ObjectSharp

Flash content is finally searchable by two of the biggest online search engines on the internet, Google and Yahoo. One of the biggest disadvantage of using Flash content for your dynamic content is simply because it is not searchable, and now with Adobe's new optimized Adobe Flash Player helping both Google and Yahoo to search and index Flash content, this means that there is no excuse left NOT TO USE FLASH on your web sites. Note that Microsoft Live Search was not included in this partnership. Now, for those enthusiastic about writing Silverlight content on the web, might I ask, what is Microsoft going to do about this? Both in its Live Search, making it competitive with Google and Yahoo to search Flash content, and also making Silverlight content searchable too. This is the biggest advantage Adobe Flash has over Silverlight now, and if Microsoft doesn't do anything about it, the web will...

I was asked a few weeks ago why Artificial Intelligence over the past few decades has been such a “failure”, meaning mostly that it isn’t seen to be living up to its great cognitive expectations. James Gaskin at NetworkWorld gives a well-referenced response very similar to the one I gave then, which went like: Essentially, whenever some [...]...

Want a good chuckle? Goto Google Maps Get Directions from Sydney Australia to Los Angeles CA ( For those with little or no time ) Read number 6 on the directions....

Is it better to have a user implicitly learning how an application work easily by discovery, rather than explicitly learning how an application works through training and books? If something goes wrong with an application, is it really a "problem between the keyboard and the chair"? Or is it because the "User Experience" isn't sufficient or consistent to assist with implicit learning? Sometimes people in the "Computer Industry" need to think more about the user and how to ease their pain, instead of blaming them and create more pain for them. I'm always amazed when a user tells me "It just works! Amazing!" instead of "How do you do this?". That's "User Experience" for you. Think about it. This is my rant today....

I normally don’t cross-link WPF articles unless sooper-excited because I figure all of us in the WPF-o-sphere are reading each other’s blogs. But I was particularly interested on Rudi Grobler’s recent look into XAML obfuscation because I’ve encountered obfuscation issues from a couple of sides in a recent project. To sum up, XAML obfuscation is a [...]...

These are a few links I want to read later on F# Quotations. Quotations are similar to expression trees in C#, but more powerful. F# - Simple quotations transformation Practical F# Parsing: The Abstract Syntax Tree F# Quotations Samples on CodePlex F# quotations visualizer - reloaded! Some Q&A on F# Quotations and LINQ...

Well, it seems this month I'm up for being interviewed. Here's the link to my interview ....

With all this heat, I almost wrote "perspiring". Why not beat the heat, and stay cool inside while watching these web casts from MS Canada targeting aspiring architects. With the predicted shortage in IT in the upcoming years, we're sure to see an influx of junior resources into our industry. This is a good opportunity for developers to transition into architecture roles to leverage their existing skill set. The Aspiring Architect Series 2008 builds on last year’s content and covers a number of topics that are important for architects to understand. So it would be a great idea to watch last year's recordings if you haven't already. Links are available here:  http://blogs.msdn.com/mohammadakif/archive/tags/Aspiring+Architects/default.aspx . Upcoming sessions are as follows: June 16 th , 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Introduction to the aspiring architect...

Last week at TechEd I gave a talk about building data access layers with the Entity Framework. I covered various approaches from not having a data access layer at all, to fully encapsulation of the entity framework - and some hybrid approaches along the way. I gave the first instance of this on Tuesday and then a repeat on Thursday. To those who saw the first instance of this on Tuesday.... you unfortunately got an abbreviated and disjointed version for which I apologize. After I queued up my deck about 15 minutes prior to the talk I left the room for a minute while people filed in and while I was out, one of the event staff shutdown my deck and restarted it running from a different folder on the recording machine and didn't tell me. I was about 1/3rd into my presentation when I realized that I had the wrong version of the deck. At the time, I had no idea why this version of the deck was...

About a month ago, Live.com released an update to their search engine and I took it upon myself to write down my observations of Live as compared to Google . Although the features seemed to be a pretty good leap in many areas, I concluded that the only way to see which one was better was to change my default engine to Live.com for a week or two and give it a try. Well, it's been a month now and Live.com is still my search engine. It's not like I didn't stop using Google however. I would say that perhaps 10% or less of the time, I felt frustrated by not finding what I was looking for on Live.com and cross-searched Google.com. Of those cases, I would say only half of the time, I found something useful on Google.com that wasn't found on Live.com. These aren't hard numbers, just an anecdotal feel of my experience. When Google.com was my default search engine, my failed searches were likely in...

If you plan to convert your physical domain controllers into virtual servers, you probably know there is a lot to consider prior to the move. But what you might not know is that Active Directory doesn't like being restored from the image, which what all physical-to-virtual conversion tools (Acronis, Ghost, etc.) are doing. It doesn't matter if you are trying to convert your physical server to a virtual or if you're converting your server from one virtual format to another (for example, Vmware-to-VPC, or vice versa). After the conversion, replication process breaks and the error starts appearing in the log files "The source server is currently rejecting replication requests"; the same error pops up when you try to run dcpromo command. Obviously if the problem is not resolved within 60 days, that domain controller will get tombstoned by Active Directory, which is not very good. Most of the...

Are you a design & mac user in a Windows Development Shop? Are they eyeing your Mac and measuring your desk to outfit you with a new PC? Over your cold dead corpse I bet. No worries. You owe it to yourself to check out the Microsoft Expression Professional Subscription.  Yeah, you could run Bootcamp but then you'd loose the OS X & Quicksilver goodness while you paid the bills. This annual subscription's most important piece of software isn't made by MS: Parallels Desktop for Mac. Parallels will let you run Windows Vista or Windows XP (also included with the subscription) without leaving OS X - better yet with Expose, your desktop will be unified. And with the SmartSelect feature, you'll be opening Mac or Windows files in the OS of your choice automatically. Edit XAML files in Expression Blend (also include) in Windows, but open JPEG's in Photoshop in OS X - regardless from which...

Rob Burke is teaching a WPF training course through Toronto-based consultancy ObjectSharp . The course is called “ Windows Presentation Foundation for Developers and Lead Designers ,” and, as the title suggests, it offers a hands-on experience designed to give developers and lead designers the knowledge, background, tips and references they’ll need to build smart client applications using the Windows Presentation Foundation. After enjoying the process of training a team of developers and designers to use WPF, this course is the result of turning that material into a course that we could offer here. The inaugural course offering is currently scheduled for August 13th-15th . If you’re interested in taking part, please find more information about the course on ObjectSharp’s site . Also, if August 13th is too long for you to wait, or you’re interested in an on-site course, please contact Julie...

I’m excited to be launching a WPF training course through Toronto-based consultancy ObjectSharp. The course is called “Windows Presentation Foundation for Developers and Lead Designers,” and, as the title suggests, it offers a hands-on experience designed to give developers and lead designers the knowledge, background, tips and references they’ll need to build smart client [...]...

What is Pex? Pex generates test inputs that cover all, or at least many of the corner cases in your .NET code. These test inputs are plugged into parameterized unit test that you write. The result is a small unit test suite, where each unit test calls the parameterized unit test with particular test inputs. There is a great picture on the main Pex page that illustrates this process. Pex supports other unit test frameworks since the unit tests that Pex generates can be executed by other unit test frameworks without Pex. Pex comes with support for MSTest, the unit test framework of Visual Studio, out of the box. For support for other unit test frameworks, please look at the Pex Extensions project. Parameterized unit tests have been around for quite some time already, under several names -- row tests, data-driven tests, theories, etc. What is really unique about Pex is that it analyzes your...

Source Analysis, also known as StyleCop, analyzes C# source code to enforce a set of best practice style and consistency rules. Source Analysis for C# can be downloaded here: https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=sourceanalysis . Source Analysis Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/sourceanalysis...

Well it's just 1 week since DevTeach came to Toronto for the first time. What a great conference and it was my pleasure to be involved as a speaker, track-chair and attendee. The conference organizer Jean-Rene Roy just sent me a note with some of the comments from the overall evaluations. If you didn't attend this year, here's some reasons why you may want to next year: Great conference! I especially enjoyed the up and personal nature of the conference. I was able to talk with the presenters. I spent most of my time at the agile track. Having topics that are rarely dealt with at user groups was a bonus. I enjoyed all the sessions I attended. The venue was great and the attention to little details, e.g., afternoon ice cream was appreciated. Jean-René, thank you SO MUCH for bringing DevTeach to Toronto. It was fantastic and I will go again. Your tech chairs did a great job choosing sessions...

Here's a very simple QuickSort algorithm from Wikipedia written in a very Functional way of C#. Notice that it looks very close to the pseudo-code algorithm shown in Wikipedia. The pivot used is just sequence.First(). You can replace the pivot by some random position if you wish. 1: public static IEnumerable<T> QuickSort<T>( this IEnumerable<T> sequence) where T : IComparable<T> 2: { 3: return !sequence.Any() 4: ? sequence 5: : ((from x in sequence.Skip(1) 6: where x.CompareTo(sequence.First()) < 0 7: select x) 8: .QuickSort() 9: ).Concat( new [] { sequence.First() }).Concat((from x in sequence.Skip(1) 10: where x.CompareTo(sequence.First()) >= 0 11: select x).QuickSort()); 12: } I tried making this more fun by using the Fix Point Generator which I mentioned previously, and converted that code into a Func<IEnumerable<T>> instead. Here's the code....

It's been awhile since I've posted any updates on my Toshiba M400. Over the past year, my experience running Vista has improved greatly and I've been surprised with my efforts on extending the useful life of this machine. For the record, it's > 2 years old for me now which is starting to breaking records for me now - I normally can't go much more than a year without an upgrade. The bottom line is with things the way they are now - I'm quite happy with the machine and haven't really envied anything on the market. I'm running the latest 3.60 bios which is pretty stable now, having not been updated since it's release in July 2007. Although I can't get to page 3 in the bios settings  (it locks up when I do that) things are working quite well. I upgraded to 4Gb of Ram. A little over a year ago I looked into this and it was going to set me back $1500+. This past march, it only cost $100....

To get more detailed messages in MOSS 2007 and WSS3.0 during development process, user can enable debugging in the web.config file for the SharePoint web application: < SafeMode MaxControls = " 200 " CallStack = " true " DirectFileDependencies = " 10 " TotalFileDependencies = " 50 " AllowPageLevelTrace = " false " > And: < customErrors mode = " Off " /> This should make development process so much pleasant and more efficient, by getting rid of "An unexpected error has occurred" error, which is useless to the developers. Note: It's not recommended to have debugging enabled on the production server, if possible, please do all your debugging on the development server(s)...

[via Paul Andrew ] [Microsoft is] doing lots of things around introductory SharePoint development for .NET developers over the next few months. Here is the schedule for a series of MSDN web casts on 10 introductory SharePoint development topics for .NET developers. If you are a .NET developer then chances are these are the most interesting ten introductory things you can do on SharePoint Products and Technologies. http://blogs.msdn.com/pandrew/archive/2008/05/12/sharepoint-developer-msdn-web-cast-series.aspx Technorati Tags: [ SharePoint ]...

The spring conference season keeps on chugging along. The MVP Summit and DevTeach just finished and TechEd is just around the corner. It will be interesting to see what effect splitting the conference into a developer week and an IT Pro week will have. I've been spending a lot of time with SharePoint lately and that's a topic that has firm roots on both sides. I'm sure there are many other disciplines (SQL Server and VSTS come to mind) that are in the same boat. This year I'll be taking it easier on the "networking" than I have in the past. I'm moderating a Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session and co-presenting an early-morning TLC talk and want to do so with a clear head. I'll also still be in the process of upgrading our ASP.NET course from 2.0 to 3.5 which will be delivered for the first time the week following the conference. I went through the session builder earlier and there are a ton...

As I mentioned a while back , I had a long conversation with Derek Hatchard that was recorded for Devcasting . The second part of that discussion - where we discuss WPF, Silverlight, technology overload, and DevTeach - has now been posted. http://devcasting.com/index.php/2008/05/16/devcasting-11-rob-windsor-on-many-things/ Happy listening. Technorati Tags: [ Devcasting ]...

No, I haven't decided to give up software development for the glitz and glamor of the Jet Set life. I'm just the poster child for our summer training promotion. If you're looking for .NET, SharePoint, VSTS, or BizTalk training in Toronto you should check it out. This summer, ObjectSharp invites you to take advantage of reduced pricing on its premiere .NET training courses. Save up to $500/person on our real-world training destinations. All flights include complimentary breakfast, and are piloted by industry Top Guns - including six Microsoft MVPs and one Microsoft Regional Director. Book your trip today! http://www.objectsharp.com/training/summer-seat-sale.aspx Technorati Tags: [ ObjectSharp ]...

Some WPF Line-of-Business App follow-up after my presentation at DevTeach today: Great Snippets: Great code snippets I have installed into my Visual Studio for WPF development are the Dr Wpf and Nerd+Art snippet packs. WPF Coding Conventions: The coding guidelines I use for WPF are a riff on Paul Stovell’s XAML and WPF Coding Guidelines. Application Quality Guide: [...]...