.Net
This year I was able to attend Microsoft's PDC 2008. There were tons of fantastic sessions that I was unable to attend. One of the great things that Microsoft did with the PDC this year was to make the session videos available to everyone within twenty-four hours of the presentation. That's great but what if you wanted to download all of the session for offline viewing? Luckily for us Luciano Evaristo Guerche has made a tutorial to download all of the session videos and PowerPoint decks. Essentially, it involves a FireFox plug-in called DowThemAll to download all of the session...
A few months ago we started development on a new system. From the ground up we redesigned everything from our business processes to how we store data. Part of the redesign was deciding on using SOA technology in our middle tier. This will allow us to separate our UI from our middle tier even further. Due to the disconnected way our objects were going to work we decided to use guid or unique identifiers for our primary keys in our data model and assign guids in the middle tier. Of course, our DBAs weren't too keen on the idea and...
Microsoft has released the Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5 Training Kit. The Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Training Kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos. This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize the Visual Studio 2008 features and a variety of framework technologies including: LINQ, C# 3.0, Visual Basic 9, WCF, WF, WPF, ASP.NET AJAX, VSTO, CardSpace, SilverLight, Mobile and Application Lifecycle Management. I always love free training material. Enjoy. Via Elegant Code.
Last week, Microsoft announced Sandcastle which produces MSDN style documentation for your Visual Studio projects. Sandcastle is used internally to build the .Net Framework documentation. About the same time, Kevin Downs the creator of NDoc an open-source .Net documentation tool, announced that he will not be working on future versions of NDoc. It's kinda sad to see a good project go wrong but it just goes to show you how frail the open source movement is. It is difficult enough to manage a project team that's on your payroll. It's exponentially more difficult to do so when contributors are doing so...
I hate throwing away code. Recently, we had a requirement to create an Excel spreadsheet with formulas and specific data for a particluar user. Of course we could always use Reporting Services to get the data in Excel format but then there would be no formulas. So I ran across this article by Peter Bromberg titled Create Dynamic ASP.NET Excel Workbooks In C#. It's a short article but it gives a good code listing at the end. I created a prototype in VB.Net & ASP.Net and it was working pretty well, a bit slow, but it worked. Then it got yanked....
Microsoft has announced some updates to thier Windows Live Local service (I really hate that name). Then enhancements include real-time traffic reporting and new social sharing tools. Here are the highlights:
Real-time traffic flow. Customizable driving directions are now even more useful with the addition of real-time traffic flow and incident reporting provided by Traffic.com. This functionality will be available only in the U.S. release.
Collections. Social networking functionality allows customers to create lists of favorite landmarks and locations, attach personal photos and save them to a Scratchpad. Collections can be saved, recalled later, permalinked, and shared with friends and community in e-mail or...
As I mentioned in my previous post I'm in the middle of moving a blog from MSN Spaces to my Community Server site. Of course there were some issues to resolve. You first need to turn on e-mail publishing for your MSN Spaces blog. You cannot use the MetaWeblog API without it. You can turn it on by following the steps documented in the Getting Started with the MetaWeblog API for MSN Spaces page. Note: you may have to use Firefox to do this. No lie. While using IE6 an error kept popping up on me. Weird.
Next you will have to download the XML-RPC dll. Unzip the...
I see that you've found my new technical blog. Welcome. Just so you know I'm using Community Server 2.0 as the software for this blog. I have loaded all of the posts in the Tech category on my personal blog at www.jorriss.com on this site. To do this I was able hook into the Community Server web service, loop through my technical blog posts (stored in .Text) and load each post. I wasn't worried about the comments or referrals since I wasn't going to remove the original posts from jorriss.com. This way, I get a fresh blog with all of my...
For almost four years I’ve been using Rockford Lhotka’s CSLA. CSLA or the Component-based Scalable Logical Architecture is a framework to build business objects. It’s a powerful architecture that provides many different features for middle-ware objects (automating validation logic, n-level undo, and databinding support just to name a few). Personally, I wouldn’t start an application without it. Rocky has updated the framework once again this time with version 2.0. It includes better validation (it also breaks some of my code, thanks Rocky), authorization support and updates to the data portal. As usual Rocky has updated his books Expert VB 2005 Business...
Recently, I needed to create a list of items that were to be manually sorted by the user. I decided to use the sorting mechanism that Netflix uses in its queue. The items are listed 1 to n on the page with the sequence number in a text box. If the user wishes to re-sequence an item all they need to do is change the number in the text box to the desired sequence number. After I created the sorting algorithm in the business collection object I started out to write the UI. I first started out using Infragisics WebGrid. It...
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