Laurent Kempé

Video of Tech Head Brothers authoring tool using Silverlight Streaming

This is a video demonstrating the offline usage of the Tech Head Brothers authoring tool.

The tool is using now WCF in place of WSE3 and works great with ASP.NET membership and role.

The video is hosted on Silverlight Streaming and was made using Camtasia Studio from TechSmith and Microsoft Media Encoder.

Tech Head Brothers Authoring tool

I just updated the source code of my Tech Head Brothers Authoring tool on Codeplex.

Now it uses Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) in place of WSE 3.0 and Word 2007.

Tech Head Brothers Authoring Tool is a content authoring tool based on Word 2007, VSTO 2005se, XML, XSLT and Web Services (WCF).
It permits offline content authoring and pre-visualization then online publishing to the French portal Tech Head Brothers - http://www.techheadbrothers.com.
Currently the tool let the author:

• Choose images to insert using a Document Action Pane
• Copy source code from Visual Studio and paste it into Word 2007, generating an external source code colorized XHTML file using Colin Coller CopySourceAsHtml http://www.jtleigh.com/people/colin/software/CopySourceAsHtml/
• Have a local disconnected preview of there publication rendering through a XSLT rendering
• Post there content on the website using Web Services

Updated my ATI Drivers on my HP nw8440 notebook

I just updated my drivers from my HP nw8440 using the new tool DH Mobility Modder.net. It runs now the last version of ATI Catalyst Drivers and after some time of usage I must say that I am happy about it.

Note: I had not to disable UAC to run the DH Mobility Modder.net, but I runned it as Administrator.

I used another tool in the past as written in my old post Notebook and ATI Drivers.

So a big thanks to Ruud Ketelaars for his fantastic tool.

ReSharper 3.0.2 is out

You might download the version 3.0.2 here.

Take a look at the full "Complete List of 3.0.2 Release Notes", or to the following extract:

• Unit Test Explorer improvements
• Better ASP.NET support
• Bugfixes
• Cross-version license support
• Remember window positions
• Provide hotkey to quickly move to begin of the current type declaration
• Allow to extract method from a block, which contains an anonymous delegate, which has read-only usage of variables from external scope
• QF to remove redundant enum base type
• And more

I hate when people just copy

I just have seen a copy of my last post 'Yahoo release a web site evaluation tool called YSlow' on the following web page "http://clevelandwebsitedesignblog.insightstyle.com/2007/08/yahoo-release-web-site-evaluation-tool.html#links"

No quotes, no link back to the original post just a straight copy. I think it is a disrespect for the author and I hate that.

Yahoo release a web site evaluation tool called YSlow

YSlow is a new web tool published by Yahoo. It let you test a total of 13 rules against your web site to check if it is efficient.

YSlow is an addin to Firefox integrated in the web development tool Firebug.

You might read the rules that are verified on this page : Thirteen Simple Rules for Speeding Up Your Web Site and the documentation is on this page : YSlow User Guide.

There is also a screencast on this page : YSlow Podcast Interview and Screencast Demo.

Performance view

YSlow analyze the web page and generate a global mark and one mark per rules tested.

This is the gui of YSLow showing the result of the analysis of Tech Head Brothers main page. You can see the global mark of C (not so bad ;) and the different marks per rule. For example a D for the rule "Make fewer HTTP requests". You can opne up each section that didn't get a A to see what might be better.

We can see on the previous picture that YSlow identified that we are doing 11 requests for different JavaScript files. When you click on the rule you get a new web page with the explanation of the rule.

Stats view

YSlow compute the total size of a web page with and without the use of the cache and also give you some information on cookies.

You can see clearly the impact of the cache on your web application. On the previous screen shot you see that the browser needs to download 127.3 Kb with 21 HTTP requests without the cache and this numbers drops to 28.2 Kb and 5 HTTP requests with.

Components view

You get also a complete list of all the components of your page, included their type, URL, expiration date, gzip status, loading time , size and ETag.

Menu tools

The last menu let's you display the whole Javascript and CSS used by your web page to get a global view. It gives you also a web page with the result of the test on one page. The last part is JSLint checking the Code Conventions for the JavaScript Programming Language.

YSlow is a tool that might be usefull when you come to the optimization of your web site.

SnagIt and One Note 2007

TechSmith just released an output addin for SnagIt: SnagIt Output for Microsoft OneNote 2007.

This is a very good combination, because I am using a lot SnagIt to communicate and OneNote 2007 to keep notes about the founding I make on the internet, now I can easily bring a snapshot to OneNote.

Fissum 0.5 released - a Team System addon

Michel Perfetti just released Fissum 0.5 a tool that will simplify the life of all developers using Team System:

"Fissum is a TFS Client. Fissum provides a direct access to your work items without opening the team explorer. Click here to see some Screenshots."

This new release provides

• Team site access

• Work Item bulk creation tools in the Work Item Form

ASP.NET AJAX and URL rewriting issue

If you are using URL rewriting you might know that you have to take care about the way you reference resources has written in the Scott Guthrie post; Tip/Trick: Url Rewriting with ASP.NET:

Handling CSS and Image Reference Correctly

One gotcha that people sometime run into when using Url Rewriting for the very first time is that they find that their image and CSS stylesheet references sometimes seem to stop working.  This is because they have relative references to these files within their HTML pages - and when you start to re-write URLs within an application you need to be aware that the browser will often be requesting files in different logical hierarchy levels than what is really stored on the server.

For example, if our /products.aspx page above had a relative reference to "logo.jpg" in the .aspx page, but was requested via the /products/books.aspx url, then the browser will send a request for /products/logo.jpg instead of /logo.jpg when it renders the page.  To reference this file correctly, make sure you root qualify CSS and Image references ("/style.css" instead of "style.css").  For ASP.NET controls, you can also use the ~ syntax to reference files from the root of the application (for example: <asp:image imageurl="~/images/logo.jpg" runat="server"/>

This is for sure also the case for javascript.

I am using the Request.PathInfo way described in Scott's post to rewrite one url on Tech Head Brothers. Everything works fine except that Sys.Services.AuthenticationService get confused about the rewriting of the URL and tries to post back on :

http://localhost:8080/Auteurs.aspx/laurent-kempe/Authentication_JSON_AppService.axd/Login

When I expect

http://localhost:8080/Authentication_JSON_AppService.axd/Login

Looking at the page rendered by ASP.NET I see that the following is rendered:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
Sys.Services._AuthenticationService.DefaultWebServicePath = 'Authentication_JSON_AppService.axd';
// -->
</script>

So I am clearly missing a / in the path and due to that the URL rewriting confuse the post to the server.

The first solution was found by Cyril Durand (always of good help in this AJAX world ;) and is to add this line of code:

ScriptManager.GetCurrent(Page).AuthenticationService.Path = "/Authentication_JSON_AppService.axd";

But I did it a bit differently, directly in the javascript adding the following line:

Sys.Services.AuthenticationService.set_path('/Authentication_JSON_AppService.axd');

Btw this javascript line would be generated at rendering time by the solution of Cyril.

Thanks Cyril for the always nice talks.

Issue with WCF Services hosted in IIS using multiple bindings per site

I am currently working on the new Tech Head Brothers authoring tool THBAuthoring as you can read in this post 'Migration from WSE 3 to WCF'. Two days ago I went to production with the migration from WSE to WCF. Today I had to post an article about Linq written by Kader Yildirim and was quite optimistic that it will work because I followed as always the process of developing on my notebook, then deploying to staging, testing of staging and finally going to production. This time it didn't work. I had a the following error:

"This collection already contains an address with scheme http. there can be at most one address per scheme in this collection."

Weird

I did a comparison using WinMerge of the web.config of staging and production web site, and nothing special in there.

After some research on the configuration of the web site in IIS I realized that the production one was using multiple bindings and the one from staging was not. Removing all bindings except the one defined in the WCF service made it, now my service is working.

Even if it is not a really good solution I can leave with it for the moment. And with some research I found this post from Ram Poornalingam 'Supporting Multiple IIS Bindings Per Site' that I have not tried right now but will asap.