dotnet.org.za

Monthly Dine & Discuss

sam-i-am — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 10:03:00 GMT

Hi All

We have dotnet dev group started on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/southafrica-dotnet-developers/96074228953?ref=ts

We are looking at having the first Dine & Discuss on thus 30th July at Buzz Cafe on Kloof St, Cape Town:

Monthly dine & discuss to chat about tech related topics. Grab a beer & a burger and discuss new (and existing!) technologies. Meal discounts have been arranged.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cape-Town-South-Africa/Buzz-Cafe/92757588818?ref=ts

Proposed topics for 1st meet:

1) Domain Driven Development using Test Driven Development - Samuel Goldenbaum

2) NHibernate ORM tool - Samuel Goldenbaum

2) SEO considerations when building web applications - Allen Jaffe of RIO Media

3) Codeplex - Stanton Roux

4) Silverlight 3? - ?

5) Agile development & Scrum? - ?

Would like to keep these to 15mins each. Obviously we can discuss topics in detail after.

Anyone keen to cover anything else then send me a mail.

10 Things to know about PRISM

Baka — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:56:27 GMT

… if you did not already know ;-)

http://www.sparklingclient.com/prism-silverlight/

Happy Coding
Baka

Top 23 .Net Open Source Projects

riaan — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 02:42:00 GMT

Below is a link to a list of what is seen by Microsoft as the top 23 OpenSource projects around.

http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/07/23-.NET-Open-Source-Projects

Same post is available on www.riaansnyders.co.za

My greatest hits…

rudi — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:08:23 GMT

“Your blog is your unedited version of yourself.” - lorelle

Here's some posts that are the most often-read according to Google Analytics.

If you enjoy them, consider subscribing via RSS.

Compact Framework PRoDucTiViTy

russdupreez — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:51:00 GMT

I am really excited now!

For a long time I have been struggling to develop on the handhelds, It is a pain to debug, test, and deploy. Additionally, it is really sloooww.

There is a way to target the Desktop from your development environment and develop for the Compact Framework using VS2008.

It is a small hack but it works. Applications that use device-specific apps will not run properly, but I am sure that if we abstract the functionality

We will overcome the problem easily. Also the controls render as desktop controls -

We will still need to Test the application on the handheld itself, but the Increase in developer productivity time will definitely negate the overall testing time on the handheld.

I tested this developing little test programs that target .Net Framework 2.0 and .Net Framework 3.5 on VS 2008 as well as our handheld.

I found this little nugget here.

INSTRUCTIONS
1. In Visual Studio select Tools/Options, and then select Device Tools/Devices from the tree.
2. In the top combo box, select the platform that you want to add desktop deployment to. You'll need to do this for each platform you want to use.
3. Select one of the devices, (it doesn't matter which one) and click the Save As... button. Save as "My Computer". If you've already done this for a platform, you'll need to save subsequent devices with slightly different names (like "My Computer2")
4. Close VS and open your %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\CoreCon\1.0\conman_ds_platform.xsl file in a text editor.
5. Find the <DEVICE ...> element corresponding to the device you created and add the node (i.e. search for "My Computer" to find the correct node.)
<PROPERTY ID="IsDesktopDevice" Name="IsDesktopDevice">true</PROPERTY>
Place it right after the first <PROPERTYCONTAINER> tag.
6. Save conman_ds_platform.xsl and restart VS.

Now when you deploy, you can select "My Computer" from the deploy dialog.

If you are developer and you are unaware of design patterns, or it reminds you of the smell rain, go out and buy a book, or just bing it out. (hehe use to be google). Finding out about anti-patterns is also a good idea.

mfLY! is has a great implementation of the MVC Pattern.

You will be amazed by this tool. You can download it here.

The tool is basically an addin to VS2008 and you will be able to create an mfLY project opposed to a smart device project or even a desktop project. It allows you to automatically create unit tests using VS2008 unit testing framework.

I allows you to define workflows and entity relationships visually which is a great productivity enhancer.

Take a look at this webcast. It is about an hour long but you will see the benefits.

C# Developer - Fin Back-Eng (IT Jobs)

Isolde — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:06:00 GMT

A company with a business focus on developing web based systems and n-Tier desktop applications using .Net Remoting on the back end seeks a C# Developer. A top team of developers developing improved business systems and integrated solutions for the financial environment. Systems include:

Insurance management systems (everything from procurement and policy management to actuarial valuation)
Loans/Securitization and financial management systems
Accounting systems

Contact: yolande@thecorporatehub.co.za

PowerBuilder Developer - IT Jobs

Isolde — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:23:00 GMT

A UK Software Company providing software solutions on a Global travel distribution system is opening a new Software house in SA (Sandton). The company is looking for PowerBuilder Developer. The Developer will join the existing team to assist with the development of new functionality (Back- office development). The role will also entail providing support to clients on application software.Read more: http://www.thecorporatehub.co.za/ITJobs/PowerBuilderDeveloper/tabid/16064/Default.aspxor contact: recruitment@thecorporatehub.co.za

Gazelle

riaan — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:51:00 GMT

Gazelle is Microsoft's latest research project. Gazelle is a browser with a kernel acting as a multi-principal operating system responsible for managing resource protection and sharing resources between various web site principals.

http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/06/Microsoft-Gazelle

Bing API

riaan — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:44:00 GMT

For those that did not know - I didn't - BING has an API. Read more from MSDN here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd900818.aspx

Me, Myself and I

rudi — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:08:00 GMT

I have to start off by apologising for the slow flow of blog articles the last 3 months but I promise you I had some good reasons… Things have been very hectic!

So, what happened the last 3 months?

On the 1st of April I received the awesome news that I have been selected as Microsoft MVP for Client Application Development!

“Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2009 Microsoft MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real worl expertise with others.”

I have to thank 3 people without whom this would not have been possible! Ahmed & Eben (From Microsoft) for all their help getting me involved in the community!

Unfortunately putting in extra effort and getting involved in the community also takes it toll on you personal life… I have to thank my loving wife for putting up with me the last 2 years… Dankie my skat!

Tech-ed Africa 2009

I also received the excellent news that I would be presenting 3.5 sessions at this years Tech-ed Africa 2009

DTL314 - Creating “real” devices
WUX205 - Microsoft Expression Blend from a Developer's Point of View - Part 1
WUX201 - Microsoft Expression Blend from a Developer's Point of View - Part 2

Is that it?

Just too prove that I haven’t been sitting doing nothing… here is 2 articles I recently released

Classic JukeBox (Coding4Fun)

This article also featured on “This Week on Channel 9”

PhotoBooth (CodeProject)

Learnings from Win7 AppCompat Labs

ahmeds — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:45:49 GMT

Last week, we hosted a series of Windows 7 AppCompat Lab for ISVs. I attended along with a consultant. Below are some high level learnings of where apps had issues.

Writing to a “secure” directory – mainly Program Files. Many companies had apps where they wrote data or some config information into some kind of INI,XML or SQL Database. Today, if you do not have an application manifest, Windows will virtualize these calls and create a copy of these files in a VirtualStore. You can browse through something like C:\Users\ahmeds\AppData\Local\VirtualStore to see these files. If you do have a manifest, virtualization is turned off – and if you run your name normally, you will likely get a permission denied error.

Depending on the scenario we would recommend putting this into ProgramData (if the data is shared) or the user Folder (if it is per user)

Auto Updates of App. I was quite interested to see the number of companies who have built auto updating of apps. All of them done in different ways. In many ways this is the same issue as (1) except here you are writing dlls/code rather than data. Some ISVs changed the ACLs so that normal users had write access to these folders. In general you might want to make sure that the updater sits in a different EXE – and you mark this EXE as requires admin. Requires admin in some companies will actually require an admin to type in credentials.
Registry. Did not see a lot of this but in some cases applications were writing data to the HKEY LOCAL MACHINE
16 bit. This was interesting. Everyone’s apps ran on a 64 bit machine (where 16 bit code is not allowed) yet it seemed like some were still shipping some 16 bit DLLs.
High DPI. This is something most apps will have an issue with. Even many MS apps have some issues. As screen resolutions get higher, people will use DPI to make the text bigger. This can cause problems with text,controls etc getting cut off or not being properly visible.

The first 3 are all as a result of UAC.

At the same time, we also played with the logo test. Most common issues here

Not providing all the information (like VersionNumber, Publisher etc) when installing the app
Not signing the code (with Authenticode signature)
Not having a manifest

All three of the above are “easy” to fix but the last one does have ramifications, as indicated in the point (1) in the first part.

Finally, the tools to help with the analysis is the “Standard User Analyzer” and the Logo test tools.

Behaviors, Triggers and Actions snippets

rudi — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 07:38:00 GMT

I am fortunate to be presenting a session about Expression Blend at Tech-ed Africa 2009 this year. One of the topics I will be covering is how easy it is to create behaviours, triggers and actions using Microsoft.Expression.Interactivity.dll!

Behaviours, triggers and actions is well encapsulated but still require a small amount of repetitive code… I created 3 snippets to aid in creating them! Here is the default implementations created using the snippets:

Behavior

/// <summary>
/// 
/// </summary>
public class MyBehavior : Behavior<FrameworkElement>
{
    /// <summary>
    /// 
    /// </summary>
    protected override void OnAttached()
    {
        base.OnAttached();
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// 
    /// </summary>
    protected override void OnDetaching()
    {
        base.OnDetaching();
    }
}

Trigger

/// <summary>
/// 
/// </summary>
public class MyTrigger : TriggerBase<FrameworkElement>
{
    /// <summary>
    /// 
    /// </summary>
    protected override void OnAttached()
    {
        base.OnAttached();
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// 
    /// </summary>
    protected override void OnDetaching()
    {
        base.OnDetaching();
    }
}

Action

/// <summary>
/// 
/// </summary>
public class MyAction : TriggerAction<FrameworkElement>
{
    /// <summary>
    /// 
    /// </summary>
    protected override void OnAttached()
    {
        base.OnAttached();
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// 
    /// </summary>
    protected override void OnDetaching()
    {
        base.OnDetaching();
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// 
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="parameter"></param>
    protected override void Invoke(object parameter)
    {

    }
}

Download the snippets here

More Information

Blend 3- Triggers, Actions, Behaviors by Christian Schormann
An Introduction to Behaviors, Triggers, and Actions by Jeff Kelly
Expression Blend 3: More on Actions, Triggers, Behaviors by Mike Taulty

If you found this interesting or useful please

Cresterea strutilor

crestereastrutilor — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:07:00 GMT

Afla care sunt beneficiile si cati bani poti castiga avand ferme de struti

sadev presentation : SOLID design

johanvw — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:01:00 GMT

Earlier this week I was honored to form part of the team presenting at this month's SADEV meeting .. we covered a very interesting topic, the design principles commonly referred to as the S.O.L.I.D principles for software design.

"Robert C. Martin, also known as "Uncle Bob", compiled a list of 5 principles of class design that became known as the SOLID Principles of Class Design. In this first session of a two part series we take a look at the first three principles: Single Responsibility Principle, Open Closed Principle and Liskov Substitution Principle. Join us as we take a look at these principles and discuss their application. "

I'm posting both the code and presentation file together with this article. To everyone that was there and could make it, thank for a wonderful time and I hope it was as much fun as it was for me... :) Rock on !!

Johan

Future of VB.NET

riaan — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 02:54:00 GMT

InfoQ article on VB.Net and if there is a future for the language:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/06/Future-VB.NET

Elevato: OnDemand - Core Services

riaan — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:49:00 GMT

New Post to www.riaansnyders.co.za on Elevato's OnDemand platform. This post describes in brief the core services architecture.

Things I learned last week #2

Pieter — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 04:11:30 GMT

Last week I started a session at work during our Monday morning development meeting called Things I learned last week. Here is episode #2.

It was a bit of a dry week in terms of what I learned, but there was a few things worth mentioning.

I learned:

to love Code Contracts. I knew that James from Intergen had done a mentoring session at Intergen and had done the same presentation at Code Camp 2009 as I looked at his presentation he put up on his blog. I have read up on Code Contract before then but then quickly forgot about it. Having a second look and actually RTFM I have to admit that I like it. So much actually that we have started using it in out new codebase that will only see the light after .NET 4.0 and VS2010 is released and as such this will provide us with some future proving as we don’t then have to pull out all our custom old school pre-condition checking. Code Contracts also add so much more, for example you can create Code Contracts for Interfaces, post-conditions and Invariants, fantastic stuff. But as always, use wisely, don’t go and implement everything the static analysis tells you to implement. ;)
how to use SyntaxHighlighter and love PreCode the Windows Live Writer add-in.
about Web.Config Transformation coming in VS2010. Finally I can get rid of all the complex homebrew .config handling between all the environments.

Microsoft OracleClient

riaan — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 03:48:00 GMT

Microsoft has decided to deprecate its Oracle classes with the release of dotnet 4.0. Read more from InfoQ:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/06/oracleclient_deprecated

CSLA 3.6!

pieterv — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 09:55:00 GMT

CSLA 3.6 introduces a host of new ways to do the things we used to do, one primary change is the use of LINQ and LINQ to SQL entities as your data layer. This change is pretty cool and the code reduction is even cooler! It is a bit of a mindset change so I seriously recommend reading Rocky Lhotka’s latest book on the framework before diving into it…it’ll make your life easier in the long run.

In this latest version of my CSLA: Step-by-Step guide, we’ll once again go through the process of creating business objects, bind them to Windows and Web UI’s and we’ll even throw in a WPF UI…

So without further ado let’s get started. Read more...

UI Framework for Windows Mobile

riaan — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 03:56:00 GMT

This is a framework allowing you to create attractive UI's for Windows Mobile based applications. Something to look into: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/uiframework

Custom tooltips and Microsoft’s chart control

Rohland — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 21:12:00 GMT

I have been meaning to blog about this topic for a while now because I am interested to find out if anyone else has picked up performance issues when using the Microsoft Chart Controls and the “MapAreaAttributes” property to create custom tooltips.

Before going into the mechanics of creating a custom tooltip as suggested by the documentation provided with the charting framework, I thought I would simply outline how you would create an instance of the default styled tooltip:

1 series.Points.DataBind(data,"X","Y","Tooltip=MyTooltipProperty");

The code above illustrates the databinding capabilities of the charting control. The data array is made up of a list of objects that are of type Point which is a simple class I created:

    1     public class Point
    2     {
    3         public double X {get;set;}
    4         public double Y { get; set; }
    5 
    6         public string MyTooltipProperty { get; set; }
    7 
    8         public Point()
    9         {
   10             this.MyTooltipProperty = "Hello!";
   11         }
   12     }

From the above it is obvious that each data point’s tooltip will look like something like this:

The tooltip is simply rendered using the relevant browser’s default implementation for elements.

Custom Tooltips:

You may be aware of the charting framework’s capability for creating rich HTML tooltips using the MapAreaAttributes property. As illustrated in an example provided with the framework you could create an HTML tooltip using code similar to that shown below:

series.Points[j].MapAreaAttributes = "onmouseover=\"DisplayToolTip('<strong>Hello From an HTML tooltip</strong>');\" onmouseout=\"HideTooltip();\""

The DisplayTooltip method referenced is a JavaScript method which essentially displays an absolutely positioned element which tracks your mouse position. The method is fired as you hover over the data point area (which is defined by an image area map). The parameter passed to the method is injected into the element as HTML. As you mouse out of the area (the relevant data point) the Hidetooltip method fires and hides the element displaying the custom tooltip. Using this methodology your tooltip could look something like this:

This looks promising because it illustrates the capability to extend our tooltips to include images, links etc. however, there is a caveat. I picked up an issue when you have a chart with a large number of data points, or a number of charts on a single page that utilise this feature. I started noticing that page loads took longer than usual. I put together a test page that rendered 40 instances of the same chart as shown above using the default tooltip. With tracing turned on the page took roughly 270ms to render:

By implementing one extra line of code to implement my rich HTML tooltip using the MapAreaAttributes property as outlined earlier, the page took almost 5 seconds to render!

It turns out anyone who dares to use the MapAreaAttributes property is severely penalised! Clearly we can’t put a page into production that takes 5 seconds just to render our charts, so we either need to revert to our dull looking tooltips or look for other ways to achieve rich HTML tooltip functionality.

Now, we know that setting the tooltip property doesn’t seem to have any performance impact but that it doesn’t result in a pretty looking tooltip either, but what if we could use the tooltip property to store the HTML tooltip markup. I know what your thinking:

Yuck. That will certainly have your users scratching their heads. So, what next? So far we know that using the example as provided by the charting documentation has an adverse affect on rendering times so that’s not ideal. Default tooltip styles work without performance issues but don’t allow us to render rich tooltips. Injecting HTML into the default tooltip property means our users need to slap on their XHTML goggles.

Well, there is an option available which I will outline here. Essentially, it relies on the ability to interpret the default tooltip property and project it into a custom tooltip that we control. If we look at the HTML rendered by the chart control, you will notice an associated image map that looks something like this:

As you can see, our HTML tooltip detail is sitting inside the title property, encoded of course. If we leave the mark-up untouched and hover over any element on the chart, the default tooltip is rendered with unparsed HTML. Thankfully, we can access this image map using JavaScript to rebuild the image map with mouseover/out events to render our custom tooltip. While this is exactly what setting the MapAreaAttributes property is supposed to do, modifying the rendered HTML to do the same thing bypasses the performance issue noted. I have provided the JavaScript method below which rebuilds the image map. All that is required, from a server side scripting point of view, is the registration of a start-up script to process any chart you wish to load with custom tooltips.

    1 RebuildImageMap: function(id) {

    2     // Fetch the image and grab the imagemap ID

    3     var map = $("#" + id).attr("usemap");

    5     // If the map ID is null, then perhaps there

    6     // were no datapoints. Don't bother

    7     // processing an empty set

    8     if (map == null)

    9         return;

   11     // Fetch the map element using jQuery and

   12     // return the raw HTML element

   13     var areaMap = $(map)[0];

   14     if (areaMap == null) {

   15         return;

   16     }

   18     // Create an empty array to store our new elements

   19     var elementArray = [];

   21     // Iterate over existing map elements and create a new

   22     // set with our mouseover/out events

   23     for (var i = 0; i < areaMap.areas.length; i++) {

   24         var oldAreaElement = areaMap.areas;

   25         var element = document.createElement("AREA");

   26         element.shape = oldAreaElement.shape;

   27         element.coords = oldAreaElement.coords;

   29         element.tooltip = oldAreaElement.title;

   30         element.onmouseover =

   31             function() { DisplayTooltip(this.tooltip); };

   32         element.onmouseout =

   33             function() { HideTooltip(); };

   34         element.href = oldAreaElement.href;

   35         elementArray[elementArray.length] = element;

   36     }

   37     // Get rid of the old map elements

   38     areaMap.innerHTML = '';

   40     // Add our new elements back in

   41     for (var i = 0; i < elementArray.length; i++) {

   42         areaMap.appendChild(elementArray);

   43     }

   45 }

The code above utilises jQuery which is useful, but not required to get the job done. If you are going to use another framework, just note that the map attribute (which contains the map’s ID) is prefixed with a #. You may want to get rid of that. The code above is a modified
snippet of an existing class. The DisplayTooltip method simply takes the tooltip HTML and loads it into a custom hidden element on the page. It then displays the element and tracks the mouse position so the element moves as the user’s cursor does. The HideTooltip method simply hides the tooltip and resets the HTML content. Using this technique, our HTML tooltip is rendered correctly without using the MapAreaAttributes property.

So far I have tested this method of rendering custom tooltips in Firefox, IE 7/8 and Chrome. Its a pity that this was required in the first place. I am really not sure why setting the MapAreaAttributes property has such a huge impact on rendering times. If anyone could shed light on the matter, please feel free to post the detail! For now, the implementation above will suffice. Since the image map processing is performed on the client side, there is no effect on the server side processing time.

Hope this helps someone out there.

The MOSS Show – Episode 4

hiltong — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:09:52 GMT

After a loooong delay, I finally managed to finish editing episode 4 of The MOSS Show. In this episode, I interview our very own Zlatan Dzinic on Records Management in MOSS. It was an interesting editing job – we had some “technical” difficulties, so I had to basically rebuild Zlatan’s side of the conversation word by word, in a hour-long recording!!

Suppress script errors in WebBrowser

adel — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 09:21:00 GMT

To Suppress and hide script errors in WebBrowser, the ScriptErrorsSuppressed property must be set to true

Modern Software

riaan — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 15:43:00 GMT

New post at www.riaansnyders.co.za on modern software and the design of "OnDemand" - Elevato's integration platform.

SharePoint Podcast - Record Management with Zlatan Dzinic

Zlatan — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:44:00 GMT

I’m being interviewed here by none other but our very own C#.NET MVP Hilton Giesenow (http://hilton.giesenow.com) on Records Management solutions in SharePoint.

The podcast is almost an hours long and was recorded over a coffee on a Saturday afternoon (I think it was a Saturday, not sure). I was not prepared for this interview, to say the least, so please excuse the repetition + other small imperfections.

Enjoy the talk and please send me your comments and feedback.

Here’s the link: http://www.themossshow.com/?p=105