Windark

Concurrency will be worth it's weight in Gold.

eddy@windark.net (Windark!) — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 13:58:50 GMT

So everyone thinks concurrency will be super important in the years to come. And who would disagree? I recently found this link on the MS Research page. Of course everyone's heard about C Omega, since it was the prototype for the implementation of generics, but did you know about the concurrency lib?

Joins - A Concurrency Library

Comega promised C# programmers a more pleasant world of concurrent programming. Comega had a simple, declarative, and powerful model of concurrency—Join Patterns—applicable both to multithreaded applications and to the orchestration of asynchronous, event-based distributed applications. By exploiting Generics in the Common Language Runtime, we can provide join patterns as a library rather than as a language feature. Offering a library has advantages: The library is language neutral, supporting C#, Visual Basic, and other languages; and the library's join patterns are dynamic, supporting solutions difficult to express with the static join patterns of Comega. The Joins library is efficient and has a simple interface that makes it easy to translate Comega programs to C#. The installer includes a tutorial, documentation, samples, and demos.

Visual Studio Tips and Tricks Book

eddy@windark.net (Windark!) — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 03:07:08 GMT

So I came across this site (http://www.infoq.com/) recently. It has lots of industry news, but more importantly has a free eBook "Visual Studio Tips and Tricks" http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/vsnettt. You have to sign up to download, so spam might be a small price to pay ;-)

I pride myself in knowing lots of VS shortcuts and the like, but I have to admit I have already picked up quite a few new ones.

Font Heaven!

eddy@windark.net (Windark!) — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 14:55:13 GMT

I can be very selective about fonts, especially for writing code. After all I spend large portions of the day staring at a computer monitor. So when I first saw this download for a font named “Consolas”, I wasn’t so sure. After trying it! Well let’s just say I have a new font for preference.

Enjoy!

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=22E69AE4-7E40-4807-8A86-B3D36FAB68D3&displaylang=en

The Visual Studio Difference

eddy@windark.net (Windark!) — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 04:19:14 GMT

I have only seen a couple of the videos, but so far they were fairly entertaining.

Enjoy J.

http://www.400plusdifferences.com/

BTW #156, PRICELESS!

Team Foundation Install Instructions and Frustrations

eddy@windark.net (Windark!) — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 16:01:17 GMT

[If you want the fix scroll to fix to bypass story]

I think there was a lot of pain, at least from what I heard, about installing Team Foundation Server in the beta editions. Well I can pretty safely assert that the final release contains some install pains as well.

Before continuing…

[Big Disclaimer]

I am not a tech or system admin person, nor do I play one on TV. However, recently our division has undergone lots of change topped off with an Office move, to a new bigger and badder digs. Needless to say things have been hectic. Since I was so psyched on using Team Foundation instead of, well the tools I was going to have to use. If I wanted Team System, I would have to take onus of the install myself as the “Systems team” was extremely busy.

So I began by reading the readme files and any other documentation the software came with. Yet, I couldn’t get Team Foundation Server to install. I tried and tried, again and again. It was a very frustrating. Perhaps an experience system admin would have known what to do or where not to follow the steps. I however did not. So finally after almost a day of spinning my wheels, I decided to put my debugger hat on and think logically, throw away the manual and base things on how I could get the software to install and run properly. As you can imagine this technique worked… So what did I do different.

[Instructions]

When installing SharePoint SP 2 (Service Pack 2), choose server farm on the Wizard, this step is inline with the instructions. However once the scripts have ran, you will briefly see command windows executing these scripts, and the web browser launches to configure the “server farm” environment, set up the Database, etc. The documentation here diverges from what actually works, it states to close out the browser “without making any changes”.

[Excerpt from Docs]

When the installation is complete, a Web browser window opens and displays the Configure Administrative Virtual Server page. After confirming that the page appears, close the browser window without making any changes.

Closing the browser always leads to receiving error 42. Instead simply by clicking “OK”, which implies commit changes currently on the screen, at the bottom of the page, everything works. The docs lead one to believe otherwise in my opinion. I realize this is a minor detail, but one of perhaps a source of huge pain, especially if you waste half a day tracking it down ;-). BTW, if you have gone down this road, you will need to un-install SharePoint and re-install again, remembering to click on the OK button before closing the form and wait for the full post back that navigates to the next page. As a last side note the “OK” button does lead to another page with more configurations, “DO” close this window without any further changes or clicking any buttons (UI elements).

ASP.NET Providers in WinForms

eddy@windark.net (Windark!) — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 14:57:59 GMT

I am probably late to this party, but somehow I recently discover this info so I thought I’d share it anyway. It is possible to use the ASP.NET providers in WinForms. Yes, you may need to read the previous statement again.. go ahead!

Ok, so what do you need to do to get the Membership, Roles, Profile, etc, providers to work? Well nothing really… ok just the same things that you would do in ASP.NET. Since the Winforms project templates do not automatically reference “System.Web”, then you will need to add that reference. This of course is achieved using the standard Add Reference window in Visual Studio.

Then, again just like you would in ASP.NET, add the required elements to the “app.Config”.

As a refresher this a boiler plate implementation of the standard configuration for memebership …

<system.web>

<membership defaultProvider="SqlProvider"

<providers>

<clear />

<add name="SqlProvider" type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider" connectionStringName="MySqlConnection"

applicationName="MyApplication"

enablePasswordRetrieval="false"

enablePasswordReset="true"

requiresQuestionAndAnswer="true"

requiresUniqueEmail="true"

passwordFormat="Hashed" />

</providers>

</membership>

</system.web>

Lastly, in you project you can use the object model just the same as you would in ASP.NET since the declarative model isn’t exactly available. Hope this was helpful for someone.

Orlando Code Camp Presentation

eddy@windark.net (Windark!) — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 02:16:49 GMT

Sorry for the delayed posting. These are the materials I presented at last week's Orlando Code Camp.(http://orlando.devcamps.net/devcamps/MCO/codecamp.aspx).

Slides Design Patterns.ppt (497.5 KB)

Demos Windark.zip (382.8 KB)

Virtual Reality on the web

eddy@windark.net (Windark!) — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 15:03:35 GMT

While Ajax has been all the rage for the a while now, Virtual Earth Street level yet again proves why user interfaces are so crucial.

I guess I never thought this is where virtual reality would end up, but I am glad is here! Btw, yes you should feel guilty about overindulging in driving the little car around instead of admiring the city's sites ;-)

Rebar Control based on Lutz Roeder’s CommandBar

eddy@windark.net (Windark!) — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 05:11:51 GMT

Download: [Removed] See Lutz Roeder's site for the new additions.

As the title suggests the control in the provided download is based on Lutz’s Roeder’s Command Bar control (http://www.aisto.com/Roeder/dotnet/ ). One of the main new features I added to the library was the DropDown and SplitButtons.

Split Button à Dropdown Button à

Additionally, there was no setting aka .NET property for displaying the Text of the button. The Buttons now support displaying an image, text or both. Along with these new capabilities is the Image and Text relation property. The buttons are now capable of displaying the text to the right of the image as it’s used in Internet Explorer, or underneath as is the case with Outlook Express.

Outlook Express

According to the MSDN documentation (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/shellcc/platform/commctls/rebar/rebar.asp ), the Rebar control is a container controls for any control or window as it is known in the Win32 world. The most popular implementation is of course Internet Explorer aka Windows Explorer.

I took the liberty of creating a … well see for yourself…

Keep in mind I only added very limited functionality for the demo.

Microsoft has however supplied some information regarding implementing an Explorer like app. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/shellcc/platform/commctls/faq/ietoolbar.asp for further details.

A couple of important notes:

I have modified the object model from the original found on Lutz’s site. Unfortunately, I don’t recall all the changes. Also, when working with the bits, just know that the code in initialization phase of the control is critical. This is a function of how the Win32 (Windows Common Controls) work. I have added things like “//new Code here” to demarcate changes form the original where possible, but not everywhere. Also, much of the new functionality I added uses Windows Constants defined by the MSDN documentation http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/shellcc/platform/commctls/toolbar/toolbar.asp . The Windows SDK will be needed (this is an option when installing Visual Studio), to define further constants that I did not provide.

One last thing to consider, because there is extensive use of PInvoke throughout, remember to clean up unmanaged resources.

Enjoy!

Auto Filling Algorithm for Business Objects/Entities

eddy@windark.net (Windark!) — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 15:33:33 GMT

Are you tired of writing code similar to this?

Customer cust = new Customer();

cust.CustomerID = reader.GetInt32(“CustomerID”);

cust.LastName = reader.GetString(“LastName”);

cust.FirstName = reader.GetString(“FirstName”);

If the answer is yes, then here is a quick solution.

A while back I wrote a small algorithm that uses a bit of reflection that basically handles the mapping fields in the database to the entity’s (Business Objects) properties.

The end result will looks something like this:

…

SqlDataReader reader = command.ExecuteReader();

//Return List -- Could easily be modified for scalar queries

List<Contact> contactList = new List<Contact>();

while (reader.Read())

{

Contact contact = new Contact();

//Map record to object

Contact.PopulateEntity<Contact>(contact, reader);

contactList.Add(contact);

}

…

While my sample uses generics, you could easily make this compatible with .NET 1.? by using “object”. The magic happens in the following method.

public void PopulateEntity<T>(T entity, IDataRecord record)

{

if (record != null && record.FieldCount > 0)

{

Type type = entity.GetType();

for (int i = 0; i < record.FieldCount; i++)

{

if (DBNull.Value != record[i])

{

PropertyInfo property = type.GetProperty(record.GetName(i));

if (property != null)

{

property.SetValue(entity, record[property.Name], null);

}

I have included a small example of how it could be used. (Download)

In the sample, I use the IDataRecord interface (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/93wb1heh.aspx ). This is the individual record that data readers implement.

Enjoy!

P.S. Download uses the Adventure Works sample DB Windark.Samples.zip (40.52 KB)