Jim Jackson

RIA Services - Iterate Items in EntityQuery Object

2009-08-04T12:55:56Z

I’m trying to get EF working with SL3, SSL, RIA Services et al. It’s a long road and I know there are issues with any route you decide to take when building a business app in Silverlight 3. In building previous iterations of my little program I used straight WCF services and had issues with host headers when using SSL and the cross domain access file. RIA Services is definitely easier to work with in terms of the plumbing. It sets up a new handler in the web.config and if you work out your EF model...(read more)

Good Documentation…

2009-07-15T16:28:27Z

Getting nationalized health care: + $3,000,000,000,000.00 Socializing the United States of America: + $10,000,000,000,000.00 Tax Hike to 'Evil Rich People' to raise less than 20% of funds needed for health care: 5.4% Good documentation about how the new health care system will work: Priceless http://docs.house.gov/gopleader/House-Democrats-Health-Plan.pdf Give ya two guesses where the rest of the funds for this travesty of liberty will come from but if you’re listening you’ll only need one....(read more)

Small Person, Big Life

2009-04-13T12:16:03Z

My friends and a few work associates know some of the details of my last trip to China to adopt my second daughter. While there my first adopted daughter, then 4 years old, got mysteriously sick. Very very sick. My wife and I spent a lot of time and obscene amounts of money playing the Ugly American role and advocating for our child in a medical and political system not set up with any specific value placed on an individual life. I love the Chinese people (all of them) and the Chinese culture is...(read more)

Silverlight 2 Drag and Scroll Image

2009-03-18T18:36:54Z

This is somewhat based on Shawn Wildermuth’s blog post for drag and drop. I had two problems with his post. I’m not scrolling a canvas. If your mouse leaves the control with the button down you are still dragging when your mouse reenters the control. So here’s my tweaked version: The control has a scroll viewer as the root element and a simple grid with one column and one row inside that. There is a large image inside the grid cell. There are events firing from the grid’s mouse down, up, move and...(read more)

Silverlight 2 Sys.InvalidOperationException: ImageError error #4001 in control Xaml1

2009-03-18T16:42:35Z

I got this last night while trying to load 2,150 images into a grid. I’m working on a map tiling control for my application because the maps are very large and custom stitched for my application. Incidentally, when loaded up, my IE windows consumes 1.3 Gb of Ram. Um, probably not gonna work in production… Anyway, it appears that there is a mechanism internal to the System.Windows.Media.Imaging.BitmapImage object that, when instanced using a Uri, will go in search of the thumbs.db object. I have not...(read more)

Using Linq to XML with C# to Read Gpx Files

2009-03-11T01:10:00Z

GPX is the standardized file format for GPS file exchanges. A GPX file can contain a lot of different kinds of information. Take a look at the schema here . In general, the major things that you will work with are: Waypoints A waypoint is a specific position that is manually marked by a user for future reference. So when you get to the suspension bridge, mark a waypoint and you can find it again later as well as tell everyone else about it. Tracks Tracks are where you've been. When I want to mark...(read more)

SQL 2008 Geography and Geometry Data Type Problems

2009-03-09T18:28:42Z

My plan was to take my application into SQL 08 from 05 since my hosting service now has it available. I was intent on killing all of my lat/long information and storing my geospatial data in geography columns. Here is what I’m finding about the Geography and Geometry data types. Initially, I expected to that once in, I’d be able to get everything back out exactly as entered. Not so much… Here is what I am finding so far. When/if I figure each of these out I’ll post an update. Geography and Geometry...(read more)

Beyond Compare 3

2009-02-16T15:55:00Z

A substantial part of a developer’s job seems to be the logistical details of getting ‘it’ from here to there. When you run a team the problem becomes larger. Even with source control, there are documents that should be updated that aren’t and things that should be done that are missed. The two tools that I use these days are Beyond Compare from Scooter Software for files and folders and Red Gate’s SQL Compare for databases. The former is dirt cheap, the later has gotten more expensive over the years...(read more)

WCF Services in a Shared Hosting Environment

2009-02-13T17:37:37Z

I’m currently using a relatively well known hosting service for my Silverlight 2 application . The problem that I’ve had in getting the app up and running is that in a shared hosting environment, I have no control over host headers and most of the other settings in IIS. So since my url is https://www.singletrax.com , the ops people also added https://singletrax.com to the host headers for my site. The problem is the order in which they added them. The www address is the second in the list so when...(read more)

Calculating Distances Between Latitude and Longitude – T-SQL – Haversine

2009-02-13T15:40:10Z

I’ve got lots of lat/long information for my Silverlight 2 application and I’m now tinkering with getting the elevation view working in my spare time. The problem is that the distances are very small and the haversine formulae I’ve located on the internet are all either miles or kilometers. Not going to work when your next position is only 50 feet away. So I wrote the simple SQL function below based directly on Seth Long’s version here . Now, since I’m storing positional latitude, longitude and intersection...(read more)

Looking for the Groove Again

2009-02-06T19:21:00Z

I spent quite a bit of time working SharePoint both in an independent project and bug-fixing other people’s work over the last six or seven months. Once you get the paradigm down, it’s not too bad but not exactly a barrel of laughs either. You spend equal thirds of your time developing, debugging and tinkering with the xml files that make up the belly of the beast. I believe that after some old-school SQL work finishes up I’ll be back in that groove. Yippee… I need to noodle around with those certifications...(read more)

Opening and Reading an XML file in a document library

2008-06-26T23:59:00Z

So in a recent SharePoint implementation, I was required to allow users to create links in web parts that performed server side functions. Most of the functions were known quantities but they were almost all external systems. Most of the requirements were to just display security trimmed links to Oracle and other external systems. I had envisioned a single sign-on, BDC system but it turned out the client didn't have the infrastructure to support getting the external data in that way. My solution...(read more)

SharePoint Logs - Tracing Service lost trace events

2008-05-13T14:27:00Z

So in the farm I'm trying to deploy to, the tracing service starting logging some "failed to write template" messages. Thousands of them. Nobody was on the machine at the time. It wasn't available to anyone so it was internal to SharePoint, whatever it was. Then it suddenly turned into the "Tracing Service lost trace events" log entries. Finally, it stopped logging altogether. I found in a forum post on MSDN that when this happens, you need to restart the Windows SharePoint Service Tracing service...(read more)

Content Query Web Part Customization Overview

2008-02-27T20:39:15Z

Oskar asked me today if I could walk some folks on his team through what can be done with the CQWP out of the box with no code. So before I write that up tonight, I figured I'd quickly describe what I know how to do and what I don't. Unfortunately, the later list is larger and more formidable than the former. So the problem that I solved was this: Project portal has four sub-sites for sub-projects. Each sub-site has a list of Scrum sprints. The actual names of the lists are not important, what is...(read more)

MOSS Configuration Certification Study Links - 70-630

2008-02-22T13:31:29Z

I'm currently going through some study materials for the 70-630 exam. I think it's going to take a pretty long time before I am there because my foundational knowledge of this technology is still pretty slim. At any rate, I located a bunch of tech-net links describing Shared Service Providers and security. Here they are in no particular order. I intend to walk through each of these as I have time (hence the time to get the cert). If I have the time and patience and I find other links I'll pass them...(read more)