March09

XAPFest talk Managing Data on Windows Phone 7

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Permalink | Comments (0) | Post FeedComment feed by author Jason Short

I did an after hours XAPFest talk a while back on Managing Data on Windows Phone 7 that is now published on the Microsoft Research site!  I am actually sort of proud that this session was the #2 most attended talk at XAPFest!

Microsoft Research – Managing Data on Windows Phone 7

I did a follow up blog post entitled Minimal virtualized data list for WP7 showing how to implement the code I spoke about in the video.  The source for that is available on Bitbucket.

December10

Silverlight Firestarter Dec 2010

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Watching the Silverlight Firestarter event that was hosted here at Microsoft today.

http://www.silverlight.net/news/events/firestarter/ 

Highlights

Silverlight 5 Announced

  • Azure support
  • 64 bit Silverlight client is now available to run within 64 bit Internet Explorer
  • Low latency network applications
  • MVVM improvements, end to end complex types, RIA improvements, also mentioned as ported from WPF

Improved Data Binding and debugging of data binding.  It was mentioned that some of these are from WPF, that is a good cross product migration of tech.  This means you now have breakpoints within XAML files!  You don’t have to do it within just the source, you can set them within the XAML for the binding.  This would be VERY nice if added to ASP.Net as well.  When you have to write code for the data binding inline you can set a breakpoint for the code that gets executed as a part of the bind (and even view exception).

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December09

DACPAC is a reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2008 R2

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SQL Server 2008 R2

I get asked from previous customers why they should care about SQL Server 2008 R2 over just 2k8.  This article is the best summary I have seen for the customer reasons to upgrade.

InfoWorld Article

Summary

The rest of this post is the part of article on DACPAC:

Reason No. 6 to upgrade to SQL Server 2008 R2: DACPAC
DACPAC, or Data-tier Application Component Packages, is a much touted feature that allows your developers to package database changes into a single file in Visual Studio and send it to the DBAs for deployment. This is a significant improvement over how changes are being distributed now. Today they're either sent as a series of .SQL files with deployment instructions, or as a set of Team Foundation Server paths for the DBA to fetch with the same deployment document. Either way, the process leads to deployment problems because there's just too much human interaction and opportunity for misinterpretation.

With DACPAC, DBAs get a single deployment file from the developers that contains all the changes; there's nothing to misunderstand or forget. But in this first incarnation DACPAC has some problems. For starters, to make even minor changes in the database, DACPAC completely re-creates the database and all of its objects, then moves all of the data over to the duplicated structures. In the final step, it drops the original database and gives the new one the proper name. You can easily see that creating an entirely new copy of the database for a small code change won't fit into most situations. Further, DACPAC doesn't copy user permissions or work with service broker or replication objects.

DACPAC is a great idea, but is currently suitable only for very small databases with limited structures. However, keep an eye on this feature; I suspect many of these limitations will be ironed out in future versions. DACPAC should only get better and better.

 

May06

Help on Visual Studio 2010 Help

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Permalink | Comments (2) | Post FeedComment feed by author js

If you have used VS 2010’s help system you may have that feeling that some changes were not as fully thought as others.  The new HTML Help 3 format may seems like a great idea, it runs as a service like an IIS website that all help instances query through.  No more hitting F1 in three copies of Visual Studio and getting three copies of the complete help loaded into RAM.

But that browser experience for the help system seems missing something to me.  Maybe the index?  Maybe the ability to actually read rather than search?  It seems optimized quite well for searching the help, but not actually following a topic.  You can’t sync the table of contents and see what other articles are in the same section of the help.

I want to cover the built in help, the Help Powertool released by Microsoft, and the H3Viewer application from The Helpware Group that allows local viewing of the html 3 help files (although Microsoft insists on calling them Help 1.0 Files).

F1 Help in VS 2010

Visual Studio 2010 Help Default Here is what I see when I hit F1 in Visual Studio 2010.  You get a system tray icon with the help service running and a browser window.

You have to already opted to install the help locally as a part of the install process, or you only talk to the remote servers at Microsoft. 

There was a bug in the beta versions that if the user selected non local help for the MSDN then ALL help was non local (even if your company put some help locally the users couldn’t see it).  I hope that has been fixed, but have not had time to test it myself again yet.

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