Er is weer een nieuwe DotNed podcast online. In deze podcast spreekt Maurice de Beijer met Koen Zwikstra over de recente Silverlight 5 release en hoe de toekomst er voor Silverlight ontwikkelaars uitziet. Verder vertelt hij over Silverlight Spy een runtime inspector waarmee je willekeurige Silverlight applicaties kan inspecteren. Hij kondigt ook nog even aan dat hij druk bezig is met een Spy voor Metro applicaties op Windows 8.
Links:
enjoy!
TheProblemSolver
DotNetEvents
Using Entity Framework Code First together with SqlServerCe is a great way to work with small databases in ASP.NET MVC applications. I have several web applications running on shared hosting sites where SqlServerCe is the database engine under the hood. Deploying is also quite easy. I typically use the build in Publish Web option which works great over FTP.
When using SqlServerCe you have to make sure you add the deployable dependencies. Forgetting those results in pretty clear error messages.
However once that is done I always run into another issue. When a page actually tries to use SqlServerCe I will see a security exception:
System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))
The solution is simple enough. Go to whatever security portal your provider is using, mine is using Plesk, and make sure the user that is actually running the web site has the required read/write privileges to work with the Bin folder.
Enjoy!
TheProblemSolver
DotNetEvents
One of the problems with HTML5, or development at the cutting edge of the web, has always the need to support a large number of different browsers. Depending on who you ask the numbers will vary slightly but is usually boils down to Internet Explorer being the biggest and Chrome and FireFox each taking quite a big chunk of the stats and the remainder of the browsers filling up the gaps.
So that means that any public facing website should at the very least support the three major browsers, not to bad right?
Turns out that live isn’t quite as good as that. With Chrome and FireFox most users are at or close to the last revision of the browser but with Internet Explorer this isn’t the case. In fact as the chart below shows the majority is still using IE8 with IE9 only accounting for a little over a third of all IE users.
So what the big difference?
There are 2 reasons.
First of all IE9 is only available on Windows Vista and Windows 7 and it turns out there is still a substantial number of people using Windows XP. For all those users Internet Explorer 8 is the latest version of the browser they can use. And that is not going to change when Internet Explorer 10 ships. However that number of XP users isn’t that large.
The second and more important reason is that Microsoft doesn’t automatically update Internet Explorer when a newer version is available. You can download it if you want to but if you don’t explicitly do so nothing happens. And by contrast all recent versions of FireFox and Chrome are self updating, so whenever a new version is available it is downloaded without any explicit user action. The benefit is that with both Chrome and FireFox a web developer wanting to do cutting edge HTML5 stuff can be pretty confident that a user has an up to date browser. Well except with Internet explorer that is 
Microsoft has seen the update light
Fortunately that won’t be a problem much longer. Recently Microsoft has announced that it will start auto updating Internet Explorer using Windows Update. So no longer are we dependent on users going in and manually doing an update, instead if they don’t take any action they will be automatically upgraded to the last possible version of IE. This means that we should soon see at leas two thirds of all IE users use IE9, and more important for HTML5 developers, a more compliant browser with a much faster JavaScript engine.
Of course IE9 still isn’t perfect because it supports less HTML5 features than both Chrome and FireFox but the fact that the JavaScript engine is much faster makes it much easier when using polyfills to insert missing pieces. And the fast JavaScript engine and more compliant rendering engine is great news for all web developers 
And the this update will mean that adoption of IE10 will be a lot faster when it ships later this year.
The auto update doesn’t start worldwide right away. At first it will start in Australia and Brazil only. But when that is done they plan on doing so in more countries around the world.
A big step forwards for Microsoft and a huge step forward for HTML5 developers all over the world 
Enjoy!
TheProblemSolver
DotNetEvents
Thanks everyone for joining in with the DevelopMentor webinar I did last night on Getting Started with WCF and Rest.
If you want to take another look at the slides or samples you can download them using the links below:
For more info about the WCF Web API you can check the WCF CodePlex site.
Enjoy!
TheProblemSolver
DotNetEvents
Uiteraard ben ik ook dit jaar weer aanwezig op de Microsoft TechDays 2012. Voor degene die het gemist hebben de TechDays zijn dit jaar van 15 t/m 17 februari in Den Haag.
Ik doe dit jaar twee sessies:
- Op vrijdag middag doe ik een sessie over het maken van een HTML5 client voor REST services.
Het maken van een REST service is pas deel een van een oplossing. Nadat deze er is moet er meestal ook een grafische interface voor gemaakt worden. En in de huidige tijd, waar het ondersteunen van diverse devices steeds belangrijker wordt, komt het maar al te vaak voor dat deze gebruikers interface in HTML geschreven wordt. Helaas blijken de verschillende browsers maar al te vaak voor extra problemen te zorgen die het leven van de ontwikkelaar een stuk moeilijker maken. In deze sessie laat Maurice de Beijer zien hoe je effectief de verschillende problemen waar je als ontwikkelaar tegenaan loopt kan oplossen. - Op donderdag avond tijdens de Geek Night doe ik mijn populaire HTML5 sessie nog een keer.
Maar uiteraard moet dat tijdens de Geek Night wel een beetje anders dus het wordt een sessie met een twist 
Tot daar!
TheProblemSolver
DotNetEvents
De PowerPoint slides en de demo code van mijn HTML5 presentatie van gisteravond zijn nu beschikbaar.
Voor de liefhebbers ook online via SlideShare.
Met dank aan 4DotNet die de sponsor was van deze bijeenkomst.
Enjoy!
TheProblemSolver
DotNetEvents
In deze podcast spreekt Maurice de Beijer met Freena Eijffinger over autisme en hoe Freena de Microsoft Surface tafel gebruikt om autisme te diagnotiseren bij kinderen.
Met dank aan onze sponsor: Red-Gate, ingeniously simple tools
Links:
Enjoy!
TheProblemSolver
DotNetEvents