All posts by : Geekswithblogs.net

701 of 910 | Silverlight Cream for December 12, 2007 - 2 -- #153 - Second half of the list from yesterday: UCAYA has an SVG to XAML converter, Omar Al Zabir has a Silverlight Pagecast, Christmas CoolWall from Tim Sneath, an Expression Encoder plugin tutorial from Tim Heuer, Sprawl2 from the Expression Team Blog, Paul Laberge put up a tutorial on the SL Streaming Publishing Plug-in for Encoder, and Karsten Januszewski discusses streaming an audio file and shows some Encoder Template tweaks. From SilverlightCream.com: XamlTune -- SVG to XAML This might not be completely clear to those of us that don't speak French, but UCAYA has an application to convert SVG to XAML, and also the source! Silverlight Pagecast - Keep an eye on Silverlight stuffs Omar Al Za......

702 of 910 | Workflow Validation Exception: Condition Not Found - Recently I migrated one of my solutions from .net 3.0 to .net 3.5.  For the most part the migration went smoothly, except for an issue with the type provider, and XAML activated workflows that included accompanying .rules files. I was able to load and work with the workflows in the Visual Studio designer, but they would fail execution at runtime: line 402 error 1342: Activity 'PersistWasSucessful' validation failed: Can not find the condition "ParticipationSaved". --->  System.Workflow.ComponentModel.Compiler.WorkflowValidationFailedException: The workflow failed validation.. Typically the "Condition Not Found" error is the result of the .rules file not being loaded at the same......

703 of 910 | Calling a web service from a Workflow hosted in MOSS, listening in an UpdateTask activity and beeing invoked by using AlterTask from external application - There is the following complex scenario: a workflow hosted in MOSS is listening in an OnTaskChanged activity which is in a While loop. The task change could happen if a user enters MOSS and manually updates the task (i.e. completes it) or by an external console application, which programatically looks up and alters the task. In the Invoked event handler of the OnTaskChanged activity a web service is called to obtain information which used to proceed further. The web service uses integrated authentication. The second way doesn't works by default. When the SPWorkflowTask.AlterTask method is called, a new thread is strated by the MOSS API in the process of the console application, having ......

704 of 910 | Events coming up this week.... - OK, so it’s short notice, but….. I have a couple of events I’d like to mention here: 1)      Tomorrow night (Dec 12 2007) will be the second meeting of the San Diego .NET User Group Connected Systems SIG. Chris Romp, Microsoft Technology Specialist for BizTalk, SOA and Process Platform in Southern California, will be presenting “What’s new in BizTalk Server 2006R2". Meeting will be at the Microsoft office in La Jolla at 6:00PM. Details (and mailing list sign-up) at http://SanDiegoDotNet.com   2)      On Wednesday (Dec 13 2007), I’ll be doing an MSDN GeekSpeak with Lynn Langit and Glen Gordon. Powerpoints are forbidden. It’ll be a free-ranging casual conversation, moving around between BA......

705 of 910 | Handy SQL Delimited string to XML - I came across this simple yet great way of translating a delimited string to XML using SQL 2005. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/XML/61618/   /* Here is the string that we need to split */ DECLARE @str VARCHAR(100) SET @str = '0001,0002,0003,0004,0005' /* I am converting the string to an XML structure by inserting XML tags. */ DECLARE @x XML SET @x = '<i>' + REPLACE(@str, ',', '</i><i>') + '</i>' /* Now we can apply XQuery to return a resultset */ SELECT x.i.value('.', 'VARCHAR(4)') AS Item  FROM @x.nodes('//i') x(i) /* Item ---- 0001 0002 0003 0004 0005 (5 row(s) affected) */ _qacct="p-03-ZsKAm7O3lI";quantserve(); ...

706 of 910 | Interesting little trick in my adapter build process - Ive been developing a few custom adapters for a project recently.  Actually one of the adapters was the .net file adapter from the BizTalk SDK samples which we wanted to use and include in our deployment.  The aim was as follows: Create the functional code for the adapters Create unit tests to cover as much of the functional code as possible Create a sample BizTalk application to allow demonstration and further testing of the adapters Create BizUnit tests to test the adapters within a BizTalk application Integrate the adapters solution into Continuous Integration From each build produce a deployment package so the adapters could be easily and reliably deploye......

707 of 910 | Rosario CTP10 the good, the bad, and the meh - So what is new in the Software Factory world for Rosario? Well actually not much (someone is bound to shoot me down for that comment) :) So firstly Rosario is not just about factories, although that is pretty much all I will comment on, so once you have your VHD up and running there are a bunch of walk-through's /mini stories to give you a sense of what you are able to do in this CTP. Developer Mini-Stories Architect Mini-Stories - for me this is my main focus Team Foundation Server Mini-Stories Tester Mini-Stories WiX Mini-Stories - looks like I'm gonna have to learn to love WiX Toolbox From a factory perspective the first thing of note is that the Service Fa......

708 of 910 | Hello World! - As all programming books start with a "Hello World" example, I'm starting this blog with a "Hello World" post and will tell you what and how I'm going to contribute to a global develops' community which has been made possible by today's technology. We need to see it more prosperous, so we have to work together to learn from each others' experiences and real world knowledge of what technology enables us to do today and what it'll do in future. Of course the main focus of this blog is to cover all the technologies coming in a pipeline with a speed of light  from Microsoft. And being a computer professional I know how much difficult it is to make decision about what technology to choose based......

709 of 910 | Integrating BizUnit & LoadGen - I have been setting up some performance tests using LoadGen today and was having a couple of problems where the message sent by LoadGen wasnt working properly and it was a bit of a pain trying to workout the cause of the problem. After 10 minutes I thought hang on ive got BizUnit tests which do exactly what I want except that I just want to run them a lot of times.  This made me think back to something Ewan Fairweather said back at TechEd Barcelona about potentially integrating LoadGen and BizUnit.  A bit of a google didnt bring up many results so I have a look at writing my own transport provider for LoadGen. This was very easy. I started off by creating a new C# project and added the f......

710 of 910 | Top 10 Articles in this Blog - Here below is a collection of articles from this blog which seemed to have interested (and benefited) many folks and I thought of sharing the links and the respective topics. Error: allowDefiniton='MachineToApplication' - Not configuring a folder as application before using application level settings. http://geekswithblogs.net/ranganh/archive/2005/04/25/37609.aspx Dynamically assigning the URL for an Iframe in ASP.NET http://geekswithblogs.net/ranganh/archive/2005/04/25/37635.aspx Parser Error: Could not load type 'WebApplication1.Global' http://geekswithblogs.net/ranganh/archive/2005/04/25/37610.aspx Login failed for user '(null)' Trusted SQL Server connection http://geekswith......

711 of 910 | Using Kerberos, WSE & LoadGen - I was wanting to use LoadGen to call an orchestration exposed as a wse web service.  In the documentation it covers a set of elements for the WSE Transport which will create a username token for the WSE call.  I wanted to however use Kerberos so this is what I did. 1. Amend the LoadGenConsole.exe.config file to include the config section for WSE.  I also included the element to point to a policy cache file. 2. I set up a policy cache to have the appropriate config to call a wse web service with Kerberos 3. I then used the below command cd "C:\Program Files\LoadGen\Bins" runas /profile /env /user:domain\username "LoadGenConsole.exe C:\LoadGen\BizUnitGetAdhocData.xml" pause   The key ......

712 of 910 | Web Services - Exposing the Schema Contract when Using NIEM Schemas? - In the new paradigm of contract first designs for services a lot of it revolves around exposing a contract that defines the operations and messages for a service.  In terms of Web Services (or WCF exposed via a web service) this also means exposing the schemas via the WSDL so that consumers know the inputs and outputs for that service and its methods. This is my big question: When working with NIEM how many are exposing their subset schemas to their web services and how many are using a generic "Package as string" approach where the package details are agreed upon outside the context of your service?  I have seen this done both ways and recently have chosen to follow one direction.  In my......

713 of 910 | Are all the Good names gone ? - Damn it I wanted to call my company  " endpoint "  ... I think we need to start thinking about the Endpoint of Technological Innovation ... Our homes will have media servers, our bedrooms will have workstations, our livingrooms will have cinemas and libraries, and our pockets will contain universal PDAs with HD video, HighRes imaging, GPS navigation and HiFi audio ... Within the next 10yrs we will be able to carry a hand-held device which will allow us to communicate with anyone at any time ... 4G phone communications will mean people will call more often than text messaging ... We will know where we are in relation to landmarks and our loved ones constantly ... Email payloads w......

714 of 910 | Biztalk ESB Guidance - Part 1 - Well, finally we have managed to grab some time and start playing with the Enterprise Service Bus Guidance. Biztalk ESB Guidance provides architecture and a set of Biztalk Server and .NET components to assist in the development of an ESB on the Microsoft platform. You can download the bits and documentation at codeplex here The guidance is well documented, but installation can be a little bumpy if you don't follow instructions carefully. You will need Biztalk 2006 R2 installed and Dundas Web Chart (http://www.dundas.com/Downloads/index.aspx ) be sure to install Enterprise Edition.   _qacct="p-03-ZsKAm7O3lI";quantserve(); ...

715 of 910 | Microsoft Volta - I came across the Public Sector Developer Weblog today to find something with bold claims. From Microsoft Live Labs, it is the Microsoft Volta CTP. According to the blog post, "The compiler creates cross-browser JavaScript for the client tier, web services for the server tier, and all communication, serialization, synchronization, security, and other boilerplate code to tie the tiers together" It almost sounds too good to be true. Script#, Astoria, etc...all concepts rolled together? Although, on initial glance of the samples, it looks to generate a lot of excess noise that is not necessary. Obviously, if you're looking for highly optimized client-side code, this is probably not s......

716 of 910 | Synchronizing Line of Business Data using RSS - Consider the problem of a group of line-of-business data that is read-only but can shrink, grow and change frequently (think product catalog) that needs to be synchronized with a large number of occasionally connected smart clients.  What mechanism could be used to perform the synchronization?  You could certainly use some kind of push technology, but that would most likely require the server to track when each client was last updated so that only the appropriate records are pushed when the client connects.  You could use some form of queuing to queue each changed record so that the client can fetch the queued changes when reconnecting, but this again requires the sever to have knowledge of......

717 of 910 | TCXNAUG Member Projects - The December 20th meeting of the Twin Cities XNA User Group promises to be a good one. We've got the following members presenting some projects they have been working on. Be sure to visit the website and RSVP so we know how many people to expect. Member Projects   Justin Chase will show us Drop In, a 1 or 2 player game featuring a simple MinMax algorithm for AI. The object of the game is to get five pucks of your color in a row by dropping pucks into a column and by rotating the game board.   ......

718 of 910 | Tools I can't live without - Still working on some Spec# posts right now, but in the mean time, here's something I meant to send out a while ago. Throughout my career, many people have asked which tools I take from project to project.  There have been plenty of tools that seemed cool, worked for a little bit then I moved onto something else.  Being in the ALT.NET mindset, I have a wide array of tools that I will bring whether they be from Microsoft or the developer community as a whole.  I'll categorize each set of tools per type.  Since I mostly do .NET at this point, I'll list those. Note that this will be a growing list and constantly updated.  Note that I don't bring all of these tools to all of my engagement......

719 of 910 | Unable to manage form templates - Just solved a problem, and wanted to document the solution. Problem: SharePoint MOSS 2007 Central Administrations site.  Select Application Management --> InfoPath Forms Services --> Manage form templates. This runs the page _admin/ManageFormTemplates.aspx Response is the ever-helpful SharePoint screen:  Error.  Unknown Error. Thanks, guys.  How do I turn on custom errors in SharePoint? And how do I get Manage form templates to work? Disclaimer:  `No warrantees, express or implied, are granted with this information.  Please note that this information is FREE and me being nice enough to give it to you does not mean that you should do anything with it, and that it won't do anyt......

720 of 910 | Deciding On Photo Editing Software - Ok, so if you didn't already know it I am a shutter bug.  Everyone who is into photography knows that the big dog on the block is Photoshop CS3.  Unfortunately if you don't get paid for your photography or get the "CEO's" approval for such an expenditure it is just way too expensive.  So lately I have been looking at alternatives.  This post will describe some of the plusses and minuses of a couple of editing packages. So which applications did I look at: Paint.NET, Nikon Capture NX, Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, and Photoshop Elements. Paint.NET has been my main editing tool for a while.  I was able to use it with a decent workflow based on the shortcut keys.  The other nice thing is that it ......

721 of 910 | Piecing it all together - The subtitle of this blog started out as gluing it all together.  I quickly realized that when thinking in terms of a loosely coupled environment glue isn't necessarily the best tool in your tool box.  I will try to post a little more in depth follow up to Querying a NIEM XML Document With LINQ as soon as I can.  After some review I realized just how reusable some of the parsing methods I wrote are.  Wouldn't it be nice to have a single NIEM XML parser that you could extend if you received additional elements not in the base NIEM schemas?   _qacct="p-03-ZsKAm7O3lI";quantserve(); ...

722 of 910 | Querying a NIEM XML Document Using LINQ - If you are not familiar with the new LINQ syntax in .NET 3.5 I recommend you read up on that first. Language Integrated Query (LINQ) is the new foundation for querying anything (I mean anything) in .NET and a lot of effort has been put into LINQ and XML integration.  I did some research a few months back on it but it was only recently that I realized how much Microsoft put into LINQ to XML.  I am a huge fan of intellisense.  That is the best thing that MS ever perfected in Studio.  I spend a lot of time making sure things show up properly via intellisense and it really irks me if something isn't there.  Studio 2008 (I've used Professional and now Team Development edition) has the best int......

723 of 910 | Creating a ClickOnce Smart Client CAB Based (SCSF) application with Environment Overrides - My application is distributed via ClickOnce and a requirement is to be able to provide endpoint overrides for multiple environments. Here's what was done to create the solution Smart Client Software Factory includes a service called EndpointCatalog. It allow for easy management of endpoints with environment overrides. Start by adding a Microsoft.Practices.SmartClient.EndpointCatalog.dll as a reference to Infrastructure.Module. Then open ModuleController class in and register the EndpointCatalog service. private void AddServices() { IEndpointCatalog catalog = WorkItem.RootWorkItem.Services.Get&lt;IEndpointCatalog&gt;(false); if (catalog == null) { IEndpointCatalogFact......

724 of 910 | New wave of Microsoft technologies/products... - Be ready for new wave of Microsoft technologies and products. Few are already released and rest will follow in the next few months. Below are some of major releases from Microsoft. Click on links below for more information: .Net 3.5 o        WCF, WPF, WWF o        ASP.Net §         ASP (.Net 3.0) - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms644563.aspx Check below blogs for “what is .Net 3.5” §         http://www.danielmoth.com/Blog/2007/06/net-framework-35.html §         http://www.danielmoth.com/Blog/2007/05/clr-v20-remains-at-same-version.html   This version of .Net is most stable, feature rich, best performing version so far. We may not see a new version of .Net a......

725 of 910 | Ping Servers for your blog - Here is a list of ping servers for your blog: Special thanks to joelevi for most of these. Let me know if you have more... http://www.joelevi.com http://www.technorati.com http://www.digg.com http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ http://api.feedster.com/ping http://api.moreover.com/RPC2 http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2 http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/ http://ping.blo.gs/ http://ping.feedburner.com http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/ http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/ http://rpc.newsgator.com/ http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2 http://topicexchan......

726 of 910 | Silverlight Cream for December 5, 2007 - 2 -- #147 - Some fun Silverlight things I didn't want to fall off my desk: Mike Ormond blogged about a series of Designer and Developer Webcasts for Silverlight and Kate Lee opens the doors on "Silverlight tutorial". From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight Webcasts Looks like MSEvents is cooking up a big list of WebCasts for Developers and Designers alike. Unfortunately, the Designers ones started on Monday, so hopefully we can get those offline later. The Developer ones start next Monday, and there are some available on demand ... oh ok, the first Designer one is already available that way ... cool :) Silverlight tutorial Kate Lee, a name you should recognize if you frequent Silverlight.net has ope......

727 of 910 | So how small did you want your PC? - Well this certainly sounds good, but I seem to recall that a few years ago there was the Cappuccino PC and the AOpen, just to name a few and there is also a good web site at www.worldssmallestpc.com that has a whole range of devices that come under the small form factor banner. The main change with this particular unit would appear to be the lack of an optical drive which frees up the design criteria allowing a much narrower profile from the front and consequently a reduction in volume for the overall unit, It's also getting less important to support an optical drive what with the growth in size of the USB storage capacity etc. I did also note that there appears to be something looking li......

728 of 910 | Visual Studio 2005 & Visual Studio 2008 Side by Side - Greetings from snowy, beautiful Washington, DC where it takes the average person three hours to get into work.  Seems that when people come across frozen bridges, the first idea people get is to step on the brakes.  WHY???  Anyhow, that's a rant for another day.  The here and now focus is Visual Studio 2005 and 2008. With the projects I've been doing lately, I haven't had the luxury to completely switch over to Visual Studio 2008 just yet.  There are a few things holding me back: BizTalk 2006 R2 integration SharePoint 2007 Web Part Projects Resharper .NET 3.5 C# intellisense doesn't work Performance concerns about some tests with WF workflow performance using while ......

729 of 910 | BizTalk Anti Pattern: Everything runs as the same user - Name: Everything runs as the same user   Description: This situation exists on some of the test environments at a project I have been working on.  Basically all of the BizTalk hosts and IIS application pools are configured to run as the same user account because it is easier to setup. This is especially common for development and testing environments.  I came across the situation on this particular project where the user account had become locked out and as result tes......

730 of 910 | Getting Your Adoption (and Welcoming It) - You completed the forms.  You did the interviews.  You provided references.  You even demonstrated the pros (and maybe the cons) using someone's copy.  So now you wait patiently to hear word from the adoption agency that your requested new addition is ready.  Then it arrives...in a shiny holographic-background DVD...with official logos. Wait what?  Did you think I was referring to human adoption?   Sorry...let me back up... Visual Studio 2008 was release from Microsoft recently (in 2007 no less).  I know companies who are still using Visual Basic 6 for production applications.  So this prompted to revisit an old discussion related to technology adoption.  The Technology Adoption Conundr......

731 of 910 | BTS2006R2 MSI Deploy - I took my first stab at deploying a BTS2006R2 application from my development machine to another BTS machine.  It worked pretty well but a couple of catches.  All the catches are in the documentation but I'm going to go through them here. 1.  Include any GACed assemblies in the Biztalk Administrator Application Resources.  I have some assemblies that are used by custom XSL maps so I have to include these.  It's pretty easy to do by right clicking the Resources folder of the application and selecting Add >  Resources.   Of course if the assemblies are going to be used by other applications the best way to install the assemblies is a setup project of their own. 2.  Change the Destination......

732 of 910 | Codename "Oslo", Microsoft's next generation SOA thinking. - Oslo is the codename for technical thinking aimed specifically at simplifying designing, building, managing and scaling  of service-oriented and composite applications that can span from the enterprise to the Internet. It is thought the first version of Oslo will be delivered through the next versions of our application platform products such as Microsoft Visual Studio 10, Microsoft System Center 5, BizTalk Server 6, BizTalk Services 1 and Microsoft .NET Framework 4. So, we are talking a 18 months to a few years timeframe. Microsoft in the past has been strongly criticised for it's SOA initiative for many different reasons which are, Not having a comparable product range with mo......

733 of 910 | Come join us at the BizTalk R2 Launch Fest! - I will be presenting the about the WCF LOB Adapter SDK ("Connect ANYthing") at the BizTalk R2 launch on December 13th at the Microsoft Silicone Valley Campus. Please join us for this event - we have some interesting new stuff to show and talk about in the SOA, ESB, BPM arena.  Following is the official invitation.  Sign up today - it's free! ***************** Join industry experts from Xterprise, Magenic Technologies, and Microsoft on December 13th, 2007 for the BizTalk R2 Launch- Extending SOA beyond the Edge of the Enterprise Event,  to discover how you can take advantage of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Business Process Management (BPM).  Globalization, competition, and......

734 of 910 | Enterprise Service Bus on the Microsoft Platform Presentation - Join us for the latest Microsoft Integration and Connected Systems User Group (MICSUG) on December 17th at 7:00PM, where we will talk about the Enterprise Service Bus Guidance provided by Microsoft on CodePlex.  Since Geoff Snowman will be out, I will be running the show that night, so I hope you come out and hope to have a great crowd.  As someone who is currently using this technology on a project, it's always great to see new ideas and perspectives on the technology. In case you don't know what ESB is, let's go over a few links: MSDN Documentation for ESB Microsoft ESB Overview PowerPoint presentation Microsoft ESB Technical Overview PowerPoint presentation Enterpris......

735 of 910 | Having Fun with Extension Methods :) - Extension Methods is a new feature of the C# language (I think it is called C# 3.0). Extension methods allows you to extend the CLR types. This includes all the types which inherit from the System.Object class. Let's see a small example where I have extended a String to add a new "Reverse" method which gives me the string in reverse.  public static string Reverse(this string s)        {            string r = String.Empty;             for (int i = s.Length -1; i >= 0; i--)            {                r += s[i].ToString();             }             return r;                     } I am using the Extension methods in a separate class. It is a good idea to keep this separation as Extension m......

736 of 910 | Life's Big Mystery: Who am I and why am I here? - My name is Chris and I spend most of my days for my employer working on a myriad of projects and systems in the criminal justice arena.  I work mainly in .NET (VB to be specific) but I am no longer afraid of things like C# and Java.  Somewhere along the line I told someone I knew something about XML too.  Most of my days are split between being a "product/project leader" for one of our mobile solutions and also as the interfaces guy.  I get to spend a lot of my interface guy time lecturing about SOA, SaaS, and S+S and why we need to change everything right now.  That also means I spend a lot of time with Web Services (ASMX and now WCF) and NIEM - the National Information Exchange Model.  ......

737 of 910 | ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Release - Now that Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 have officially shipped, it's time to start looking at the additional products and tools that build on top of that foundation. Scott Guthrie has an excellent post that details the roadmap for the Web related products. The biggest announcement is that the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions will have it's first public preview available sometime next week. If you don't know what the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions are, here is the list (taken from Scott's post): ASP.NET MVC: This model view controller (MVC) framework for ASP.NET provides a structured model that enables a clear separation of concerns within web applications, and makes it easier to unit test your code and su......

738 of 910 | Required Fields & web service bindings in 2.0 - Having worked so much with BizTalk, haven't had the chance to create a pure .NET 2.0 web service (automaticly generated WSDL). Much to my surprise, the concept of a "Required Field" is not explicitly supported -- i.e. setting minOccurs = 1, etc.  For future reference, some mitigating suggestions are provided by Microsoft here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/zds0b35c.aspx. Feels like going back to the stone ages. Apparently this is much better with WCF bindings....   _qacct="p-03-ZsKAm7O3lI";quantserve(); ...

739 of 910 | Dev Teach Day 3 - Source Control Best Practices with Bil Simser and James Kovacs - Are there really places that just use zip files for source control? Wow. I've been lucky to never have worked anywhere like that...VSS was always the lowest point I was at. Optimistic locking is a good thing; keeps things current. Friends don't let friends use VSS. Tortoise SVN has an adapter for TFS that allows you to see the status of your files (checked out, not checked out) in your explorer! Very kewl. Branching - How to Structure Your Sourcecode Folder Subversion can move the folder structure on your client machine much easier than TFS (which needs you to create a new workspace on the TFS server). You have Trunk and Branches. Trunk is your main, Branches are short-term areas to work on......

740 of 910 | Yoda for Christmas - Life Size Yoda Monument Product Information:  The Lifesize Yoda monument stands 37" tall (51.5" to the top of the Lightsaber) by 55" wide.  Made of fiberglass with real fiber clothing. The Lifesize Yoda monument features a light-up Lightsaber with dual working modes and adjustable sound effects. Comes with AC adaptor for destination country and 6 AA batteries. Now fan can bring home one of the most beloved characters from the Star Wars Universe.  This item will be special ordered while supplies last. (I love how they refer to this as a monument, not just a statue.  It's still $825 no matter WHAT you call it.) _qacct="p-03-ZsKAm7O3lI";quantserve(); ...

741 of 910 | Dev Teach Day 3 - Out of Agile, Into Coding - Yesterday was filled with Agile talks, but today my focus is switching to some of the more code-intensive presentations. 8:00 - Rich Internet App. with ASP.NET AJAX and WCSF (Glenn Block)9:30 - Intro to WCF (The Rob)11:00 - Interaction Based Testing with Rhino Mocks (Oren Eini)1:30 - Ajaxing your .NET Apps (Rod Paddock) or Agile Q&A with Dave Laribee & Friends3:00 - Source Control in the Enterprise: Best Practices (Bil Simser) Donald and I are going to work out the last session of the day, assuming my brain doesn't explode from content overload by then. Gonna be a full day! D _qacct="p-03-ZsKAm7O3lI";quantserve(); ...

742 of 910 | Dev Teach Day 3 - Rob Windsor: Intro to Windows Communication Foundation - I heart Rob Windsor...I must say that up front. Rob is a class guy and I'm really looking forward to him stroking my cereberal cortex with WCF goodness. WCF Basics Service ContractDefined by an interface type,a nd attributes are used to indicate the methods that will be included in the service topic. Service ClassRegular class with no inheritance requirements and implements the service contract interface. Service HostServices hosted in any application, as well as IIS.Service ClientConsumes operations via a proxy, which can be created transparently by WCF given a contract, using the svcutil command line util, or using the Add Service Reference dialog in Visual Studio WCF - End PointsClient p......

743 of 910 | Expect the unexpected - I have just encountered a very bizarre and annoying problem today and thought Id do a quick post to vent my frustration.  Problem Ok so in one of the testing environments we have a BizTalk application running which had been fine.  There are a combination of recieve locations from some orchestrations published as web services.  2 ports are one way recieve and the rest are 2 way recieve. As I say all had been working fine, then today the one way recieve ports started to have problems.  The symptoms are listed below: In the IIS logs I could see that the client had called the service and recieved a 202 response The client responded that all was fine and continued processing thi......

744 of 910 | Forms Server 2007 Presentation Wrapup - Sahil Malik gave a great presentation tonight at the CapArea.NET user group meeting tonight.  From this discussion he covered quite a few things that involved InfoPath, Forms Server and WF for SharePoint.  A lot of the interesting tidbits discussed are available on his blog. Customizing the default Document Information Panel in which he populates the document properties by using a custom InfoPath form. Writing SharePoint Workflows in Visual Studio 2005 covers the basic WF scenarios in SharePoint, but also the custom InfoPath solutions you can introduce Aggregating multiple data sources in a Forms Server Form covers a scenario in which you can load data from a SQL Server D......

745 of 910 | Identity crisis - I am having a look at Microsoft's Identity Lifecycle Manager 2007 as a solution to our disparate user identity problem. Some of the bigger companies out there have solved this problem, and in many of the smaller companies it just does not exist, but we have many system that hold meta data about our employees. From HR systems to Active Directory and custom web based address books. Because of Aggreko's unprecedented growth these systems have outgrown our capacity to maintain the consistency of the data, with small groups responsible for each repository and everyone not knowing where ALL the repository's are or who controls them. The idea of ILM server is to provide a single "metaverse" where ......

746 of 910 | Start your factory engines.... - Rosario CTP10 is available for download see Jeff's blog here for more details Of note is the following Visualizing Interaction Sequences between Service-Oriented applications Using the Distributed System Designers and the Web Service Software Factory to build WCF applications Designing and Visualizing Interactions between classes _qacct="p-03-ZsKAm7O3lI";quantserve(); ...

747 of 910 | ASP.NET MVC Roundup - Last month, Scott Guthrie announced the ASP.NET MVC framework which allows for built-in support for the Model View Controller based architecture.  Since that time there has been a flurry of activity from Microsoft to demo the technology to the world and make demos readily available.  In case you missed it, here are some of the features: Clean separation of concerns.  All core contracts of the MVC framework are testable and mockable Highly pluggable to use NHibernate, Spring.NET, Windsor, and other great products URL mapper to create clean URLs Use existing ASPX, ASCX, .MASTER as view templates, but post-back and view-state are not supported Supports ASP.NET fe......

748 of 910 | Enterprise Web Applications using ASP.NET 2.0 - Well, most of the web developers today develop Enterprise Web Applications.  While the challenge lies on different parameters like designing the different layers, transferring