TheCoder

Visual Studio 2010 RC Install Error Fix

Thinker — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 19:01:32 GMT

Thought I would give the new VS 2010 RC a try and see what kind of performance increase they made. After uninstalling the VS 2010 Beta 2 and the Team Sever Beta and the .NET frameworks 4.0 beta, I gave it a shot. After a reboot during the install, if finally failed with an error I do not remember, but after that I got a second error 7012 (perhaps?) that the install failed to return the system to its prior status, shortly after followed by a complete crash of the installer.

I looked at the log and seems to have died on the Silverlight 3 check. I am running Windows 7 and IIRC, I had already installed Silverlight 3 before. Just to be safe I downloaded and installed the Silverlight 3 SDK and the install again. It seemed to install after that point.

During a search, I noted that one site had the RTM at I believe March 22, 2010. If that does not move then it is probably just a month more to have the RTM download available.

Win2008 Server without FrontPage Extensions, really?

Thinker — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:58:00 GMT

Some have complained about FrontPage Extensions for it seems like ages. Over the years though, they have filled the bill and allowed many different development tools, quickly and easily, to work on remote servers. You just kind of consider that functionality as part of Windows. Opps..

Well, when I switched over to Windows 2008 Server, I was surprised to not find my old friend there. The answer was a form of FTP that is supposed to work on a shared IP, but is not integrated into many tools, or to use WebDAV, which is also not integrated into the tools I need and would result in mapping a network drive to handle it with some tools. Just not as simple or clean as it was with FPSE (FrontPage Server Extensions).

After a bit of research, it appears Microsoft has spun off the FPSE to a third party and they have a version that is supposed to work with Windows 2008 Server. Before I would think about that, I tried using the FTP which did not work as I needed. Then I tried WebDAV and found it had some problems with large files and was more-or-less a pain to deal with after coming from a FPSE background.

I posted messages around in different forums including one of Microsoft’s about solution to the problem and how to handle this moving forward. Still no replies yet, it is almost like no one is working with it in that area. Perhaps those that work with it have the luxury of dedicated IP’s for all their sites and can use secure FTP without all the hassles. Still though, that does limit some of the functionality of Visual Studio that has worked for years with FPSE.

I found and played just a bit with Web Deploy framework that works with Visual Studio 2010 to build deploy packages to update your server. For many of the smaller sites though it is kind of like hunting for flies with a shotgun, there is a lot of power there but the older simpler tools would work better.

Well, at the end of the day, or should I say a couple of days, I broke down and put FPSE on the server. Of course it does not have that integrated feel as it did before in Windows 2003, but at least this was a start.

Currently, I have two issues to dig through. The first is when I go tot eh admin page for an individual site, it says I do not have the rights to access that page. This might be left over from moving the files from an older server to the new server. The other is that if I do not enable FPSE on every site on the server, you can use FPSE to open it without a user name and password. It must be some simple setting somewhere, but I have not had the time to dig it out yet, I just enabled FPSE for every site for now.

The current conclusion to the story is that I wish Microsoft would have looked a little further than their nose when the decided to pull this technology that has been the friend of many developers for a long time!

Silverlight 3 Beta 1 is HERE!

Thinker — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 07:38:22 GMT

Seems it is now available or at least parts. Time to play!

http://www.nextbestgeek.com/2009/03/18/silverlight-3-its-here/

Silverlight Domain Names up for grabs!

Thinker — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 05:46:59 GMT

Silverlight domain names up for free! Just go to the site, use the Auth Codes to transfer to your registrar!

www.SilverlightCity.com

www.SilverlightDevs.com

Silverlight Games one the way?

Thinker — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 05:05:20 GMT

Looks like there may be some XNA 2D games on they way to your browsers. Here is a short blip:

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/03/xna-2d-games-come-to-the-browser-via-silverlight.ars

Here is a link to the SilverSprite library at CodePlex:

http://silversprite.codeplex.com

Will be interesting to see Silverlight move heavily into this market place. While many are banking on business apps, the game industry should be pretty huge over the coming years.

Silverlight Guitar Chord Finder

Thinker — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 09:28:22 GMT

Here is a cool little demo:

http://johnpapa.net/demos/chordcalc/demo.html

You can play individual notes by clicking on them and here the entire chord. Sweet little app. Here is more about it along with the code:

http://www.simple-talk.com/dotnet/.net-framework/using-silverlight-to-build-a-guitar-chord-calculator/

Visual Studio 2008 Express – Standard – Pro – What’s the diff?

Thinker — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 04:57:50 GMT

Back with the Visual Studio 2005 editions, it was vague at best to which versions had which features. Well, when Visual Studio 2008 came out, I never bothered with the comparison between the different versions of this latest release. Today, I took a look and found a very informative document and what is included with the different versions. If you are considering upgrading to Visual Studio 2008, you might give this document a view, it could be very helpful!

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=727bcfb0-b575-47ab-9fd8-4ee067bb3a37&DisplayLang=en

ViewState and SEO – Move it!

Thinker — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 04:56:08 GMT

This is an old dilemma, but some may still have issues with it. When you build a site using ASP.NET and WebForms, you often will see a bulky hidden field on the form called “ViewState”. Of course, this is the values of your ViewState on the form which can be quite large depending on the values on your form and type of controls.

Since the ViewState field is placed at the top part of your form, this means that you can have large amounts of text before you ever get to the main part of your form. Even though hidden, it can hinder some search engines to clearly discern the content on the page.

There are different ways you can solve this issue, even up to disabling ViewState and not using it. You really do not have to go to that drastic step though, you can always move it. Yep, there are different ways you can actually move the field to the bottom of your form so that it does not hinder search engines even when it grows large.

Not that long ago, I found a quick and easy way to handle this situation. Mads Kriestensen posted a solution that only requires dropping a class file into your App_Code directory and added ah HTTPModule line to your web.config, no code changes.

Here is the original blog post:

http://blog.madskristensen.dk/post/An-HttpModule-that-moves-ViewState-to-the-bottom.aspx

You will want to scan down the comments though, there is a solution down on the list by “Icy” to replace the “Write” method. That addition seemed to work well for me. I have the entire text of the ViewstateModule.cs file as Toolbox Text item so that I create a new class file and just paste in all the text. It is better than hunting down the file at times ;)

LINQ to SQL Dead?

Thinker — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 05:04:16 GMT

Is Microsoft going to kill LINQ to SQL (L2S)? The rumors are that Entity Frameworks (EF) is the database plan of choice now and L2S is out the door. There have been a few posts on the topics, here are a couple:

http://codebetter.com/blogs/ david.hayden/archive/2008/10/30/linq-to-sql-gets-kicked-to-the-curb-needs-a-good-home.aspx

http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2008 /10/31/microsoft-kills-linq-to-sql.aspx

Personally, I think if they just added some method of change tracking to the entities and made disconnected work easier, then L2S would be pretty hot. I do not like passing around connections (DataContext’s) to different layers and prefer to work in a disconnected form. Of course, this means you either hit the database for the original data and then overwrite it with the modified data or you keep a copy of the original data manually (I have used this later method and there is a post here about it.

Of course, with L2S you must watch your queries very carefully. If you do not pay attention, you might be generating tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of queries to your database from a single query. SQL Profiler comes in real handy there.

From what I have seen about EF though, it appears it is geared for more substantial applications and could not be thought as lightweight unless you an extreme fantasy. There needs to be a lightweight but yet truly functional database layer and L2S could be just the ticket with a few modifications.

Guess we will have to wait and see…

Windows Live to OpenID, no return love?

Thinker — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 01:06:29 GMT

News has it that Microsoft Live will be came to be used as an OpenID server so that you can use your Live ID to log into any OpenID enabled site. That is good, BUT… What about the other way? Will this deal be just like Yahoo! where you will be able to use them as an OpenID server but not be able to log into them by OpenID?

Come on you big guys quit playing games and allow use to use OpenID to log into Microsoft live, Yahoo! and Google! Is that so hard? OpenID NOW!

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/27/windows-live-adds-support-for-openid-calls-it-de-facto-login-standard/

Netflix API Released!

Thinker — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 03:16:18 GMT

It appears Netflix has released a public API to access their information. I have not had the time to full investigate their developer pack, but here is the link:

http://developer.netflix.com/

There is a post about it here:

http://josephsmarr.com/2008/10/01/using-netflixs-new-api-a-step-by-step-guide/

I do have a few ideas how I might use this in the future. Now if I can just dig around here and find the time for it :)

Going to Stanford University for free?

Thinker — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 06:38:20 GMT

Well, not exactly, but you can now partake of ten free online Computer Science and Electrical Engineering courses for free. No need to signup or anything, just browse and view lectures:

http://www.deviceguru.com/2008/09/17/stanford-frees-cs-robotics-courses/

http://see.stanford.edu

One Method of adding Odiogo to Subtext

Thinker — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:38:31 GMT

For those that are unfamiliar with Odiogo, it is a site that provides free text-to-speech abilities to your blog and does a pretty good job! The site takes your RSS feed and converts all the articles in the feed to MP3s. It also gives you the ability to add a “Listen” button that makes it easy for people to listen to your posts.

This post will show you a method to insert the Odiogo “Listen” button to all your posts automatically. The method used here is kind of hacked together, but seems to work. There may be easier methods, but it was early AM hours and wanted to get it functional. At the end of the day, it might be best to make a user control for the button, but this should get your started.

Getting started:

The first step is to go to the following link and signup for an account (is quite simple and only takes a couple minutes):

http://www.odiogo.com

After a period of time, your account will be created and they will email you the information about your account which will include your feed#.

Here is a sample (from this site’s account) of what that will look like:

Important Information:

Your Odiogo Feed ID: 153595

Your Odiogo Control Page Url: http://podcasts.odiogo.com/aggregated-blogs/podcasts-html.php

Your Odiogo RSS Feed Url: http://podcasts.odiogo.com/aggregated-blogs/podcasts-xml.php

Your Blog Title: Aggregated Blogs

Your Blog Url: http://reflectedthought.com/mainfeed.aspx

Your Blog Feed Url: http://reflectedthought.com/mainfeed.aspx

For our purpose the feed ID is the only information we need to add the button to our posts.

On my installation of Subtext Version 2.0.0.43, I modified the following controls to the skin I use along with added the Odiogo JavaScript link in the header of the DSP.aspx file to automatically include it to all skins and blogs.

Additions to the DSP.aspx page:

Before the close of the </head> tag, add:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://podcasts.odiogo.com/odiogo_js.php?feed_id=153595&platform=be"></script>

Additions to the Days.ascx and EntryList.ascx:

At the top of the page after the import statements and before the HTML starts, I added this routine:

<script runat="server">
string SetUrlPage(string theValue)
{
   string urlPage = theValue.Substring(0, theValue.Length - 5).Replace('-', '_');
   urlPage = urlPage.Substring(urlPage.LastIndexOf("/")+1);
   return urlPage;
}
</script>

In the skin I based my skin off of, it has a “<div class="post">“ right under the <itemtemplate>. This is where I inserted after the div:

<script type="text/javascript"></script><br />
<script type="text/javascript"><!--
showInitialOdiogoReadNowFrame( '153595','<%# SetUrlPage((string) DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "Url")) %>',290, 0);

//—>

</script><br />

Here, you would replace the feed ID (153595) with your own feed ID.

Additions to ViewPost.aspx:

ViewPost was a bit different though. I did not see a way to access the entry class data, so I ended up retrieving the data and working with it directly. Where I wanted the listen button to appear (in mine just above the body), I inserted:

<%
Entry entry = Subtext.Framework.Data.Cacher.GetEntryFromRequest(CacheDuration.Short);
string urlPage = entry.FullyQualifiedUrl.Segments[6];
urlPage = urlPage.Substring(0,urlPage.Length-5).Replace('-','_');

Again, you need to change the feed ID (‘153595’) to the feed ID you received from Odiogo.

SQL Server 2008!

Thinker — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 08:14:32 GMT

SQL Server 2008 is now RTM! Truth be told, I have not kept up on the changes now bothered with the betas. The article that mentioned it was RTM had a link to this article of a quick overview of changes in SQL Server 2008:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc434690.aspx

http://blogs.microsoft.nl/blog_van_mark_voermans/archive /2008/07/15/sql-server-2008-ships-in-august.aspx

A few things that jumped out at me:

Compression at row or page level
Merge - Insert/Update rolled in one (no more check to see if record already exists and the update if it does, otherwise insert the new row, it is all handled by this one TSQL command)
LINQ Provider (allowing direct LINQ queries against SQL Server 2008 tables/columns)
Date and Time enhancements
Filestream data type

Silverlight – Silverlight – Silverlight!

Thinker — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:31:03 GMT

As a developer, it is obvious that Silverlight is HOT now that 2.0 betas are flowing. There is a ton of information coming from different sources along with many demos / tutorials. It kind of makes you wonder if WPF will remain a top-level technologies or perhaps in the future it will be absorbed into Silverlight, with all the pressure from other competing technologies for cross platform stand alone applications.

Anyway, amongst all the info out there, AppDev is providing four hours of free Silverlight 2 training. Here is the blog post I found about it:

http://weblogs.asp.net/lduveau/archive/2008/07/16/4-hours-of-microsoft-silverlight-2-training-for-free.aspx

When was the last time you visited the Silverlight.net site? They have added 17 Silverlight 2.0 listings to their gallery:

http://silverlight.net/themes/silverlight/community/gallerydetail.aspx?cat=6

Some that caught my eye:

Silverlight Presentation Tool
Search Light
Silverlight Panorama Viewer
Silverlight File Explorer and Uploader
FlipBook
Silverlight Rich Text Editor
Spider Solitaire

Also, if you are keeping up with Silverlight, you might want to add the RSS feed from:

www.SilverlightCity.com

(Shameless plug – :)