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.NETOOP high level configuration storage decision.

In designing .NETOOP we have this issue: Since .NETOOP will be an adaptable application designed to meet the needs of many users, some of the things that one might hard code in an application like “Web Site Name” will need to be set at installation time. For “system” configuration settings we......

Twitter API - Submit a post in C#

I used C# and WCF, but I could have just as easily used an ASMX web service. This code is fairly simple. No I didn't write it initially. I found it online (Hey, we all have to start somewhere). I massaged it a little to fit my needs and boom, here it is. I have decid......

Twitter API - Sending a Direct Message in C#

I tried writing some code to send a direct message using the Twitter API. It was a FAIL. I did some searching in google, and found this method below listed in a google group. I didn't write it, but it works, so enjoy. I plugged the method into my WCF Service and it just worked......

Twitter API - Get a list of your friends in C#

I needed to call the Twitter API and get a list of friends. I thought I could do something similar to getting a list of posts, but alas, I had some stupid error in my linq to xml code. I futzed around with it for days to no avail. Finally, I decided it was just easier to itera......

Silverlight 2.0 Walkthrough – Creating a “Traffic Jam” game

This series of posts are not really in-line with my normal debugging posts, but I just created a simple Traffic Jam game in Silverlight and thought I’d make it into a “lab series” that you can go through if you are getting started with Silverlight. The game is called Seattle Streets and it based on......

Silverlight Game – Part 3 - Using Linq to XML to read and generate the levels

This is part three in a series of 5 posts showing how I built a simple game in Silverlight, you can follow along (reading the posts in order) to build your own Traffic Jam game. I would recommend that you also go through ScottGu’s silverlight tutorials as well as the other tutorials on www.silverli......

Xml - A Simple Database

Xml can be used for different purposes. But in my programming life, I used it as database alone. I feel very comfortable while using xml as data store for my application, due to its simple structure....

CommonData 0.2O has been released to CodePlex

New Items from 0.2N:The application is gradually being migrated from Framework 2.0 to 3.5The ParamDate table has been renamed to ParamDateTime in anticipation of migrating to SQL2008 and the use of explicit date and time datatypes.The stored procedures for generating stored procedures have be......

Creating a "What I'm Reading" Widget

A number of personal websites and blogs have a "What I'm Reading" section, where the site owner lists books he's currently reading. Typically these widgets include a cover image of the book, the title and author, and a link the web visitor can click to buy the book or learn more about it. I rece......

Dynamically generating XML and stream to browser

One of the pages in my application retrieves data from a database as XML and streams this to the client in a pop-up window. Read More......(read more)...

Improving Debugging And Testing Through Assertions

Reading through the The Typemock Insider blog, I came across this post from Gil Zilberfeld. I myself tend to fall in Gil’s practice ("binary search" debugging), but I don’t think Kent Beck has the right solution. Gil’s suggestion of using Isolator is tempting (I don’t miss an opport......

Spell checker update 2.2: full support for VS 2008 SP1, simpler setup and a few bug fixes

Download: VSSpellChecker.msi What's new in version 2.2: Spell checker now fully supports VS 2008 SP1 Content of <code>, <abbr> and <address> elements is ignored Setup no longer requires COM registration, it uses VS AddIn registration in XML file List of words to ignore (SpellC......

Should HTML be considered as a data format?

As HTML is becoming more and more semantic, at least in intent, and all styling is moving into CSS, one has to wonder what it is now representing. It seems like it is now a format for unstructured data (a.k.a. rich text), in the same sense that XML and JSON are formats for semi-structured and struc......

Amazon.com AlbumViewer Application for Silverlight 2 Released

Back in the early days when Silverlight still had the WPF/e code name I put together a sample application that showed how to access album data from Amazon.com to display a 3D carousel. When Silverlight 1 was released I upgraded it which was straightforward since JavaScript was used for just a......

POP QUIZ: What’s wrong with this code – part 3

Imagine you are a developer and your boss comes to you complaining that your piece of code has been deemed to be taking up too much memory and causing problems for the application. You take a look at your code and you see the following, assume that stream is defined above this and is correct:......

About development on two-way RTF to XML/XHTML converter components and services

Microsoft introduced the Rich Text Format for specifying simple formatted text with embedded graphics. Initially intended to transfer such data between different applications on different operating systems, today this format is commonly used in Windows for enhanced editing capabilities. The XHTML t......

44 Silverlight Videos

Mike Taulty recently uploaded and amazing collection of Silverlight 2.0 screencasts on how Silverlight works, controls, File IO, networking, UI design, data-binding, interacting with HTML pages, and more. If you want to learn about Silverlight, this set of screencasts should definitely help! ......

Helping Visitors Search Your Site By Creating an OpenSearch Provider

One of the nicest features of modern browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer is the search bar in the upper right corner. With this tool you can quickly search any number of websites without having to first visit their search page. This functionality is most commonly u......

Internet Explorer 8 Address Bar like Windows Vista

Yesterday I brought up the question if there could be a change to the address bar of the next version of Internet Explorer. Since I’m using Windows Vista I’m very happy with the new view of the path in explorer.exe. It is very easy to navigate to parent folders by simple clicking on the part of the......

Pushing Data to a Silverlight Client with a WCF Duplex Service – Part II

In Part 1 of this series on pushing data to a Silverlight client with a WCF polling duplex service I demonstrated how service contracts and operations can be defined on the server. WCF has built-in support for duplex communication (two-way communication between a service and a client) but d......

Pushing Data to a Silverlight Client with a WCF Duplex Service - Part I

Silverlight provides several different ways to access data stored in remote locations. Data can be pulled from Web Services and RESTful services and even pushed from servers down to clients using sockets (see my previous articles on sockets here, here and here). Silverlight 2 Beta 2 int......

Creating a Silverlight 2 Client Access Policy Socket Server

Silverlight 2 provides built-in support for sockets which allows servers to push data to Silverlight clients. By using this feature clients can avoid polling the server on a timed basis to ensure that clients are kept up-to-date. If you're new to the socket features built-into Silverlig......

Working with XML Data Using LINQ, a TreeView, and a ListView :: Displaying Data

With more and more data being stored in XML, web applications today commonly need some way to view and edit the data stored in an XML file from a web page interface. If the XML data is relatively "flat" and tabular in nature, we can use data Web controls like the DataGrid, GridView, and Repeater......

Pushing Data to a Silverlight Client with Sockets: Part II

In Part 1 of this two part series on socket support in Silverlight 2 I discussed how a server could be created to listen for clients using classes in the System.Net.Sockets namespace. In that post the TcpListener class was used to listen for client connections and the client stream was access......

Silverlight 2 Networking Options

I've been spending my nights working on a new book covering Silverlight 2 and have been focusing on the new networking features that are available in the System.Net and related namespaces. Silverlight's great at animating objects, performing transformations and collecting data with all of th......

ApplicationHost.config file getting corrupted when OneCare or Forefront is running?

We have seen some reported cases when applicationHost.config file is getting corrupted when OneCare or Forefront is running on the same machine. By "corruption" I mean the XML is malformed is you may get an error: Error: Configuration file is not well-formed XML. Without going into the te......

Breaking Changes in Silverlight 2

There is an MSDN article that focuses on changes that might cause your older Silverlight-based applications to now fail or behave differently not on new features/enhancements for this release: Important! Migrating Older Code to the Newer Release Update Silverlight.js ......

Looking at DSLs in .NET

As I've mentioned in recent posts such as here, here and here, I've been very interested in Domain Specific Languages (DSLs), especially with regards to F# and the DLR as well. I recently re-listened to Software Engineering Radio Episode 52 with Obie Fernandez discussing DSLs in Ruby. &n......

Silverlight 2.0 Video Tutorials (Updated)

Silverlight 2.0 provides a new and exciting framework for building rich applications using C#, VB.NET or other languages that are capable of running on multiple operating systems and in multiple browsers. Scott Guthrie recently posted a great set of tutorials on Silverlight 2.0 that are an ex......

Silverlight 2.0 Video Tutorials

Silverlight 2.0 provides a new and exciting framework for building rich applications using C#, VB.NET or other languages that are capable of running on multiple operating systems and in multiple browsers. Scott Guthrie recently posted a great set of tutorials on Silverlight 2.0 that are an ex......

LINQ to XSD

One of the cool features in VB 9.0 is the ability to work directly with XML in code without having to wrap quotes around everything. If you're a C# developer, that's a feature that we don't have although you can do similar things with LINQ to XML (quotes required though). Microsoft just rel......

Microsoft Download Center using Silverlight 1.0

Some weeks ago Microsoft already published a preview version of the Microsoft Download Center. Now, there is a new URL for the preview version (which is now called beta): http://www.microsoft.com/beta/downloads/. Well, I run the Fiddler tool to calculate the download size of all files (JavaScr......

Acropolis, CAB, WPF, and the future

"Acropolis, the future of Smart Client" So sayeth Glenn Block, product lead for the Smart Client Software Factory and CAB. Glenn's a good friend and he's just doing his job, but I felt a little shafted when Acropolis popped up on the scene. I mean, after the last few weeks of CAB is complex and CA......

How to create Silverlight Applications with Notepad

You may have read my post about how you can build Silverlight Web applications with Visual Studio .NET 2005 instead of using the next verison codename Orcas. Until this time I used always a Virtual PC which was sometimes a little bit slow. Today I was thinking about how I could do this with Notepad......

Silverlight with Visual Studio .NET 2005

Could Silverlight 1.1 assemblies be generated with Visual Studio .NET 2005? Well, if you read the GetStarted page of Silverlight you see only upcoming Visual Studio codename Orcas as development platform. Bryant asked this in the Silverlight forum and got a great answer from Scott Louvau. He replie......

A Better Way To Show your Build Output: BuildConsole.NET

Sometime ago I built a tool I called Build Console. I was a quick and dirty development but until today we are using it often in our daily building. Why I needed this tool, well I don’t wanna tell you that VS build report is really poor but… it is ;) I don’t wanna open a bi......

XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0, XQuery and WSDL Support in XMLSpy 2007

I've always been a fan of Altova's XMLSpy and have used it since it was first released. Their release of XMLSpy 2007 doesn't disappoint as it adds support for several things that are of particular interest to me such as XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0, XQuery and enhanced WSDL editing.&nbs......

Method Tree Visualizer :: Fun with IronPython, Cecil and Netron Graph - Part III

As I said in the last post, the output from Microsoft GLEE looked but not ideal and as the method tree gets bigger with more relationships, the diagram gets out of control. Disappointed with that, my further search takes me to the Netron Project, which is a diagramming and ......

Clarius SFT February 2007 CTP is available !!

Before you even mention this… yes… it’s March already…I’m proud to announce that one week after the GAX February 2007 CTP release (aka v1.2) we are making available our Clarius Software Factories Toolkit February 2007 CTP that is compatible with the new GAX version.......

WPF Text Reading and Flow Document Support, and the new NYTimes, Daily Mail, and Seattle Post-Intelligencer Reader Applications

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF aka "Avalon") is a massive step forward for Windows client development, and delivers a super-rich .NET UI framework that integrates vector graphics, rich flow text support, and 3D visualization with a powerful control model framework. You get WPF sup......

Support for Reflector 5.0 in TestDriven.NET 2.3

Lutz Roeder has just announced the release of .NET Reflector 5.0! This is a significant update with lots of refinements and new features. Perhaps most significantly it includes support for C# 3.0 language features such as LINQ query expressions, lambda expressions and extension methods. See my......

Code Metrics - Complexity & The .NET Framework...

If you have never heard of "Cyclomatic Complexity" a good place to start is here. I decided to grab the Reflector Addin by Peli which will examine an assembly's methods and produce a list of code metrics for each given method, one of which is the Cyclomatic Complexity and run it......

VS.NET 2005 Tool Window for testing XPath expressions - XPathmania

I had to define some XPath expressions to query information from an XML document. I couldn't find any standard support for this in Visual Studio 2005, but after some searching I stumbled accross XPathmania, a tool window developed by Don Xml. Works like a breeze! See below. See this blog entry for ......

XML Encryption

XML Encryption is a W3C standard for encrypting XML elements. The encryption process involves taking an element from an xml document, encrypting it and it's children, and then replacing the original XML content with the generated encrypted XML in such a way as the document remains well formed....

Semantic Annotations for WSDL and Xml Schema

ECIS slams Microsoft over Vista

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/26/HNrivalsslamvista_1.htmlAs Microsoft Corp. gears up for the consumer launch of Vista, rivals slammed the new product, claiming that it breaks the very same European antitrust laws that its operating-system predecessor, XP, fell foul of in 2004, and that ......

W3C Publishes Eight New Standards in the XML Family

We have been waiting for this a few years now. W3C has announced the release of eight (8) Recommendations, representing some eight years of work by members of the W3C XSL Working Group and XML Query Working Group, with widespread implementation experience and extensive feedback from users and vendo......

Update on Mobile Blogging App

Although Keith Elder recommended I put my mobile blogging app up on CodePlex, I'm going to hold off on that for a while. Here's why: First off, I need to clean up the code before any of it goes public. It started as a prototype -- sort of a "I wonder how well this would work." As ......

Server-Side Creation of Excel 2007 Files Using .NET 3.0 and Office Open XML

The adoption of XML as the native file format for Excel 2007 has opened up a whole host of new possibilities for utilizing the power of Excel as a reporting tool. Now instead of relying on hacks and OLE Automation, you can create native Excel files on the server using standard tools.Visit our new ......

Documenting Private Methods

At my current contract, I've done three brand new applications from scratch and have been involved in modifying a couple of others. Every developer has their own coding style and it can be sometimes difficult to come up to speed on how someone else has decided to code a particular applic......

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