Blogs @ IRM

When I set up a continues integration build on our new build-server, I got “The agent process was stopped while the test was running.” when the test ran. This is not a very helpful error message and the troubleshooting is hard when all test succeeds locally. Fortunately I have the possibility to read the event log on the build server and there ...

So in my struggling to get a lean and effective way to roll out new versions of an application for two of my clients, I have some more to share with you. I want it to be extremely easy for me to create a new ClickOnce installer for my clients and I have identified three things that I need to solve: The installations will be run from different ...

When you are developing both the service and the client it can many times be good to not use the “Add Service Reference” in Visual Studio. Instead the service and data contracts can be defined in a shared class library. There can be many reasons for this, on popping up immediately is that such a solution removes the need to always update the ...

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 ...

I had a method that looked like this in my code: public string Translate(string entity, string field) { string key = Translator.GetKey(entity, field); if (translationCache.ContainsKey(key)) return translationCache[key]; else { string res = this.Translator.Translate(entity, field); ...

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 ...

When installing Enterprise Library 4.1 today I recived the “This version of Enterprise Library cannot be installed side-by-side with version 4.0. Please uninstall …” message even though I had uninstalled version 4.0 already (and re-booted). After searching for the problem, I quickly found som tips (for example this) stating that removing the ...

When using WCF to create services it is very easy to forget all places where you have to specify the namespace, so that there won't be any http://tempuri.org showing up in the generated wsdl. It is very common to see that the ServiceContract attribute specifies a real namespace, but there is still two (not counting the DataContracts/Schemas) more ...

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 ...

One of the first results delivered from pattern & practices was the Application Architecture Guide, and if I remember correctly that was back in 2002 or 2003. That's a long time ago considering the speed in which .NET Framework and related technologies has progressed and also the big focus shifts in many areas like project methodolgy, DDD vs ...

I've been watching Jason Dolinger excellent demonstration of how he takes a "traditional" GUI approach in WPF and then refactor it to a Model-View-ViewModel (M-V-VM) implementation. M-V-VM seems like the dominating design pattern for WPF/Silverlight application and it fits very good together with data-binding, commands and Unity (or ...

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. ...

From what I've seen of "Oslo", the new "M" language for creating Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) is the part that seems most mature (even though it's not even in beta yet). Josh has two sample video's showing a DSL creating XAML and the second one shows how to write "plain english" to create a WPF application. Really ...

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.