As mentioned in my previous post Hadoop Streaming not only supports text streaming, but it also supports Binary Streaming. As such I wanted to put together a sample that supports processing Office documents. As before the code can be downloaded from:...

As you may know Microsoft has recently announced plans for a Hadoop adoption for both Windows Server and Windows Azure . You can find out more about Hadoop and Windows Azure at Apache Hadoop-based Services for Windows Azure and Availability of Community...

This post covers the steps required to secure communication between a WCF client and a WCF data service using mutual certificate authentication. The client/service topology is depicted below: Both the client and server run on a Windows Server 2008 R2...

From the development perspective I often have to perform an analysis of a database application. More often than not this entails looking at a running system and ensuring that the application queries are behaving as expected. As such, I thought it would...

When you run the BAM data maintenance package (BAM_DM_ <activity name> ) BAM copies each partition in the BAM Primary Import database to a separate table in the BAM Archive database. You can create partitioned views in the BAM Archive database to...

It seems that several times now I have had the requirement to create a comma separated string from column values. The latest reason for doing this was to build up a list of table column names such that a view could be generated for the table. This is...

Recently I was tasked with changing our daily and Continuous Integration builds so that they would also execute our unit tests. This seemed like a straightforward task, and indeed it was. Except for one thing: every so often a build would fail because...

FSharpChart now supports binding for Stacked Charts and for modifying the Marker associated with a series. As always one can download the latest release from: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/FSharpChart-b59073f5   In previous versions of FSharpChart...

In a recent project I was using regular expressions a lot for validating string expressions such that statements like the following were true: Must be all characters Must be all alphanumeric’s and be of length 6 Must be all numeric digits (e.g. “3648...

Note : An updated version of this post can be found here . Recently I was tasked with changing our daily and Continuous Integration builds so that they would also execute our unit tests. This seemed like a straightforward task, and indeed it was. Except...

If you have been using FSharpChart you will have seen some recent activities around documentation. I am happy to say that a new code drop has been made available. This release deals with some minor bug fixes and restructures the code download, hopefully...

In this blog post I am going to walkthrough the steps required to secure a WCF service with ADFS 2.0, as well as how to call this service from a client. The aim of this article is to provide an outline of the general principals and steps, not to explain...

After further experimenting with the Kinect SDK, it became obvious what needed to come next. If you were to create an application using the Kinect SDK, you will want to be able to control the application using gestures (i.e. waving, swiping, motions to...

The Kinect for Windows SDK has finally arrived, and we couldn’t wait to get our hands on it! After downloading, installing, and actually getting a Kinect with a USB connector for our PC’s, we were good to go… Step 1 – What does the SDK give us? When we...

If you are like me and often use console applications for a variety of purposes you would have found the F# template not much use (in fact a blank code file). As such I decided to put together a more complete Project Template that I could use. The template...

Following on from my previous posts on html5 animation and reflection effects, I thought I'd put it all together and create a carousel. Firstly, I create a JavaScript pseudo class called CarouselImage. This takes an image url and draws it at a given co...

In all the previous discussions around FSharpChart, samples have been shown within F# Interactive. I wanted to spend a few moments and demonstrate how FSharpChart can be consumed within a WinForms application, and how chart properties can be modified...

With the addition of the SQL Server date and time types, I have often found myself needing to create a datetime (or datetime2) value based on the addition of a date and a time value. However, there is no built-in function for such an operation. There...

Recently I have been working a lot with the Task Parallel Libraries. In doing so, in F#,  you will quickly learn that one has to perform quite a bit of casting. As such I have found it useful to define some wrapper members that abstract these casting...

In a previous post I talked about a mechanism for Parallel Process Execution with Conditional Completion . This code was a direct translation from a C# pattern. However it is worth noting that the Command pattern is not actually necessary in functional...

In carousel and coverflow type controls, you often see a “reflection” type effect. This is normally done by transforming an image to mirror the original then applying an alpha gradient to this (i.e. progressively increasing the transparency...

As I mentioned in my previous post, Array.Parallel sort functions demonstrating a Merge Sort using Barrier , I wanted to continue the parallel sort examples with a Quicksort using the Task Parallel Libraries. F#, as do all functional languages, lend themselves...

Sometimes, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) can be tough going. Whilst things will often work straight out of the box, customisation can quickly get complicated. Equally though, the solution can sometimes turn out to be pretty simple but it is the...

As a little exercise to teach myself WPF (argue amongst yourselves about how successful I was on that point; feedback most welcome) I have written a tool call the Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) Configuration Editor. It’s purpose is to exercise complete...

In this article, I will show how to create a basic animation using JavaScript and the HTML 5 Canvas elements. The animation uses two png images (of concentric circles with transparency) that move within the constrains of the canvas to create a nice pattern...