November 2007 - Posts
Recently I was looking for the different controls to represent "wait" indicator on the web page, and found the great site http://ajaxload.info/ , which allows you to generate number of different wait controls. You can view them online and download to use on your site.
Updated: another collection is there http://www.napyfab.com/ajax-indicators/
Mirror: Please wait... online control generation
When you are moving to consulting role from development you need to understand that there is something else except pure development. This "something else" is rather tiny thing which may be missed easily.
If you look back to development or lead role your will see that the "product delivery" was the major area of responsibility. In consulting - it's absolutely the same, plus new "keeping the client happy" role :)
What does it mean for you?
Just forget about your technical readiness. No matter how you are good technically - it means nothing for client :) You need step above delivery into "meet client's expectations" position. It brings your to number communication between client's business holders to understand their needs and client's "massaging" (Chris I suppose it's your copyright) to rule the project into right direction. You are becoming responsible to deliver your promises on time and control that everything is done.
There is a number of other items which mostly depends on your charisma and communication skills helping your being proactive with client. Your need to be heard by the client, bringing the clear understanding of what's going on. Heroic silent coding is the thing you must never do as a consulter on-site.
mirror: Wining the client
After moving to VS 2008 I've noted that Entity Framework Beta2 is partly broken. Even if you are able to build existed projects, creating one fails when you are trying to create "New Connection" to database.
The is no solution for this issue right now, only configuring your connection manually.
So, for those who are using ADO Entity Framework in they projects, like me, the best way is use the VS 2008 Beta2 till ADO vNext provide updated version of their Entity FW and Entity Tools for RTM of VS 2008. Only if you are not so eager of VS 2008 RTM and ready to configure your Entity FW projects manually (exactly what I'm doing right now :) )
PS: To install Entity FW and Entity Tools you need to make some changes to install packages to remove the VS version check up. The best tool for this is Orca editor. See more details there.
Using this poster we can easily inspect what new was added to .NET 3.5 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=7b645f3a-6d22-4548-a0d8-c2a27e1917f8&displaylang=en&tm
The most interesting changes are:
in ASP.NET regarding authentication and roles
- System.Web.ApplicationServices namespace provides classes that enable you to access ASP.NET forms authentication, roles, and profiles application services as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services.
- System.Web.ClientServices namespace provides classes that support access in Windows-based applications to the ASP.NET AJAX authentication, roles, and profiles services.
in WCF regarding P2P, new ServiceModels
- System.Net.PeerToPeer namespace provides access to peer networking functionality.
- System.ServiceModel.Web classes that make up the Web Http Programming Model.
- System.ServiceModel.Syndication classes that make up the Syndication Object Model
in CLR
- System.DateTimeOffset
- System.TimeZoneInfo
- System.AddIn
- System.Diagnostics.Eventing
- System.Diagnostics.PerformanceData
- System.IO.Pipes
and etc.