Vince Blasberg's Blog

Watch a Sea Turtle on the Windows Phone

vblasberg — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 06:03:00 GMT

Chris Rajczi and Michael Perry worked very hard on the Sea Turtle application for the last few Dallas XAML User Group meetings. The application can be reviewed on the Marketplace at http://windowsphone.com/s?appid=c1ccc254-5735-471e-96c0-88a0d89d3a80.

So if you are reading this…please do two things:

Download the free Sea Turtle Conservancy application by searching for 'Sea Turtle App'.
Rate and Review the application.

The application code can be found on the Dallas XAML User Group past meetings section. You can also review the past few newsletters on the Dallas XAML User Group site to see more details.

Thanks,
-Vince

I Have a Blog!!!!

vblasberg — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 05:49:00 GMT

Sure I have a blog, but all of my time is spent working on cool work or contributing to the Dallas XAML User Group. I write the newsletters and maintain everything including the momentum, hopefully.

Feel free to drop by the Dallas XAML User Group on our monthly meetings, surf to the site and watch one of our videos, or read a newsletter if you have time. There is also a nice list of webcast and podcast resources.

So there... Guilt subsided for not contributing to the blog much.

-Vince
Dallas XAML User Group
http://www.DallasXAML.com

A Technical Packrat

vblasberg — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 18:51:00 GMT

My name is Vince and I'm a technical packrat. ( Hello Vince.... )

I have notes from the first Dallas .Net User Group meeting in 2001 and the first Microsoft MSDN meetings in Dallas around 1998. I have an ascii chart in my wallet but soon to be on my phone. I have books related to project management in the late 80's. I still have 8086 assembly and SQL 6.5 books.

Why? I'm a technical packrat.

After 20 years of development, I actually know who I am and what I want to focus on. Technology moves like a train around mountains, but it still moves forward. Some good advise I've heard is that if we don't read it in 3 months, throw it out. It feels good to throw away obsolete things that no one needs. A trip to the local Goodwill will be a relief.

What's in your wallet?

-Vince

Windows Phone Mango Release - Finally Upgraded

vblasberg — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 05:07:00 GMT

After several attempts, I finally got my Windows Phone 7 updated to the Mango release. It kept failing and reported an error C1010007. That error indicates that the cable is bad or not the original cable. I finally tried again and kept touching the phone every minute or two. The upgrade continued and finally finished. I suspect the phone goes to sleep during the upgrade.

Hope this helps others upgrade easier. It's something to remember for the next upgrade.

-Vince

The .Net Micro Framework Event in Dallas

vblasberg — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 05:33:00 GMT

This is a mention of the event that came and went last weekend for the .Net Micro Framework here in Dallas at the Improving Enterprises offices. Shawn Weisfeld worked on the event for the last 6 months. Shawn pushed the moderately priced package from FEZ that proved to be an excellent product. We all met last Saturday and went through some exercises to understand how to develop most of the basic tasks to interact with the plug and play hardware. When the day was over, we all had a great understanding of how to create .Net application with Visual Studio 2010 and deploy to this device. It's so much easier than the Windows CE deployments.

All this to say that if anyone has a project that needs low-power consumption hardware integration, the FEZ boards are a great solution with C# and Visual Studio. I think one of the coolest things on the board is not the ethernet, infrared, or color touch screen but the serial port integration. There are still so many integrations needed for existing serial port devices. Just plug this in and with .Net get you the rest of the way to a solid solution.

The Products

Visual Studio 2010 with SP 1 (any version will work even the Free C# Express edition)

Microsoft .NET Micro Framework 4.1 SDK

GHI Electronics NETMF 4.1 SDK

TeraTerm
FEZ Ultimate Kit - The plug and play training package.

Then there's an ebook with suggested projects for our cool new geek toy. http://www.ghielectronics.com/downloads/FEZ/FEZ_Internet_of_Things_Book.pdf

Now I'm off off build something great with C# of course.

-Vince

Never SELECT * from Entity Framework called Stored Procedures

vblasberg — Sun, 22 May 2011 01:23:00 GMT

The Entity Framework can help us create an efficient Data Access Layer or a horribly inefficient one.

It's worth mentioning that if we use Entity Framework to call a stored procedure that returns a database derived Entity using a SELECT * (star), we will have that horribly inefficient DAL. Of course, as we've been told for years, SELECT * is 99.0% wrong with 1% for those dynamic field cases. With EF calling a stored procedure, it's really wrong.

SQL Profiler will show us that the store procedure does return all records as fast as it can, barring a badly written stored procedure or low SQL server memory. Entity Framework unfortunately does not assume all fields have returned. EF then calls back with the defined primary key for each record. This means that for a stored procedure that returns 1 million rows in one connection, actually returns 2 million rows with 2 million and one database server calls / connections from the application layer. Try it on a 3 record table sometime to see that it calls SQL Server 4 times for three rows even when we use a stored procedure. Enterprise DBA's will complain as they should. If there is an obscure switch to avoid this, I couldn't find it.

The Moral of the Story:

Always define fields from the SELECT statement even if SQL 2005 and greater does optimize it for us.
Use SQL Profiler to look at the number of calls and the I/O count of each call.

-Vince

Containing Silverlight Lists and DataGrids in the Browser Window

vblasberg — Sun, 01 May 2011 22:30:00 GMT

In a typical Silverlight line-of-business application we have Lists, Grids, DataGrids, and StackPanels. We populate a list and it flows down and off the browser page. When we have a ScrollViewer, it will scroll the whole page including edit controls and graphics and not just the list that's tall and flowing off the page. The good news is that we can easily contain the list in the viewable area with the few simple steps listed below.

Remove the ScrollViewer from the page if it exists.
Contain all upper area graphics and edit controls in a RowDefinitions of explicit size or Auto.
Contain the lower List(s) in a final Grid RowDefinition with the Star notation to fill the remainder of the window using the outer-most Grid as a parent container.
Optionally specify for the List properties, VerticalAlignment="Top" and VerticalContentAlignment="Stretch". Otherwise the List and its borders will stretch to the bottom of the screen even if it has no items. Either way may be preferred.

The following screen shots demonstrate this with a simple GridSplitter to size either side. Notice the List on the left is using two rows compared to the list on the right. The list on the right isn’t flowing to the bottom and uses only one row. Both lists flow to the bottom of the browser window and no further, regardless of the number of items.

XAML rocks.
-Vince

Runtime:

Designer:

XAML:

Code-Behind:

private void MainPage_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    listBox1.Items.Clear();
    listBox2.Items.Clear();

    for (int i = 1; i <= 100; i++)
    {
        string listItem = "List Item " + i.ToString();

        listBox1.Items.Add(listItem);
        listBox2.Items.Add(listItem);
    }
}

Dallas GiveCamp 2011

vblasberg — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 05:44:00 GMT

Dallas GiveCamp came and went this last weekend. It was my second GiveCamp and was very rewarding. Our team created a site for the Tarrant County Birth Network. Jon and I quickly explained the resulting web site and sat down, but I forgot to present and thank the team. So this is a very weak attempt to thank them after the event.

Thanks to the Dallas GiveCamp team for a fun weekend.

Jonathan Keith - Developer
Nick Coombs - Developer
Rick Michaels – Developer
Sridhar – Very helpful floating developer
Shannon Blackwell - The very active charity representative
Jaime Grassi - Business Analyst
Vince Blasberg (myself) – Developer

The GiveCamp weekend was very unusual, thankfully. There were many challenges from the first moment until the last. In the end we at least accomplished one big thing. We enabled the charity with a CMS that will grow as their needs grow. They now have a huge network of .Net developers around the world that can easily develop and support them. When they switch over to the new site, there is no doubt the requirements document will grow and there will be developers like our team to help them.

What is the Tarrant County Birth Network?
http://tcbirthnetwork.org/
The Tarrant County Birth Network is a community organization to provide information about, and advocacy for evidence-based, Mother-Friendly care for expectant Tarrant County families seeking a healthy, informed, and enjoyable pregnancy and birth.

What is GiveCamp?
http://dallasgivecamp.org/
GiveCamp is a weekend-long event where software developers, designers, and database administrators donate their time to create custom software for non-profit organizations.

I hope to see everyone there next year.

-Vince

Videos from My Past Presentations

vblasberg — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 05:23:00 GMT

Shawn Weisfeld has recorded several presentations that I've been fortunate enough to present at various times. Shawn also stalks other active community speakers with that camera of his. Check out the complete list on the INETA Champs live site at http://newlive.ineta.org/. That's more than enough video content to fill a Saturday night or skip the Monday night football.

Here is a list of my presentations at http://newlive.ineta.org/Presentation/Speaker/26

Nuts and Bolts in XAML Part 1 - 7/6/2010
http://newlive.ineta.org/Presentation/ViewVideo/110

Nuts and Bolts in XAML Part 2 - 8/3/2010
http://newlive.ineta.org/Presentation/ViewVideo/122

Working with Data in Silverlight - 6/18/2010
http://newlive.ineta.org/Presentation/ViewVideo/106

Understanding Databinding with XAML in WPF and Silverlight - 3-2-2010
http://newlive.ineta.org/Presentation/ViewVideo/36
http://newlive.ineta.org/Presentation/ViewVideo/37
http://newlive.ineta.org/Presentation/ViewVideo/38

RIA Services - Solutions to 'The remote server returned an error: NotFound'

vblasberg — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 05:52:00 GMT

Isn't it great when the answers are out there? I finally got a Google hint and overcame this one. So here are a few reasons that I encountered and overcame this error. We can easily reproduce (and often fix) this error. This occurs on the asynchronous return from a Silverlight 4 to RIA services. It's as if for any of the few reasons it fails, the call just gets aborted and we get a head-scratching "Not Found". We can sometimes even hit a debugger breakpoint in the Domain Service that gets the IQueryable call and wonder why the server appears to work in the debugger.

Here are a few suggestions to help.

Returning too much data for the object graph. Solution: Edit the 'maxItemsInObjectGraph' setting in the web.config.
Throwing an unhandled error on the service logic. It can't get back to the client. Solution: Comment out logic and see if the call succeeds.
Solution: Only enable Anonymous authentication. The request can then avoid authentication errors and possibly return successfully. This one got me again tonight when deployed a new client’s project for the first time. It also confused several of us at the Dallas Silverlight and WP7 DevCamp that I mentored at the other day. The project will work great in the local development server but when deployed to IIS, we get a Not Found error. So try disabling the Forms and Basic Authentication with only Anonymous enabled. I'm convinced that this is the most likely reason for most people.

Hope this helps others with this unintuitive error message....Hopefully it's "Now Found".

-Vince

Silverlight OOB - CheckAndDownloadUpdateAsync

vblasberg — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:01:00 GMT

I’ve been looking at the Silverlight Out-Of-Browser support and the easy update feature. In the current version, we’re given the method, CheckAndDownloadUpdateAsync(). This method does a lot for us but is rather limited. With an asynchronous method and no parameters, what can we expect? With a huge team in Redmond working for us and trying to meet deadlines, we get what we get. In the spirit of sharing, here’s what I see so far.

Features:

Detect network connectivity (and sometimes it fails miserably…)
Connect to the original authorized URL that it was installed from
Download the new XAP file and compare the current version against the downloaded version from the manifest
Detect the current Silverlight version vs. the new version’s Silverlight version
If a failure occurs, failure exception types are provided for recovery such as “PlatformNotSupportedException”

Limitations:

Can’t interrupted the request. So when it times out, we wait for it.
Can’t download the update and make it optional to install and replace the currently running XAP. A flag to just detect a newer version would be better. This would allow the UI to show the current version and available update version.
Returns a false for the “UpdateAvailable” property for several reasons such as the new XAP is not signed, is a newer Silverlight Version, or various other errors. We must then look at *ALL* of the possible error class types placed in the error collection. A bunch of try-catches are therefore necessary. The try-catches do the job as long as we have every possible error type in a catch. An enum for the actual error reason may be better.
Can’t revert to a previous stable version and have it install over a newer bad version. It makes sense, but real development teams have recovery plans when updating production versions.

Q: What if we want to make the newer XAP file replacement optional? Here are some thoughts.

Not everyone wants to increase the newer version number for a rollback version. The Silverlight client can call the web server to get the new version number using other networking connectivity options. The server call could be as complicated as a WCF service, ASMX service, Web Method call, or an HTTPRequest to get the online version information. Getting the version from the server could be as complicated as reading the newer version’s manifest file, read the new file date and time, or newer folder date and time. It could be as simple as getting a text file that has only the expected Silverlight version and the new XAP version. If the major or minor version is different, then the Silverlight client can act appropriately such as displaying an update message box or button to perform the CheckAndDownloadUpdateAsync() call. The only issues I can imagine would be security issues of calling back to a “different” server where a ClientAccessPolicy.xml file is required. If it were HTTPS from the install, the new version check call may to an HTTP. The different server could also include “WWW” or not include it and therefore require the ClientAccessPolicy.xml file. The simple version text file can be automatically generated in the Silverlight application build script. This way DEV, QA, and Production can generate and test it easily without requiring the file to be edited every time it gets deployed. This may not allow a previous version to replace a new bad version (users install updates with the Silverlight plugin, not our code) but it does get closer so the installed version can stop working or corrupting data until they uninstall and reinstall the previous version. A rollback with a version increase is easier so we can just call CheckAndDownloadUpdateAsync for the actual rollback. Again, these are just some thoughts to get closer to real-world deployments.

A Silverlight OOB launcher debugger is available. More information: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/silverlight_sdk/archive/2010/04/10/sllauncher-error-messages.aspx

Q: Needs some good code examples? A few really good Silverlight OOB blog entries can be found here: http://nerddawg.blogspot.com/search/label/Out-of-browser

This should give some food for thought until we get a more robust CheckAndDownloadUpdateAsync method.

-Vince

Silverlightpalooza - The DFW Silverlight and WP7 DevCamp

vblasberg — Thu, 27 May 2010 04:17:00 GMT

Teresa Burger and Chris Koenig are heading up a great event on Jun 18th and 19th called the DFW Silverlight and WP7 DevCamp. It is two full days (Friday and Saturday) of Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 fun. Yes - I said fun. I'll be one of the available on-site mentors both days. It will be at our favorite hang-out, the Microsoft headquarters in Dallas. There will be prizes and lots of experience to be gained. So if you want to join in the fun and learning, please register now before it is filled. After two days of Silverlight and WP7, there’s still a Sunday left to ride the motorcycle. So it definitely will be a great weekend.

http://silverlightpalooza.dynamitesilverlight.com/

-Vince

Dallas XAML UG Samples for Data Binding

vblasberg — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 07:38:00 GMT

The Dallas XAML User Group is holding their second meeting on April 6th 2010. We will be spending most of the time on our laptops practicing data binding techniques for WPF and Silverlight. The completed samples are uploaded and ready to review before the meeting. The theme for samples is a GoldWing reseller. Can you guess which sweet Orange motorcycle that I own and love to ride around Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas with my wife?

WPF Routed Events – Bubbling Several Layers Up

vblasberg — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 06:03:00 GMT

Recently, the WPF question of the day for me was how to bubble up a toggle button event through several layers with less code. In WPF we can easily add layers without worrying about wiring up delegates for each level.

Most of the blogs and MSDN help pages were detailed but not obvious. This simple example shows how a registered event in the lowest level user control can bubble up for a top level parent to handle the event. The example bubbles up an event from the QueueButton user control (Level 4) to View2 (Level 3) , then View1 (Level 2), then the top parent Window1 (Level 1) . There is no code behind nor any delegates to maintain at any level except the firing control and any listeners. We should be able to add any number of views in the visual tree and still avoid any extra work. The event is a Bubble event and not Tunnel, but that is an example for another day. Tunneling can be thought of (informally) as a falling bubble from the top level of the visible tree to the source. This lets each level receive the event like bubble up does, but knowing that the parent control had an option of acting on the event.

I hope this simple example helps someone keep the WPF code clean and simple.

-Vince

Window1 - Level 1 - The Top Level Listener:

XAML:

The Single Code-Behind Method:

private void Window_EnableQueue(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    QueueButton queueButton = e.OriginalSource as QueueButton;
    if (null != queueButton)
        ToggleStateTextBlock.Text = "Toggle Button IsChecked = " + queueButton.IsChecked.Value.ToString();
}

View1 - Level 2: (No Code Behind in View1)

View2 - Level 3: (No Code Behind in View2)

QueueButton - Level 4 - The Event Source

QueueButton XAML:

QueueButton Code Behind:

using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Controls.Primitives;
namespace Routed
{
        public partial class QueueButton : ToggleButton
        {
            public static readonly RoutedEvent EnableQueueEvent;

            static QueueButton()
            {
                QueueButton.EnableQueueEvent = EventManager.RegisterRoutedEvent("EnableQueue",
                RoutingStrategy.Bubble, typeof(RoutedEventHandler), typeof(QueueButton));
            }

            public event RoutedEventHandler EnableQueue
            {
                add { AddHandler(QueueButton.EnableQueueEvent, value); }
                remove { RemoveHandler(QueueButton.EnableQueueEvent, value); }
            }

            public QueueButton()
            {
                InitializeComponent();
            }             protected override void OnChecked(RoutedEventArgs e)
            {
                RaiseEvent(new RoutedEventArgs(QueueButton.EnableQueueEvent, this));
            }

            protected override void OnUnchecked(RoutedEventArgs e)
            {
               RaiseEvent(new RoutedEventArgs(QueueButton.EnableQueueEvent, this));
            }
        }
}

DallasXAML.com – A New User Group for Silverlight, WPF, XBAP, etc.

vblasberg — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 05:33:00 GMT

http://DallasXAML.com

I’ve devoted much of last month to starting the DallasXAML User Group. I finally got back into user group management after 2 years away from leading the Dallas C# SIG. Now I’m having fun getting a Silverlight/WPF user group going strong for the Dallas / Ft. Worth community. Our first meeting was March 3rd at the Improving Enterprises offices in North Dallas. We had about 25 to 35 attendees in the first meeting and it went well. We covered the most important topic that everyone should understand well – data binding.

So I chose the XAML user group so we can get together for a common group improvement in the Dallas / Ft. Worth area and learn cross-technology information that we can use now. It is not a lecture hall. The great thing is that we’ll provide hands-on experience with most every meeting. The goal is to get the experience that we can use the next work day. I unfortunately broke that rule by speaking all through the first meeting, but next month is part two with more hands-on data binding.

The differentiation is this group concentrates on XAML, not Silverlight or Windows Client alone. What we learn in one area, we gain for all areas. That includes the Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 coming later this year. Next year it may be Windows Phone 8, 9, or whatever.

I started developing WPF seriously almost a year ago. I experienced the painful learning curve. Anyone who reports that there isn’t a big learning curve either thinks in XAML before it was developed, is on the Silverlight or WPF development team, or has already conquered the learning and forgot the pain. So I wanted to share the pain or make it easier for others – same thing. I have found that the more I learn and use good disciplined techniques, the more interesting and rewarding development is again.

A few months ago, I was sitting in the iPhone development session at the Dallas C# SIG. After the meeting, the audience was polled for future topics. After a few suggestions, Silverlight got the big hands up. That makes sense because it’s still the hot topic for many Microsoft developers. So I surfed around and found that there aren’t enough user groups to help in this area. I polled a few local group leaders and did the work to start the group. This week I got a telerik controls licence and improved the site with some great controls, namely the RadHtmlPlaceholder control. It provides a Silverlight control to show HTML in an IFrame-like area. On DallasXAML.com, the newsletters and resource pages display in HTML because Silverlight just isn’t there yet. I’m looking forward to a Silverlight XPS viewer with flow documents. There are some good commercial version available, but this is a non-profit group.

The DallasXAML.com site points to many other resources such as podcasts and webcasts. I would rather give them the credit than try to out-do them. So check out the DallasXAML user group site and attend our meetings if you can. We meet the first Tuesday of the month.

-Vince

DallasXAML User Group Leader