While looking into purchasing MSDN licenses for a client here’s what I found:

For the US:

Now when you change the drop down from US to Australia we get these prices (given that $AUD 1 = (approx) $USD 1

So for e.g. take a MSDN – VS.NET Test.

Aussie Dollar = $3,460   US= $2,170 which equates to $AUD 1 = $USD 0.627

this is what happens when living in a 3rd world country…. - absolutely outrageous.

After wrestling with this tonight for sometime I’ve finally cracked it. SP2013 RTMed and alot of the sample code fails due to the fact that you need to now add ‘..;odata=verbose’ onto pretty much every call to SharePoint.

Basically you get a series of errors such as:

MIME type could not be found that matches the content type of the response. Noneof the supportedtype(s) 'application/atom+xml;type=entry, application/atom+xml, application/json;odata=verbose

Previously alot of the sample code has

$.getJSON(….) as part of the call to the server – as mentioned we now need to add some custom header values of ‘odata=verbose’, so to save you hours of slogging on this, the getJSON call doesn’t allow custom header values. You need to use the $.ajax(…) for these calls.

READING FROM A LIST

function getCustomers() {
 

  // begin work to call across network
  var requestUri = _spPageContextInfo.webAbsoluteUrl +
                "/_api/Web/Lists/getByTitle('CustomersREST')/items/" +
                "?$select=Id,FirstName,Title,WorkPhone" +
                "&$orderby=Title,FirstName";
   
  var requestHeaders = {
      "accept": "application/json;odata=verbose"
  }
    // execute AJAX request
  $.ajax({
      url: requestUri,
      type: 'GET',
      dataType: 'json',
      headers: requestHeaders,
      success: onDataReturned,
      error: onError
  });
}

UPDATING A LIST ITEM

//Sample code to update a Customer List Item in a Customer List called ‘CustomersREST’

function updateCustomer(dialogResult, returnValue) {

  if (dialogResult == SP.UI.DialogResult.OK) {
    var Id = returnValue.Id;
    var FirstName = returnValue.FirstName;
    var LastName = returnValue.LastName;
    var WorkPhone = returnValue.WorkPhone;
    var etag = returnValue.etag;

    var requestUri = _spPageContextInfo.webAbsoluteUrl +
              "/_api/Web/Lists/getByTitle('CustomersREST')/items(" + Id + ")";

    var customerData = {
      __metadata: { "type": "SP.Data.CustomersRESTListItem" },
      Title: LastName,
      FirstName: FirstName,
      WorkPhone: WorkPhone
    };

    requestBody = JSON.stringify(customerData);

    var requestHeaders = {
        "accept": "application/json;odata=verbose",
        "X-RequestDigest": $("#__REQUESTDIGEST").val(),
        "X-HTTP-Method": "MERGE",
        "content-length": requestBody.length,
        "content-type" : "application/json;odata=verbose",
        "If-Match": etag
    }

    $.ajax({
      url: requestUri,
      type: "POST",
      contentType: "application/json;odata=verbose",
      headers: requestHeaders,
      data: requestBody,
      success: onSuccess,
      error: onError
    });

  }

}

While setting up a new SharePoint solution one of the requirements was to embed a Yammer Feed.

So I followed the help document only to have an unusual situation:

1) the feed wouldnt render in browse mode.

2) the feed WOULD render in Edit Mode.

The key to the situation was to declare a little more on the sample script Yammer gave – adding ‘text/javascript’

Here’s the working script – (one for the bat –utility belt)

*tested from Win8, Firefox *

<script data-app-id='hyB2pTvrL36Y50py8EWj6A' type='text/javascript' src='https://assets.yammer.com/platform/yam.js'></script>
<script type='text/javascript'>
yam.connect.embedFeed(
{ container: '#embedded-feed'
, network: 'yournetworkhere'
});
</script>
<div id='embedded-feed'></div>

I recently ran into an interesting one while building some InfoPath forms for SP2010/2013 forms services.

I wanted to return some Rich Text (XHTML) fields back from a WCF WebService call.

I was at the point as a developer, where I couldn’t even say ‘Works on my machine…’.

The problem was – no matter what I tried, I would always have *plain text* and no ‘richness’ of the Rich Text. Didn’t work for me.

So I have:

1) a basic WCF Web service – running on my dev environment.

2) an InfoPath Form that makes the call and displays the results.

The WCF Service:

This is the field that I eventually want to return as RichText to InfoPath.

Here’s the Service Method code (which basically goes into a file and returns back a list of clauses) – just focus on the CONTENT = …GetXHTMLRichText(…)

InfoPath and Returning a RichTextField
2 things need to happen for this to work.

1. When InfoPath adds the WCF Service to the form, it needs to ‘detect’ the field correctly when it build the underlying schema.



You need (nb – ‘Content’ is my field name):
<xs:element minOccurs="0" name="Content" nillable="true">
                <xs:complexType mixed='true'>
                    <xs:sequence>
                        <xs:any minOccurs="0" processContents="lax" maxOccurs="unbounded" namespace="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"></xs:any>
                    </xs:sequence>
                </xs:complexType>

</xs:element>

Note the namespace on the ANY element above – this is the winner to tell InfoPath that this is a richtext field.

2. When returning data via this field (in my case the ‘Content’ field), it needs to be in a certain shape, as in:
<Content xmlns=http://yournamespace>
    <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Rich text here</div>
</Content>

Your rich text content needs to be ‘wrapped’ for InfoPath to play nicely with it.

This was the purpose of my GetXMLRichText method as

The gotcha:

When I pointed InfoPath at my webservice and added a service reference I was getting back a SimpleType for the field and not a ComplexType/Rich Text field.

The WCF Service WSDL was ‘almost there’ but not close enough:


The Content field described in a ComplexType which is almost there, but not quite.

It’s missing the <xs:complexType mixed=’true’>…<xs:any namespace=’http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml’ …/>. The rest were good.

The fix:

Cutting a long story short, the simplest way forward here was to simply edit the form components that InfoPath had built and correct the schema. Then reuse the form.

The form looks like this:

From the File->Publish->Export Source Files you can get to the source and edit the correct schema (XSD) file.

Close the form down in InfoPath (or you may even need to close InfoPath) to edit the Schema.

You may need to hunt through a few of them to find the right one. My file was GetKCCTerms12.xsd

Modify, save and close that file.

Right click on manifest.xsf –> Design to launch InfoPath and then select Save As to work with it as *.XSN form (*.xsn files are just CABs with all these files inside)

The final result as viewed from an InfoPath form – notice the bolding sent through.

Enjoy,

Mick.

Hi folks, you've probably heard a fair bit about the make over of Azure into 'Azure 2.0' (the SDK is still 1.7)

There's some great new tools within VS.NET to manage your environment better, even a Service Bus 'explorer' which was much needed.

I've collected a few links to start with for you guys to read up on when you've got a moment:

Azure 2.0 Details on:

• Windows Azure Powershell Extension - http://cloud.github.com/downloads/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-tools/windowsazure-powershell.0.6.0.msi
• Command Line Tools Independent of WebPI - https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/downloads/
• Virtual Machines - FAQs etc - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj156003
• Windows Azure Virtual Network - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj156007
  • Get slides from my previous presentation here - Azure Virtual Network 2.0
• Windows Azure Media Services - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh973629
• Create and Deploying WebSite walk through - https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/services/web-sites/how-to-create-websites/
  • (like we need this one - seriously takes 3 minutes! - well done MS!)
• Azure Chalk Talk Videos - http://www.meetwindowsazure.com/DigitalChalkTalks
  • Azure Virtual Machines - Part I & Part II
  • Web Sites with ASP.NET (NB: SSL is not supported, but it will arrive when Win Server 2012)
  • Web Sites with node.js
  • Web Sites with OSS Apps & Web Matrix
  • Azure Cross Platform Command Line Tools
  • Cloud Services (aka perviously web+worker roles)
  • Apache Hadoop Based Services On Windows Azure
  • TFS Service Preview Intro
  • Azure Websites - Continuous Integration with TFS.
  • Azure SQL Databases Intro
  • Azure Storage Introduction

Hi guys, I gave an online presentation earlier this afternoon as part of Microsoft Readiness on Azure Virtual Networks.

I had the whole presentation prepared until the http://meetwindowsazure.com announcement, where I had to go to the drawing board and just share all this goodness that was pouring out in Azure V2.0.

Thanks to the healthy turnout for those online and to those who registered, then check the emails for a link shortly.

As promised here’s the slide deck guys that I used through my demos

Presentation:

Now we’re talking….

Off to do some damage…umm play.

I thought I’d give it a go and see how far this would take me. (One of the Win8 x64 beta installs caused alot of grief)

So my environment:

• Recent Win8 RC x64
• Office 2010 x64
• Outlook 2010 x64

Installed the CRM 2011 Client by going to the web address of our crm site e.g. https://crm.acme.com

There’s a button on page that says ‘download Dynamics CRM for Outlook’ – after a short download and install all went well

I grabbed CRM2011 CU8 - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29692 and updated accordingly.

Note at this point CRM plugin had not been configured.

CRM Client Log files prove very helpful here:

When I fired up Outlook and went to configure the CRM Plugin, Testing connection I would get back

“…we can’t authenticate your credentials…”

Digging into the log files…..

C:\Users\mickb\AppData\Local\Microsoft\MSCRM\Logs\Crm50ClientConfig.log

22:05:18|  Error| Error connecting to URL: https://crm.acme.com/XRMServices/2011/Discovery.svc Exception: System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.IdentityModel, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.
File name: 'Microsoft.IdentityModel, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35'
   at Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Client.ServiceConfiguration`1.CreateLocalChannelFactory()
   at Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Client.ServiceConfiguration`1.CreateChannelFactory(ClientCredentials clientCredentials)
   at Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Client.DiscoveryServiceConfiguration.CreateChannelFactory(ClientCredentials clientCredentials)
   at Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Client.ServiceProxy`1.get_ChannelFactory()
   at Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Client.ServiceProxy`1.CreateNewServiceChannel()
   at Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Client.ServiceContextInitializer`1.Initialize(ServiceProxy`1 proxy)
   at Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Client.DiscoveryServiceProxy.Execute(DiscoveryRequest request)
   at Microsoft.Crm.Application.Outlook.Config.DeploymentsInfo.DeploymentInfo.LoadOrganizations(AuthUIMode uiMode, Form parentWindow, Credential credentials)
   at Microsoft.Crm.Application.Outlook.Config.DeploymentsInfo.InternalLoadOrganizations(OrganizationDetailCollection orgs, AuthUIMode uiMode, Form parentWindow)

Solution: Install the Windows Identity Framework 3.5 that comes with Win8 RC.

And in my case, you’re done.

Happy CRM-ing.

Now to fill in my timesheets

Mick.

I think at the moment, the short answer is no! Off to check the documentation…

”To continue with this installation or upgrade…please remove!…”

….

From the documentation – we uninstall TFS 2010 bits, but not the DB obviously and you do….

Use Control Panel to completely uninstall the previous version of Team Foundation Server. If SharePoint Products is running on a computer other than Team Foundation Server, you have to uninstall the TFS Extensions for SharePoint from the SharePoint server, too. If SharePoint Products is on the TFS application tier, don’t worry: We’ll automatically uninstall the TFS Extensions for SharePoint while we remove the old version of TFS.

Run the Team Foundation Server install from the product DVD and then use the Upgrade Configuration wizard to upgrade your installation. But wait—if SharePoint Products is running on a computer other than the computer running Team Foundation Server, you’ll first want to install the new TFS Extensions for SharePoint on the SharePoint server. Similar to the previous step, if SharePoint Products is on the TFS application tier, we’ll automatically install the Extensions for SharePoint while we set up the new version of TFS.

Hi folks,

We’re looking for someone who loves technology and is currently surrounded by .NET technologies.
Contact us if you want to be part of a great team that sinks their teeth into many different projects, concepts and technologies.

The most important thing I look for is your ‘can do’ attitude, the rest we can essentially learn. Come and be part of a team that loves what they do, and do what they love.
(Makes it easier to get up on these colder mornings )

Sydney based.

If you’re interested and want to start the ball rolling - http://breeze.net/who-we-are/jobs.aspx
(I might even get you to leave your CV at home for the interviews )

Talk to you soon,

Mick.

p.s. No agencies please.

1. How to enumerate and get at each of your TPM Partners.
2. How to create Partners + Profiles within BizTalk 2010.

staticvoid Main(string[]
args) { //enumerate
all the TPM Profiles in BizTalk var builder =new SqlConnectionStringBuilder("DATA
SOURCE=localhost;Initial Catalog=BizTalkDB;"+"Integrated
Security=SSPI;MultipleActiveResultSets=True"); var tmpCtx = TpmContext.Create(builder);
Console.WriteLine("Connected
to BizTalk Global Parties"); var partners = tmpCtx.Partners;
Console.WriteLine("Number
of Parters:{0}", partners.Count()); Console.WriteLine("------------"); foreach (var
ptr in partners)
{ var profiles = ptr.GetBusinessProfiles();
Console.WriteLine("{0}
Business Profiles:{1}", ptr.Name, profiles.Count); foreach (var
profile in profiles)
{ Console.WriteLine("\tProfile:{0}",
profile.Name); } } tmpCtx.Dispose(); if (bCreateProfile)
{ createProfile("Breeze
Partner #"); } Console.WriteLine("Finished");
Console.ReadLine(); }

//
need to do this through a single threaded connection - no MARSprivatestaticvoid createProfile(string partnerName)
{ partnerName += DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyyMMdd-hhmmss") + (new Random().Next(0,
65535)); Console.WriteLine("Writing
a new Profile for {0}", partnerName); var builder =new SqlConnectionStringBuilder("DATA
SOURCE=localhost;Initial Catalog=BizTalkDB;Integrated Security=SSPI"); var
tmpCtx = TpmContext.Create(builder);
var ptr = tmpCtx.CreatePartner(partnerName);
var pname ="Breeze
Profile-#"+ DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyyMMdd-hhmmss") + (new Random().Next(0,
65535)); var bp = ptr.CreateBusinessProfile(pname);
bp.Description ="Created
from Code"; var pcol =new AS2ProtocolSettings("BreezeProtocolSettings");
bp.AddProtocolSettings(pcol); tmpCtx.SaveChanges(); tmpCtx.Dispose(); }

Local MS Developer pillar Andrew Coates spilled the beans on this next new language to come out of MS Research.

Db.NET or ‘D flat’ – F#, C# and the Cinderella of the 3 sisters ‘VB.NET’
(Last year I was introduced to F# over a 5 month project and absolutely loved the simplicity and freshness of it – async was simple, tasks, functions and code that would normally take 400 lines in C#, we were able to do in 100 in F#)

It promises:

- speed

- optimisation (I wonder if it’ll be smart enough to run tasks on different CPU cores?)

There is a focus on Orchestration – data Orchestration found here http://thenextlanguage.net/a-focus-on-orchestration/

Where it talks about “An example of the close collaboration between the product team and the company’s research arm is the use of Schenkerian Analysis in the compiler to maximize orchestration between sections of the code.”

Oooh I thought – let’s check out what this is Schenkerian Analysis and a quick check of Wikipedia reveals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenkerian_analysis

“Schenkerian analysis is a method of musical analysis of tonal music based on the theories of Heinrich Schenker. The goal of a Schenkerian analysis is to interpret the underlying structure of a tonal work. The theory's basic tenets can be viewed as a way of defining tonality in music. A Schenkerian analysis of a passage of music shows hierarchical relationships among its pitches, and draws conclusions about the structure of the passage from this hierarchy. The analysis is demonstrated through reductions of the music, using a specialized symbolic form of musical notation that Schenker devised to demonstrate various prolongational techniques. The concept of tonal prolongation, in which certain pitches determine the goal of other, subordinate pitches, is a cornerstone of the pitch hierarchy that Schenkerian analysis involves itself with.”

So tones, pitches and music is where this algorithm has its roots…I can see how you could take this analysis when applied to the frequency of music and apply it to the frequency of code items; data being hit etc.

I’ll crack open this VS.2011 extension and see what transpires…

Grab the TOOLS here - http://thenextlanguage.net/tools/

Easy but effective

<script type='text/javascript'>
var msg = "your big title goes here…";
msg = " ..... " + msg;pos = 0;
function scrollTitle() {
document.title = msg.substring(pos, msg.length) + msg.substring(0, pos); pos++;
if (pos > msg.length) pos = 0
window.setTimeout("scrollTitle()",300);
}
scrollTitle();
</script>

With the ever changing Azure space, chances are you’ve had services working a treat and then one day just fail.

“Can’t connect…" etc.

This has happened to me twice this week – with over 14 IP Address ranges defined in the client’s firewall rules.

It appears that my service bus services were spun up or assigned another IP outside the ‘allowed range’.

It gets frustrating at times as generally the process goes as follows:

1) fill out a form to request firewall changes. Include as much detail as possible.

2) hand to the client and they delegate to their security/ops team to implement.

3) confirmation comes back.

4) start up ServiceBus service

5) could work?? may fail – due to *another* IP address allocated in Windows Azure not on the ‘allowed list of ranges’.

6) fill out another form asking for another IP Address…
…
By the 3rd iteration of this process it all is beginning to look very unprofessional. (in comparison, these guys are used to tasks such as ‘Access to SQL Server XXX – here’s the ports, there’s the machine and done’. Azure on the other hand – ‘What IP Addresses do you need? What ports?’… we need better information in this area)

Anyway – here’s the most update to date list 10/02/2011.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazureappfabricannounce/archive/2010/01/28/additional-data-centers-for-windows-azure-platform-appfabric.aspx

Recently there’s been an update to the ‘on-premise’ AppFabric for Windows Server.

Grab the update here - http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=27115 (runs on win7, 2008, 2008R2)

What’s new

I’m in the process of updating my components, but the majority of updates seems to be around caching and performance.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh351389.aspx

Hi folks, welcome to Monday…so I thought.

Here I was registering a message inspector which should take 5 mins tops.

Find the right config, make sure the .NET full assembly name is cool and away we go.

I wanted to use this guy from my custom WCF Adapter within BizTalk – so I needed my new message inspector to be seen by BizTalk.

So I used:

<add name="wcfMsgPropPromoter" type="Breeze.WCF.Extensions.BreezeMessagePromoteBehaviour,Breeze.WCF.Extensions,Version=1.0.0.0,Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=c2c8c7e827e9dd6a"/>

and added this guy to the <behaviorExtensions> element in the Machine.Config for .NET 4.0 x64/.NET 4.0 (& .NET 2.0 for good measure)

As if a scene from SpongeBob,… 3 hours later….

I had triple check GACs, caches, full assembly names etc…Scotty popped his head around and said “Oh yeah I had this one ages ago you need to use this…”

<add name="wcfMsgPropPromoter" type="Breeze.WCF.Extensions.BreezeMessagePromoteBehaviour, Breeze.WCF.Extensions, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=c2c8c7e827e9dd6a"/>

Can you spot the difference?

SPACES!!!!

Interestingly enough – this work is part of a .NET plugin I wrote for IIS 7.5 and to register the plugin you use “Breeze.WCF.Extensions.BreezeMessagePromoteBehaviour,Breeze.WCF.Extensions,Version=1.0.0.0,Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=c2c8c7e827e9dd6a"

NO SPACES!

My head hurts for a Monday…

Hopefully you reclaim the hours I’ve lost here.

Mick.

Hi folks, as you may/may not have been aware these are the core corner stone technologies of the MS Integration Stack.

The teams have been busily plugging away and coming up with the new versions – 4.5 corresponding to .NET 4.5 framework.

Here’s some links that describe what’s new from MS Santa & his elves:

1. What's New in Windows Communication Foundation 4.5

1. New Items I found of note are:

• New Service Transport Default values – keep an eye on these.
• Improvements from VS.NET 2011 – validation , better intellisence support.
• Streaming improved – true async (yay!)
• WebSocket support – through NetHttp(s)Binding
• Single WSDL file generation with ‘?singleWSDL’ (which is pretty handy)
• Self hosted + II hosted allow you to get to ServiceHost from code for dynamic configuration.
• Binary Encoder supports compression!! – this is generally gzip compression.
• My personal favourite – UDP support
  

1. New Items of note are:

• New Activites – NoPersistScope (possible previously but we needed to write code)
• WF Designer improvements – several here, but the ‘Outline view’ looks to be easier to work with.
• C# Expressions – where’s the F# ones ??
• Designer Annotations – add your own comments to keep control of the jungle that is built.
• WF Versioning – use WorkflowIdentity & DefinitionIdentity to define the version. WorkflowServiceHost supports multiple versions of the same WF. All pretty cool.
• WF Designers can still be rehosted – I’ve used that many a place.
• Contract First Development – ticks the boxes.
  

1. Will have to check out perf in this new land on these rules.
   

Async CTP – while this didn’t make the ‘whats new’ list, it certainly does deserve a mention here.
Over the last year I’ve built some pretty serious F# projects, and F# has the async support through and through the language. After over coming the challenge of learning it, the Async functionality is absolutely brilliant!!! F# does a great job in being able to turn a non-async chunk of code/method/class into an async one with by using the keyword async and a !. It’s straight forward from that aspect.

It’s great to see the C# & VB.NETs being able to use the same fundamentals (albeit not as slick IMO ). – see a previous POST - http://blogs.breezetraining.com.au/mickb/2011/04/26/EasierAsyncProgrammingComingToCVBSoon.aspx

As developers we sit here and say – what do I need this for? My code runs fine as it….and yes for the most part of what we do on our machine it does. This technology really comes into it’s own when you want consistent throughput from a solution with 1 person or 10000 concurrent people using it. That’s the difference.

To use it:

1. Get VSNET 2011 (as it requires a new compiler)
2. Use ASYNC CTP (refresh3) with VSNET2010 SP1
   

Hi folks, from a previous set of posts, we’ve been running a series of Azure Training Sessions.

Here’s the online links to the recordings that many of you have asked me about. Enjoy.

The links below should take you to the landing page, from the click on the View Online button.

Hi folks, I thought I’d share something that captivated me on this rainy Easter day and that was

Visual Studio Asynchronous Programming - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/vstudio/async
(you’ll need VS2010 + SP1 before you grab the CTP)
There’s a new improved compiler + an extended library for us.

Hands up who’s done async programming in either VB.NET or C#??? It’s a pain! Thread management, Main UI threads can only update certain objects, passing values between main + background threads, determining whether a thread has completed its tasks… and so on…

Basically all these ‘issues’ keep us from delving further into the world of asynchronous programming cause it very rapidly becomes complex just managing the two worlds – sync + async.

Today I was pleasantly surprised!!!

About a year ago I saw a great presentation on F# and I was amazed at how if they wanted to run a bit of code async it was simple an extra character as in:

set results = …..   <-sync

set results! = ….  <- run this async

(don’t quote me on the above, but it’s something like that – let’s call it pseudo code)

Why are we interested in this? – that’s always the first question to ask when investigating. Too many times we here ‘this is really cool’ and ‘check this cool software out’ etc… but the real reason of WHY do we want to go down this road is never answered.

On a ‘developers machine’ looking at 5 items, running a single test client – you’d have to say “works on my machine” and you’d have no need to async anything. True. Let’s move beyond our beloved developer box and think about UAT/PROD environments and what your code is doing.

What happens if 4 concurrent requests come along – how is your code going to perform? (As developers we’d be thinking …’it’s in the hands of IIS, not my issue’ :) )
(I recently was presented with a solution that ran across 20 odd servers, the answer to everything was get more hardware to make the app more performant, scalable etc – couldnt be the code.)

So as the requests start to build (don’t know an exact number but let’s say 100/sec), what is happening to your code? how often do we sit down with profiling tools on our code in this space? must be the disks..slow…and as always we have definitive proof works on my machine says the developer!

It’s not until we see our code running under load that we get an appreciation for where things could be improved and are causing grief for not only IIS but other systems as well.

Scalability, performance and scalability – single threaded app/service vs multi-threaded. Multi-threaded tend to win all the time.

Let me give you a couple of suggestions where this stuff is great:

1. As part of a WF/WCF/Class where you want to ‘push’ some processing into the background – critical things can be done upfront, and you can push some of the ‘other stuff’ into the background.
   
2. Take advantage of some of the great multi-core/multi-cpu Servers out there – single threaded tend to run on the same core on the same CPU (known as thread affinity)

Anyway enough jabbering from me and let’s see some of the hidden gems…

Async Programming Framework

Let me show you a couple of examples (from my set):

1. Fetching a webpage

Here I go off to twitter and search for all the BizTalk items.

Couple of things to notice
- …Async is added to the end of routines for convention, indicating that these are Async callable routines.
- not a single IAsyncResult to be seen, no StateObject and no Callback routines!
– line 104 the async keyword indicating that this routine itself can be called async if desired (more for the compiler)
- line 108 the await keyword is used in the Async framework to ‘wait for the async task to complete’  then move onto the next line.
- line 108 WebRequest.Create(…).GetResponseAsync – it’s the GetResponseAsync that is the async method, no …Begin or ..OnEnd calls! Just write it as you read it.
- line 109 We get a reference to the response stream (I should check for the existence of data etc – demo code, demo code :))
- line 112 …await stm.ReadAsync(…) – reads the response stream into a buffer on a background thread and we wait there until this completes (await keyword). By all means there’s many other ways to program this, as in we don’t need to wait, we could run this guy in the background quite happy and then check on him periodically.

That’s it! Not too tough at all, multi-threaded goodness right there. You can have blocking and non-blocking calls etc.

2. What about a Chunk of CPU based code

NO Async Example – as per normal, doing some cpu things.

Written in Async….

Points to notice:
- line 63 async Task<int[]> … to the Async framework the async methods are wrapped within a Task class. We must ‘wrap’ anything we return from our routines within a Task<..> – here I’m returning an int[]
-line 66 … = TaskEx.Run(…something to run in a background thread…). As we’re dealing with a block of code, there’s a Task Extension class that allows us to run that bit of code Async.
-line 79 await matrix – this line ensures that our async routine has indeed completed (or errored) before we move onto the next line.

Too easy if you’ve lived in the other world.

As always remember this is CTP so I wouldn’t go rolling out into Prod just yet. The perf numbers I get are pretty much identical to rolling all of this by hand with ThreadPool.QueueWorkItem(…) and IAsyncResult etc.

Well done MS!

Enjoy and here’s my VS.NET Sample Solutions – I had great fun! Oh – this is also applicable to Silverlight + WP7 apps :)

The scene looks like this – while teaching a SharePoint 2010 class I decided to build a Feature that used one of the OOTB Service Applications of SharePoint 2010.

 

I decided to create a PDF Converter ‘Feature’ that used the Word Automation Services hosted in SharePoint 2010. Looking into the Word Automation Services, I’d say that if you’ve already got a PDF creation process going, then stick with it as it appears this service is pretty simple. However if you’ve got nothing, then Word Automation Services will be great!
(Having spent a previous life in a graphics company, there are many options that go with creating just that perfect PDF…I could find none of these here :()


(yes the pdf icon needs work…)

So I created a VS.NET 2010 Solution with a Feature.

The PDFConverter.cs is where the crux of the work is – the rest of the solution is working out just the right spot to call it.

Couple of Interesting Points about the Solution

1. ScriptLink – using this from a CustomAction within an Elements file allows to inject Script into a site where the Feature is Activated. There is also ScriptBody that allows you to inject script code right there.

2. RegistrationType – being declared as a FileType, currently this will work with docx. Feel free to experiment and extend out.
Also, seeing this action is activated on a list item, we need to track what list it came from {ListId} and the item in that list {ItemId} which is an integer.

            

              
               1
              <
              Elements
xmlns
              =
              "
              http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/
              "
              >
              
              
               2
              
              
              <
              CustomAction
Id
              =
              "
              MicksPDFScript
              "
              
              
               3
               ScriptSrc
              =
              "
              ~site/_layouts/WordAutomationServices/Scripts/MoveItMoveIt.js
              "
              
              
               4
               Location
              =
              "
              ScriptLink
              "
              >
              
              
               5
              
              
              </
              CustomAction
              >
              
              
               6
              
              
               7
              
              
              <
              CustomAction
Id
              =
              "
              MicksPDFConverter
              "
              
              
               8
               RegistrationType
              =
              "
              FileType
              "
              
              
               9
               RegistrationId
              =
              "
              docx
              "
              
              
              10
               Location
              =
              "
              EditControlBlock
              "
              
              
              11
               Sequence
              =
              "
              106
              "
              
              
              12
               Title
              =
              "
              Convert
to PDF
              "
              
              
              13
               ImageUrl
              =
              "
              ~site/_layouts/WordAutomationServices/Images/pdf.gif
              "
              
              
              14
              
              
              >
              
              
              15
              
              
              <
              UrlAction
Url
              =
              "
              javascript:MicksOpenDialog('{ListId}','{ItemId}');
              "
              />
              
              
              16
              
              
              </
              CustomAction
              >
              
              
              17
              
              
              18
              
              
              </
              Elements
              >
              
              
              19
              
              
            
          

3. Code that actually does the work – is pretty simple really with Folders and entire Document Libraries able to be passed to the Conversion Job.
One annoying thing is that below in Line15, conversionJob.Start() is called, really a job gets created and added to the Job Timer queue. Regardless of what goes on, the Started property always returns true.

Typically I’ve found the Timer Job to kick in every 5 mins to process the conversions and eventually a PDF file is seen in the library.

            

              
               1
              
              
              public
              
              
              bool
               Convert(
              string
               srcFile,
              string
               dstFile) 
               2
               { 
               3
              
              
               4
              
              
              //
              create
references to the Word Services.
              
              
               5
              
              
               var
wdProxy 
              =
               (WordServiceApplicationProxy)SPServiceContext.Current.GetDefaultProxy(
              typeof
              (WordServiceApplicationProxy)); 
               6
               var
conversionJob 
              =
              
              
              new
               ConversionJob(wdProxy); 
               7
              
              
               8
               conversionJob.UserToken 
              =
               SPContext.Current.Web.CurrentUser.UserToken; 
               9
               conversionJob.Name 
              =
              
              
              "
              Micks
PDF Conversion Job 
              "
              
              
              +
               DateTime.Now.ToString(
              "
              hhmmss
              "
              ); 
              10
               conversionJob.Settings.OutputFormat 
              =
               SaveFormat.PDF; 
              11
               conversionJob.Settings.OutputSaveBehavior 
              =
               SaveBehavior.AlwaysOverwrite; 
              12
              
              
              13
               conversionJob.AddFile(srcFile,
dstFile); 
              14
              
              
              15
               conversionJob.Start(); 
              16
              
              
              return
               (conversionJob.Started); 
              17
              
              
              18
               }
            
          

A couple of screen shots in action:

Of course this is not production ready, but it should give you a great start in getting there. To start, simply install and Activate the Feature on a site collection to see the functionality.

Go to a document library and activate the item drop down to see the Convert to PDF option. Must be a DOCX file currently.

Grab the VSNET2010 Solution and go for it – have fun.

Olaf and I were cracking away on some SharePoint 2010 work which we thought should be simple…point SPMetal to the site and start LINQ-ing to our hearts content…..

with the one exception that we couldn’t select items from a list based on their Content Type.

By default SPMetal.exe doesn’t include these ‘system’ fields (apart from ID + Title – go figure) and the secret is to use an Override file.

The good oil is:http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee535056.aspx
(Here’s a good article on how .NET Types are mapped to SharePoint - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee536245.aspx)

The simple override/parameters file:

          <
          Web
           
          AccessModifier
          ="Internal" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/SharePoint/2009/spmetal">
  <ContentType Name="Item" Class="Item">
    <Column Name="ContentType" Member="ContentType" />
   
  </ContentType>
  
</Web>

The SPMetal Command Line

The VS.NET Code

 static void Main(string[]
args)

        {

            using (BreezeDataContext dc
= new BreezeDataContext("http://breezelocal"))

            {

                var myitems
= from i in dc.GetList<ContentListTraining>("My
Content List")

                              where i.ContentType
== "Training"

                              select i;

                var courses
= myitems.ToList<ContentListTraining>();


                Console.WriteLine("There
are {0} items",courses[0].Title);

                    


            }


            Console.ReadLine();

        }

I got an email from David Marsh telling me about this new world from MS. Let me share a little…
Way back when…LOGO was one of the first languages I learnt as a kid.

Moving a turtle around on a page with commands such as PenUp, PenDown, RightTurn etc etc – pretty cool as a kid and then you could draw things (there was a big version of the Turtle that interfaced into an Apple II via a ribbon cable as wide as a 4 lane highway)

MS Dev Labs have released a great SmallBasic environment that is very simple to pickup (great for kids).
It’s got a very simple set of commands AND it outputs straight to Silverlight.


Pretty quick ways of building silverlight apps….nice!

Check out http://smallbasic.com –only if you have some free time

Many times in BizTalk land we work with Schemas that are nested and have several related Schemas that are Imported from URL locations etc.

When you include these schemas and deploy to Production, you find out that the BizTalk server doesn’t access the Internet directly. Hence all the schema Imports fail.

You’ll then go and try hand edit the Imports, downloading the referenced Schema and try and Mash up something that refers to local files and no URL based Schemas. It may or may not work…till the next update…

I recently came across a handy set of free tools that take all the pain out to do with Schemas –>

Xml Help Line

Which has Xml Schema Lightener, Xml Schema Flattener

Another very handy tool not to leave home without.

Enjoy.

Recently at the SharePoint Conference (SPC2010) delegates were given a beautiful book with all sorts of developers bits.

The book stars 123 pages of great information, and improvements to many areas that we previously had pain with (lists, queries, and just CAML in general)

There’s also 6 walkthroughs (sort of like HOLs) with code etc. to give you a feel for customising SharePoint.

Grab the PDF version HERE

Some snippets which I found interesting from the book are:

1. Some great object model options now for integrating with SharePoint.
   
   
   Points to note here:
   - Client OM + Rest are exposed as WCF Services (based on Client.Svc) and the Client OM is a batched model, so you transmit only what you ask for within Object Collection Hierarchies (unlike SPSite.AllWebs etc etc)
   - LINQ to SharePoint is initially created with SPMetal to create all the LINQ classes (there’s no ‘designer’ support for this yet, like LINQ for SQL – at least in this beta)
   - External Lists are an interesting one, you can develop plugins to expose two-way data syncs within SharePoint. I’m looking to reach out to SAP + Siebel systems when I explore this option :)
   
2. Resource Throttling is turned on by default – previously developers could write code like SPList.Items… Usually on a Developer’s machine, with 5 items in a list this was not an issue, 8000 items in a list turns into a different story.
   
   SharePoint 2010 now has safe guards against this turned on by default.

Enjoy…I’m off to enjoy the sun.

Great to see some public information surfacing around SharePoint 2010 and development.

To get started (if you’re not already) here’s the SDK with a CHM file and PDF/XPS on “how to customise the ribbon”.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=94AFE886-3B20-4BC9-9A0D-ACD8CD232C24&displaylang=en

Doing a little digging in the CHM file, you can see (below) all the different Content categories with some special areas to note:

1. There appears to be a Visio Server – I guess like InfoPath + Excel Services as they currently stand in 2007.
2. AJAX + JSON seem to make an appearance at the foundational core – yay! less page reloads.
3. WCF Services used (*.SVC) as expected and simplified. Also it appears that BDC systems are accessible via a SharePoint custom WCF Binding, making it possible to work on BDC based data from various applications within SharePoint. SharePoint might become the hub ‘repository’ for this sort of information.

Bear in mind *alot* of this information is ‘subject’ to change.

Certainly going fwd it should be very exciting to see what actually ships and whether some of the immediate constraints are dealt with.

Looks like we’re up for another Ribbon experience in this Version of SharePoint from within the Browser.

Hi guys,

If you're looking to get into how to host WCF Services on Azure, showing some cool graphics, then these samples are for you.

Silverlight v3.0 (beta), and important samples showing how to take your existing WCF Services and hosting/housing them in Auze (there's a few gotchas - and these samples have work arounds :) )

Grab them here -

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/wcfazure

Yep - hot off the press thanks to Stephen a friend of mine (who brought this to my attention)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=baa3ad86-bfc1-4bd4-9812-d9e710d44f42

Don't leave home without it.

You want to know the ins and outs of WCF at a glance – then the mini-book is a winner.
(Just let this puppy fall out of your back pocket in the office and watch the guys instantly want to Sync up their Complete Series of Star Trek with you…)

Seriously – great guide, easy to flick through and welcome to another 8 million lines of code you thought you could live without :)

Thanks to the efforts of Cliff Simpkins and his team for their dedication on this.

6 Chapters + Code….are you man enough?

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=netfxsamples&DownloadId=4962

“The product cannot be installed on this machine since it seems to be a domain controller”

What a start to 2009!!! – the above dreaded message when trying to (in this case) install BizTalk RFID on a DC.
For me – this happens quite a bit, as I’m building up a proof of concept, a demo, something to show and present with.

I always…always….forget to install BizTalk RFID bits before I promote to a DC (this technique can also cause security acct issues after the machine has been promoted to a DC – depends on how the authentication is setup etc)

NOTE: BTW – Installing BizTalk RFID on a DC is NOT SUPPORTED (had to put that one in their – keeps both sides happy)

For love or money I’ve bounced this question around for a while and come up empty, until…today!!! Niklas Engfelt a senior MS support engineer came to my rescue (he famously provided those thoughts from left field which were on the money! Big thank you Niklas)

He suggested grabbing Orca from the Platform SDK and having a browse through – I’d used HEX editors, disassembled files, attached process monitors during installs and looked through any config file with a fine tooth comb…but I’d never tried a MSI Editor.

The steps to Enlightenment: (changing the installer validation conditions)

1. Grab a download of Orca from here (I didn’t have the platform SDK currently installed and wasn’t about to install 1.2 GB worth either) and follow default install prompts.
2. If you haven’t done so already copy the RFID_x86 or RFID_x64 folders off the install media to a temp folder nearby (note: sometimes on Win2K8, the system prevents copied files from being accessed until an admin comes along and says ‘these are ok’ by going into File->Properties on each file. It’s weird I know, but I get it every now and then)
3. Locate the RFIDServices.msi under the RFID folder and you’re ready to go.
4. Launch Orca and open RFIDServices.msi to get something like:
5. 
   
6. Under the Tables Column select LaunchCondition and drop the 2nd Row as follows:
   
7. 
   
8. Drop the Row and Save the MSI file again.
   
9. Run Setup.exe as per normal.

Oh what a sweet day!

p.s. I’m sure you’d be able to employ this technique onto other MSI’s causing grief.

Mick

With all the developer extensions in recent time around SharePoint (Features, Solutions etc), I've found there seems to be a few little known and little used 'other' APIs within the SharePoint space.

We've got things like WebServices and the SharePoint Object Model (SPSite etc) that we use however, there's a couple of other APIs that could be useful also for the times when you're not running locally on the SharePoint machine - they generally center around HTTP and extending it.

Two (that come immediately to my mind) are:

1. WebDav - early versions of 'Web Folders' used this.

2. RPC (over HTTP) APIs - Front Page and SharePoint Designer still use these.
(InfoPath when submitting forms uses this to promote properties to a forms library)

A great example of this is SharePad for SharePoint on CodePlex

Merry Christmas,

Mick.

Ever wondered how you might implement "Hello World" in a non-domain specific language such as in the roots of Oslo looks like.........(I found a snippet from one of the PDC Webcasts....)

(This is written in a tool/shell that ships as part of the Oslo SDK - Intellipad)
The left hand side is the instance document; the middle is the grammar or transformation; and the right is the Output Graph.

This is a pretty specific sample - as in fact its very specific and only takes one input - "Hello World" (as dictated on the syntax line)

What's so special about all of this?? I hear you ask.....

There's a huge amount of power in being able to 'model' your world/data and relationships. Today we're pretty comfortable with XML but we also have to tolerate things like parsing '<' or attributes etc. Or if you've ever been given a schema full 100s of fields when you needed to use just 5. XML is not perfect, but it certainly has its need.

Storing this sort of XML in the DB I think is painful at best, while SQL 2005/2008 goes part way towards helping us, there's still a bunch of specifics that the DB needs to know about the XML and if that Schema changes, then that change goes all the way to the DB....otherwise the alternative is Tables/Rows/Columns + invest in Stored Procs to manipulate the data.

Enter the Modeling Language -M

We can basically define our world - if you're dealing with a customer with 5 attributes, that's all you specify. You could take your V1.0 representation of a Customer and extend it etc etc.

Deploying the model is deployed straight to the Database (known as a Repository) - the deployment step actually creates one or more tables, and corresponding Views. Access is never granted to the raw table, only to the View. That way when you extend or upgrade your models, existing clients see just their original 'View' keeping the new attributes separate.

So in terms of building a model of the information your systems are utilising -> 'M' is a very rich language, which decorates and defines a whole bunch of metadata around your needed entities.

Digging a little deeper into M.... we have 3 main defining components:

1. M-Schema - defines the entities + metadata (e.g. unique values/ids etc)

2. M-Grammar - defines the 'Transformation'. How to transform the source into the output. You could loosely look at this as:  Y=fn(M) "Y equals some Function of M"

3. M-Graph - a directed graph that defines the output (they use directed graph to indicate through lexical parses, that something has a start and definitely finishes.This is a check the compiler will do)

You'll notice at the top of this shot, there are DSLs - these are Domain Specific Languages. e.g. a language full of terms and expressions to define for e.g How to work with You local surf clubs competitions; another could be How to Manage and describe Santa's Wish list.

You might be thinking....I go pretty well in C#, why should I look into M?? C# is obviously a highly functional language that when you start coding you've got all the language constructs and notation under the sun at your disposal - decorations are done through attributes on methods/classes etc.....but modeling something still in done in a pretty bland way e.g. structs, classes, datasets, typed datasets etc. You're starting with a wide open language that really without you creating a bunch of classes/code doesn't have methods like Club.StartCarnival.....

M - take what you're describing, a carnival and model it. What entities are in a Carnival (people, lifesavers, boats etc) - model this - give us a picture of what they look like (data you'd like to hold and the relation ship), define a grammar (words, constructs and operations) on how we can work with these entities - we now have a Surf DSL (that of course can be extended to V2.0....)

Developing solutions against the Surf DSL - the compiler knows all the defined commands, constructs and schemas (cause we defined them in our DSL). They're the only operands that you can use as a developer - this simplifies the picture immensely.

The beauty about M is that the DSL is simply deployed to a Repository (which at this stage is SQL Server, but could be any DB as we get access to the TSQL behind the scenes)

As I dig a little deeper I'll be illustrating with some samples going forward - hope you enjoyed this post....for now :)

Lastly - it's amazing that way back at Uni, I studied a subject called 'The Natural Language-L' (and it was one of those things where I thought - I'd never use this again....well guess what 15 years on....M is looking very close. How I even remember this is even scarier!!!) - the subject was language agnostic and dealt with what was required to create/specify a language that could be learnt, written and interpreted.

Cheers...'L'

Folks - while setting up some IIS servers for a BTS production environment I came across this handy little tool.

Basically gives you a Tree View of what things you'd like to install on your IIS Web Server from MS (mother ship).

Includes things like Service Packs, etc etc. - handy spot to grab all the new files in one spot.
(as opposed to the piece meal approach - of install asp.net, oh you need the .net 3.5 framework - install...oh...you also need SP1 ..with maybe a few reboots inbetween)

- single place for all the tools and other components that you'll need.

- great way to do them all at once.

Here's what you're after -
http://www.microsoft.com/web/channel/products/WebPlatformInstaller.aspx

 

The system we built has made it through its maiden event and was still capturing reads well into the later afternoon (until we got round to tearing it down....technically called 'Bump Out'....with all the moving bodies and parts, it's no wonder they call it Bump Out!)

 I grabbed a couple of SilverLight screen shots to show what the system is capable of - in the hectic pace of last week I didn't manage to grab some screen captures of the system in action, these screen shots come from the courtesy of Eileen Brown's Blog (she is responsible for running MS Events in the UK + a founder/advocate for Women in IT)

Walk-In Displays - these walk in displays were up on the big screens as delegates entered/exited their sessions. Pretty cool!!!.

These screens are delivered via a browser and are what we call the 'Walk-in' Display. Here you can see 3 people leaving the room with the graph in the background showing some delegate profiling data around attendance of previous TechEds.

Here we've got an enter and a leaving of the session. Something we didn't get time to do at this show was to play on the scope for customisations with these avatars. We had over 120 textures + bitmap type surfaces set for this, but during the show this 'feature' got bumped further down the list. (Hats, scarves, hair type, colours etc. you know the stuff)

We had fun with a couple of names though - '@Coatsy' was one, 'The Stig' was another.

The beauty about these screens was that people outside the conference got real time stats about the rooms and could see the 'Walk-in' displays in near real time. (Late night trouble shooting with my friends in MS Corp - this proved a great tool)

In testing performance of our SL Services over the internet - I had a link to the UK where we had a technician monitoring the various walk-in displays and giving feedback. All worked pretty well.
(At this point we don't have an upper limit on the number of individual 'Walk-in' display sessions that run concurrently - each open browser receiving events in near realtime is an additional WCF Service instance + a SQL connection. Not sure how much benefit SQL Connection pooling will give as these connections are active pretty much all the time)

Overall the Breeze Boiler room (HQ) got great attendance from the delegates wanting to know the "whats/whos/whys" on the Breeze Event Tracker System.

We're currently still analysing the results but some interesting numbers are:

(1) In a 16 hr period for one room, we got 345000 reads.......(this maybe picking up the persons in the back row while sessions are on - our business logic takes care of these)

(2) We experienced a very particular 'known' problem (don't you love it when you experience an issue for the first time and describe it, only to be told it's 'known' - well telling us that ahead of time would have been great :). The problem arises from Tags being physically close together, and two tags respond 'around' the same time. In very special circumstances this confuses the Reader and instead of getting 12byte TagIDs we got 16, 18 or sometimes 20 byte IDs where the 2 tagIDs were 'spliced'.

It occurred in very special cases - but we got it. That particular read should be discarded as it fails the CRC check.
In peak time, out of 8000 reads we got around 2 of these cases.

Couple of phone calls to India and our Intel R1000 Provider was 'patched' and as a PlanB we had the current provider being wrapped by another .NET class to catch that particular exception.

(3) SCOM2007 couldn't have worked better!!!! I dropped on the BizTalk RFID Mgmnt pack and it was a breath of fresh air. All the Readers, Devices, Processes, Providers and RFID Servers out on the network appeared as healthy items in lists (mostly). From the mgmnt pack I was able to see the number of Tags Read, settings, when the last heartbeat was heard etc etc. from all the devices over the conference - certainly Mission Control.

(4) We had various 'Show' type issues such as power cords being unplugged; cables being cut; cabinets that housed the equipment in each room collapsing....so all in all it was filled with fun and excitement. We did have a couple of Network issues where at the conference there were several networks implemented for different regions/events at the conference. e.g Public Delegate WiFi; Networks within each of the Break out rooms - we were on our own VLAN and these network layers above us, proved a little troublesome from time to time.

Various Licensing arrangements of this system are available - from the software components through to the hardware. Feel free to ping me for more details.

Here's a video of a screen capture that I *did* manage to do.

Folks - fellow MVP Richard Seroter has written a VERY comprehensive series around this very topic including the new BizTalk Adapter Pack V1.0 (V2.0 is in Beta at the moment).

Over 20+ thousand words + 178 screen shots - all for the love of BizTalk/WCF.

Complete with Source Code!!!

What a champion series - I'm looking forward to in tucking into some of his great material!

The BizTalk community is in debt to you Richard - well done!!!

SERIES SUMMARY FOUND HERE

This one came from Paolo Salvatori (a senior PM within the MS Connected Systems Division Team... I know a bit of a mouthful) whom has gotten in touch with his creative side and drawn a picture for all us common folk :) - well done Paolo.

The scenario is - a Request/Response Port is published at the 'front end', goes through BizTalk and the work is done by a backend system that operates via a One-Way Send and BTS gets the response via another One-Way Receive.

The thing I like about Paolo's piece of work is that he shows all the Message Context Properties required to be set by BizTalk for message correlation.
Which makes this a Messaging Only Solution and NO Orchestrations required!!!! (how cool)

Click on the image to enlarge......one day I'll get Silverlight Zoom Composer control running for these.... :)

After the more than normal pain in getting this done for my previous post, I decided to post the fruits of my labour (not labor that my wife tells me about watermellons and men wouldn't know the first thing about birth....I'm not about to do the pepsi challenge on that :))

- this is a stock standard Web.Config for a MOSS install NOT a plain WSS install (there's about 3 lines different from a plain WSS install to a MOSS install - mainly anything that references SharePoint.Publishing....)

Grab this and these are the changes that WORK!

Enjoy!

Cheers,

Mick.

"Could not load file or assembly 'System.Web.Silverlight, Version=2.0.5.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies."

You're starting to Roll your sleeves up and get dirty with Silverlight 2 Beta 2, load up some of the Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint Samples, run the installer (it's great that most of these examples have an installer) and Boom! you get the above error!!!

Here's a list I've compiled to get Silverlight working - I'm currently running this on Win2008 IIS7

(1) Install WSS SP1/MOSS SP1 on your SharePoint box if you haven't already. You need the SP1 to support .NET 3.5 calls through SharePoint - my guess is that these tell SharePoint not to intercept the calls and let them go to their rightful owners.

(2) Create a 'dummy' site collection on a test Web Application - e.g. http://localhost:81 - This is so you can see all the changes to the web.config that are made through the installation process, in isolation. By keeping this separate to your usual web.config, you'll be able to merge changes at a later date.

(3) Install the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 runtime and other developer bits - From http://Silverlight.net - VS2008 Developer Bits and just the runtime if you want from here

(4) Do one installation of a Silverlight for BluePrint Sample - the installer creates a 'virtual directory' under your Web Site called ClientBin where the various Silverlight 2 files go (*.js, *.XAP). This is a handy install so you can see what the directory execution settings are required to make this work through SharePoint. i.e. Execute permissions only. Take note of this directory.

(5) Add a IIS MIME type - With Silverlight 2 beta 2 - there is a new file type added which is a *.XAP file type. IIS by default doesn't know how to encode/translate or send these files down over the wire.
Add a mime type of: Extention: xap Mime Type: application/x-silverlight-app to your IIS Test Web Site

(6) Make Web.Config changes - there's a whole series of Web.Config changes to be made to your SharePoint Web Application to support AJAX/.NET 3.5 and now Silverlight.... fortunately other hard working folks have done this for you!!!! :) Bless their cotton socks! - grab the Feature that makes the modifications from here (** NB: you want the 3.5 config feature)

You're almost done........ :)

(7) EXCEPT for the error above!!! After much inspection of your system, you'll realise that you *don't* have that DLL (on a clean install). The Silverlight Ninja will know that this is from Silverlight 2 Beta 1 and not found in the Beta 2 kits!! Yay team!

The System.Web.Silverlight.dll is found in the Silverlight 2 beta 1 SDK - so download that puppy, extract out the DLL and either GAC it, or add it to your BIN directory on your SharePoint site. (I added it to my BIN directory - as I reckon when SL2 is released, this problem would have been resolved)
(**UPDATED: Due to how painful that was, I decided to package up the DLL for you - HERE**)

Here are the Compiled Files - FOR SL2 BETA 2 - they WORK!! :-)

(I grabbed the Blueprint Hello World Web Part and updated to work)

1. Silverlight Web Part DLL

2. Silverlight *.XAP updated for Beta 2, copy straight to the *sub-directory* under your client BIN

3. Sample SharePoint Web.Config with all the changes! :-)

One of the handiest tools I've used in the last year - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897434.aspx

If you're presenting, even just showing your code, screen to colleagues then this is superb

You'll get this error when using WCF/IIS and host headers.....fortunately a fellow colleague Paul Glavich figured it out!!! Well done Paul! (It involves an IIS reshuffle, you may be able to do something within a custom WCF Binding.)

Remember: There is a limit on the number of IIS Websites you can have on a single machine.

You might be wondering what do all these guys have in common....good question.... :-)

We're currently building an RFID enabled System where complex processes are handled by BizTalk Server, and data being pushed down to Silverlight V2.0 clients via a WCF Silverlight 'Eventing System' (which really is polling under the hood, but to us in developer land - it's cool and it's Events)

Scotty has the full write up of some of his learning experiences through this - well done Scotty, he's been in that place where there are no manuals, no documentation, no previous code, just a gut feel and a compass to sail the seas.

We demo-ed the system at our last user group (or more over used them a guinea pigs :)

Token Screen shot: (we've associated tags with people information and this is what is displayed when TagReadEvents are captured. We need a little work to avoid being underneath or on top of a previous animation)

FULL DETAILS HERE

http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/Default.aspx

Some pretty cool features as I've previously posted

From my perspective I'm particularly interested in the supported 'WCF Dual HTTP Binding'.......more on that later :)

(updated**)

SILVERLIGHT 2.0 BETA 2 SDK is now available!!!!

Grab it here from the Getting Started section

Also get the videos, hands on labs, training material from HERE

Jesse has written a great little article on creating a popup control in Silverlight 2.0.

Nice way of doing it - I was also thinking, that quite simply you could also set the ZIndex of the element to a positive value.

Enjoy.

I've started developing a RFID Mobile application on a Windows Mobile device - which is pretty cool.

I decided to use VS2008 and all worked well until deployment.
"Unable to load System.Data.SqlServerCe.dll ....Version=3.0.xxxxx " as the version OOTB with VS2008 is v3.5

So I grabbed SQL CE Mobile 3.0 and copied over and installed the sqlce30.wce5.armv4i.CAB and all is good!

I was cracking into getting my machine setup for a Silverlight project that I'm working on and came up with the above error.

Now....I admit....running x64 Windows 2008 on my Fijitsu Laptop mighten be the best combination given the huge support for my laptop drivers that I have.

I installed all the new(er) Silverlight 2.0 Beta bits from http://silverlight.net (VS2008 Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 Bits) and opened up my VS2008 seeing all the new Silverlight project types - cool! (I thought)

Each time I either created or opened an existing project - boom! up came the error.

So I figured the installation didn't complete properly.........after running/re-running/uninstalling/installing countless times the error was still there!!!!

My one solace and saving grace was running the following command line:

devenv /setup

......"I'm on my way, on my way to happiness today.....ah huh ah huh ah huh"........

:-)

Hi folks,

While freezing in NZ (this week) I came across this this great MSDN article discussing some of the lower level implementation details around .NET 3.5 Framework.

The part that interests me is the Presence information (right at the end of the article) where once a connection is setup, you can get presence information about the other party - right from the .NET 3.5 framework.

If you've ever had to try and develop for that other ways i.e. by talking straight to communicator, or messenger or... etc.

You'll realise that they each have a slightly different API set, (some accept SIP, some don't, some require it, some don't...) and it's opening up trouble - cause on the target deployment machine...can you imagine the production guys when you say "hang on, I've just got to go and download Messenger (from Live)...."

Anyway - here's the article.

Enjoy - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163356.aspx