geeks with blogs - Page 78

Windows Embedded Compact 7

- by Valter Minute

I’m back from Seattle where I attended the MVP Summit and presented the Windows Embedded Compact 7 training materials during the Train The Trainer in Bellevue (many thanks to all the people attending and providing great suggestions to improve the materials!). The MVP summit was a great chance to discover new things about all the different technologies, to see old friends and meet new ones. The TTT location (Microsoft training facilities at Lincoln square in Bellevue) was great and here’s the landscape that the attendees could enjoy (partially ruined by my presence in the foreground!). In the meantime Windows Embedded Compact 7 has been released: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsembedded/en-us/evaluate/windows-embedded-compact-7.aspx You can download an evaluation version and start to discover its new features (SMP support, support for 3GBs of RAM, Silverlight for Windows Embedded tools, ARM v5,v6 and v7 compilers and many more…) and, maybe, decide to attend a training about it.

Read the article

Unreal Tournament 3 vs UDK: What Should I Choose?

- by Matt Christian

Many people in the mod community were very excited to see the release of the Unreal Developer Kit (UDK) a few months ago. Along with generating excitement into a very dedicated community, it also introduced many new modders into a flourishing area of indie-development. However, since UDK is free, most beginners jump right into UDK, which is OK though you might just benefit more from purchasing a shelf-copy of Unreal Tournament 3. UDK UDK is a free full version of UnrealEd (the editor environment used to create games like Gears of War 1/2, Bioshock 1/2, and of course Unreal Tournament 3). The editor gives you all the features of the editor from the shelf-copy of the game plus some refinements in many of the tools. (One of the first things you'll find about UnrealEd is that it's a collection of tools grouped into the same editor so it really isn't a single 'tool') Interestingly enough, Epic is allowing you to sell any game made in UDK with a few catches. First off, you must purchase a liscense for your game (which, I THINK is aproximately $99 starting). Secondly, you must pay 25% of all profits for the first $5,000 of your game revenue to them (about $1250). Finally, you cannot use any of the 'media' provided in UDK for your game. UDK provides sample meshes, textures, materials, sounds, and other sample pieces of media pulled (mostly) from Unreal Tournament 3. The final point here will really determine whether you should use UDK. There is a very small amount of media provided in UDK for someone to go in and begin creating levels without first developing your own meshes, textures, and other media. Sure, you can slap together a few unique levels, though you will end up finding yourself restriced to the same items over and over and over. This is absolutely how professional game development is; you are 'given' (typically liscensed or built in-house) an engine/editor and you begin creating all the content for the game and placing it. UDK is aimed toward those who really want to build their game content from scratch with a currently existing engine. It is not suited for someone who would like to simply build levels and quick mods without learning external 3D programs and image editing software. Unreal Tournament 3 Unless you have a serious grudge against FPS's, Epic, or your computer sucks, there really is no reason not to own this game for PC. You can pick it up on Steam or Amazon for around $20 brand new. Not only are you provided with a full single-player and multiplayer game, but you are given the entire UnrealEd 3.0 including all of the content used to build UT3. If you want to start building levels and mods quickly for UT3, you should absolutely pick up a shelf-copy. However, as off-the-shelf UT3 is a few years old now, the tools have not been updated for quite a while. Compared to UDK, the menus are more difficult to navigate through and take more time getting used to. Since UDK is updated almost every month, there are new inclusions to the editor that may not be in UT3 (including the future addition of 3D!). I haven't worked enough with shelf UT3 to see if there are more features in UDK or if they both feature the same stuff in different forms, however you should remember that the Unreal Engine 3.0 has undergone numerous upgrades between it's launch and Gears of War 2 (in fact, Epic had a conference to show off what changed just between the Gears of Wars games). Since UT3 has much more core content, someone who wants to focus on level editing or modding the core UT3 game may find their needs better suited with an off-the-shelf copy of UT3. If that level designer has a team that is generating custom assets, they may be better off with UDK. The choice is now yours...

Read the article

IASA South East Florida Chapter February Meeting Report

- by Rainer Habermann

IASA South East Florida Chapter – February Meeting The topic for our February chapter meeting was Legal Issues in IT. Ms. Kennedy, Intellectual Property Attorney with an active litigation, trademark and copyright practice, presented: How Google, Wal-Mart & Apple Make their Millions – The Secret Ingredient: Intellectual Property This topic initiated great interest and the meeting room at Microsoft Ft. Lauderdale filled up to the last seat. Most Architects, Engineers, and MBA’s are not aware about Intellectual Property, Basic Patent, Trademark, or legal issues related to the web. After clarifying the basic definitions, Ms. Kennedy explained in detail how intellectual property issues could make or break a company. Members had the opportunity at the end of the presentation to ask questions, discuss legal problems, and several members shared their experiences related to Intellectual Property and other IT related issues. If you want to protect your ideas and intellectual property, you have to be aware of the implications and need to take the right steps in order to protect them. All Chapter Members agreed that it was an outstanding and lively presentation. Ms. Kennedy presented high quality content and made participants aware of legal IT issues. In the name of all chapter members, thank you Ms. Kennedy for taking the time for this amazing presentation and to Quent Herschelman for hosting the meeting. Rainer Habermann President IASA South East Florida Chapter

Read the article

If spaces in filenames are possible, why do some of us still avoid using them?

- by Chris W. Rea

Somebody I know expressed irritation today regarding those of us who tend not to use spaces in our filenames, e.g. NamingThingsLikeThis.txt -- despite most modern operating systems supporting spaces in filenames. Non-technical people must look at filenames created by geeks and wonder where we learned English. So, what are the reasons that spaces in filenames are avoided or discouraged? The most obvious reason I could think of, and why I typically avoid it, are the extra quotes required on the command line when dealing with such files. Are there any other significant reasons, other than the practice being a vestigial preference? UPDATE: Thanks for all your answers! I'm surprised how popular this was. So, here's a summary: Six Reasons Why Geeks Prefer Filenames Without Spaces In Them It's irritating to put quotes around them when referenced on the command line (or elsewhere.) Some older operating systems didn't used to support them and us old dogs are used to that. Some tools still don't support spaces in filenames at all or very well. (But they should.) It's irritating to escape spaces when used where spaces must be escaped, such as URLs. Certain unenlightened services (e.g. file hosting, webmail) remove or replace spaces anyway! Names without spaces can be shorter, which is sometimes desirable as paths are limited.

Read the article

Upcoming events 2011 IT Camp Saturday Tampa and Orlando Code Camp 2011

- by Nikita Polyakov

I’ll be speaking at a few upcoming events: Saturday March 19th 2011 IT Camp Saturday Tampa http://itcampsaturday.com/tampa This is a first of it’s kind – IT Pro camp, a more topic open then many traditional Code Camp and no so much code focused. Here is just a small sample: Adnan Cartwright Administrating your Network with Group Policy Nikita Polyakov Intro to Phone 7 Development Landon Bass Enterprise Considerations for SharePoint 2010 Michael Wells Intro to SQL Server for IT Professionals Keith Kabza Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Overview Check out the full session schedule for other session, if you are in the IT Pro field – you will find many sessions of interest here: http://itcampsaturday.com/tampa/2011/03/01/schedule/ Saturday March 26th 2011 Orlando Code Camp http://www.orlandocodecamp.com/ Just a highlight of a few sessions: Design & Animation Chris G. Williams: Making Games for Windows Phone 7 with XNA 4.0 Diane Leeper: Animating in Blend: It's ALIVE Diane Leeper: Design for Developers: Bad Design Kills Good Projects Henry Lee: Windows Phone 7 Animation Konrad Neumann: Being a Designer in a Developer's World Nikita Polyakov: Rapid Prototyping with SketchFlow in Expression Blend WP7 Henry Lee: Learn to Use Accelerometer and Location Service (GPS) in Windows Phone Application Joe Healy: Consuming Services in Windows Phone 7 Kevin Wolf: Work From Anywhere = WFA (Part 1) Kevin Wolf: Work From Anywhere = WFA (Part 2) Nikita Polyakov: WP7 Marketplace Place and Monetization Russell Fustino: Making (More) Money with Phone 7

Read the article

No endpoint listening at.........

- by Michael Stephenson

I was having some very frustrating behaviour on our build server and while I found a number of articles online with similar error messages none of them helped me. I thought I would just explain this here incase if helps me or anyone else in future.The error message we were getting is:There was no endpoint listening at http://localhostStubs.ExternalApplication/SampleService.svc that could accept the message. This is often caused by an incorrect address or SOAP action. See InnerException, if present, for more detailsOur scenario is as follows:We have a solution where a WCF service application hosting the WCF routing service is listening to the Windows Azure Service Bus Relay. We have an acceptance test project in the solution which sends a message to the service bus which is then received by the WCF routing service and routed to SampleService.svc which is hosted in another IIS application on the same box. A response is flowed back through to the test. In the tests there are 5 scenarios simulating a successful message, and various error conditions. On my developer machine it was working absolutely fine every time, and a clean build on my developer machine worked fine. On the build server however one or more of the tests would fail each time with the above error message. There didnt seem to be any pattern to which test would fail.The solution was building on a Windows 2008 R2 machine with IIS 7 and AppFabric Server installed with auto-start configured for the IIS Application which would be listening to service bus.After lots of searching online and looking at logs etc it turned out to be a simple solution to just restart the WAS service (Windows Process Activation Service) and the services it advised you to restart with it. Hope this helps someone else

Read the article

BUILD 2013 Session–What’s New In XAML

- by Tim Murphy

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tmurphy/archive/2013/06/27/build-2013-sessionndashwhatrsquos-new-in-xaml.aspx If ever there was a session that you felt like your head was going to explode, this one would do it. Tim Heuer proceeded to try to fit as many of the changes and additions to XAML as he could in one hour. There were a number of improvements that struck me. The first was the fact that we no longer need to put stack panels in the AppBar in order to add buttons. This has been changed to a CommandBar which at the very least makes the markup read more cleanly. Now if they would just bring this same improvement to Windows Phone we would be set. There was a lot of cheering at the beginning of his talk when he showed that there are now date time pickers. I understand that it makes life easier, but I just couldn’t get that excited. The couple of features that did grab my attention being able to select a group of tags and then add an encapsulating tag such as a StackPanel around them and the fact that they have optimized XAML so that now runs on average 25% faster. I’d go crazy trying to list off all the improvements and new features so be sure to go and review the recording of the session. del.icio.us Tags: BUILD 2013,XAML,Windows 8.1

Read the article

Silverlight Cream for November 24, 2011 -- #1173

- by Dave Campbell

In this Thanksgiving Day Issue: Andrea Boschin, Samidip Basu, Ollie Riches, WindowsPhoneGeek, Sumit Dutta, Dhananjay Kumar, Daniel Egan, Doug Mair, Chris Woodruff, and Debal Saha.Happy Thanksgiving Everybody! Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight CommandBinding with Simple MVVM Toolkit" Debal Saha WP7: "How many pins can Bing Maps handle in a WP7 app - part 3" Ollie Riches Shoutouts: Michael Palermo's latest Desert Mountain Developers is up Michael Washington's latest Visual Studio #LightSwitch Daily is up From SilverlightCream.com:Windows Phone 7.5 - Play with musicAndrea Boschin's latest WP7 post is up on SilverlightShow... he's talking about the improvements in the music hub and also the programmability of musicOData caching in Windows PhoneSamidip Basu has an OData post up on SilverlightShow also, and he's talking about data caching strategies on WP7How many pins can Bing Maps handle in a WP7 app - part 3Ollie Riches has part 3 of his series on Bing Maps and pins... sepecifically how to deal with a large number of them... after going through discussing pins, he is suggesting using a heat map which looks pretty darn good, and renders fast... except when on a device :(Improvements in the LongListSelector Selection with Nov `11 release of WP ToolkitWindowsPhoneGeek's latest is this tutorial on the LongListSelector in the WP Toolkit... check out the previous info in his free eBook to get ready then dig into this tutorial for improvements in the control.Part 25 - Windows Phone 7 - Device StatusSumit Dutta's latest post is number 25 in his WP7 series, and time out he's digging into device status in the Microsoft.Phone.Info namespaceVideo on How to work with Picture in Windows Phone 7Dhananjay Kumar's latest video tutorial on WP7 is up, and he's talking about working with Photos.Live Tiles–Windows Phone WorkshopDaniel Egan has the video up of a Windows Phone Workshop done earlier this week on Live Tiles31 Days of Mango | Day #15: The Progress BarDoug Mair shares the show with Jeff Blankenburg in Jeff's Day 15 in his 31 Day quest of Mango, talking about the progressbar: Indeterminate and Determinate Modes abound31 Days of Mango | Day #14: Using ODataChris Woodruff has a guest spot on Jeff Blankenburg's 31 Days series with this post on OData... long detailed tutorial with all the codeSilverlight CommandBinding with Simple MVVM ToolkitDebal Saha has a nice detailed tutorial up on CommandBinding.. he's using the SimpleMVVM Toolkit and shows downloading and installing itStay in the 'Light!Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCreamJoin me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User GroupTechnorati Tags:Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows PhoneMIX10

Read the article

C#: My World Clock

- by Bruce Eitman

[Placeholder: I will post the entire project soon] I have been working on cleaning my office of 8 years of stuff from several engineers working on many projects. It turns out that we have a few extra single board computers with displays, so at the end of the day last Friday I though why not create a little application to display the time, you know, a clock. How difficult could that be? It turns out that it is quite simple – until I decided to gold plate the project by adding time displays for our offices around the world. I decided to use C#, which actually made creating the main clock quite easy. The application was simply a text box and a timer. I set the timer to fire a couple of times a second, and when it does use a DateTime object to get the current time and retrieve a string to display. And I could have been done, but of course that gold plating came up. Seems simple enough, simply offset the time from the local time to the location that I want the time for and display it. Sure enough, I had the time displayed for UK, Italy, Kansas City, Japan and China in no time at all. But it is October, and for those of us still stuck with Daylight Savings Time, we know that the clocks are about to change. My first attempt was to simply check to see if the local time was DST or Standard time, then change the offset for China. China doesn’t have Daylight Savings Time. If you know anything about the time changes around the world, you already know that my plan is flawed – in a big way. It turns out that the transitions in and out of DST take place at different times around the world. If you didn’t know that, do a quick search for “Daylight Savings” and you will find many WEB sites dedicated to tracking the time changes dates, and times. Now the real challenge of this application; how do I programmatically find out when the time changes occur and handle them correctly? After a considerable amount of research it turns out that the solution is to read the data from the registry and parse it to figure out when the time changes occur. Reading Time Change Information from the Registry Reading the data from the registry is simple, using the data is a little more complicated. First, reading from the registry can be done like: byte[] binarydata = (byte[])Registry.GetValue("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\Time Zones\\Eastern Standard Time", "TZI", null); Where I have hardcoded the registry key for example purposes, but in the end I will use some variables. We now have a binary blob with the data, but it needs to be converted to use the real data. To start we will need a couple of structs to hold the data and make it usable. We will need a SYSTEMTIME and REG_TZI_FORMAT. You may have expected that we would need a TIME_ZONE_INFORMATION struct, but we don’t. The data is stored in the registry as a REG_TZI_FORMAT, which excludes some of the values found in TIME_ZONE_INFORMATION. struct SYSTEMTIME { internal short wYear; internal short wMonth; internal short wDayOfWeek; internal short wDay; internal short wHour; internal short wMinute; internal short wSecond; internal short wMilliseconds; } struct REG_TZI_FORMAT { internal long Bias; internal long StdBias; internal long DSTBias; internal SYSTEMTIME StandardStart; internal SYSTEMTIME DSTStart; } Now we need to convert the binary blob to a REG_TZI_FORMAT. To do that I created the following helper functions: private void BinaryToSystemTime(ref SYSTEMTIME ST, byte[] binary, int offset) { ST.wYear = (short)(binary[offset + 0] + (binary[offset + 1] << 8)); ST.wMonth = (short)(binary[offset + 2] + (binary[offset + 3] << 8)); ST.wDayOfWeek = (short)(binary[offset + 4] + (binary[offset + 5] << 8)); ST.wDay = (short)(binary[offset + 6] + (binary[offset + 7] << 8)); ST.wHour = (short)(binary[offset + 8] + (binary[offset + 9] << 8)); ST.wMinute = (short)(binary[offset + 10] + (binary[offset + 11] << 8)); ST.wSecond = (short)(binary[offset + 12] + (binary[offset + 13] << 8)); ST.wMilliseconds = (short)(binary[offset + 14] + (binary[offset + 15] << 8)); } private REG_TZI_FORMAT ConvertFromBinary(byte[] binarydata) { REG_TZI_FORMAT RTZ = new REG_TZI_FORMAT(); RTZ.Bias = binarydata[0] + (binarydata[1] << 8) + (binarydata[2] << 16) + (binarydata[3] << 24); RTZ.StdBias = binarydata[4] + (binarydata[5] << 8) + (binarydata[6] << 16) + (binarydata[7] << 24); RTZ.DSTBias = binarydata[8] + (binarydata[9] << 8) + (binarydata[10] << 16) + (binarydata[11] << 24); BinaryToSystemTime(ref RTZ.StandardStart, binarydata, 4 + 4 + 4); BinaryToSystemTime(ref RTZ.DSTStart, binarydata, 4 + 16 + 4 + 4); return RTZ; } I am the first to admit that there may be a better way to get the settings from the registry and into the REG_TXI_FORMAT, but I am not a great C# programmer which I have said before on this blog. So sometimes I chose brute force over elegant. Now that we have the Bias information and the start date information, we can start to make sense of it. The bias is an offset, in minutes, from local time (if already in local time for the time zone in question) to get to UTC – or as Microsoft defines it: UTC = local time + bias. Standard bias is an offset to adjust for standard time, which I think is usually zero. And DST bias is and offset to adjust for daylight savings time. Since we don’t have the local time for a time zone other than the one that the computer is set to, what we first need to do is convert local time to UTC, which is simple enough using: DateTime.Now.ToUniversalTime(); Then, since we have UTC we need to do a little math to alter the formula to: local time = UTC – bias. In other words, we need to subtract the bias minutes. I am ahead of myself though, the standard and DST start dates really aren’t dates. Instead they indicate the month, day of week and week number of the time change. The dDay member of SYSTEM time will be set to the week number of the date change indicating that the change happens on the first, second… day of week of the month. So we need to convert them to dates so that we can determine which bias to use, and when to change to a different bias. To do that, I wrote the following function: private DateTime SystemTimeToDateTimeStart(SYSTEMTIME Time, int Year) { DayOfWeek[] Days = { DayOfWeek.Sunday, DayOfWeek.Monday, DayOfWeek.Tuesday, DayOfWeek.Wednesday, DayOfWeek.Thursday, DayOfWeek.Friday, DayOfWeek.Saturday }; DateTime InfoTime = new DateTime(Year, Time.wMonth, Time.wDay == 1 ? 1 : ((Time.wDay - 1) * 7) + 1, Time.wHour, Time.wMinute, Time.wSecond, DateTimeKind.Utc); DateTime BestGuess = InfoTime; while (BestGuess.DayOfWeek != Days[Time.wDayOfWeek]) { BestGuess = BestGuess.AddDays(1); } return BestGuess; } SystemTimeToDateTimeStart gets two parameters; a SYSTEMTIME and a year. The reason is that we will try this year and next year because we are interested in start dates that are in the future, not the past. The function starts by getting a new Datetime with the first possible date and then looking for the correct date. Using the start dates, we can then determine the correct bias to use, and the next date that time will change: NextTimeChange = StandardChange; CurrentBias = TimezoneSettings.Bias + TimezoneSettings.DSTBias; if (DSTChange.Year != 1 && StandardChange.Year != 1) { if (DSTChange.CompareTo(StandardChange) < 0) { NextTimeChange = DSTChange; CurrentBias = TimezoneSettings.StdBias + TimezoneSettings.Bias; } } else { // I don't like this, but it turns out that China Standard Time // has a DSTBias of -60 on every Windows system that I tested. // So, if no DST transitions, then just use the Bias without // any offset CurrentBias = TimezoneSettings.Bias; } Note that some time zones do not change time, in which case the years will remain set to 1. Further, I found that the registry settings are actually wrong in that the DST Bias is set to -60 for China even though there is not DST in China, so I ignore the standard and DST bias for those time zones. There is one thing that I have not solved, and don’t plan to solve. If the time zone for this computer changes, this application will not update the clock using the new time zone. I tell you this because you may need to deal with it – I do not because I won’t let the user get to the control panel applet to change the timezone. Copyright © 2012 – Bruce Eitman All Rights Reserved

Read the article

Don’t use MySQL .net connector, here is why ?

- by Anirudha

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/anirugu/archive/2013/11/04/donrsquot-use-mysql-.net-connector-here-is-why.aspxIf you use .net mysql connector and all project new or old use different different version of Mysql .net connector then you need to upgrade it to latest (if you don’t use copy local=true for bin assembly). This is not the single problem happen to me. In my case I use .net connector 6.7.4.0 and let’s see what happen to me after I start using it. 6.7.4.0 install register the mysql module in machine.config and it’s broke every software you haven’t deployed with Mysql. Suppose for example I just create a website ( in webmatrix 3) put my index.cshtml and now see what it preview for me. This means I need to add the mysql.Web even I don’t use any kind of database. I need to do every asp.net mvc project no matter they use mysql. it’s problematic when we use older .net mysql connector in some of my project. If you have trouble like this simply use nuget and say Bye bye to this trouble.

Read the article

Windows CE: Newsgroups Shutdown

- by Bruce Eitman

As of June 1, 2010 many of the Windows CE newsgroups have been shut down by Microsoft, and the rest will be shut down by October 1, 2010. This is part of an overall Microsoft strategy to move community from newsgroups to web based forums. The newsgroups have been indexed by Google, so the existing content can and should be searched for answers using http://groups.google.com/advanced_search Microsoft has replaced the newsgroups with http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/windowsembeddedcompact which has forums for OS Development, Managed Application Development and Native Application Development. Note that with the planned release for Q4 2010, Microsoft is renaming Windows Embedded CE to Windows Embedded Compact. This name change is reflected in the forum naming. Copyright © 2010 – Bruce Eitman All Rights Reserved

Read the article

The Open Data Protocol

- by Bobby Diaz

Well, day 2 of the MIX10 conference did not disappoint. The keynote speakers introduced the preview release of IE9, which looks really cool and quick, and Visual Studio 2010 RC that is scheduled to RTM on April 12th. It seemed to have a lot of improvements aimed at making developers more productive. Here are the current links to these two offerings: Internet Explorer 9 – Platform Preview Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 – Release Candidate While both of these were interesting, the demos that really blew me away today centered around the work being done with The Open Data Protocol, or OData for short! OData is a recommended standard being pushed by Microsoft that uses a REST based interface to interact with various types of data in a uniform manner. Data producers then provide the data to consumer in either ATOM or JSON formats as requested by the client application. The OData SDK contains client and server libraries for many of the popular languages in use today, including .NET, Java, PHP, Objective C and JavaScript, so you consume or even produce your own OData services. More information can be found using the following links: OData.org How to navigate an OData compliant service Query Functions (WCF Data Services) Netflix has made available one of the first live OData services by exposing their entire movie catalog. You can browse and query using URLs similar to the following: http://odata.netflix.com/ http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/Genres('Horror')/CatalogTitles http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/CatalogTitles?$filter=startswith(Title/Regular,%20'Star%20Wars')&$orderby=Title/Regular So now I just need to find an excuse reason to start using OData in a real project! Enjoy!

Read the article

Read & Write app.config

- by Rodney Vinyard

Imports System.Configuration Public Class Form1 Private Sub Form1_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load Dim config As System.Configuration.Configuration = ConfigurationManager.OpenExeConfiguration(ConfigurationUserLevel.None) Me.txtFromFolder.Text = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings("fromFolder") Me.txtToFolder.Text = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings("toFolder") End Sub Private Sub Form1_FormClosing(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.Windows.Forms.FormClosingEventArgs) Handles MyBase.FormClosing 'to write Dim config As System.Configuration.Configuration = ConfigurationManager.OpenExeConfiguration(ConfigurationUserLevel.None) config.AppSettings.Settings.Remove("fromFolder") config.AppSettings.Settings.Add("fromFolder", txtFromFolder.Text.Trim) config.AppSettings.Settings.Remove("toFolder") config.AppSettings.Settings.Add("toFolder", txtToFolder.Text.Trim) config.Save(ConfigurationSaveMode.Modified) ConfigurationManager.RefreshSection("appSettings") End Sub

Read the article

Useful link for Xpath Query Testing

- by Arvind Chaudhary

Following link is very useful to test xpath query instantly http://www.xmlme.com/XpathTool.aspx Cheers, Arvind Chaudhary

Read the article

Wheaties Fuel = Wheaties FAIL

- by Steve Bargelt

Are you kidding me? What a load of nutritional CRAP. Don’t buy this product. Just don’t do it. They are just like Wheaties with more sugar and fat. Awesome just what we need more sugar!! Okay now I’m not against carbs… I’m really not. Being a cyclist I realize the importance of carbohydrates in the diet… but let’s be realistic here. Even though the commercials for Wheaties Fuel say they are for athletes you know that what General Mills is really hoping for is that kids will see Payton Manning, Albert Pujols and KG and buy this cereal and eat a ton of it for breakfast. Sad, really. I’ve watched all the videos and read all the propaganda on the Wheaties Fuel web site and no where do they talk about why they added sugar and fat the original Wheaties. There is a lot of double-speak by Dr. Ivy about “understanding the needs of athletes.” I had to laugh – in one of the videos Dr. Ivy even says that he thinks the "new Wheaties will have even more fiber! Wrong! My bad... there is 5g of fiber not 3g per serving. Just Way more sugar. A serving of FROSTED FLAKES has less sugar per serving!!! Wheaties Fuel Wheaties Frosted Flakes Honey Nut Cheerios Quaker Oatmeal Serving Size 3/4 cup 3/4 cup 3/4 cup 3/4 cup 3/4 cup Calories 210 100 110 110 225 Fat 3g .5g 0g 1.5g 4.5g Protein 3g 3g 1g 2g 7.5g Carbohydrates 46g 22g 27g 22g 40.5g Sugars 14g 4g 11g 9g 1.5g Fiber 5g 3g 1g 2g 6g In reality it might not be a bad pre-workout meal but for a normal day-in-day-out breakfast is just seems to have too much sugar - especially when you bump the serving size up to 1 to 1.5 cups and add milk! I’ll stick with Oatmeal, thank you very much.

Read the article

Caching in the .NET Stack: Inside-Out

- by Elton Stoneman

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2013/06/28/caching-in-the-.net-stack-inside-out.aspxI'm delighted to have my first course published on Pluralsight - Caching in the .NET Stack: Inside-out. It's a pretty comprehensive look at caching in .NET solutions. The first half covers using local, remote and persistent cache stores inside the solution, including the .NET MemoryCache, NCache Express, AppFabric Caching, memcached, Azure Table Storage and local disk stores. The second half covers caching outside the solution in HTTP clients and proxies, and how to set up ASP.NET WebForms, MVC, Web API and WCF projects to use HTTP validation and expiration caching. The course takes a hands-on approach, starting with a distributed solution that has no caching, analysing key points which can benefit from caching, and adding different types of cache. At the end of the course I run through a set of before and after performance tests, stressing the solution under load. Without caching and with 60 concurrent users the page response time maxes out at 18 seconds - with caching that falls to 2 seconds, so it's a huge improvement from very little effort. I’d be glad to hear feedback if you watch the course, especially if it’s as positive as my editor’s.

Read the article

International Radio Operators Alphabet in F# & Silverlight – Part 1

- by MarkPearl

So I have been delving into F# more and more and thought the best way to learn the language is to write something useful. I have been meaning to get some more Silverlight knowledge (up to now I have mainly been doing WPF) so I came up with a really simple project that I can actually use at work. Simply put – I often get support calls from clients wanting new activation codes. One of our main app’s was written in VB6 and had its own “security” where it would require about a 45 character sequence for it to be activated. The catch being that each time you reopen the program it would require a different character sequence, which meant that when we activate clients systems we have to do it live! This involves us either referring them to a website, or reading the characters to them over the phone and since nobody in the office knows the IROA off by heart we would come up with some interesting words to represent characters… 9 times out of 10 the client would type in the wrong character and we would have to start all over again… with this app I am hoping to reduce the errors of reading characters over the phone by treating it like a ham radio. My “Silverlight” application will allow for the user to input a series of characters and the system will then generate the equivalent IROA words… very basic stuff e.g. Character Input – abc Words Generated – Alpha Bravo Charlie After listening to Anders Hejlsberg on Dot Net Rocks Show 541 he mentioned that he felt many applications could make use of F# but in an almost silo basis – meaning that you would write modules that leant themselves to Functional Programming in F# and then incorporate it into a solution where the front end may be in C# or where you would have some other sort of glue. I buy into this kind of approach, so in this project I will use F# to do my very intensive “Business Logic” and will use Silverlight/C# to do the front end. F# Business Layer I am no expert at this, so I am sure to get some feedback on way I could improve my algorithm. My approach was really simple. I would need a function that would convert a single character to a string – i.e. ‘A’ –> “Alpha” and then I would need a function that would take a string of characters, convert them into a sequence of characters, and then apply my converter to return a sequence of words… make sense? Lets start with the CharToString function let CharToString (element:char) = match element.ToString().ToLower() with | "1" -> "1" | "5" -> "5" | "9" -> "9" | "2" -> "2" | "6" -> "6" | "0" -> "0" | "3" -> "3" | "7" -> "7" | "4" -> "4" | "8" -> "8" | "a" -> "Alpha" | "b" -> "Bravo" | "c" -> "Charlie" | "d" -> "Delta" | "e" -> "Echo" | "f" -> "Foxtrot" | "g" -> "Golf" | "h" -> "Hotel" | "i" -> "India" | "j" -> "Juliet" | "k" -> "Kilo" | "l" -> "Lima" | "m" -> "Mike" | "n" -> "November" | "o" -> "Oscar" | "p" -> "Papa" | "q" -> "Quebec" | "r" -> "Romeo" | "s" -> "Sierra" | "t" -> "Tango" | "u" -> "Uniform" | "v" -> "Victor" | "w" -> "Whiskey" | "x" -> "XRay" | "y" -> "Yankee" | "z" -> "Zulu" | element -> "Unknown" Quite simple, an element is passed in, this element is them converted to a lowercase single character string and then matched up with the equivalent word. If by some chance a character is not recognized, “Unknown” will be returned… I know need a function that can take a string and can parse each character of the string and generate a new sequence with the converted words… let ConvertCharsToStrings (s:string) = s |> Seq.toArray |> Seq.map(fun elem -> CharToString(elem)) Here… the Seq.toArray converts the string to a sequence of characters. I then searched for some way to parse through every element in the sequence. Originally I tried Seq.iter, but I think my understanding of what iter does was incorrect. Eventually I found Seq.map, which applies a function to every element in a sequence and then creates a new collection with the adjusted processed element. It turned out to be exactly what I needed… To test that everything worked I created one more function that parsed through every element in a sequence and printed it. AT this point I realized the the Seq.iter would be ideal for this… So my testing code is below… let PrintStrings items = items |> Seq.iter(fun x -> Console.Write(x.ToString() + " ")) let newSeq = ConvertCharsToStrings("acdefg123") PrintStrings newSeq Console.ReadLine() Pretty basic stuff I guess… I hope my approach was right? In Part 2 I will look into doing a simple Silverlight Frontend, referencing the projects together and deploying….

Read the article

HTML5 and Visual Studio 2010

- by Harish Ranganathan

All of us work with Visual Studio (or the free Visual Web Developer Express Edition) for developing web applications targeting ASP.NET / ASP.NET MVC or Silverlight etc., Over the years, Visual Studio has grown to a great extent. From being a simple limited functionality tool in VS.NET 2002 to the multi-faceted, MEF driven Visual Studio 2010, it has come a long way. And as much as Visual Studio supports rapid web development by generating HTML mark up, it also added intellisense for some of the HTML specifications that one has otherwise monotonously type every time. Ex.- In Visual Studio 2010, one can just type the angular bracket “<” and then the first keyword “h” or “x” for html or xhtml respectively and then press tab twice and it would render the entire markup required for XHTML or HTML 1.0/1.1 strict/transitional and the fully qualified W3C URL. The same holds good for specifying HTML type declaration. Now, the difference between HTML and XHTML has been discussed in detail already, though, if you are interested to know, you can read it from http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/xhtml_html.asp But, the industry trend or the buzz around is HTML5. With browsers like IE9 Beta, Google Chrome, Firefox 4 etc., supporting HTML5 standards big time, everyone wants to start developing HTML5 based websites. VS developers (like me) often get the question around when would VS start supporting HTML5. VS 2010 was released last year and HTML5 is still specifications under development. Clearly, with the timelines we started developing Visual Studio (way back in 2008), HTML5 specs were almost non-existent. Even today, the HTML5 body recommends not to fully depend on the entire mark up set as they are still under development specs and might change in the future. However, with Visual Studio 2010 SP1 beta, there is quite a bit of support for HTML5 based web development. In fact, one of my colleagues pointed out that SP1 beta’s major enhancement is its ability to support HTML5 tags and even add server mode to them. Lets look at the existing validation schema available in Visual Studio (Tools – Options – Validation) This is before installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta. Clearly, the validation options are restricted to HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1 transitional and below. Also, lets consider using some of the new HTML5 input type elements. (I found out this, just today from my friend, also an, ASP.NET team member) <input type=”email”> is one of the new input type elements according to the HTML5 specification. Now, this works well if you type it as is in Visual Studio and the page renders without any issue (since the default behaviour is, if there is an “undefined” type specified to input tag, it would fall back on the default mode, which is text. The moment you add <input type=”email” runat=”server” >, you get an error Naturally you don’t get intellisense support as well for these new tags. Once you install Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 Beta from here (it takes a while so you need to be patient for the installation to complete), you will start getting additional Validation templates for HTML5, as below:- Once you set this, you can start using HTML5 elements in your web page without getting errors/warnings. Look at the screen shot below, for the new “video” tag which is showing up in intellisense (video is a part of the new HTML5 specifications) note that, you still need to hook up the <!DOCTYPE html /> on the top manually as it doesn’t change automatically (from the default XHTML 1.0 strict) when you create a new page. Also, the new input type tags in HTML5 are also supported One, can also use the <asp:TextBox type=”email” which would in turn generate the <input type=”email”> markup when the page is rendered. In fact, as of SP1 beta, this is the only way to put the new input type tags with the runat=”server” attribute (otherwise you will get the parser error mentioned above. This issue would be fixed by the final release of SP1 beta) Going further, there may be more support for having server tags for some of the common HTML5 elements, but this is work in progress currently. So, other than not having runat=”server” support for the new HTML5 input tags, you can pretty much build and target HTML5 websites with Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta, today. For those who are running Visual Studio 2008, you also have the “HTML5 intellisense for Visual Studio 2010 and 2008” available for download, from http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/d771cbc8-d60a-40b0-a1d8-f19fc393127d/ Note that, if you are running Visual Studio 2010, the recommended approach is to install the SP1 beta which would be the way forward for HTML5 support in Visual Studio. Of course, you need to test these on a browser supporting HTML5 such as IE9 Beta or Chrome or FireFox 4. You can download IE9 Beta from here You can also follow the Visual Web Developer Team Blog for more updates on the stuff they are building. Cheers !!!

Read the article

CAML Query Utility by U2U

- by Wayne H Magnum

This is a great utility which i have used countless times to generate CAML Queries. Enjoy.... http://www.u2u.net/res/Tools/CamlQueryBuilder.aspx

Read the article

Reflections on Life

- by MOSSLover

I haven’t written a blog post in a while. I understand there is blog neglect going on, but there is a lot going on in my life. I am trying really hard to embrace the change and roll with everything thrown my way. I had a really hard year it was not my best and it was not my worst. I cannot say it was entirely hard, because January 1st I received the MVP Award. If you know me you know the three things that happened starting in August, but if you really know me it was miserable for a substantial period of time prior to August. There was some personal life issues I neglected to deal with that came into a headway. Anyway I’d like to think that as of today I am doing much better. I finally went to Paris and London. I found out I love Paris and Nottingham. I think that London is something I need to visit a few more times. I would love to go back to the UK and France. I think I’d love to live overseas someday, but not anytime soon. The past few weeks were like a whirlwind experience. I felt like I had been sitting around for months just waiting for this trip and the big move. Maybe it was something I was waiting to do for several years. I needed a big change. I needed to get unstuck. I feel like August, however horrible it was, helped me get to the point where I am somewhere happy. For at least two years I have been miserable outside of my work (community and otherwise). I was just downright unhappy. One of my coworkers said that my tweets were just horrible this past year. Depressing might I add. I agree they were incredibly depressing for the past several years. But things are on an upturn. I decided a month or so ago that I was going to do all the things I have wanted to do without looking back. So I dove into this trip and into this move to NYC head first. I was scared for a bit and I didn’t think it would come through. Everyone friend-wise and coworker-wise has helped me accomplish this great feat. I am now a New Yorker and as of January 1st 100% living in the city. Thank you for those who have checked up on me. Thank you for those who listened to all my problems and continue to do so. Thank you to everyone who has helped me through this really terrible time. You guys mean the world to me. You are my friends. Some of you I have not met and some of you I barely know. I have been to a lot of events where people just walked up to me and asked me if I was doing ok. I will continue to keep moving forward one foot in front of the other. If I ever get so down again please remind me about this year. I hope to see you all in the upcoming year as I attend more events. Have a good night or a good morning or a good afternoon. I will catch you all later. Technorati Tags: Life,2011,Disaster Year,Happinness

Read the article

TechEd 2012 - last day

- by Stefan Barrett

Miss when TechEd was 5 days long!, it's Thursday already and we are on the last day. The snacks haven't appeared, but more developer sessions have. Having access to online schedule is very important, since the new sessions are usually the more interesting ones. On the whole, I think the wifi network has been worse this year - more blank spots, and more areas where performance is bad. I do think its funny that I get better reception on my iPad than my phones (iPad & Nokia/Microsoft). There seems to be less areas for people to plug in their own laptops this year - I do wonder, since more and more people have smart phones, and since most of the attendees are from America, perhaps they are not using the wifi - but rather their own phone provider. If I was in Japan, I would probably do the same. About to attend a session on F#, something which is probably going to be important for me over the next year.

Read the article

Fixing up Configurations in BizTalk Solution Files

- by Elton Stoneman

Just a quick one this, but useful for mature BizTalk solutions, where over time the configuration settings can get confused, meaning Debug configurations building in Release mode, or Deployment configurations building in Development mode. That can cause issues in the build which aren't obvious, so it's good to fix up the configurations. It's time-consuming in VS or in a text editor, so this bit of PowerShell may come in useful - just substitute your own solution path in the $path variable: $path = 'C:\x\y\z\x.y.z.Integration.sln' $backupPath = [System.String]::Format('{0}.bak', $path) [System.IO.File]::Copy($path, $backupPath, $True) $sln = [System.IO.File]::ReadAllText($path) $sln = $sln.Replace('.Debug|.NET.Build.0 = Deployment|.NET', '.Debug|.NET.Build.0 = Development|.NET') $sln = $sln.Replace('.Debug|.NET.Deploy.0 = Deployment|.NET', '.Debug|.NET.Deploy.0 = Development|.NET') $sln = $sln.Replace('.Debug|Any CPU.ActiveCfg = Deployment|.NET', '.Debug|Any CPU.ActiveCfg = Development|.NET') $sln = $sln.Replace('.Deployment|.NET.ActiveCfg = Debug|Any CPU', '.Deployment|.NET.ActiveCfg = Release|Any CPU') $sln = $sln.Replace('.Deployment|Any CPU.ActiveCfg = Debug|Any CPU', '.Deployment|Any CPU.ActiveCfg = Release|Any CPU') $sln = $sln.Replace('.Deployment|Any CPU.Build.0 = Debug|Any CPU', '.Deployment|Any CPU.Build.0 = Release|Any CPU') $sln = $sln.Replace('.Deployment|Mixed Platforms.ActiveCfg = Debug|Any CPU', '.Deployment|Mixed Platforms.ActiveCfg = Release|Any CPU') $sln = $sln.Replace('.Deployment|Mixed Platforms.Build.0 = Debug|Any CPU', '.Deployment|Mixed Platforms.Build.0 = Release|Any CPU') $sln = $sln.Replace('.Deployment|.NET.ActiveCfg = Debug|Any CPU', '.Deployment|.NET.ActiveCfg = Release|Any CPU') $sln = $sln.Replace('.Debug|.NET.ActiveCfg = Deployment|.NET', '.Debug|.NET.ActiveCfg = Development|.NET') [System.IO.File]::WriteAllText($path, $sln) The script creates a backup of the solution file first, and then fixes up all the configs to use the correct builds. It's a simple search and replace list, so if there are any patterns that need to be added let me know and I'll update the script. A RegEx replace would be neater, but when it comes to hacking solution files, I prefer the conservative approach of knowing exactly what you're changing.

Read the article

F# for the C# Programmer

- by mbcrump

Are you a C# Programmer and can’t make it past a day without seeing or hearing someone mention F#? Today, I’m going to walk you through your first F# application and give you a brief introduction to the language. Sit back this will only take about 20 minutes. Introduction Microsoft's F# programming language is a functional language for the .NET framework that was originally developed at Microsoft Research Cambridge by Don Syme. In October 2007, the senior vice president of the developer division at Microsoft announced that F# was being officially productized to become a fully supported .NET language and professional developers were hired to create a team of around ten people to build the product version. In September 2008, Microsoft released the first Community Technology Preview (CTP), an official beta release, of the F# distribution . In December 2008, Microsoft announced that the success of this CTP had encouraged them to escalate F# and it is now will now be shipped as one of the core languages in Visual Studio 2010 , alongside C++, C# 4.0 and VB. The F# programming language incorporates many state-of-the-art features from programming language research and ossifies them in an industrial strength implementation that promises to revolutionize interactive, parallel and concurrent programming. Advantages of F# F# is the world's first language to combine all of the following features: Type inference: types are inferred by the compiler and generic definitions are created automatically. Algebraic data types: a succinct way to represent trees. Pattern matching: a comprehensible and efficient way to dissect data structures. Active patterns: pattern matching over foreign data structures. Interactive sessions: as easy to use as Python and Mathematica. High performance JIT compilation to native code: as fast as C#. Rich data structures: lists and arrays built into the language with syntactic support. Functional programming: first-class functions and tail calls. Expressive static type system: finds bugs during compilation and provides machine-verified documentation. Sequence expressions: interrogate huge data sets efficiently. Asynchronous workflows: syntactic support for monadic style concurrent programming with cancellations. Industrial-strength IDE support: multithreaded debugging, and graphical throwback of inferred types and documentation. Commerce friendly design and a viable commercial market. Lets try a short program in C# then F# to understand the differences. Using C#: Create a variable and output the value to the console window: Sample Program. using System; namespace ConsoleApplication9 { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var a = 2; Console.WriteLine(a); Console.ReadLine(); } } } A breeze right? 14 Lines of code. We could have condensed it a bit by removing the “using” statment and tossing the namespace. But this is the typical C# program. Using F#: Create a variable and output the value to the console window: To start, open Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio 2008. Note: If using VS2008, then please download the SDK first before getting started. If you are using VS2010 then you are already setup and ready to go. So, click File-> New Project –> Other Languages –> Visual F# –> Windows –> F# Application. You will get the screen below. Go ahead and enter a name and click OK. Now, you will notice that the Solution Explorer contains the following: Double click the Program.fs and enter the following information. Hit F5 and it should run successfully. Sample Program. open System let a = 2 Console.WriteLine a As Shown below: Hmm, what? F# did the same thing in 3 lines of code. Show me the interactive evaluation that I keep hearing about. The F# development environment for Visual Studio 2010 provides two different modes of execution for F# code: Batch compilation to a .NET executable or DLL. (This was accomplished above). Interactive evaluation. (Demo is below) The interactive session provides a > prompt, requires a double semicolon ;; identifier at the end of a code snippet to force evaluation, and returns the names (if any) and types of resulting definitions and values. To access the F# prompt, in VS2010 Goto View –> Other Window then F# Interactive. Once you have the interactive window type in the following expression: 2+3;; as shown in the screenshot below: I hope this guide helps you get started with the language, please check out the following books for further information. F# Books for further reading Foundations of F# Author: Robert Pickering An introduction to functional programming with F#. Including many samples, this book walks through the features of the F# language and libraries, and covers many of the .NET Framework features which can be leveraged with F#. Functional Programming for the Real World: With Examples in F# and C# Authors: Tomas Petricek and Jon Skeet An introduction to functional programming for existing C# developers written by Tomas Petricek and Jon Skeet. This book explains the core principles using both C# and F#, shows how to use functional ideas when designing .NET applications and presents practical examples such as design of domain specific language, development of multi-core applications and programming of reactive applications.

Read the article

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. :)

Read the article

UppercuT – Custom Extensions Now With PowerShell and Ruby

- by Robz / Fervent Coder

Arguably, one of the most powerful features of UppercuT (UC) is the ability to extend any step of the build process with a pre, post, or replace hook. This customization is done in a separate location from the build so you can upgrade without wondering if you broke the build. There is a hook before each step of the build has run. There is a hook after. And back to power again, there is a replacement hook. If you don’t like what the step is doing and/or you want to replace it’s entire functionality, you just drop a custom replacement extension and UppercuT will perform the custom step instead. Up until recently all custom hooks had to be written in NAnt. Now they are a little sweeter because you no longer need to use NAnt to extend UC if you don’t want to. You can use PowerShell. Or Ruby. Let that sink in for a moment. You don’t have to even need to interact with NAnt at all now. Extension Points On the wiki, all of the extension points are shown. The basic idea is that you would put whatever customization you are doing in a separate folder named build.custom. Each step Let’s take a look at all we can customize: The start point is default.build. It calls build.custom/default.pre.build if it exists, then it runs build/default.build (normal tasks) OR build.custom/default.replace.build if it exists, and finally build.custom/default.post.build if it exists. Every step below runs with the same extension points but changes on the file name it is looking for. NOTE: If you include default.replace.build, nothing else will run because everything is called from default.build. * policyChecks.step * versionBuilder.step NOTE: If you include build.custom/versionBuilder.replace.step, the items below will not run. - svn.step, tfs.step, or git.step (the custom tasks for these need to go in build.custom/versioners) * generateBuildInfo.step * compile.step * environmentBuilder.step * analyze.step NOTE: If you include build.custom/analyze.replace.step, the items below will not run. - test.step (the custom tasks for this need to go in build.custom/analyzers) NOTE: If you include build.custom/analyzers/test.replace.step, the items below will not run. + mbunit2.step, gallio.step, or nunit.step (the custom tasks for these need to go in build.custom/analyzers) - ncover.step (the custom tasks for this need to go in build.custom/analyzers) - ndepend.step (the custom tasks for this need to go in build.custom/analyzers) - moma.step (the custom tasks for this need to go in build.custom/analyzers) * package.step NOTE: If you include build.custom/package.replace.step, the items below will not run. - deploymentBuilder.step Customize UppercuT Builds With PowerShell UppercuT can now be extended with PowerShell (PS). To customize any extension point with PS, just add .ps1 to the end of the file name and write your custom tasks in PowerShell. If you are not signing your scripts you will need to change a setting in the UppercuT.config file. This does impose a security risk, because this allows PS to now run any PS script. This setting stays that way on ANY machine that runs the build until manually changed by someone. I’m not responsible if you mess up your machine or anyone else’s by doing this. You’ve been warned. Now that you are fully aware of any security holes you may open and are okay with that, let’s move on. Let’s create a file called default.replace.build.ps1 in the build.custom folder. Open that file in notepad and let’s add this to it: write-host "hello - I'm a custom task written in Powershell!" Now, let’s run build.bat. You could get some PSake action going here. I won’t dive into that in this post though. Customize UppercuT Builds With Ruby If you want to customize any extension point with Ruby, just add .rb to the end of the file name and write your custom tasks in Ruby. Let’s write a custom ruby task for UC. If you were thinking it would be the same as the one we just wrote for PS, you’d be right! In the build.custom folder, lets create a file called default.replace.build.rb. Open that file in notepad and let’s put this in there: puts "I'm a custom ruby task!" Now, let’s run build.bat again. That’s chunky bacon. UppercuT and Albacore.NET Just for fun, I wanted to see if I could replace the compile.step with a Rake task. Not just any rake task, Albacore’s msbuild task. Albacore is a suite of rake tasks brought about by Derick Bailey to make building .NET with Rake easier. It has quite a bit of support with developers that are using Rake to build code. In my build.custom folder, I drop a compile.replace.step.rb. I also put in a separate file that will contain my Albacore rake task and I call that compile.rb. What are the contents of compile.replace.step.rb? rake = 'rake' arguments= '-f ' + Dir.pwd + '/../build.custom/compile.rb' #puts "Calling #{rake} " + arguments system("#{rake} " + arguments) Since the custom extensions call ruby, we have to shell back out and call rake. That’s what we are doing here. We also realize that ruby is called from the build folder, so we need to back out and dive into the build.custom folder to find the file that is technically next to us. What are the contents of compile.rb? require 'rubygems' require 'fileutils' require 'albacore' task :default => [:compile] puts "Using Ruby to compile UppercuT with Albacore Tasks" desc 'Compile the source' msbuild :compile do |msb| msb.properties = { :configuration => :Release, :outputpath => '../../build_output/UppercuT' } msb.targets [:clean, :build] msb.verbosity = "quiet" msb.path_to_command = 'c:/Windows/Microsoft.NET/Framework/v3.5/MSBuild.exe' msb.solution = '../uppercut.sln' end We are using the msbuild task here. We change the output path to the build_output/UppercuT folder. The output path has “../../” because this is based on every project. We could grab the current directory and then point the task specifically to a folder if we have projects that are at different levels. We want the verbosity to be quiet so we set that as well. So what kind of output do you get for this? Let’s run build.bat custom_tasks_replace: [echo] Running custom tasks instead of normal tasks if C:\code\uppercut\build\..\build.custom\compile.replace.step exists. [exec] (in C:/code/uppercut/build) [exec] Using Ruby to compile UppercuT with Albacore Tasks [exec] Microsoft (R) Build Engine Version 3.5.30729.4926 [exec] [Microsoft .NET Framework, Version 2.0.50727.4927] [exec] Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 2007. All rights reserved. If you think this is awesome, you’d be right! With this knowledge you shall build.

Search Results

Search found 17192 results on 688 pages for 'geeks with blogs'.

Page 78/688 | < Previous Page | 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 | Next Page >

- by Valter Minute

- by Matt Christian

- by Rainer Habermann

- by Chris W. Rea

- by Nikita Polyakov

- by Michael Stephenson

- by Tim Murphy

- by Dave Campbell

- by Bruce Eitman

- by Anirudha

- by Bruce Eitman

- by Bobby Diaz

- by Rodney Vinyard

- by Arvind Chaudhary

- by Steve Bargelt

- by Elton Stoneman

- by MarkPearl

- by Harish Ranganathan

- by Wayne H Magnum

- by MOSSLover

- by Stefan Barrett

- by Elton Stoneman

- by mbcrump

- by Steve Michelotti

- by Robz / Fervent Coder

< Previous Page | 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 | Next Page >