Alexander Schmidt Mathematical methods, programming

LIDNUG: Project “Dublin” Overview for Application Developers

Tuesday November 10, 2009, 10:00AM

Tuesday November 10, 2009, 11:30AM

https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/microsoft/join?id=G2K4BH&role=attend&pw=PN6.%3CQ%5Drb

Project Code Named “Dublin” extends the hosting capabilities of the .NET 4 runtime for WCF and WF services and delivers rich monitoring, configuration and control for WAS activated services.

This session will focus on what developers need to know about “Dublin” to build easy to deploy, configure, monitor and troubleshoot middle-tier services and to unlock the rich extensibility capabilities “Dublin” provides.

Scott Guthrie Talks Shop

Monday November 23, 2009, 12:00PM
Monday November 23, 2009, 01:30PM

https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/microsoft/join?id=G2K4BH&role=attend&pw=PN6.%3CQ%5Drb

This event comes straight off the back of PDC2009, so be sure that there'll be a ton of new stuff announced - and who better to ask than the Gu himself?

Don't miss out.

Note: this event is PST (Pacific Time)

Phil Haack in the hot chair - Q&A on ASP.Net MVC

Monday December 14, 2009, 10:30AM
Monday December 14, 2009, 11:30AM

Ever wondered what ASP.Net MVC is all about? Well, you now have the chance to ask all the questions of Phil Haack when he takes a seat in the hot chair for a full Q&A on ASP.Net MVC.

https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/microsoft/join?id=G2K4BH&role=attend&pw=PN6.%3CQ%5Drb

Phil Haack's blog: http://www.haacked.com

ASP.Net MVC Home: http://www.asp.net/mvc

If your scenarios include running an assembly in 64 bit, and there are dependencies on native components, i.e. oracle drivers, COM components, make sure that you're running each one in the same processor architecture. There are the following limitations on 64 bit Windows:

1. Process cannon run 32 dlls in 64 bit address space.
2. 32 bit COM components cannot be instantiated in using 64 bit assembly.

You can change assembly's build setting settings to x86 if you need to load 32 bit components. Lets go to a few examples. Microsoft Visual Studio is 32 bit application capable of building 64 bit assemblies. If you need to debug 32 bit COM component, you need to build your assembly into x86 architecture. Another example is TestDriven.NET. Latest version, 2.23, by default, matches VS architecture, i.e. x86. If you want to debug Oracle driver, you need 32 bit. You can switch TestDriven.NET to 64 bit to have architecture parity. To run tests in NUnit, I'd recommend to go everywhere with 64 bit, since there is a NUnit 64 bit, and you will be sure that there are no issues once the code is built into the product.

I've being intrigued to find fast algorithms for the prime numbers and the latest advances in this field, because, as you probably know, this is the problem which can be solved using several algorithms known since old times. Despite some shortcuts and several very huge numbers proved to be primes such as Mersenne's Numbers (GIMPS), several other algorithms include Rabin-Miller which is a standard primality test, ancient Sieve of Eratosthenes, and a bit faster Sieve of Atkin. The running time of these algorithms is a logarithmic function, where the Sieve of Atkin FFT implementation computes the result in O(k × log² n). In reality, if you try to find the prime numbers on the latest computer hardware, it still takes a considerable amount of time and the problem is a good candidate for parallelization.

On January 13, 2009 the Microsoft Developer Conference will be held in Hyatt Regency Hotel in Chicago, which is a scaled-down version of the Professional Developer Conference which took place a bit earlier. They will show off the Cloud Computing innovations with Azure platform, the next generation of web development tools and the advances in computer languages on Microsoft .Net platform. Sounds very interesting and I could not resist to attend this event in person to be able to put my fingers on the latest bits of upcoming Microsoft Windows 7 and speak in person with leading Microsoft evangelists. Will see you at Hyatt on Tuesday and if you expressed a desire to learn more, check out the web site of the conference at

http://www.msdndevcon.com/Pages/Chicago.aspx

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.

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.

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

After trying several times to start writing a testing framework for UI layer in one of my applications, which I should acknowledge were not really successful, I finally came across the Scott's blog post on best practices related to reusing the user controls between the projects at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479564.aspx. The trick is to reuse the user control from the application in another project, which implements the test harness. In just under an hour, the working prototype was created in Visual Studio 2005. And this does not require any third-party tools such as NUnitAsp and could be build from the scratch, which I prefer over the bloating the code with unnecessary dependencies on the external tools. Alright, so that means that the work can be done in truly test-driven approach and result in to the higher quality of code.