tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-301741992009-05-19T10:30:50.351-07:00Stephane Legayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01593730213717050672noreply@blogger.comBlogger29125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30174199.post-60636377400049872312009-05-19T10:18:00.001-07:002009-05-19T10:30:50.357-07:00

I went to this free MSDN event yesterday, a 3-hour recap of the most interesting technologies unveiled at Mix ‘09. The event focused on Silverlight 3, Windows Azure and ASP.NET MVC (we skipped that introductory lecture since we’ve been using the framework for quite a while). Here’s a quick recap. Silverlight 3 / .Net RIA services The MS demo guy really just focused on the RIA services

Stephane Legayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01593730213717050672noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30174199.post-67662148880480448912009-04-28T09:36:00.001-07:002009-04-28T10:44:15.277-07:00

Last week I needed to implement an authorization scheme in our MVC and WCF apps. I found a bunch of resources on how to implement Role or Claims-based authorization in both frameworks, but they all required adding CLR attributes on controller actions and service operations - a bit of messy for my taste, and required hard-coding your authorization rules, which didn’t fit my requirements. We

Stephane Legayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01593730213717050672noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30174199.post-26818453001803741262009-04-28T08:25:00.001-07:002009-04-29T08:50:04.203-07:00

I usually use 2 types of endpoints when using WCF: SOAP for server - server communication, and REST/JSON for browser – server service calls. But yesterday, while trying to debug some POST & PUT HTTP calls in Fiddler, I decided to use a REST/XML endpoint. After all, POX is a bit easier on the eyes than JSON, and this would give me an opportunity to test my XML endpoints, which I had created but

Stephane Legayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01593730213717050672noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30174199.post-59474694799764382162008-10-24T10:55:00.001-07:002008-10-27T08:58:34.257-07:00

I was pretty excited when I received the email this morning (here's a link to the announcement). After looking at the details though - not so much. The good news is their pricing is cheaper than I originally planned, with basic offering starting at $.125/hour (without authentication). The SQL Server instances are pretty pricey though, starting at $1.10/hr. That's roughly $750/mo. But for a large

Stephane Legayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01593730213717050672noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30174199.post-11029702246911882602008-10-03T09:56:00.001-07:002008-10-03T09:57:36.439-07:00

Back in January I wrote about our serious need for EC2 to run Windows OSes, and since I couldn't get more info from Amazon (although Flexiscale's CEO was kind enough to post more info in a comment) I pretty much gave up and started looking elsewhere for a pay-as-you-go clustering platform to run our .Net code and SQL Server database. We built our architecture to run certain conversions on Linux

Stephane Legayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01593730213717050672noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30174199.post-38132148271854560772008-09-01T09:08:00.000-07:002009-04-28T10:41:47.457-07:00

Note: this post is NOT about whether or not to use MS Ajax in ASP.NET MVC, nor is it a comparison between various JS framewqorks. I'll discuss this issue in another post. Also, this code will only enable MS Ajax for true Ajax apps that rely on javascript to render the UI and communicate with the server using services. This tutorial does NOT enable UpdatePanels. Introduction We've been

Stephane Legayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01593730213717050672noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30174199.post-88386275356886771552008-03-07T15:26:00.000-08:002008-03-07T15:44:15.442-08:00

The bad:UX track needs some work. Business panelists were not very impressive and forward-thinking. I found the 2006 sessions with Ebay, MySpace and Amazon to be more interesting. Those guys actually had profitable businesses. Web 2.0 guys make cool stuff but still have no idea how to make a buck out of it other than ads.Keynote was too demo-centric. I understand the need for some wow-factor in

Stephane Legayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01593730213717050672noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30174199.post-61873834932003139022008-03-07T11:56:00.000-08:002008-03-07T15:26:48.091-08:00

SilverLight / Ajax integrationSome good ideas there, like how to integrate your siliverlight app with the Ajax history manager. I was impressed with how transparent the integration is.Not only can you can access any DOM element or JS object from SilverLight, but you can even register managed code event handlers for javascript events. That's pretty cool. The JS to SilverLight integration is really

Stephane Legayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01593730213717050672noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30174199.post-19746792426983583672008-03-06T15:37:00.000-08:002008-03-07T11:58:51.218-08:00

Out of the 3 sessions I attended yesterday the SEO one really stood out. Great session. I got a ton of cool tips out of it. It pretty much paid for the trip. I'll post the link to the video as soon as I find it.Oh yeah, and the TAO party was really great.Steve Ballmer keynoteGreat keynote today. Ballmer is a fun guy, and answered tough questions with a smile. He looked like a motivated, smart,

Stephane Legayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01593730213717050672noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30174199.post-20198872090240979062008-03-05T10:26:00.000-08:002008-05-12T12:35:59.423-07:00

I'm attending the Mix 08 keynote in Vegas right now.StrategySo far, nothing really new. Microsoft is basically playing catch-up with other industry leaders. MS seems to be focusing in 3 areas:- Advertising platform (desperately trying to grab some of Google's insane market share)- Device management unification (Zune/XBox/MediaCenter etc...)- Virtualization and utility compupting both at the

Stephane Legayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01593730213717050672noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30174199.post-27649854512321234392008-02-29T10:23:00.000-08:002008-02-29T12:21:31.376-08:00

Microsoft is finally admitting ASP.NET is now an outdated web framework. It makes testing very complex, working around the ViewState is a big waste of time, and the webform metaphor makes zero sense to most web developers. Most web front-end developers don't use the designer, and want complete control over rendered HTML and styles. You can do this in ASP.NET, but it requires workarounds like CSS

Stephane Legayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01593730213717050672noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30174199.post-68048770835865292182008-02-29T10:11:00.000-08:002008-02-29T10:23:39.700-08:00

It's a big step in the right direction, but there are still some things that need to be figured out. My biggest problems are:Lack of intellisense support within the prototype. Let's say I'm writing a JS "class". Intellisense seems to work well for all external libraries that are properly referenced, but I can't access the current class methods and properties within its prototype. "this" doesn't

Stephane Legayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01593730213717050672noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30174199.post-87716165501367727172008-02-13T14:14:00.001-08:002008-02-13T14:19:03.863-08:00

I've been using a neat little Visual Studio command-prompt tool lately: xsd.exe. It lets you create XSDs from XML (though it seems to generate some dataset-specific code that I had to clean up), classes from XSD (very useful), and other little things.http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/x6c1kb0s(VS.80).aspx

Stephane Legayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01593730213717050672noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30174199.post-26204639304410131652008-02-06T13:15:00.000-08:002008-02-13T13:41:08.260-08:00

I had been reading about Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection for a while. It looked interesting, but I never took the time to implement it in any of my projects. I think I just never had the perfect scenario that would greatly benefit from that kind of configurable component-oriented architecture.If you're an ASP.NET programmer and have never heard of those terms, they're basically the

Stephane Legayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01593730213717050672noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30174199.post-38032802908011688412008-02-06T13:00:00.001-08:002008-02-06T13:13:53.110-08:00

Shockingly, Microsoft released the entire .Net framework source code a few weeks ago. More here. This is really amazing; a great, great move. A full downloable version will come out soon. It'll really help debugging, and gives me better visibility in the inner workings of various components. I don't have to use my favorite decompiler anymore, and even have access to developer comments. I'm also

Stephane Legayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01593730213717050672noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30174199.post-86259356581451834282008-02-06T12:38:00.000-08:002008-02-13T14:14:11.459-08:00

After using VS 2008 and TFS 2008 for a few weeks, here are a few initial impressions.Pros:- TFS 2008 merging is working great- Unit test creation is much, much faster (UI used to freeze for 2 solid minutes)- Thanks to Vishal Joshi for giving me access to the latest build of WDP 2008 before official release. You saved the day.- ASP.NET ListView control is pretty cool- LINQ is amazing. Just utterly

Stephane Legayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01593730213717050672noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30174199.post-8561040839664681402008-01-25T10:21:00.001-08:002008-01-25T10:47:47.270-08:00

We're implementing some changes to move our processing and file storage components to Amazon Web Services (more on that later). We're using S3 for file storage, EC2 for report processing and SQS for report queuing. The end result will be a very exciting, cheap, virtualy infinitely scalable platform that will remove a lot of day-to-day maintenance headaches and gives us cost predictability.But I

Stephane Legayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01593730213717050672noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30174199.post-7649847601730528912008-01-08T12:04:00.001-08:002009-03-30T20:59:05.680-07:00

After using Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2005 for a few months now, we recently ran into the well - documented merge bug: "TF14087: Cannot undelete 'filename here' because not all of the deletion is being undeleted.". This was the second it happened to us, and resolving this conflict is quite difficult (More info about this issue). We found a hotfix that might fix the problem, but since we were

Stephane Legayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01593730213717050672noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30174199.post-80806762104804783802007-09-25T17:48:00.000-07:002007-09-25T18:17:12.519-07:00

Just received my new laptop last week. I decided to go ahead and install Vista Ultimate 64-bit (I have 4 GB of RAM - the 32 bit version only sees 3).Overall, considering how many rants I've read about Vista, I have to say I'm quite pleased. My machine is pretty speedy, apps are pretty snappy. The only headache was to get our web app to run on IIS 7 (64-bit).Here are a few things to keep in mind:-

Stephane Legayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01593730213717050672noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30174199.post-16525336990456373092007-09-25T17:37:00.000-07:002007-09-25T17:47:50.533-07:00

Yes, we have our own tag cloud. I'm not a big fan of those, but I guess some users like them.The secret of tag clouds relies in normalizing your tag sizes. I found out that there's a bunch of different approaches to the problem, with various results. We started from the following control:http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/cloud.aspWorks fine, but I didn't like the way the normalization was

Stephane Legayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01593730213717050672noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30174199.post-69080108655610720322007-09-25T17:33:00.000-07:002007-09-25T17:37:28.059-07:00

We are implementing a Flash Banner rotator on our web site. To render the flash movie we've been using the following web control:http://www.flash-control.net/Very happy with it. Some feature I've found valuable:- IE security alert workaround is built in.- Plug-in detection, redirection etc... built in.- Ability to access Flash Vars as a collection in your code-behind.Well worth the $15!

Stephane Legayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01593730213717050672noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30174199.post-21054100850983206132007-09-25T17:00:00.000-07:002007-09-25T17:31:41.188-07:00

We've been using Visual Studio Team Suite for over 6 months now, and I have to say - it solved most of my problems. Yes, it's very pricey. But for our small team releasing very often, the man hours it's saved us so far paid for the heavy licensing costs.Database Schema SynchronizationVS for Database Developers is my new friend. The Schema Compare tool saves me at least 4 hours per release, and a

Stephane Legayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01593730213717050672noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30174199.post-1152913896846529672006-07-14T14:31:00.000-07:002006-07-14T17:12:46.690-07:00

Well, I finally figured out a solution to my deployment issues. Until a couple of days ago, I thought Web Deploymetn and Web Setup projects were the same thing. Why? Well, maybe because Web deployment projects were an added feature that didn't make it to the final release of VS 2005Even after installing the add-on, the project type doesn't appear in the traditional project template selector.

Stephane Legayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01593730213717050672noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30174199.post-1152731468412387942006-07-12T10:55:00.000-07:002006-07-14T17:14:37.156-07:00

During every release, my stress level used to go up 10x. It shoudn't have to be that way. Here are my main deployment issues, with workaounds when applicable.Did I change my config settings to reflect the production environment? Not an easy one. Maintaining mutliple web.config files is a pain, so I'm using only one, with development, testing and production settings. I comment them out and

Stephane Legayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01593730213717050672noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30174199.post-1151704356788872512006-06-30T14:50:00.000-07:002006-06-30T14:52:36.790-07:00

Quick note: when serving flv files on a Windows 2003 server, remember to add the flv MIME Type: .flv video/x-flv

Stephane Legayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01593730213717050672noreply@blogger.com0