The art of simplicity

If you are not registered yet for Community Day 2010 on June 24 at Utopolis Mechelen, now is the time! It will be a great event as always where all 14(!) Microsoft User groups will be present. I will be giving following VISUG session together with my colleague Gill Cleeren : Building an enterprise application with Silverlight and NHibernate [15.45 - 16.45] See you all there!

As I was trying the Spark View Engine as an alternative for the WebForms View Engine inside ASP.NET MVC, I first didn’t succeed in using HtmlHelpers inside my views. The problem was easy to fix. I forgot that the HtmlHelpers are in a seperate namespace. After adding the correct namespace ‘System.Web.Mvc.Html’ to the SparkSettings my views finally compiled. 1: var settings = new SparkSettings() 2: .SetDebug( true ) 3: .AddAssembly( "SparkDemo" ) 4: .AddNamespace( "System" ) 5: .AddNamespace( "System.Collections.Generic" ) 6: .AddNamespace( "System.Linq" ) 7: .AddNamespace( "System.Web.Mvc" ) 8: .AddNamespace( "System.Web.Mvc.Html" ) ; 9:   10: ViewEngines.Engines.Add( new SparkViewFactory(se...

For a client we are investigating a range of log files from different sources. To simplify this task we are projecting all different log formats to the same structured CSV file. We first started writing some custom log parsers, until I found this tool: Log Parser . An extract from the documentation: Log Parser 2.2 is a powerful, versatile tool that provides universal query access to text-based data such as log files, XML files and CSV files, as well as key data sources on the Windows operating system such as the Event Log, the Registry, the file system, and Active Directory.  You tell Log Parser what information you need and how you want it processed. The results of your query can be custom-formatted in text based output, or they can be persisted to more specialty targets like SQL, SYSLOG, or a chart.  Most software is designed to accomplish a limited number of specific tasks. Log Parser is different... the number of ways it can be used is limited only by the needs an...

While having fun with reflection in C#, I started to wonder when I should use TypeDescriptor.GetProperties() vs Type.GetProperties(). The difference is in what they return. obj.GetType().GetProperties() returns a System.Reflection.PropertyInfo[] whereas TypeDescriptor.GetProperties() returns a PropertyDescriptorCollection , . The PropertyInfo class represents only actual properties created on the object. A PropertyDescriptor is either a custom concrete child of the PropertyDescriptor class (implemented by the type defining the custom descriptor), or is an instance of ReflectPropertyDescriptor that uses the PropertyInfo class to provide dynamic invocation of the property. So for a class that does not define a custom descriptor, you will functionally get the same objects back, though the PropertyDescriptor is abstracting away the PropertyInfo . Where is this useful? The TypeDescriptor class is used in designers, so that they can interact with the design-time environment...

After upgrading our Team Foundation Server environment, we ended up with 2 collections each containing their own process templates, build server and so on… The concept of a Team Project Collection is a really great improvement in the TFS solution, but there is one caveat: schema conflicts can occur when a set of attributes for reportable fields differs across team project collections. When a schema conflict occurs, data that is associated with that schema cannot move into the data warehouse and the SQL Server Analysis Services data cube. You must correct all schema conflicts to unblock processing of the associated data for the warehouse and to enable the associated reports to display current data. All reportable data from all team projects that are defined in all project collections for a deployment of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server is written to a single relational data warehouse. Data from that warehouse is then processed and written to the cube. Collecting data into a si...

After upgrading our Team Foundation Server environment to 2010, we got the following error on the project dashboard web page on the TFS2010 project portal. “Web Part Error: A Web Part or Web Form Control on this Page cannot be displayed or imported. The type is not registered as safe.” I tried a lot of things (reinstalling the WSP solution, adding the controls to the web.config file,…) before I found this simple solution: After executing "Repair Connection" on all the Sharepoint Applications in the Team Foundation Server Administration Console, everything worked fine.

And just before the weekend begins, some good news. The Scrum for Team System version 3 RTM template is now available for download. To get your copy now click here . Check out the below links for more information on all the new features of SfTS v3: PDC Presentation Process Guidance Crispin Parkers Blog Simon Bennett's Blog