Carter Maslan : Technical

Queue-up the DJ with ASP.NET 2.0 Control for Amazon Web Service

jcmaslan — Sun, 21 May 2006 09:37:00 GMT

We had guests queue up their favorite dance music for our DJ in advance of a party we hosted last month. The party site used this ASP.NET 2.0 control to call the Amazon E-Commerce Web Service to search for music and bind the selected items to a database table recording everyone's selections.

It's a hack to put a static database schema in the control, and you'll have to bind to your own MusicTableAdapter ; but here's the source for the control if you want to use it for something similar. It's based on the Amazon code sample.

Add the control to your page with a line like:
<uc1:AmazonItemSearchControl ID="AmazonItemSearchControl1" SubscriptionID="YOURIDHERE" runat="server" EnableTheming="true" />

The yellow "music cart" that floats on the right was styled with:
#musicCart
{
z-index: 2;
position: absolute;
right:1cm;
top:3cm;
background-color:Yellow;
width: 7cm;
padding: 10px;
border: red 2px dashed;
}

Mimi is on the Map

jcmaslan — Thu, 11 May 2006 13:13:00 GMT

My therapist wife Mimi is literally my exact opposite on the Myers-Briggs personality type test. I think one of the reasons she’s so good at what she does is that she’s very grounded – results-oriented with a pragmatic assessment and prioritization of things needing immediate attention. She completely understands my late nights working towards a critical deadline. But she’s amazed (not in a flattering way) when I stay up late “playing” with software… like tonight.

I set out post a rudimentary web site with Mimi’s basic information. I did that, but then got lost in experimenting with Windows Live Local Beta for Mimi's office location page. How do you style a Windows Live map control? How do you create custom pushpins? In the absence of bird’s-eye coverage, wouldn’t it be nice to have a street level view of Mimi’s office? etc... So now, an otherwise mundane web site design has a fun map control that, for IE browsers at least, lets you pan, zoom, and hover on pushpins for street level photos - all in-place on the page:

Since this is a simple common scenario, I'm pasting the code I assembled from the various programming resources on the Web for Windows Live Local:

Also, thanks to Omar for his recommendation of Server Intellect for ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005 web hosting.

What's new in Avalon with the March CTP

jcmaslan — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 06:27:00 GMT

Today, Karsten published an MSDN article Introducing the March 2005 CTP: What's New in "Avalon" - it includes code samples that highlight some of the changes in this build of Avalon.

Bay Area Traffic for your Smartphone (or Duct-Taping the Web)

jcmaslan — Sun, 30 Jan 2005 19:09:00 GMT

At Inktomi, we used to joke that cookies were the “duct tape” of the Internet.

That was before XML Web Services; but even now, this Smartphone 2003 bay area traffic application uses .NET Compact Framework and XML Web Services as a kind of “super duct tape” to make it easy for me to get drive times from my Audiovox 5600 (BTW, the best consumer purchase I’ve made in years). My job hasn’t enabled me to code in years, so the fact that I can create personal glue-ware for my phone - so easily that I view it as a minor customization to a consumer purchase - is truly a testament to platform advances.

Unfortunately, www.511.org does not yet provide a WSDL interface, so please do as I did and contact 511.org requesting that they do. Until then, this ASP.NET Web Service screen scrapes www.511.org to get drive times. Since there’s no easy way to know 511’s origin intersection codes, the argument to the web service is simply the URL you see when you lookup a route on their web site (this URL for example).

Use Visual Studio 2005 (codename “Whidbey”) beta 1 refresh to customize the source code for this project. It uses this OpenNETCF.org implementation of BackgroundWorker. Here’s the ASP.NET source code for the web service, here’s .NET Compact Framework source code for Form1.cs and Form2.cs. Sample screen shots:

(thanks to Ben Riga for pointing me to ActiveSync Remote Display to take Smartphone screenshots)

Also, based on comments in Scoble’s prior posting on the WeatherByZip application, know that you can point your phone’s web browser to the CAB file to install it over the air.

New Technical Evangelist Position - Whidbey and WinFX

jcmaslan — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 08:14:00 GMT

I'm looking for an outstanding Technical Evangelist to join our team (this new job posting) Since our career site falls short on text formatting, here's a somewhat easier-to-read version of the same:

Technical Evangelist

Do you love helping companies change their business with agenda-setting uses of software? Are you a voracious learner, devouring new technologies and industry trends with an unabashedly geeky enthusiasm? Can you quickly digest your learnings into pragmatic, succinct suggestions that help CxO decision makers meet their particular business objectives? If so, join our team to evangelize Whidbey and WinFX as part of the Developer and Platform Evangelism Division.

You’ll work with leading companies and the latest technologies to identify, develop, and drive strategic engagements that demonstrate the business value of key Microsoft platform technologies. You’ll be responsible for delivering:

Early, high-impact customer wins that demonstrate the value of building solutions using our latest platform capabilities
Compelling demos, presentations, and case studies that prepare field evangelists to create their own customer successes
Clear implementation guidance for top-of-mind scenarios
Critical feedback that helps product teams improve our platform
Community engagement (e.g. blogs, webcasts, videos, events, newsletters) that build awareness and excitement

From a day-to-day work perspective, you’ll:

Focus on opportunities that influence an industry, value chain or ecosystem
Qualify and select engagements that can execute quickly and set an agenda for the industry
Collaborate with product teams, architect evangelists, and field sales to flesh out prescriptive guidance for technical decision makers
Leverage resources across Microsoft’s commercial sector teams, evangelism teams, product teams, and account teams to execute quickly and effectively
Go deep to resolve technical problems and how-to questions experienced in early engagements

To be successful, you’ll need the following skills:

Solid technical background and development experience on the Windows platform
Ability to grasp quickly strategic customer/partner business objectives and to articulate an engagement plan that addresses these objectives.
Methodical approach with good organizational skills to manage multiple opportunities and projects concurrently.
Excellent oral and written communication and listening skills.
A blend of curiosity, creativity, persistence, commitment, passion and optimism

.NET Compact Framework 2.0 in 4 minutes

jcmaslan — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 04:23:00 GMT

This a bit unfair. Craig Neable was asked to sit down in front of a camera and talk extemporaneously about his favorite things about .NET Compact Framework 2.0 for an internal training video. Now I'm posting that video publicly just because I liked listening to it and thought you might too. It's only fair, since I did the same to Thomas Lewis yesterday ;)

ASP.NET 2.0 in 10 minutes

jcmaslan — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 22:28:00 GMT

Watch Thomas Lewis, Technical Evangelist for ASP.NET 2.0, give you his top-of-mind perspective on salient features of ASP.NET 2.0 in this 10 minute video.

Breaking Changes Fx 1.1 -> "Whidbey" beta 1

jcmaslan — Thu, 01 Jul 2004 21:52:00 GMT

I get asked frequently about .NET Framework compatibility (e.g. “will my Fx v1.1 app run on Whidbey?” or “will my Whidbey app run on Longhorn?”

While the goal is full backward compatibility, BradA points to the compatibility issues in his post today.

"Chalk-talk" on WSE 2.0

jcmaslan — Sat, 26 Jun 2004 02:33:00 GMT

This video is an old-school chalk-talk on WSE 2.0; it's a quick overview of how easy it is to add WS-Security headers to your Web Services.

Two Regional Directors describe the WSE proxy class that takes care of encoding authentication credentials. Good pointers to related info too.

Jonathan's Squarified Treemaps with XAML and C#

jcmaslan — Tue, 25 May 2004 02:58:00 GMT

I'm digging out from a 10-day-vacation-without-connectivity inbox, and just saw great work by Jonathan Hodgson that Chris Sells mentioned last week. Data visualization is going to be huge!

Great Overview of Indigo Architecture & Programming

jcmaslan — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 21:24:00 GMT

The Longhorn Indigo episode of the .NET Show provides a great overview of Indigo’s

1) architectural motivations / principles (John Shewchuk)

2) programming model (Steve Swartz)

Deploying applications with email?!

jcmaslan — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 23:29:00 GMT

Regarding the Commercial Real Estate Longhorn demo, Joseph asked in email,

How can the one-click install feature possibly be secure when a one click install application is e-mail? You are allowing someone else’s code to run on your machine. What is preventing malicious code from being executed, your demo did not touch on this at all.

This demo was ambiguous about what exactly got installed when; I hedged on whether A) the base application was already installed and we were simply retrieving the updates needed to support the attached document, or B) whether the whole application was being installed from that attached document.

Option A requires that attached document use ClickOnce APIs to retrieve the required updates upon being opened. That’s definitely possible.

Option B, at least at this point, requires that the email instead point to your application’s ClickOnce Deployment Manifest that in turn points to a Application Manifest that installs your application. It’s still unclear whether Avalon will provide a generic document container that can deploy code based on a remote URI embedded in that document.

In either case, I’m relying on Code Access Security (CAS) to make things safe. There’s a good overview in Steve Hiskey’s Building Secure Client Applications in Windows "Longhorn". Jamie Cool also explains ClickOnce in Introducing ClickOnce: The New Web Based Application Deployment for Windows Forms and “Avalon”. Though in recent conversations, the scope of the SEE (Secure Execution Environment) is still a bit unclear, you might be interested in a good discussion on the definition of the SEE.

Indigo, Biztalk, and Longhorn - how they play together

jcmaslan — Fri, 16 Jan 2004 19:13:00 GMT

The data exchanges in the Longhorn demo for Commercial Real Estate prompted questions about the way Biztalk, Indigo, and Longhorn work together.

Scott Woodgate's PDC session DAT420: BizTalk Server 2004 with SQL Server “Yukon” DTS and “Indigo” helps clarify (ppt here). Biztalk will use Indigo as a Biztalk transport for secure, reliable, transacted services. The Longhorn client will also use Indigo, so you'll have an easy way to connect roaming clients into business processes.

Longhorn PDC Materials

jcmaslan — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 18:20:00 GMT

Want an outline of Longhorn-related information from PDC03? This makes a good quick study guide: http://msdn.microsoft.com/longhorn/pdcmaterials/default.aspx