|
|
Front Page News
-
|
Silverlight 3 will soon be released. And to properly celebrate the excitement of its release, ObjectSharp is teaming up with Microsoft to present an action-packed first look at the UX3 platform, live from the Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto. As one of the first companies to be featured on Microsoft’s Silverlight gallery, our consultants will share with you their deep knowledge of the next generation of tools. Whether you are a designer, developer, or purely a marketing geek, you will not want to miss this blockbuster event. You will see feature-rich demonstrations of Silverlight, Expression Blend, SketchFlow, and Windows 7 touch technology. You will also see how these tools can be used to dazzle your customers and gain attention for your brand. For Developers and Designers: See in-depth demonstrations of Silverlight...
|
-
|
On June 17, 2009 , I will have my first talk at Toronto SharePoint User Group . The topic of the presentation is " Using SharePoint for Public Facing Websites ". This presentation will cover (or attempt to cover) the best practices for building public facing websites using SharePoint, as well "gotchas" that I have came across working with SharePoint over the years. If interested, please come along… Toronto SharePoint User Group usually meets 2 Bloor Street West, 12th Floor, Toronto (Bloor-Yonge subway station). Attendees tend to arrive at 6pm, grab a bite and socialize, meeting starts at 6:30 with Q&A, and the presentation starts by 7pm. The presentation wraps at about 8:20 or 8:30 and we end with prizes for the last 10pm. Some people get together for a beer after the meeting, but it's optional… Please RSVP to Susie Ibbotson at sibbotson@nonlinear.ca if you're coming, in order to make...
|
-
|
You don’t want to miss this. It’s going to be great. July 9th 2009 at the Scotia Bank Theatre...
|
-
|
Found this out just this past week. What a great tip. Thanks Colin Bowern by way of Buck Hodges Have you ever wanted to check something in without kicking off the CI build? All you have to do is put ***NO_CI*** in the check in comment. Now I will never forget....
|
-
|
I just finished upgrading Vista to win7 RC1 on my work laptop. Everything went smoothly right up until I got to work this morning and tried to use VMWare Workstation, which booted up without issue, but the network wasn’t working. “The network bridge on device VMnet0 is not running” and “VMNet0: Overlapped I/O operation is in progress which failed to connect” were the messages I was getting. The problem was that thewin7 upgrade failed to add the VMWare Bridge Protocol back to my network card. You could probably add this manually, but I just did a repair from my original msi and a reboot later I was up and running....
|
-
|
This is a third post of the blog post series on building public-facing websites using SharePoint 2007. The first part was dedicated to the planning building public-facing websites using SharePoint 2007 . The second part was dedicated to custom branding and development in SharePoint. Plan SharePoint search: performance and sizing Here is an excellent post on planning performance and sizing for SharePoint search: http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2006/12/01/perf-and-sizing-data-from-msw-enterprise-search.aspx Customize search box To customize search box in SharePoint: Search for PlaceHolderSearchArea in the code Change Visible property of PlaceHolderSearchArea section to False: visible="false" Add Search Box web part To hide search scope drop down, add <DropDownModeEx xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:SearchBoxEx">HideScopeDD</DropDownModeEx> tag to the Search Box web part section...
|
-
|
A tiny bug in Service Pack 2 of MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 has been discovered recently. Installing SP2 changes a product expiration date and sets your SharePoint install to 180-day trial. This expiration date bug should not affect the normal function of SharePoint, at least until the expiration date passes. After 180-day trial expires, customer's data, configuration or application code will still not be affected, but will render SharePoint inaccessible for end-users. Microsoft promised a hotfix for this bug within the next 48 hours or so (KB971620). Meanwhile, you can easily fix this problem by re-entering your license key: Open SharePoint Central Administration Go to Operations Under Upgrade and Migration section, click on Convert license type Type in your license key and hit Enter That's it, problem solved....
|
-
|
For those of you who are not on the ObjectSharp mailing list, you might not be aware that next week we have another in our Smart Breakfast series. This time it’s David Chennels talking about Business Intelligence. You can find the details out here . Now the term “Business Intelligence” is one of those amorphous phrases that have the potential to make people crinkle their nose. It has the good buzzwords to entire management and it’s vague enough so that you can put many different technologies under that umbrella. If you’re a geek in the Microsoft space, typically business intelligence includes the OLAP and Analysis Services parts of SQL Server, maybe a third-party tool to visualize the data (if Reporting Services isn’t enough) and perhaps Integration Services. But those tools have been around for a while. And, even though there is no licensing fee added to be able to use then, they don’t seem...
|
-
|
If you want to learn what your data can do for you. You should attend The next ObjectSharp Smart breakfast with David Chennells. Click on the image below for more information and to register....
|
-
|
Although I have been twittering, I have also been struggling with its usefulness. Frankly I don’t care what you had for dinner, or how you golfed yesterday. There is certainly good info on the web that people broadcast that I may not have come across on my own. To date that was the driving force to Tweet and follow, for me. However, I attended a MS event yesterday and the first speaker talked about a bakery in London that tweets when a batch of bread is coming out of the oven. Using a Baker Tweet device. The bakeries followers can then follow a link to a picture of the product and a map to the location. I have to admit this put a new light on Twitter for me. Knowing what someone is doing right now seems pointless to me, but finding out a batch of rye just came out of the oven is useful. Twitter is like an event broker. If I want to execute my buy fresh bread event when the bread is at it’s...
|
-
|
I’m sure that, for the vast majority of the readers of my blog, becoming more productive with your programming tools is a desirable goal. Not all developers go out of their way to advance their skills, but the very fact that you read blogs means that getting better is of interest to you. And, for most companies, they would also like you to make better use of your existing tools. It’s certainly obvious that it’s in your company’s best interest for this to happen, even if they don’t go out of their way to explicitly advance your skills. And this is the ugly truth for most companies. In the best of times, a large number of companies don’t provide any significant budget for formal training. Usually developers are expected to pick up any new skills on their own time. Or, worse, they are expected to apply new technologies without spending any ‘exploratory’ time with them. As most of your are aware,...
|
-
|
Andre King & I presented “Never Test Alone” at TASSQ in Toronto yesterday evening. After the presentation Joe Larizza (TASSQ President) addressed the group saying that with the economy businesses are looking for ways to reduce costs. Outsourcing testing will be one of them. People need to be proactive in finding ways to reduce cost and produce quicker. Joe encouraged people to talk to their management teams, present the concept outlines in “Never Test Alone” and volunteer to give it a try. See how it works, what it saves and in the end you may be saving more then you expect. In Never Test Alone testers are involved in the Requirements & Design reviews and validations . This allows the test team to prepare for testing early, creating test cases, test scenario's and other documentation at the start of the project. Plus testers add value to the process from their experience and perspective....
|
-
|
Microsoft has just released Service Pack 2 for MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0. It includes all the fixes prior to SP2, and also several enhancements to improve server farm performance, availability and stability. Here is the description of the for Service Pack 2 for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 . To download the Service Pack 2 files: Download Service Pack 2 for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, x86 & x64 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=79BADA82-C13F-44C1-BDC1-D0447337051B&displaylang=en Service Pack 2 for Office SharePoint Server 2007, x86 & x64 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B7816D90-5FC6-4347-89B0-A80DEB27A082&displaylang=en To update your WSS 3.0 server (needs to be run on every SharePoint server): Install Service Pack 2 for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Install Service Pack 2 for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Language Pack (if applicable)...
|
-
|
My final presentation in my April World Speaking tour was at the Toronto Code Camp this afternoon. As always, the code camp was a huge success. The efforts of many people went into making it so, but the organization was top notch. As part of the lead-up to my presentation, Joey de Villa made good on a promise to wear Microsoft branded assless chaps. And he even regaled the crowd with his version of Hit Me With Your Best Shot, a choice completely in character with the theme of the presentation. As for the presentation, it went very well. Something like 70-80 people where there and I was pleased by the questions that were asked. I have always preferred an interactive audience because it means that they are probably listening. :) As I promised at the end of the presentation, here are links to the slides and demos. Any questions are most welcome. Slides: here Demos: Download Update: For those...
|
-
|
To configure Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) to work with SharePoint follow these instructions: Get your certificates ready ( http://blogs.technet.com/adfs/archive/2007/02/26/setting-up-an-adfs-lab-environment-part-1.aspx ) Configure ADFS environment ( http://blogs.technet.com/adfs/archive/2007/04/25/setting-up-an-adfs-environment-part-2.aspx ) Configure SharePoint as claims aware application ( http://blogs.technet.com/adfs/archive/2007/02/14/installing-moss-as-a-claims-aware-application-in-adfs.aspx ) I have to say that it's awesome that we can configure SharePoint to use ADFS for user authentication as eases the burden on the SharePoint users because they don't have to remember another username and password. This is especially useful, if you're using SharePoint for public-facing website. I wish it was easier to configure though. Here are a few "gotchas" that I have encountered...
|
-
|
Bruce Johnson and I attended the KWSQA Conference yesterday in Waterloo. We teamed up doing a session at the conference. Our topic was "Never Test Alone - the Route to Success". Bruce wowed the crowd with a demo of his test-driven development skills and the Microsoft Research tool Pex (Automated Whitebox .Net testing tool). As we promised the presentation slides can be downloaded see link below. Congratulations to the KWSQA group for a great job. Never Test Alone presentation slides Research Microsoft Pex If we can be of help or answer any questions please don't hestitate to contact us. Testa...
|
-
|
I finished presentation four of my April World Tour of the GTA earlier today. It was actually a co-presentation with Deb Forsyth and I was basically code-monkey and the 'developer’ that she could point to with here ‘bad developer’ stories. This was an unusual conference for me, in that I was a lone developer in a room full of testers. Daniel never had it so bad with the lions. :) Anyway, as I mentioned in the presentation, the slides are now available for download at the following link. As always, questions are welcomed. Slides – Download...
|
-
|
This is a second part of the blog post on building public-facing websites using SharePoint 2007. The first part was dedicated to the planning building public-facing websites using SharePoint 2007 . Start with the minimal master page Create a new blank master page using SharePoint Designer. I do not recommend basing your first custom master page on existing master pages templates, as those usually have a lot of SharePointy fluff that you do not necessarily want on your page. Start from scratch and only add the stuff you want/nee into your master page. Remember you can always come back to that master page and add more stuff in it later, if needed. Here is an excellent guide from Microsoft on how to how to create a minimal master page . Building content types and page layouts Building content types and page layouts is done in the following order: Create a few additional columns that are needed...
|
-
|
I was asked an unusual question yesterday about cookies, Silverlight and WCF. The scenario was that a Silverlight application was being used in a consumer-facing situation. The application itself communicates with the server using WCF. The service which is the target of the communication uses ASP.NET Authentication to authenticate the user. It’s an implementation detail (but critical to this post) that the method of storing the authentication token is a cookie called .ASPXAUTH. In a normal (that is, working) scenario with Silverlight, the credentials are sent to the server and an .ASPXAUTH cookie is returned. The browser strips off the cookie and stores it. On any subsequent requests, Silverlight creates a request and sends it the the server through the browser’s networking API. The browser is responsible for determining which, if any, cookies should be send with the request and adding them...
|
-
|
On Wednesday past, I did a Code Contracts presentation to the Toronto Visual Basic User Group . It was a continuation of my whirlwind ‘April Presentation Tour’, in that it was my third presentation in a week and the third of five that I’m doing in April. Tee shirts for the April Presentation Tour were available for sale from vendors as you left the arena I have posted the slides and the source code to the following links: Slides: Here Source Code: Here If you have any questions, please feel free to drop me a comment or an email message....
|
-
|
Lang.NET was just over an hour or so ago, and there are many funny and interesting quotes I compiled over the last few days. Here are all I can remember and find on twitter. Mads Torgersen on C# dynamic: “We owe it to IronPython and Ruby to make them first class languages.” Mads Torgersen: “Static typers put the ‘anguish in languish’.” Keith Robertson: “I’m here to sell you something. You can tell because I'm the one with the tie.” Erik Meijer: “C# dynamic ‘is like the needle exchange program’.” Tim Macfarlane: “We're planning on putting [Tycho] on the DLR pretty soon.” Karl Prosser: “When I see squiggly brackets, it feels like a real language to me.” Jeffrey Snover on Powershell: “No prayer based parsing.” Lars Bak: “It’s good to have a slow compiler because that gives you job security.” Joshua Goodman: “The way PMs fix things is by sending email.” Erik Meijer: “I love the math - you don't...
|
-
|
This past Thursday, I had the opportunity to present on Silverlight 3 to the Toronto Silverlight User Group . It was my first time presenting to the group and I was impressed by the number of attendees (I would say 30-40) who managed to hang around on the Thursday evening before a long weekend. As promised, I have posted the slides and the source code to the following links: Slides: Here Source Code: Here If you have any questions, please feel free to drop me a comment or an email message....
|
-
|
While working on one of the demos for my upcoming Toronto Silverlight User Group presentation, I ran into a catastrophic failure. Actually, the starting point for the problem was that when I right-clicked on the Silverlight application and selected the installation option, nothing happened. No errors, no warnings, but also no results. While trying to figure out the problem, I when to the more direct method of installation by programmatically calling Application.Current.Detach(). When this statement was hit, an exception was thrown with the following beautiful details. System.Exception: Catastrophic failure (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8000FFFF (E_UNEXPECTED)) at MS.Internal.XcpImports.CheckHResult(UInt32 hr) at MS.Internal.XcpImports.Application_Detach(Application app) at System.Windows.Application.Detach() at LocalConnectionDemo.MainPage.Button_Click(Object...
|
-
|
ObjectSharp has been working with SharePoint technologies for years now: building public facing websites and intranet for the clients, developing custom SharePoint web parts and features, designing custom templates, and so on... Oh yes, I forgot to mention hundreds of hours of SharePoint training (public and private) for developers and power users that we have taught to our clients. But, despite this tremendous amount of SharePoint expertise ObjectSharp has built up internally, we never had time to move our own corporate website to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 platform. Long story short, finally, the vast benefits from moving to SharePoint platform outweighed the problems with dedicating our own internal resources to this project, and we have received a go ahead to proceed with the project. As a project manager for this SharePoint migration project, I would like to share with you...
|
-
|
One of the most common comments from Silverlight and WPF developers is their lack of design sense. Over the next little while, I’ll be posting (interspersed with other topics) on some of the basics of color theory and how they can be applied to WPF and Silverlight. To start with, let’s talk about one of the fundamental artifacts of color theory – the color wheel. Originally conceived by Sir Isaac Newton, color wheel is a representation of the colors in the visual spectrum. In the representation, the three primary colors are placed equidistant from one another. The gaps between the the primary colors is then filled with with secondary and tertiary colors. Now, already I’ve used three terms, only one of which I would expect you to be familiar with. Primary colors (red, blue and yellow) are something that we learned about in elementary school. Secondary colors (orange, green and violet) are...
|
|
|
|