Community Blogs

Microsoft PDC Sessions/Keynotes online for Download

Scott Cate: Family: Scott Cate: Technology — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 23:11:00 GMT

If you’re seen the tech new recently, you’ve heard about the Microsoft PDC (Professional Developers Conference). If you couldn’t make the conference (like me) then you’ll be happy to know that Microsoft has posted video of all the sessions and keynotes. And they’re available for download. In fact, here is a set of CURL scripts that will download them for you all at once (or overnight depending on your bandwidth). The script basically says – do I have this file? If no, go get it. Included with the scripts, is a handy Renamer, that renames the file to the session name, which is much more meaningful than the original session number. But … what if (like my) you download 1/2 of them, and the other 1/2 die...(read more)

Resources for my SharePoint Services Talk

ASP.NET Weblogs — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:30:49 GMT

As promised here are some resources for my recent talk on creating and consuming services in SharePoint that I delivered at TechDays . You’ll be able to get the full slide deck, video, and code later at http://my.techdays.ca but here are the links from the slide deck and things I mentioned during the talk. Links Writing Custom Web Services for SharePoint (MSDN) Developing SharePoint Applications guidance from the Patterns and Practices group The SharePoint Service Locator pattern Books Developing Service-Oriented AJAX Applications (Book) Developers Guide to WSS 3.0 (Book) Professional Reporting with SharePoint 2007 (Book) Tools U2U CAML Builder (2003 and 2007 versions) CAML.NET (.NET Library for writing CAML queries in code) Read More......(read more)

ASP.NET MVC: Creating reports using Chart control

ASP.NET Weblogs — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 13:36:44 GMT

ASP.NET Chart control is powerful control you can use to add charting support to your web applications. Although chart controls are mainly used with ASP.NET forms it is not very hard to use them also in ASP.NET MVC applications . In this posting I will show you how to use ASP.NET Chart control in ASP.NET MVC application and I will illustrate how to do it easily so you don’t mess up your views. Before we start coding I want to make some notes about my solution: this solution is pretty new and it is sure that one can improve the code provided here, using this solution I’m trying to generalize in-place reporting for MVC applications, also I’m trying to keep my views as clean as possible – chart definitions are not small if you have more complex...(read more)

Unit Testing and Integration Testing in real projects

ASP.NET Weblogs — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 10:52:00 GMT

I am yet to find a proper sample on how to do realistic Test Driven Development (TDD) and how to write proper unit tests for complex business applications, that gives you enough confidence to stop doing manual tests anymore. Generally the samples show you how to test a Stack or a LinkedList, which is far simpler than testing a typical N-tier application, especially if you are using Entity Framework or Linq to SQL or some ORM in data access layer, and doing logging, validation, caching, error handling at middle tier. There are many articles , blog posts , video tutorials on how to write unit tests, which I believe are all very good starting points. But all these examples show you basic tests, not good enough to let your QA team go. So, let me...(read more)

T4MVC 2.5.01: added support for Html.RenderAction and Html.Action

ASP.NET Weblogs — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 02:10:19 GMT

To get the latest build of T4MVC: Go to download page on CodePlex MVC 2 Beta introduces two nice helpers called Html.RenderAction and Html.Action. Phil Haack described them in detail on his blog , so you may want to read through that before Read More......( read more ) Read More......(read more)

Lot’s of new software for IIS, ASP.NET, AJAX and PHP this week

ASP.NET Weblogs — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:13:44 GMT

Wow, what a week of innovation for the Microsoft Web Platform. This week we released a ton of new software which, if you haven’t already, you’ve got to check out. Here is a quick overview: IIS Search Engine Optimization v1 final release Read More......( read more ) Read More......(read more)

Twitter in a Dead End

Keyvan Nayyeri — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:30:53 GMT

These days it’s hard to find someone who doesn’t know about Twitter as a social networking status updating site mainly founded in 2007 with the very simple and basic idea to let people share their status on the web with 140 characters and follow others’ updates. I was among the first group of users who appeared on Twitter and have been continually tweeting for almost three years to now, so I’ve been able to witness the progress of the site and the way it evolved. The idea behind this service was very simple that had been tried by some other sites before, but Twitter was able to gather a reasonable number of known people to incorporate because it had a very simple and basic structure, and was founded by some of the well...(read more)

Visual Studio 2010: Generating sequence diagrams on the fly

ASP.NET Weblogs — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:28:28 GMT

One nice feature that Visual Studio 2010 provides is generating sequence diagrams on the fly. Just point out method and choose diagram generating option from context menu. In this posting I will show you how to generate sequence diagrams on the fly. To keep example illustrative and simple I will use simple code. Let’s suppose we have ASP.NET MVC application with following controller. public class PriceEnquiryController : Controller { // ... some properties and methods ... public ActionResult Index() { var model = new PriceEnquiryListModel (); model.PriceEnquiries = PriceEnquiryRepository.ListPriceEnquiries...(read more)

Memory leaks with Infragistics NetAdvantage Windows Forms edition

ASP.NET Weblogs — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:07:00 GMT

When I finalized my article about memory leaks , I removed a part about Infragistics NetAdvantage. Here it is. It may be useful to some of you. Warning: It's based on NetAdvantage 7.3, and may or may not apply to recent versions. Let's take an example. In project X, visual controls from the Infragistics NetAdvantage suite are used to build the GUI. One of these controls is the UltraToolbar. As told by its name, this control is used to display toolbars. The way a UltraToolbar is used is via a UltraToolbarsManager component. This works fine, except that even though the UltraToolbar class implements IDisposable, the UltraToolbarsManager class never calls the Dispose method on the UltraToolbars it manages. This is a bug. Fortunately, a workaround...(read more)

Stylin: Adventure Time

Dave Burke — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:22:21 GMT

Super stylish background, borders and page elements. Increases confidence to make a purchase with a site layout as pretty as this and with as much attention to detail. Good balance among page content dimensions. On the UN-stylin side, there’s a spider dropdown animation that’s stupid as hell in my opinion. Link to Adventure Time | View all Stylin Sites Read More......(read more)

Stylin: Wild Wings Safaris

Dave Burke — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:07:37 GMT

The low contrast between headers/footers and the body is what I liked about this. Link to Wild Wings Safaris | View all Stylin Sites Read More......(read more)

Stylin: Safarista Design

Dave Burke — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 06:58:36 GMT

Very beautiful. Someone sweated the details here. Like the menubar. Nice execution of an attractive body area background on the site content pages. Link to Safarista Design | View all Stylin Sites Read More......(read more)

Stylin: Boco Creative

Dave Burke — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 06:51:35 GMT

Unique borders on header and footer to the body if you look at an enlarged image. Info-rich and attractive slideshow in header area. Cool logo. Big “B.” We like that. Link to Boco Creative | View all Stylin Sites Read More......(read more)

Stylin: Rumos do Brasil

Dave Burke — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 06:41:28 GMT

This isn’t an exceptionally pretty page, but it’s distinctive with several different elements comfortably integrated as a whole. I liked the author sketches, very WSJ. Pronounced font. Nicely proportioned menubar. Artistry demonstrated in both the sketches and page illustrations. Link to Rumos Do Brasil | View all Stylin Sites Read More......(read more)

SharePoint 2010 Setup - Hurry up and Wait Edition

ASP.NET Weblogs — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:57:00 GMT

By now, everyone and his brother are downloading and installing the SharePoint 2010 beta onto their Windows 7 and Vista boxes. Why not? I mean, for the longest time we were stuck with having to spin up a Windows 2003 or 2008 server so now accessibility is here and we can genuinely put it on our machines without hackish workarounds. Of course why you would install a server application on a desktop OS is beyond this blog post and for a discussion over beers at SharePint. In any case there all kinds of guidance coming out on how to set things up. One of them is the MSDN article called Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint Server . This is a pretty good article but two gotchas I want to point out if anyone is following it and trying...(read more)