Brian H. Madsen - .Net Powered by Caffeine : Handy Tools

Microsoft releases Chart Controls for .Net 3.5 SP1 - and they're free!!!!

Brian Madsen — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 04:41:00 GMT

Microsoft just recently released some very handy .Net Chart Controls for .Net 3.5 and does require SP1 - something which i've been waiting forever to see.

These controls are very crisp looking and come in both 3D and 2D versions. There's a whole range of chart types available.

I'm going to have a serious play with them and see what capabilities these controls offer. I hope they include AJAX capability (for the ASP.Net ones that is) and that we can extend them if we need to.

This was announced on Scott Guthrie's blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/11/24/new-asp-net-charting-control-lt-asp-chart-runat-quot-server-quot-gt.aspx

Here's a few links for those of us too lazy to dig them up ourselves (thanks Scott!):

Download:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=130f7986-bf49-4fe5-9ca8-910ae6ea442c&DisplayLang=en

VS2008 Support:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=1D69CE13-E1E5-4315-825C-F14D33A303E9&displaylang=en

Forum:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/MSWinWebChart/threads/

Documentation:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=EE8F6F35-B087-4324-9DBA-6DD5E844FD9F&displaylang=en

Web and Winform samples:
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/mschart/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=1591

Chart Control Language Packs:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.aspx?na=45&p=3&SrcDisplayLang=en&SrcCategoryId=&SrcFamilyId=130f7986-bf49-4fe5-9ca8-910ae6ea442c&u=details.aspx%3ffamilyid%3d581FF4E3-749F-4454-A5E3-DE4C463143BD%26displaylang%3den

.Net 3.5 SP1:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.aspx?na=47&p=2&SrcDisplayLang=en&SrcCategoryId=&SrcFamilyId=130f7986-bf49-4fe5-9ca8-910ae6ea442c&u=details.aspx%3ffamilyid%3dAB99342F-5D1A-413D-8319-81DA479AB0D7%26displaylang%3den

System Requirements

Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2; Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista; Windows XP Service Pack 3

.NET Framework: .NET Framework 3.5 SP1
Processor: 400 MHz Pentium processor or equivalent (Minimum); 1GHz Pentium processor or equivalent (Recommended)
RAM:96 MB (Minimum); 256 MB (Recommended)
Hard Disk: Up to 500 MB of available space may be required
CD or DVD Drive: Not required
Display: 800 x 600, 256 colors (Minimum); 1024 x 768 high color, 32-bit (Recommended)

As usual, it pays to keep an eye out on Scott's blog. Now i just hope they're easier to implement than some of the other third party vendor controls i've been working with in the past. Some has been an absolute nightmare to get working, some has used nifty Wizard-like UIs inside Visual Studio and others have "professed" to have capabilities for supporting AJAX where it was soon discovered that it was only in "some" scenarios (eg, the exact single scenario they had displayed).

Apparently the sample project from CodePlex contains more than 200 examples - i guess now its just up to me to have a real play with it.

Service and support when it matters…Applied Innovations

Brian Madsen — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 06:48:19 GMT

A little while ago I was contacted by Kentico (www.kentico.com) with an offer for a free enterprise license of their CMS system. As I had planned on moving the Perth SQL Server User Group over to a site where we’re have a lot more control it came at a very convenient time.

With the offer came also a further offer for free web hosting for the CMS system – this was provided by Applied Innovations (www.appliedi.net (my apologies, got .com/.net switched around)) which is a hosting company.

We got the CMS system set up (or rather Kentico configured it for us) and we were off. The along came the first problem i face – the domain name. Naturally I wanted a .au domain name, but for me to get a .org.au domain name the user group needs to be incorporated (eg. a registered non-profit organisation), which carried a lot of benefits + administrative burdens. In the short timeframe there was no way i could get that organised.

So i registered two domains first, www.perthsqlserver.com and www.perthsqlserver.org, and set about getting it up and working. When i found the “Domains” tab in the Applied Innovations’ control panel (Helm i believe) i saw that it was set to perthsqlserver.org.au, as we had originally planned. So, delete and….oops…

Here came the biggest oops – I had inadvertedly deleted everything – domain, site and database. Christ!!!! Well, what can you do but to contact the service desk at Applied Innovations to figure out what I could possibly do to get things back. Now, generally you pay anywhere from $80 to $200 to have a backup restored which I was prepared to pay, just so i could get the system back up and running again.

First i noticed that there was an “online” chat – well, normally they’re closed for us in Australia, since it’s out of hours for most other countries, but i gave it a good try anyways.

First surprise was the message “Welcome to Applied Innovations’ LiveChat service. How may I help you today?”…woah, it was open for business.

The gentleman on the other line "- Scott Brown – listened to my newbie’ish (ok, total foolish mistake) and said simply – i’ll just have a look for you. Remember the domain, ip etc of the server..i had to admit i didn’t. Nevermind, he’d dig around a bit.

After a few minutes he came back and said “have a backup here from 5am this morning, will that do?”. I was literally gobsmacked..that fast, and then a backup that wasn’t a week old?

Naturally i told him that would do just fine – 10 minutes later my site, database etc had been restored for me..voila! as easy as that.

So, how’s that for a piece of service? Big thanks goes to Scott Brown, Applied Innovations, for helping a poor smuck like me out. When it comes to services on the internet today, a lot of companies fall through when it comes to delivering this support to their customers – and remember, i’m a freebie here – not a paid business class service holder which i’d pay big money for. No, this service came as a freebie in support of the community.

10 minutes guys…and i had a backup restored from earlier that day (literally 3-4 hours old). Even more surprised was i when Scott simply thanked off and asked me if there was anything else he could help me with.

We’re now up and running – the Perth SQL Server User Group has found a new home, thanks to Kentico and Applied Innovations. I’m still in the process of configuring everything, but for all sense and purposed we’ll be moving along fast and get everything fixed for us.

After having had a good thorough play around with the CMS system, I have to admit that it’s very intuitive and lends itself very easily to building and configuring a web site.

It works very much in the sense that you set up web part zones and apply web parts to them – very easy to manage and it’s extremely feature rich, with polls, calenders/events, sponsors, membership areas, articles etc available straight out of the box.

I’ll be doing a full review in the near future and will also attempt to do some development work with it – seems that plugging modules into the system is not only extremely easy, but also supporting the ASP.Net framework exceedingly well.

Kentico has also just launched a free edition – something a lot of CMS systems doesn’t have - http://www.kentico.com/Company/News/Kentico-CMS-Free-Edition.aspx

Technorati Tags: Kentico,Applied Innovations,CMS,ASP.Net

Community Server has a bug? WLW not getting categories when updating/editing a post

Brian Madsen — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:27:25 GMT

I noticed lately that WLW wasn’t getting the “Categories” from Community Server when I was editing a post i’d published.

At first i thought it was a problem with WLW, but i have it from reliable sources that it’s only Community Server which seems to behave like this.

I wonder if there’s a problem with the implementation of WLW into Community Server, or if there’s a “bug” in retrieving data associated with a post in Community Server.

Hopefully our admins here will upgrade to Community Server 2008 and there’ll be a fix for it.

Technorati Tags: Telligent,Community Server,Windows Live Writer

NTBackup is gone from Windows Server 2008? Michael Kleef #MSFT#

Brian Madsen — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 22:41:53 GMT

Having never really liked NTBackup, i can't say that i'm saddened that it's been replaced.

From all accounts, the new feature - Windows Server Backup - is more than capable, although lacking the support of tape backups.

On that note, i'm definitely not feeling a loss. I cannot stand tape backups and in my opinion tapes should be eliminated entirely. they're unreliable, slow and basically just a pita to work with. I don't know how often i've tried to bring back a system from a tape backup, only to find after hours of work that it simply just didn't work. And this could even be from a tested backup (eg. backups are only really any good if you also TEST them after you've taken it). Magnetic tapes are, simply put, useless.

Anyways, Michael Kleef speaks a bit about this on his blog.

I be lazy - SoftFuse Password Generator

Brian Madsen — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 22:38:00 GMT

How often do you actually have to "think" real hard about a password? seriously, it's in the top 10 of most time consuming mini-tasks for IT admins and developers (the dev's has variable naming and method naming as the top) and since i have to set up quite a few service accounts for MOSS i was starting to get a brainfreeze after my third.

So, instead of doing the lazy (and dangerous) one on these passwords and keep the same once i'd come up with one that'd pass the password policies, i decided to look for a password generator.

I could easily write one, but that's just too much work for me atm..So, going the extra step i did a simple search and found a few possible tools.

First one was SoftFuse Password Generator Free 1.2 and it's simple to use and gives you three character options (Letters, Numbers and Symbols), a prefix and a suffix and a password length..Click "Generate" and voila, it works.

So, being totally lazy i stopped there and now i can spit out passwords in a matter of seconds.

You can find this tool, and more, at www.softfuse.com - neat!

Fabian rocks....Sharepoint DVDs going on order!

Brian Madsen — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 02:05:06 GMT

today i got the green light to purchase two copies of the Sharepoint Training DVD which Sahil Malik created together with Carl Franklin.

All thanks to Fabian who vouched for it and put the PO through for me.

Now i just have to wait for Carl to get back to me on how we actually buy them.

Awesome work Fabian - thanks heaps for putting your weight behind the request!

Groove - it can come in handy!

Brian Madsen — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 13:56:33 GMT

Today i decided to start building a complete set of references for the platforms i work with. Starting with Sharepoint.

I don't know why i never thought about doing it this way and i'm sure i can come up with a better way to store the info, by perhaps building a custom form for Groove and a custom View?

yeps - so that's what i did! First entry was Sahil Malik's latest tip - AutoGAC your class library on build!! awesome going!

Now, if i only now could find a Groove service provider so i could have this workspace from other PCs that would be great!

When a presentation goes so well i'm left speechless!

Brian Madsen — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 23:58:29 GMT

Last night I attended the Perth .Net Community of Practise's event, presented by a friend of mine, Nick Randolph and it was a brilliant presentation.

Nick presented on Visual Studio 2008 and he simply keeps on improving. The presentation was so well done that i'm at a loss for words.

An excellent mixture of demos and presentation materials.

I've been to a few of Nick's presentations before - even co-presented with him at Curtin University - and I have to admit that he is getting very, very good.

The topic as i said, was Visual Studio 2008 and as many know, Nick co-wrote Professional Visual Studio 2005 together with Dave Gardner, and Nick announced yesterday that he is in the process of writing Professional Visual Studio 2008.

If the presentation last night is any indication, i'd be standing in line at the bookshop once it's released.

The authors has set up a web site for the new book - www.professionalvisualstudio.com - so keep a look out for news on the book there!

Well done Nick - not only did you pull a crowd (we didn't have enough chairs!!!) but you made the event extremely pleasant and educational!

my hat's off for you!

Run IT on a Virtual Hard Disk

Brian Madsen — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 12:50:11 GMT

I don't know how often i've had to delay playing with a new piece of released technology, just because I was in the middle of another set of tests and simply didn't have the time to create my own virtual server environment again to accommodate the platform i want to test.

Here's a bit of good news - Microsoft VHD (www.microsoft.com/vhd) is a set of virtual hard disks available for download which already has the necessary bits installed.

Currently there's a range of virtuals available:

Biztalk Server 2006	System Center Essentials 2007
Exchange Server 2007	System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007
Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Beta 2	Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite
ISA Server 2006	Visual Studio 2005 Team System
Microsoft Office 2007 Professional	Windows Server 2008 Beta 3
Office Sharepoint Server 2007	Windows Server 2003 R3
SQL Server 2005	Windows Vista
SQL Server 2005/Exchange 2007

Just download either Virtual PC or Virtual Server 2005 (which is free btw), and you're ready to go!

CSharpZealot.com starts another competition...

Brian Madsen — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 05:45:20 GMT

The IdeaBlade DevForce Pro competition is kicking of at CSharpZealot.com.

Don't miss out of winning this fantastic prize.

- a copy of IdeaBlade's DevForce Professional with 1 year full support, valued at more than $3000.

This prize is generously provide by Murray Ware from Devforce.com.au.

IdeaBlade’s DevForce is a powerful .NET framework that accelerates the development of data intensive enterprise applications. DevForce provides components that extend .NET and simplify data access, improve user-interface design, and enable rich applications to operate over the internet.

DevForce is available in three editions to accommodate the needs of small to large enterprise development teams.

The announcement can be found here: http://csharpzealot.com/forums/thread/172.aspx

InnerWorkings - .Net training very much hands-on

Brian Madsen — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 13:58:30 GMT

I got an email from Brian Finnerty yesterday who runs www.innerworkings.com - a .Net training site with a twist.

I've been through quite a few of them over the years..from instructional DVDs, to remote training and onto class-room training and thought at first this was yet another of the same.

But i was rather surprised when i took the trial..

First off, you download an application which contains your "courses" and you can do them at your leisure.

The first thing you get faced with a "Developer Interface":

The "Developer Interface" also syncs your results with their server, so you can keep tap on your progress through the labs you take.

When selecting the "Drill" from the list (i have one, a sample - circled with red) it'll take you to the main interface which you'll be dealing with.

Each "Drill" has a set of tasks to perform:

Once you've selected a task, you'll be forwarded to the scenario which explains what the outcome of the task is:

At the top of the Developer Interface you have three tabs:

And after you've read through the scenario you move onto the challenge which explains what the goal is, the individual steps you have to make in order to complete the task.

The problem statement sums up the issues that this task has in detail.

After reading through that there is just to open up the code/project and you're on your way.

It is extremely simple to navigate this Developer Interface and to get started. All is taken care of as it will launch Visual Studio 2005 for you, load the solution and off you go. Each task is commented in each class enough so that it's not too "easy" to engage with. Methods and Classes are comment clearly where you are expected to edit and you are to leave alone.

Once you're done you simply go back to the Developer Interface and click on "Judge Project Code" and it'll scan your solution and find out if you have successfully accomplished the task, or alternatively what you have missed or done inaccurately.

When Visual Studio loads it not only loads the solution, but it also configures your environment, tabs etc so that everything is at hand - including a "userful links" window which will take you to MSDN. Absolutely Brilliant!!!

I can highly recommend taking a look at this - www.innerworkings.com ..simply brilliant! i'm hooked that's for sure. the Drills aren't just a "copy/paste", but leaves you with enough clues and help to "figure" things out yourself.

Ozzie Rules Blogging : Release Candidate of Windows Presentation Foundation labs now available!!

Brian Madsen — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 14:03:31 GMT

Charles "Chuck" Stirling has just released a nice 3 part series of labs for WPF.

After having a good read through them, i'm surprised in how much effort he must have put into these "manuals".

If you haven't already had a read, i suggest you skip on over to Chuck's blog and go through the material:

Ozzie Rules Blogging : Release Candidate of Windows Presentation Foundation labs now available!!

Great work Mr. Chuck and Mrs. Chuck!

Currently listening to:
H I T M U S I C S T A T I O N . N E T - http://www.HitMusicStation.net - Enjoy the best & *** the rest! -

Feedburner releases paid services for free after Google purchased them.

Brian Madsen — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 06:22:16 GMT

Source: www.builderau.com.au

Feedburner has announced that both their Stats PRO and MyBrand services will be free from now on. This news is coming a little over a month after Google acquired Feedburner at the end of May. I will admit that I was a little skeptical when Google bought Feedburner as to how it would affect the actual service, but this is certainly a step in the right direction.
Feedburner's Stats PRO is just an enhancement to the regular stats that Feedburner already provides. Most notably, it contains a stat called "reach" and also item views. As opposed to the number of subscribers that is displayed by Feedburner, reach is a measure of how many people are "actively engaging with your content." If you want to enable Stats PRO on your account, you have to go and turn it on in your feed's control panel, although it is free for everyone.
MyBrand is a service that really appeals to larger sites who still want the benefits of using Feedburner, such as stat tracking, but want everything to be hosted on their own domain. MyBrand lets you host your feed and access all of your stats from your domain to make the whole experience very transparent.
So, if you are interested in either of these services, just login to your Feedburner account and make the upgrade for free. Hopefully these are just the first of many improvements to come for Feedburner now that they are backed by Google.

Excellent news!!!!

Microsoft Surface web site launched

Brian Madsen — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 01:06:05 GMT

I seriously want a table like this...anyways, this new technology (well sort off, HP apparently has a VERY high-end, non-affordable version) just got a home.

www.microsoft.com/surface

i'm still totally keen on this idea...i wonder what the wife would say if i got rid of her favorite coffee table??

Networking Virtual PC 2007 on Vista

Brian Madsen — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 14:54:02 GMT

I decided to forego the pleasure of a BIOS upgrade to my desktop and install Windows Server 2008 in a virtual environment - gotta love virtualisation!!

Well, the install went very well and took less than 30 minutes even with the lack of resources.

Firs thing first, my desktop is currently running on an USB wireless adapter from DLink with an wrong driver for Vista..yes i know, but apparently the one i have didn't have Vista support to start with so i went for another one and it worked. there's now a Vista driver available but i haven't bothered to upgrade seeing as the other driver is working just fine.

The problem i had was that VPC wouldn't use the network adapter. Regardless of what i tried (even turning on VM support on the adapter didn't work)..

So i crept off my high horse and asked Ken Schaefer what to do - incidentially he'd just had the same problem and informed me that i just needed to install the MS LoopBack Adapter, bridge the adapter with the USB adapter and it'd work.

So here's what you do to get it working:

1) open up the Device Manager

2) Rick-click on your computer name

You'll then see the Add Hardware wizard dialog:

3) Click "Next" which will bring up the first step..here you select "Install the hardware that I manually select from a list (Advanced)"

4) Click "Next" and you'll get a list of "Hardware Types"..Here locate "Network Adapters"

5) Click "Next" and you'll get a list of Manufacturers, locate "Microsoft". The list on the right then fills with MSFT adapters. Locate "Microsoft Loopback Adapter" in the list and click "Next" again.

6) You'll get the confirmation screen, click "Next" and you're good to go.

Once that's done you simply just have to bridge the Loopback Adapter with your USB wireless Adapter. Be patient as it takes a few seconds before it's located your workgroup/domain..If you don't have DHCP running you need to ensure that you assign the right IP address to your Loopback adapter.

That's it - in less than 5 minutes i was up and running with a working network connection.

Thanks again goes to Ken Schaefer for this little tip.

New ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Release - ScottGu's Blog

Brian Madsen — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 02:44:33 GMT

One thing about Scott Guthrie's blog is that there's always GOOD news coming from him. I know that he writes his own blog and doesn't have an assistant or some other write it for him.

I think Scott's blog was one of the first i ever subscribed to and have read ever since.

True to form, Scott just announced a new release of the ASP.Net AJAX Control Toolkit. fantastic!!

For more information about this release, and the numerous bug fixes, additions etc can be found on Scott's blog.

New ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Release - ScottGu's Blog

On top of that there's also new ASP.Net AJAX videos available (already??) on the official ASP.Net website.

D-Link AirPlus G for Vista - driver that works

Brian Madsen — Thu, 03 May 2007 09:14:52 GMT

Since we haven't been able to find a sparky to take care of the wiring we need done after moving office from one end of the house to the other, I decided to get a wireless USB adapter till we can locate a sparky we can trust.

Since it's a temporary solution I didn't want to go full out on the cost of it so bought a cheap one - the D-Link AirPlusG (DWL G122) which came in at around $60 only - could find it cheaper elsewhere but didn't want to waste time driving around.

Since i'm running Vista Ultimate I quickly found that the shipped drivers with the adapter, wasn't for Vista at all.

So the search went on for a driver...D-Link didn't have one for the revision of the adapter i bought...great!! how smart is that..they had one for RevA, RevB and RevD..figure which one i bought? RevC.

Anyways, I decided to try to download the one for RevD and installed it.

The install went practically without a hitch - no mention of RevC not being supported by this driver, nor any warnings from Vista that it was an incompatible driver.

I was up and running in less than 5 minutes...how easy is that!

So for you who's been stuck with a RevC version of the D-Link GWL G122 just download the RevD version - works a treat.

Here's a link to the driver: http://support.dlink.com/products/view.asp?productid=DWL%2DG122%5FrevD

- Orcas Beta 1 Available - no fix for my problems that i can see :(

Brian Madsen — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 14:29:39 GMT

Finally - "Orcas" is out of CTP and the first public Beta has been released, as was mention on the CSharpZealot.com forums by Stu Smith from FeedGhost.

I'm very tempted to download the Beta, but i'm having some serious reservations after the debacle i had with the March CTP. I've tried to find out if the problem i got with NGEN and MSCORSVW has been sorted, but nothing i can find anywhere leads me to believe it's even been noticed.

Since i ended up downloading 3 seperate file sets of the CTP (to a total of about 14Gb) i am hoping to find out from other sources if the problems are purely mine and not something native to Orcas.

I nearly threw my brand new laptop after Dell when this kept happening. But luckily i found out what the problem was, though not why it was doing it, and simply uninstalling Orcas, shut down the services, uninstall .Net 2.0..then re-install .Net 2.0 fixed the memory issues i was having with NGEN and MSCORSVW.

I've still not found anybody else who'd the same problems i did, which leads me to believe that it's isolated to me alone, though i can't see what could have caused it, other than the Orcas install..it was a fresh Vista install..well all three times i tried it.

Anyways, unless i can get some light shed on this and my concerns erased, i think i'm going to have to sit Orcas out till it's in full productions. It saddens me that i have to do this, but i just can't afford to have this laptop go down hill for me.

Link to - Orcas Beta 1 Available

Logitech S510 Cordless Keyboard - New Keyboard for the laptop

Brian Madsen — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 14:13:26 GMT

One thing i find hard to get used to is the keyboard on a laptop - it's set too far forward, especially on a laptop the size of the Dell XPS M1710, so to alleviate the slight "discomfort" i get from using the keyboard i went out and bought myself a new Logitech keyboard.

I'm a bit of a Logitech fan i must admit. They look good but most importantly they fit my wrist position perfectly. On my desktop i have a Logitech G15 and use a G7 cordless mouse seeing as i'm a gamer, and although not as slim as i like, it feels comfortable.

So today i got a new one, to supplement my laptop while it's parked on my desk at home - am not going to drag the keyboard with me outside, so it's only for home use.

I didn't want to spend too much for just a part-time keyboard so I looked at the low-end, no frills Logitech keyboards and actually think this one looks sleek. It's small which is good as my desktop real-estate is starting to becom expensive (am looking for a new desk as it is).

Anyways, the Logitech Cordless S510 is pretty neat to be honest, while the mouse is feeling a bit lousy - so i wouldn't recommend buying this for anybody who has high requirement to the mouse (the G7 on the other hand is very nice).

At this stage i'm not going to bother installing SetPoint - have never been happy with SetPoint's performance to be honest - especially not since i get tons of crashes from SetPoint on the G15, using Vista. The Media display in the LCD keeps crashing.

Anyways, for AU$99.95 it's definitely one of the best keyboards i've used so far. Did i mention that it also looks great?

Andrew Coates ::: MSFT : ReMix Australia

Brian Madsen — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 02:41:29 GMT

This is SOOO cool!!! finally a massive initiative from MSFT to bring one of the most popular events worldwide to australia. MIX, which is held in Las Vegas this year is going to have a little brother. ReMix Australia.

It's in Melbourne, which eventhough nowhere near Perth, is a massive step in the right direction...and for $140 for the two day conference i'd say that puts the value up among one of the best this year.

Insofar as i can see, there's no set itenirary (spledled like that?) but i'm sure that'll come soon enough.

Good job guys!!!

Link to Andrew Coates ::: MSFT : ReMix Australia