Enter the Stargate Destiny, courtesy of Silverlight, DeepZoom, Photosynth.

This may result in a “geekasm” – you’ve been warned.

http://stargate.mgm.com/photosynth

How’d they do it?

Join ObjectSharp for Silverlight on the Silver Screen – July 9 – Scotiabank Theatre Toronto

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 3, Expression Blend, and Windows 7 touch technology.
• Learn how to quickly design user interactions with Microsoft SketchFlow
• Take Designer/Developer work flow to the next level with Visual Studio Team System
• Learn how to cut off your bosses head off and paste it on other people’s bodies with Expression Studio

For CTOs and Marketing Managers

• Understand the benefits of creating line-of-business applications with Silverlight and .NET RIA Services
• Learn how to integrate Rich Media and Advertising with the Microsoft Platform
• See Touch technology and natural user interfaces bring kiosk applications to life with Windows 7 and WPF

Technologies You Will See:

• Silverlight 3 featuring WPF & XAML
• Expression Blend 3 featuring SketchFlow
• Windows 7 featuring Touch
• Microsoft Office SharePoint System 2007 (MOSS) for external facing web sites
• Visual Studio 2010 Team System

Register Online   |   Watch the Movie Trailer

Generic Implementation of INotifyPropertyChanged on ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) Proxies with T4 Code Generation

Last Week Mike Flasko from the ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) Team blogged about what’s coming in V1.5 which will ship prior to VS 2010. I applaud these out of band releases.

One of the new features is support for two-way data binding in the client library generated proxy classes. These classes currently do not implement INotifyPropertyChanged events nor project into ObservableCollections out of the box.

Last week at the MVP Summit I had the chance to see a demo of this and other great things coming down the road from the broader Data Programmability Team. It seems like more and more teams are turning to T4 Templates for code generation which is great for our extensibility purposes. At first I was hopeful that the team had implemented these proxy generation changes via changing to T4 templates along with a corresponding “better” template.  Unfortunately, this is not the case and we won’t see any T4 templates in v1.5. It’s too bad – would it really have been that much more work to invest the time in implementing T4 templates than to add new switches to datasvcutil and new code generation (along with testing that code).

Anyway, after seeing some other great uses of T4 templates coming from product teams for VS 2010, I thought I would invest some of my own time to see if I couldn’t come up with a way of implementing INotifyPropertyChanged all on my own. The problem with the existing code gen is that while there are partial methods created and called for each property setter (i.e. FoobarChanged() ), there is no generic event fired that would allow us to in turn raise a InotifyPropertyChanged.PropertyChanged event. So you can manually added this for each and every property on every class – but it’s tedious.

I couldn’t have been the first person to think of doing this, and after a bit of googling, I confirmed that. Alexey Zakharov’s post on generating custom proxies with T4 has been completely ripped off, er, inspirational in this derivative work. What I didn’t like about Alexy’s solution was that it completely over wrote the proxy client. I would have preferred a solution that just implemented the partial methods in a partial class to fire the PropertyChanged event. This way, any changes, improvements, etc. to the core MS codegen can still be expected down the road. Of course, Alexey’s template is a better solution if there are indeed other things that you want to customize about the template in its entirely should you find that what you need to accomplish can’t be done with a partial class.

What I did like about Alexey’s solution is that it uses the service itself to query the service meta data directly. I had planned on using reflection to accomplish the same thing but in hindsight, that would be difficult to generate a partial class of a class I’m currently reflecting on in the same project (of course). Duh.

So what do you need to do to get this solution working?

1. Add the MetadataHelper.tt file to the project where you have your reference/proxies to the data service. You will want to make sure there is no custom tool associated with this file – it’s just included as a reference in the next one. This file wraps up all the calls to get the meta data I’ve made a couple of small changes to Alexey’s -- Added support for Byte and Boolean (typo in AZ’s).
2. Copy the DataServiceProxy.tt file to the same project. If you have more than one data service, you’ll want one of these files for each reference. So for starters you may want to rename it accordingly. You are going to need to edit this bad boy as well.
3. There are two options you’ll need to specify inside of the proxy template. The MetadataUri should be the uri to your service suffixed with $metadata. I’ve found that if your service is secured with integrated authentication, then the the metadata helper won’t pass those credentials along so for the purposes of code generation you’d best leave anonymous access on. Secondly is the Namespace. You will want to use the same namespace used by your service reference. You might have to do a Show All Files and drill into the Reference.cs file to see exactly what that is. 
   

var options = new {
    MetadataUri = "http://localhost/ObjectSharpSample.Service/SampleDataService.svc/$metadata",
    Namespace = "ObjectSharp.SampleApplication.ServiceClient.DataServiceReference"
    };

.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

That’s it. When you save your file, should everything work, you’ll have a .cs file generate that implements through a partial class an INotifyProxyChanged interface. Something like…..

public partial class Address : INotifyPropertyChanged
{
    public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged;

    private void OnPropertyChanged(string property)
    {
        var handler = PropertyChanged;
        if (handler != null)
        {
            handler(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(property));
        }
    }

    partial void OnAddressIdChanged()
    {
        OnPropertyChanged("AddressId");
    }
    partial void OnAddressLine1Changed()
    {
        OnPropertyChanged("AddressLine1");
    }
}

Technology Predictions and Trends for 2009

I’m sure we’re going to look back at 2009 and say “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times’ and it will no doubt be interesting. Here’s my predictions….

Social Networking Everywhere

Although online social networking companies are already struggling with diminished valuations, in 2009 we’ll see social networks break out of their silos and become essential platform elements that see their way into other online applications such as travel, e-commerce, job-posting boards, online dating services, CRM services, web based email systems, etc. Blogging is also changing, slowing down in fact. Micro-blogging with status update-esque features in FaceBook, Windows Live, and of course the explosion of Twitter will take on even larger roles. It’s as true today as it was back in 1964 when fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan wrote “The Medium Is The Message”.

The Death of Optical Media

Okay, so you’ll still be able to walk into a video store to rent a DVD or buy a spindle of blanks at your grocery store but make no mistake about it – the death march is on, and that includes you too Blu-Ray. Blu-Ray will never see the adoption curve that DVD’s had. They thought they won when HD-DVD died, but if winning means dying last, then sure, you won. We’ll increasingly be renting our movies on-demand through our cable boxes, on our converged PC’s and XBOX 360’s via services like Netflix. Along with this, the rest of us will start to realize we don’t really need to own our libraries of movies. With IPod penetration as high as it is, it may take longer to realize we don’t need to own our music either – frankly we don’t own it anyway even though the pricing models try to convince us we do. I won’t go out and predict the death of DRM, frankly, I think 2009 maybe the year where DRM starts to get more tolerable once we are clearly renting our music and movies. The Zune Pass is making some inroads here but until Apple starts offering a similar subscription pricing, this may take a bit longer.

The Mac Air may have been a bit ahead of the curve with dropping the optical drive, but get used to it. Expect more vendors to do the same as they reduce size or cram in additional batteries or hard drives.

The Rise of the NetBook

If 2009 is the year of doing more with less, then this will surely be the NetBook’s year. Mainstream hardware manufacturers hate these and their small profit margins, but Acer and Intel will be raking it in building market share if not large bottom lines. Who knows, MS may learn to love the NetBook if they can get Acer to start shipping Windows 7 on them this year as well. Be prepared to see these everywhere in 2009, but don’t expect to see Apple make one (ever).

Zune Phone

The big story at the end of 2008 has been the global suicide of the original Zune 30s. I predict that tomorrow they’ll be they shall rise from the dead but it might take until the 2nd for everybody to figure out that they need to entirely drain the battery. The big news is that there won’t be a Zune phone with the MS brand name on it, but the Zune UI will come to Windows Mobile (6.5?) turning legions of touch based smart phones into music players almost as good as an IPhone. The bad news is that without an App Store to vet software quality, crapware will continue to be the source of reliability issues for the Windows Mobile platform. The good news is that without an App Store, Windows Mobile users will have lots of choice in the software for their devices, not to mention lots of choice in devices, carriers and plans. The battle between Good and Evil may morph into the battle between Reliability and Choice.

Touch Everywhere

Get your head out of the gutter, that’s not what I meant. What I did mean is that 12-24 months from now, it will be difficult to purchase a digital frame, LCD monitor or phone without an onscreen touch capability. Windows 7 will light these devices up and we’ll start to not think about the differences between Tablet PC’s and Notebooks as they just converge into a single device. With the advent of Silverlight, WPF and Surface computing, MS has been banging the “user experience” drum for a while now but when touch starts to be the expectation and not the exception, we’ll have to re-engineer our applications to optimize for the touch experience. This may turn out to be bigger than the mouse or even a windowed operation system.

Flush with Flash

In 2008 we’ve been teased with sold state hard drives but with less than stellar performance at outrageous prices, they’ve been on the fringe. In 2009 prices and read/write times will both come down in solid state drives, but with the increased capacity of USB memory sticks 32gb, 64gb +, we likely won’t see SSD drives hitting mainstream this year. Instead I think we’ll see an increase in the behavior of people keeping their entire lives on USB flash memory sticks. Hopefully we’ll see sync & backup software such as Windows Live Sync, Active Sync, Windows Home Server, etc. become more aware of these portable memory devices that may get synced from any device in your mesh. 

Camera flash will have to have a new format as SDHC currently is maxed at 32gb. With the increase in demand for HD video recording on still and video cameras, we’ll need a new format. As such we’re seeing rock bottom prices on 2gb chips now. Maybe somebody will come out with a SD Raid device that lets us plug in a bank of 2GB SD Cards.

Growing up in the Cloud

Cloud computing is going to be a very long term trend. I think we’ll only see baby steps in 2009 towards this goal. In the consumer space we’ll see more storage of digital media in the cloud, online backup services and the move of many applications to the cloud. Perfect for your Touch Zune Phone and Touch NetBook without an optical drive eh? IT shops will take a bit longer to embrace the cloud. Although many IT Data centers are largely virtualized already, applications are not all that virtual today and that doesn’t seem to be changing soon as developers have not whole-heartedly adopted SOA practices, addressed scalability and session management issues nor adopted concepts such as multi-tenancy. As we do more with less in 2009, we won’t see that changing much as a lot of software out there will be in “maintenance mode” during the recession.

Maybe, Just Maybe, this is the year of the Conveniently Connected Smart Client

Adobe Air & Silverlight are mainstreaming web deployed and updated rich client desktop apps. It’s hard to take advantage of touch interfaces and massive portable flash storage within a browser. All of these other trends can influence Smart Client applications, potentially to a tipping point. We’ll hopefully see out of browser, cross-platform Silverlight applications in 2009 to make this an easy reality on the MS Stack.

Incremental, Value-Based and Agile Software Development

Many of my customers began large-scale re-writes of their key software assets in 2008, many of them against my recommendations. For most of my key customers in 2008 and into 2009 I’m an advocate of providing incremental value in short iterative releases, not major re-writes that take 6+ months to develop. Even if your application is written in PowerBuilder 6 or Classic ASP, avoid the temptation to rewrite any code that won’t see production for 4 months or longer. We can work towards componentized software by refactoring legacy assets and providing key integration points so that we can release updated modules towards gradual migration. It is difficult for software teams in this economy to produce big-bang, “boil the ocean”, build cathedral type projects. We simply can’t predict what our project’s funding will be in 4 months from now, or if we’ll be owned by another company, scaled down, out sourced or just plain laid off. That is of course unless you work for the government. Government spending will continue if not increase in 2009, but still, try to spend our taxpayer money wisely by delivering short incremental software releases. It allows you to build trust with your customers, mark a line in the sand and move onward and upward, and let’s you move quickly in times of fluid business requirements and funding issues.

Incremental, Value-Based software development isn’t easy. It takes lots of work, creative thinking, and much interop and integration work than one would prefer. It might easily seem like an approach that costs more in the long term, and in some cases you could be right. But if a company has to throw out work in progress after 6-8 months or never sees the value of it because of other changing business conditions, then what have you saved? Probably not your job anyway.

Entity Framework: What you need to know. Metro Toronto UG Dec 9th 2008

I’ll be speaking tomorrow night at the Metro Toronto .NET UG tomorrow night.

Entity Framework: What You Need to Know

• Barry Gervin, ObjectSharp
• Tuesday, December 9, 2008 at 6:00pm
• New Location! Palmerston Library Theatre (lower level), 560 Palmerston Avenue, Toronto (2 blocks west of Bloor & Bathurst)

Is this the last data access technology we’ll ever need from MS – or just another one along the way? What is the Entity Framework and what is the difference between EDM, and LINQ to Entities. What’s different between LINQ to SQL? This session will give you the background on the Entity Framework and help you understand the MS data access strategy and how to apply it in practice. We’ll look at what’s available today, how best to apply it in the real world coupled with other complimentary technologies such as ADO.NET Data Services and Enterprise Library’s Validation Application Block.

And best of all, we’re having a food drive for the Daily Bread Food Bank. You can donate cash by clicking here or non-perishable good such as.

• Peanut Butter
• Baby Formula & Food
• Canned Fruits or Vegetables
• Canned Fish  or Meat
• Dried Pasta & Tomato Sauce
• Rice
• Lentils
• Cans of Soup or Hearty Stew
• Powdered, Canned or Tetra Pak Milk
• Cans of Beans
• Macaroni and Cheese

Did You Know?

Your cash donation will purchase twice as much food as you can purchase at the grocery store. The daily bread food bank purchases Bulk Quantities of food, which gets to where it is needed faster because there is no sorting step required.

DevTeach Montreal December 1-5, 2008 – Coupon Enclosed

DevTeach Montreal is less than a month away but it’s not too late to register. This is a great conference with sessions covering .NET FX, Future, SQL Server, VSTS/Team System, Silverlight, Agile Development, Software Architecture, ASP.NET.

Aside from the great content, build up your professional network by rubbing shoulders with the speakers in an intimate conference. The list of speakers is particularly impressive this year. From MS you’ll get to see Elisa Flasko and Carl Perry from the Data Programmability Team, Beth Massi and Yair Alan Griver. Of course .NET Rockers Carl Franklin & Richard Campbell will also be there with fellow MS Regional Directors Tim Huckaby, Joel Semeniuk, Stephen Forte, Jim Duffy, Guy Barrette and yours truly.

But wait, there’s more. Each attendee will get Visual Studio 2008 Pro and Expression Web 2.0 full copies along with the entire DVD set covering all sessions from TechEd 2008 Developers conference from Orlando this year. It’s Shamwow!

If you attended TechDays, your included coupon is now worth $350 off the price of DevTeach. If you didn’t, you can use this code:TO000OBJSHARP good for 50$ off. Sign up here.

VSTS Development & Database Editions to Merge!

An early Christmas present from our friends in Redmond! Beginning October 1, 2008 subscribers to VSTS Developer Edition and Database Edition will have access to the additional SKU. This was reported this week over at the MSDN VS 2010 & .NET Framework 4.0 overview page, but you don’t have to wait until Visual Studio 2010 is released.

Well that is just an awesome announcement and kudos to MS for listening to the community feedback about the multiple hats people wear on projects. I’m sure that this will lead to more teams actually using the Database edition functionality on their project which offers great source code integration for their database scripts not to mention T-SQL unit testing and test data generation.

Blog Resume

Oh where did the summer go? Not spent blogging. My life was turned a bit upside down this summer. My expectant wife Caroline was hospitalized for pre-eclampsia (high blood pressure) for 2 weeks, and when she did get released – she was put on bed rest. Caroline has been a stay-at-home Mom for the past 9 years so I had to learn her ways of keeping the wheels moving with two busy daughters during the summer months, not to mention hospital visits to see Mom once or twice a day.

I picked up the Rogers Portable (Wireless) Internet service so Caroline and I could both keep up on email while at the hospital (no cell phones allowed). It wouldn’t penetrate our new windows in the house, likely because of the low-emissivity coating on the glass but it worked fine from the Oakville hospital.

The situation for high-risk pregnancies in Ontario was quite grim this summer. There few hospitals equipped for a high-risk/early delivery (i.e. not Oakville) were quite full and they threatened to move us to as close as Credit Valley in Mississauga, to downtown Toronto, to Montreal, Winnipeg (yuck), or even Detroit or Buffalo. I can’t believe the lack of capacity in our healthcare system – it’s embarrassing.

Anyway, after a couple of weeks at home, pre-eclampsia was turning into eclampsia so they decided to do an early delivery (just under 7 months). We picked the right day (July 14th) as we managed to get a spot at the nearby and wonderful Credit Valley Hospital. Our baby was breech so they had to do an emergency cesarean section delivery. We were blessed with another baby girl weighing 4lbs, 14 ounces, not bad for a 7-month old. As usual, we didn’t have a name picked right away so I nicknamed her Buttercup. The nurses quite liked this and made a special name card for her isolette.

Caroline’s blood pressure was still pretty high and she had a dedicated nurse bedside for the next 24 hours taking her blood pressure every 5-15 minutes as they loaded her up on various blood pressure medications including magnesium sulphate. After 24 hours she was well enough to be moved to the regular labour & delivery unit. Caroline was in the hospital for another week, which wasn’t too bad since she was able to visit Baby Buttercup as often as she liked.

Caroline had received a steroid shot for lung development when she was first admitted a month ago so that really helped with Buttercup’s lung development. Buttercup still needed oxygen for the first week or so to keep her saturation up as she breathing very rapidly and shallowly. They kept her on IV fluids and then added a nutritional supplement for the first couple of weeks before they started feeding her *** milk with a nasal tube. After almost 4 weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit at Credit Valley we were finally able to bring her home. By this time she was fully breastfeeding and was about 6lbs and gaining weight every day.

I don’t think I’ve spent as much time in a hospital my entire life as I have this past  summer, but we are very thankful that everybody is now home together and healthy. Claire and Fiona adore their new baby sister – now named Maeve Juliet, and as of today' she must be well over 8lbs.

As if this wasn’t enough, I started leading a new project in July with a few of my O# colleagues. It’s a rich client in .NET 3.5, WPF front end connecting to SQL Server through a ADO.NET Data Service (formerly Astoria) sitting on top of the Entity Framework. We’re using elements of our own framework as well as portions of Enterprise Library 4.0 including the Unity IoC Container, Composite Application Library (CAL) and the Validation Application Block. Of course we’re also using VSTS including the database edition and using TypeMock here and within our unit testing.

As you can imagine, a tremendous amount of the application is declarative, not just architecturally, but also programmatically with liberal use of LINQ queries throughout. We’ve started to see some really great productivity now that the architecture is stable so I’m looking forward to resuming regular programming here with some tales from the trenches.

Aspiring Architect - Web cast series

With all this heat, I almost wrote "perspiring". Why not beat the heat, and stay cool inside while watching these web casts from MS Canada targeting aspiring architects. With the predicted shortage in IT in the upcoming years, we're sure to see an influx of junior resources into our industry. This is a good opportunity for developers to transition into architecture roles to leverage their existing skill set.

The Aspiring Architect Series 2008 builds on last year’s content and covers a number of topics that are important for architects to understand. So it would be a great idea to watch last year's recordings if you haven't already. Links are available here:  http://blogs.msdn.com/mohammadakif/archive/tags/Aspiring+Architects/default.aspx .

Upcoming sessions are as follows:

June 16^th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Introduction to the aspiring architect Web Cast series

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380836&Culture=en-CA

June 17^th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Services Oriented Architecture and Enterprise Service Bus – Beyond the hype

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380838&Culture=en-CA

June 18^th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – TOGAF and Zachman, a real-world perspective

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380840&Culture=en-CA

June 19^th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Services Oriented Architecture (Web Cast in French)

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380842&Culture=en-CA

June 20^th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Interoperability (Web Cast in French)

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380844&Culture=fr-CA

June 23^rd , 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Realizing dynamic systems

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380846&Culture=en-CA

June 24^th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Web 2.0, beyond the hype

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380848&Culture=en-CA

June 25^th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Architecting for the user experience

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380850&Culture=en-CA

June 26^th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Conclusion and next steps

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380852&Culture=en-CA

Follow up on Entity Framework talk at Tech Ed 2008

Last week at TechEd I gave a talk about building data access layers with the Entity Framework. I covered various approaches from not having a data access layer at all, to fully encapsulation of the entity framework - and some hybrid approaches along the way.

I gave the first instance of this on Tuesday and then a repeat on Thursday.

To those who saw the first instance of this on Tuesday....

you unfortunately got an abbreviated and disjointed version for which I apologize. After I queued up my deck about 15 minutes prior to the talk I left the room for a minute while people filed in and while I was out, one of the event staff shutdown my deck and restarted it running from a different folder on the recording machine and didn't tell me. I was about 1/3rd into my presentation when I realized that I had the wrong version of the deck. At the time, I had no idea why this version of the deck was running so I wasn't going to fumble around looking for the correct one. Given a change in the order of things - I'm not sure if changing decks at that point would have made things better or worst. I still had no idea why this had happened when I gave the talk again on Thursday but when the same thing almost happened again - this time I caught the event staff shutting down my deck and restarting it again (from an older copy). Bottom line, sorry to those folks who saw the earlier version.

The complete deck and demo project is attached. It is a branch of the sample that is part of the Entity Framework Hands on Lab that was available at the conference and which is included in the .NET 3.5 Enhancements (aka SP1) training kit. You can will need the database for that project which is not included in my down.

Download the training kit here.