XAML Essential Tools

December 11, 2008 at 10:26 AMalex

 

If you're doing a developement for WPF/Silverlight, these are the essential tools aiding you in routine tasks such as viewing an object graph or auto-generating a business form from your code:

http://karlshifflett.wordpress.com/mole-for-visual-studio/

Mole is a Visual Studio visualizer. Visualizers have been part of Visual Studio since version 2005. During debugging sessions, visualizers allow developers to view objects and data using a customized interface. Visual Studio ships with several simple but useful visualizers. Many developers have posted visualizers for .NET classes.

http://karlshifflett.wordpress.com/xaml-power-toys/

XAML Power Toys is a Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Multi-AppDomain Add-In that empowers WPF & Silverlight developers while working in the XAML editor.  Its Line of Business form generation tools, Grid tools,  DataGrid and ListView generation really shorten the XAML page layout time.

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The Virtualization Launch

September 19, 2008 at 1:31 AMalex

Register for a getVIRTUALnow event in your area and find out how Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V, Microsoft System Center - including Virtual Machine Manager 2008 - and Microsoft Desktop and Application Virtualization can help you virtualize from the data center to the desktop.

The agenda looks pretty cool, which includes Hyper-V introduction, application assesment and planning toolkit, and you supposed to get home a software package. The only drawback, even though it is a roadshow, you'd have to throw $149 to get into it.

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The fact: Microsoft Exchange Team was an original developer of AJAX

September 17, 2008 at 10:39 PMalex

This is a really nice story indeed regarding how some techniques were developed just for utility purposed and later evolved into hot technology now known by the name as AJAX. Read on from the former Exchange guy at http://www.alexhopmann.com/story-of-xmlhttp/

 

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Publishing styles

September 10, 2008 at 10:51 PMalex

If you're writing an article or any other paper, make sure you format it according to the style, recognized in the area the paper supposed to  appear. For example, the following styles are available in Microsoft Word 2007

  1. APA - American Psychological Association
  2. GB7714
  3. GOST - Russian style
  4. ISO 690 - ISO standard for bibliographic referencing in documents
  5. MLA - Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing
  6. SIST02
  7. Turabian

If you're writing a technical paper, you can stick with either Harvard or APA style.

Since Microsoft Word 2007 does not support Harvard reference style by default, here is a project on CodePlex site which provides XML extensions for Microsoft Word 2007 to enable the support for several styles commonly used in colleges and universities. 

 

 

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MSDN Events Unleashed

August 26, 2008 at 1:20 PMalex
Microsoft Events
MSDN Events Unleashed

 

Session 1: Demystifying WPF
Session 2: Developing Applications with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1

 

 
- September 16, Downers Grove, IL
- September 17, Indianapolis, IN
- September 23, Milwaukee, WI
- October 7, Chicago, IL
With a bewildering array of choices, the biggest challenge we face today is how to architect robust applications with the right technologies to meet our user's needs and integrate nicely into our existing IT ecosystems. Join our Central Region Architect Evangelists for a great discussion on architecting distributed applications using all the latest technologies and best practices.
User Groups
 
September 16, Evansville, IN
Alan Stevens presents TDD and the MVC Framework.
Third-Party Events
 
September 15 - 19, Chicago, IL

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The requested Performance Counter is not a custom counter, it has to be initialized as ReadOnly.

August 7, 2008 at 3:26 PMalex

 

If you are getting the message in your asp.net web application with Microsoft Enterprise Library installed:

The requested Performance Counter is not a custom counter, it has to be initialized as ReadOnly.

this means that the category of the performance counter, that your application is trying to use is not registered. Try to find that assembly, that has the installer and using InstallUnit from .Net framework, execute the installer with the following command:

InstallUtil.exe /i YourAssemblyName.dll

In addition, if something went wrong during the installation of Enterprise Library, execute C:\Program Files\<Microsoft Enterprise Library dir>\InstallServices.bat

 

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CoolCommands for Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008

July 30, 2008 at 9:16 AMalex

Give a try for the CoolCommands for the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008, which includes all the commands Microsoft should've included to the bundle from the vey beginning:

http://weblogs.asp.net/GMilano/archive/2006/02/27/439208.aspx

 

Also, if you're struggling from the poor IDE performance when your solutions are relatively big, following those guidelines might be a relieve: Go to first article to apply the tips and see if that is enough. If not, go to the second article...
http://www.thekua.com/atwork/?p=29
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/09/22/Tip_2F00_Trick_3A00_-Optimizing-ASP.NET-2.0-Web-Project-Build-Performance-with-VS-2005.aspx

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The thoughts on C# 4.0

July 27, 2008 at 5:10 PMalex

So, what we expect in the next iteration of the C# called C# 4.0 as a development community? You've probably heard that the core team is working on the next version and they put quite an efforts on the expanding the possibilities of the language. If you didn't, check this video from the Channel 9 where they have core guys talking about what is on horizon: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/C-40-Meet-the-Design-Team/ C# will contain many features tailored for the better integration with the dynamic constructs of the modern design approaches, which already exist in primitive form today.

I'd like to see more features brought to it to support more parallel programming, such as this addition that exists today: Parallel Extensions for .NET framework http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=348F73FD-593D-4B3C-B055-694C50D2B0F3&displaylang=en This is besides an ADO.NET Entity framework http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa697427(VS.80).aspx In addition, we want to see tightly integrated with IDE application services for virtualization: http://blogs.technet.com/softgrid/archive/2008/06/17/microsoft-application-virtualization-4-5-release-candidate-is-now-available.aspx

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A story of laptop repair

July 27, 2008 at 4:54 PMalex

After a period of overheating problems, my primary laptop went down, thus leaving me in a dark mood, because it was a three-year-old device without the warranty at that time. Being in a dark mood, I called HP via their online char and was happy to hear that for the specific amount, they can repair device and replace virtually any piece of faulty hardware including LCD, motherboard, or, if you will, graphics card such as ATI or NVIDIA. They shipped to me an empty box via FedEx overnight service and you'd have to package the laptop and send it back for repair. Even though they estimated the repair to take 7-9 days, it took them just one business day to replace the broken motherboard, which was in my case the component that broke down and another night the repaired laptop was shipped to me. So, I picked it up on Friday at FedEx location and was happy about the successful story. I was quite amazed by the easiness of the process and it took less than a week to get my primary laptop. Thus, I'd recommend to contact the manufacturer of your laptop if it's out of warranty but still relatively new (3-5 years) and you might be able to get it repaired.

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Remoting Compression Sample

July 25, 2008 at 10:22 AMalex

There are requests from the business to increase the amount of data to be passed through remoting. Due to the know fact that the default binary serializer is very chatty, the amount of data passed through the channel is very large. There is a global solution, which allows to compress the remoting requests and responses thus alleviating the problem of exceeding the remoting maximum request size.

I was looking at the possible design approaches related to the compression of the remoting and found that extendable remoting framework architecture allows the following as depicted on the diagram:

diagram

Next we will review the sample code with the custom compression sink, which represents the typical application designed with layered architecture.

More...

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