knom's developer corner : Personal

LINQ-To-Everywhere – List of LINQ Providers

knom — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 12:23:05 GMT

This weekend I’ve built a small application, which queries the “Simpsons” seasons guide data and updates the filenames/descriptions. To do this I needed to query a CSV file. While searching for a LINQ to CSV file implementation I’ve found an interesting list of LINQ Providers provider by MVP Charlie Calvert.

LINQ to CSV

LINQ to Amazon

LINQ to Active Directory

LINQ to Bindable Sources (SyncLINQ)

LINQ to C# project

LINQ to Continuous Data (CLinq)

LINQ to CRM

LINQ To Geo - Language Integrated Query for Geospatial Data

LINQ to Excel

LINQ to Expressions (MetaLinq)

LINQ Extender (Toolkit for building LINQ Providers)

LINQ to Flickr

LINQ to Google

LINQ to Indexes (LINQ and i40)

LINQ to IQueryable (Matt Warren on Providers)

LINQ to Metaweb(freebase)

LINQ to MySQL, Oracle and PostgreSql (DbLinq)

LINQ to NCover

LINQ to Opf3

LINQ to Parallel (PLINQ)

Custom Search Providers for Internet Explorer

knom — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 16:12:00 GMT

I’m sure all of you know the search box in Internet Explorer!

You can search ANY searchable site there via pluggable search providers.

Per default some of them are installed, but you can add your own!

Here’s how to do it:

Go to the page you want to search through.
Search for “TEST”.
Copy the URL of the search result page (where TEST should be in somewhere)
Now go to the Internet Explorer Search Page and paste the URL in the rst textbox.
Choose a name and select install.
Now you have a new search provider in the search box, which will search the wanted page (and substitute TEST with your search text).

Note.. the search providers are standardized and will work in any browser, which supports the open search specification.

Note 2: Some sites are clever enough to include a search provider already!

Read here how you can solve equations, get the current weather or other thing directly in the search box.

IE 8 Searchbar – Instant Answers

knom — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 15:34:18 GMT

Now that I’m running Windows 7 I’m using the new IE 8 as well. Recently I found a cool new feature called “Instant Answers”.

Just enter some queries into the search box and you’ll get the answer in the drop-down box below the search box.

There are different possible queries:

Calculations (2+2, …)	Conversions (75 C in F, …)
Weather (with or without location)	Equations
Definitions (smile)

Upgrade TFS 2008 Workgroup Edition to Standard Edition

knom — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 19:46:33 GMT

I’ve had a little playground TFS 2008 installation for a while for use with some “pet-projects”. I used TFS 2008 Workgroup Edition for this, as this is already part of MSDN subscription package. This edition works the same as the full one, but is limited to 5 users.

Now that I needed more user accounts for a larger project I tried to upgrade to TFS 2008 Standard Edition.

This seems to be pretty easy:

1.) Open Add/Remove Programs in control panel.
2.) Select “Visual Studio 2008 Team System – Team Foundation Server” and choose “Change”.

3.) At the TFS setup, select “Upgrade” and enter the new serial number.

4.) Finished.

(Summarized from Brian Harry's Weblog)

This is great, but unfortunately the serial number boxes are disabled / grayed out on my system (and all others as well) :-)

So it’s harder than expected…

But.. thanks to a thread in the MSDN Forums I found a way to change the serial number.

All you need to do (as step 0.) is open setup.sdb in
"Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server\Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server - ENU"
and change the [Product Key] value (skip the dashes).

Voila!

WPF Day in Dublin

knom — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:56:00 GMT

Last week I was in Dublin doing two sessions on WPF for Microsoft Ireland.

They did a "Client-UI Day", where they featured WPF and Silverlight.

The first session was given by the Irish Developer Evangelist Ronan Geraghty, who did an introduction to the Microsoft Client Platform, showing the differences between AJAX, Silverlight, WPF and when to use what.

Next I did a WPF for beginners session, where I showed all the details of XAML, Databinding, Styles, Templates, etc...

Afterwards my colleague Martha Rother from Ireland did a session on Silverlight.

Last but not least I showed how to leverage WPF and Composite WPF Guidance ("Prism") to build business applications.

Overall a really nice event, with around 80 attendees and a lot of interesting ideas and feedback on the Microsoft Client Continuum.

If you're interested in my slides on WPF Introduction and Composite WPF, find them here:

WPF Sessions.zip

Going home from Ireland I took two flights via London.. What a bad choice.. I drove to Dublin Airport at 6:30 am, arriving in Vienna at 5pm :-) Almost half a day of traveling and waiting...

Silverlight 2.0 Upgrade Experience

knom — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 14:33:28 GMT

Silverlight 2.0 was released earlier this day.

If you browse to http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/ and choose "Install", you will get this nice page (only if Silverlight Pre-RTW is installed on your machine).

Thats cool! The installed runtime version is analyzed and upgrade tips are shown :-)

A Must Have Tool - VS 2008 Snippet Designer

knom — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:23:25 GMT

Mathew Manela from the Online Tools Group at Microsoft has written a really cool tool, which adds a feature missing for a long time in Visual Studio: Code Snippet Creation.

The tool, which is available at http://www.codeplex.com/SnippetDesigner allows a bunch of functionality for working with custom snippets.

Add a new .SNIPPET file via File-New-File--Code Snippet File
Export existing code into a snippet:
Simply right click on the selected code and press "Export as Snippet".
Edit snippets (set placeholders, etc..)
The editor is opened after exporting something.
Additionally you can later on open .snippet files out of the "Snippet Explorer" (see below).
The Snippet Explorer
Go to "View - Other Windows - Snippet Explorer" to search for existing snippets.

The snippets you build are stored under the path %USERPROFILE%\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Code Snippets\Visual C#\My Code Snippets.

You can either insert them via the context menu "Insert Code Snippet"
(Ctrl+K-X) or you can assign a short-phrase (shortcut).

With the shortcut you just need to type e.g. prop<tab><tab> to insert a property code snippet.

You can set the shortcut (and other things as well) in the property window of the snippet editor.

On the road - The .NET Beginners Road Show

knom — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:41:31 GMT

From September 16th to 25th I'll be on the road with the .NET Beginners Road Show together with my colleague Mario.

Our goal is to target newcomers to .NET and show them, how to implement a simple solution over the three tiers.

Target audience are VB6 guys, as well as Java, C++ or Delphi people.

As the schedule is pretty tight, we expect the attendees to know the principles of object oriented programming.

Andreas has produced a series of webcasts, called "Get the basics", which introduce OOP in .NET for those who don't know (so they can also attend).

The videos are 15 minutes each (at a maximum) and are going to be published before the event (obviously :-)).

The roadshow stops in Dornbirn, Innsbruck, Salzburg, Linz, Graz and Wien.

So pretty much everywhere over Austria.

It's going to be a tough week travelling around for us two - as we have events every day and have to move on to the next stop in the evening ;-)

The attendee fee is 85 € for a one day power event full of demos (and food as well *ggg*).

Visit http://www.microsoft.com/austria/msdn/netstartups/ for more informations - and don't forget to register soon, as the venues have only restricted seats available.

We're going to Las Vegas

knom — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 12:19:36 GMT

As MiX conference currently takes place here - I travelled "over" to Las Vegas. 15h of flight! That's really hard.

We departed at 10:50am in Vienna with Austrian Airlines towards Washington. Although economy class was as narrow as always we had nevertheless a lot of fun. They had small screens, where we could watch a lot of cool movies (like Disney's Pocahontas ;-)) as well as get ourselves ready for Las Vegas by playing Roulette (unfortunately without real money).

I tried hard not to get asleep! So I spend my time with watching movies, reading Harry Potter (The order of the phoenix) and eating "delicious" food served by the stewardesses. Every now and then I had to walk around in the narrow airplane, otherwise my feet would have fallen off...

(no comments..)

Finally we arrived.. no.. not in Las Vegas, but in Washington! After getting out of the aircraft we had to wait at the immigration counters to get our temp-immigration sheet. There was a long queue in front of the counter, which didn't get any shorter (although we were already waiting half an hour).

Thank god they were playing a nice ad-movie about the beauty of America ;-)

Finally an immigration officer told the waiting crowd, that their computers had hang up (I removed all "Microsoft" labeled items on my backbag and jacket in a hurry)..

So we had to wait and wait.. and watch the beautiful ad, about people talking of equal chances mixed with beautiful scenes of canions...

After what seemed like 100 repeats of the movie the computers were fixed again and we were finally allowed to immigrate.

Time to our connection flight was rather short, so we hurried to the boarding-gate, where we got into the airplane. Big mistake: The airline (TED) had nearly no meals (only pre-built snack boxes with chips,.. for lots of money..). So we were starving for the next 5 hours until we finally arrived in LAS VEGAS!!

I have to say Las Vegas is really nice! Especially the Venetian Hotel, where the MiX conference takes place. Everything here is styled like in Venice. They even have a small canal "grande" with condolas.

But will MiX be worthwhile 15 hard hours of travel.. ?! Let's see!

MiX 2008 - I'm coming!!

knom — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 18:43:02 GMT

Hurrah! This year I'm allowed to attend MiX conference in Las Vegas! And I'm really excited!

I'm sure it will be a week of interesting sessions about Silverlight, Expression and other Web / UX Dev. topics!

You can also expect some interesting announcements around these topics.. :-)

So stay tuned to the news around MiX 08!

According to my weather sidebar gadget the temperature in Las Vegas will rise up until 22°C - so it's going to be a *hot week*!

Also it's my first time in Las Vegas, so I'm really curious seeing all the places I've only seen in lots of movies.

Are male Tech-Geeks more corpulent?!

knom — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:08:19 GMT

What made me think about this topic, was a combobox of shirt-sizes I came across during my speaker registration for TechEd 2007 in Barcelona, last November.

Why are there T-Shirts in sizes until X-X-X-X-X (5!) L ??

Well.. one possible reason: all shirts were smaller than usual. It turned out XL fitted me perfectly (while it is normally not my size).

Funny VB-LINQ MSDN Manual

knom — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 19:43:28 GMT

While browsing around in the MSDN library, I stopped at a funny page about LINQ in VB 9 (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms364068(vs.80).aspx)

It's an eyecatcher, isn't it - but at least they're really explicit in their samples ;-)

MSDN Subscription - Restrict DVD delivery language

knom — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 17:10:26 GMT

If you have an MSDN subscription, I suppose you get a lot of DVDs in different languages like Italian, German, Swedish, etc... every month.

Je ne parle pas français? - Non parlo italiano? - No hablo español?

Good news for all Europeans: You can restrict the languages of DVDs delivered to you!

1.) Go to https://microsoft.eu.subservices.com/msdn/default.aspx

2.) Login with your Firstname / Lastname, Email & Subscriber-ID as printed on your MSDN card.

3.) Select "Subscription Information"

4.) Select "Change your Media/Language Type".

5.) Select the language of your choice:

And no more hours of throwing away useless DVD - PLUS: you've helped reducing the wastage.

If you surprisingly need a language later on: No need to be confused - you can download it from the MSDN site anyway.

Microsoft Popfly is Public

knom — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 17:07:24 GMT

For some time now Popfly has been around as a private alpha. Now it has been opened to public as a beta version of it!
So what is Popfly?! Popfly is a Web 2.0 application allowing consumers (and developers *gg*) to do a lot of cool things.

One part is the Webpage editor, which you can use to build webpages and host them on Popfly - so if you want to build a private website, just use popfly:

The other part, which is even more interesting in my opinion is the Popfly Mashup Builder.

With the Mashup Builder you can create own little applications with the metaphor of building blocks.

Choose a block out of the toolbox and drag it onto the design surface. Each block can hav input values and output values. You can then connect these input and output values to a pipeline of blocks. The exact mapping of input parameters can be done with in a configuration view.

At the end of each pipe there should be same output-block, which generates visuals. Then you can preview your mashup.

For those interested in more development-oriented tasks: Everything is established in background by the use of JavaScript.
So if you want to build more complex mashups, you can tune the code in the so called "Advanced View":

Another option is to build custom blocks, which is also done with JavaScript and a custom XML file for the specification of the input and output parameters.

Later you can share "Mash Out" your application, which can then be embedded into blogs (see upper left corner of my blog) or sidebar gadgets for instance.

By the way: Popfly was developed in Silverlight 1.0!!

So there's lot of fun there, not just for consumers!

I'll soon publish another article on popfly..

My first contact with the Windows Vista Package

knom — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 13:45:50 GMT

Although I've installed the Vista Beta on my first day at Microsoft and upgraded it continuously up to RTM, it took me until today (the official start of Vista sale) to get a real package into my hands! (the bad news.. it doesn't belong to me..)

Here it is...

Today I was sitting in our local cafeteria, when the local Vista BG-lead passed by heading to ITnT exhibition with some "real-world" Vista packages.

I just had the time to play around a little bit with the package and make some fotos. I think it looks really cool, but it's not that easy to open it, if you don't know how.. maybe some kind of theft protection :-)

Then the packages was gone again.. leaving me with the unspectacular green MSDN subscription version of Vista I have.. :-(