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  • An introductory presentation about testing with MSTest, Visual Studio, and Team Foundation Server 2010

    - by Thomas Weller
    While it was very quiet here on my blog during the last months, this was not at all true for the rest of my professional life. The simple story is that I was too busy to find the time for authoring blog posts (and you might see from my previous ones that they’re usually not of the ‘Hey, I’m currently reading X’ or ‘I’m currently thinking about Y’ kind…). Anyway. Among the things I did during the last months were setting up a TFS environment (2010) and introducing a development team to the MSTest framework (aka. Visual Studio Unit Testing), some additional tools (e.g. Moq, Moles, White),  how this is supported in Visual Studio, and how it integrates into the broader context of the then new TFS environment. After wiping out all the stuff which was directly related to my former customer and reviewing/extending the Speaker notes, I thought I share this presentation (via Slideshare) with the rest of the world. Hopefully it can be useful to someone else out there… Introduction to testing with MSTest, Visual Studio, and Team Foundation Server 2010 View more presentations from Thomas Weller. Be sure to also check out the slide notes (either by viewing the presentation directly on Slideshare or - even better - by downloading it). They contain quite some additional information, hints, and (in my opinion) best practices.

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  • Tech-Ed 2012 North America &ndash; meet me there!

    - by Nikita Polyakov
    I’m excited to be near home in Orlando, FL next week for Tech-Ed 2012 NA. Here are the times you can come chat with me about the Windows Phone topics at the TLC stations in the main expo hall: Monday 7:00pm - 9:00pm Tuesday 12:30pm - 3:30pm Wednesday  12:30pm - 3:30pm Thursday 10:30am - 12:30pm This year I will be attending many new sessions on topics such as System Center 2012 and SharePoint. These topics are exciting and useful for me as part of my new role at Tribridge, in fact this trip is sponsored by Concerto Cloud Services where I am an Cloud Applications Engineer. Also, grab the Nikita application it should be updated just in time so you can have this schedule in your pocket :)

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  • TFS Rant *WARNING* negative opinions are being expressed.

    - by ryanabr
    It has happened several times now where I end up installing TFS "over the shoulder" of the system admin guy whose job it will be to "own" the server when I am gone. TFS is challenging enough to stand up when doing it myself on a completely open platform, but at these locations, networks are locked down, machines are locked down, and the unexpected always seems to pop up. I personally have the tolerance for these things as a software developer, but as we are installing I have to listen to all of 'colorful' remarks being made about: "why is it like this" or "this is a piece of crap". Generally the issues center around SharePoint integration. TFS on it's own is straightforward, but the last flavor in everyone's mouth is the SharePoint piece. As a product I like SharePoint, but installation is a nightmare. In this particular case, we are going to use WSS since the customer would like this separate from their corp SharePoint 2010 installations since there dev team is really small (1 developer) and it is being used as a VSS replacement, more than a full blown ALM tool. The server where it is being installed as a Cisco Security Agent on it that seems to block 'suspicious' activity, and as far as I can tell is preventing WSS from installing properly. The most confounding thing we can find no meaningful log entries to help diagnose the issue. it didn't help matters that when we tried to contact Microsoft for support, because we mentioned TFS in the list of things that we were trying to install, that after waiting 2 hours that we got a TFS support person NOT the SharePoint person that we really needed, so after another 2 hours the SharePoint support that we did get managed to corrupt the registry sufficiently with his 'tools' that we ended up starting over from scratch the next day anyway after going home at midnight. My point to this is: The System Administrator who is going to own this, now thinks it is a piece of crap because SharePoint wouldn't install properly. Perception is everything.  Everyone today is conditioned that software installs and works in a very simple matter. When looking at the different options to install TFS with the different "modes" there is inconsistency in the information being presented which leads to choices that causes headaches and this bad perception before the product is even installed. I am highlighting this because I love TFS as a product, but I HATE installing it, and would like it to install as simply and elegantly as the product operates once it is installed.

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  • xcopy file, suppress &ldquo;Does xxx specify a file name&hellip;&rdquo; message

    - by MarkPearl
    Today we had an interesting problem with file copying. We wanted to use xcopy to copy a file from one location to another and rename the copied file but do this impersonating another user. Getting the impersonation to work was fairly simple, however we then had the challenge of getting xcopy to work. The problem was that xcopy kept prompting us with a prompt similar to the following… Does file.xxx specify a file name or directory name on the target (F = file, D = directory)? At which point we needed to press ‘Y’. This seems to be a fairly common challenge with xcopy, as illustrated by the following stack overflow link… One of the solutions was to do the following… echo f | xcopy /f /y srcfile destfile This is fine if you are running from the command prompt, but if you are triggering this from c# how could we daisy chain a bunch of commands…. The solution was fairly simple, we eventually ended up with the following method… public void Copy(string initialFile, string targetFile) { string xcopyExe = @"C:\windows\system32\xcopy.exe"; string cmdExe = @"C:\windows\system32\cmd.exe"; ProcessStartInfo p = new ProcessStartInfo(); p.FileName = cmdExe; p.Arguments = string.Format(@"/c echo f | {2} {0} {1} /Y", initialFile, targetFile, xcopyExe); Process.Start(p); } Where we wrapped the commands we wanted to chain as arguments and instead of calling xcopy directly, we called cmd.exe passing xcopy as an argument.

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  • Short interview I gave about Commercial Software Development is now available

    - by Liam Westley
    At the DDD8 conference in January I gave a quick interview to Sara Allison expanding my Commercial Software Development presentation (available here).  The interview has just appeared on the Ubelly.com site, run by some of the Microsoft UK team,   http://ubelly.com/2010/04/how-to-succeed-in-commercial-software-development-2 For those of you for whom video just isn't enough, you can get Commercial Software Development in person at DDDScotland and DDDSouthWest.

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  • Call for authors for new eBook on the Windows Azure Platform

    - by Eric Nelson
    I intend to pull together a FREE eBook on the Windows Azure Platform – but I need your help to make it rock! If you have detailed experience of any aspect of the Windows Azure Platform and can spare a few hours of time to turn that into a short article (400 to 800 words) then please get in touch. This is not a big commitment but my suspicion is the end result will make for a cracking good read. I am hoping for a mix – everything from lessons learnt from early adopters to introductions to elements of the platform to getting technologies such as Ruby up and running on Azure. 10 to 20 articles sound about right – which means I am after 10 to 20 authors :) All I need from you right now is: One or two suggestions of topics you would like to cover A pointer to any example of your previous work – which could be as simple as a blog post or a work document. For simplicity, just drop me an email direct to eric.nelson A@T microsoft.com. BIG THANKS! Eric The provisional dates are: Confirm authors and topics by 3rd May Get first draft from all authors by 10th May Complete reviews by 17th May Final versions by 24th May Published by 31st May And finally, an example: To give you an idea of what I have in mind, check out the eBook we pulled together last December which has had several thousand downloads. However I’m thinking of making this one a little bit more fun/informal. More on that later. UK MSDN Flash eBook Best Technical Articles #2 - ericnel Related Links: Spread the word – 6 Weeks of FREE Azure Training UK Azure Online Community – join today. UK Windows Azure Site Start working with Windows Azure

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  • More goodness: Scrum for Team System Migration Tool from EMC

    - by Enrique Lima
    I have always liked how SfTS works, and the functionality it offers.  In an earlier assessment I wrote of their toolset, the only issue I had encountered was the migration of environment that had been created and worked on for a while in the TFS 2008 world using SfTS 2.0 to the TFS 2010 SfTS 3.0.  There were several elements (Work Items and such) that were not moving correctly. Anyway, that is now in the past! Congratulations to Crispin Parker and Team for the release of the Migration Tool. You can see the release information and link to download here … http://www.scrumforteamsystem.com/main-news/sfts-v3-migration-tool-goes-gold

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  • Finding an alert in the middle of your javascript

    - by Ariel Popovsky
    I was debugging a script injection issue the other day using some sample code with an alert in it. The alert was popping out meaning the code got executed leaving open the possibility for a hacker to put there some nasty malicious code. I knew my alert was being executed but didn’t know how. So I tried something that worked perfectly for this problem, replaced the native alert function with my own one. All I had to do in Chrome was open the javascript console and type: alert = function(msg){ console.log(msg); console.trace(); }; The next time the malicious code was executed, instead of the regular alert I got something similar to this:   alert("testing") testing console.trace() alert:2 (anonymous function):2 InjectedScript._evaluateOn:312 InjectedScript._evaluateAndWrap:294 InjectedScript.evaluate:288 undefined In my case I was able to see what was going on and find the offending function. This was tested on Firebug in Firefox and it works as.

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  • Silverlight Cream for May 29, 2010 -- #872

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Michael Washington, Chris Koenig, Kunal Chowdhury, SilverLaw, Shayne Burgess, Ian T. Lackey, Alan Beasley, Marlon Grech. Shoutouts: Ozymandias has a post up that's not Silverlight necessarily, but it's pretty cool: Typeface Selection Flowchart Damian Schenkelman posted about the latest: Prism 2.2 Release available. Get it at Codeplex. From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight 4 OData Paging with RX Extensions Michael Washington continues with this OData and Rx post using the View Model Style. Michael has some good external links, good info, and all the code. WP7 Part 4: Morphing and Mapping Chris Koenig has the 4th in his WP7 series he's doing, and this one is on MVVMLight and BingMaps ... code included. Silverlight 4: Interoperability with Excel using the COM Object Kunal Chowdhury has a post up about Excel Interoperability using the COM object including opening an Excel Workbook and writing data out, then modifying the data in the spreadsheet and seeing it updated in the app. Creating A Flexible Surface Effect – Silverlight 4 (Part 1) SilverLaw put up a demo of an awesome 'water ripple' SL4 demo a couple days ago, and now he's got part 1 of a great tutorial explaining it all. Service Operations and the WCF Data Services Client Shayne Burgess has a post up about Service Operations and how they can be used by the WCF Data Services client. Role Based Silverlight Behaviors Also from the Open Light Group, Ian T. Lackey has a post up about Behaviors that takes a list of roles and updates the UI appropriatetly. How to Toggle (Show/Hide) using Behaviours (Behaviors) between Visual States or Storyboards in Expression Blend for Windows Phone Alan Beasley has a quick post up talking about the solution he found to a problem he was having with state switching in a WP7 app. MEFedMVVM: Testability Marlon Grech has another MEFedMVVM post up and he's discussing Testability all rolled in there with everything else :) 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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  • Silverlight Cream for May 20, 2010 -- #866

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Mike Snow, Victor Gaudioso, Ola Karlsson, Josh Twist(-2-), Yavor Georgiev, Jeff Wilcox, and Jesse Liberty. Shoutouts: Frank LaVigne has an interesting observation on his site: The Big Take-Away from MIX10 Rishi has updated all his work including a release of nRoute to the latest bits: nRoute Samples Revisited Looks like I posted one of Erik Mork's links two days in a row :) ... that's because I meant to post this one: Silverlight Week – How to Choose a Mobile Platform Just in case you missed it (and for me to find it easy), Scott Guthrie has an excellent post up on Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 and WCF RIA Services Released From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight Tip of the Day #23 – Working with Strokes and Shapes Mike Snow's Silverlight Tip of the Day number 23 is up and about Strokes and Shapes -- as in dotted and dashed lines. New Silverlight Video Tutorial: How to Fire a Visual State based upon the value of a Boolean Variable Victor Gaudioso's latest video tutorial is up and is on selecting and firing a video state based on a boolean... project included. Simultaneously calling multiple methods on a WCF service from silverlight Ola Karlsson details a problem he had where he was calling multiple WCF services to pull all his data and had problems... turns out it was a blocking call and he found the solution in the forums and details it all out for us... actually, a search at SilverlightCream.com would have found one of the better posts listed once you knew the problem :) Securing Your Silverlight Applications Josh Twist has an article in MSDN on Silverlight Security. He talks about Windows, forms, and .NET authorization then WCF, WCF Data, cross domain and XAP files. He also has some good external links. Template/View selection with MEF in Silverlight Josh Twist points out that this next article is just a simple demonstration, but he's discussing, and provides code for, a MEF-driven ViewModel navigation scheme with animation on the navigation. Workaround for accessing some ASMX services from Silverlight 4 Are you having problems hitting you asmx web service with Silverlight 4? Yeah... others are too! Yavor Georgiev at the Silverlight Web Services Team blog has a post up about it... why it's a sometimes problem and a workaround for it. Using Silverlight 4 features to create a Zune-like context menu Jeff Wilcox used Silverlight 4 and the Toolkit to create some samples of menus, then demonstrates a duplication of the Zune menu. You Already Are A Windows Phone 7 Programmer Jesse Liberty is demonstrating the fact that Silverlight developers are WP7 developers by creating a Silverlight and a WP7 app side by side using the same code... this is a closer look at the Silverlight TV presentation he did. 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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  • Silverlight Cream for January 16, 2011 -- #1029

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Michael Washington, Jesse Liberty, Deborah Kurata(-2-, -3-, -4-), Sergey Barskiy(-2-), Miroslav Nedyalkov, Jeff Prosise, and Matthias Shapiro(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Building a Multi-Page Silverlight LOB Application" Deborah Kurata WP7: "Windows Phone 7 [Controls] Project" Sergey Barskiy Sketchflow: "Sketchflow To Final" Michael Washington From SilverlightCream.com: Sketchflow To Final Check out this post by Michael Washington detailing the Sketchflow he did of his app, and how the final result tracks amazingly well. Windows Phone From Scratch #19 – MVVM Light Toolkit Soup To Nuts #4 Continuing to try to catch up to Jesse Liberty is this post, number 19 in the Windows Phone series and the 4th in that series about MVVMLight, and discussing binding a collection in the ViewModel to a ListBox in the view. Building a Multi-Page Silverlight LOB Application Deborah Kurata has the first 4 parts up (in 2 days) in a 6-part tutorial series she's doing on building a Silverlight LOB app. The first post was an intro and link to the rest as they become available. This 2nd post is getting the app newed up and making sure you've got your head wrapped around multiple pages. Theming a Silverlight Application using Existing Themes Deborah Kurata's next part is about getting started with themes in your app using the themes provided in the toolkit specifically. Theming a Silverlight Application using Custom Themes Deborah Kurata's next tutorial in the series is also about themes, but this time it's about custom themes... or rather customized from a 'standard' one in this case. Adding a New Page to a Multi-Page Silverlight Application Deborah Kurata's last available post in the tutorial series is this one on adding a new page to the app. Windows Phone 7 Project Sergey Barskiy has a pair of posts up about a calendar control that he is building and has out on CodePlex... nice-looking control too! Windows Phone 7 Controls Project Update Sergey Barskiy's second post is an update to the calendar... the biggest update being the ability to use the Toolkit context menu. How to Create Ad Rotator with Telerik TransitionControl and CoverFlow control for Silverlight Miroslav Nedyalkov uses the Telerik TransitionControl and CoverFlow controls to produce a great-looking ad rotator using any ContentControl or ListBox... very nice demo on the page.... Building Touch Interfaces for Windows Phones, Part 2 Jeff Prosise has part 2 of his tutorial series on WP7 Touch Interfaces up... and he's processing touch events directly in this one. Fixing the ListPicker / ScrollViewer Problem in Windows Phone 7 Matthias Shapiro has a couple of posts out that I've missed... this one is on an issue with ListPickers in a ScrollViewer where the listpicker gets hit rather than the scroll, and of course he has a work-around... but you'll need the source for the ListPicker to do it. Embedding a Sound File in Windows Phone 7 app (Silverlight) The next post by Matthias Shapiro is an explanation of embedding a sound file in a WP7 app with 2 conditions: 1) it downloads with your app, and 2) it plays no matter what. 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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  • Is SOA really dead?

    - by Ahsan Alam
    I have come across many articles/blogs where authors have strongly hailed the death of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). I could almost hear the laughter pouring out of their writings. Being a big supporter of SOA, I have found myself wondering – have I been following the wrong path all along? Do I need to change the way I think? Then I started to look around. Many newer technologies and concepts have evolved in the past few years. People are starting to take advantage of cloud computing, SAAS (Software as a Service), multitudes of on-demand platforms and many more. Now, I started thinking – is SOA really dead? In order to effectively utilize these newer concepts, I believe we need SOA more than ever because it gives us loose-coupling. People often forget that the key principal behind SOA is loose-coupling. We cannot achieve SOA just by throwing services (WCF, Web Service); we need loosely coupled systems.

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  • Paper Gold Rush

    - by Chris G. Williams
    The last few days at the shop have been reminiscent of a marathon of Pawn Stars. Quite a few people have come in wanting to trade for store credit. Most of them have left disappointed. We did pick up a few things here and there (which hopefully I can sell.) The problem, in a nutshell, is that people get it in their head that a (YuGiOh) card is worth X amount because they looked it up 2-3 years a...go, or someone told them it was valuable... then they play it in their deck for a year without sleeves, and cram it in a binder covered in duct tape. By the time they bring the cards in to me, new sets have come out which often de-value the tournament usefulness of the card from $20 to *maybe* 50 cents, in mint condition. Which means I can offer them about 10-15 cents... only they are almost never in mint condition, which means I usually offer them nothing at all. Most of the time, you can watch their smile fade as I start going through their cards. It's kinda sad, really, since I know they think they've spent the last two years walking around with the keys to their own personal gold mine. I don't really enjoy seeing that look on a child's face. I like kids and I remember those moments when perception and reality crashed headlong into each other. It was seldom pretty. So, when I'm talking to a child, I try to take it easy on them and give them some suggestions on how to better preserve their cards. Sometimes though, it's an adult. Depending on the situation, my response to them varies pretty broadly. Most of the time though, I still feel pretty bad when it doesn't go their way.

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  • ADDS: 1 - Introducing and designing

    - by marc dekeyser
    Normal 0 false false false EN-GB 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-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} What is ADDS?  Every Microsoft oriented infrastructure in today's enterprises will depend largely on the active directory version built by Microsoft. It is the foundation stone on which all other products (Exchange, update services, office communicator, the system center family, etc) rely on to get their information. And that is just looking at it from an infrastructure perspective. A well designed and implemented Active Directory implementation makes life for IT personnel and user alike a lot easier. Centralised management and the abilities opened up  by having it in place are ample.  But what is Active Directory Domain Services? We can look at ADDS as a centralised directory containing all objects your infrastructure runs on in one way or another. Since it is a Microsoft product you'll obviously not be seeing linux or mac clients listed in here (exceptions exist) but in general we can say it contains everything your company has in place in one form or another.  The domain name services. The domain naming service (or DNS for short) is a service which translates IP address (the identifiers for each computer in your domain) into readable and easy to understand names. This service is a prequisite for ADDA to work and having wrong record in a DNS server will make any ADDS service fail. Generally speaking a DNS service will be run on the same server as the ADDS service but it is worth wile to remember that this is not necessary. You could, for example, run your DNS services on a linux box (which would need special preparing to host an ADDS integrated DNS zone) and run the ADDS service of another box… Where to start? If the aim is to put in place a first time implementation of ADDS in your enterprise there are plenty of things to consider depending on what you are going to do in the long run. Great care has to be taken when first designing and implementing as having it set up wrong will cause a headache down the line. It is for that reason that I like to start building from the bottom up and start with a generic installation of ADDS (which will still differ for every client) and make it adaptable for future services which can hook in to the existing environment. Adapting existing environments is out of scope for this document (and series) although it is possible to take the pointers and change your existing environment to run in a smoother manor. Take great care when changing things as one small slip of the hand can give you a forest wide failure… Whenever starting with an ADDS deployment I ask the client the following questions:  What are your long term plans and goals?  How flexible do you want it? Are you currently linux heavy and want to keep this or can we go for an all Microsoft design? Those three questions should give some sort of indicator what direction can be taken and if the client has thought about some things themselves :).  The technical side of things  What is next to consider is what kind of infrastructure is already in place. For these series I'll keep it simple and introduce some general concepts without going in to depth on integrating ADDS with other DNS services.  Building from the ground up means we need to consider our layers on which our infrastructure will rely. In my view that goes as follows:  Network (WAN/LAN links and physical sites DNS Namespacing All in one domain or split up in different domains/forests? Security (both for ADDS and physical sites) The network side of things  Looking at how the network is currently set up can potentially teach us a large deal about the client. Do they have multiple physical site? What network speeds exist between these sites, etc… Depending on this information we will design our site links (which controls replication) in future stages. DNS Namespacing Maybe the single most intresting thing to know is what the domain will be named (ADDS will need a DNS domain with the same name) and where this will be hosted. Note that active directory can be set up with a singe name (aka contoso instead of contoso.com) but it is highly recommended to never do this. If you do end up with a domain like that for some reason there will be a lot of services that are going to give you good grief in the future (exchange being one of them). So one of the best practises would be always to use a double name (contoso.com or contoso.lan for example). Internal namespace A single namespace is just what it sounds like. You have a DNS domain which is different internally from what the client has as an external namespace. f.e. contoso.com as an external name (out on the internet) and contoso.lan on the internal network. his setup is has its advantages in that you have more obscurity from the internet in the DNS side of this but it will require additional work to publish services to the web. External namespace Quite like the internal namespace only here you do not differ the internal namespace of the company from what is known on the internet. In this implementation you would host your own DNS servers for the external domain inside the network. Or in other words, any external computer doing a DNS lookup would contact your internal DNS server for the resolution. Generally speaking this set up is a bad idea from the security side of things. Split DNS Whilst using an external namespace design is fairly easy it involves a lot of security risks. Opening up you ADDS DSN servers for lookups exposes your entire network to the internet and should be avoided at any cost. And that is where the "split DNS" design comes in. In this setup up would still have the same namespace internally and externally but you would be using different DNS servers for lookups on the external network who have no records of your internal resources unless you explicitly publish them. All in one or not? In determining your active directory design you can look at the following possibilities:  Single forest, Single domain Single forest, multiple domains Multiple forests, multiple domains I've listed the possibilities for design in increasing order of administrative magnitude. Microsoft recommends trying to use a single forest, single domain in as much situations as possible. It is, however, always possible that you require your services to be seperated from your users in a resource forest with trusts set up between the different forests. To start out I would go with the single forest design to avoid complexity unless there are strict requirements to have multiple forests. Security What kind of security is required on the domain and does this reflect the physical security on the sites? Not every client can afford to have a domain controller in a secluded server room on every site and it is exactly for that reason that Microsoft introduced the RODC (read only domain controller). A RODC is a domain controller that has been limited in functionality, in essence it will only cache the data you explicitly tell it to cache and in the case of a DC compromise (it being stolen) only a limited number of accounts will need to be affected. Th- Th- Th- That’s all folks! Well at least for now! In future editions of this series we’ll be walking through the different task that need to be done and the thought which needs to be put in to it. But for all editions we’ll be going from the concept of running a single forest, single domain with a split DNS setup… See you next time!

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  • Goodbye XML&hellip; Hello YAML (part 2)

    - by Brian Genisio's House Of Bilz
    Part 1 After I explained my motivation for using YAML instead of XML for my data, I got a lot of people asking me what type of tooling is available in the .Net space for consuming YAML.  In this post, I will discuss a nice tooling option as well as describe some small modifications to leverage the extremely powerful dynamic capabilities of C# 4.0.  I will be referring to the following YAML file throughout this post Recipe: Title: Macaroni and Cheese Description: My favorite comfort food. Author: Brian Genisio TimeToPrepare: 30 Minutes Ingredients: - Name: Cheese Quantity: 3 Units: cups - Name: Macaroni Quantity: 16 Units: oz Steps: - Number: 1 Description: Cook the macaroni - Number: 2 Description: Melt the cheese - Number: 3 Description: Mix the cooked macaroni with the melted cheese Tooling It turns out that there are several implementations of YAML tools out there.  The neatest one, in my opinion, is YAML for .NET, Visual Studio and Powershell.  It includes a great editor plug-in for Visual Studio as well as YamlCore, which is a parsing engine for .Net.  It is in active development still, but it is certainly enough to get you going with YAML in .Net.  Start by referenceing YamlCore.dll, load your document, and you are on your way.  Here is an example of using the parser to get the title of the Recipe: var yaml = YamlLanguage.FileTo("Data.yaml") as Hashtable; var recipe = yaml["Recipe"] as Hashtable; var title = recipe["Title"] as string; In a similar way, you can access data in the Ingredients set: var yaml = YamlLanguage.FileTo("Data.yaml") as Hashtable; var recipe = yaml["Recipe"] as Hashtable; var ingredients = recipe["Ingredients"] as ArrayList; foreach (Hashtable ingredient in ingredients) { var name = ingredient["Name"] as string; } You may have noticed that YamlCore uses non-generic Hashtables and ArrayLists.  This is because YamlCore was designed to work in all .Net versions, including 1.0.  Everything in the parsed tree is one of two things: Hashtable, ArrayList or Value type (usually String).  This translates well to the YAML structure where everything is either a Map, a Set or a Value.  Taking it further Personally, I really dislike writing code like this.  Years ago, I promised myself to never write the words Hashtable or ArrayList in my .Net code again.  They are ugly, mostly depreciated collections that existed before we got generics in C# 2.0.  Now, especially that we have dynamic capabilities in C# 4.0, we can do a lot better than this.  With a relatively small amount of code, you can wrap the Hashtables and Array lists with a dynamic wrapper (wrapper code at the bottom of this post).  The same code can be re-written to look like this: dynamic doc = YamlDoc.Load("Data.yaml"); var title = doc.Recipe.Title; And dynamic doc = YamlDoc.Load("Data.yaml"); foreach (dynamic ingredient in doc.Recipe.Ingredients) { var name = ingredient.Name; } I significantly prefer this code over the previous.  That’s not all… the magic really happens when we take this concept into WPF.  With a single line of code, you can bind to the data dynamically in the view: DataContext = YamlDoc.Load("Data.yaml"); Then, your XAML is extremely straight-forward (Nothing else.  No static types, no adapter code.  Nothing): <StackPanel> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.Title}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.Description}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.Author}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.TimeToPrepare}" /> <TextBlock Text="Ingredients:" FontWeight="Bold" /> <ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Recipe.Ingredients}" Margin="10,0,0,0"> <ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Quantity}" /> <TextBlock Text=" " /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Units}" /> <TextBlock Text=" of " /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Name}" /> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> </ItemsControl> <TextBlock Text="Steps:" FontWeight="Bold" /> <ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Recipe.Steps}" Margin="10,0,0,0"> <ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Number}" /> <TextBlock Text=": " /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Description}" /> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> </ItemsControl> </StackPanel> This nifty XAML binding trick only works in WPF, unfortunately.  Silverlight handles binding differently, so they don’t support binding to dynamic objects as of late (March 2010).  This, in my opinion, is a major lacking feature in Silverlight and I really hope we will see this feature available to us in Silverlight 4 Release.  (I am not very optimistic for Silverlight 4, but I can hope for the feature in Silverlight 5, can’t I?) Conclusion I still have a few things I want to say about using YAML in the .Net space including de-serialization and using IronRuby for your YAML parser, but this post is hopefully enough to see how easy it is to incorporate YAML documents in your code. Codeplex Site for YAML tools Dynamic wrapper for YamlCore

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  • Building a &ldquo;real&rdquo; extension for Expression Blend

    - by Timmy Kokke
    .Last time I showed you how to get started building extensions for Expression Blend. Lets build a useful extension this time and go a bit deeper into Blend. Source of project  => here Compiled dll => here (extract into /extensions folder of Expression Blend)   The Extension When working on large Xaml files in Blend it’s often hard to find a specific control in the "Objects and Timeline Pane”. An extension that searches the active document and presents all elements that satisfy the query would be helpful. When the user starts typing a search query a search will be performed and the results are shown in the list. After the user selects an item in the results list, the control in the "Objects and Timeline Pane” will be selected. Below is a sketch of what it is going to look like. The Solution Create a new WPF User Control project as shown in the earlier tutorial in the Configuring the extension project section, but name it AdvancedSearch this time. Delete the default UserControl1.Xaml to clear the solution (a new user control will be added later thought, but adding a user control is easier then renaming one). Create the main entry point of the addin by adding a new class to the solution and naming this  AdvancedSearchPackage. Add a reference to Microsoft.Expression.Extensibility and to System.ComponentModel.Composition . Implement the IPackage interface and add the Export attribute from the MEF to the definition. While you’re at it. Add references to Microsoft.Expression.DesignSurface, Microsoft.Expression.FrameWork and Microsoft.Expression.Markup. These will be used later. The Load method from the IPackage interface is going to create a ViewModel to bind to from the UI. Add another class to the solution and name this AdvancedSearchViewModel. This class needs to implement the INotifyPropertyChanged interface to enable notifications to the view.  Add a constructor to the class that takes an IServices interface as a parameter. Create a new instance of the AdvancedSearchViewModel in the load method in the AdvanceSearchPackage class. The AdvancedSearchPackage class should looks like this now:   using System.ComponentModel.Composition; using Microsoft.Expression.Extensibility;   namespace AdvancedSearch { [Export(typeof(IPackage))] public class AdvancedSearchPackage:IPackage {   public void Load(IServices services) { new AdvancedSearchViewModel(services); }   public void Unload() { } } }   Add a new UserControl to the project and name this AdvancedSearchView. The View will be created by the ViewModel, which will pass itself to the constructor of the view. Change the constructor of the View to take a AdvancedSearchViewModel object as a parameter. Add a private field to store the ViewModel and set this field in the constructor. Point the DataContext of the view to the ViewModel. The View will look something like this now:   namespace AdvancedSearch { public partial class AdvancedSearchView:UserControl { private readonly AdvancedSearchViewModel _advancedSearchViewModel;   public AdvancedSearchView(AdvancedSearchViewModel advancedSearchViewModel) { _advancedSearchViewModel = advancedSearchViewModel; InitializeComponent(); this.DataContext = _advancedSearchViewModel; } } }   The View is going to be created in the constructor of the ViewModel and stored in a read only property.   public FrameworkElement View { get; private set; }   public AdvancedSearchViewModel(IServices services) { _services = services; View = new AdvancedSearchView(this); } The last thing the solution needs before we’ll wire things up is a new class, PossibleNode. This class will be used later to store the search results. The solution should look like this now:   Adding UI to the UI The extension should build and run now, although nothing is showing up in Blend yet. To enable the user to perform a search query add a TextBox and a ListBox to the AdvancedSearchView.xaml file. I’ve set the rows of the grid too to make them look a little better. Add the TextChanged event to the TextBox and the SelectionChanged event to the ListBox, we’ll need those later on. <Grid> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="32" /> <RowDefinition Height="*" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <TextBox TextChanged="SearchQueryTextChanged" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" Margin="4" Name="SearchQuery" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" /> <ListBox SelectionChanged="SearchResultSelectionChanged" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" Margin="4" Name="SearchResult" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" Grid.Row="1" /> </Grid>   This will create a user interface like: To make the View show up in Blend it has to be registered with the WindowService. The GetService<T> method is used to get services from Blend, which are your entry points into Blend.When writing extensions you will encounter this method very often. In this case we’re asking for an IWindowService interface. The IWindowService interface serves events for changing windows and themes, is used for adding or removing resources and is used for registering and unregistering Palettes. All panes in Blend are palettes and are registered thru the RegisterPalette method. The first parameter passed to this method is a string containing a unique ID for the palette. This ID can be used to get access to the palette later. The second parameter is the View. The third parameter is a title for the pane. This title is shown when the pane is visible. It is also shown in the window menu of Blend. The last parameter is a KeyBinding. I have chosen Ctrl+Shift+F to call the Advanced Search pane. This value is also shown in the window menu of Blend.   services.GetService<IWindowService>().RegisterPalette( "AdvancedSearch", viewModel.View, "Advanced Search", new KeyBinding { Key = Key.F, Modifiers = ModifierKeys.Control | ModifierKeys.Shift } );   You can compiler and run now. After Blend starts you can hit Ctrl+Shift+F or go the windows menu to call the advanced search extension. Searching for controls The search has to be cleared on every change of the active document. The DocumentServices fires an event every time a new document is opened, a document is closed or another document view is selected. Add the following line to the constructor of the ViewModel to handle the ActiveDocumentChanged event:   _services.GetService<IDocumentService>().ActiveDocumentChanged += ActiveDocumentChanged;   And implement the ActiveDocumentChanged method:   private void ActiveDocumentChanged(object sender, DocumentChangedEventArgs e) { }   To get to the contents of the document we first need to get access to the “Objects and Timeline” pane. This pane is registered in the PaletteRegistry in the same way as this extension has registered itself. The palettes are accessible thru an associative array. All you need to provide is the Identifier of the palette you want. The Id of the “Objects and Timeline” pane is “Designer_TimelinePane”. I’ve included a list of the other default panes at the bottom of this article. Each palette has a Content property which can be cast to the type of the pane.   var timelinePane = (TimelinePane)_services.GetService<IWindowService>() .PaletteRegistry["Designer_TimelinePane"] .Content;   Add a private field to the top of the AdvancedSearchViewModel class to store the active SceneViewModel. The SceneViewModel is needed to set the current selection and to get the little icons for the type of control.   private SceneViewModel _activeSceneViewModel;   When the active SceneViewModel changes, the ActiveSceneViewModel is stored in this field. The list of possible nodes is cleared and an PropertyChanged event is fired for this list to notify the UI to clear the list. This will make the eventhandler look like this: private void ActiveDocumentChanged(object sender, DocumentChangedEventArgs e) { var timelinePane = (TimelinePane)_services.GetService<IWindowService>() .PaletteRegistry["Designer_TimelinePane"].Content;   _activeSceneViewModel = timelinePane.ActiveSceneViewModel; PossibleNodes = new List<PossibleNode>(); InvokePropertyChanged("PossibleNodes"); } The PossibleNode class used to store information about the controls found by the search. It’s a dumb data class with only 3 properties, the name of the control, the SceneNode and a brush used for the little icon. The SceneNode is the base class for every possible object you can create in Blend, like Brushes, Controls, Annotations, ResourceDictionaries and VisualStates. The entire PossibleNode class looks like this:   using System.Windows.Media; using Microsoft.Expression.DesignSurface.ViewModel;   namespace AdvancedSearch { public class PossibleNode { public string Name { get; set; } public SceneNode SceneNode { get; set; } public DrawingBrush IconBrush { get; set; } } }   Add these two methods to the AdvancedSearchViewModel class:   public void Search(string searchText) { } public void SelectElement(PossibleNode node){ }   Both these methods are going to be called from the view. The Search method performs the search and updates the PossibleNodes list.  The controls in the active document can be accessed thru TimeLineItemsManager class. This class contains a read only collection of TimeLineItems. By using a Linq query the possible nodes are selected and placed in the PossibleNodes list.   var timelineItemManager = new TimelineItemManager(_activeSceneViewModel); PossibleNodes = new List<PossibleNode>( (from d in timelineItemManager.ItemList where d.DisplayName.ToLowerInvariant().StartsWith( searchText.ToLowerInvariant()) select new PossibleNode() { IconBrush = d.IconBrush, SceneNode = d.SceneNode, Name = d.DisplayName }).ToList() ); InvokePropertyChanged(InternalConst.PossibleNodes);   The Select method is pretty straight forward. It contains two lines.The first to clear the selection. Otherwise the selected element would be added to the current selection. The second line selects the nodes. It is given a new array with the node to be selected.   _activeSceneViewModel.ClearSelections(); _activeSceneViewModel.SelectNodes(new[] { node.SceneNode });   The last thing that needs to be done is to wire the whole thing to the View. The two event handlers just call the Search and SelectElement methods on the ViewModel.   private void SearchQueryTextChanged(object sender, TextChangedEventArgs e) { _advancedSearchViewModel.Search(SearchQuery.Text); }   private void SearchResultSelectionChanged(object sender, SelectionChangedEventArgs e) { if(e.AddedItems.Count>0) { _advancedSearchViewModel.SelectElement(e.AddedItems[0] as PossibleNode); } }   The Listbox has to be bound to the PossibleNodes list and a simple DataTemplate is added to show the selection. The IconWithOverlay control can be found in the Microsoft.Expression.DesignSurface.UserInterface.Timeline.UI namespace in the Microsoft.Expression.DesignSurface assembly. The ListBox should look something like:   <ListBox SelectionChanged="SearchResultSelectionChanged" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" Margin="4" Name="SearchResult" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" Grid.Row="1" ItemsSource="{Binding PossibleNodes}"> <ListBox.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <tlui:IconWithOverlay Margin="2,0,10,0" Width="12" Height="12" SourceBrush="{Binding Path=IconBrush, Mode=OneWay}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Name}"/> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </ListBox.ItemTemplate> </ListBox>   Compile and run. Inside Blend the extension could look something like below. What’s Next When you’ve got the extension running. Try placing breakpoints in the code and see what else is in there. There’s a lot to explore and build extension on. I personally would love an extension to search for resources. Last but not least, you can download the source of project here.  If you have any questions let me know. If you just want to use this extension, you can download the compiled dll here. Just extract the . zip into the /extensions folder of Expression Blend. Notes Target framework I ran into some issues when using the .NET Framework 4 Client Profile as a target framework. I got some strange error saying certain obvious namespaces could not be found, Microsoft.Expression in my case. If you run into something like this, try setting the target framework to .NET Framework 4 instead of the client version.   Identifiers of default panes Identifier Type Title Designer_TimelinePane TimelinePane Objects and Timeline Designer_ToolPane ToolPane Tools Designer_ProjectPane ProjectPane Projects Designer_DataPane DataPane Data Designer_ResourcePane ResourcePane Resources Designer_PropertyInspector PropertyInspector Properties Designer_TriggersPane TriggersPane Triggers Interaction_Skin SkinView States Designer_AssetPane AssetPane Assets Interaction_Parts PartsPane Parts Designer_ResultsPane ResultsPane Results

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  • ALT.NET Seattle

    - by GeekAgilistMercenary
    Time to rock the ALT.NET scene and head up to the conference this weekend.  I must say, out of all the conferences I have been to the ALT.NET Conference is by far one of the best.  Great minds, great attitudes, awesome chances to learn, awesome changes to expand on one's ideas with others that hit on the same hurdles!  All in all, last year was great and I am expecting it to be a great conference this year also. For more information check out the ALT.NET site: http://2010conf.altnetseattle.org/ To get more involved in the monthly ALT.NET events in Seattle: http://groups.google.com/group/altnetseattle http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=111345965570 http://www.altnetseattle.org/ If you are in the Seattle area this weekend, be sure to hit up the conference. For original entry and other blog entries check out my personal blog.

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  • Silverlight Cream for April 09, 2010 -- #835

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Tim Heuer, smartyP, and Kevin Moore. From SilverlightCream.com: Using XNA libraries in your Silverlight Windows Phone 7 applications Tim Heuer has a post up using XNA on WP7 to hook up sound to a 'normal' Silverlight WP7 app... so there ya go! Example Pivot Control for Windows Phone 7 smartyP acknowledges that he said he was done with the Pivot control for WP7 and yes he realizes we're most likely going to get one from Microsoft, but just like the rest of us, he just couldn't leave it alone :) Bag of Tricks Update (two years in the making) I found this via Cool view transitions using ZapScoller by Rudi Grobler, and it points at Kevin Moore's Bag of Tricks Update for Silverlight 4 and WPF ... just the fact that Robby Ingebretsen is using it means we should all rush to CodePlex and absorb it :) 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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  • GWB: 5 yr anniversary

    - by Theo Moore
    Wow, just realized it's my 5 year anniverary on GeeksWithBlogs. Hard to believe so much time has passed. I paged back through some of my early posts, curious what sort of things about which I used to post. It's also interesting to see how my focus has changed and what really hasn't. I was also reminded that Chris Williams and I have been friends for that long. I don't blog nearly as often now as I used to do, but I still really like the GWB community, and I am honoured to be allowed to continue to be a part of it. Another 5 years ahead (or more), I hope. :-)

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  • OCS 2007 Access Edge Server Certificate issue

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

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  • Book Review: Professional ASP.NET Design Patterns by Scott Millett

    - by Sam Abraham
    In the next few lines, I will be providing a brief review of Wrox’s Professional ASP.NET Design Patterns by Scott Millett. Design patterns have been a hot topic for many years as developers looked to do more with less, re-use as much code as possible by creating common libraries, as well as make their code easier to understand, extend and collaborate on. Scott Millett’s book covered classic and emerging patterns in a practical presentation that demonstrated with thorough examples how to put each pattern to use in the context of multi-tiered ASP.NET applications. The author’s unique approach and content earned him much kudos in the foreword by Scott Hanselman as well as online reviews. The book has 14 chapters of which 5 are dedicated to a comprehensive case study. Patterns covered therein include S.O.L.I.D, Gang of Four (GoF) as well as Martin Fowler’s Patterns of Enterprise Applications. Many thanks to the Wiley/Wrox User Group Program for their support of our West Palm Beach Developers’ Group. Best regards, --Sam You can access my reviews of books I recently read: Professional WCF 4.0 Inside Windows Communication Foundation Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2008 series

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  • Responsible BI for Excel, Even for Older Versions

    - by andrewbrust
    On Wednesday, I will have the honor of co-presenting, for both The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI) and the New York Technology Council. on the subject of Excel and BI. My co-presenter will be none other than Bill Baker, who was a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and, essentially, the father of BI at that company.  Details on the events are here and here. We'll be talking about PowerPivot, of course, but that's not all. Probably even more important than any one product, will be our discussion of whether the usual characterization of Excel as the nemesis of IT, the guilty pleasure of business users and the antithesis of formal BI is really valid and/or hopelessly intractable. Without giving away our punchline, I'll tell you that we are much more optimistic than that. There are huge upsides to Excel and while there are real dangers to using it in the BI space, there are standards and practices you can employ to ensure Excel is used responsibly. And when those practices are followed, Excel becomes quite powerful indeed. One of the keys to this is using Excel as a data consumer rather than data storage mechanism. Caching data in Excel is OK, but only if that data is (a) not modified and (b) configured for automated periodic refresh. PowerPivot meets both criteria -- it stores a read-only copy of your data in the form of a model, and once workbook containing a PowerPivot model is published to SharePoint, it can be configured for scheduled data refresh, on the server, requiring no user intervention whatsoever. Data refresh is a bit like hard drive backup: it will only happen reliably if it's automated, and super-easy to configure. PowerPivot hits a real home run here (as does Windows Home Server for PC backup, but I digress). The thing about PowerPivot is that it's an add-in for Excel 2010. What if you're not planning to go to that new version for quite a while? What if you’ve just deployed Office 2007 in your organization? What if you're still on Office 2003, or an even earlier version? What can you do immediately to share data responsibly and easily? As it turns out, there's a feature in Excel that's been around for quite a while, that can help: Web Queries.  The Web Query feature was introduced, ostensibly, to allow Excel to pull data in from Internet Web pages…for example, data in a stock quote history table will come in nicely, as will any data in a Web page that is displayed in an HTML table.  To use the feature In Excel 2007 or 2010, click the Data Tab or the ribbon and click the “From Web” button towards the left; in older versions use the corresponding option in  the menu or  toolbars.  Next, paste a URL into the resulting dialog box and tap Enter or click the Go button.  A preview of the Web page will come up, and the dialog will allow you to select the specific table within the page whose data you’d like to import.  Here’s an example: Now just click the table, click the Import button, and the Import Data dialog appears.  You can simply click OK to bring in your data or you can first click the Properties… button and configure the data import to be refreshed at an interval in minutes that you select.  Now your data’s in the spreadsheet and ready to worked with: Your data may be vulnerable to modification, but if you’ve set up the data refresh, any accidental or malicious changes will be corrected in time anyway. The thing about this feature is that it’s most useful not for public Web pages, but for pages behind the firewall.  In effect, the Web Query feature provides an incredibly easy way to consume data in Excel that’s “published” from an application.  Users just need a URL.  They don’t need to know server and database names and since the data is read-only, providing credentials may be unnecessary, or can be handled using integrated security.  If that’s not good enough, the Web Query can be saved to a special .iqy file, which can be edited to provide POST parameter data. The only requirement is that the data must be provided in an HTML table, with the first row providing the column names.  From an ASP.NET project, it couldn’t be easier: a simple bound GridView control is totally compatible.  Use a data source control with it, and you don’t even have to write any code.  Users can link to pages that are part of an application’s UI, or developers can create pages that are specially designed for the purpose of providing an interface to the Web Query import feature.  And none of this is Microsoft- or .NET-specific.  You can create pages in any language you want (PHP comes to mind) that output the result set of a query in HTML table format, and then consume that data in a Web Query.  Then build PivotTables and charts on the data, and in Excel 2007 or 2010 you can use conditional formatting to create scorecards and dashboards. This strategy allows you to create pages that function quite similarly to the OData XML feeds rendered when .NET developers create an “Astoria” WCF Data Service.  And while it’s cool that PowerPivot and Excel 2010 can import such OData feeds, it’s good to know that older versions of Excel can function in a similar fashion, and can consume data produced by virtually any Web development platform. As a final matter, instead of just telling you that “older versions” of Excel support this feature, I’ll be more specific.  To discover what the first version of Excel was to support Web queries, go to http://bit.ly/OldSchoolXL.

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  • Be Careful When Referencing SPList.Items

    - by Brian Jackett
    Be very careful how you reference your SPListItem objects through the SharePoint API.  I’ll say it again.  Be very careful how you reference your SPListItem objects through the SharePoint API.  Ok, now that you get the point that this will be a “learn from my mistakes and don’t do unsmart things like I did” post, let’s dig into what it was that I did poorly. Scenario     For the past year I’ve been building custom .Net applications that are hosted through SharePoint.  These application involve a number of SharePoint lists, external databases, custom web parts, and other SharePoint elements to provide functionality.  About two weeks ago I received a message from one of our end users that a custom application was performing slowly.  Specifically performance was slow when users were performing actions that interacted with the primary SharePoint list storing data for that app. The Problem     I took a copy of the production site into a dev environment to investigate the code that was executing.  After attaching the debugger and running through the code I quickly found pieces of code referencing SPListItem objects (like below) that were performing very poorly: SPListItem myItem = SPContext.Current.Web.Lists["List Name"].Items.GetItemById(value); // do updates on SPListItem retrieved     As it turns out the SPList I was referencing was fairly large at ~1000 items and weighing in over 150 MB.  You see the problem with my above code is that I retrieved the SPListItem by first (unnecessarily) going through the Items member of the list.  As I understand it, when doing so the executing code will attempt to resolve that entity and pull it from the database and into RAM (all 150 MB.)  This causes the equivalent of a 50 car pile up in terms of performance with a single update taking more than 15 seconds. The Solution     The solution is actually quite simple and I wish I had realized this during development.  Instead of going through the Items member it is possible to call GetItemById(…) directly on the SPList as in the example below: SPListItem myItem = SPContext.Current.Web.Lists["List Name"].GetItemById(value); // do updates on SPListItem retrieved     After making this simple change performance skyrocketed and updates were back to less than a second.   Conclusion     When given the option between two solutions, usually the simplest is the best solution.  In my scenario I was adding extra complexity going through the API the long way around to get to the objects I needed and it ended up hurting performance greatly.  Luckily we were able to find and resolve the performance issue in a relatively short amount of time.  Like I said at the beginning of the post, learn from my mistakes and hope it helps you.         -Frog Out   Image linked from http://www.freespirit.com/files/IMAGE/COVER/LARGE/BeCarefulSafe.jpg

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  • Charms and the App Bar

    - by Dennis Vroegop
    Ok. I admit. I made a mistake in the last post about our planespotter app. I have dedicated a full part of the hub to Social. I also had a section called Friends but that made sense since I said that “Friends” is a special group of people that connect to each other through our app and only our app. Social however is sharing our spots with Twitter, Facebook and so on. Now, we could write that functionality in our app in a different section but there is one small problem with that: users don’t expect that. Ok, I admit. The mistake was quite deliberate to give me an excuse to write this part. But still: the mistake is one I see a lot. People are trying to do stuff in their application that they shouldn’t be doing. This always strike me as slightly odd: why do some work when others have already done it for you and you can just use it? After all: good developers are lazy (lazy people will always try to find the easiest way to do something and in development land this usually means the cleanest and best to support way…) So. What is that part that Microsoft has done for us and we don’t have to do ourselves? The answer lies on the right hand of your Win8 screen: This is a screenshot of my tablet (as you can see I am writing this right now….) When I swipe my finger from out of the screen on the right inside the screen (or move the mouse to the upper right corner) this menu will appear. Next to settings and the start menu button we’ll find the Search and the Share charms. These are two ways that your app can share the information it contains with the rest of the world, or at least: the rest of your system. So don’t write a Search feature in your app. Don’t write a Share feature in your app. It’s here already. Users, once they are used to Windows 8, will use that feature and expect it to work. If it doesn’t, they won’t like your app and you can kiss you dreams of everlasting fame goodbye. So use these two. What are they? Well, simply they are parts of a contract. In your app you say somewhere in code that you are supporting Search and Share. So when the user selects Share the system will interrogate the current app in the foreground if it supports this feature. Your app will say “But why, yes, I do!” Then the system will ask the app “Ok then, wisecrack, then share!” and you will have to provide the system with some information about the format. Other applications have subscribed to be at the receiving end of the Share contract. They have told the system that they support Sharing (receiving) and which formats they understand. If one or more of them support the formats you specify, the user will see them. The user clicks / taps on the app of their choice and data is moved from your app to the new one. So if you say you support Facebook and Twitter users can post data from your app to these networks by selecting Share. The same applies to Search. Don’t make a “search” button in your app but use the contract to tell the system that you support search and use that instead. Users will be grateful (remember that bar with men/women/creatures that are waiting for you?) The more and more people get to know Windows 8, the more they will use this. And if you are one of the people who wrote an app that helped them learn the system, well, that’s even better. So. We don’t have a Share or a Search button. We do have other buttons. Most important: we probably need a “New Spot” button. And a “Filter” might be useful. Or someway to open the camera so you can add a picture to the spot. Where will be put those? The answer is the “Appbar” . This is a application / context aware menu that slides up from the bottom of the screen when you move your finger / mouse from below the screen into it. From above downwards works just as well. Here you see an example of the appbar from the People app. (click on it for a larger version). This appears whenever you slide your finger up from below of down from above. This is where you put your commands. Remember, this is context aware so this menu will change when you are in different parts of your app or when you have selected different items. There are a few conventions when you create this appbar. First, the items on the right are “General” items, meaning they have little to do with what is on the screen right now. I think this would be a great place to add our “New Spot” icon. On the far left are items associated with the current selected item or screen. So if you have a spot selected, the button for Add Photo should be visible here and on the left hand side. Not everything is as clear as this, but this is what you should strive for. Group items together. And please note: this is the only place in Metro design where we are allowed to use lines as separators. So when you want to separate a group of icons from another group, add a line. Also note the simplicity of the buttons. No colors, no lights or shadows, no 3D. After a couple of years of fancy almost realistic looking icons people have finally decided that hey, this is a virtual world: it’s ok to look virtual as well. So make things as readable and clear as possible and don’t try to duplicate nature. It’s all about the information, remember? (If you don’t remember I’d like to point you to a older blog post of mine about the what and why of Metro). So.. think about the buttons a bit and think about Share and Search. What will you put there? Remember: this is the way the users interact with your apps and while you shouldn’t judge a book by its covers when it comes to people, this isn’t entirely so when it comes to apps. People DO judge an app by its looks and the way it feels. Take advantage of that. History has learned that a crappy app with a GREAT user interface gets better reviews than a GREAT app with a lousy UI… I know: developers will find this extremely unfair but that’s the world we live in (No, I am not saying you should deliver rubbish apps). Next time: we’ll start by building the darn thing!

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