Commentaries

Silverlight Is Dead, Long Live Silverlight

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 15:00:00 EST

There’s been a lot of discussion since Microsoft’s BUILD conference on the fate of Silverlight. (Something that is an issue for us because Sybase was originally looking at supporting it for web app development in PowerBuilder 15.) Contrary to what a number of the pundits and would-be pundits have said, I don’t think it’s quite accurate to say that Silverlight is dead in Windows 8. I think it’s more accurate to say it’s evolved. As background for those who haven’t been following this closely, Microsoft announced that the Windows 8 operating system would support two kinds of applications: traditional “desktop apps” and the newer “metro style apps.” What would not be available in the Internet Explorer provided with Windows 8 would be support for any plugins, either Silverlight or Flash (see Figure 1).

Good News about Silverlight and WPF for a Change

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 09:00:00 EDT

We have decided to push forward with the one of the Silverlight projects and the WPF project in order to introduce XAML into the environment. With METRO on the horizon you will have no choice but to learn XAML. Most of my posts lately have only been delivering bad news about BUILDS affects on our Silverlight and WPF projects. Instead of dropping 2 Silverlight and 1 WPF project, we will only be dropping one Silverlight project. I am lucky enough to work with some very bright people. We have decided to push forward with the one of the Silverlight projects and the WPF project in order to introduce XAML into the environment. With METRO on the horizon you will have no choice but to learn XAML. The HTML/JS/CSS may pay off for the goal of attracting hobbyist and college kids, but it is going to make a heck of a lot of messes. Plus the Silverlight will run fine in the desktop browser. At least as of today it will. XAML will be the only realistic choice for real development for METRO apps. The HTML/JS/CSS environment is messy as messy can get. I wish it would just be outlawed.

Microsoft Windows 8 METRO and BUILD - The Good, Bad, Ugly, and WWTD

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 10:01:47 EDT

The Good, Bad, Ugly of Microsoft Windows 8 METRO and the BUILD Conference. Microsoft considers the enterprise line of business environment owned by them and not losable. Their full attention is on the mobile world. They not only do not own that, they don't even own part of it. I have to help evaluate enterprise products quite often and I am finding more and more situations were only Java products are available. At least all the products in the quadrant of the Gartner quadrants that counts. I have been putting it off for a long time, but I can't put it off any longer. I will be getting more familiar with Java. We need RIA and client applications in order to achieve the performance required by internal enterprise applications. Because Microsoft is making it so difficult to get them in the door, even in Microsoft shops, I don't have a choice but to get familiar with the products coming out that support our needs. Beyond Java I will also be learning the ins and outs of HTML5/JS/CSS. I will have to if for no other reason than to know enough about them to keep them off my projects when not appropriate. I certainly won't be using them for METRO apps while XAML still exists, and using them on the web is anybody's game, not just Microsoft's. If I had to use HTML5/JS/CSS, I would probably look at Dreamweaver first. Their attention is also on windows 8 and getting some of the private cloud and virtualization business. That is good in my book, but believe it will breed fear in most enterprises. The enterprises I work with were just starting to consider accepting Silverlight and WPF into their ASP.NET world. Microsoft stopped that from happening by not communicating over the last year about their intentions, and then by not even mentioning it in the sessions at BUILD. Most places I have experience with will not be touching Windows 8 unless METRO can be disabled on the desktop. It is silly to think you would have to work in such an environment on a desktop.

The Political Side of Silverlight’s Death

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 12:12:00 EDT

I believe Silverlight within a year will be known as the “S” word, and we won’t be using it anywhere except in conversations about how painful Microsoft made that initiative. Let us say MS supports Silverlight for the next 10 years. That is great. But that means nothing to the customers I work with. Microsoft's poor communication over the past months built the coffin and BUILD put the nails in it when it was not even listed as a product. I lost a contract about 9 months or a year ago because of Bob M.'s comments, rebooted two Silverlight and one WPF project because of BUILD.

PowerBuilder – Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 12:15:00 EDT

As you may be aware, the company I work for does both PowerBuilder and RIA (Flex) application development. We actually create client/server and web-based front ends for the same application. Doing that has really emphasized just how much faster we can do development using PowerBuilder. Of course, we’re originally a PowerBuilder shop, so one could argue we’re faster using PowerBuilder because we know it better. But along comes a thread in the Adobe Flex Developers discussion groups on Linkedin with this heading: “I’m sometimes amazed at how unproductive [modern] development tools are compared to the client/server tools of 20 years ago.”[1] There’s a lot of discussion back and forth, but it seems that a number of other folks chimed in with similar feelings. While the development environment has changed (mobile devices and the web), many of the tasks that are simple to do in a product like PowerBuilder (e.g., formatting a field) require coding, sometimes a great deal of coding, to implement in more “modern” IDEs.

Can PowerBuilder Leverage Mono?

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 08:00:00 EDT

If you’ve been following my recent editorials, you’ll know I have some concerns with HTML5 as the silver bullet for all web / mobile development. As a result, I’ve been a proponent of rich GUI applications for both web and mobile. To that end, I’ve been supportive of adding Silverlight as a deployment target for PowerBuilder applications for web support. I also had been hopeful that Silverlight adoption on mobile devices would enable PowerBuilder to deploy to those devices as well. Recent indications are that although Silverlight may end up being a solution for web applications (and may even displace WPF for desktop applications), all indications are that few mobile devices will support it other than perhaps Windows Phone. If we are going to be able to develop for mobile devices with PowerBuilder, and we don’t believe that HTML5 is the only way to do that, what other options might we have?

To HTML5, or Not to HTML5, That Is the Question

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 11:15:00 EST

If you’ve been following Sybase’s announcements concerning their plans for future versions of PowerBuilder, you’ll know that they are planning for PowerBuilder 15 to be able to generate a Silverlight application and are looking at having it generate applications based on HTML5 as well. If you’ve been following this column, you’ll know I’ve been arguing that we need Silverlight generation much sooner than that. Back in November of 2008[1], I suggested that by the time PowerBuilder 12 was delivered, Microsoft would have Silverlight 3 out and it would be much more stable and ubiquitous. PowerBuilder 12 is here, and Microsoft is actually already on Silverlight 4. According to statowl.com, Silverlight was installed in 20% of browsers in November of 2008 and is now installed in 56% of browsers. Riastats.com indicates that Silverlight 4 is installed in 56% of browsers, and that Silverlight 3 is installed in another 6.5%. The bottom line is that Silverlight is now mainstream technology and the player is already installed in approximately two out of every three browsers. It’s also available on phones based on the Windows Mobile 7 or Symbian operating systems. Finally, there are rumors flying about support for a player on Android and perhaps even iPhone, but nothing definite yet.

Microsoft Angles for a Serious Comeback in the Mobile Game

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:00:00 EST

Many people have wondered what has taken Microsoft so long to update its lackluster Windows Mobile platform. It finally did it! At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft introduced the Windows Phone 7 Series, its latest operating system for phones. The Software giant’s Windows Mobile has been getting the short end of the stick and stood no chance to compete with the likes of iPhones, Blackberries and Android devices. It was also embarrassingly ignored by apps developers who spearheaded the success of Apple’s devices and now are bestowing their undivided attention on Android. Microsoft's mobile system appeared in 13.1 percent of smart phones sold in the U.S. last year, according to research firm In-Stat making it No. 3 after Research in Motion’s BlackBerry and the iPhone. But Microsoft has been fast losing its relevance in the handset market with the unbeatable momentum of Google’s Android phones fast edging it out.

Ensuring Website Performance

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:45:00 EST

In order to ensure that end user response times are acceptable at all times it is necessary to measure the time in the way the end user perceives performance. Measuring and monitoring your live system is important to identify problems early on before it affects too many end users. In order to make sure that web pages are fast from the start it is very important to constantly and continuously measure web page performance throughout the development phase and in testing. There are two questions that need to be answered * What is the time the user actually perceives as web response time? * How to measure it accurately and in an automated way?

Bridging the Computing Clouds with SSMA2008

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 13:30:00 EST

Well, for various reasons you may be willing (wanting) to place a part of your stuff on Microsoft Azure and part on the Amazon Cloud. In fact it is a repetition of the same story of the bygone era, some data on Microsoft platform, some on Oracle etc. Sooner or later you want to move data from one to the other. Of course there are the integration tools that can handle this. But there are others who specialize in migration of data. Microsoft went relational with its flagship SQL Server 2008 ported out to the clouds with SQL Azure. Soon Amazon followed with its relational offering based on MySQL.

Windows Shopping

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 20:45:00 EST

I’m really not one of those vocal Operating System lover/haters. My dad worked at IBM for 30 years and so I grew up with computers and even took a PC Jr. with a whopping 128k of RAM and a color (what we called color) monitor with me to college in the 80’s. My first work computer was a Macintosh and learned about all that AppleTalk stuff and the cool publishing Quark could do. I’ve used and administrated Win3.1, NT 4.0 (on laptops), Win95, WinME, Win2000/Server, and of course a user of XP and Vista along with a few variants of Linux. I use Windows for home and work and personally I think each OS has it’s plus’/minus’. Very non-committal, I know. Now I’m looking to buy a new computer and with that, a new Operating System.

Breaking Changes for .NET Services in Azure

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:15:00 EST

If you want the full gory details, check out the .NET Services team blog post here. What follows below are some of the things that I think are most crucial to understand both for new developers and for developers unfortunate enough to be in a position of having to migrate a lot of code. Quite possibly the single most important thing to note is this: If you bought a book on Windows Azure that has already been released or will be released within the next month or two, it is out of date and completely irrelevant. PDC (along with the changes I'm going to outline below) will substantially change all of the Azure offerings.

Setting up an ASP.NET MVC 2 Application for Windows Azure

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:30:00 EST

Yesterday, Microsoft released another update to the Windows Azure SDK. This update includes a truckload of new goodies that I will be covering in additional blog posts. For this blog post, however, I want to walk you through getting an ASP.NET MVC 2 application working on Windows Azure in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. Now that Azure and VS2010 are finally starting to sync up, the amount of raw goodness coming out of Redmond cannot be measured. First, install the Windows Azure SDK and the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio, making sure you pay attention to all of the installation details. There are lots of little hotfixes and things that you might need. Luckily, if you're running VS2010 Beta 2 on Windows 7, you have very little extra work to do beyond configuring IIS 7 for WCF HTTP activation.

Working with Table Storage on the Windows Azure

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

If you've been working with Azure for a while then you've probably spent some time using the StorageClient sample that came with previous versions of the SDK. With the November 2009 release of the SDK (the one they'll be using at PDC 2009), they have wrapped that sample up into the SDK and refactored it to fit more in line with the conventions and quality standards of a Microsoft API. As a result, some of your code will break (but not much). Queue storage and Blob storage (discussed in upcoming posts) actually have more breaking changes than table storage.

Table storage, under the hood, is exposed as an ADO.NET Data Service (formerly Astoria). As a result, if you've used the System.Data.Services.Client library before, you've already got a leg up in interacting with Azure Storage.

When you're working with table storage, there are a few things that you're going to need. Once you've got these, you're good to go:

References to System.Data.Services.Client and Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient (obviously you also need a reference to service runtime if you're hitting table storage from within the cloud itself... remember that you can hit table storage from the desktop too, e.g. from WPF applications).
Credentials. There have been some changes to the way storage client credentials work that are beyond the scope of this post, but you can still use the same accountname/account shared key pattern that you used in the past.
A DataServiceContext. You're going to need this to interact with the tables in table storage. As you'll see in the code below, the pattern is to create your own context that derives from the base and exposes your tables as IQueryables. If you've ever worked with ADO.NET Data Services or Entity Framework before, this pattern should also look familiar.
Entity objects. Every table that you have in table storage contains arbitrary columns. In other words, if you really wanted, you could have a different schema for every row in your table. However, to work with it using the Data Services client, each row needs to conform to a fixed schema - this fixed schema you'll represent with a regular C# class that contains the necessary partition key and row key properties. This class also needs a parameterless constructor (required by the data services client to reconstitute instances of that class from the HTTP results)
The cloud table client. This new class will let you create tables and test for the existence of tables. You do not need to use this class for querying table storage, it's more of an administrative class for dealing with table storage itself.

The first thing we're going to want to do is get the credentials. The new SDK allows us to dynamically determine if we're running in a fabric or running as a standalone app (which allows us to build apps that we can run on-premise OR in the cloud!). Here's some code I used to get the configuration settings for the account name and shared key:

string accountKey = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["AccountSharedKey"];
string tableBaseUri = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["TableStorageEndpoint"];
if (RoleEnvironment.IsAvailable)
{
accountName = RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("AccountName");
accountKey = RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("AccountSharedKey");
}

Once you've got the account key and the account name, you can get an instance of the storage credentials and table client classes:

StorageCredentialsAccountAndKey creds =
new StorageCredentialsAccountAndKey(accountName, accountKey);
CloudTableClient tableStorage = new CloudTableClient(tableBaseUri, creds);
CustomerContext ctx = new CustomerContext(tableBaseUri, creds);

Using the table storage class, we can create a new table (if it doesn't already exist):

if (tableStorage.CreateTableIfNotExist("Customers"))
{
CustomerRow cust = new CustomerRow("AccountsReceivable", "kevin");
cust.FirstName = "Kevin";
cust.LastName = "Hoffman";
ctx.AddObject("Customers", cust);
ctx.SaveChanges();
}

Here I'm also using my customer context class and my customer row class (will show those shortly) in order to put a new customer into table storage. Note my use of an application name for the partition key and the username for the row key. Entire chapters of books can (and will) be written on strategies and patterns for using partition and row keys.

Now let's say that we're inside an MVC 2 controller and we want to make the list of customers available to the view. If we're not doing a strongly typed view (which we should be doing unless we can't help it...) then we can use code that looks like this:

CustomerRow[] customers = ctx.Customers.ToArray();
ViewData["Customers"] = customers;

Now let's look at the CustomerContext class:

public class CustomerContext : TableServiceContext
{
    public CustomerContext(string uri, StorageCredentials creds) : base(uri, creds) { }
    public IQueryable<CustomerRow> Customers
    {
        get
        {
            return this.CreateQuery<CustomerRow>("Customers");
        }
    }
}

The CustomerRow class is just a POCO class that has a default constructor and a constructor that takes a partition key and a row key, and inherits from the TableServiceEntity class.

public class CustomerRow : TableServiceEntity
{
    private string firstName;
    private string lastName;
    private string userName;
    private string applicationName;

    public CustomerRow(string applicationName, string userName)
      : base(applicationName, userName)
    {
      ApplicationName = applicationName;
      UserName = userName;
    }

public CustomerRow() : base() { }

I snipped out the rest of the class for brevity - I'm assuming we've all seen stock property accessors before. At this point you should be ready to roll using table storage. There is also one other benefit they gave us in November 2009 CTP - you no longer need to pre-rig your database schema in your SQL 2008 database!! The new development storage simulator accurately simulates the dynamic schema nature of the actual table storage in the cloud. I can't begin to describe how many headaches this alleviates.

Enjoy table storage on the new Nov 2009 CTP and I'll be posting similar blog posts about the new Queue storage and Blob storage clients shortly!

How to Find Me at TechEd Europe

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:18:00 EST

Here’s when and where you can find me in Berlin this week: Microsoft Online Services booth (Unified Communications area) in the TLC area (3.2) I’ll be there tomorrow (Tuesday) during the evening reception – 6:15-8:00 pm. Obviously, I will be happy to answer any questions on Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, LiveMeeting, OCS Online and sign And then, both [...]

Solution Dependencies in SharePoint 2010

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 10:45:00 EDT

With MOSS 2007, I often got asked what order do I install these solution packages in. Oftentimes, it was critical that they get installed in a particular order. With features, we have had the ability to set dependencies, but we really didn’t have anything like that for solution packages. Well, I haven’t heard people talking about this new feature yet, but we can in fact set solution dependencies in the manifest.xml file.

Turning on the Developer Dashboard in SharePoint 2010

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 10:00:00 EDT

The developer dashboard is a great new feature that developers can use to aid them in tuning performance on a page. This new functionality adds information to the bottom of any page in SharePoint that displays performance information and what SQL queries were executed to display the page. To my knowledge, there is currently no way in the UI to turn this on, so you can do this with a quick x64 console application. This is soon to become a quite popular code snippet I am sure.

Will Virtualization Die in SharePoint 2010 Development?

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 09:00:00 EDT

So what does this mean? For some reason, Microsoft has not given us desktop virtualization software that can run 64 bit guest (even though Hyper-V can). So I think this left Microsoft a choice. Get 64 bit guests added to Windows Virtual PC, recommend developers use a non Microsoft virtualization technology, or get SharePoint working on Windows 7 and Vista. Now, adding 64 bit support I am sure is quite an undertaking and they definitely don’t want to recommend a competitor’s product. This means that making SharePoint work directly on the developer’s machine the obvious choice. After all it runs on top of IIS and IIS is pretty similar between Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, and Windows Vista (yes, I do know there are differences).

Amazon RDS vs. SQL Azure

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:45:00 EDT

Back in July I wrote my post about databases in the cloud. The big surprise that I discovered at the time was that the only “Native” RDBMS offering in the cloud came from Microsoft. Microsoft SQL Azure (launching formally at the PDC in a few weeks) is a mostly-compatible SQL Server as a Service release complete with support for Transact SQL/TDS. SQL Azure is a multitenanted DBMS with several customers running databases up to 10GB in size on a single server. Their target is the 95% of business applications running in the enterprise that have databases with less than 5GB of data (based on their research). Well, Microsoft is alone no more.

Microsoft SharePoint 2010

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 10:00:00 EDT

First let me apologize for the lack of blogging for a while. We have been under the gun with a sizable SharePoint development project. I have gown farther down into the innards of InfoPath then I ever thought possible. To give you an idea, we worked over 140 hours in the 2 weeks prior to the conference. I promise to be better, and now I have good reason to do so: We at Syrinx just got back from a long week loaded with sessions, booths, experts, and information all about SharePoint 2010. All I can say is *WOW*. I predict the trend of SharePoint adoption to continue to to climb at an alarming rate.

Get Your Red Hot VS2010 Beta 2

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 09:00:00 EDT

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is now available to MSDN subscribers and will be available to the public at large late next week. The list of stuff that is awesome and worth checking out in VS2010 Beta 2 is too long and ridiculously in-depth for me to cover here. Some of the big things that affect me right off the bat are the following:

Visual Studio 2010 Is Cloud Friendly

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:15:00 EDT

New testing options in Visual Studio 2010 will help ensure quality code. Enhancements to the integrated development environment mean that whether modeling, coding, testing or debugging, developers can use existing skills to deploy a growing number of application types. Built-in tools for Windows 7 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010, new drag and drop bindings for Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation, and interoperability with innovative technologies (such as those for the database, ASP.NET model view controller, unified modeling language, Expression, and multicore) allow developers to bring their visions to life.

Cloud Computing Does Not Require Change in Programming Model – Microsoft

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:00:00 EDT

In two of my previous posts I have highlighted why I think cloud computing needs change in thinking. However, in a recent discussion Walid Abu-Hadba (of Microsoft) clearly stated that Microsoft’s cloud strategy assumes that they are going to retain the existing programming model for cloud. That is, programmers can develop their application without bothering [...]

ASP.NET Membership Provider in the Cloud

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:30:00 EDT

Let's take a look at this pretty common scenario. You're building an ASP.NET application (MVC or otherwise) and you intend to publish it in the cloud and you're using Azure Storage (not SQL Azure) for your underlying data store. You've already hooked your app up with the sample Azure-based Membership provider that comes with the Azure SDK and everything is running along nicely.

Your application has quite a bit of administrator-only functionality so, after you've been using it locally for a while you put in some safeguards to block access to the admin areas unless the user is in the Administrators role. That's awesome and ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC both have some really great code shortcuts for enabling this kind of situation and you can make yourself an administrator pretty darn easily.

So you're an admin and you deploy your application to staging and you go to run it and you try to log in. Whoops your account isn't there. This is because for the last couple of weeks you've been running against your local SQL 2008 (or SQL Express) database and you forgot that you did a few tweaks to make yourself an administrator. In the last couple of weeks you removed the code on the site that allows users to self-register since your application is an LOB app with a manually administered user list.

There is a built-in tool that comes with Visual Studio 2008 that allows you to do site administration. In a non-cloud environment, this was a great way to do things because you could simply configure your providers and then click "Project" and then "ASP.NET Configuration" and you would be taken to a Cassini-based website that allows you to add/remove users, manipulate roles, etc. It was great.

The problem is that when you run an Azure application locally, you're running the Role, you're not running the ASP.NET application. This means that when you launch (at least as of last night when I tried this) the ASP.NET configuration site, you're going to get a pile of errors all stemming from the fact that information contained in your service configuration file wasn't found and you'll get other errors because the local fabric doesn't get initialized when you don't start the app through the role.

So what can you do? If you can't use the admin site then how do you create an admin user that can then create more users? Lots of really talented people have contributed to the MVC community including a fully functional admin site that uses the membership provider to administer users, etc and you can use this if you want. What I've been doing, however, to ensure that I'm never left without some form of administrative access to my sites is by creating a root account.

What I do is in the service definition I declare three settings: RootAccountName, RootAccountPassword, AdminRoleName. I then have code in my application startup that will use the Membership API to create this user with the given password and add them to the Admin Role (and create that role if it isn't created already). This guarantees me that any time I do a fresh deploy or even wipe my storage account that I'll still be able to login as an administrator to stage or production and I can keep the root account name different between stage and production.

Again, Azure development is awesome and shares a lot of similarities with traditional ASP.NET development but some things (like the built-in site admin tool) don't work out of the box via the cloud and so we have to keep these things in mind as we build applications for the cloud.

Two Great Tools to Work with SQL Azure

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 15:15:00 EDT

SQL Azure Migration Wizard is a nice tool. It can connect to (local)Server as well as it supports running scripts. I tried running a script to create 'pubs' on SQL Azure. It did manage to bring in some tables and not all. It does not like 'USE' in SQL statements(to know what is allowed and what is not you must go to MSDN). For running the script I need to be in Master(but how?, I could not fathom). I went through lots of "encountered some problem, searching for a solution" messages. On the whole it is very easy to use tool.

Governmental Cloud Interoperability on The Microsoft Cloud

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:00:00 EDT

Interesting post over at the interoperability @ Microsoft blog on viewing public government data with Windows Azure and PHP. The post outlines a functional example of a governmental cloud interoperability scenario using REST. The demo is part of Microsoft's Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) a cloud-based collection of software assets that enables publicly available government data to be easily accessible. Using open standards and application programming interfaces (API), developers and government agencies can retrieve the data programmatically for use in new and innovative online applications, or mashups.

Silverlight 3 Navigation

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 17:30:00 EDT

I got a lot of great feedback on my post Silverlight 3 Navigation: Dynamically Loaded Pages… Now MEF Powered! Dinesh Chandnani decided to do an update to this sample after looking at the feedback and talking to Nikhil Kothari and Wes Haggard from the MEF dev team. The goals for this update are:

Windows 7 Drives Desktop Virtualization

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:45:00 EDT

The fact that most organizations did not roll out Vista has given IT departments time to reflect on how they want to manage client computing. Organizations that previously went from one OS migration to the next want to get off the treadmill and get more control over their own destiny. Desktop virtualization allows them to do this by componentizing the software components of a desktop and bringing them together for a user whenever needed. This removes the bulk of the issues of application compatibility that have made past migrations so difficult and expensive. The move to Windows 7 should be the last time organizations have to do a brute force migration.

Space Based Programming in .NET

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 06:45:00 EDT

At a recent Skills Matter event in the UK Goyko Adzic presented for over an hour on Space Based programming in .Net. The slides are embedded below, but as this blog is syndicated and sometimes the slides get stripped out, you can find them here.

SQL Azure Migration Wizard

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:45:00 EDT

SQL Azure Migration Wizard helps you migrate your local SQL Server 2005 / 2008 databases into SQL Azure. The wizard walks you through the selection of your SQL objects, creates SQL scripts suitable for SQL Azure, and allows you to edit / deploy to SQL Azure. The SQL Azure Migration Wizard (SQLAzureMW) will let you identify [...]

Microsoft's George Moore Talks About Windows Azure

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 09:00:00 EDT

Check out Charles Torre talking with George Moore (21 year MS veteran) about the what is behind the billing of Azure. Watch the interview on Channel 9 here. 21 year Microsoft veteran and Software Architect George Moore is involved in defining and implementing an effective strategy for taking Windows Azure from technology preview to enterprise business [...] Related posts:

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Eval JavaScript in a Global Context

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 19:15:00 EDT

Even though it's considered bad practice, it's often handy to eval code in JavaScript. And in my case, it was simply necessary, since the JSF specification requires eval of scripts. And it's also necessary to execute those evaluated scripts in the global scope. It's not as easy as it first looks. For our first naive implementation, we'd simply used eval(src) in our first pass at the implementation.

Use Windows Azure Right Now

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:15:00 EDT

Until this week, using the Windows Azure CTP meant signing up and then waiting a couple of days for an invitation code to arrive by email. No more. You can now register for access and receive an invitation code right there on the spot. No email, no waiting, no excuses. Go register now and build something cool! (Via [...] Related posts:

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Bridging to Open Ajax

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 12:45:00 EDT

The Open Ajax Alliance is a standards organization with the mission of ensuring interoperability within Web based Ajaxified applications. One of their standards relates to intercomponent communication - the ability to subscribe and publish messages which can then be picked up by code written by other authors. Please note that if you don't have an interest in Open Ajax, this post may not be especially illuminating - I've talked about the addOnEvent function before, even recently.

Meeting the Constant Challenges of Desktop Management

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 09:30:00 EDT

Desktop management is a constant challenge for most IT or call center managers. A new update, service pack or totally new version of operating system can cause headaches for even the most experienced IT professional. The challenges with provisioning new versions of operating systems for desktops haven’t changed over the years.

Silverlight Polling Duplex Channel is NOT a Scalable Solution

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 09:00:00 EDT

This is great and the programming model for communicating with the Polling Duplex channel is brain-dead simple. It does NOT get any easier to implement push data to a RIA - not in Flash, not in AIR, and certainly not in JavaFX. The problem is that this solution doesn't scale. On the server side, for each concurrently running Silverlight application (so probably one per concurrent user), there is a full live socket being consumed that will not be relinquished until the client disconnects/closes their browser.

Live Framework Developers Get Boned

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 09:00:00 EDT

When I first read this, I was all "OMFGWTFNoMesh!?!" and exploded in front of my computer. After cleaning the bits of my exploded brain off the keyboard and looking at it again, some of it made sense. They are taking the Live Framework stuff down and theoretically coming up with a better, more in-depth, more unified API for Live. This step is long overdue because for a very, very long time developers have been confused because there is "old live framework" and then "live mesh/live framework" and then there's Azure and then there's a bunch of crap that's been labelled as part of "Live" for which there is no developer API.

OpenXava 3.1.4 Released

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 09:45:00 EDT

OpenXava 3.1.4 is a framework focused in productivity for developing business Java applications. The idea is that you write only your POJOs annotated with JPA and you get an application ready for production. With OpenXava, you only need to write your model, POJOs and Java annotations. You do not need to write the view, and the controller (for CRUD, printing, etc) is reused. And from that you'll have an application for CRUD, report generation in PDF, export to Excel, searching, sorting, validations etc. You only need to write a simple Java class, no XMLs, no JSPs and no code generation.

Rich Content with a Database Server

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 22:00:00 EDT

Enterprises are increasingly being called upon to provide a high level of user experience with compelling and interactive content. Serving enterprise content and data securely to internet / intranet has become a very common necessity and is routinely handled by web servers. Web services technology, on the other hand, addresses the application-to-application transparent interaction over the web using industry standards. Delivery of web services can also be handled by databases which are responsive to HTTP requests. In this article a simple example of serving a static web page containing dynamic content from a SQL Anywhere 11 database server is described. The web page has examples of jQuery, DOJO, as well as an embedded ADOBE flash file.

.NET RIA Services: Separate Solution Files

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:00:00 EDT

Still updating my Mix 09 Silverlight 3 + RIA Services talk with more fun stuff. This time I take up a challenge from Mr. Wildermuth. Shawn recently raised a very interesting issue with RIA Services