Blogs @ IRM

I got an idea for an Windows Media Center (MCE) application (add-in) that I wanted to try out if I could get it working. First step was to learn how to develop something for Media Center. I found this to be harder than I thought it would be, partly because I have chosen to not install Visual Studio 2008 on this machine. This post will be ...

In an add-in for Outlook that I’m developing I wanted to show the built in Color Categories dialog so that the user could choose categories in a familiar way. The categories should be set on an object that is unique for the add-in (aka not for a mail or calendar item). I couldn’t find any way to show the dialog itself and when searching Internet I ...

Three years ago (can’t believe it’s been so long) I blogged about creating an Outlook add-in. The add-in was developed with VSTO 2, but now I thought it was time to upgrade it to VSTO 3 and try out the ClickOnce deployment. If I was impressed about how easy and much better it had become to develop for Outlook 2007 with VSTO 2, I must say that the ...

Windows Identity Framework (known as Geneva) has now been released as a release candidate (RC). This is great and will have a big impact on how identity and some other security related parts of your applications will be implemented. If yu haven’t started use claims yet, now is the time to do some reading to catch up and shift yuor mind. Vibro’s ...

Lately I’ve been using Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) in Windows Forms application with great success. I really like using this pattern because it has made me getting even more code out of the View and into the ViewModel instead. One reason for this I believe, is that the ViewModel has no reference to the View and this forces me to have better ...

I haven't managed to bind the Visible property of Windows Forms controls and getting it to work. I belive that it does not work because the property that I bind to returns false initially and therefor are the control never created, and the data binding of the control is not active if the control is not created (because of optimization). This is ...

Sometimes it is necessary to send a complete collection as argument to a stored procedure. I recantley had a situation where I wanted to get information from the database dependeing on which windows groups/roles the user belonged to. I think that the easiest way to solve this problem is to send the collection as XML (if you don't use SQL Server ...

UPDATE 2008-12-06: After Dominick Baier's comment (thanks!), I have now updated the code to be more effecient. Since .NET 2.0 it has been possible to get the groups that a user belongs to, by accessing the Groups property of the WindowsIdentity class. What you get when from the property is an IdentityReference, which in turn has a Value property. ...

We, as developers, must begin to use more asynchronous thinking when we develop applications. Processors don't get any faster, they just gets more cores that can do more work simultaneously, but that is no good for us if we don’t use it. Microsoft is for example working on ParallelFX, which probably will be included in .NET 4.0. There is ...

Today I noticed that Microsoft Sync Framework v1.0 became available for donwload in the beginning of august. I have not heard or read much about it since TechEd 2007, but the sessions I joined on TechEd presented a promising picture of this important piece of technology. A couple of years ago I wrote an occassionally connected client with bits ...

I just learned from a former colleague that redgate has acquired .NET Reflector. Read more at redgates web.

I run into an issue with grids not showing newly added objects in one of my projects a couple of days ago. We use LINQ to SQL classes and the client is built according to the MVP pattern and what we want to do is of course to add child objects to the collections in the presenter class. The problem with this though is that the newly added object ...

I recently blogged about the much improved Add Service Reference dialog in Visual Studio 2008. If you have DataSets exposed in your web services it will still generate new Datasets from the schemas and not reuse your existing DataSets even if you have a reference to the DataSet-project. The new dialog handles this without problem for you ...

In my requirements for the STS implementation I wanted to be able to use the SAML token in the client and I also wanted to log in the user against the STS when the user logs in through the GUI and not when the first call to a service is made. To be able to fulfill this I need to manually issue a SAML token and set the token to my custom principal ...

A common problem is the need of different configurations in development, test and production environments. For example it's very common to have different databases, and therefore its necessary to modify the connectionStrings section when moving from development to test. Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects contains a solution for this, but ...

When a business service receives a SAML token, WCF will extract the SAML attributes (containing the information) as claims and make it available as a ClaimSet that can be reached through the AuthorizationContext. This not the way I would like my business logic to work with the information available in the SAML token though, because that will thigh ...

Almost three years ago I started to think in the terms of having an infrastructure service to handle security like verifying users, getting which roles they belong to and so on. Back then it was WSE 3 in a beta and no information available on the Internet (that I could find anyway). I had heard of WS-Trust and I had also seen a sample on an event ...

First of all, the service factory version 3 will be released any minute now. I've just listen to Don Smith from pattern & practices and he hopes that he got the sign of on the bits by now so that he can release version 3 after this session. Version 3 main goal is to enable model driven creation of services, but it also wanted to enable the ...

TechEd keynote this year is presented by S. Somasegar (Corporate Vice President of the Developer Division, Microsoft) and we've got some great seating not far from the stage (super early bid benefit).   Announcment: Microsoft Sync Framework CTPSoftware + Services Blueprints from pattern & practices Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5 ...

I started to use Visual Studio 2008 for some development when it was released in Beta 2. The projects still targets .NET 2.0 and 3.0, but one nice thing with using VS 2008 is that it is possible to use some of the new compiler goodies. For example there is a new short version of writing properties.public string Context { get; set; }By writing a ...