BloggingAbout.NET

.NET Open Space 2008

jenskuehner — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:03:00 GMT

The best discussions happen in the coffee breaks of a conference. So why not arranging an event around the coffee breaks? As the name suggests, .NET Open Space 2008 is organized as an open space.

This isn't a typical developers conference. There are no designated speakers and no agenda.

You decide what to talk about!

The conference itself is free, but the available places are limited.

The .NET Open Space 2008 will cover these four topics:

ALT.NET
Mobile Computing
Soft Skills
.NET on embedded systems and microcontroller electronics

What will be discussed under those topics depends on you. Join us for free.

Please note that the "conference" is held in German language only.

I will be there and I am the contact person for the .NET Micro Framework topic.

StyleCop - QuickStart tips

Jan Schreuder — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 07:15:00 GMT

After using StyleCop for some weeks, there are some things I think that might be useful to others when they want to start using the tool. So here are some tips.

Tip 1 - Also download the documentation

The documentation for StyleCop is available as a separate download. It explains why the rules are introduced and how you can fix violations. Without this documentation, you may think some of the rules are useless or annoying.

Tip 2 - Do not run the tool on an entire solution

At least, not untill you're satisfied that your code complies with the rules. You get so many warnings in a project or solution where the tool hasn't been used before, that you may think to stop using it immediately.

Tip 3 - Running the tool on one class file

Could have been in tip 2 as well, but I wanted to make a distinction here. When you right-click in the code, you will see the item Run StyleCop. Select this, and the tool will only check that particular class file. The number of warnings is signicantly less than when you run the tool on an entire project or solution, so the results are more obvious and motivate you more to keep using the tool.

Tip 4 - Disable rules you really disagree to

Rules you really don't want to check can be disabled using the StyleCopSettingsEditor. How this can be done is explained in this blog post. I disabled a number of them. I also included a number of overrides to the check for hungarian notation. For example, I have boolean variable names like isValid and isCompliant. StyleCop used to warn me about using hungarian notation in these cases, whereas I'm not. You can add the 'is' part in the Hungarian tab of the StyleCopSettingsEditor and it will no longer warn you about this.

New version of Microsoft StyleCop available

Jan Schreuder — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 06:45:00 GMT

A new version of StyleCop was made available only a few days ago, so I downloaded it and installed it. One thing I had to correct after installation was the Settings.SourceAnalysis file. Because of the name change to StyleCop, the extension of the settings file was also changed. But after that, I was back in business. One of the first things you notice is that the results are now shown as warnings in the standard errors and warnings list. And there are more changes:

A separate help file is available that explains the rules and shows how violations can be solved
A number of bug have been fixed
New rules, including a rule to check if Using directives are sorted, in line with the Visual Studio 2008 Organize Usings functionality

Another announcement on the StyleCop Teamblog suggested that they will be releasing SDK documentation to allow you to add your own rules to the tool. This is of course interesting if you have additional rules on top of the ones already available.

I've been using the tool for some weeks now and I really like the consistency in code style which is now slowly emerging in my projects. Where I thought I was using a consistent style in my own code, I was pointed out by StyleCop that in fact I wasn't. But that's all changing now.

You can download the new version of StyleCop here.

WCF and large messages

Ramon Smits — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 11:46:00 GMT

Today I got this nice InvalidOperationException:

System.InvalidOperationException: There is an error in XML document (11, 11657). ---> System.Xml.XmlException: The maximum string content length quota (8192) has been exceeded while reading XML data. This quota may be increased by changing the MaxStringContentLength property on the XmlDictionaryReaderQuotas object used when creating the XML reader.

The reason was that the message contained an element that had more then 8k of textual data as seen in the exception message. Problem was that I could not adjust this as I am using WCF and it is using an XML reader internally. Luckily MSDN comes to the rescue:

I now set the values in code:

var binding = new BasicHttpBinding(BasicHttpSecurityMode.None);
binding.MaxReceivedMessageSize = 256*1024;
binding.ReaderQuotas.MaxStringContentLength = 64 * 1024;

The only thing is that you need to reference System.Runtime.Serialization to set it from code.

BizTalk Software Factory v1.5 released

Jean-Paul Smit — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 23:51:04 GMT

Finally the next major release of the BizTalk Software Factory is on CodePlex, version 1.5.

This version supports, besides the current functionality, the following:

Solution folders for the BRE artifacts Rules and Policies
Support for creating Pipeline Components
Support for generating Unit Tests

Adding solution folders to the guidance was a piece of cake, but it took quite some time to figure out how to integrate Martijn Hoogendoorn's Pipeline Component Wizard. The classes he used to derive his dialog classes from aren't supported in the guidance so I actually had to understand what he was doing there instead of just copying. But that is also a good thing.

You can now add a Pipeline Component to your project like any other artifact and the wizard is basically the same as Martijn used. The only thing I skipped was the image that you can set on the component. Thanks for borrowing your code Martijn! I was also able to solve one issue in the Pipeline Component Wizard regarding SchemaList design-time properties. Thanks to Kader Yildirim (http://www.techheadbrothers.com/Articles.aspx/decouverte-biztalk-server-2006-1-3-page-4). The page is in French, but babefish does a great job if your French is as good as mine.

Another need to have was the ability to generate unit tests for artifacts. I wanted to add all kinds of generated tests like for BRE Rules, Policies and Pipelines. I know Martijn also has written something to unit test BRE Rules and I know there is a nice Pipeline test framework. Unfortunately lack of time made me skip these things. Feel free to add it to the code J

So, what was I able to add?

Support to generate unit tests for Schemas
Support to generate unit tests for Maps
Support to generate unit tests for Orchestrations

What you can do now is select the unit test project and select 'Add' from the context menu. You'll see options to add these artifacts. For Schemas, I used the class Michael Stephenson wrote (http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2008/03/30/120850.aspx). This class does and XSD validation of the supplied XML test message. You can also use BizUnit for this. For testing a map I also (tried to) used a class from Michael Stehpenson. This was not as easy as it looked and at the end I decided to leave the code in there but it doesn't work as I would like it to. Besides the custom transform there is another issue because the output of the transform is character by character compared to the 'expected' output. Because of this way of comparing it marks an output of <Body/> not the same as <Body></Body> so the test would fail.

In a next version of BizUnit it is possible to test a map, but maybe someone has built a custom step for this and is willing to share it with me so I can put it in now. J

For orchestrations the regular unit test is generated, together with a test-case and test-data file.

The one big thing missing is setup and deployment. There were plans of also putting it into this release, but at the moment it would just take too much time. Maybe next release.

If you're working with BizTalk, go get it here!!

(and don't forget to share your opinion on the BSF with me, I'm very interested in improving it)

Two videos on K2

Mark Willems — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:41:00 GMT

There are two videos out on the web on K2.

The first video talks about the K2 products and the pricing model.

Earlier I did post some things around K2 Blackpoint. Well, the second video is even more interesting! It's a demonstration by Seb and Shaun on K2 Blackpoint on channel 9.

I'm now off for a well deserved holiday in Belgium:)

Interesting stuff coming with the BizTalk Adaper Pack

Patrick Wellink — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 06:52:00 GMT

I really can't wait for the BizTalk Adapter pack. Finally we get a good SQL adapter capable of almost everything. I had concurrency problems in the past cause the Adapter always has a transaction level Serializable. Now with the new SQL Adapter the transaction level is settable. Have a read of the SQL LOB adapter capabillities >> here << They also threw in some goodies in the Adapter pack, The various Adapters will now show up as native BizTalk Adapters, have a look >> here...(read more)

Configuring HTTP Access to SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services on Microsoft Windows Server 2008

Mike Glaser — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 04:50:11 GMT

Since Team Foundation Server (TFS) uses SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) as its repository for all kinds of info, people are interested to expose the data through Excel or SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). SSAS doesn't expose itself through the HTTP protocol by default, but this can be configured using this paper. I didn't created the complete document myself but used this paper from Edward Melomed as start. The paper on Microsoft TechNet uses SSAS 2005 and Windows Server 2003. Both products are still widely used, but 2008 is the magic word nowadays. By the way, I can't wait till his new book Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services Unleashed is released.

Summary: This paper is intended for anyone who is interested in providing access to SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services through HTTP protocol.The paper explains the steps required to set up HTTP access and discusses different performance and security settings. All the instructions in this paper are specific to the Microsoft Windows® Server™ 2008 operating system.

Overview

Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2008 Analysis Services uses the same architecture for providing HTTP access as did SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services.

The pump component is loaded into IIS (Internet Information Services) and serves as an ISAPI extension, pumping data from the client to an Analysis Services server and back.

This white paper walks you through the process of setting up HTTP access to Analysis Services when using Microsoft Windows Server™ 2008.

Figure 1 provides a high-level overview of the component architecture.

Getting binaries

To get binaries:

Copy the contents of the %Installation folder%\OLAP\bin\isapi directory into the folder you would like to become the base for the virtual directory in IIS.

In this example, we are going to copy all the files from the C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSAS10.MSSQLSERVER\OLAP\bin\isapi folder into the C:\inetpub\wwwroot\olap directory.

Notes: To take advantage of the full set of security settings, it is important to make sure that the folder to become the base for the virtual directory is located on the drive formatted for the NTFS file system.

Due to IIS limitations, the path to your directory should not contain spaces.

If you are planning to run the HTTP pump on a different server than the Analysis Services server, please make sure that you also install OLEDB for Analysis Redistributable package.

Creating an application pool

To create an application pool:

1.	To open the Computer Management console, open Control Panel, then Administrative Tools, then Computer Management. (Or, right-click the My Computer icon and select Manage on the shortcut menu.)
2.	In the Computer Management console, expand the Roles node and then the Web Server (IIS) and Internet Information Services node. If you can’t find the Internet Information Services node, IIS is probably not installed on your machine. To install it, open Add or Remove Programs in Control Panel. Select Add/Remove Windows Components. Then add IIS to Windows.
3.	Right-click the Application Pools to open the shortcut menu and select Add Application Pool...
4.	Name the application pool. In this example, we call it OLAP. (See Figure 2.) Figure 2

Setting up an application

To use the application pool:

To open the Computer Management console, open Control Panel, then Administrative Tools, then Computer Management.

(Or, right-click the My Computer icon and select Manage on the shortcut menu.)

In the Computer Management console, expand the Roles node and then the Web Server (IIS) and Internet Information Services node.

If you can’t find the Internet Information Services node, IIS is probably not installed on your machine. To install it, open Add or Remove Programs in Control Panel. Select Add/Remove Windows Components. Then add IIS to Windows.

Right-click the OLAP directory in your Web site to open the shortcut menu and select Convert to Application. Choose the application pool as one you’ve just created. (See Figure 3.)

Figure 3

Setting up directory properties

To set properties for the directory:

1.	Click your virtual directory node and select Handler Mappings from the menu. (See Figure 4.) Figure 4
2.	Make sure the directory has Read and Script permissions. This can be checked by clicking the "Edit Feature Permissions..." in the top right corner of the Handler Mappings screen as shown in Figure 5. Figure 5
3.	In the top right corner of the Handler Mappings screen click the option " Add Script Map...".
4.	Enter .dll in the Request path* text box. In the Executable option, enter the full path name to msmdpump.dll. In this example, it would be: C:\wwwroot\olap\msmdpump.dll
5.	Name the Script Map. In this example, we call it OLAP. Your screen should look something like the dialog box shown in Figure 6. Figure 6
6.	Click the OK button to accept the settings.
7.	When you hit OK to add the script mapping you will be prompted if you want to enable the ISAPI extension. (See Figure 7.) Figure 7
8.	Click the Yes button to accept the settings.
9.	The configuration of this decision can be found under ISAPI and CGI Restrictions of the server. (See Figure 8.) Figure 8
10.	Search for your extension and name it as shown in Figure 9. Figure 9
11.	Click the OK button to accept the settings.

Selecting security settings

To select security settings:

Click your virtual directory node and select Autentication from the menu. (See Figure 10.)

Figure 10

You are presented with three options. Choose one of them. (See Figure 11)

Figure 11

This section briefly describes these options, citing the advantages, disadvantages, and security concerns of each one. All other options are not discussed in the paper. You can use Help for IIS to read more about it.

Anonymous access

When this mode is selected, the pump (msmdpump.dll) is running with credentials; in our case, these are the credentials of IUSR_MACHINENAME user. Therefore, every connection to Analysis Services is opened as IUSR user. When this mode is selected, there is no distinction between which user is connecting to IIS and which to Analysis Services. There is no way to distinguish between users.

This mode is to be used when the security infrastructure does not take advantage of the security functionality of Analysis Services. This is most likely an extremely controlled environment, where users are given or denied access to the virtual directory.

Windows authentication

This is the most secure and the recommended mode.

It requires that IIS Server be able to access user domain credentials. This could be done using Microsoft Active Directory® or another mechanism. It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss all the possible configurations.

Basic authentication

This mode requires that the user enter a user name and password. The user name and password are transmitted over the HTTP connection to IIS. IIS will try to impersonate the user using the provided credentials.

Please note that it is absolutely imperative for anyone building a system where the password is transmitted to have ways of securing the communication channel. IIS provides a great set of tools for setting up and requiring that all communications be encrypted using HTTPS protocol.

For configuring anonymous authentication right-click Anonymous Authentication and then click Edit. You will see a dialog box similar to the one in Figure 12 Here you can configure a specific account which will be used to logon SSAS.

Figure 12

Selecting the target Analysis Services server

As you can see in the architectural diagram in Figure 1, every pump component uses its own configuration file.

Open the msmdpump.ini file located in your folder and take a look at the contents of this file. It should look like the following:

    1 <ConfigurationSettings>
    2     <ServerName>localhost</ServerName>
    3     <SessionTimeout>3600</SessionTimeout>
    4     <ConnectionPoolSize>100</ConnectionPoolSize>
    5     <MinThreadPoolSize>0</MinThreadPoolSize>
    6     <MaxThreadPoolSize>0</MaxThreadPoolSize>
    7     <MaxThreadsPerClient>4</MaxThreadsPerClient>
    8 </ConfigurationSettings>

The only setting you are interested in at this point is <ServerName>.

If the Analysis Services instance that you need to provide access to is located on the local machine and installed as a default instance, there is no reason to change this setting. Otherwise, you need to specify the machine name and instance name ( mymachine\inst1).

It is also possible to specify a pointer to the virtual directory on another IIS server that is set up for HTTP access to Analysis Services.

For example, you could have <ServerName>http://secondmachine/olap/msmdpump.dll</ServerName>

Getting it all together

At this point you should have configured your HTTP pump and should be ready to connect from your application.

If your application provides you with a way to specify the server name, all you need to do is to substitute your server name with the path to your virtual directory concatenated with “msmdpump.dll”.

As in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services, the MSOLAP OLEDB provider will understand that the server name includes an URL path and will automatically start using HTTP protocol.

For example, to connect to “MyMachine” from the MDX sample application, you should be able to connect to the Analysis Services server using “http://MyMachine/olap/msmdpump.dll” as a server name.

Technorati tags: TFS, Team Foundation Server, SQL Server, SSAS, SQL Server Analysis Services

32 Hours Recharge Cocktail

Adel Khalil — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:12:08 GMT

For the people who spend more than 24 hours with no sleep ( not recommended ), I’ve discovered the magic of baring with the sleepy eyes, I tried working from a cafe instead from home trying to prevent expected fall to bed, and the waiter suggested a weird cocktail that will have me recharged right away, this is more powerful than any coffee you may consider drink.

Pepsi or Cola (Only tested with Pepsi) with Nescafe together.

PROVED, now 4 PM still able to write this blog post and probably have few more hours to kill :)

Hacking your life: Tim Ferris on a lot of things saving your time

Mischa Kroon — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:55:47 GMT

If there is one blog your should read at the moment it's the 4 hour workweek The blog is pretty diverse it covers things like how to travel better, doing more with your money while traveling. It's about personal productivity: personal outsourcing, doing things more efficiently, getting a better body, etc etc Below are some of my favorite tips tricks / information. Youtube gallery Lets just call this the teasers for the rest of the information Tim's Youtube videos (Personal) Outsourcing...(read more)

You want C:\Users on XP too? Read here how

Ramon Smits — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:32:00 GMT

At both home and work I use Vista and XP resulting me typing "C:\Users" in XP and "C:\Documents and Settings" in Vista which - of course - don't work. You cannot really change those paths except when you install Vista or XP with the pre configuration tool.

But there is a solution!

Both Vista and XP can access NTFS volumes and the NTFS format has support for hardlinks. XP and 2003 do not have native support for all these NTFS features and you normally need a resourcekit tool to create such entries. The Link Shell Extension adds all support for these NTFS features to the Windows Explorer in XP, 2003 and Vista.

Install the Link Shell Extension
Navigate to "C:\"
Create a Junction from "C:\Documents and Settings" to "C:\Users" on XP and a Junction from "C:\Users" to "C:\Documents and Settings" on Vista

And Presto! I now have access to "C:\Users" on XP which is a delight.

This tool is also very useful when you manage an FTP server on Windows so you can put a large file in multiple paths while only have one hardcopy on disk (in this case create a hard or symbolic link).

Build your own activities for Internet Explorer 8.

Mike Glaser — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:37:00 GMT

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is an online database of information related to movies, actors, television shows, production crew personnel, and video games. IMDb launched on October 17, 1990, and in 1998 was acquired by Amazon.com. Since I'm a big fan of this site and still loves to use Internet Explorer, why can't I combine these two.

Activities
With Activities, you can access your services from any webpage. Activities simplify the common task of copying, navigating, and pasting into a single action. Users can access an Activity on selection simply by selecting content and opening the context menu. For example, users can select an address on a webpage and the Activity button appears. Alternatively, you can access selection Activities from the context menu. Activities are also available for the current webpage in the Page menu on the Command bar and for links within a page in the context menu for the link.

The XML namespace for Activities is: http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0 The main components to the format are:

homepageUrl
display (Name, Icon, Description)
activity (Category)
- activityAction (Context ["selection", "document", or "link"])
  - preview
    - parameter
  - execute
    - parameter

This is my activity for IMDb. I added it to same category as all Search activities. Save the file as SearchIMDb.xml.

    1 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    2   <openServiceDescription xmlns="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0">
    3   <homepageUrl>http://www.imdb.com</homepageUrl>
    4   <display>
    5     <name>Search with IMDb</name>
    6     <icon>http://www.imdb.com/favicon.ico</icon>
    7   </display>
    8   <activity category="Search">
    9     <activityAction context="selection">
 
   10      <execute action="http://www.imdb.com/find">
   11         <parameter name="s" value="all"/>
   12         <parameter name="q" value="{selection}"/>
   13       </execute>
   14     </activityAction>
   15   </activity>
   20 </openServiceDescription>

Click the link below to add this activity to your IE.

Add IMDb Activity

Update: Community Server won't allow me to add javascript to my blog posts. This is the link you should add to an html file.

    1 <a onclick="java script:window.external.addService('SearchIMDb.xml')" href="#">Add IMDb Activity</a>

After installing the activity you can also change it to a default activity.

This will result in the following possibilities

Summary
I created a simple activity for IMDb, but you easily create some activities for Torrent sites (especially if your from Italy), MSDN, Wikipedia etc. To install a activity the installer must be run from a Web Server, this can't be from a local hard drive. Here are some interesting links:

Activities white paper
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=ie8whitepapers&ReleaseId=566

Activities Hands-On Lab
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=iemix08labs&ReleaseId=583

Technorati tags: Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer 8.0 Beta 1

MediaFire Update: Upload changed.

Mischa Kroon — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 15:22:21 GMT

A while back I created a little utility to upload files to MediaFire which is a file hosting service. MediaFire supports uploading of files up to 100 MB in a free account with unlimited storage, and is in my opinion one of the best free online storage possibilities out there. It has galleries for pictures, nag free FAST downloads, sharing options, file manager the works. It now also has a paid option which has additional features. The news is that they added in a Flash uploader which makes it possible...(read more)

.NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack RTM

Mike Glaser — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:45:26 GMT

The .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack features new abstractions for working with data, smaller client profiles and performance updates to Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). It will ship before the end of the summer, Microsoft said. In a July 31 meeting with SD Times, Shanku Niyogi, product unit manager of the UI Framework and Services team at Microsoft, said that "the .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (SP1) would be broadly available in all localized versions within a few weeks."

SP1 adds support for SQL Server 2008, the ADO.NET entity framework and ADO.NET data services, which was formerly known as “Astoria.”

Astoria uses ADO.NET to model data, and it exposes entities as URI-addressable resources to be consumed by Web clients within corporate networks and across the Internet. The entity model provides developers with an additional layer of abstraction between the database and themselves.

Since Microsoft has released to manufacturing SQL Server 2008 and the DVD images are now available on Microsoft and the MSDN subscriber downloads.

Interestingly, the Microsoft .NET Framework SP1 doesn't appear to be available although when the SQL Server 2008 setup program is ran it installs the RTM build of the .NET Framework SP1. You can install it separately by selecting the setup at ..\x86\redist\DotNetFrameworks\dotNetFx35setup.exe.

As a result of this install my Add or Remove Programs will look like this.

The Product itself will be released today. I will update this post with the correct link.

Update 08/12
You can download the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 here.

Furthermore Visual Studio 2008 SP1 was released today which can be downloaded here.

Summary
Microsoft shame on you to release such an important framework only the cd of a server product. Hopefully the holiday did good for all your employees.

Technorati tags: .NET, .NET Framework

August edition of MSDN magazine

Mark Willems — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 22:24:00 GMT

HOT of the press the August edition of MSDN Magazine in PDF format

In this issue information on BizTalk EDI, creating animations with Silverlight and how to consume and expose data in a web services world.

Here is the link

Happy reading!

Cool tool: DebugView

Rick van den Bosch — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 08:47:13 GMT

Taken from the SysInternals website:

The SysInternals web site was created in 1996 by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell to host their advanced system utilities and technical information. Microsoft acquired Sysinternals in July, 2006. Whether you’re an IT Pro or a developer, you’ll find Sysinternals utilities to help you manage, troubleshoot and diagnose your Windows systems and applications.

One of the must-have SysInternals tools for a developer is DebugView.

DebugView is an application that lets you monitor debug output on your local system, or any computer on the network that you can reach via TCP/IP. It is capable of displaying both kernel-mode and Win32 debug output, so you don't need a debugger to catch the debug output your applications or device drivers generate, nor do you need to modify your applications or drivers to use non-standard debug output APIs.

So that means that an easy Debug.Write (or Debug.WriteLine) statement is picked up by the DebugView tool, and displayed in the tool. From there, you can filter the lines, search them and more...!
The code that made this screenshot: Debug.WriteLine("Written through a simple Debug.WriteLine statement");

Technorati tags: link,Visual Studio,Development

Gaming for students

Dennis van der Stelt — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 20:04:14 GMT

We used to have an XBox at Class-A for students to play on. But the older it got, the less students were interested in playing with it. So we decided to have a new console and opted for either Nintendo Wii or PlayStation 3. I took an investigation upon me to see which was most interesting. Wii has of course great controllers, but PlayStation 3 way better graphics and more important, cooler games to play with multiple people. Wii can’t even beat that, as it can’t even handle splitscreen from a performance point of view!

Anyway, today Astrid and I connected a 40” TV and the PlayStation 3 together with Guitar Hero 3 and two guitars, Buzz!: Quiz TV with four buzzers and Call of Duty 4, because of the 4 player splitscreen multiplayer part. Motorstorm Pacific Rift and LittleBigPlanet (check out this video) are already on pre-order and we’ll see about other games.

Here’s me testing out Guitar Hero 3. After seeing the images I think I look much too sweet to be a Rock Legend, but I did enjoy playing the game though.

Don’t forget, when you visit us for a training, you _will_ be challenged to play a game! After my vacation I’ll create some .NET questions for Buzz! :-)

[BAM] PivotTable names must be unique

Marc Jacobi — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 10:05:00 GMT

More a note to self than a serious blog post (haven't got the time to do screen shots and stuff).

When creating BAM views in Excel, you can copy the initial PivotTable that is generated to create multiple predefined 'views'. To copy the PivotTable select it (go to the edge until you get a solid arrow cursor) then Copy it (Ctrl+C), select a free cell well below the existing PivotTable and Paste (Ctrl+V). Right-click in the Pivot Table and select Table Options... to give it a name. This Name must be unique across the workbook. Otherwise the PivotTable will not be linked to a cube when exported (although it all seems to work in excel) and your view will be missing from the Aggregations node in the BAM Portal navigation pane.

.NET Micro Framework Beta 3.0 Firmware available for GHI Electronics Embedded Master Hardware

jenskuehner — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 08:46:00 GMT

Only one week after Microsoft made the .NET Micro Framework Beta 3.0 SDK available for all developers, GHI Electronics provides a free Beta 3.0 firmware update for their Embedded Master hardware.

Already available:

4 UART ports
SPI
I2C
GPIO
Debug/deploy over COM1

Features to come very soon:

Some of GHI exclusive features to verify interops
USB device
TCP/IP
SSL
Full exclusive GHI library (ADC, DAC, PWM...etc.)
And many, many more!

Sandcastle now on CodePlex

Jan Schreuder — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 06:47:00 GMT

The Sandcastle project, Microsoft's tools to generate documentation from your well-documented code, is now available on CodePlex. That was already the case, but until about 2 month's ago, that was without the source code. You can now download Sandcastle including the source code from CodePlex.

You can find the related information about this decision here. And you can find the project in Codeplex here.

BizTalk: Create Message based on deployed schema

chilberto — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:15:00 GMT

Here is technique for generating an instance of a BizTalk message (a.k.a, XmlDocument) based on a deployed schema. It requires references to the following assemblies:

Assembly	Location
Microsoft.BizTalk.Pipeline	%Program Files%/Microsoft BizTalk Server
Microsoft.BizTalk.ExplorerOM	%Program Files%/Microsoft BizTalk Server/Developer Tools

In a class library that has references to the above libraries, create a public class with the following two public methods:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Xml;
using Microsoft.BizTalk.Component.Interop;
using Microsoft.BizTalk.ExplorerOM;
namespace Spike.Sandbox
{
public class Utilities
{
/// <summary>
/// Build a BizTalk message for a single root node message
/// </summary>
/// <param name="schemaName"></param>
/// <returns></returns>
public static XmlDocument CreateBTSMessage(string schemaName)
{
return CreateMessage(schemaName, schemaName);
}
/// <summary>
/// Build a BizTalk Message for a multi-root node message
/// </summary>
/// <param name="schemaName"></param>
/// <param name="rootNode"></param>
/// <returns></returns>
public static XmlDocument CreateBTSMessage(string schemaName, string rootNode)
{
return CreateMessage(schemaName, string.Format("{0}+{1}", schemaName, rootNode));
}

These two methods call a private method that accesses the BizTalk management database to retrieve a deployed schema and construct the message:

private static XmlDocument CreateMessage(string schemaName, string rootNode)
{
XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
DocumentSpec docSpec;
BtsCatalogExplorer catalog = new BtsCatalogExplorer();
catalog.ConnectionString = "Data Source=myServer;Initial Catalog=BizTalkMgmtDb2;Integrated Security=True";
Schema schema = catalog.Schemas[schemaName];
if (schema != null)
{
docSpec = new DocumentSpec(rootNode, schema.BtsAssembly.DisplayName);
if (docSpec != null)
{
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
StringWriter sw = new StringWriter(sb);
try
{
doc.Load(docSpec.CreateXmlInstance(sw));
}
finally
{
sw.Dispose();
}
}
}
return doc;
}

Cheers to Tomas Restrepo for his insight into the CreateXmlInstance: http://www.winterdom.com/weblog/2008/07/16/CreateXmlInstanceWithMultiRootSchemas.aspx

Creating shared types with SvcUtil against multiple sources

chilberto — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:07:00 GMT

One of the teams I am working with ran into an issue when generating shared types via SvcUtil. The issue was SvcUtil was generating multiple types (e.g., classes, enums) in the proxy .cs file. After a google search, I found this was being experienced by others:

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=745657&SiteID=1

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1392697&SiteID=1

An example of the duplicate types:

[System.CodeDom.Compiler.

GeneratedCodeAttribute("svcutil", "3.0.3906.22")]

[System.

SerializableAttribute()]

[System.Xml.Serialization.

XmlTypeAttribute(Namespace="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/LR.Model.Enums")]

public enum ReturnStatusEnum

{

/// <remarks/>

None,

/// <remarks/>

BadLogonOrPassword,

/// <remarks/>

Successful,

}

[System.CodeDom.Compiler.

GeneratedCodeAttribute("System.Runtime.Serialization", "3.0.0.0")]

[System.Runtime.Serialization.

DataContractAttribute(Namespace="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/LR.Model.Enums")]

public enum ReturnStatusEnum : int

{

[System.Runtime.Serialization.

EnumMemberAttribute()]

None = -1,

[System.Runtime.Serialization.

EnumMemberAttribute()]

BadLogonOrPassword = 0,

[System.Runtime.Serialization.

EnumMemberAttribute()]

Successful = 1,

}

The solution is simply including a switch to SvcUtil to force the serializer to be a specific type. The default is Auto so in the example above, the SvcUtil decided to use the XmlSerializer for one class and the DataContractSerializer for another.

An example of the syntax: svcutil /ns:*,my.namespace /serializer:XmlSerializer service1.svc service2.svc service3.asmx

Hope this saves someone some time!

Microsoft Research: Sphere multi-touch computing

Rick van den Bosch — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 07:54:27 GMT

Earlier this week the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit was held. On 10 was on the scene, and has a nice movie about the Sphere. For the entire article @ on 10, have a look over here: http://on10.net/blogs/laura/Sphere-multi-touch-computing/.

This is just another sign that the best is yet to come... Good times :)

McDonald's is discriminating against the car-impaired

Erwyn van der Meer — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 07:16:07 GMT

Yesterday evening I found that McDonald's is discriminating against the car-impaired. I am currently in Seattle for the Microsoft TechReady conference. After a photo walk with two colleagues we were getting thirsty and hungry. I managed to stay out of McDonald's for the almost four weeks that I have been in the States, but the McDonald's two blocks away from the Space Needle was a bit hard to resist.

We arrived there at 23:02 and the "restaurant" had just closed. However, the drive thru (yes, that seems to be the correct spelling here) is open 24 hours per day. But what do you do when you don't have a car? You walk through the drive thru. We weren't carrying enough metal to trip the detector in front of the ordering pole. So we couldn't state our order. We preceded to the pay window to order there. The guy there looked very amazed and said he could not and would not serve us. WTF! "Why not?" we asked. "Because you don't have a car", he replied. Disappointed we left. Next time, I will try riding a bike through the drive tru.

In the mean time I will boycot McDonald's for a while.

PS: This is just for my own good as I have the feeling that I gained a couple of kilos here in the US.

Need help with Crystal Reports? Look here!

Jan Schreuder — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 11:36:00 GMT

Because I blog about Crystal Reports occasionally, and created a helper class to assist in integrating it into .Net applications, I get a lot of questions from people that have problems running their reports. Especially in production environments after they deploy the reports. Unfortunately, I'm not a Crystal Expert. I use it in my applications but that's how far it goes. I don't have all the answers people might want.

But I do know where you can find information about Crystal and where you do find answers to any problems you might have. I created a blog post a few weeks ago to sum up a number of resources that can help you find answers to almost all of your Crystal Reports issues. Click here to read that post.