All posts by : Geekswithblogs.net

1 of 747 | Messaging-only request-response correlation - Recently I have been asked if it was possible to "couple" two services via BizTalk without using orchestrations. Let's look at that required scenario more closely: 1. A request message (ReqA) is received on the WCF-BasicHttp Receive Adapter, and it is posted to the MsgBox. 2. A solicit-response send port is activated due to a subscribtion to ReqA. 3. ReqA is mapped to ReqB. 4. ReqB is sent via the WCF-BasicHttp Send Adapter 5. RespB is received by the WCF-BasicHttp Send Adapter. 6. RespB is mapped to RespA and it is posted to the MsgBox. 6. RespB is picked up by the appropriate instance of the request-response receive port due to an instance subscription. 7. RespA is sent via the ......

2 of 747 | Types Of Convoys - Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:" "; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;}   Convoys are groups of related messages that are intended by a partner business process to be handled in a specific order within an orchestration.   1 ......

3 of 747 | Good Books to read about BizTalk Server 2006 - Hello All, I was going through almost all the Biztalk Server books present in the Market but the book which I would suggest are the best are: 1. Pro BizTalk 2006 by George Dunphy, Ahmed Metwally 2. Professional BizTalk Server 2006 by Darren Jefford, Kevin B. Smith, Ewan Fairweather Pretty good books and well explained the Architecture of the Server along with many real time senarios. ...

4 of 747 | High level nerdiness - If you’re reading this (and you’re not just one of my friends or acquaintances who is stalking me), you know you’ve done it.  Yep, you know you have.  You’ve spoken to someone or written to someone in various computer languages.  It just happened here at /n software in an IM conversation between two of my co-workers, James and Tom.  James is trying to get a group of people together to see the Pink Floyd Experience.  James IM’d Tom in RSBScript (For you nerds that don’t know, RSBScript is an xml-based language used to help create and consume web services with RSSBus): <rsb:equals attr="Tom.isGoingToFloyd" value="true">    <rsb:else>      <rsb:unset item="Tom" /> ......

5 of 747 | Microsoft Dynamics Ax 2009 Enterprise Portal Development - Coming Soon! ERR 1: Enterprise Developer Tools - Dynamics Projects not shown in Visual Studio WORKAROUND: The prerequisites - Sharepoint Site, Enterprise Portal and Visual Studio 2008 are installed. The AOS & Role Center are configured. Strangely only the user who had the EP installed was able to use the Project Templates related to Dynamics Ax - The Dynamics Ax Report Project seem to be global to all users but the other templates for eg: "Dynamics Ax Web Project" doesnt show up for other users. Copying the VisualStudio 2008 to your document & setttings folder does the trick ERR 2: Unable to connect to Microsoft Dynamics AX. The Dynamics AX Enterprise Portal Tools are no......

6 of 747 | VS2008 and web application - hostname - Recently I ran into an issue where IIS was refusing to load an otherwise previously perfectly good web application in the solution. The Visual Studio 2008 solution included a Web Application csproj, and was referencing it by URL on IIS (that is, not a local file based or cassini web project). Attempting to load the solution brought up an error: The local IIS URL http://localhost/{YourAppName} specified for Web Project {YourAppname} has not been configured.  In order to open this project the Virtual Directory needs to be configured.  Would you like to create the Virtual Directory now? First, checked the IIS manager and ensured application pool and web site were up and operational. All......

7 of 747 | PerformancePoint Dashboard Performance, KPI Properties and Parameter Passing - Issue Found - Solved in SP1 - In PerformancePoint 2007 you have the capability to setup custom properties and pass them into dashboard objects. This is especially useful for simplifying dashboards where you are linking scorecard KPIs to report views. Alyson Powell Erwin outlines how to do this in the PerformancePoint MSDN blog:   http://blogs.msdn.com/performancepoint/archive/2007/12/21/passing-context-from-scorecards-to-other-report-views.aspx   This is very handy. By setting up a custom property that contains measure names for the KPI you can use one report for each data source and pass the value of the custom property into the [Measures] endpoint on the report view. If you have a scorecard with 20 KPIs from the s......

8 of 747 | Post-receive debatching without orchestrations - This post describes a way to perform debatching of a message after the original message has already been received and submitted to the BizTalk message box. This can be the case when for instance there are subscribers defined in BizTalk that subscribe to: - The original message before debatching. To my knowledge, it isn't possible to post both the original message and the debatched messages to the BizTalk MsgBox. - A mapped version of the original message. To my knowledge, it isn't possible to post both the original and the mapped messages to the BizTalk MsgBox. So how do we handle a message in the BizTalk MsgBox, that needs to be mapped and afterwards debatched into seperate messages (wi......

9 of 747 | Formal Program synthesis without External Boundary - It is important to note that the adaptability of interfaces is only one facet that dynamic systems must deal with. Wherever possible I wish to illustrate the use of functional programming in the web domain. In this domain, expressions that involve mirrors of HTML and XML elements are the key constituents. Microsoft has confirmed that socket support and a rich control set will be added in a future release of Silverlight. Software reverse engineering is done to retrieve the source code of a program because the source code was lost, to study how the program performs certain operations or to improve the performance of a program or even to fix a bug as per C# geeks. So did you know developers ca......

10 of 747 | Interesting Leadership - Inversion of Control means that objects get the objects that they need from an outside source. SSRS is just one of the components in the Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) platform, read more at Influential Leadership. Multithreading comes with a resource and CPU cost in allocating and switching threads if used excessively. In the "Test Driven Testing" phase testers can do efficient testing without any interruptions by frequent defect fixes of the development team, check Web 3.0 and prestigious libraries. In a similar way, most ORM systems allow writing raw SQL to some degree. In addition to basic principles, it is increasingly important to understand the computational aspects......

11 of 747 | RSS Feed Aggregator in ASP.NET - Hi, I just finished a very small module to gather RSS fields from Database and show them in my page. THIS POST FROM MSDN was really helpful and it is just what I wanted. I tried a lot to use asp:Repeater and XSLT togather to format my feeds but I found no way to do that. At last I came back to XML control in ASP.NET and did following: Made a small parser class to transform my SqlDataReader to XmlDocument object Used Xml Control to combine XmlDocument and XSLT to transform the result. ...

12 of 747 | Nice Tutorial from Nick Swans Blog: Sharepoint 2007 Workflows for infopath Forms and Form Services - SharePoint 2007 Workflow with Visual Studio 2005 + InfoPath 2007 (RTM VERSION!) I have been amazed at how many hits and questions the 'how-to' article I posted on creating a SharePoint 2007 workflow with Visual Studio 2005 and InfoPath 2007 got. That article was based on Beta2 of SharePoint 2007, and although most of the steps are still the same, I decided to rewrite the article now that RTM is out. There were so many questions on the previous post that it was difficult for me to answer them all, so I've got to thank other people who tried out the workflow and got it to work for coming along and helping others. At the end of this article I've a link to forum post where I think we can put ......

13 of 747 | Writing a UAC compliant Application - I've seen a lot of developers clueless when it comes to UAC in Vista.  The whole point to UAC is give your application the minimum amount of privileges required for it to run.  If you wrote your application, you should have a pretty good idea of what system resources your application needs to access.  The solution here is not to require your users to "turn off UAC", or to set your application to run in compatibility mode.  This is the biggest reason UAC has gotten such a bad reputation.. its our fault! Most apps shouldn't require full privilege to run (with exceptions of course, depending on the app) Don't claim your application is "Vista-Compliant" because it works if you run it as admin......

14 of 747 | Collaborative Experiential Perspective - Complexity issues raise from the the nature of properties of objects. Changes to one part of a system’s design may affect multiple other parts in terms of privacy, refer to database developer company. A service and its clients agree on the interface between them, but are otherwise independent. Lock statement of C# is in fact a syntactic shortcut for a call to the methods Monitor.Enter and Monitor.Exit wrapped within a try-finally block. One of the biggest problems with waterfall is that it pushes most of the "high-risk and difficult" elements toward the end of the project (Modeling Framework). Software without documentation is a disaster. you can start developing the type of message-......

15 of 747 | Poka-yoke and Defensive design - Poka-yoke (mistake-proofing) is a technique for mistake-proofing in process design. It's trading the flexibility for less variance. There is a similar concept in software called defensive design or defensive programming. Yesterday, I just experienced a good example of how important defensive design is. I was trying to plug my external hard-drive to my laptop via USB port. As you know the USB port actually has some sort of defensive design - the connectors in the metal enclosure is actually located only at the lower half. It supposes you can not plug the male connector into it at all if flips it upside down. The problem I see is the implementation of this defensive design on my laptop. The ......

16 of 747 | StreamAndUserData Problems with Biztalk Adapter Wizard - Creating a custom Biztalk Adapter is a complex process. But fortunately there is a tool available at CodePlex called Biztalk Adapter Wizard that simplifies the process. This is a great tool but has some minor issues, the worst of then is when you create a Receive Adapter it creates a new instance of StreamAndUserData on the SubmitBatch method, the bad news is that if you try to compile the project it will fail, because there is no reference to that class. Well if you Google the error message you will get a link to a post that will not be very helpful. At some point someone said that you can remove the reference to the object, but I think that there is another solution. If you use......

17 of 747 | MsBuild Task for consuming WCF Services - Article Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson Recently at the UK SOA/BPM User Group Yossi Dahan and I chatted briefly about using MsBuild and BizTalk, more specifically Yossi mentioned that he wished it was possible to regenerate the schemas for consuming a service automatically. Following this discussion and a few other things I had a blast at seeing how difficult this would be to do. I think there is a lot of value in having this approach as it fits well with a contract based development approach and continuous integration. I want to be able to regenerate my schemas every time I build the solution, and if a breaking change has been introduced I want the solution to break......

18 of 747 | HOW TO: Spell Check Forms Services Forms - I'm going to be blogging on various .NET related technologies. My first post is going to kick-off with a how-to on using the spell check web service with SharePoint Forms Services. Enjoy!  http://geekswithblogs.net/scavanagh/archive/2008/07/28/how-to--spell-check-an-infopath-form-displayed-via.aspx ...

19 of 747 | Custom Persistence Points - Article Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson A few weeks back I got a comment to one of my blog posts by a guy who said he wished he had more control over persistence points in an orchestration. In his example he basically wanted to reduce the number of persistence points as he needed to improve performance in what sounded like a request response scenario. Often in these kinds of scenarios if BizTalk has been well optimised and you still do not get the latency requirements you need then the likely hood is you are trying to solve a problem with BizTalk when a different solution would be most appropriate. Anyway what did make me wonder was the opposite of what this guy wa......

20 of 747 | Protecting Content Passed From Web Services - Recently, I got called in to help a developer who had an issue where he was using the Infragistics HTMLWebEditor control to allow users to submit content.  Many of the users copy and paste code from Word into the editor.  For those in the web development industry we all know that Word's HTML is not your typical HTML.  The issue the developer ended up having was that certain characters were being saved to the database and when passed back to the front end from his web service they were causing XML validation errors because symbols were not being properly escaped.  Regardless of whether HTML should be saved to the database or not, the developer needed a solution quickly so that the users coul......

21 of 747 | Functionality beside Argument - The 'first do this, next do that' is a short phrase which really in a nutshell describes the spirit of the imperative paradigm. Web services are the killer application for XML, with reference to Implicit Anticipation over Empty Techniques. Using environments to emulate references limits the granularity of references to fields. The paradigm originates from a purely mathematical discipline: the theory of functions. If a method does not contain non-transportable types, it can be offered in the interface unmapped and can be invoked without special intervention. Spring.Net is an open source framework that provides a toolset of components that help developers implement industry best p......

22 of 747 | Map Dataset to XML and XML to Dataset - Relational databases to XML for Biztalk (maybe?) Found A good Article by Xun Ding Check it out below! Map DataSet to XML and back Map XML to Dataset and back Published: 10 Sep 2007 By: Xun Ding This article illustrates the translation to and from an ADO .NET DataSet and XML. Introduction Since the arrival of the Internet, people have become more and more dependent on it for daily operations. The Web's (as well as computing applications') insatiable appetite for data has grown even more intense. Most websites have seen the interplay of relational database and XML. Websites rely on relational databases for storing a vast amount of data and performing fast retrieval and manipula......

23 of 747 | Recursive Orchestration - This post describes how to implement a recursive BizTalk orchestration using correlation sets. The need for recursive orchestrations came up during one of my previous projects, where a message needed to be resubmitted with a changed status code, so that a new instance of the same orchestration type could pick it up for processing. Next to that, it's a fun excersize! You can't recurse orchestrations using the Call Orchestration or Start Orchestration shapes, because the Orchestration designer just doesn't let you select the same orchestration type as the one you're trying to start/call from. I haven't tried fooling the orchestration editor by editing the .odx file in the xml editor, but I......

24 of 747 | New CodePlex project released - For anyone that is interested I have released a project on CodePlex, this is named Core. It is written in C#.NET 3.5 and uses SQL 2005-any edition and uses WCF for communcicating. What does it do? The goal of Core is to be able to provide the ability to scale out processes running in applications-often processes that might not take a lot of CPU cycles when the application is new, but as features are added and the database grows in size, the same process could increase in time and CPU cycles taken to process. Why not head over and check it out at: www.codeplex.com/Core ...

25 of 747 | Data Access - Approximate strong classification behaves identical to strong classification restricted to a subset of all classes. Considering the fact that A way to get some of the features of dynamic layout from a layout that was created in absolute coordinates is to scale the UI. In retrospect, sometimes business components need to retrieve information from external sources in order to do their work. The internal mechanisms of what allows user-mode debugging to work have rarely ever been fully explained. Approximate explanative classification behaves identical to classical explanative classification to which a set of classes is added. In the absence of any specific knowledge, most prefetching sc......

26 of 747 | Mid to Senior Level Developer Needed: Bartlesville, OK - As President of the Bartlesville .NET User Group I get many people asking me if I know of people looking for jobs.  I have decided to start posting the positions on my blog as well hoping to help the companies in Bartlesville find skilled developers.  Description:  Seeking one mid to senior level developer for a local Bartlesville company (not ConocoPhillips).  This position will revolve around Windows Forms and Applications development with a focus on mobile devices.  The right person for this position will thrive in a smaller team atmosphere.  They will need to be versatile and able to 'hit the ground running.'  Experience with the following technologies is a must, C#, SQL server 2000/2......

27 of 747 | Store custom objects configuration in separate custom configuration files using EntLib - We are going to have a windows service that will run a few workflow(WF) instances. I want to have configuration information to be stored in  separate config files for each WF instance. I remembered that EntLib has helper classes to store custom objects configuration in separate custom configuration file, but finding good examples in Google wasn't easy(probably I didn't find good search keywords). The links that I finally found(more relevant to the task first) Tom Hollander 'post External configuration files in Enterprise Library for .NET Framework 2.0 mostly talks about EntLib provider config sections, but comments are talking about FileConfigurationSource  and custom sections. Alois K......

28 of 747 | Codeplex Developer Tools for BizTalk -   Some of the great and useful tools available at codeplex site for biztalk developers. I listed down few of them here.   BizTalk Server 2006 Documenter Creates compiled help files for a given BTS 2006 installation.   BizTalk Server Pipeline Component Wizard A project meant to ease to development of pipeline components used within a BizTalk Server environment. Supports both C# and VB.NET   BizUnit - Framework for Automated Testing of Distributed Systems BizUnit is a test framework that is intended to test Biztalk solutions.   BizUnitExtensions This project aims to play a kind "NAntContrib" role (where the community has extended NAnt with a bunch of valuable tasks) in the BizUni......

29 of 747 | Green Computing- Software for a Green Landscape - A friend of mine Denny Boynton and I were talking at TechEd last week about green computing and it started me thinking. He mentioned that he and some other architects were discussing green computing platforms (server vitalization, cloud computing,etc...). That started me talking about: What is the responsibility of the software developer in this emerging green computing grid? Many infrastructure groups over the last few years have been moving to virtual servers and environments initially to save on capital expenditures slow the ever growing demand for data center real estate. Now after establishing the foundation for vitalization operations groups are seeing tertiary benefits form this pro......

30 of 747 | Silverlight Cream for June 07, 2008 -- #293 - I've got 17 links here tonight... Welcome to SL2B2.. :) ... Many are by the same folks, so I'm just going to list names: Scott Guthrie (duh), Michael Scherotter, Joel Neubeck(2), Kathy Kam, Walt Ritscher, Jesse Liberty, Shawn Wildermuth(2), David Anson, Tim Heuer(4), WPFEDevCon, Mike Taulty/Mike Ormond, and Mike Snow. Wow... what a bunch of links! ... I tried not to pull all the "Silverlight 2 Beta 2" links since we're all posting that. There are a lot of people echoing the information on Silverlight.net, and I tried to only pull the ones that also have other details or info to offer so enjoy... there's a couple week's worth of reading in this one post... and that doesn't count 50 video......

31 of 747 | Tech Ed - Working the ARC Area - So instead of trying to do these Tech Ed posts on a day-to-day basis, I'm just going to be doing them topical instead. So let's talk about working the ARC area. As an MVP, we're given an opportunity to attend Tech Ed under a work program. We commit to working 16 hours in one of the TLC areas, and in exchange we get free admission to Tech Ed. I submitted and was selected for the program, being assigned to the Architecture area (or ARC). Now, I had gone to Tech Ed in 2005, and I knew there were people sitting at the various areas, but I really had no idea why they were there or what they actually did. In working at the ARC area, I had no idea what to expect either. I supposed that people ......

32 of 747 | Unrecognized Zune - Reinstall Windows Media Player - All of a sudden I couldn't sync my Zune anymore on my Windows XP computer. I would always get an error that there was an error on the installation of the hardware when I plugged the Zune into the USB port. The actual error I would get was: There was a problem installing this hardware "zune"  I tried all sorts of "fixes" including installing the Zune software update and uninstalling the Zune drivers, but nothing seemed to be working. There were folks on the Internet saying that I should format the Zune through a series of clicks - ummm no. There was also a suggestion of cleaning up my registry and that I should get a registry cleaner of sorts and fix the problem. Though, there was also th......

33 of 747 | Mass Transit Update - Just wanted to drop a note to say that Chris is on fire! He has written a whole chunk of awesomeness today that should make handling some of our concerns quite easy. We have a new dispatcher sub-system which is quite awesome and will provide a one stop shop for bullet proofing the code to handle errors in a totally awesome way. :) We are working on the Health Monitoring pieces as well so that you can respond to downed endpoints. How cool would it be that when an endpoint goes down, if you could some how do a NET STOP and NET START as a way to automatically heal (?) a down service. We are also looking at how we can better integrate an IoC container into the system as well, which should......

34 of 747 | Mixed Lang Stuff (again) - OK, here I go again on the mixed language stuff. I continue to be impressed by the capabilities of DOT NET.  This time, it's in the realm of salvaging legacy code.  This included graphic shows a project I've been working on this week where I needed to leverage a lot of legacy MFC code.  Originally, I was just going to write this in C# as I do most new projects, but needing to rewrite some of the classes I had previously written (using MFC) in another project made me come to my senses. If I wrote the new app in C++/CLI, I would not need to rewrite the MFC-flavored classes.  I had already started a couple of classes in C#, however.  There are many things easier done in C#, I'll admit. Wh......

35 of 747 | Standard Process Management - SNOOP is a fantastic tool that provides the ability to change the value of any UI property at run time. A Request Splitting attack abuses flaws in asyncronous requests and allows to inject arbitrary headers when an Http request is built, with reference to AOP using System.Reflection.Emit. The key difference between processes and threads is that processes are fully isolated from each other while threads share (heap) memory with other threads running in the same application. A blocked thread doesn't consume CPU resources. You may ready more at Average Predicate Logic for Exuberant Association. The MVC paradigm dates to the late 1970's when it was developed in conjunction with the Smalltalk-......

36 of 747 | .NET Framework Client Profile - Oop .NET Framework Client Profile was a great reply from .Net team because it’s full fill the need of those customers how are wary and ask questions from Microsoft for small .Net framework for its client application deployment. One thing that I want mention here is .Net Framework Client Profile is a subset of .Net 3.5 and it’s available in .Net Framework 3.5 SP1. Download .Net Framework Client Profile is came into begin with following things keep in minds. Small framework runtime. Smart, faster application deployment. Client Application focused feature set: o    Common Language Runtime (CLR) o    ClickOnce  application deployment o    Windows Forms o    WPF ......

37 of 747 | Building Better Software: Tips and Tools to Improve Your Applications - I attended a session (title above) by the famous Doug Seven. Doug is always one of the better speakers out there and he covered how to construct your projects to work with various systems that improve the overall application and approach. Focus was put on unit tests and code coverage and the importance of incorporating these items into your development process. It is surprising to me that this is not yet the norm of application development. Again, I said this in a previous post, but development teams need to work to a continuous integration process and use tools that facilitate such activities. Microsoft has done a lot in this space, but so has the open source community. I, myself, use as......

38 of 747 | Chicago Architecture Group - First Meeting Review - Tonight was the first meeting of the Chicago Architecture Group.  David Dickinson made a wonderful presentation on real life SOA.  This was accompanied by a lively discussion with the 19 people in attendance. Thanks to Carl Franklin, Stephan Rylander and Larry Clarkin for making this such a success. We have a meeting planned for July 10th at the Microsoft Downers Grove office.  Stay tuned for more information. ...

39 of 747 | Contract-First CodeGen - I've added some codegen scripts to the ESBSimpleSamples project, and a simple UI which runs the scripts against metadata it retrieves from a WSDL endpoint. The codegen templates were built for a custom tool which we use (not public I'm afraid), and then stripped down for the "ServiceClient.Generator" tool, so the structure might look a bit odd, but they do the following jobs: Extract the schema from the WSDL location to XSD (ready for loading into BizTalk) Build a (very) clean request DTO for the selected method Build a (similarly) clean response DTO for the selected method Build a typed ServiceRequest object for use with the ESBSimplseSamples.ServiceClient library......

40 of 747 | Tracking EDI Control Numbers in R2 EDISend Pipelines - After months of working on Biztalk 2006 R2 EDI tracking I'm still not sure how the inbound EDI 997s are correlated to outbound EDI transactions.  I need to track certain message properties in the outgoing EDI transactions.  For some reason one of our trading partners is not sending 997s for all of the EDI messages we transmit.  But I can query their system and see that the transactions were received.  So my problem is now finding the outbound EDI messages and somehow resolving the open status. Using HAT I can see certain EDI message properties are created in the EDI assemble pipeline component.  These properties are <Property Name="InterchangeControlNo" Namespace="http://schemas.mic......

41 of 747 | BizTalk 2006 R2 Downgrade - Downgrading from BizTalk 2006 R2 to plain 2006 doesn't seem to be a well-trodden path. It's not ideal, but if you have to do it, the following steps should get you there: Uninstall BizTalk 2006 R2 from Add/Remove programs Try to uninstall Enterprise SSO from Add/Remove programs* Remove the BizTalk databases (detach the databases in SQL Server, then remove the MDF and LDF files) Delete all the BizTalk-related SQL Server Agent jobs Unregister the Notification Service for BAM Alerts Install & Configure BizTalk 2006 * - I had issues with SSO where the uninstall kept crashing halfway through. Eventually removed it by selecting "modify" then removing ......

42 of 747 | Enterprise Architecture is a Joke - Jeff Schneider over at Momentumsi has stirred up some EA’s with his post Why Enterprise Architecture is a Joke in particular John McGovern with this post which Jeff Schneider replied to with this. In Jeff's post, point 3 hit home the most ... "3. Silo Organizations promote Silo Funding. Many EA's never had a chance. They live in organizations that fund everything according to business silo's. Then, the EA is expected to bridge the silos with nickle and dime funding. Their inability to perform Herculean change (multi-channel, master data, cross-organizational BPM, master SOA services) has many of them designated as cops with no gun, just a good flashlight." I'm working in an organisation ......

43 of 747 | SOA WCF and You Tech Ed Session - Today I attended an amazing session presented by Juval Lowy . I have to say in the last 5-8 years it was the most interesting and enjoyable session I have been to 4 Microsoft TechEd's, 3 SAP TechEd's, 2 Microsoft Mix's and 2 VS Live conferences. I enjoyed the historical walk down memory lane of software development. Having been in the industry for 20+  years it was interesting to see the patterns that Juval drew out. A number of interesting thoughts were brought out during the day long conversation. Object are inherently non reusable. Its the interface that is reusable.  Its about time in my office it seems I am the only one that has ever sung this song. Refactoring - Its Ev......

44 of 747 | Software + Services - So lately I've been thinking a lot about the next generation of IT. Software + services... While the concepts for Web 2.0 are intriguing many questions come to mind. What is a good candidate for Web 2.0 especially if it’s not maintained inside the corporate infrastructure? The approach is very attractive but introduces many new obstacles, how do we ensure the integrity of transactions, data ownership issues, transparency. As services grow and mature they tend to change significantly over time with inevitable impact on subscribers. How do we continue to reduce TCO in this type of environment? Can subscribers create prescriptive contracts that prevent this from occurring? On the provider si......

45 of 747 | Wanted: Web Application UX Designer @ NetIDme Ltd. -     Web Application UX Designer   Itching for an opportunity to work in an environment where design and usability really matters? Here’s your chance. NetIDme are now looking for a designer to help us conceptualise and sweat the details of our web applications’ user experience.   As a User Experience Designer, you will: Imagine new opportunities to hit the “sweet spot,” that place where our products delight customers while fulfilling our business goals. Develop a deep understanding of our customers’ motivations and behaviors through user research methods such as field studies. Lay the groundwork for new products by modeling workflows, crafting per......

46 of 747 | Windows CE: GetAdaptersInfo() handling when no Adapters are exist - I thought that I would experiment with GetAdaptersInfo() yesterday (this is GeeksWithBlogs!)  Being lazy, I googled to find example code to start with, and found GetAdaptersInfo Function on MSDN .  This certainly was a good starting point, but I soon found a problem. As it turns out, the day before I had been working on Platform Builder: Find the Source of a Data Abort; an Example where I purposely added a Data Abort to my Ethernet driver.  As a result, I didn't have any Ethernet adapters to get information for.  This meant that when I called GetAdaptersInfo(), it failed returning ERROR_NO_DATA (232) which was not handled well in the sample code. The original code contained: // Make an i......

47 of 747 | Writing to .Net Config Files - I've been working with config files for quite some time.  I was recently reminded that I needed to finish my original article and share my final findings on my personal best practices for working with config files. One of the coolest and most useful features in config files is the file attribute as displayed below (see my other article for a more detailed explaination, preferred-method-for-read-only-config-files). <configuration>   <configSections>     <section name="MyCustomSection" type="System.Configuration.NameValueFileSectionHandler, System, Version=1.0.3300.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089"/>   </configSections>   ......

48 of 747 | 10 posts in 1 -   Imagine that every project in codeplex had to be decomposed into codeplex hosted unit tested functions which complied to some xunit standard - that would go along way towards code reuse, and move away from reinventing the wheel.   worked on 2 Silverlight projects recently - see screenshots: and Last 3 months learned the following: NET Components revise – reread Yuval Loweys book – revised best mechanism for interface usage,  delegates (circa .NET Framework 2.0), threading. The Interface stuff leads me to think upon the design patterns Decorator, Bridge and Proxy, and on the Unity AB IoC. The threading stuff is good – advises not to go low level – forget Moni......

49 of 747 | Improve Productivity with Keystroke Shortcuts - I'm clearly not the oldest knife in the drawer, nor am I the youngest.  I got involved with computers in my youth just about the time Bill Gates was positioning himself to put a PC in every home.  What this means is, I g