Joteke's Blog

Silverlight 3 is released

joteke — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 17:07:00 GMT

See ScottGu's post for details:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/07/10/silverlight-3-released.aspx

Survey: Ajax usage among .NET developers

joteke — Mon, 25 May 2009 05:35:00 GMT

Simone has created a survey to better understand Ajax usage among .NET developers. It would be nice if You could also complete it, if you haven't done so yet, as there are also MS people interested in the results. More answers means more understanding there too plus can also help evaluating the future for Ajax techniques.

Here's direct link to the survey.

What's new in the BCL in .NET 4 Beta 1 (from BCL Team blog)

joteke — Sat, 23 May 2009 19:39:00 GMT

Interesting stuff : http://blogs.msdn.com/bclteam/archive/2009/05/22/what-s-new-in-the-bcl-in-net-4-beta-1-justin-van-patten.aspx

My favorite features are parallel extensions, code contracts (I was familiarized with them thanks to Peli ), memory mapped files and compression improvements. Hell, any improvement to the current state is great! :-D And wait till you see the list of ASP.NET improvements. Scott Galloway has already blogged about a few of them...

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Training Kit - May Preview is available

joteke — Fri, 22 May 2009 20:18:00 GMT

Thanks to Bill Evjen for informing about this.

Download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=752cb725-969b-4732-a383-ed5740f02e93

The Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos. This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize the Visual Studio 2010 features and a variety of framework technologies including:

C# 4.0
Visual Basic 10
F#
Parallel Extensions
Windows Communication Foundation
Windows Workflow
Windows Presentation Foundation
ASP.NET 4
Entity Framework
ADO.NET Data Services
Managed Extensibility Framework
Visual Studio Team System

This version of the Training Kit works with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 1.

Do You Want To Give Feedback on ASP.NET 4.0 Beta 1?

joteke — Thu, 21 May 2009 09:13:00 GMT

If you do, then head to ASP.NET Forums / ASP.NET Beta 1 Forum

And if you look for where to get VS2010 / ASp.NET 4.0 Beta 1, then have a look at here

Get Your Copy of Windows 7 RC!

joteke — Tue, 05 May 2009 13:26:00 GMT

See: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx

I've installed Win7 RC on VMWare Server 2 (2.0.1), earlier today, and it went smoothly. There's not yet option for Win7 in VMWare Server, but using Windows Server 2008 as a guest OS when creating the VM worked fine. Nothing mystical here.

Office System 2007 SP2 now available

joteke — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:42:00 GMT

More details:

http://blogs.msdn.com/chrisfie/archive/2009/04/28/announcing-service-pack-2-sp2-for-microsoft-project-2007-and-microsoft-project-server-2007.aspx

Edit: List of all packages in the SP 2: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968170

and also download:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B444BF18-79EA-46C6-8A81-9DB49B4AB6E5&displaylang=en

Free ASP.NET MVC “NerdDinner” Tutorial Now in HTML

joteke — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 09:22:00 GMT

From: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/04/28/free-asp-net-mvc-nerddinner-tutorial-now-in-html.aspx

You can read the tutorial here.

Sharepoint Designer is now free!

joteke — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 08:43:00 GMT

Late to this game, as usual but still adding here. From: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/04/02/sharepoint-designer-available-as-a-free-download.aspx

Sharepoint Team made Sharepoint Designer available as a free download. I've been using SD for customizing our internal site we use to run our processes, it is invaluable tool.

Release time: Silverlight 3 beta, ASP.NET MVC 1.0, IE8...

joteke — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 17:25:00 GMT

You're blessed to be web developer nowadays :-)

Lots of interesting releases by MS lately:

ASP.NET MVC 1.0
http://haacked.com/archive/2009/03/18/aspnet-mvc-rtw.aspx
download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=53289097-73ce-43bf-b6a6-35e00103cb4b&displaylang=en
source: http://aspnet.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=24471

Internet Explorer 8
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/03/19/internet-explorer-8-final-available-now.aspx

Silverlight 3 beta
http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight3/default.aspx

And also a few other interesting ones too from ASP.NET Team's Codeplex site

ASP.NET Dynamic Data 4.0 Preview 3
ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 Preview 4
WCF REST Starter Kit Preview 2
ASP.NET 4.0 Cache Extensibility

Enjoy!

"Security Guidance for Writing and Deploying Silverlight Applications" whitepaper released

joteke — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 17:34:00 GMT

Do you have concerns with Silverlight's security aspects? MS has just released the whitepaper "Security Guidance for Writing and Deploying Silverlight Applications"

Download it from here

Now on Windows 7

joteke — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 21:56:00 GMT

I installed Windows 7 Beta to my old home machine. Basic installation took 25 minutes approx.

I had slight issues with display drivers since this mummy display adapter (RadeonIGP9100) hasn't worked even with Vista (ever). Well, with nice tip from here I was able to get it to work somehow - no Aero but I don't mind :-).

Another source of issue was Windows Live Messenger. Starting Messenger hangs the machine to 'reboot condition'. So as long as I use it, it's now web messenger, not the real one, unless the issue is solved somehow. I googled that could also be related to display drivers, but so far only MSN has got the machine to hang...

This is what I have so far. I'm impressed, very stable product to be at beta stage.

Techdays 2009, Finland

joteke — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 08:52:00 GMT

I attended Techdays 2009 at Helsinki on 5th of March. It was the biggest MS event in Finland so far, measured purely by the number of audience. I had the honor to participate on Thursday and sit down and chat with many well-known experts like Peli de Halleux, Scott Galloway as well as hang around at the night party.

One of the best picks was Peli de Halleux's personal lesson about PEX (Automated White-Box Testing for .NET), I wholeheartedly recommend that every serious .NET developer at least takes a look at it. Made me feel stupid I haven't heard of it before as well as I didn't know really too much about the facts surrounding it (despite that I believe I know something about architecture and testability)

Also, big thanks to people at Microsoft Finland. You were great!

Here's a few pics (some of them aren't too good, sorry, my phone camera doesn't always succeed)

Sampo Lehtiniemi briefing about Windows matters

Peli de Halleux and Scott Galloway discussing

Phil Haack's achievements are important part of Peli's presentations

Surface got attention

Almost more than Jaana Pelkonen

Jani Järvinen finishing his presentation

And Scott preparing for his (ASP.NET 4.0)

Glass holder caused confusion at some point

Scottish are all bravehearts

-2147467259.Message:Unspecified error when installing Business Intelligence Development Studio (SQL2008, 64bit)

joteke — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Definately, long time no see!

I was setting up my new work machine, and during installation of Business Intelligence Development Studio in SQL2008 64-bit, I got the aforementioned error (I had installed VS2008 to other than the default location). Fortunately, following KB article solved the problem:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/960127

Calling WCF service asynchronously from ASP.NET

joteke — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 10:47:00 GMT

I was recently asked how to call WCF Service asynchronously from ASP.NET. Here's my sample code:

1) WCF Service Library Implementation

namespace WcfServiceLibrary1
{
    [ServiceContract]
    public interface ISampleService
    {
        [OperationContract]
        string SayHelloWorld();
       
    }

   
}

namespace WcfServiceLibrary1
{
  
    public class Service1 : ISampleService
    {

        #region ISampleService Members

        public string SayHelloWorld()
        {
            //Simulate it running longer than it usually takes for the page to handle request
            System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(5000);

            return "Hello World";
        }

        #endregion
    }
}

2) ASP.NET side using the service

<%@ Page Async="true" Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true"  CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" %>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
    <title></title>
</head>
<body>
    <form id="form1" runat="server">
    <div>
        <asp:Button ID="Button1" runat="server" Text="Call the service" 
            onclick="Button1_Click" />
         <asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server" ></asp:Label> 
    </div>
  
    </form>
</body>
</html>

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;

public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page 
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
         
    }

    ServiceReference1.SampleServiceClient client = null; 
    protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        PageAsyncTask task = new PageAsyncTask(BeginGetAsyncData, EndGetAsyncData, null, null);
        Page.RegisterAsyncTask(task); 
    }

    IAsyncResult BeginGetAsyncData(object src, EventArgs args, AsyncCallback cb, object state)
    {
        client = new ServiceReference1.SampleServiceClient();
        return client.BeginSayHelloWorld(cb, state); 
    }

    void EndGetAsyncData(IAsyncResult ar)
    {
        string returnedValue = client.EndSayHelloWorld(ar);
        Label1.Text = DateTime.Now.ToString() + ":" + returnedValue;  
    }

}

Points to get:

- Async="True" in @page directive
- Use of PageAsyncTask to register the task (steps when starting the async action, and steps to end it) , supports tasks running parallel
- Using Begin/End methods of the WCF service (Begin/EndSayHelloWorld instead of SayHelloWorldAsync e.g not using event based implementation because ASP.NET already provides hooks to the async pattern)
- these async tasks execute between PreRender and PreRenderComplete - they're done when PreRenderComplete executes (page waits for them to execute, releasing the worker thread to the pool, and then spins up another one to end the request when async tasks are done) - e.g from user perspective it might not seem so fancy although if you can run tasks parallel, user sees it as better performance since page responds faster

Resources about async pages/ calling WCF
http://weblogs.asp.net/despos/archive/2005/10/19/427861.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms734701.aspx