Everyone else is doing it (incorrectly)!

_[This is actually a repost from my personal blog, but I think the technical audience might “dig” it as well.]_Innovation is hard. You can definitely foster it, but you can't really force it. It's completely fascinating when people innovate in a massively disruptive way. While you can't make innovation happen, it's something I try to strive for. There are certain ways that I've had a great de

modern.ie

We are planning to update our very old web application so that it works better with modern web browsers. I have heard of modern.ie in the past and decided to give it a try. The site has a scanner that can scan a URL entered by a user. Unfortunately, our site requires log-in before getting to the page we want to scan. Fortunately, the site also offers a downloadable scanner that we can use in our

Red Gate Is Looking For Feedback On Its ASP.NET MVC Web Development Education Website

Red Gate is looking for feedback on its ASP.NET Web Development Education website.Visit their website and answer the survey.

70-484 exam: Essentials of Developing Windows Store Apps using C#

Just got this one! Here is a little tip for you: While studying a new exam the first thing to do is to consult the “Skills Measured” section of the official page of Microsoft Learning website: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/Exam.aspx?ID=70-484Better than that, Vitor Ciaramella, put together this nice sheet with direct hyperlinks to MSDN resources for each topics covered by the ex

Mapping and Location in iOS and Android at Xamarin Evolve 2013

The following is a link to my talk on Mapping & Location in iOS and Android at Xamarin Evolve 2013.  Obviously, the talk is centered on MonoTouch, aka Xamarin.iOS, and Mono for Android, aka Xamarin.Android.  In this talk, I cover the native functionality of each platform.  In addition, I cover Google Maps for iOS SDK.  I hope that you find the talk to be helpful.http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013#s

World's largest startup competition and hackathon (AngelHack 2013) comes to Singapore in June 2013

Entrepreneurship has been on the rise in sunny Singapore over the past years with more and more youths having the guts to take the bold step to be different - stepping out of the comforts of a stable 9am to 5pm desk job to realize their dreams. Although I'm still fairly un-impressed with our startup scene here (in comparison with the US, or something closer to home - China and Korea), I am happy t

Lessons from live blogging with Azure (nothing bad happened)

I wrote previously about how I built a "live blog" app in Azure, so we could use it for PointBuzz during last week's festivities at Cedar Point. Not surprisingly, it worked just fine. As I expected, the whole thing was kind of overkill. Sweet, over-provisioned overkill.The traffic loads we encountered were not a big deal. At one point, we were close to 300 simultaneous connections. We didn't

Consuming Windows Azure Mobile Services REST API from ASP.NET Web API App

Windows Azure Mobile Services lets the developers to use structured storage, user authentication and push notifications to Android, iOS, HTML, Windows Store, or Windows Phone 8 apps  by leveraging the Windows Azure Cloud platform. Using with Windows Azure Mobile Services, you can enjoy the scalability power of Cloud to your Mobile apps. In this blog post, I will demonstrate how to persist data o

Creating a simple Live Cricket Score using ASP.NET SignalR

        Introduction:                    I am from Pakistan. Like most of Pakistanis, I am also a huge fan of Cricket. Yesterday, I got some time from my busy job. I thought to create a simple Cricket Live Score feature using ASP.NET SignalR. It is also Interesting to note that the guys(David Fowler from West Indies and Damian Edwards from Australia) that are heavily involved in SignalR devel

Using Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) in ASP.NET Web API

For security reasons browsers prohibit AJAX calls to resources residing outside the current origin. This means you under the current settings, you can't provide a service exposed by a Web API to some other origin. However, at times you might want to allow a legitimate origin to access a resource. This is where Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) specifications come into the picture. While there

Entity Framework Code First Fluent Validation

Back to Entity Framework Code First (EFCF) validation. On my previous post I mentioned that EFCF did not support fluent validation. While this is true, it isn’t too hard to implement one such mechanism, which is exactly why I am writing this! I will be using the SavingChanges event to inject the validation logic, which will be implemented by strongly typed delegates. Let’s see some code:

Entity Framework Code First Validation

IntroductionMost persistence frameworks implement some kind of custom validation of entities before they are sent to the database. By custom I mean something more than just “is not null”, “has XX characters”, etc. This typically includes individual properties as well as validation of the entity as a whole – for example, checking that a property’s value is valid when used together with another

Blogs Portugueses Sobre SharePoint

This post is in portuguese only, sorry!A partir de um comentário no LinkedIn, no grupo da Comunidade Portuguesa de SharePoint (http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=996587&trk=anet_ug_hm) foi começada uma lista dos blogs de autores portugueses e brasileiros sobre SharePoint, ainda que não exclusivamente. Vou publicar essa lista aqui, e tentarei mantê-la actualizada.* Comunidade Portugu

System.InvalidOperationException: jsdebug Web Service method name is not valid

If you are getting a 'web service undefined' error when calling a web service from Javascript which is defined inside the ScriptManager tag like so: <asp:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" runat="server"><Services><asp:ServiceReference Path="~/Services/WebService.asmx" InlineScript="True" /></Services></asp:ScriptManager>Actual Error: System.InvalidOperationException: jsdebug Web Ser

Using the Enterprise Library 6 Configuration Console with Visual Studio 2012

You will have to download and run the Configuration Console from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38789, there is no NuGet package for it. After that, you will get a context menu for each project on the solution for editing the configuration:

Hiring .NET Developers in Washington DC

My company, Thycotic Software is hiring for .NET Developers.  http://www.thycotic.com/career_tdddeveloper.html This is a great position - competitive salary, great benefits, awesome developers and fun problems to solve - you will be challenged!

Could not load type System.ServiceModel.Activation.HttpModule

If you install DotNet framework 4.0 on IIS server and then enable .NET 3.0 or 3.5 WCF features, you might see following error when browse your application site made of ASP.NET 4.0 (or run on ASP.NET 4.0 application pool).Could not load type ‘System.ServiceModel.Activation.HttpModule' from assembly ‘System.ServiceModel, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089′.    De

Building for Web scale is a different skill

There are a lot of things that one can find satisfying about building stuff for the Web. For a lot of people, it's probably just the act of building something cool, pretty and useful. These are certainly things to strive for, but for me, the interesting thing has always been to build something that can scale.Like so many things in life, this particular desire grew out of experience. Very earl

free pop3 for Windows 2012 Server

Our team develops tools for Windows Server. Fifteen years ago we started with a pop3 queuing (popConnect) tool. We offer a free extender for the IIS SMTP Service to support pop3.·         You want to provide emails from any source (e.g. IIS, SharePoint, …) for POP3 retrieval by any mail client (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird, …). ·         You used the Microsoft POP3 Service in Windows Server 200

Filter Collections Automatically With Entity Framework Code First

IntroductionIn some O/RMs, it is possible to specify automatic filters for entity collections such as one-to-many or many-to-many. These are applied automatically whenever these collections are being populated. Entity Framework does not offer one such mechanism, however, it is possible to implement it.Context CollectionsIn Entity Framework Code First, entities are exposed as IDbSet<T> or

Zip and Unzip Files Programmatically in C#

Most of us deal with Zip files on a daily basis. Normally people use some third-party utility to create, open and extract Zip files. At times you may want to deal with Zip files programmatically. Luckily, .NET framework 4.5 introduces some new classes in System.IO.Compression namespace that allows you to do just that. Using these classes you can create new Zip files, open and modify existing Zip

Solving WmiApRpl and BITS errors with SharePoint 2013 on Windows Server 2012

I have been searching for a way to get rid of some performance counter errors (WmiApRpl and BITS) on my SharePoint 2013 installation for a while but couldn't find the answer. Today I decided to have a look with Process Monitor and finally found a solution....(read more)

Adding Custom FTP Providers with the IIS Configuration Editor - Part 2

In Part 1 of this blog series about adding custom FTP providers with the IIS Configuration Editor , I showed you how to add a custom FTP provider with a custom setting for the provider that is stored in your IIS configuration settings. For my examples, I showed how to do this by using both the AppCmd.exe application from a command line and by using the IIS Configuration Editor . In part 2 of this

An Example for Self-Hosting Nancy in an Application

In my recent blog post I wrote about the technical aspects of using the Nancy framework, in this post I’d like explain the “what did I want to achieve” a bit more. Maybe it inspires other people to think about possible self-hosting scenarios that combine desktop and web software.The Desktop SoftwareOne of my hobbies involves writing software for the local basketball club, the Telekom Baske

Announcing the Release of WebMatrix 3

I’m excited to announce the release of WebMatrix 3.  WebMatrix is a free, lightweight web development tool we first introduced in 2010, and which provides a great, focused web development experience for ASP.NET, PHP, and Node.js.   Today’s release includes a ton of great new features.  You can easily get started by downloading it, and watching an introduction video:Some of the highlights o

Windows Azure SDK 2.0 for .NET Released

The Windows Azure Cloud Computing platform has been in the big news after the platform exceeded the annual revenue of $1 billion. Today, Microsoft has been released the Windows Azure SDK 2.0 for .NET update that lets the .NET developers to build Windows Azure apps from Visual Studio with an easy and more elegant manner. The new update provides the lot of improvements within Visual Studio, for de

Using Nancy to Remotely Control a Desktop Application

I recently had the requirement to control a desktop application from a mobile device. The application, written using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) uses the secondary monitor of a system in full-screen mode, generating views that are shown on projection screens in a sports arena. More on the background story in a later blog post. [Update: the post is now online]When I write “control” I

Feedback Request for Curated Content Views

Publishing technical documentation is an interesting business, and a lot of discussion & deliberation goes into the creation process for articles and videos that we produce at Microsoft. For example, when I am writing an article for IIS, should I publish that on www.iis.net, or technet.microsoft.com, or msdn.microsoft.com? Or should I just write a blog about it? And after I have published an artic

Announcing the release of Windows Azure SDK 2.0 for .NET

This morning we released the v2.0 update of the Windows Azure SDK for .NET. This is a major refresh of the Windows Azure SDK with some really great new features and enhancements.  These new capabilities include:*Web Sites: Visual Studio Tooling updates for Publishing, Management, and for Diagnostics *Cloud Services: Support for new high memory VM sizes, Faster Cloud Service publishing & Vi

Sending and Receiving Messages in Windows Azure Storage Queue with JavaScript Serializer

In this blog post, I will demonstrate sample code for sending and receiving messages in Windows Azure Storage Queue with JavaScript Serializer for serializing and de-serializing messages. We are adding a custom type to Windows Azure Queue where we are using JavaScriptSerializer Class provided by System.Web.Script.Serialization namespace, for the serialization.Creating a Windows Azure Storage