Latest News from Silverlight Developer's Journal

How to Resolve “Invalid Data” Error in Microsoft Windows

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:15:00 EST

There are some Windows users who do not know about the slipstream. This is actually a fix, upgrade or enhancement to the operating system without creating new version to identify its changes. This is a quick and easy way to get specified updates. It is generally done for security updates and some hotfixes. But in some situations, after this operation, your system may start behaving strangely and may not start properly. This behavior renders all of your valuable files on the hard drive inaccessible and cause critical file loss situations. At this point, File Recovery solutions are required to get your missing, lost or inaccessible files back.

Chinese Court Orders Windows Off the Market

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:00:00 EST

A court in China, where most software is pirated, has ordered Microsoft to stop selling the Chinese versions of its operating systems because they infringe on fonts owned by a Chinese company called Zhongyi Electronic. Microsoft says it has a license from Zhongyi and will appeal. Zhongyi says the license only applies to Windows 95.

Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) Release Candidate Is Out

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:45:00 EST

I'm not sure how all this managed to slip by me, but apparently last Friday the Windows Identity Foundation Release Candidate was unleashed on the world. Now keep in mind that this is not the ADFS v2 server, this is the foundational plumbing on which ADFS v2 will run. Good news, though, is that if you're like me and you're using WIF to build your own STS websites, then the RC will suit you just fine and you don't have to wait for the ADFS v2.

Anyway, if you'd like to get your hands on some WIF action, click here for the download link.

It doesn't appear as though there are a lot of changes in the framework itself, though I think there are some possible breaking namespace changes but, I'm still downloading it so I don't know at this point. Also, you might want to pick up the Identity Training Kit. It has been revised and there's a new installer for the samples that works on Windows 7 that actually works and installs the SSL certs properly. Previous versions of the ID kit required lots of manual futzing around to get things to work properly with UAC and permissions and the whole "Internet Zone" download issue.

Enjoy!

Setting up an ASP.NET MVC 2 Application for Windows Azure

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:30:00 EST

Yesterday, Microsoft released another update to the Windows Azure SDK. This update includes a truckload of new goodies that I will be covering in additional blog posts. For this blog post, however, I want to walk you through getting an ASP.NET MVC 2 application working on Windows Azure in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. Now that Azure and VS2010 are finally starting to sync up, the amount of raw goodness coming out of Redmond cannot be measured. First, install the Windows Azure SDK and the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio, making sure you pay attention to all of the installation details. There are lots of little hotfixes and things that you might need. Luckily, if you're running VS2010 Beta 2 on Windows 7, you have very little extra work to do beyond configuring IIS 7 for WCF HTTP activation.

Microsoft Co-Founder Has Cancer Again

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:45:00 EST

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, 56, one of the richest men in the world, is suffering from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, according to his sister Jody Allen, the CEO of Vulcan Inc, his private asset management company. Allen left Microsoft in 1983 to undergo radiation treatment and bone marrow transplant for Hodgkin's disease and, although successful, he never returned to Microsoft.

SQL Server Management Studio Support for SQL Azure

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 05:00:00 EST

The long awaited build of SQL Server Management Studio with support for SQL Azure is available today for MSDN and TechNet subscribers and will be generally available for the rest of the world as of tomorrow. The download page can be found here. This support is included as part of the November CTP release of SQL Server 2008 R2. This release not only includes SQL Azure support from within SSMS but a wealth of other SQL Server 2008 specific features. Check out this blog entry for more.

Win7 Makes Early Difference

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:15:00 EST

Morgan Stanley was keeping its eye on NPD data the week Windows 7 came out and, although it’s nothing to hang your hat on, said it showed a 40% spike in PC sales year-over-year after only three days of Win7 availability. It also said PC inventories were still below average.

Likewise Wants To Move the Moochers

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:45:00 EST

Likewise, which authenticates Linux, Unix and Mac users with Microsoft Active Directory, has started offering three starter packs that combine its Enterprise software with support and training services. They are designed to move customers from the company’s open source software to Likewise Enterprise. Likewise Enterprise controls access to applications and data, centrally manages settings with group policies and creates reports for regulatory audits. It’s also the only solution to provide 100% native support for Apple’s Workgroup Manager application.

Red Hat Virtualization for Servers Goes GA

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:00:00 EST

The company says “extensive collaboration with large enterprise beta customers, such as Comviva, Host Europe, NTT Communications, Qualcomm and Swisscom, resulted in enhanced product capabilities designed to meet enterprise requirements for deploying and managing heterogeneous virtualization and cloud environments.” It didn’t say what exactly. The widgetry includes a standalone, lightweight, secure, high-performance KVM hypervisor designed to host Linux and Windows virtual servers and desktops whose memory-sharing technology reportedly permits more efficient guest consolidation and enterprise features such as live migration.

Browser Underdogs Want Ballot Screen Changes

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:45:00 EST

Microsoft’s browser rivals aren’t satisfied with the tentative “ballot screen” settlement that the company came to with the European Commission, which would offer all its European users a chance to download a rival browser. Google, Mozilla and Opera want changes made. According to the New York Times, Mozilla doesn’t like the idea of the top five browsers by market share in Europe would appear in a row alphabetically from left to right. That would put Apple’s Safari first. Mozilla doesn’t think that’s fair on the theory it would give Safari – not your first thought for an Internet Explorer substitute – an advantage; it wants them to appear randomly.

International Product Communication at SMA Solar Technology AG

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:15:00 EST

SMA Solar Technology AG, listed in the TecDAX of the Frankfurt stock exchange since last year, is the world market leader in photovoltaic inverters, a central component of every solar system. With subsidiaries in eleven countries on four continents, the product and company communication volume, too, has grown considerably. SMA Solar Technology AG has been using the Across Language Server as the central platform for all language resources and translation processes since 2008. It is seamlessly connected to the SCHEMA ST4 editorial system and other interacting systems.

LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework on top of SQL Azure

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 18:00:00 EDT

As mentioned in my previous blog post, you don't get full designer support on SQL Azure within SQL Server Management Studio. In addition, you don't get designer support for LINQ to SQL or Entity Framework, either. So what do you do if you want to take advantage of these awesome object mapping tools but the designers don't work directly against the cloud?

Conveniently enough, if you follow the tips in the previous blog post, you would have already created a local copy of your SQL Azure database. The "trick" (not really a trick at all, just not immediately obvious) is to point your EF or LINQ to SQL Visual Studio projects at your local database. This will give these mappers the schema and relationship information they need in order to create the appropriate conceptual<->relational mappings.

For LINQ to SQL, all you need to do is replace the connection string that it adds to your app.Config file with the connection string supplied by the sql.azure.com portal. Remember to include your password in this connection string because the portal copies a version of this string to your clipboard with the password of myPassword. At this point you should also be thinking to yourself, "Wow, I just put a cleartext password in a .config file. It's a really good thing that this code isn't going to sit on someone's desktop and will be protected in the cloud."

With Entity Framework, the connection string is a little more complicated. There's some entity stuff in there that points to the various model definition files in the project and then there's an embedded connection string. Replace the embedded connection string (take care to maintain the escaping of nested quotes, etc) with the one the SQL Azure portal supplied and change the password to reflect the right password.

At this point you should have been able to generate a model from your local database and then change the connection string so that the actual data comes from the cloud database. It might seem a little inconvenient but it isn't really all that bad. It just adds a few extra steps to your SDLC when you need to change the schema of a live application.

The feeling I got when I ran my first LINQ to Entities query against a cloud-based SQL Server database was overwhelming. Sure I love new technology as much as the next guy, but the possibilities that are being opened for developers by Windows Azure and cloud computing in general are so numerous it's hard to contain myself.

This is a damn good time to be a developer.

Solution Dependencies in SharePoint 2010

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 10:45:00 EDT

With MOSS 2007, I often got asked what order do I install these solution packages in. Oftentimes, it was critical that they get installed in a particular order. With features, we have had the ability to set dependencies, but we really didn’t have anything like that for solution packages. Well, I haven’t heard people talking about this new feature yet, but we can in fact set solution dependencies in the manifest.xml file.

Quick Overview of Master Pages in SharePoint 2010

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 09:45:00 EDT

SharePoint 2010 brings a few new master pages that you may want to know about. There are additional master pages to accommodate both the old and new versions of UI. There are also some simplified pages to take note in. The first master page we will talk about is v4.master. This is the default team site master page used with version 4 (obviously) of the UI. This will be the master page you typically use. It provides the ribbon bar and all of the other new visual UI changes such as the site actions menu on the left side.

Microsoft Nudges Eclipse Developers to Windows-Ware

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:00:00 EDT

Microsoft was in one of its interoperability moods Wednesday and said that developers using Eclipse, the great open source IDE, will be able to target Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, its Azure cloud operating system and Silverlight. This renewed open source invasion – Microsoft’s no stranger to Eclipse although it’s not a member – is being spearheaded by two open source allies of Microsoft: Canada’s Tasktop Technologies for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, and France’s Soyatec for Azure and Silverlight. Tasktop’s CEO, by the way, created Eclipse’s Mylyn project.

Top Low Hanging Fruit to Performance Optimize Your Web Site

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 22:15:00 EDT

Web Page Performance was one of the big topics at the Ajax Experience in Boston this week. Steve Souders - author of High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites - talked about the top things to look into when analyzing web page performance.

Creating and Manipulating Your SQL Azure Database

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:45:00 EDT

So after the long and torturous wait, you're now in the SQL Azure CTP and you are ready to get the ball rolling with your fabulous, shiny new cloud-based SQL database server. Now what? Well, the first thing you're going to need to do is create a database.

To do that, you'll go to sql.azure.com and follow the directions to sign in - if you haven't already supplied the invite key you'll need to supply it after you sign in the first time. Select your project and click on it. At this point you'll see a pretty sparse management screen with two tabs: databases and firewall settings. On the database tab, create a new database (its up to you whether you create a 1GB or a 10GB max database). After you've created it, you'll be able to click the Connection Strings button to get an ADO.NET connection string for the database as well as an ODBC connection string.

That's great, but how do you manage the schema? Can you just fire up SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and right-click on the "Tables" node and create new tables the old fashioned way? Unfortunately, no. You cannot connect to SQL Azure directly with SSMS the way you can to a regular SQL Server instance.

To connect to SQL Azure with SSMS:

Open SSMS (this part should be pretty obvious)
When you are prompted to connect to a database, cancel that dialog.
You should be left with an empty management console. Click New Query.
For the server name, take the fully qualified host name from your SQL Azure connection string. It should look something like (blah).database.windows.net.
Choose SQL Server Authentication. Supply the username and password that you used for your database. Parts of this information should also be visible on your connection string.
Click on the Options button on the bottom right of the dialog box
Set the database name, manually, to the name of your database. It will not show up in the drop-down list.
Force the network protocol to be TCP/IP (this step may not be necessary, but I do it out of habit)
Make sure Server type is set to Database engine (this is the default, but might not be if you use SSMS for more than your average bear)
Now you can click Connect.

At this point, if everything worked well, you should FAIL to connect to SQL Azure :) You should get some horrid message about a connection from your public IP address not being allowed. This is because this version of SQL Azure has a built-in firewall and, by default, it doesn't allow anything through.

Go back to the sql.azure.com portal and click on the Firewall Settings tab. Check the Allow Microsoft Services to Access this server box. Click the button to add a new record. At this point it will conveniently show you what it thinks your public IP is so you can create a new rule to allow your IP through. Keep in mind this is only required to allow your home computer to access your SQL Azure server. If you have checked the Allow Microsoft Services... checkbox, then connections from within the Azure fabric (like an ADO.NET call from inside an ASP.NET app in an Azure Web Role) will pass through the firewall unhindered. This firewall is specifically to keep the communication safe and give you a "DMZ-like" experience where only the people (IPs) you trust will be able to hit that server from outside the Azure cloud fabric.

Now, after adding the firewall rule, you will need to wait up to 15 minutes or more. When I did it, it took over 20 minutes. The reason is that the portal where you hit the submit button is not the same physical machine as your SQL Azure server. It takes a few minutes for your new firewall rule to make it over to the actual data center where your SQL Azure server has been provisioned (at least that's my best guess to explain this delay). So don't be alarmed if 10 seconds after you add the firewall rule you still can't get into your database.

Now you are free to write T-SQL until you are blue in the face. What's that, you don't love hand-writing T-SQL schema change scripts without any assistance from an IDE? Neither do I. This is why I created a Visual Studio 2008 "Database Project" that references a local database with the same schema as the one I want to have in the cloud. This is useful for multiple reasons. The biggest of which is that with a "Database project" I can version control my scripts. Secondly, I automatically gain the benefit of a local development copy of my database. Finally, this allows me to, from within VS, right-click any schema element and script it into the project. I can then open that script, do some cleaning up, and then execute that script in the aforementioned SSMS query window. The cleaning up I'm referring to means stripping out the plethora of extraneous options on the ends of the CREATE TABLE statements and things like that. A lot of those options aren't available in SQL Azure so just strip them out after you script the table, proc, view, whatever. It's a pain in the butt, but it's certainly better than having to hand-craft all that T-SQL if you aren't into that sort of thing. I know some developers that like to get all kinky with their T-SQL and would never let VS script it for them. Me, I like to wear protective gear when I talk to the database schema so letting VS give me a head start suggestion as to the script I should run on SQL Azure works just fine for me.

Competition in the Clouds for Microsoft - Amazon RDS

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:00:00 EDT

Microsoft cannot sleep comfortably. There is assault from all flanks- be it mobile, be it OS, be it the venerable Office, almost anything one can think of. Now SQL Azure has a competitor. Amazon Web Services is out with a relational database service, the Amazon RDS. It is still in beta and seems to do everything that SQL Azure will and can do: infrastructure provisioning, software maintenance, etc. What's more MySQL 5.1 database, the darling of open source gang will get stronger as it takes up center stage for Amazon RDS.
Also it is not 1GB or 10GB database, you can start up with 20GB if you want. It's going to cost money. Looks like it can range from 11c/hr to $3.10/hour depending on the size of the database you want to take to the clouds.

Sign up here for Amazon RDS

When you sign up you will be agreeing to use the following:

Amazon RDS
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Amazon Simple Storage Service

Even if you don't use the latter two, you may have to pay for ECC since RDS uses ECC for CloudWatch Metrics.

After this you will be allowed to explore Amazon RDS

What about the tool to use to work with Amazon RDS?

You can use the MySQL tools to work with the RDS. For monitoring the usage, you use CloudWatch.

Jill T. Singer of CIA to Present at Cloud Computing Expo on November 2

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:00:00 EDT

As the pressure mounts to meet more stringent budgets, CIOs need to find the proper balance between transforming IT and reducing costs. IT operational costs continue to increase as a percentage of overall IT dollars. At the same time, IT is being pressured to provide an innovative, competitive advantage for the business. Will the Enterprise Cloud support both? Can the Enterprise Cloud make infrastructure operations faster, easier, cheaper, and safer while also unleashing the transformative creativity of the workforce? Will the Cloud be both a strong efficiency play as well as the Infrastructure's Ultimate Revenge by positioning IT to be the accelerator of corporate strategy instead of its bottleneck? All these questions, plus many more will be answered for you by Jill Singer during her session.

Microsoft SharePoint 2010

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 10:00:00 EDT

First let me apologize for the lack of blogging for a while. We have been under the gun with a sizable SharePoint development project. I have gown farther down into the innards of InfoPath then I ever thought possible. To give you an idea, we worked over 140 hours in the 2 weeks prior to the conference. I promise to be better, and now I have good reason to do so: We at Syrinx just got back from a long week loaded with sessions, booths, experts, and information all about SharePoint 2010. All I can say is *WOW*. I predict the trend of SharePoint adoption to continue to to climb at an alarming rate.

ADO.NET Data Services Projections Makes Sliced Bread Jealous

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 09:30:00 EDT

The other day I ran into a blog entry from the Astoria team discussing the projections feature of the 1.5 CTP2 version of the product. If you're not familiar with ADO.NET Data Services (formerly codenamed Astoria), it's basically a layer that you can put on top of an Entity Data Model and it will expose that model as a RESTful service. The URL format for this RESTful service is quite flexible, allowing you to select individual rows, perform filters, sorts, and many other things.

One of the new things that you can now do server-side via the new CTP2 URL syntax is projections. Projections actually allow you to control the shape of the output coming back. You can specifically choose which properties on the entity you want. Even more awesome is that this can be controller hierarchically. So if you bring back an Order entity and you include all of the OrderItem entities for that order, you can tell the server that you only want the customer for the Order and you only want Quantity and Price for the order items.

To perform a projection on the URL, you just use the $select parameter, like this:

blah.svc/Orders?$select=OrderID,Quantity,Price

And to control the shape of hierarchical data:

blah.svc/Orders?$select=OrderID,Quantity,OrderItems/Price,OrderItems/Quantity&$expand=OrderItems

At this point when I saw this I started having convulsions of pure joy. The main reasons being that every ADO.NET Data Services URL query will output either AtomPub or JSON. This means I can get only the columns I need and give them to my Ajax calls. Then I noticed that support for the new projections is actually in the Astoria client library as well, allowing me to write the following query:

var q = from order in ctx.Orders
        where order.Price > 300
        orderby order.Price descending
        select new { Price = order.Price, Quantity = order.Quantity };

This will translate into an Astoria query that filters, sorts, AND projects all on the server side, leaving me with a network footprint that only transmits the information I want and nothing else. This is a godsend if you have entities with huge amounts of columns but each individual query might only need to use 1 or 2 of those columns at a time.

And now, if this wasn't ridiculous enough, you can actually perform updates using the projected objects, AND those updates will ONLY transmit the information necessary. For example, if I only want to change an order's price and I got the price from a projection, I don't need to carry the entire order payload across the wire in order to commit the change:

order = q.First();
order.Quantity = order.Quantity + 42;
svc.UpdateObject(order);
svc.SaveChanges();

This will figure out that the only thing changing is the Quantity field and it will ONLY send that information. After discovering the combination of projections and the efficient round-trips of Astoria, this is when my head exploded.

If you have a multi-tier scenario and you're using an Entity Data Model (EDM), then you should definitely look into using ADO.NET Data Services to expose that model via services because now with projections, you can really do some unbelievable stuff. All that garbage code you used to have to generate to convert between DTOs and ViewModels and Entities and back again? You can delete ALL of that crap.

I've said it before but the folks working on ADO.NET Data Services deserve a medal. If you see a member of that team, buy them a beer. You have no idea how ridiculously complicated and difficult it is to write code that supports arbitrary projections like this. I'm pretty sure every time you run an Astoria query with projections, an Angel gets its wings.

Get Your Red Hot VS2010 Beta 2

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 09:00:00 EDT

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is now available to MSDN subscribers and will be available to the public at large late next week. The list of stuff that is awesome and worth checking out in VS2010 Beta 2 is too long and ridiculously in-depth for me to cover here. Some of the big things that affect me right off the bat are the following:

New Version of TuneUp Utilities Available in Late October

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 20:30:00 EDT

TuneUp Utilities 2010 contains the new Turbo Mode to increase the performance of users' PCs. This allows consumers to switch off a large number of unnecessary background processes -- with a single click. The Live Optimization function is another addition to TuneUp Utilities. It helps improve programs' startup and response times, even when computers are bogged down with a number of applications running simultaneously. TuneUp Utilities 2010 also provides users with a concise Optimization Report, which outlines the Windows maintenance processes carried out and the problems that have been fixed. TuneUp has redesigned the Start Center; once the software program has been opened, this feature shows users in a clear and concise layout which optimization processes are necessary for their individual system.

HyperOffice Introduces HyperBase

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:30:00 EDT

HyperOffice announced HyperBase, "cloud-computing" software tools that give businesses the ability to easily collect, manage and analyze data - and share it with teams, customers, partners and suppliers. HyperBase users can quickly create online database applications for automating common business tasks, such as managing events, tracking inventory and sales leads, and processing support tickets. "Spreadsheets and traditional database management software like MS-Access lock data inside one user's computer," said Farzin Arsanjani, president of HyperOffice. "HyperBase is an ideal alternative to Microsoft Access and other traditional database software," said Arsanjani. "It moves this data to the web, where it can be shared with colleagues and clients anywhere on the planet, using websites, private Intranets and even mobile devices."

Yahoo! to Present at 4th International Cloud Computing Expo

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:15:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announced today that Eric Baldeschwieler, VP Hadoop Software Development at Yahoo!, will be presenting at SYS-CON’s 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, CA, this coming November 2 – 4, 2009. His session is entitled “Hadoop @ Yahoo - Internet Scale Data Processing.” Yahoo! is running the largest Hadoop clusters in the world – 25K+ servers, analyzing billions of Web pages, multiple petabytes of storage and billions of records per day.

SQL Azure and MS SQL Server Integration Services

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 19:15:00 EDT

Enterprise data can be of very different kinds ranging from flat files to data stored in relational databases and XML datasources. The extraordinary number of database related products, and their historic evolution, makes this task exacting. The entry of cloud computing has brought area into the forefront as SSIS has been one of the methods indicated for bringing ground based data to cloud storage in SQL Azure, the next milestone in Microsoft Data Management. Presently the following methods are indicated:

Run Insert statements SQL Manager to populate tables schema created using SQL Azure MW*
Configure SSIS to bring in data
BCP [perhaps in next CTP of SQL Azure]

The first method works and can be very fast (only a small table was tested )

It may be noted that SSIS is another tool to bring in tables (so far only tried this object in the initial tests) to SQL Azure although only table schema is migrated and not the data. If the table were to have a clustered index, data porting may also be possible. In the test conducted the table did not even have a primary key column.

* It appears that the recent tweaking of SQL Azure MW can bring in the entire database according to a posting on the Oakleaf Systems blog site.

Social Media on Ulitzer - Strategy Nets New AUM for RIA

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 07:30:00 EDT

RIAbiz.com recently discussed the findings of an August 24-25, 2009 Investment News survey conducted on the Twitter habits of the financial-advisory community. Not surprisingly the survey reveals that "a mere 14.9% of financial advisers say they communicate with clients or colleagues through Twitter. Meanwhile, only 44.9% and 43.8% of advisers say they use LinkedIn and Facebook, respectively, the survey found".

This Bing Thing Is Working

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 08:45:00 EDT

Microsoft’s share of U.S. searches jumped 22.1% in August to 10.7% of the market to Google’s 64.6%, up 2.6%, and Yahoo’s 16%, according to Nielsen. Yahoo was down 4.2%. Microsoft was up from 9% in July. That’s a sequential leap of 22.1% for Microsoft’s newfangled Bing search machine, backed by a $100 million marketing budget. Microsoft hasn’t begun to spend that kind of money overseas yet promoting the widgetry. It does have HP and Lenovo PCs defaulting to Bing.

Media 2.0 on Ulitzer - New Media and Content Marketing Strategies

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:30:00 EDT

Here is an interesting news item which claims that UK online ad spend overtakes mainstream TV. The same news was corroborated by another post which stated that spending on online advertising surpasses TV. The news was little disconcerting because it did not seem to match with my ground level experience.

Keynote Transaction Perspective 9.0 Now Available

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 08:23:00 EDT

Keynote Systems, a provider of on-demand mobile and Internet test & measurement solutions for continuously improving the online experience, today announced that Keynote Transaction Perspective® 9.0 is now generally available to all Keynote customers. Transaction Perspective 9.0 is a much enhanced version of the company’s market-leading on demand Web site monitoring service specifically designed for the ‘Next Web’ applications of today and tomorrow.

Silverlight 3 Navigation

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 17:30:00 EDT

I got a lot of great feedback on my post Silverlight 3 Navigation: Dynamically Loaded Pages… Now MEF Powered! Dinesh Chandnani decided to do an update to this sample after looking at the feedback and talking to Nikhil Kothari and Wes Haggard from the MEF dev team. The goals for this update are:

The Difference Between Web Hosting and Cloud Computing

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 17:15:00 EDT

Yesterday a friend of mine was asking me what I've been doing lately in my spare time. When I mentioned that I'd been doing a lot of messing around with Windows Azure, he was naturally curious. After explaining what Azure is, he asked me what the difference was between Windows Azure, a cloud computing environment, and traditional web hosting scenarios. On a really high level, he's got a valid point : With Azure you can develop your application offline locally and then when you're done you can publish it to a remote host. To the casual observer, this looks exactly like what you might do with a web hosting company that provides space on an IIS box and let's you use ASP.NET and maybe even a little SQL server database.

Kaazing Adds Networking Industry Executive and Startup Veteran

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 18:00:00 EDT

Kaazing Corporation, developers of real-time Web communications software that connect web-based applications to high-volume, real-time message traffic, today announced the appointment of Vito Palermo, a 23-year veteran of the technology industry with extensive executive level operating and financial experience in the computing, networking and communications and digital media industries, to its Board of Directors.

What Do You Want To See in Silverlight 4?

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:45:00 EDT

It used to be so easy to slam Microsoft. There are the 800lb gorilla with all the money that have done some shady business deals - but that is very much in the past. Today Microsoft keeps doing things that make it hard not to like them. They are going Open Source and being transparent and even making mistakes (Vista, anyone?) and the 800lb almost appears humble. Or maybe I need to stop drinking the cool aid.

Microsoft's George Moore Talks About Windows Azure

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 09:00:00 EDT

Check out Charles Torre talking with George Moore (21 year MS veteran) about the what is behind the billing of Azure. Watch the interview on Channel 9 here. 21 year Microsoft veteran and Software Architect George Moore is involved in defining and implementing an effective strategy for taking Windows Azure from technology preview to enterprise business [...] Related posts:

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Eval JavaScript in a Global Context

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 19:15:00 EDT

Even though it's considered bad practice, it's often handy to eval code in JavaScript. And in my case, it was simply necessary, since the JSF specification requires eval of scripts. And it's also necessary to execute those evaluated scripts in the global scope. It's not as easy as it first looks. For our first naive implementation, we'd simply used eval(src) in our first pass at the implementation.

Use Windows Azure Right Now

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:15:00 EDT

Until this week, using the Windows Azure CTP meant signing up and then waiting a couple of days for an invitation code to arrive by email. No more. You can now register for access and receive an invitation code right there on the spot. No email, no waiting, no excuses. Go register now and build something cool! (Via [...] Related posts:

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Live Framework Developers Get Boned

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 09:00:00 EDT

When I first read this, I was all "OMFGWTFNoMesh!?!" and exploded in front of my computer. After cleaning the bits of my exploded brain off the keyboard and looking at it again, some of it made sense. They are taking the Live Framework stuff down and theoretically coming up with a better, more in-depth, more unified API for Live. This step is long overdue because for a very, very long time developers have been confused because there is "old live framework" and then "live mesh/live framework" and then there's Azure and then there's a bunch of crap that's been labelled as part of "Live" for which there is no developer API.

How Win7's "Boot to VHD" Feature has Changed the Way I Work

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:45:00 EDT

This is normally an adequate situation for me. However, with some things I just don't want the virtualization overhead or the difference in environment. For example, VS2010's GUI is written in WPF and that particular GUI hates being virtualized. When put under a virtual machine running Windows 7, VS2010 fails to render things, borders disappear, windows become unusable and the experience is downright awful. On the other hand, when you run VS2010 "bare metal" with no virtualization between it and your video card, everything is beautiful and all works well.

Using CAML To Deploy A Lookup Column Via Feature

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 10:30:00 EDT

This week, I needed to deploy lookup columns to some of my lists and as usual I wanted to avoid writing code at all costs. As some of you may know, Kyle Kelin and I debate this topic often as he prefers a code approach. I figured it had to be possible with CAML, but many claimed it was not even possible. A few approaches showed up out there involving using code to modify the elements.xml file with your GUID, but that just wasn’t going to cut it for me. One popular post on the topic by Josh Gaffey, started me in the right direction, but there were a few hurdles I ran into as I was trying to implement it. It would create the list, show the content type, and site columns, but when I tried to create a new item, the lookup column was not there.

Upgrading to Windows 7 – Part Two

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 18:00:00 EDT

With the installation complete it was time to test the critical software I use daily. The first was Microsoft Outlook and as I expected it worked perfectly. So did the rest of the Office suite. Next on my list were the Java environments that I use, Eclipse and NetBeans. First I checked at java.sun.com for newer [...]

Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services wirth NHibernate

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:15:00 EDT

I am having a blast with the series where I am updating my simple Mix 09 Business Application demo. In this part, I wanted to explore one of the most popular data access solution for .NET – NHibernate. Many customers finds that the flexibility of NHibernate makes it easier for them to build maintainable and testable applications. As an aside, I think NHibernate is an excellent example of the vibrant open source community on .NET that I’d like to support.

Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services: Part 18

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 17:00:00 EDT

Continuing in our discussion of Silverlight 3 and the update to .NET RIA Services. I have been updating the example from my Mix09 talk “building business applications with Silverlight 3”. RIA Services is very much an extension of the LINQ project. Effectively you can think of RIA Services as n-tier LINQ. As such, I thought it would be interesting to show how any of the tons of Linq Providers can be used with RIA Services.

Calling the Enterprise Search Web Service from Silverlight 3

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 21:00:00 EDT

I needed to do a quick proof of concept of displaying search results in Silverlight recently and it actually proved easier than I thought it was going to be. I tried this once before in a beta version of Silverlight 2 and it was much more difficult at the time. I was able to easily add the reference to the search web service but the proxy was filled with classes that were not supported in the Silverlight .NET Framework. This time I was relieved to find that it was much simpler. I’ve written many applications to query using the web service, so the first thing I thought of was how is this thing going to authenticate to SharePoint. I started doing tons of unnecessary research when I should have just written some code.

Exposing a WCF Service in Silverlight

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 08:00:00 EDT

I am having a blast with the series where I am updating my simple Mix 09 Business Application demo. In this part, I wanted to consider the scenario that I hope is a common one. The developer writes their Silverlight app using the RIA Services pattern and the application becomes wildly successful. So successful in fact there is a demand to put a services head on top of the same application logic to facilitate writing a bunch of other clients. This is the sort of pattern we see happening with applications like Twitter and Sharepoint.

Why Silverlight in Web 2.0?

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 07:30:00 EDT

Silverlight is the next step towards user experience in enriching today’s 2.0 technology. Microsoft Silverlight is a web application framework with added interactivity features and supports .NET language and development tools. It is basically a programming model to develop and distribute Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). It is a free cross browser plug-in for delivering multimedia experiences for the web. It is considered as an Adobe flash alternative. Silverlight supports Microsoft’s Common Language Runtime (CLR), which allows both designers and developers to run the .NET environment within a browser and do so in a relatively lightweight package

Widget Wars: OpenSocial vs. OpenAjax vs. W3C Widgets

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:15:00 EDT

The popularity of widgets these days has brought to attention the need for interoperability, i.e. for widgets developed for one site or platform to be able to run in other sites and widgets developed by different people to be able to work with each other. So much so that I know of at least 3 somewhat competing specifications for widgets. There's the gadget portion of the OpenSocial specs which was adopted from the Google Gadgets work. Then there's OpenAjax which is more broadly focused on Ajax interoperability but has a lot of pieces geared towards widget interoperability.

Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services: Part 12

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 10:45:00 EDT

More from my Mix09 talk “building business applications with Silverlight 3”. Many customers have told me that they love Entity Framework and LinqToSql, but that they are not always able to use them in their projects just yet. In fact the number of folks that are using ADO.NET DataSet, DataReader, etc. is very high.

The Top Five DaaS Cloud Companies

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 18:00:00 EDT

Data as a Service can empower your business, or help you develop great web apps quickly and easily. Not everybody believes in the validity of the term “data as a service,” but these opinions seem to be held mostly by academics and niche bloggers who are resistant to “yet another –aaS acronym” (which is understandable, I guess). There is still no entry for the term DaaS on Wikipedia. But whatever you want to call it, the vendors who are leading the charge for this kind of functionality – data on tap as and when you need it, priced affordably – are calling it DaaS, and as far as I’m concerned, they offer the service so they make the rules. Here’s my top 5, unranked:

Microsoft Reports Fourth-Quarter Results

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:30:00 EDT

Microsoft announced revenue of $13.10 billion for the fourth quarter ended June 30, 2009, a 17% decline from the same period of the prior year. Operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $3.99 billion, $3.05 billion and $0.34 per share, which represented declines of 30%, 29% and 26%, respectively, when compared with the prior year period. "Our business continued to be negatively impacted by weakness in the global PC and server markets," said Chris Liddell, chief financial officer at Microsoft. "In light of that environment, it was an excellent achievement to deliver over $750 million of operational savings compared to the prior year quarter." The financial results for the fourth quarter ended June 30, 2009, included the deferral of $276 million of revenue related to the Windows 7 Upgrade Option program that was announced on June 25, 2009. This revenue deferral reduced earnings per share by $0.02.