Ben H Blog - Keep it Simple, Then Refactor.

I thought I would pass this on.  I have not had time to go through all the screenshots and videos, but basically this is web development environement where the IDE is actually an online website.  So, you can develop web pages from within a web page!  Kind of ironic.  They also let you deploy your web site to thier infrastructure so you don’t have to worry about hosting and such.  SAAS for the web developer.  Who’d of thought.

Just wanted to let everyone know that they released a new version of the CRM SDK on May 1st.  Download it here.  Also, learn more about customizing and developing with MS Dynamics CRM 3.0 here.  Enjoy!

I had to put this out here.  In short a company is suing MS for patent infringement saying they have a patent on using XML to define web sites.  I think this is a move to get some free press and nothing more. 

It does bring up an interesting point about patents and software.  How can you patent software?  It is so easy to grab sample code from the net and tweak it to work in your application.  So, does the code have to be an exact match for it to be patent infringement?  Or is it sufficient to say that if software solves the same problem in the same way it is an infringement?  I think there is some gray area there.  Any Comments?

I found this offer from Innerworkings today and wanted to pass it along.  It’s a free trial of their new Ajax learning for ASP.Net.

I had the opportunity to work with some of Innerworking’s object oriented related courses (innerworkings calls them drills) when I was doing some supplementary web casts on the same topics for FDC.  I have to say their e-learning methods are top notch.  Instead of everything being web based, they have you install their client interface.  It is a great interface and the drills really walk you through the processes of solving real world problems. 

If you are a manager\team lead and are trying to get your people up to speed with new techniques\technologies, Innerworkings is a great way to go.  It is also great for the software professional who is just trying to upgrade his\her skills to the latest technology.

Obviously, I highly recommend them.

I must admit that I bleed Microsoft and the .Net Framework when it comes to software development.  So, I’m not very familar with the J2EE or Linux platforms but I recently came accross a link to a plug in for Visual Studio that will let you deploy and convert your projects to these platforms.  I thought it was interesting so if you want to know more click here.

This has been out for a few months, but I just ran across it.  This is an update to the Web Services Software Factory that was released by the Patterns and Practices group last year.  This one includes loads of stuff that will help you use WCF and also migrate your current asmx web services over to WCF.  Check it out!

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480534.aspx

I recently found some ASP.Net tutorials out on Scott Guthrie’s blog.  These are great if you would like to walk through some of the ins and outs of using data in ASP.Net.  Obviously, you also get some exposure to ASP.Net in general since you must be pretty familar with ASP.Net in order to start working with data.  Click here for Scott’s post.  

David Yack and I presented at the Utah Code Camp last weekend.  Dave’s presentation on WPF/E was tremendous!  He has a great post with tons of links to good WPF\E resources.  Check it out here.  Also, check Dave’s blog for updates on WPF/E, which has now officially been renamed Microsoft SilverLight.

Unfortunently, one of the presenters scheduled for the Spring Utah Code Camp had a dirt bike accident and could not do his presentation.  So, Pat asked for someone to step in and I volunteered to fill in with a talk on Windows Workflow Foundation (WF).  I was surprised that many of the people that attended the session had never really heard of WF.  I was, however, relieved that my talk had the right audience.  This presentation is aimed at those developers that had never seen or worked with WF.  It is pretty high level and the demos are pretty simple.  That being said it is great way to get familiar with WF and the benefits it brings to the table.  There is tons of information and samples on WF out there on the web, but this presentation and demo is a great way to spend 1 – 2 hours getting your feet wet with WF.  The presentation and demos are below.  There are two files. One that is over 35 MB and includes all the demo videos I got with the Launch Kit for WF.  These videos are also great ways to get up to speed with WF and I recommend talking the time to watch them.  If you want to simply get the slide deck and the demos, that file is only 1.5 MB.  So, choose wisely…

File Attachment: WF With Video Demos.zip (34795 KB)

File Attachment: WF No Video Demos.zip (1718 KB) 

I presented on Design Patterns at the Spring Utah Code Camp today in Salt Lake City.  Thanks to all of you who attended and thanks to Pat Wright for allowing me to attend and present.  I love learning new stuff as well as passing on my experiences with .Net to other people.  The talk was only one hour so I had to limit myself to the patterns I thought were the most useful.  However, there are so many cool and useful patterns out there that I ran out of time.  I’ve included all my demos and the slides in the zip file below.  Please feel free to add any questions or comments to this blog entry or email me at benh@coloradotc.com.

File Attachment: Design Patterns.zip (1451 KB)

I’ve been working on a new system that will report system health both from the health of the server (CPU Usage, Memory Usage, Disk Space, etc…) and the health of the application (# of Orders, # of Errors, Inventory Levels, etc…).  The system uses a WCF service to collect all the data.  I recently got it working great on my machine.  However, deployment has been an adventure.  If you are going to use WCF please read through the following documentation before you try to deploy:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-US/library/aa751792.aspx

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/b044b1c9-c1e5-4c9f-84d8-0f02f4537f8b.aspx

Also, remeber that you can only have one address per binding in a WCF service.  This bit me because you cannot have a WCF service hosted in IIS if you have multiple Host Headers\IP addresses defined for the the site.  I wanted to have an internal address for my WCF service so I could call the servers in my cluster individually to determine thier health.  That caused the following error:

This collection already contains an address with scheme http.  There can be at most one address per scheme in this collection.
Parameter name: item

So, if you ever get this error check your bindings and make sure you do not have multiple Host Headers\IP addresses defined in IIS.  Also make sure you only have one address defined per binding.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, David Yack and I are both attending and presenting at the Code Camp in Uah.  Here are all the details:

What: Utah Spring Code Camp

When:  April 14^th 2007 9:00-5:00

Where: Neumont University

Registration: http://utahcodecamp.eventbrite.com

The local .NET Users Group and SQL Server Users Group is conducting a “Code Camp” for local software programmers next month at Neumont University.  The code camp is by the community for the community.  Always free and Always for the community.

The Saturday, April 14^th event is scheduled from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. The conference is free please register at. http://utahcodecamp.eventbrite.com

Lots of Sponsors and Lots of software and Tech Gadgets to giveaway!

You can check out www.msutahevents.com  for a session schedule and speaker list for the Code Camp.

I’d like to say thanks to everyone who attended the South Colorado .Net User Group’s Vista and Office 2007 launch.  I think everyone had a great time.  Unfortunently, I did not have enough time to get thru all the stuff I had planned.  No big deal.  I’ve attached a zip file with the presentaion and all the demos to the bottom of this post.  So, please download that and take a look at everything.  There is a bunch of good info and samples  in there.  Many of the WPF samples included media so the download is big (approx. 30mb).  Here are a couple of pictures as well:

Download Developer Slides and Demos

Hopefully many of you are planning on joining us tomorrow at the Southern Colorado .Net User Group meeting for the Vista and Office 2007 Launch.

Also, my talk on Design Patterns scheduled for the May .Net User Group meeting has been changed to the July meeting.  The May meeting has been cancelled due to the Memorial Day Holiday.

I ran into an interesting issue this morning with one of the sites I’m working on.  I’m using Ajax and some JavaScript to do multiple things on my site.  We rolled the site out to production and started getting “Access Denied” JavaScript errors all over the site.  We were NOT getting these errors in test and I could not understand why.  I searched online to see if I could get any clues about how to fix this.  I found one article that discussed this error being related to security when working on window objects that are in two different domain (ie. trying to use “http://www.mydomain.com” and “http://mydomain.com” as config values on the same site).  So, the problem turned out to be that we were doing some domain forwarding and cloaking through zoneedit.com.  The cloaking displays “www.mydomain.com” in the address bar no matter what page you go to in the site.  Turning the cloaking off fixed the problem.  Cloaking is not a real high requirement for us so just turning that off is OK for us.  I’m not sure if there is a fix to get both the cloaking and the JavaScript to work.  Our site is working fine now so I’m not going to pursue it, but if someone finds the answer to that question please post that comment here for future reference.

This has nothing to do with .Net, but I thought there might be a bunch of people out there with Vonage that might be affected by this.

Vonage Patent Infringement

Many of you may have already seen this and fixed it.  I know that I had dealt with this once before, but I could not remember the fix.  So, I figured I’d blog it so if\when I come accross it again I can use this post as a reference to the workaround.  Here is the scenario:

We have been using the CTP version(s) of Ajax for many months now.  The RTM version was released and the validation controls were moved to a different release and were not included in the RTM version.  These controls that were left out caused the following error:

There is a great post here or here that explains this error in more detail, but I will give you the cliff notes version real quick.  This error is directly related to these Web.Config entries:

<tagMapping>

<add tagType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.CompareValidator" mappedTagType="System.Web.UI.Compatibility.CompareValidator, System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"/>

<add tagType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.CustomValidator" mappedTagType="System.Web.UI.Compatibility.CustomValidator, System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"/>

<add tagType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.RangeValidator" mappedTagType="System.Web.UI.Compatibility.RangeValidator, System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"/>

<add tagType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.RegularExpressionValidator" mappedTagType="System.Web.UI.Compatibility.RegularExpressionValidator, System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"/>

<add tagType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.RequiredFieldValidator" mappedTagType="System.Web.UI.Compatibility.RequiredFieldValidator, System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"/>

<add tagType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.ValidationSummary" mappedTagType="System.Web.UI.Compatibility.ValidationSummary, System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"/>

</tagMapping>

If you are not using any of these controls then you can simply remove these entries.  They are located in the <pages> section in the Web.Config.  I would try this first and recompile to see if this fixes the issue.  If you are using the Validation controls then you will need to download this dll and reference it from your web project.  You will aslo need to change the Web.Config settings from above to look like this:

Just wanted to put a quick update out here to let everyone know my schedule for the next couple of months.  Below is a list of my upcoming speaking engagements:

April 3^rd: Launch Speaker at the Vista and Office 2007 Launch for the South Colorado .Net User Group

April 14^th: Simple Design Patterns That Solve Real World Development Issues at the Code Camp in Salt Lake City Utah

May 21^st: Simple Design Patterns That Solve Real World Development at the Denver .Net User’s Group

Please join me at these events to learn about .Net and have some fun as well.

Once you install Vista you start getting some annoying security messages when trying to remote from Vista to Servers or PCs that do not have the latest version of Remote Desktop.  I found a cool post on Scott Forsyth’s blog that discusses how to turn this off and the risks\rewards of doing so.  Check it out here.

I just upgraded to the 2.0 version of Blogjet to see if i can get it to connect to my blog correctly.  Here are a few test pictures: