ObjectSharp

I did a presentation this afternoon on some of the basic functions of WCF. I had put a slide deck together using a new Microsoft Office add-in called PPTPlex . You can see demos of what this add-in does in the provided link, but basically is allows for a much more dynamic experience of going through the slides in a slide deck. As compared to the typical linear flow, PPTPlex allows you to easily jump from one slide to another with a couple of clicks up and down the slide hierarchy. I was pretty excited to be able to put this technology to work in the real world - right up to the time when I started the slide show. Most of the time when I do presentations, I use a split screen. That is to say that what is displayed to the audience is not the same as what I see on the laptop in front of me. The new Presentation Mode in PowerPoint 2007 helps me a great deal with working that way. I was expecting...

I recall my first experience with Word 2007...it took me 20 minute to figure out how to do a Save As. Who would have figured that the cute icon in the top left corner actually had functionality associated with it. :) In a blog post from Chris Sells , I was point to a tool whose purpose is to bridge this gap. You see an on-line image of Office 2003 menu structure and by hovering an item, you are told where to find the same function in 2007. You can find the tool here . Check it out, use it and avoid the embarrassment that I went through....

There appears to be a bug in SharePoint (WSS or MOSS) that breaks the backup process after extending a web application. If you need to add host headers or load balancing URL to your SharePoint web application, the only way to do that is to extend your web application (SharePoint Central Administration >> Application Management >> Create or extend Web application >> Extend an existing Web application). Even though extending web application allows you to add load balancing URL and host headers, for some reason, it breaks the backup for all site collections and sites that use that web application. You could still backup SharePoint site collection using stsadm.exe command ( stsadm.exe –o backup –url http://damagedWebApp/ -filename backup_damaged_webapp.bak ), but built-in SharePoint backup through Central Administration wouldn't work. You will start receiving an error ( Error:...

The two or three of you who follow my blog with regularity will have noticed that I was dark for most of the summer. The reason was that I was in the process of writing a book. Co-writing, would be more accurate, but still long hours were spent pounding out prose on my antique Underwood. Okay, maybe not so much pounding, but writing a book does dry me out for writing blog posts. The recent influx of posts would seem to indicate that the book writing process was finished. And indeed it is. In fact, my editor informed me yesterday that the files have been shipped off to the publisher for final processing and printing. This is a source of great cheer, as I can now rest easy that no additional requests for editing will arrive in my inbox. For those of you who are interested, the book is the MS Press training kit for the Windows Communications Foundation exam. You can see what it looks like at...

I'm just passing along some information that has been making the rounds (I found it on Guy Burstein's blog). If you attempt to install SQL Server 2008 on a machine that has Visual Studio 2008 installed, it will fail. The requirement is to have VS 2008 SP1 installed, an update that is still about a week away from release. And you need the 'real' SP1. The same problem exists with the beta for SP1. So, for you developer/database people out there, it looks like at least a week of waiting to get the combination on a single machine....

The project that I have been working on for a number of months uses the Composite UI Application Block (CAB) as the basis for the user interface. If you have never worked with CAB before, it is an interesting framework. In many ways it makes tasks easy that would be incredibly challenging otherwise. This includes the ability to add and remove elements from the user interface by simply adding or removing lines from an XML file. On the other hand, there are parts of CAB that appear to work as if by magic. One of the 'magic' pieces is dependency injection. As a smart part (the name of the UI element that is part of the composition process) is loaded, the presenter (CAB supports a model-view-presenter pattern) is instantiated with some number of parameters passed into the constructor. The cool feature is that the value of any one of the parameters can be 'injected' into CAB by marking the parameter...

… and then I Silverlit it! Is alternately a LOLQuilt, a ROFLMosaic, or a Deep LOL! Here is the full screen version. You can click ur mouse to zoom in, shift-click to zoom out, or just use the mouse wheel to see that the image is made of thousands of LOLCats. How this came to be? The kittehs [...]...

Dare Obasanjo had an interesting post yesterday on the Second System Effect in software development. For those who are unaware, the second system effect is a term first coined by Frederick Brooks in The Mythical Man Month . It deals with (in general) the idea that the second system designed/implemented by anyone is typically over-architected, with more bells and whistles added then need be. Dare goes on to describe a number of common factors that keep systems from falling into this trap. Factors that my experience do contribute greatly to the success of a second version. I do have a couple of factors to add. Only One Driver There is a fundamental clash between marketing and developers when it comes to the priority of items added to a product. Marketing is looking for features that will help to drive sales. Developers are looking for features that will improve the architecture, stabilize the...

This post is basically a reminder to a future me. The client I'm working with right now (basically an ISV) is using SQL Express as part of their project. And included in their database are a number of CLR stored procedures. In other words, the stored procedures are written in C#. While a little unusual, this is not particularly extraordinary. The problem arose as I deployed my application from the build server to a freshly installed machine by hand. Moving the binaries was simple (a file copy from a shared directory). Moving the database was nothing more than a backup and restore. But when I ran the application, things didn't work. It turns out that I had forgotten an important point, that being that the database setting that enabled the CLR would be 'backedup and restored' along with the database. Given that CLR functionality is turned on using sp_configure (sp_configure 'clr Enabled' to...

Roger from SilverlightAddict.com asked me for more information about how I manage the sound effects in the Silverlight version of Legend of the Greasepole. I have a Canvas element in my scene called MusicCanvasRoot. It contains a number of MediaElement children equal to the maximum number of simultaneous sounds that the game will play. This helper [...]...

Invisible Add-In Support in Blend June Preview + Robby’s Intellisense code from KAXAML + Stefan’s great work = Awesome. +1 to excitement about add-in support in Blend +1 to observations that the WPF designer in VS2008 is way too slow +1 to also wanting C# Intellisense in Blend, to reduce VS2008/Blend context switching (And no I don’t care that I’m not supposed [...]...

I would be very grateful for any advice on how to paste code from Visual Studio into a WordPress post. I have never found a plug-in or cut-and-paste pipeline that worked well for me....

Before I start writing how to set up Kerberos authentication in SharePoint, let me explain our set up a little bit, i.e. server names, account names and so on that will be used in this guide: WSSSERVER1 – SharePoint web front server WSSSERVER2 – another web front server (optional) DBSERVER1 – database server running Microsoft SQL Server 2005 SP2 Domain\wss_srvc_account – User account used to run SharePoint services Domain\sql_srvc_account – User account used to run SQL services on database server Domain\wss_apppool – User account used to run SharePoint web application pool Domain\mysite_apppool – User account used to run My Site web application pool Domain\sspadmin_apppool – User account used to run Shared Services Provider web application pool To set up a Kerberos authentication in SharePoint (WSS or MOSS) you need to do a bunch of small configuration changes: Make sure that you have host...

I’m back in Toronto after a much appreciated break in Italy and Greece. Before I left, I had the chance to work on a very interesting Silverlight and Windows Live project, and this week I am planning for the rest of the calendar year and eagerly anticipating the release of .NET 3.5 SP1! Silverlight Streaming was updated [...]...

I guess I am - at least according to Cuil ....

ObjectSharp has been growing quite steadily for the past little while. But winning a couple of recent contracts have begun to strain our seemingly unending supply of high-end talent. For this reason (and to get some fresh blood and ideas into the company), we are now actively searching for associates. If you're immediately available, we do have a project that could use your skill set (assuming that your skill set includes C#, Windows/Web Forms and SQL Server). But if you're just interested in learning what ObjectSharp has to offer, I'd be happy to answer any questions. Or you can contact (or forward a resume to) our fantastic Service Manager, Gisele Bourque . In a few sentences, working with ObjectSharp is a great opportunity to work with some of the top minds in the .NET world using technologies and techniques that are at the forefront of software development. The people are great. The projects...

I have recently had the opportunity to work ( once again ) with Oracle. Specifically, I had to create a mechanism that would, based on configurable settings, update either a SQL Server or an Oracle database. In and of itself, this is not particularly challenging. Not since ADO.NET implemented a provider model using the Db... classes that are part of System.Data. The provider name can be used to generate the appropriate concrete instance of the DbConnection class and away you go. While testing out this capability, I ran into this error when the target data source was Oracle. One would think (and I certainly did) was that I had missed out assigning one of the in-line parameters. The text associated with the error certainly gave that impression. And I was, after all, building the SQL statement on the fly. A bug in my logic could have placed a parameter into the SQL and not created a corresponding...

Recently, a question regarding the cost associated with migrating from VB6 to VB.NET was asked by one of our clients. Since that is a question whose answer has a broader appeal than just to the asker, I thought I would replicate my response here. It should be stated up front, however, that I don't normally recommend a migration from VB6 to .NET. This isn't to say that there aren't ways to benefit from the move. It's just that a straight migration typically won't see any of those benefits. Re-architecting an application is generally the only way to get those improvements and a straight migration doesn't accomplish this. And if you already have a working VB6 application, there is little to be gained by creating a VB.NET application that does exactly the same thing. Keep in mind that I said "little", not "nothing". While the benefits are greater for redesigning, there are still times where a...

There is a bug in Visual Studio 2008 that causes some projects that are upgraded via the /Upgrade command line switch to not properly upgrade. In order to fix it you need to modify the project file's XML as specified in the forum post, otherwise when it is opened in VS2008 it will prompt again for conversion (which will succeed this time as you are doing it via the UI rather than the command line!). This is going to be fixed in VS2008 SP1. Massive trap for young players.......

I recently looked into creating my own .net configuration section by implementing a custom configuration handler, which leverages the System.Configuration classes. Piece of cake I thought... I had written my own configuration handlers in .net 1.1, which was straightforward using the IConfigurationSectionHandler Interface . When using this interface, all you need to do is create your object from the XmlNode that is passed in. Pretty simple! I knew System.Configuration had been enhanced from v1.1 to v2.0 (resulting in its' own assembly), however I didn't realise the implementation had changed so radically. When all you are doing is reading data from configuration, the only real change you have to make in moving from 1.1 to 2.0 (or higher) is to use the ConfigurationManager Class instead of the ConfigurationSettings Class . This doesn't give you much insight into what else has changed. It turns...

Today I learned an important lesson about Sql Server 2005, don’t change your default database unless you absolutely have to. I set mine to DatabaseX and then I promptly dropped DatabaseX. When I tried to log in I got a nice error message Cannot Open User Default Database, Login Failed I didn’t setup the VM that I was using, so I didn’t know the SA password. I basically had no way to get back into the server. So if you ever find yourself in this predicament, execute the following from the command line: C:\> sqlcmd -E -d master 1> ALTER LOGIN [ YOUR USER NAME HERE ] WITH DEFAULT_DATABASE=master 2> GO That will reset your default database back to master and you can login again....

Visual Studio Lab (VSLab) exploits the power of F# and its interactive top level to provide an interactive environment similar to MatLab and Mathematica, in which you can easily create Add-ins and interact dynamically with them inside Visual Studio. Moreover, since F# is a compiled language, the final code can be compiled as a standalone application. Goal of the project is to provide the basic infrastructure to turn Visual Studio in VSLab, and a number of addins (called viewlets) used to show data and support development of scientific based applications. Take a look. :) I assure you that you'll be impressed....

It's been a while since I blogged about something. Maybe it's because I've been busy lately, maybe it's because of I've spent a week at the TechEd conference (the best conference ever, by the way) and a week working on my tan at Daytona Beach, or maybe it's because I'm just getting old and lazy. But I digress... I have recently had the "pleasure" of installing Microsoft Exchange 2007 SP1 on a virtual server running Windows Server 2008. I was eager to try Microsoft's latest and greatest product. Originally I wanted to install it on Microsoft Virtual Server, but unfortunately MS Virtual Server doesn't support 64-bit virtual servers on a 32-bit host server! So, to get virtual server running, I had to rebuild the physical server, which makes no sense to me whatsoever. Since I was willing to do that, I had no choice but to go with VMWare Virtual Server which fully supports 64-bit virtual servers...

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 [...]...