Danny-T.co.uk

Silverlight Masterclass

A while back I took a training course on the then new Microsoft RIA toolset offerings. The platform then was definitely not what it is today and now I would consider the MS offering a very solid platform for building RIAs upon and is now pushing Adobe for new and faster innovation. As a developer (and RIA agency) this is all good for both camps.

If you’ve been considering getting into Silverlight development in an effort to extend your skillset bbits is offering a Silverlight Masterclass in the UK in June. Here follows the spiel:

The Silverlight Tour comes to the UK – and it’s called the Masterclass!

This 3 day hands-on training with both designer and developer tracks looks awesome and (uniquely) has two expert trainers per course.

Currently scheduled in London, Manchester, and the Midlands for June, all courses also come with the chance to win an xbox 360, and Silverlight Spy licences!

Early bird discount of £100 if you book in May, and if you are a member of #SLUGUK or #nxtgenug there are additional discounts to be had.

Full Details are here: http://silverlightmasterclass.net

In addition bbits are holding a raffle for a free ticket for the masterclass. To be eligible to win the ticket (worth £1095!) you MUST paste this text, including all links, into your blog and email Ian@bbits.co.uk with the url to the blog entry. The draw will be made on June 1st and the winner informed by email and on http://silverlightmasterclass.net

So if Silverlight has been on your to-do list for a while and you want to short-cut to being a pro check it out

The following module was built either with optimizations enabled or without debug information

Having received the following error in Visual Studio a few times I thought I’d post the solution here.

I did have debug enabled and seemingly nothing i changed would stop the error. Many of the solutions found when first searching didn’t work, what I had to do was to delete all files from the following directory:

C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\temp\Temporary ASP.NET Files

“invalid character” and “ajaxcontroltoolkit is undefined” errors on some comptuers

This was an extremely odd error that I’m posting here for others and probably my own future reference.

We recently deployed an Intranet system that used some of the ASP.Net AJAX framework, two users were receiving a javascript error and not displaying a tabcontrol. The first js error was “invalid character at line 0″ and the second was “ajaxcontroltoolkit is undefined”. This baffled me as all the client machines were identical (in fact they were using a Citrix client so they were definitely identical).

Anyway turns out it’s something to do with the last modified date of the assembly if it’s somehow set to be in the future compared to the date of the server it is running on (possibly due to a converstion from UK to US date formats for example) you will get this error.

The solution is to simply change the last modified date of the assembly which can be done either using one of several freeware applications available or by using the very simple console application provided at Plain Old Stan’s blog. I used this and just set the date back a year and it resolved the issue.

Hopefully that’ll be of some use to someone.

Intro to NAnt tutorials

Just posting this for my own reference really, these are ages old but Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo has written a bunch of excellent articles on getting started with NAnt here.

Inversion of Control Containers Links

I’m slowly getting my head around IoC containers and want to note a few useful links for future reference. As things tend to go in my geeky exploits I read about and learn these ideas from the .net world, who often have picked things up from the Java world, I then try to find out who’s doing similar stuff in the Flex world and am generally not disappointed, which is very cool. So these links below are a mashup of various technologies but should be useful to anyone who has been hearing about
IoC and wants to learn more regardless of language/platform.

The ‘Textbook definition’ by Martin Fowler
Very useful explanation with some basic sample code (.net) by Ayende
Castle Windsor step by step basic intro (.net)
Prana – a Spring-ish IoC Container for AS3 by Christophe Herreman (via jesterxl)

This stuff doesn’t come naturally to me to say the least so if anyone else has any links they want to share feel free to post them in the comments.

Foundations of programming

Karl Seguin, a .net developer for Fuel Industries has written an excellent series of posts on modern development techniques. Examples are based on .net and associated open source and commercial tools and utilities but the theory is great reading for any developer.

A lot of what is covered I will be bringing into my talk at 360 Flex Europe and will be referencing and expanding upon in some upcoming blog posts with a Flex/ActionScript slant.

Testing IIS in Parallels from OSX

If you’re running visual studio in Parallels you can set it up to deploy to a virtual directory in IIS then make that site accessible to OS X. This is great for when developing web services or remoting in .Net with Flex Builder in OS X. You can also assign an alias to your windows IIS server meaning you don’t have to remember the IP address of the Parallels VM.

Setup Visual Studio to deploy to IIS Virtual Directory
By default since VS 2005, when you run a website project it will execute in the built-in web server in visual studio. You can however set it to deploy to your windows version of IIS by doing the following:
Goto your web project’s properties (right click the project in the solution explorer and hit properties),
Select the “Web” tab,
In the Servers section select “Use IIS web server”,
Enter a name for your project and hit the “Create Virtual Directory” button.

When you run or debug your site it will now use IIS instead of the built-in web server.

Run IIS website from OSX
You’ll need to do a couple of things before you can run your IIS deployed website in OS X, firstly you need to enable remote access to the site and secondly you need to find the IP address of your parallels VM.
Go to Control Panel, Adminsitrative Tools, Internet Information Services,
Expand your Computer node and right click on the websites folder and click Properties,
In the Directory Security tab click the annonymous access Edit button,
Check the box titled “integrated windows authentication”.

Now to test your site, open a comand prompt in windows and type ipconfig to find out your windows VM address. Then in OS X open your browser and enter http://[your.ip.address]/yourVirtualDir/ and you shoudl see your asp.net website running.

Setup an alias instead of remembering the IP address
I found this out from a comment on Andy Jarrett’s blog, use the following command from terminal to use a more friendly name to access your IIS webserver (replacing ‘localhostwin’ with your chosen alias and IP address with your XP’s IP:
sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Hosts/localhostwin IPAddress 10.23.0.1

Here’s the rest of the comment which has some other useful commands:

sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Hosts/ridiculous.nonsense.monkeys IPAddress 192.168.0.1

Enter your password when asked, and you can now ping 192.168.0.1 with the name ridiculous.nonsense.monkeys

You can see the results of your work with:

dscl localhost -readall /Local/Default/Hosts

And to undo your handy-work:

sudo dscl localhost -delete /Local/Default/Hosts/ridiculous.nonsense.monkeys

P.S. You can see the results of your BSD flat-file method with this command:

dscl localhost -readall /BSD/local/Hosts
# Posted By j0no | 11/11/07 8:01 PM

New .Net Tutorial “Introduction to NHibernate”

I’ve just written a new tutorial on NHibernate (an Open Source OR Mapper for .Net).

As ususal any feedback much appreciated.

The Silverlight Problem

As anyone who regularly reads this blog will know, I’ve been looking into Silverlight of late. Nothing commercial as yet, just to fulfill my own geeky interests (if anyone is looking for Silverlight development get in touch). Throughout this experimentation and research I’ve also discussed Silverlight with other developers and designers from various small and large agencies particularly at a recent MS web agencies dinner in London.

Through all this investigation and chatter, I’ve drawn a conclusion of a problem that MS still have to solve:

There are still no way near enough “creatives/designers” willing to to experiment with the tools available for creating Silverlight applications.

Maybe this is obvious and I’m sure MS are well aware of this but I’m not sure enough is being done. The reason being, I myself and others are getting frustrated by not having anyone available to work with in order to create good-looking Silverlight applications and experiments.

.Net developers are excited by Silverlight, MS partners are excited by Silverlight, MS is excited by Silverlight… Designers couldn’t give two hoots about Silverlight.

This is pretty frustrating because there are a lot of very skillful .Net coders waiting to work with someone using this amazing workflow that is available between Visual Studio and Blend but there’s no-one there on the Blend end! Blend is a good tool, I’ve played around with it and realised what could be done if I could work with someone who, unlike myself has even the slightest bit of artistic flair. Unfortunately this person doesn’t exist yet, or at least is very hard to come by.

Microsoft,

Get the Expression tools available for Mac ASAP.
Do whatever’s needed to get designers comfortable and happy with using Expression Design and Expression Blend.
Throw more resources and free training at creative decision makers.
Make integration with Photoshop and other design tools as seemless as possible.

The devs are sold on Silverlight, the appeal of being able to use CLR languages in a rich environment is huge. But it’s fruitless without designers. We need more designers picking up these tools if you want your massive .net community to do some amazing things with Silverlight.

Until then, Flash and Flex are here, available on both platforms and have a passionate and loyal user-base. I appreciate Silverlight and the tools are only at version 1, but if you’re out to compete (and let’s not kid ourselves, you are), you can’t measure success on version numbers.

Silverlight Adventures – part 2

Continuing from my previous post on learning Silverlight (sorry for the VERY long delay i’ve been very busy lately)…

5 – The tools (cont)
Okay so downloads required were as follows:

• Silverlight Runtime
• .NET Framework 3.0
• Visual Studio Orcas
• Visual Web Developer 2008 – due to the massive download required i opted for the Express edition of visual studio for now – by all accounts the express edition doesnt allow the Silverlight extensions to be installed… back to downloading vs2008 standard again! NOTE TO MS – make this clearer please
• Visual Studio 2008 (in the time its taken me to finish this post the beta2 has been released)
• Silverlight Tools for Orcas
• Microsoft Silverlight Tools Alpha Refresh for Visual Studio (July 2007)
• Expression Blend

.NET Framework 3.0
I’ve already installed the runtime so next is .NET Framework 3.0. The .Net installer seems to have improved, although is now a whopping 30 meg which downloads and installs silently after you run the setup, it does however hog resources a little during the install but no system restart required! . A point to note is that viewing Silverlight web applications does not need the .NET 3.0 Framework to be installed, a subset of the framework is included in the Silverlight runtime. I’m installing it for the use of Expression Blend and VS Orcas.

Expression Blend
Standard install process here, there were options for “custom” or “full” install but I chose “typical” as I’m on a tight budget with regards to the spec of my laptop. I’m sure things will run painfully slow but I’ll just have to put up with it until I get a new machine. Another simple install down, so far so good.

Visual Web Developer 2008
So finally settling on giving this a go with Visual Web Developer 2008. There was a nice online install that basically setup everything for me. I like this sort of install, yeah maybe there are a million and one options i might want to set on install but in the real world if i don’t get these options I dont lose any sleep and am less frustrated with slow installs – start it going, leave it, come back and its done. – removed due to no support for the Silverlight extensions!

Visual Studio Orcas 2008 beta2
From the downloads, the first step was to run the extractor which extracts all downloads into an installation directory, this took ages just to extract it uses winRAR self-extractor which was a bit annoying in that it has a progress indicator for each file extracted but no indication of overall progress and no indication of how many files there are left. VS 2008 is going to be a bit of a resource hog.
After it had finally extracted I run vs_setup.msi… to be instantly prompted to run setup.exe (I always get that wrong). A familiar Visual Studio setup screen is presented and then a typical visual studio installation process. That was with Orcas, with VS2008 beta2 I opted to download and install the standard edition which downloaded an ISO image. Using magic ISO I extracted this and had a much quicker experience, although the install did still take a considerable amount of time.

Microsoft Silverlight Tools Alpha Refresh for Visual Studio (July 2007)
A simple to install extension to VS2008 that offers the Silverlight specific features.

And finally that is all that we apparently need.

Overall the setup experience was pretty good, alot of downloading and waiting but no painful unknown errors or crashes so i’m happy with that. A bit of confusion with the new release of vs2008 and no support for Silverlight in the Express editions. Now, finally onto some development and time for another post that might take me months to finish (hopefully not though).