Love that ASP.NET and SQL Server : .NET

Free eLearning from Developer eLearning on MSDN

benmiller — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 18:57:00 GMT

Check this out. http://msdn.microsoft.com/elearning/

First course is about Windows Server : Taking Advantage of 64-Bit Computing. This is your opportunity to take advantage of some Free Developer learning that is free and available 24/7. On that page there is a description of the courses and best of all, YOU COULD WIN SOME COOL PRIZES :-). Rules for the sweepstakes are on the site through a link.

Grand Prize Sony 50" Plasma WEGA High Definition TV ultimate home theater package
2nd Prize Nikon D70 SLR Digital Camera package
3rd Prize Bose Acoustic Wave 5-CD Music System
4th Prize Bose Acoustic Noise Cancelling Headphones

Now how is that for some cool prizes. Get out there now and take a course. This learning will cover some key new technologies in Visual Studio 2005. There will be more courses planned in the near future, but for now, go get involved. You deserve it.

Have a great day and go see the site for details.

MSDN Smart Client Developer Center REBOOTED:

benmiller — Sat, 04 Dec 2004 10:16:00 GMT

Check out this entry from Jonathan Wells about the MSDN Smart Client Developer Center

This is the link http://blogs.msdn.com/onoj/archive/2004/12/03/274799.aspx

From the site 'The goal of the site is to help you understand smart clients, what they are, when they are most appropriate, and most importantly, the best and most efficient way to construct them.'

This is a great resource for anyone doing Smart Client development.

Installing VS 2005 Beta 1 Refresh with Team Server

benmiller — Sat, 30 Oct 2004 04:35:00 GMT

I spent the better part of my day a couple of days ago helping out someone having problems installing Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 Refresh with Team System.

It was such an experience that I decided to blog about it.

I began with 2 VPC images (cause I found out that you could install it on 2 machines and could not install it on 1) with Windows Server 2003 on them. The first thing I recommend is to become familiar with the Installation Roadmap that is on the DVD’s. This illustrates that you need a DB Server (for the DB Tier) and a Application Box (for App Tier, and Client Tier). On the DB Tier machine (VPC) I created a domain controller and Active Directory. I allowed the installer to create a DNS server so that I could have name resolution between the 2 VPC’s. I then added the Server Role of Application Server (IIS and ASP.NET Enabled). I then installed SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 that came with the VS 2005 Beta 1 Refresh DVD, and configured it as the DEFAULT instance (as this is required for this version of TS).

Then I turned to the other VPC. I joined it to the domain I just created and then added the Server Role of App Server (IIS and ASP.NET but NOT Frontpage Server Extensions as it will break the install). Then created a User that is a domain account and gave it admin rights. This will be used for the Application Pool identity. Then the key was to install the components that were on the list of components to install from the Roadmap. (included .NET Framework 2.0, Sharepoint Services 2.0 – link is in the Roadmap, and ADAM.)

These are the short steps, but the key is to follow the Roadmap and I highlighted the main points that cannot be missed or you will not succeed in installing it (from my experience).

1. DB Server must be installed as the Default Instance.

2. App Server Role on AppTier cannot have FrontPage Server Extensions enabled.

3. IIS Installed before the SQL 2005 Beta 2 is installed on the DBTier.

What you will see that may alarm you when you install is when you go to install Team Server on the App Tier is that the install will hang installing the newbanner.gif file and it will continue to bring the blue bar across as it is installing. There will be no visual indication that it is connecting to the DB Tier to create databases, etc. but that is what it is doing. I found out this by when I installed the Database Server as a named instance, it would continue to go after the newbanner.gif and then it would fail with a 26205 and a 26201 and a 26204 error. In the event logs, I found that it indicated that it could not connect to the server (db). When I changed the DB Tier to be a default instance of SQL, then it succeeded (and it took a while, so be patient).

Hope this helps people out there that may run into problems. I did this on VPC using Virtual Server 2005 on 1 box with 2 VPC’s each with 256 MB RAM. More would have been better, but it worked at least.

Have a great one.

Brad Abrams talk at the San Jose dotNet User Group...

benmiller — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 11:24:00 GMT

I attended the San Jose dotnet User Group and listened to Brad talk about the CLR. It was a FANTASTIC talk and was very informative.

We talked about the architecture of the CLR and where the BCL’s sit (that is what Brad worked on is the BCL’s). He just gave a great talk.

One thing that I thought was interesting is that I actually knew what a Singleton was and how it was defined as a Pattern. I was pretty much amazed that I understood. We had a talk in the SLC DotNet User Group about that and Aaron Zupancic (don’t know if Aaron has a blog) gave a great talk on Patterns in development. Singleton happened to be one of them. Brad called it the “double check lock”.

Anyone who does not currently attend a User Group, should hop onto INETA’s website and find the local one and get involved. It is a great time and you even learn things.

Great job Brad.

Visual C# Express application ScreenSaver

benmiller — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 01:16:00 GMT

Just wanted to post my successes on working on the Visual C# Express project. I modified a ScreenSaver program that came from the template that is installed with Visual C# Express. It has an RSS Feed that gets loaded from a application setting in the .config file pointing to a main feed of an RSS (but could just as well point to the individual's RSS Feed.

The thing that I modified on it was to use the RegEx libraries to remove the HTML tags and the   stuff so that when you saw the description on the screen, that you did not see tags, but just text.

I was talking to Brad Abrams about the project and how it was displaying the tags and I thought, well, why don't we just remove it so it would just show the text. So I set out to do just that.

I have completed the project, thanks to some Regular Expressions from RegExLib.com. Great stuff there. If anyone wants the finished project, let me know and I will post it up here or somewhere you can get to.

I have definitely decided that I am jumping in now and doing more Whidbey stuff so that I can catch up with my MVP's.

More to come from BorCon as we still have 1 more full day.

PICT to JPG image format

benmiller — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 09:50:00 GMT

I encountered another interesting question. This individual is using an application that has PICT formatted pictures stored in a database Image field. This data is then brought out of the database and put in an image control. The problem is that this app that is being written cannot use PICT images and therefore PICT needs to be able to be converted programmatically. I found that there are many apps including the ones at 2jpeg.com but they are not components that can be used inside code. It is a console application (command line app) that can run without a UI but is an app that must be launced.

I found LeadTools products, but then found out that the .NET Vector Imaging product was 2000.00. So that puts it out of reach for someone developing an app that is for one customer or friend or whatever.

I was a little disappointed on how little conversion code there was for things like this as we get more standardized on coding techniques, etc. there is still a gap in the imaging front between platforms (PICT = Mac, JPG = Windows, etc.)

Just an interesting day here at BorCon.

How do I change the value in an XsltArgumentList

benmiller — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 09:44:00 GMT

I encountered a customer today with a question. Remember I am at BorCon this week.

The question was around the XsltTransform and using parameters. So I quickly looked up the object and the method of Tranform and found that indeed I could pass parameters in an XsltArgumentList. Now the question was this. If I am using the same xslt and the same parameters (obviously), but want to just change the value of the parameter for another run, how do I do this?

So I looked up the XsltArgumentList and found that there is an AddParam, and a GetParam, and a RemoveParam, but there no reference to an indexer, or anything that would allow me to change the value of the parameter without doing a RemoveParam and an AddParam. Then there is the curious GetParam and it returning an Object instead of a type of like say XsltArgument so that you can just change the value or the namespace without removing and re-adding with a new value.

Are there any takers? I could not find anything on it and it would be great to learn a little more about a space that I have little experience in.

Christian Weyers WsContractFirst add-in

benmiller — Tue, 24 Aug 2004 03:45:00 GMT

I just downloaded Christian Weyer’s WsContractFirst Visual Studio Add-In. I wanted to try it because I want to bind the results of the webservices I call to a DataGrid or another databind-able control. This worked like a champ. On the above site it explains what the tool does, but I wanted to tell Christian that it was a very nice thing to have. Making the public fields into Properties is a great time saver as I would have had to do it by hand.

Integration with Web Services will be more fun now.

Imaging in .NET

benmiller — Tue, 27 Jul 2004 09:49:00 GMT

I was playing around with an ASP project and used the ASPImage from serverobjects.com to do some stuff in ASP to resize and change DPI, etc.

But I wanted to do this in ASP.NET so that I could mass change the image sizes and create thumbnails (sort of). So I did a google search of [image resize .net] and I got some interesting links and some were good and others were not. I found this link on the second page to resize images and I tweaked it to make them the size I wanted to and to keep proportions correct. I was surprised how easy it was to get it to generate thumbnails for me.

I then went after changing the DPI of the image to 72. By default, I found that the Framework uses 96 dpi for it’s images and that if I used the System.Drawing.Image.SetResolution(int, int) that I could change it from 96 to 72. One thing I found that I could not change the original graphics DPI, I had to copy that image into the new graphic at that dpi. It worked and I was very happy to learn this. Not earth shattering, but a new one for me.

Happy Imaging…