Community Blogs

I spent a week in Vienna Austria without seeing the sun light besides through the windows of a conference room. Sad to say yet this is what happens when you travel for work. Always seems so exciting for go International travelling, all the plans you make and all the idea of being in a foreign country with somebody else paying the bill, yet is never the case, all plans give way to long hours of work, and trying to keep jet lag on check that is never easy. I did go to visit the city at night with the excuse of going for dinner and a beer, everything I wanted to see like the Mozart house he stayed while in Vienna was already close as well as the Opera House. I added a little gallery for you to see my adventures in the dark of the Vienna night....

Had to stream the PDC from Vienna, Austria, that was pretty cool that Microsoft gave that feed for people that didn’t make it to the PDC this year, yet I lost the chance to get my free laptop. Silverlight Beta is OUT! Announced at the PDC 2009 . This is the present Scott Guthrie took out of his pocket as well as 3 iPhones. Silverlight 4 looks so amazing, the release candidate and hardware acceleration with now being able to get out of the browser with trusted support, means you can create a Silverlight 4 application that can be installed on the clients computer and run trusted to access the local system and call COM components. So Silverlight 4 can call ArcObjects if you hosting the ArcGIS Server in that machine? Or can you call a remote COM...

The most waited OS from Microsoft is here without any doubt, now you can find many blogs reviewing Windows 7 and everybody is giving the new OS a good review I believe, of course you can also find the radicals and the never happy people, yet in my modest opinion a good release for Microsoft all said and done. Yet there is something that does not complete the story. When you purchase a operating system, you want a simple upgrading path, just go to a store and get your upgrade. Something that Apple did great with Snow Leopard, go home and upgrade your old operating system to what you just purchased. Microsoft had to add many version of the same operating system, that is ok by itself, yet you need to purchase the update that will let you install...

Great news this morning, the new ESRI API for Silverlight when up on the Resource Center . This is the build I have been waiting for, the biggest change I think is the added Map Viewer that you can personalize quite easily using Expression Blend. Below I added as a background image my ugly picture.        Also is comes out with Action and Behaviors to enrich your objects by just dragging it and allows you to add interactivity without writing any code. You can find them all under your Assets in Expression Blend. I would suggest that if you haven’t used Expression Blend much to read this great paper to get started personalizing your Map Viewer.   Version 1.1 was released November 2009 (build 97). See the What's New...

My favorite conference/summit is now open for registration. If you are a developer in GIS or even just getting into mapping and location, this is a must go. You’ll find how to use the ESRI Silverlight SDK, Flex, JavaScript and the new iPhone SDK. So many developers for the Apple iPhone with great knowledge of Objective-C and Cocoa are waiting for the ESRI iPhone SDK that will provide you with all the ArcGis online maps and functionality  to create your applications. Registration What's Included All scheduled sessions Presummit seminars ESRI Showcase GIS Solutions EXPO and Social DevSummit party Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday’s continental breakfast, lunch, and beverage breaks   When? March 22-25, 2010 From the official...

I have been receiving a few emails about my old post how to fix the javascript error Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManagerParserErrorException on ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX 1.0. Looks like google maybe is not looking in those old post anymore for people to find it, so I reposted for your convenience. Hope that helps now, or maybe is a problem with Graffiti CMS. I'm planning to move the blog to something better and more optimized by search engines. Original post from 2007 Most annoying issue with MS ASP.NET 2.0 Ajax 1.0 is the error Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManagerParserErrorException that will crash the web app. I found a great article from Eilon Liptonhttp://weblogs.asp.net/leftslipper/archive/2007/02/26/sys-webforms-pagerequestmanagerparsererrorexception...

Tonight at Hudson Software Craftsmanship , I paired with another group member and worked on the PotterKata for the first time.  I’d seen NotMyself write about it a few days ago, which prompted me to suggest it for the group to work on ( summary of the meeting here ). Briefly, this kata is a fairly real-world exercise in that it has to do with business rules for a shopping cart that are non-linear.  In this case, the rules are: One copy of any of the five books costs 8 EUR. If, however, you buy two different books from the series, you get a 5% discount on those two books. If you buy 3 different books, you get a 10% discount. With 4 different books, you get a 20% discount. If you go the whole hog, and buy all 5, you get a huge 25% discount...

The new VS 2010 has a new lineup of versions which you can find described on the Visual Studio 2010 Products page .  Some things to note: Ultimate is the new Suite The “Data Dude” SKU is now fully incorporated in the Premium and Ultimate versions Premium and Ultimate come with a production license for Expression Studio 3, as well as Visio and Project 2010. All versions now come with some Windows Azure pieces for dev/test use All versions ship with Team Foundation Server (which now supports running on the client as a lightweight alternative to a full server-side install ), providing version control, build automation, bug tracking, and continuous automation out of the box very quickly Read More...

I decided to reinstall Win7 on one of my laptops because it was acting up – turns out that’s not helping and I think at this point it’s a hardware problem (either memory or hard drive – I’m going to try memory next).  In the course of troubleshooting the problem, I decided to rule out a bad installer DVD for Windows 7 (the installer was failing, saying it couldn’t access certain required files).  So I created a USB installer for Windows 7 x64.  And since I’ve been meaning to install Win7 on my Dell mini10 for a while (which has no CD/DVD reader), I also created a separate USB installer for it for Win7 32-bit x86. I found this post to be helpful, but it has some problems in the original post that are corrected in the comments Read...

Last year I wrote about Avoiding Dependencies and described some Insidious Dependencies (with help from many commenters) that many developers might not immediately recognize as dependencies.  It occurred to me today that I should point out that dependencies themselves are not intrinsically bad design – all software has dependencies.  The important distinction here that I think is a best practice is that one should make efforts to avoid entrenched dependencies on things that are likely to change . As an example, I write most of my software using Microsoft .NET.  I’m inherently taking a dependency on the CLR.  If at some point the customer’s needs dictate that I need to move to Java or Ruby, that is most likely going to be...