I nstant M essage, U ser A ssistance, B iz T alk S erver. So it’s closing out on the end of the day and for whatever reason my brain activity kicks up a notch. This happens every day between 5-7 and good or bad, ideas happen. This one could bomb, but…(read more)
I nstant M essage, U ser A ssistance, B iz T alk S erver. So it’s closing out on the end of the day and for whatever reason my brain activity kicks up a notch. This happens every day between 5-7 and good or bad, ideas happen. This one could bomb, but…(read more)
Several people have begun to encounter a problem compiling projects after installing
BizTalk Server 2004 SP2. Fortunately this problem has been encountered before
and there is a Windows HotFix which solves it. Despite the name, this fix will
work for SP2 just as well as SP1. You
can find it here.
Signing Assemblies
In Visual Studio 2003, you had no way to create strong name keys and you were forced to use a command line utility (SN.exe). Microsoft simply assumed that creating strong names is a relatively infrequent operation, done once per company, and it saw no need to have that functionality in Visual Studio. However, in […]
We have been waiting for this a few years now. W3C has announced the release of eight (8) Recommendations, representing some eight years of work by members of the W3C XSL Working Group and XML Query Working Group, with widespread implementation experience…(read more)
There was an email thread going around the NZ .NET mailing list yesterday asking whether an enterprise winforms developer should be looking at doing a new development of their LOB application in WPF or if it is still a little early.
Chuck suggested that “For most mainstream line of Business applications Microsoft still recommends using Windows Forms.”
He goes on to say that “Until there is a 100% superset of WPF controls to COM AND Winform controls you are looking at the answer being: Use the best technology and integrate them together. For the time being that is almost certainly hosting your application Windows forms and doing the integration to WPF through WPF controls and elementhost”.
I have a slightly different take on this…
Although we are still at the mid stage of the process of porting all the controls and releasing the final cut of our WPF design surfaces (January CTP of VS “Orcas”, Blend) some companies have chosen to build entirely in WPF for new applications. Remember that the .NET 3.0 platform is now released and it is also deployed by default in Windows Vista.
If you have complete control to build from scratch, you can deal with the bleeding edge and your target audience can run .NET 3.0 then absolutely build a true “next generation WPF application” like those at http://www.thirteen23.com. Kevin’s Bag-o-Tricks adds to the WPF controls shipped out of the box and includes a number of components (content slide, search visualisation) that were used in the New York Times reader application.
I see also today that Xceed has released a FREE version 1.0 of their DataGrid component for WPF (if you have .NET 3.0 installed you can try it here). This is a great example of the ISV/ component ecosystem shipping tools that make life easier for industry developers.
There is absolutely a place for new applications completely written in WPF and right now it is front and centre! New York Times Reader, Yahoo’s new IM client and I know we will be seeing many more arriving throughout 2007.
The key difference being that in this brave new world we are separating the roles of a designer and a developer but alowing them to work together on the same code base (although a person can of course still do both roles). Testament to this is probably Lee from Frog design that built the entire UI for the Yahoo IM client without any prior knowledge of coding in .NET. Lee is sharing his experiences with other “designers” like him that are looking at this technology on his new tutorial site http://contentpresenter.com.
IMO .NET developers that are wanting to get a grasp on this technology should read Code + Markup (which I have read and is heavily developer focused) or the recently released WPF Unleashed by Adam Nathan (software design engineer at Microsoft).
My opinion not Microsoft’s 🙂
[Via Angus Logan] Nintex, famous for their workflow solutions for SharePoint 2003, announced Nintex Workflow 2007. If the screenshots are for real: very impressive!
Every once in a while you bump into a new feature in the 2007 Microsoft Office System and you think “hey! this is really cool!”. This happened to me last week when I was playing around with InfoPath 2007. To be able to share with you my little aha erlibnis (credit for this term goes to my former math teacher), let’s assume you’ve got following InfoPath form: the U2U Course Order form. A very basic form with Customer, Email, Course and Date fields, and a repeating table with student name and email fields.
You probably know that if you publish an InfoPath form to a SharePoint document library (or content type), the Publishing Wizard will ask you which columns you would like to make available in the SharePoint document library. InfoPath will allow you to pick a field from your InfoPath form which will become a column in the document library, so the data of the filled out InfoPath form will be replicated in the document library automatically.
Let’s select for example the Customer field, from the InfoPath fields list; the Column name will be filled out automatically. The new cool InfoPath/SharePoint 2007 feature is displayed at the bottom of the dialog window: “Allow users to edit data in this field by using a datasheet or properties page”. If you select this checkbox, users will be able to edit the value of the Customer column in the SharePoint properties page (so without opening InfoPath), and that updated value will be stored in the InfoPath file! It’s magic! 🙂 I repeated this step for Email and Course fields, and finished the Publishing Wizard. Then I filled out the InfoPath form in the InfoPath client application:
The filled out data is of course replicated in the columns of the SharePoint document library. Now let’s click Edit Properties in the document’s dropdown menu (aka ECB).
Because I selected that the Customer, Email and Course fields could be edited in the properties page, you can change them and the values in the filled out InfoPath form (the XML file) are updated too!
On the same morning I read that there’s a pending “drought” of architects who really “get” SOA and can sell it to the business, I see a great SOA reading list from Loosely Coupled Thinking. I’ve also spent a bit of time recently
re-reading some of the old MS Architect Journal issues(issue 2, and
issue 8 […]
Mick Badran tagged me. I’ve been procrastinating doing this, but i’m scared that i might bring an evil pox on myself if i break the sacred chain…or some such hokey pokey.
The idea is that i reveal 5 things about myself and then tag 5 other people. I wonder if the person that devised this scheme realises that with that level of exponential growth the whole blogosphere will be tagged and then people will be forced to retag people and then those people will have to find 5 more things to blog about and then tag 5 more people who have already been tagged and eventually it leads to a HIGH CPU state where the entire blogosphere maxs out the CPU thread pool on this “taggingphenomonon” eventually taking out large sections of the interwebs as blogs just become echo chambers of 5 more things that people don’t care about and thenthe Time Magazine’s person of the Year for 2006 becomes”The idiot whodestroyed the internet with his blathering and ended global civilisation in 2007″.
Anyway, here are my 5 things you don’t know about me.
The five people i’m tagging are:
Ah…no one. Everyone i know has already been tagged. I looks like I’m going to be a terminating node.