The art of simplicity

Everyone likes things for free.  So here is a free ebook “ Silverlight for Windows Phone ” written by Puja Pramudya from Microsoft Innovation Center, Indonesia. This e-book is written for those who want to get to know, use, and develop applications for Windows Phone, Microsoft’s latest mobile platform. The download link and more information here . I didn’t had time yet to read it myself, but it’s on my list…

To solve the growing need for more memory, we decided to upgrade all our development machines to a 64bit OS.  Although this allows us to install and use more memory on our machines, it also introduces a whole list of new problems. One of them was regarding the usage of the .NET transactionscope in combination with DB2. In DB2 managing your transactions through the transactionscope will immediatelly involve the DTC coordinator. However the moment the DTC tries to open a transaction, it fails with the following error message: The XA Transaction Manager attempted to load the XA resource manager DLL. The call to LOADLIBRARY for the XA resource manager DLL failed: DLL=C:\Program Files\IBM\SQLLIB\BIN\DB2APP.DLL, HR=0x800700c1, File=d:\w7rtm\com\complus\dtc\dtc\xatm\src\xarmconn.cpp Line=2446. After trying almost every possible solution, we finally found a solution that worked for us. When installing the DB2 client, it doesn’t correctly register the 64bit dll’s in the register. ...

After we started to use the Visual Studio Test Professional for managing and executing our test scenario’s, I noticed that our TFS databases grew a lot faster in size. This is not completely unexpected as you know the large amount of data you can capture while running your tests: Video’s Screenshots Intellitrace files System information Event Log data Test Impact data … I was looking for some possible solutions when I noticed that Microsoft already released a Visual Studio Power tool that tackles this problem. With the Test Attachment Cleaner TFS administrators can 1. Determine which set of diagnostic captures is taking up how much space AND 2. Reclaim the space for runs which are no longer relevant from business perspective. Usage is simple through the command line. This makes it easy to add this as a scheduled tasks on your TFS server. Some sample scenario’s are also included in the download package. More information about the Test Attachm...

Debugging databinding and the visual tree of a WPF application can be hard. Last week I found WPF inspector on Codeplex. “WPF Inspector is a utility that attaches to a running WPF application to troubleshoot common problems with layouting, databinding or styling. WPF Inspector allows you to explore a live view of the logical- and visual tree, read and edit property values of elements, watch the data context, debug triggers, trace styles and much more.” It allows you to attach to your running WPF applications and start browsing through a lot of available information like properties, the datacontext, triggers and so on… This simplifies debugging a lot. A must have for every WPF developer out there.

Microsoft released last week the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 . Downloadable here , the new toolkit is helps ease the building Windows Phone 7 applications that use services running on Windows Azure . The toolkit provides you with: Binaries for your Windows Phone 7 applications Project templates to optimize new phone application creation Sample applications in both C# and VB.NET A dependency checker that checks the prerequisites required by the toolkit Setup and configuration documentation, toolkit content review, a getting started walkthrough, and troubleshooting tips Get started now!

One of the things that most of my customers find challenging when moving to the cloud, is the whole pricing model. They have a hard time finding out what the cost of moving to a cloud platform like Windows Azure would be. Therefore Microsoft introduces the Windows Azure platform TCO calculator , and in 10 minutes or less, you’ll see how Windows Azure compares to on-premises solutions, quantify migration costs, and get a pricing overview.

A colleague recommended me the following Visual Studio extension: VS10x Code Map . “ VS10x Code Map is a Visual Studio 2010 extension that displays a graphical nested representation of the current code editor window (C# and VB.NET). It helps the developer visualize type nesting, implemented interfaces, regions, member type and scope , as well as quickly navigate to their respective positions in code.” Some of the features it offers: Code Visualization Code Collapsing and Sync Persistent History Highlighting Favorite Items Named Bookmarks Filtering Color Themes

The Entity Framework ObjectContext implements the unit of work pattern and does all the change tracking for you. However sometimes you just need to get some readonly data(for example in a CQRS architecture). In that case change tracking is just an extra performance penalty.  How to Disable the Change Tracking Option In Entity Framework, change tracking is being done by the ObjectStateManager . The ObjectStateManager maintains object state and identity management for entity type instances and relationship instances. In order to disable change tracking you use the MergeOption.NoTracking option of the MergeOption enumeration. Using that option will retrieve entities in a detached state. There are 2 places where you can specify this option: One place to disable the change tracking is when we retrieve data with the ObjectQuery object. One of the overloaded constructors of the ObjectQuery gets as a parameter the MergeOption enumeration. var query = new ObjectQuery<Emp...

Too funny to ignore(although my girlfriend didn’t understand the clue ):

After some refactoring, my integration tests started to fail with the following error message: “Unable to load the specified metadata resource.” I found out that the error was raised when I initialized the Entity Framework datacontext.  It looked like that EF couldn't find my meta description files(csdl , msl, ssdl files). So where did they go? I opened up Reflector , and browsed to the DLL where my datacontext was stored. I noticed that the name of the files was prefixed with an extra DB part. This was caused because I had moved the context file under a new subfolder inside the Visual Studio project. After I updated the connection string information, all tests were green again. <connectionStrings> <add name="EventsEntities" connectionString="metadata=res://*/DB.EventsModel.csdl|res://*/DB.EventsModel.ssdl|res://*/DB.EventsModel.msl;provider=..." /> </connectionStrings>

With the new build engine based on Workflow 4 in Team Foundation Server 2010, creating build definitions and automatic builds became a lot easier. One of the most useful activities is the InvokeProcess activity. This activity offers the following important properties: Arguments: the argument values you want to pass to the invoked process FileName: name of the process you want to execute WorkingDirectory: location from which the process should be invoked. One feature that makes debugging a lot easier is that you can setup the activity for logging(by default nothing will be logged other than the command line invoked). If you expand the activity in the designer, you can see that the Standard and Error output is captured in two variables( stdOutput and stdError ). You can then add the WriteBuildMessage and WriteBuildError activities by dragging them from the toolbox into the handler areas of the InvokeProcess activity.

After upgrading to WSS 3.0 I noticed that I no longer could exclude managed paths for directories that you don't want 'managed' by SharePoint. So how do you do this then? The answer is simple, you don’t have to do anything. Just create your virtual directory in IIS and that's it. WSS will just ignore it. One extra thing to remember: don’t forget to perform an IISRESET, otherwise SharePoint isn't yet aware of the new mapping.

While browsing around, I noticed a new code drop on the EntLib codeplex site containing the Enterprise Library 5.0 Silverlight Integration Pack . Most important features are: port of the Validation Application Block new pieces of the infrastructure to support XAML-based configuration async configuration loading Note there is also a conversion tool to facilitate the reuse of your Enterprise Library existing configurations and convert them to XAML. It can be plugged in the config tool via a wizard or you may integrate it in your build process. The conversion tool is still rough and we are iterating on it. Both a demo and  a short screencast are available to get you started.  

The announcements of new releases continues. Microsoft has updated the Windows Azure SDK to version 1.4 and added some improvements to the Windows Azure Management Portal. Bug Fixes: Resolved an issue that caused full IIS fail when the web.config file was set to read-only. Resolved an issue that caused full IIS packages to double in size when packaged. Resolved an issue that caused a full IIS web role to recycle when the diagnostics store was full. Resolved an IIS log file permission Issue which caused diagnostics to be unable to transfer IIS logs to Windows Azure storage. Resolved an issue preventing csupload to run on x86 platforms. User errors in the web.config are now more easily diagnosable. Enhancements to improve the stability and robustness of Remote Desktop to Windows Azure Roles. New features: Windows Azure Connect : Multiple administrator support on the Admin UI. An updated Client UI with improved status notif...

Microsoft has upgraded it’s Introductory Special offer. It now includes 750 free hours of the Windows Azure extra-small instance , 25 hours of the Windows Azure small instance and more, until June 30, 2011. This extended free trial will allow developers to try out the Windows Azure platform without the need for up-front investment costs*. To see full details of the new Introductory Special and to sign up, please click here .   * You still need a credit card to sign up

jQuery 1.5.1 is now out! This is the first minor release on top of jQuery 1.5 and lands a number of fixes for bugs. You can download 2 versions of jQuery, one minified and one uncompressed (for debugging or reading). jQuery Minified (29kb Gzipped ) jQuery Regular (212kb)

Last week VS 2010 SP1 and TFS 2010 SP1 have shipped and the Team Foundation Server Project Server Integration Feature Pack is now available for MSDN subscribers. Both service packs are available here: VS 2010 SP1 TFS 2010 SP1 SP1 SP1 has a handful of nice new features (like IIS Express support and support for the Project Server Feature Pack) and hundreds of bug fixes. The list of changes you’ll find here: VS 2010 SP1 Changes (includes Test and Lab Manager) TFS 2010 SP1 Changes TFS Project Server Integration Feature Pack Integration between Project Server and Team Foundation Server is a considerable advancement for organizations that want to bridge the collaboration gap between the Project Management Office and software development teams. I blogged about this before .

Microsoft released an update to the Team Foundation Server Power Tools. You can download them here: Main Power Tools Build Extensions MSSCCI plugin (unchanged from previous release) Backup/Restore Power Tool The backup/restore Power Tool was already available in the last Power Tools release but due to a large amount of bugs it was not usable. In this release Microsoft fixed about every bug that was reported.  Windows Shell Extension Microsoft knows that not everyone is using source control from within Visual Studio. The shell extension allows you to manage your source controlled file right within your folder windows. In this release a lot of new commands were added to the context menu: Workspace History Compare Shelve/Unshelve Here’s a screen shot showing the new commands: TFS  Build Power Tools This Power Tools release includes a new builddefinition command to the tfpt command line Power Tool that allows you to easily script som...

Although Unity 2.0 is out for a while, it took me until now to try some of the nice new features.  One of the nicest feature is the InjectionFactory which replaces the StaticFactoryExtension that was available in Unity 1.2. A small sample: using (var container = new UnityContainer()) { container .RegisterType<IService, ConcreteService>( new InjectionFactory(c => new ConcreteService())); var service= container.Resolve<IService>(); }

This week a customer wanted to access the Azure blob storage from their Silverlight and Flash client applications. However due to the cross-domain restrictions of both technologies, we couldn’t access the blob storage out-of-the-box. Let’s see how we can solve this and enable full access to blob storage through Silverlight and Flash. ClientAccessPolicy.xml When a Silverlight application makes a cross-domain call (other than those that are allowed by default ), it first fetches a file called ClientAccessPolicy.xml from the root of the target server. For the blob storage this will be something like http://{namespace}.blob.core.windows.net/ . Every blob in Windows Azure storage lives within a container, but there’s a special root container which lets us store blobs directly off the root of the domain. This is where we’ll put our ClientAccessPolicy.xml file. The following code creates a publicly readable root container and creates a blob named ClientAccessPolicy.xml within it: private v...

Microsoft seems to continue it’s monthly update process. The February 2011 update of the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit is now available for download . This new version includes several updated HOLs to include support for the Windows Azure AppFabric February CTP and the new AppFabric Caching, Access Control, and Service Bus portal experience.    Specific updates include: HOL: Building Windows Azure Apps with the Caching service HOL: Using the Access Control Service to Federate with Multiple Business Identity Providers HOL: Introduction to the AppFabric Access Control Service V2 HOL: Introduction to the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus Futures Improved PHP installer script for Advanced Web and Worker Roles Demo Script - Rafiki PDC Keynote Demo

Yesterday Microsoft announced the release of the Load Testing Feature Pack.  This gives Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN users the ability to do unlimited load testing.  Before you had to buy separate Load Test Packs.  This has now all been included into Ultimate Edition (including the load agent software necessary to run a distributed load test simulation), enabling you to load test with as many virtual users as you want. Thank you Microsoft! For more information regarding this new Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN benefit, visit the Visual Studio Load Test Virtual User Pack 2010 page .

I wanted to do some extra stuff when compiling a Visual Studio project but only when I was working in Debug mode. You can easily do this by adding the configuration name to the post-build script and check it in there to see if it should run. You can pass the configuration name with $(ConfigurationName). A sample: if $(ConfigurationName) == Debug ( copy "$(TargetDir)test.dll" "c:\testrun\" /y )

As a consultant and architect I have the opportunity to see a lot of different applications and architectures. Most of these applications have a kind of so called business logic layer. It states the idea of a layer in any way capable of handling all business logic all by itself.  Although these architectures claim that all business logic “belongs” to this layer, I always find business logic in at least at least two places and sometimes three. Is there something wrong with these architectures or do we have to say that Business Logic really is a cross-cutting concern? Let me explain this a little bit more… A definition of business logic Let’s state that business logic includes schema (types and constraints), derived values (timestamps, userstamps, calculations, histories), non-algorithmic compound operations (like batch billing) and algorithmic compound operations, those that require looping in their code. This encompasses everything we might do from the simplest passive thi...

For a long time web designers were limited to a very small set of “ web safe ” fonts. Anything beyond those fonts, had to be done through images. Images for text not only meant creating and maintaining dozens (if not hundreds) of images, but it introduced accessibility issues. @font-face to the rescue With the introduction of @font-face in 1998(!)  in the CSS 2 specification, web designers could link to actual font files via CSS: @font-face { font-family: "ChunkFiveRegular"; src: url('Chunkfive-webfont.ttf') format("truetype"); } And then utilize those specified fonts in style declarations: h1 { font-family: "ChunkFiveRegular", serif; } However as the specification was there, the browser support wasn’t.. And then each browser vendor decided to support different, rarely-used formats. Plus, there were the licensing issues. Even if you had supported font formats, that didn’t mean you could legally use those fonts with @font-face. Bro...

A few weeks ago, one of my customers sent me the following screenshot mentioning that they couldn’t search for information on their Team Foundation Server Sharepoint site. In order for search to work you do need to assign search to an indexer. This typically means specifying the server name where the indexing service is running. If you have a single-server installation then that single server of course. Open the Sharepoint Central Administration website. Go to Operations Click on Services on Server under Topology and Services Click on Start next to the Windows Sharepoint Services Search Enter a Service Account Enter a Content Access Account Leave the default Search Database selected(or select a new one) Configure the indexing Schedule Click Start Go to Application Management Click on Content databases under Web Application Management Click on the Content database Select t...