.ini 6. Added support for Audio Offset on Conversion Task page in GUI (this overrides the profiles AudioDelay when specified)Mugen Injection: Mugen Injection 3.0: Added a generic version of the fluent syntax. Big changes in fluent-syntax. Added support to resolve a parameters: - Factory: AnyCustomFunc{T}, AnyCustomFunc{IEnumerable<IInjectionParameters>,T}, AnyCustomFunc{IDictionary<string, object>,T}, AnyCustomFunc{IEnumerable<IInjectionParameters>,IDictionary<string, object>,T} - Lazy: AnyCustomLazy<T> - Binding metadata: ISetting Change binding builders, now you can configure them through the string settings. Increase performance. F...Aggravation: Version 1.0: This version 1.0 release is pretty stable. You need the Silverlight 4 runtime, developer tools, and Experssion Blend 4 installed.Tube++: Tube++ 4.0.0.43: Fix parser for downloading and add new default slate gray styleReadable Passphrase Generator: KeePass Plugin 0.7.1: See the KeePass Plugin Step By Step Guide for instructions on how to install the plugin. Changes Built against KeePass 2.20Windows 8 Toolkit - Charts and More: Beta 1.0: The First Compiled Version of my LibraryCatchThatException: Release 1.0: This is the first relase for CatchThatException library at 29-9-2012CardPlay: a Solitaire Framework for .Net: 0.3.0: Added 5 games: Blockade, Chessboard, Colorado, Sly Fox, TwentyUltraFluid Modeling Suite: Beta 1: This release is experimental but contains a lot of features like: - xml serialization - multiple selection - clipboard copy/cut/paste on context menu There is the debug and the release (recommanded default) versions.PDF.NET: PDF.NET.Ver4.5-OpenSourceCode: PDF.NET Ver4.5 ????，????Web??????。 PDF.NET Ver4.5 Open Source Code,include a sample Web application project.Visual Studio Icon Patcher: Version 1.5.2: This version contains no new images from v1.5.1 Contains the following improvements: Better support for detecting the installed languages The extract & inject commands won’t run if Visual Studio is running You may now run in extract or inject mode The p/invoke code was cleaned up based on Code Analysis recommendations When a p/invoke method fails the Win32 error message is now displayed Error messages use red text Status messages use green textZXing.Net: ZXing.Net 0.9.0.0: On the way to a release 1.0 the API should be stable now with this version. sync with rev. 2393 of the java version improved api better Unity support Windows RT binaries Windows CE binaries new Windows Service demo new WPF demo WindowsCE Hotfix: Fixes an error with ISO8859-1 encoding and scannning of QR-Codes. The hotfix is only needed for the WindowsCE platform.C.B.R. : Comic Book Reader: CBR 0.7: Synthesis since 0.6 : ePUB : Complete refactoring Add a new dedicated feed viewer for opds stream PDF conversion : improved with image merge Make all backstage panel scrollable Integrate the new AvalonDock 2 library. Support multi-document. Library explorer and Table of content are now toolboxes Designer for dynamic books is now mvvm and much better New BrowserForControl Customized xps viewer to suppress toolbars and bind it to cbr commands Add quick start manual and button ...sosoft: sosoft source: sosoft source include alarm clockRawr: Rawr 5.0.0: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr Addon (NOT UPDATED YET FOR MOP)We now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including ba...Coevery - Free CRM: Coevery 1.0.0.26: The zh-CN issue has been solved. We also add a project management module.New ProjectsAmazonGlacierGUI - GUI Client for Amazon Glacier | WPF: a GUI client for amazon glacier , Written in .NET 4, C#,WPF,MVVM & RavenDB for storageAthene: UML editor.Basic Helpdesk Application: Develop a simple application to be used in a network environment to aid support staff while working remotely with users to resolve problems in their local PC.CAPTCHA Solver: CSolver, is a CAPTCHA Solver for Simple CAPTCHAs.ComicExt: ComicExt Works with CBZ files decompress them into a folder of the same name and convert them into zip files and vice versa from a single folder.Copy Your Table Storage: Tool to permit copy table storage dotCMS: it is a content management system base on BlogEngine.NET and Ext.NETihongma??: ?????????????????????????，????????????????、??????，?????????????????????????????，??????????????????????。 ??????????????，??????；???????????????，???????Liam F: Basic mathematical functions implemented using AVX/AVX2MVC Solution: MVC Solution, including many mvc best practicesopengltest: opengl testsample project: Testing...Sériethèque: A small tvshow organizer with viewed option, link to addict7ed.com, rename file etc ...SHOIC (SUPER HIGH ORBIT ION CANION): SHOIC (Super Hight Orbit Ion Canion) es una aplicación derivada de LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Canion)SignalRServerTry: signal r trySilverlight Datagrid Plus: Silverlight Datagrid plus adds basic features to the Silverlight toolkit datagrid such as grouping, filtering, new record and formatting of the datagrid.Sitecore Modules: This is a home for all the Sitecore Shared Source modules distributed by 5 Limes. Over time we expect this solution to contain several projects.Spiritual Chanting Utility: A quick media loop utilitySQL Web Studio Pad: A Simple Web Based SQL Management IDE for managing Database objectsStockmarket Simulation: Stockmarket Simulationtest_proj: ok testTISSEAN.NET: This project is based on: TISEAN 3.0.1 Nonlinear Time Series Analysis Rainer Hegger,Holger Kantz, Thomas Schreiber With major contributions by Eckehard OlbrichUntangler: Class hierarchy viewer for .Net assemblyValarmathi Hospital: Patient management.Windows 8 App For SharePoint Online: Windows 8 app to SharePoint 2013 OnlineWPF Anti-DataBinding Anti-DataTemplate Extensions: WPF Anti-DataBinding Anti-DataTemplate Extensions offers a pure C# code-behind (no XAML) approach to working with WPF controls, starting with the WPF ListBox.Yandex Positions Parser: ?????? ??????? ????? ? ?????? ??????? ?? ???????? ???????? ??????.YunCMS: A simple CMS for build protal site.

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• Silverlight Cream for January 11, 2011 -- #1024

  - by Dave Campbell

  1,000 blogposts is quite a few, but to die-hard geeks, 1000 isn't the number... 1K is the number, and today is my 1K blogpost! I've been working up to this for at least 11 months. Way back at MIX10, I approached some vendors about an idea I had. A month ago I contacted them and others, and everyone I contacted was very generous and supportive of my idea. My idea was not to run a contest, but blog as normal, and whoever ended up on my 1K post would get some swag... and I set a cut-off at 13 posts. So... blogging normally, I had some submittals, and then ran my normal process to pick up the next posts until I hit a total of 13. To provide a distribution channel for the swag, everyone on the list, please send me your snail mail (T-shirts) and email (licenses) addresses as soon as possible.   I'd like to thank the following generous sponsors for their contributions to my fun (in alphabetic order): and Rachel Hawley for contributing 4 Silverlight control sets First Floor Software and Koen Zwikstra for contributing 13 licenses for Silverlight Spy and Sara Faatz/Jason Beres for contributing 13 licenses for Silverlight Data Visualization controls and Svetla Stoycheva for contributing T-Shirts for everyone on the post and Ina Tontcheva for contributing 13 licenses for RadControls for Silverlight + RadControls for Windows Phone and Charlene Kozlan for contributing 1 combopack standard, 2 DataGrid for Silverlight, and 2 Listbox for Silverlight Standard And now finally...in this Issue: Nigel Sampson, Jeremy Likness, Dan Wahlin, Kunal Chowdhurry, Alex Knight, Wei-Meng Lee, Michael Crump, Jesse Liberty, Peter Kuhn, Michael Washington, Tau Sick, Max Paulousky, Damian Schenkelman Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Demystifying Silverlight Dependency Properties" Dan Wahlin WP7: "Using Windows Phone Gestures as Triggers" Nigel Sampson Expression Blend: "PathListBox: making data look cool" Alex Knight From SilverlightCream.com: Using Windows Phone Gestures as Triggers Nigel Sampson blogged about WP7 Gestures, the Toolkit, and using Gestures as Triggers, and actually makes it looks simple :) Jounce Part 9: Static and Dynamic Module Management Jeremy Likness has episode 9 of his explanation of his MVVM framework, Jounce, up... and a big discussion of Modules and Module Management from a Jounce perspective. Demystifying Silverlight Dependency Properties Dan Wahlin takes a page from one of his teaching opportunities, and shares his knowledge of Dependency Properties with us... beginning with what they are, defining them in code, and demonstrating their use. Customizing Silverlight ChildWindow Style using Blend Kunal Chowdhurry has a great post up about getting your Child Windows to match the look & feel of the rest of youra app... plus a bunch of Blend goodness thrown in. PathListBox: making data look cool File this post by Alex Knight in the 'holy crap' file along with the others in this series! ... just check out that cool Ticker Style Path ListBox at the top of the blog... too cool! Web Access in Windows Phone 7 Apps Wei-Meng Lee has the 3rd part of his series on WP7 development up and in this one is discussing Web Access... I mean *discussing* it... tons of detail, code, and explanation... great post. Prevent your Silverlight XAP file from caching in your browser. Michael Crump helps relieve stress on Silverlight developers everywhere by exploring how to avoid caching of your XAP in the browser... (WPFS) MVVM Light Toolkit: Soup To Nuts Part I Jesse Liberty continues his Windows Phone from Scratch series with a new segment exploring Laurent Bugnion's MVVMLight Toolkit beginning with acquiring and installing the toolkit, then proceeds to discuss linking the View and ViewModel, the ViewModel Locator, and page navigation. Silverlight: Making a DateTimePicker Peter Kuhn attacks a problem that crops up on the forums a lot -- a DateTimePicker control for Silverlight... following the "It's so simple to build one yourself" advice, he did so, and provides the code for all of us! Windows Phone 7 Animated Button Press Michael Washington took exception to button presses that gave no visual feedback and produced a behavior that does just that. Using TweetSharp in a Windows Phone 7 app Tau Sick demonstrates using TweetSharp to put a twitter feed into a WP7 app, as he did in "Hangover Helper"... all the instructions from getting Tweeetshaprt to the code necessary. Bindable Application Bar Extensions for Windows Phone 7 Max Paulousky has a post discussing some real extensions to the ApplicationBar for WP7.. he begins with a bindable application bar by Nicolas Humann that I've missed, probably because his blog is in French... and extends it to allow using DelegateCommand. How to: Load Prism modules packaged in a separate XAP file in an OOB application Damian Schenkelman posts about Prism, AppModules in separate XAPs and running OOB... if you've tried this, you know it's a hassle.. Damian has the solution. 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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• BizTalk 2009 - Installing BizTalk Server 2009 on XP for Development

  - by StuartBrierley

  At my previous employer, when developing for BizTalk Server 2004 using Visual Studio 2003, we made use of separate development and deployment environments; developing in Visual Studio on our client PCs and then deploying to a seperate shared BizTalk 2004 Server from there.  This server was part of a multi-server Standard BizTalk environment comprising of separate BizTalk Server 2004 and SQL Server 2000 servers.  This environment was implemented a number of years ago by an outside consulting company, and while it worked it did occasionally cause contention issues with three developers deploying to the same server to carry out unit testing! Now that I am making the design and implementation decisions about the environment that BizTalk will be developed in and deployed to, I have chosen to create a single "server" installation on my development PC, installling SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and BizTalk Server 2009 on a single system.  The client PC in use is actually a MacBook Pro running Windows XP; not the most powerful of systems for high volume processing but it should be powerful enough to allow development and initial unit testing to take place. I did not need to, and so chose not to, install all of the components detailed in the Microsoft guide for installing BizTalk 2009 on Windows XP but I did follow the basics of the procedures detailed within.  Outlined below are the highlights of this process and any details of what choices I made.   Install IIS I had previsouly installed Windows XP, including all current service packs and critical updates.  At the time of installation this included Service Pack 3, the .Net Framework 3.5 and MS Windows Installer 3.1.  Having a running XP system, my first step was to install IIS - this is quite straightforward and posed no difficulties. Install Visual Studio 2008 The next step for me was to install Visual Studio 2008.  Making sure to select a custom installation is crucial at this point, as you need to make sure that you deselect SQL Server 2005 Express Edition as it can cause the BizTalk installation to fail.  The installation guide suggests that you only select Visual C# when selecting features to install, but  I decided that due to some legacy systems I have code for that I would also select the VB and ASP options. Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 Following the completion of the installation of Visual Studio itself you should then install the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition The next step before intalling BizTalk Server 2009 itself is to install SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition. On the feature selection screen make sure that you select the follwoing options: Database Engine Services SQL Server Replication Full-Text Search Analysis Services Reporting Services Business Intelligence Development Studio Client Tools Connectivity Integration Services Management Tools Basic and Complete Use the default instance and the same accounts for all SQL server instances - in my case I used the Network Service and Local Service accounts for the two sets of accounts. On the database engine configuration screen I selected windows authentication and added the current user, adding the same user again on the Analysis services Configuration screen.  All other screens were left on the default settings. The SQL Server 2008 installation also included the installation of hotfix for XP KB942288-v3, the Windows Installer 4.5 Redistributable. System Configuration At this stage I took a moment to disable the SQL Server shared memory protocol and enable the Named Pipes and TCP/IP protocols.  These can be found in the SQL Server Configuration Manager > SQL Server Network Configuration > Protocols for MSSQLServer.  I also made sure that the DTC settings were configured correctley.   BizTalk Server 2009 The penultimate step is to install BizTalk Server 2009 Standard Edition. I had previsouly downloaded the redistributable prerequisites as a CAB file so was able to make use of this when carrying out the installation. When selecting which components to install I selected: Server Runtime BizTalk EDI/AS2 Runtime WCF Adapter Runtime Portal Components Administrative Tools WFC Administartion Tools Developer Tools and SDK, Enterprise SSO Administration Module Enterprise SSO Master Secret Server Business Rules Components BAM Alert Provider BAM Client BAM Eventing Once installation has completed clear the launch BizTalk Server Configuration check box and select finish. Verify the Installation Before configuring BizTalk Server it is a good idea to check that BizTalk Server 2009 is installed and that SQL Server 2008 has started correctly.  The easiest way to verify the BizTalk installation is check the Programs and Features in Control panel.  Check that SQL is started by looking in the SQL Server Configuration Manager. Configure BizTalk Server 2009 Finally we are ready to configure BizTalk Server 2009.  To start this I opted for a custom configuration that allowed me to choose in more detail the settings to be used. For all databases I selected the local server and default database names. For all Accounts I used a local account that had been created specifically for the BizTalk Services. For all windows groups I allowed the configuration wizard to create the default local groups. The configuration wizard then ran:   Upon completion you will be presented with a screen detailing the success or failure of the configuration.  If your configuration failed you will need to sort out the issues and try again (it is possible to save the configuration settings for later use if you want too - except passwords of course!).  If you see lots of nice green ticks - congratulations BizTalk Server 2009 on XP is now installed and configured ready for development.

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• NDepend 4 – First Steps

  - by Ricardo Peres

  Introduction Thanks to Patrick Smacchia I had the chance to test NDepend 4. I can only say: awesome! This will be the first of a series of posts on NDepend, where I will talk about my discoveries. Keep in mind that I am just starting to use it, so more experienced users may find these too basic, I just hope I don’t say anything foolish! I must say that I am in no way affiliated with NDepend and I never actually met Patrick. Installation No installation program – a curious decision, I’m not against it -, just unzip the files to a folder and run the executable. It will optionally register itself with Visual Studio 2008, 2010 and 11 as well as RedGate’s Reflector; also, it automatically looks for updates. NDepend can either be used as a stand-alone program (with or without a GUI) or from within Visual Studio or Reflector. Getting Started One thing that really pleases me is the Getting Started section of the stand-alone, with links to pages on NDepend’s web site, featuring detailed explanations, which usually include screenshots and small videos (<5 minutes). There’s also an How do I with hierarchical navigation that guides us to through the major features so that we can easily find what we want. Usage There are two basic ways to use NDepend: Analyze .NET solutions, projects or assemblies; Compare two versions of the same assembly. I have so far not used NDepend to compare assemblies, so I will first talk about the first option. After selecting a solution and some of its projects, it generates a single HTML page with an highly detailed report of the analysis it produced. This includes some metrics such as number of lines of code, IL instructions, comments, types, methods and properties, the calculation of the cyclomatic complexity, coupling and lots of others indicators, typically grouped by type, namespace and assembly. The HTML also includes some nice diagrams depicting assembly dependencies, type and method relative proportions (according to the number of IL instructions, I guess) and assembly analysis relating to abstractness and stability. Useful, I would say. Then there’s the rules; NDepend tests the target assemblies against a set of more than 120 rules, grouped in categories Code Quality, Object Oriented Design, Design, Architecture and Layering, Dead Code, Visibility, Naming Conventions, Source Files Organization and .NET Framework Usage. The full list can be configured on the application, and an explanation of each rule can be found on the web site. Rules can be validated, violated and violated in a critical manner, and the HTML will contain the violated rules, their queries – more on this later - and results. The HTML uses some nice JavaScript effects, which allow paging and sorting of tables, so its nice to use. Similar to the rules, there are some queries that display results for a number (about 200) questions grouped as Object Oriented Design, API Breaking Changes (for assembly version comparison), Code Diff Summary (also for version comparison) and Dead Code. The difference between queries and rules is that queries are not classified as passes, violated or critically violated, just present results. The queries and rules are expressed through CQLinq, which is a very powerful LINQ derivative specific to code analysis. All of the included rules and queries can be enabled or disabled and new ones can be added, with intellisense to help. Besides the HTML report file, the NDepend application can be used to explore all analysis results, compare different versions of analysis reports and to run custom queries. Comparison to Other Analysis Tools Unlike StyleCop, NDepend only works with assemblies, not source code, so you can’t expect it to be able to enforce brackets placement, for example. It is more similar to FxCop, but you don’t have the option to analyze at the IL level, that is, other that the number of IL instructions and the complexity. What’s Next In the next days I’ll continue my exploration with a real-life test case. References The NDepend web site is http://www.ndepend.com/. Patrick keeps an updated blog on http://codebetter.com/patricksmacchia/ and he regularly monitors StackOverflow for questions tagged NDepend, which you can find on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ndepend. The default list of CQLinq rules, queries and statistics can be found at http://www.ndepend.com/DefaultRules/webframe.html. The syntax itself is described at http://www.ndepend.com/Doc_CQLinq_Syntax.aspx and its features at http://www.ndepend.com/Doc_CQLinq_Features.aspx.

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• Ingame menu is not working correctly

  - by Johnny

  The ingame menu opens when the player presses Escape during the main game. If the player presses Y in the ingame menu, the game switches to the main menu. Up to here, everything works. But: On the other hand, if the player presses N in the ingame menu, the game should switch back to the main game(should resume the main game). But that doesn't work. The game just rests in the ingame menu if the player presses N. I set a breakpoint in this line of the Ingamemenu class: KeyboardState kbState = Keyboard.GetState(); CurrentSate/currentGameState and LastState/lastGameState have the same state: IngamemenuState. But LastState/lastGameState should not have the same state than CurrentSate/currentGameState. What is wrong? Why is the ingame menu not working correctly? public class Game1 : Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game { GraphicsDeviceManager graphics; SpriteBatch spriteBatch; IState lastState, currentState; public enum GameStates { IntroState = 0, MenuState = 1, MaingameState = 2, IngamemenuState = 3 } public void ChangeGameState(GameStates newState) { lastGameState = currentGameState; lastState = currentState; switch (newState) { case GameStates.IntroState: currentState = new Intro(this); currentGameState = GameStates.IntroState; break; case GameStates.MenuState: currentState = new Menu(this); currentGameState = GameStates.MenuState; break; case GameStates.MaingameState: currentState = new Maingame(this); currentGameState = GameStates.MaingameState; break; case GameStates.IngamemenuState: currentState = new Ingamemenu(this); currentGameState = GameStates.IngamemenuState; break; } currentState.Load(Content); } public void ChangeCurrentToLastGameState() { currentGameState = lastGameState; currentState = lastState; } public GameStates CurrentState { get { return currentGameState; } set { currentGameState = value; } } public GameStates LastState { get { return lastGameState; } set { lastGameState = value; } } private GameStates currentGameState = GameStates.IntroState; private GameStates lastGameState; public Game1() { graphics = new GraphicsDeviceManager(this); Content.RootDirectory = "Content"; } protected override void Initialize() { ChangeGameState(GameStates.IntroState); base.Initialize(); } protected override void LoadContent() { spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(GraphicsDevice); currentState.Load(Content); } protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime) { currentState.Update(gameTime); if ((lastGameState == GameStates.MaingameState) && (currentGameState == GameStates.IngamemenuState)) { lastState.Update(gameTime); } base.Update(gameTime); } protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.CornflowerBlue); spriteBatch.Begin(); if ((lastGameState == GameStates.MaingameState) && (currentGameState == GameStates.IngamemenuState)) { lastState.Render(spriteBatch); } currentState.Render(spriteBatch); spriteBatch.End(); base.Draw(gameTime); } } public interface IState { void Load(ContentManager content); void Update(GameTime gametime); void Render(SpriteBatch batch); } public class Intro : IState { Texture2D Titelbildschirm; private Game1 game1; public Intro(Game1 game) { game1 = game; } public void Load(ContentManager content) { Titelbildschirm = content.Load<Texture2D>("gruft"); } public void Update(GameTime gametime) { KeyboardState kbState = Keyboard.GetState(); if (kbState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Space)) game1.ChangeGameState(Game1.GameStates.MenuState); } public void Render(SpriteBatch batch) { batch.Draw(Titelbildschirm, new Rectangle(0, 0, 1280, 720), Color.White); } } public class Menu:IState { Texture2D Choosescreen; private Game1 game1; public Menu(Game1 game) { game1 = game; } public void Load(ContentManager content) { Choosescreen = content.Load<Texture2D>("menubild"); } public void Update(GameTime gametime) { KeyboardState kbState = Keyboard.GetState(); if (kbState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Enter)) game1.ChangeGameState(Game1.GameStates.MaingameState); if (kbState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Escape)) game1.Exit(); } public void Render(SpriteBatch batch) { batch.Draw(Choosescreen, new Rectangle(0, 0, 1280, 720), Color.White); } } public class Maingame : IState { Texture2D Spielbildschirm, axe; Vector2 position = new Vector2(100,100); private Game1 game1; public Maingame(Game1 game) { game1 = game; } public void Load(ContentManager content) { Spielbildschirm = content.Load<Texture2D>("hauszombie"); axe = content.Load<Texture2D>("axxx"); } public void Update(GameTime gametime) { KeyboardState keyboardState = Keyboard.GetState(); float delta = (float)gametime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds; position.X += 5 * delta; position.Y += 3 * delta; if (keyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Escape)) game1.ChangeGameState(Game1.GameStates.IngamemenuState); } public void Render(SpriteBatch batch) { batch.Draw(Spielbildschirm, new Rectangle(0, 0, 1280, 720), Color.White); batch.Draw(axe, position, Color.White); } } public class Ingamemenu : IState { Texture2D Quitscreen; private Game1 game1; public Ingamemenu(Game1 game) { game1 = game; } public void Load(ContentManager content) { Quitscreen = content.Load<Texture2D>("quit"); } public void Update(GameTime gametime) { KeyboardState kbState = Keyboard.GetState(); if (kbState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Y)) game1.ChangeGameState(Game1.GameStates.MenuState); if (kbState.IsKeyDown(Keys.N)) game1.ChangeCurrentToLastGameState(); } public void Render(SpriteBatch batch) { batch.Draw(Quitscreen, new Rectangle(200, 200, 200, 200), Color.White); } }

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• Install NPM Packages Automatically for Node.js on Windows Azure Web Site

  - by Shaun

  In one of my previous post I described and demonstrated how to use NPM packages in Node.js and Windows Azure Web Site (WAWS). In that post I used NPM command to install packages, and then use Git for Windows to commit my changes and sync them to WAWS git repository. Then WAWS will trigger a new deployment to host my Node.js application. Someone may notice that, a NPM package may contains many files and could be a little bit huge. For example, the “azure” package, which is the Windows Azure SDK for Node.js, is about 6MB. Another popular package “express”, which is a rich MVC framework for Node.js, is about 1MB. When I firstly push my codes to Windows Azure, all of them must be uploaded to the cloud. Is that possible to let Windows Azure download and install these packages for us? In this post, I will introduce how to make WAWS install all required packages for us when deploying.   Let’s Start with Demo Demo is most straightforward. Let’s create a new WAWS and clone it to my local disk. Drag the folder into Git for Windows so that it can help us commit and push. Please refer to this post if you are not familiar with how to use Windows Azure Web Site, Git deployment, git clone and Git for Windows. And then open a command windows and install a package in our code folder. Let’s say I want to install “express”. And then created a new Node.js file named “server.js” and pasted the code as below. 1: var express = require("express"); 2: var app = express(); 3: 4: app.get("/", function(req, res) { 5: res.send("Hello Node.js and Express."); 6: }); 7: 8: console.log("Web application opened."); 9: app.listen(process.env.PORT); If we switch to Git for Windows right now we will find that it detected the changes we made, which includes the “server.js” and all files under “node_modules” folder. What we need to upload should only be our source code, but the huge package files also have to be uploaded as well. Now I will show you how to exclude them and let Windows Azure install the package on the cloud. First we need to add a special file named “.gitignore”. It seems cannot be done directly from the file explorer since this file only contains extension name. So we need to do it from command line. Navigate to the local repository folder and execute the command below to create an empty file named “.gitignore”. If the command windows asked for input just press Enter. 1: echo > .gitignore Now open this file and copy the content below and save. 1: node_modules Now if we switch to Git for Windows we will found that the packages under the “node_modules” were not in the change list. So now if we commit and push, the “express” packages will not be uploaded to Windows Azure. Second, let’s tell Windows Azure which packages it needs to install when deploying. Create another file named “package.json” and copy the content below into that file and save. 1: { 2: "name": "npmdemo", 3: "version": "1.0.0", 4: "dependencies": { 5: "express": "*" 6: } 7: } Now back to Git for Windows, commit our changes and push it to WAWS. Then let’s open the WAWS in developer portal, we will see that there’s a new deployment finished. Click the arrow right side of this deployment we can see how WAWS handle this deployment. Especially we can find WAWS executed NPM. And if we opened the log we can review what command WAWS executed to install the packages and the installation output messages. As you can see WAWS installed “express” for me from the cloud side, so that I don’t need to upload the whole bunch of the package to Azure. Open this website and we can see the result, which proved the “express” had been installed successfully.   What’s Happened Under the Hood Now let’s explain a bit on what the “.gitignore” and “package.json” mean. The “.gitignore” is an ignore configuration file for git repository. All files and folders listed in the “.gitignore” will be skipped from git push. In the example below I copied “node_modules” into this file in my local repository. This means,  do not track and upload all files under the “node_modules” folder. So by using “.gitignore” I skipped all packages from uploading to Windows Azure. “.gitignore” can contain files, folders. It can also contain the files and folders that we do NOT want to ignore. In the next section we will see how to use the un-ignore syntax to make the SQL package included. The “package.json” file is the package definition file for Node.js application. We can define the application name, version, description, author, etc. information in it in JSON format. And we can also put the dependent packages as well, to indicate which packages this Node.js application is needed. In WAWS, name and version is necessary. And when a deployment happened, WAWS will look into this file, find the dependent packages, execute the NPM command to install them one by one. So in the demo above I copied “express” into this file so that WAWS will install it for me automatically. I updated the dependencies section of the “package.json” file manually. But this can be done partially automatically. If we have a valid “package.json” in our local repository, then when we are going to install some packages we can specify “--save” parameter in “npm install” command, so that NPM will help us upgrade the dependencies part. For example, when I wanted to install “azure” package I should execute the command as below. Note that I added “--save” with the command. 1: npm install azure --save Once it finished my “package.json” will be updated automatically. Each dependent packages will be presented here. The JSON key is the package name while the value is the version range. Below is a brief list of the version range format. For more information about the “package.json” please refer here. Format Description Example version Must match the version exactly. "azure": "0.6.7" >=version Must be equal or great than the version. "azure": ">0.6.0" 1.2.x The version number must start with the supplied digits, but any digit may be used in place of the x. "azure": "0.6.x" ~version The version must be at least as high as the range, and it must be less than the next major revision above the range. "azure": "~0.6.7" * Matches any version. "azure": "*" And WAWS will install the proper version of the packages based on what you defined here. The process of WAWS git deployment and NPM installation would be like this.   But Some Packages… As we know, when we specified the dependencies in “package.json” WAWS will download and install them on the cloud. For most of packages it works very well. But there are some special packages may not work. This means, if the package installation needs some special environment restraints it might be failed. For example, the SQL Server Driver for Node.js package needs “node-gyp”, Python and C++ 2010 installed on the target machine during the NPM installation. If we just put the “msnodesql” in “package.json” file and push it to WAWS, the deployment will be failed since there’s no “node-gyp”, Python and C++ 2010 in the WAWS virtual machine. For example, the “server.js” file. 1: var express = require("express"); 2: var app = express(); 3: 4: app.get("/", function(req, res) { 5: res.send("Hello Node.js and Express."); 6: }); 7:  8: var sql = require("msnodesql"); 9: var connectionString = "Driver={SQL Server Native Client 10.0};Server=tcp:tqy4c0isfr.database.windows.net,1433;Database=msteched2012;Uid=shaunxu@tqy4c0isfr;Pwd=P@ssw0rd123;Encrypt=yes;Connection Timeout=30;"; 10: app.get("/sql", function (req, res) { 11: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 12: if (err) { 13: console.log(err); 14: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 15: } 16: else { 17: conn.queryRaw("SELECT * FROM [Resource]", function (err, results) { 18: if (err) { 19: console.log(err); 20: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 21: } 22: else { 23: res.json(results); 24: } 25: }); 26: } 27: }); 28: }); 29: 30: console.log("Web application opened."); 31: app.listen(process.env.PORT); The “package.json” file. 1: { 2: "name": "npmdemo", 3: "version": "1.0.0", 4: "dependencies": { 5: "express": "*", 6: "msnodesql": "*" 7: } 8: } And it failed to deploy to WAWS. From the NPM log we can see it’s because “msnodesql” cannot be installed on WAWS. The solution is, in “.gitignore” file we should ignore all packages except the “msnodesql”, and upload the package by ourselves. This can be done by use the content as below. We firstly un-ignored the “node_modules” folder. And then we ignored all sub folders but need git to check each sub folders. And then we un-ignore one of the sub folders named “msnodesql” which is the SQL Server Node.js Driver. 1: !node_modules/ 2:  3: node_modules/* 4: !node_modules/msnodesql For more information about the syntax of “.gitignore” please refer to this thread. Now if we go to Git for Windows we will find the “msnodesql” was included in the uncommitted set while “express” was not. I also need remove the dependency of “msnodesql” from “package.json”. Commit and push to WAWS. Now we can see the deployment successfully done. And then we can use the Windows Azure SQL Database from our Node.js application through the “msnodesql” package we uploaded.   Summary In this post I demonstrated how to leverage the deployment process of Windows Azure Web Site to install NPM packages during the publish action. With the “.gitignore” and “package.json” file we can ignore the dependent packages from our Node.js and let Windows Azure Web Site download and install them while deployed. For some special packages that cannot be installed by Windows Azure Web Site, such as “msnodesql”, we can put them into the publish payload as well. With the combination of Windows Azure Web Site, Node.js and NPM it makes even more easy and quick for us to develop and deploy our Node.js application to the cloud.   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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• EU Digital Agenda scores 85/100

  - by trond-arne.undheim

  If the Digital Agenda was a bottle of wine and I were wine critic Robert Parker, I would say the Digital Agenda has "a great bouquet, many good elements, with astringent, dry and puckering mouth feel that will not please everyone, but still displaying some finesse. A somewhat controlled effort with no surprises and a few noticeable flaws in the delivery. Noticeably shorter aftertaste than advertised by the producers. Score: 85/100. Enjoy now". The EU Digital Agenda states that "standards are vital for interoperability" and has a whole chapter on interoperability and standards. With this strong emphasis, there is hope the EU's outdated standardization system finally is headed for reform. It has been 23 years since the legal framework of standardisation was completed by Council Decision 87/95/EEC8 in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector. Standardization is market driven. For several decades the IT industry has been developing standards and specifications in global open standards development organisations (fora/consortia), many of which have transparency procedures and practices far superior to the European Standards Organizations. The Digital Agenda rightly states: "reflecting the rise and growing importance of ICT standards developed by certain global fora and consortia". Some fora/consortia, of course, are distorted, influenced by single vendors, have poor track record, and need constant vigilance, but they are the minority. Therefore, the recognition needs to be accompanied by eligibility criteria focused on openness. Will the EU reform its ICT standardization by the end of 2010? Possibly, and only if DG Enterprise takes on board that Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) have driven half of the productivity growth in Europe over the past 15 years, a prominent fact in the EU's excellent Digital Competitiveness report 2010 published on Monday 17 May. It is ok to single out the ICT sector. It simply is the most important sector right now as it fuels growth in all other sectors. Let's not wait for the entire standardization package which may take another few years. Europe does not have time. The Digital Agenda is an umbrella strategy with deliveries from a host of actors across the Commission. For instance, the EU promises to issue "guidance on transparent ex-ante disclosure rules for essential intellectual property rights and licensing terms and conditions in the context of standard setting", by 2011 in the Horisontal Guidelines now out for public consultation by DG COMP and to some extent by DG ENTR's standardization policy reform. This is important. The EU will issue procurement guidance as interoperability frameworks are put into practice. This is a joint responsibility of several DGs, and is likely to suffer coordination problems, controversy and delays. We have seen plenty of the latter already and I have commented on the Commission's own interoperability elsewhere, with mixed luck. :( Yesterday, I watched the cartoonesque Korean western film The Good, the Bad and the Weird. In the movie (and I meant in the movie only), a bandit, a thief, and a bounty hunter, all excellent at whatever they do, fight for a treasure map. Whether that is a good analogy for the situation within the Commission, others are better judges of than I. However, as a movie fanatic, I still await the final shoot-out, and, as in the film, the only certainty is that "life is about chasing and being chased". The missed opportunity (in this case not following up the push from Member States to better define open standards based interoperability) is a casualty of the chaos ensued in the European Wild West (and I mean that in the most endearing sense, and my excuses beforehand to actors who possibly justifiably cannot bear being compared to fictional movie characters). Instead of exposing the ongoing fight, the EU opted for the legalistic use of the term "standards" throughout the document. This is a term that--to the EU-- excludes most standards used by the IT industry world wide. So, while it, for a moment, meant "weapon down", it will not lead to lasting peace. The Digital Agenda calls for the Member States to "Implement commitments on interoperability and standards in the Malmö and Granada Declarations by 2013". This is a far cry from the actual Ministerial Declarations which called upon the Commission to help them with this implementation by recognizing and further defining open standards based interoperability. Unless there is more forthcoming from the Commission, the market's judgement will be: you simply fall short. Generally, I think the EU focus now should be "from policy to practice" and the Digital Agenda does indeed stop short of tackling some highly practical issues. There is need for progress beyond the Digital Agenda. Here are some suggestions that would help Europe re-take global leadership on openness, public sector reform, and economic growth: A strong European software strategy centred around open standards based interoperability by 2011. An ambitious new eCommission strategy for 2011-15 focused on migration to open standards by 2015. Aligning the IT portfolio across the Commission into one Digital Agenda DG by 2012. Focusing all best practice exchange in eGovernment on one social networking site, epractice.eu (full disclosure: I had a role in getting that site up and running) Prioritizing public sector needs in global standardization over European standardization by 2014.

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• A Custom View Engine with Dynamic View Location

  - by imran_ku07

      Introduction:          One of the nice feature of ASP.NET MVC framework is its pluggability. This means you can completely replace the default view engine(s) with a custom one. One of the reason for using a custom view engine is to change the default views location and sometimes you need to change the views location at run-time. For doing this, you can extend the default view engine(s) and then change the default views location variables at run-time.  But, you cannot directly change the default views location variables at run-time because they are static and shared among all requests. In this article, I will show you how you can dynamically change the views location without changing the default views location variables at run-time.       Description:           Let's say you need to synchronize the views location with controller name and controller namespace. So, instead of searching to the default views location(Views/ControllerName/ViewName) to locate views, this(these) custom view engine(s) will search in the Views/ControllerNameSpace/ControllerName/ViewName folder to locate views.           First of all create a sample ASP.NET MVC 3 application and then add these custom view engines to your application,   public class MyRazorViewEngine : RazorViewEngine { public MyRazorViewEngine() : base() { AreaViewLocationFormats = new[] { "~/Areas/{2}/Views/%1/{1}/{0}.cshtml", "~/Areas/{2}/Views/%1/{1}/{0}.vbhtml", "~/Areas/{2}/Views/%1/Shared/{0}.cshtml", "~/Areas/{2}/Views/%1/Shared/{0}.vbhtml" }; AreaMasterLocationFormats = new[] { "~/Areas/{2}/Views/%1/{1}/{0}.cshtml", "~/Areas/{2}/Views/%1/{1}/{0}.vbhtml", "~/Areas/{2}/Views/%1/Shared/{0}.cshtml", "~/Areas/{2}/Views/%1/Shared/{0}.vbhtml" }; AreaPartialViewLocationFormats = new[] { "~/Areas/{2}/Views/%1/{1}/{0}.cshtml", "~/Areas/{2}/Views/%1/{1}/{0}.vbhtml", "~/Areas/{2}/Views/%1/Shared/{0}.cshtml", "~/Areas/{2}/Views/%1/Shared/{0}.vbhtml" }; ViewLocationFormats = new[] { "~/Views/%1/{1}/{0}.cshtml", "~/Views/%1/{1}/{0}.vbhtml", "~/Views/%1/Shared/{0}.cshtml", "~/Views/%1/Shared/{0}.vbhtml" }; MasterLocationFormats = new[] { "~/Views/%1/{1}/{0}.cshtml", "~/Views/%1/{1}/{0}.vbhtml", "~/Views/%1/Shared/{0}.cshtml", "~/Views/%1/Shared/{0}.vbhtml" }; PartialViewLocationFormats = new[] { "~/Views/%1/{1}/{0}.cshtml", "~/Views/%1/{1}/{0}.vbhtml", "~/Views/%1/Shared/{0}.cshtml", "~/Views/%1/Shared/{0}.vbhtml" }; } protected override IView CreatePartialView(ControllerContext controllerContext, string partialPath) { var nameSpace = controllerContext.Controller.GetType().Namespace; return base.CreatePartialView(controllerContext, partialPath.Replace("%1", nameSpace)); } protected override IView CreateView(ControllerContext controllerContext, string viewPath, string masterPath) { var nameSpace = controllerContext.Controller.GetType().Namespace; return base.CreateView(controllerContext, viewPath.Replace("%1", nameSpace), masterPath.Replace("%1", nameSpace)); } protected override bool FileExists(ControllerContext controllerContext, string virtualPath) { var nameSpace = controllerContext.Controller.GetType().Namespace; return base.FileExists(controllerContext, virtualPath.Replace("%1", nameSpace)); } } public class MyWebFormViewEngine : WebFormViewEngine { public MyWebFormViewEngine() : base() { MasterLocationFormats = new[] { "~/Views/%1/{1}/{0}.master", "~/Views/%1/Shared/{0}.master" }; AreaMasterLocationFormats = new[] { "~/Areas/{2}/Views/%1/{1}/{0}.master", "~/Areas/{2}/Views/%1/Shared/{0}.master", }; ViewLocationFormats = new[] { "~/Views/%1/{1}/{0}.aspx", "~/Views/%1/{1}/{0}.ascx", "~/Views/%1/Shared/{0}.aspx", "~/Views/%1/Shared/{0}.ascx" }; AreaViewLocationFormats = new[] { "~/Areas/{2}/Views/%1/{1}/{0}.aspx", "~/Areas/{2}/Views/%1/{1}/{0}.ascx", "~/Areas/{2}/Views/%1/Shared/{0}.aspx", "~/Areas/{2}/Views/%1/Shared/{0}.ascx", }; PartialViewLocationFormats = ViewLocationFormats; AreaPartialViewLocationFormats = AreaViewLocationFormats; } protected override IView CreatePartialView(ControllerContext controllerContext, string partialPath) { var nameSpace = controllerContext.Controller.GetType().Namespace; return base.CreatePartialView(controllerContext, partialPath.Replace("%1", nameSpace)); } protected override IView CreateView(ControllerContext controllerContext, string viewPath, string masterPath) { var nameSpace = controllerContext.Controller.GetType().Namespace; return base.CreateView(controllerContext, viewPath.Replace("%1", nameSpace), masterPath.Replace("%1", nameSpace)); } protected override bool FileExists(ControllerContext controllerContext, string virtualPath) { var nameSpace = controllerContext.Controller.GetType().Namespace; return base.FileExists(controllerContext, virtualPath.Replace("%1", nameSpace)); } }             Here, I am extending the RazorViewEngine and WebFormViewEngine class and then appending /%1 in each views location variable, so that we can replace /%1 at run-time. I am also overriding the FileExists, CreateView and CreatePartialView methods. In each of these method implementation, I am replacing /%1 with controller namespace. Now, just register these view engines in Application_Start method in Global.asax.cs file,   protected void Application_Start() { ViewEngines.Engines.Clear(); ViewEngines.Engines.Add(new MyRazorViewEngine()); ViewEngines.Engines.Add(new MyWebFormViewEngine()); ................................................ ................................................ }             Now just create a controller and put this controller's view inside Views/ControllerNameSpace/ControllerName folder and then run this application. You will find that everything works just fine.       Summary:          ASP.NET MVC uses convention over configuration to locate views. For many applications this convention to locate views is acceptable. But sometimes you may need to locate views at run-time. In this article, I showed you how you can dynamically locate your views by using a custom view engine. I am also attaching a sample application. Hopefully you will enjoy this article too. SyntaxHighlighter.all()  

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• What should you bring to the table as a Software Architect?

  - by Ahmad Mageed

  There have been many questions with good answers about the role of a Software Architect (SA) on StackOverflow and Programmers SE. I am trying to ask a slightly more focused question than those. The very definition of a SA is broad so for the sake of this question let's define a SA as follows: A Software Architect guides the overall design of a project, gets involved with coding efforts, conducts code reviews, and selects the technologies to be used. In other words, I am not talking about managerial rest and vest at the crest (further rhyming words elided) types of SAs. If I were to pursue any type of SA position I don't want to be away from coding. I might sacrifice some time to interface with clients and Business Analysts etc., but I am still technically involved and I'm not just aware of what's going on through meetings. With these points in mind, what should a SA bring to the table? Should they come in with a mentality of "laying down the law" (so to speak) and enforcing the usage of certain tools to fit "their way," i.e., coding guidelines, source control, patterns, UML documentation, etc.? Or should they specify initial direction and strategy then be laid back and jump in as needed to correct the ship's direction? Depending on the organization this might not work. An SA who relies on TFS to enforce everything may struggle to implement their plan at an employer that only uses StarTeam. Similarly, an SA needs to be flexible depending on the stage of the project. If it's a fresh project they have more choices, whereas they might have less for existing projects. Here are some SA stories I have experienced as a way of sharing some background in hopes that answers to my questions might also shed some light on these issues: I've worked with an SA who code reviewed literally every single line of code of the team. The SA would do this for not just our project but other projects in the organization (imagine the time spent on this). At first it was useful to enforce certain standards, but later it became crippling. FxCop was how the SA would find issues. Don't get me wrong, it was a good way to teach junior developers and force them to think of the consequences of their chosen approach, but for senior developers it was seen as somewhat draconian. One particular SA was against the use of a certain library, claiming it was slow. This forced us to write tons of code to achieve things differently while the other library would've saved us a lot of time. Fast forward to the last month of the project and the clients were complaining about performance. The only solution was to change certain functionality to use the originally ignored approach despite early warnings from the devs. By that point a lot of code was thrown out and not reusable, leading to overtime and stress. Sadly the estimates used for the project were based on the old approach which my project was forbidden from using so it wasn't an appropriate indicator for estimation. I would hear the PM say "we've done this before," when in reality they had not since we were using a new library and the devs working on it were not the same devs used on the old project. The SA who would enforce the usage of DTOs, DOs, BOs, Service layers and so on for all projects. New devs had to learn this architecture and the SA adamantly enforced usage guidelines. Exceptions to usage guidelines were made when it was absolutely difficult to follow the guidelines. The SA was grounded in their approach. Classes for DTOs and all CRUD operations were generated via CodeSmith and database schemas were another similar ball of wax. However, having used this setup everywhere, the SA was not open to new technologies such as LINQ to SQL or Entity Framework. I am not using this post as a platform for venting. There were positive and negative aspects to my experiences with the SA stories mentioned above. My questions boil down to: What should an SA bring to the table? How can they strike a balance in their decision making? Should one approach an SA job (as defined earlier) with the mentality that they must enforce certain ground rules? Anything else to consider? Thanks! I'm sure these job tasks are easily extended to people who are senior devs or technical leads, so feel free to answer at that capacity as well.

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• A Semantic Model For Html: TagBuilder and HtmlTags

  - by Ryan Ohs

  In this post I look into the code smell that is HTML literals and show how we can refactor these pesky strings into a friendlier and more maintainable model.   The Problem When I started writing MVC applications, I quickly realized that I built a lot of my HTML inside HtmlHelpers. As I did this, I ended up moving quite a bit of HTML into string literals inside my helper classes. As I wanted to add more attributes (such as classes) to my tags, I needed to keep adding overloads to my helpers. A good example of this end result is the default html helpers that come with the MVC framework. Too many overloads make me crazy! The problem with all these overloads is that they quickly muck up the API and nobody can remember exactly what order the parameters go in. I've seen many presenters (including members of the ASP.NET MVC team!) stumble before realizing that their view wasn't compiling because they needed one more null parameter in the call to Html.ActionLink(). What if instead of writing Html.ActionLink("Edit", "Edit", null, new { @class = "navigation" }) we could do Html.LinkToAction("Edit").Text("Edit").AddClass("navigation") ? Wouldn't that be much easier to remember and understand?  We can do this if we introduce a semantic model for building our HTML.   What is a Semantic Model? According to Martin Folwer, "a semantic model is an in-memory representation, usually an object model, of the same subject that the domain specific language describes." In our case, the model would be a set of classes that know how to render HTML. By using a semantic model we can free ourselves from dealing with strings and instead output the HTML (typically via ToString()) once we've added all the elements and attributes we desire to the model. There are two primary semantic models available in ASP.NET MVC: MVC 2.0's TagBuilder and FubuMVC's HtmlTags.   TagBuilder TagBuilder is the html builder that is available in ASP.NET MVC 2.0. I'm not a huge fan but it gets the job done -- for simple jobs.  Here's an overview of how to use TagBuilder. See my Tips section below for a few comments on that example. The disadvantage of TagBuilder is that unless you wrap it up with our own classes, you still have to write the actual tag name over and over in your code. eg. new TagBuilder("div") instead of new DivTag(). I also think it's method names are a little too long. Why not have AddClass() instead of AddCssClass() or Text() instead of SetInnerText()? What those methods are doing should be pretty obvious even in the short form. I also don't like that it wants to generate an id attribute from your input instead of letting you set it yourself using external conventions. (See GenerateId() and IdAttributeDotReplacement)). Obviously these come from Microsoft's default approach to MVC but may not be optimal for all programmers.   HtmlTags HtmlTags is in my opinion the much better option for generating html in ASP.NET MVC. It was actually written as a part of FubuMVC but is available as a stand alone library. HtmlTags provides a much cleaner syntax for writing HTML. There are classes for most of the major tags and it's trivial to create additional ones by inheriting from HtmlTag. There are also methods on each tag for the common attributes. For instance, FormTag has an Action() method. The SelectTag class allows you to set the default option or first option independent from adding other options. With TagBuilder there isn't even an abstraction for building selects! The project is open source and always improving. I'll hopefully find time to submit some of my own enhancements soon.   Tips 1) It's best not to have insanely overloaded html helpers. Use fluent builders. 2) In html helpers, return the TagBuilder/tag itself (not a string!) so that you can continue to add attributes outside the helper; see my first sample above. 3) Create a static entry point into your builders. I created a static Tags class that gives me access all the HtmlTag classes I need. This way I don't clutter my code with "new" keywords. eg. Tags.Div returns a new DivTag instance. 4) If you find yourself doing something a lot, create an extension method for it. I created a Nest() extension method that reads much more fluently than the AddChildren() method. It also accepts a params array of tags so I can very easily nest many children.   I hope you have found this post helpful. Join me in my war against HTML literals! I’ll have some more samples of how I use HtmlTags in future posts.

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• Announcing the New Windows Azure Web Sites Shared Scaling Tier

  - by Clint Edmonson

  Windows Azure Web Sites has added a new pricing tier that will solve the #1 blocker for the web development community. The shared tier now supports custom domain names mapped to shared-instance web sites. This post will outline the plan changes and elaborate on how the new pricing model makes Windows Azure Web Sites an even richer option for web development shops of all sizes. Free Shared Reserved # of Sites 10 100 100 Egress 165MB/Day 5GB/Month Included 5GB/Month Included Storage 1GB 1GB 10GB Throttling CPU/Memory/Egress CPU/Memory Unlimited Price Free $.02/hr per site, per instance $.08/hr per core Setting the Stage In June, we released the first public preview of Windows Azure Web Sites, which gave web developers a great platform on which to get web sites running using their web development framework of choice. PHP, Node.js, classic ASP, and ASP.NET developers can all utilize the Windows Azure platform to create and launch their web sites. Likewise, these developers have a series of data storage options using Windows Azure SQL Databases, MySQL, or Windows Azure Storage. The Windows Azure Web Sites free offer enabled startups to get their site up and running on Windows Azure with a minimal investment, and with multiple deployment and continuous integration features such as Git, Team Foundation Services, FTP, and Web Deploy.  The response to the Windows Azure Web Sites offer has been overwhelmingly positive. Since the addition of the service on June 12th, tens of thousands of web sites have been deployed to Windows Azure and the volume of adoption is increasing every week. Preview Feedback In spite of the growth and success of the product, the community has had questions about features lacking in the free preview offer. The main question web developers asked regarding Windows Azure Web Sites relates to the lack of the free offer’s support for domain name mapping. During the preview launch period, customer feedback made it obvious that the lack of domain name mapping support was an area of concern. We’re happy to announce that this #1 request has been delivered as a feature of the new shared plan. New Shared Tier Portal Features In the screen shot below, the “Scale” tab in the portal shows the new tiers – Free, Shared, and Reserved – and gives the user the ability to quickly move any of their free web sites into the shared tier. With a single mouse-click, the user can move their site into the shared tier. Once a site has been moved into the shared tier, a new Manage Domains button appears in the bottom action bar of the Windows Azure Portal giving site owners the ability to manage their domain names for a shared site. This button brings up the domain-management dialog, which can be used to enter in a specific domain name that will be mapped to the Windows Azure Web Site. Shared Tier Benefits Startups and large web agencies will both benefit from this plan change. Here are a few examples of scenarios which fit the new pricing model: Startups no longer have to select the reserved plan to map domain names to their sites. Instead, they can use the free option to develop their sites and choose on a site-by-site basis which sites they elect to move into the shared plan, paying only for the sites that are finished and ready to be domain-mapped Agencies who manage dozens of sites will realize a lower cost of ownership over the long term by moving their sites into reserved mode. Once multi-site companies reach a certain price point in the shared tier, it is much more cost-effective to move sites to a reserved tier.  Long-term, it’s easy to see how the new Windows Azure Web Sites shared pricing tier makes Windows Azure Web Sites it a great choice for both startups and agency customers, as it enables rapid growth and upgrades while keeping the cost to a minimum. Large agencies will be able to have all of their sites in their own instances, and startups will have the capability to scale up to multiple-shared instances for minimal cost and eventually move to reserved instances without worrying about the need to incur continually additional costs. Customers can feel confident they have the power of the Microsoft Windows Azure brand and our world-class support, at prices competitive in the market. Plus, in addition to realizing the cost savings, they’ll have the whole family of Windows Azure features available. Continuous Deployment from GitHub and CodePlex Along with this new announcement are two other exciting new features. I’m proud to announce that web developers can now publish their web sites directly from CodePlex or GitHub.com repositories. Once connections are established between these services and your web sites, Windows Azure will automatically be notified every time a check-in occurs. This will then trigger Windows Azure to pull the source and compile/deploy the new version of your app to your web site automatically. Walk-through videos on how to perform these functions are below: Publishing to an Azure Web Site from CodePlex Publishing to an Azure Web Site from GitHub.com These changes, as well as the enhancements to the reserved plan model, make Windows Azure Web Sites a truly competitive hosting option. It’s never been easier or cheaper for a web developer to get up and running. Check out the free Windows Azure web site offering and see for yourself. Stay tuned to my twitter feed for Windows Azure announcements, updates, and links: @clinted

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