Saturday, October 30, 2010

Out with kids

While most of my posts have been about work, technology and experiences took a break today to report an evening with the kids on the beach. T'was a lot of fun..

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

VS 2010 and .NET 4.0

While looking for new features in VS 2010 and .NET 4.0, we came across the following set that helps us  in Project execution:
Managed Extensibility Framework
The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a new library in the .NET Framework 4 that helps you build extensible and composable applications. MEF enables you to specify points where an application can be extended, to expose services to offer to other extensible applications and to create parts for consumption by extensible applications. It also enables easy discoverability of available parts based on metadata, without the need to load the assemblies for the parts. Check Managed Extensibility Framework Overview and Managed Extensibility Framework. For a list of the MEF types, see the System.ComponentModel.Composition namespace.
Parallel Computing

The .NET Framework 4 introduces a new programming model for writing multithreaded and asynchronous code that greatly simplifies the work of application and library developers. The new model enables developers to write efficient, fine-grained, and scalable parallel code in a natural idiom without having to work directly with threads or the thread pool. The new System.Threading.Tasks namespace and other related types support this new model. Parallel LINQ (PLINQ), which is a parallel implementation of LINQ to Objects, enables similar functionality through declarative syntax. See Parallel Programming in the .NET Framework.
ASP.NET
  • Core services, including a new API that lets you extend caching, support for compression for session-state data, and a new application preload manager (autostart feature).
  • Web Forms, including more integrated support for ASP.NET routing, enhanced support for Web standards, updated browser support, new features for data controls, and new features for view state management.
  • Web Forms controls, including a new Chart control.
  • MVC, including new helper methods for views, support for partitioned MVC applications, and asynchronous controllers.
  • Dynamic Data, including support for existing Web applications, support for many-to-many relationships and inheritance, new field templates and attributes, and enhanced data filtering.
  • Microsoft Ajax, including additional support for client-based Ajax applications in the Microsoft Ajax Library.
  • Visual Web Developer, including improved IntelliSense for JScript, new auto-complete snippets for HTML and ASP.NET markup, and enhanced CSS compatibility.
  • Deployment, including new tools for automating typical deployment tasks.
  • Multi-targeting, including better filtering for features that are not available in the target version of the .NET Framework.

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Aussies series

Was hoping to see a nice contest with the Oz team but rain has again played a spoilsport at Goa..Vizag match was fun...Waiting for the match to start...

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

CMS Options

While discussing with a colleague over what the different choices for a present day CMS systems were, I discovered a nice .NET 4.0 based package Composite C1. This has been now convered into a free open source web CMS.

http://www.composite.net/C1.aspx

Monday, October 18, 2010

CS 2009 Articles

Some articles that I found interesting on the CS 2009 front. Hosted on MOSS 2007 the CS webparts while a cumbersome at times can provide a lot of relief.
Introducing Commerce Server 2009, including what's new in Commerce Server 2009

Introducing Commerce Server 2009
Creating Commerce Server 2009 Web applications, integrating Commerce Server 2009 with other applications, and extending Commerce Server 2009 functionality
Development
Learn about the new, out-of-the-box Default Web site and how Web Parts work in Commerce Server 2009
SharePoint Commerce Services
Documentation about programming with the Commerce Server 2009 platform
Development
Deploying Commerce Server 2009- Deploying Commerce Server 2009
Terms used in Commerce Server 2009 - Glossary

Saturday, October 16, 2010

MS CRM 5.0

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a multi-lingual Customer Relationship Management software package developed by Microsoft. Out of the box, the product focuses mainly on Sales, Marketing, and Service (help desk) sectors, but Microsoft has been marketing Dynamics CRM as an XRM platform and has been encouraging partners to use its proprietary (but .NET based) framework to customize it to meet many different demands.

Some new features in MS CRM 5.0:
http://demiliani.com/blog/archive/2008/11/11/6526.aspx

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Leaning past 3 days

Some new things I learnt in the last 3 days:
The site which outlines most of the highly scalable projects/sites:
http://highscalability.com/
This site discusses the arch of the following sites
  • YouTube
  • Flickr
  • Amazon
  • Google
  • Plenty of Fish
For comparison of features between the basic, standard and enterprise versions of SharePoint :
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/buy/Pages/Editions-Comparison.aspx

Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Telerik RADAJAXManager slow at ihttpasynchandler.beginrequest

We are experiencing an issue with the AJAX calls getting slow while using the RADAJAXManager and the AVICode analysis of the dump shows slowness in the IHttpAsyncHandler BeginRequest. This is for a specific project. Similar implementations done on other projects is not causing any probs...Investigating..

Tuesday, October 05, 2010

Two updates in the Program I am working

While resolving some of the FxCop issues tht we encountered in the program, we were trying to use the GlobalSuppression.cs file for obviously...suppressing the errors and were having some issues. Interestingly I personally did not find a lot of places where global suppression was being explained..So here goes some places we visited / used to get it working:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/codeanalysis/archive/2006/12/28/faq-what-is-the-globalsuppressions.cs-globalsuppressions.vb-file-and-why-is-it-needed-is-it-possible-to-change-the-name-of-this-file-david-kean.aspx

http://dansen.wordpress.com/2008/04/15/suppressing-code-analysis-rules/

Another area we are seeing is the "Please wait while scripts are loaded" message. Typical suspects are JS issues, big JS/CSS sizes etc...A good JS debugger tool for ie should help..Firebug anyone?
This did help us to narrow down on the piece of JS script that was causing this error to come up..Removed that and BINGO!.

Saturday, October 02, 2010

Sandboxed vs Farm

Nice article on "Developing, Deploying, and Monitoring Sandboxed Solutions in SharePoint 2010"
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee335711.aspx

For those who donno about Sandboxed solutions, some primer:
One of the many challenges in SharePoint solutions is striking a balance between creating solutions and deploying them in a way that you can trust will not damage or impair the SharePoint farm. Farm administrators are responsible for maintaining the health and integrity of the SharePoint farm, and often this means putting complicated, time-consuming processes in place to test and validate solutions deployed to the farm. This need is counter to the rapid application model used to create SharePoint solutions, and it complicates the deployment of third-party solutions. A new feature in SharePoint 2010, called sandboxed solutions, addresses many of these concerns, enabling farm administrators to feel comfortable that the SharePoint farm is safe, giving site collection administrators the authority to manage the applications in their site collection, and providing developers with the flexibility to create solutions they know will be deployed in a safe and rapid manner.

Friday, October 01, 2010

RBS Storage

Overview of Remote BLOB Storage (SharePoint Server 2010)

This article is a conceptual overview of how RBS works with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Express. It contains important information about RBS features and providers. We strongly recommend that you read this article before you implement RBS.

Install and configure Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) with the FILESTREAM provider (SharePoint Server 2010)
This article describes how to install and configure RBS and implement the FILESTREAM provider for use with SharePoint Server 2010.

Install and configure Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) without the FILESTREAM provider (SharePoint Server 2010)
This article describes how to install and configure RBS without using the FILESTREAM provider.

Set a content database to use Remote Blob Storage (RBS) (SharePoint Server 2010)
This article describes how to set a content database to use RBS. You must already have RBS installed to perform these procedures.

Migrate content into or out of Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) (SharePoint Server 2010)
This article describes how to migrate content into or out of RBS, or to a different RBS provider.

Disable Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) on a content database (SharePoint Server 2010)
This article describes how to disable RBS in a SharePoint Server 2010 environment.