A lot changed since my last blog post… we had a great and beatiful summer with an awesome vacation and I am now part of the Azure Customer Advisory Team which is the customer-facing part from Azure Engineering. So, I finally ended up in Jason Zander’s part of Microsoft, the person who’s responsible for Azure, itself. That means I am now involved in the most complex Azure-projects we run with customers and not dedicated to SAP, only, anymore. Although I still work with SAP a lot.
Now, in the meantime a lot of Azure tech stuff expanded as well. In this post I want to focus on two specific features - the In-VM Instance Metadata Service and the Managed Service Identity (in short, MSI) which we recently started using in a customer project even before MSI got publicly available and announced.
At last SAP Sapphire (May 2017) we announced several improvements and also new offerings for SAP on Azure as you can read here. The most prominent ones are more HANA Certifications as well as SAP Cloud Platform on Azure (as you can read from my last blog post specifically focused on SAP CP.
One of the less discussed and visible announcements, despite being mentioned, is the broad support of Enterprise-Grade Single-Sign-On across many SAP technologies with Azure Active Directory. This post is solely about one of these offerings - HANA integration with Azure AD.
The main project that kept me busy for the past 7 months was the work with SAP Labs Israel to get a beta version of SAP Cloud Platform running on Azure. During SAP Sapphire, SCP on Azure got now announced together with other public cloud vendors as part of SAP’s multi-cloud strategy (see here and here. It is currently available as public beta for anyone to try on Azure. Here I dig into some first basics…
This is an exciting week for me… although I am usually not that much into attending Business-oriented conferences, over the past two years I did so by attending SAP Sapphire.
Up until know, that mainly is caused by the fact that I’ve contributed some aspects to what was announced with regards to the partnership between Microsoft and SAP at the conference. Last year, my part was mainly about Office 365 with the work I’ve supported for Concur, Ariba, Fieldglass and SuccessFactors as well as the Sports Basement Demo which was shown in the Key Note to highlight the HANA One Certification for Azure in our DS14 VM-Series at that time.
While I cannot write about the major project I supported for this year, yet, here’s a little nugget to get started with - a Quick Start Template for SAP HANA Express!
This week I was presenting at the CloudFoundry Summit 2016 Europe in Frankfurt, of course about running CloudFoundry on Azure and Azure Stack. It was greate being here, especially because one of my two main Global ISV partners I am working with on the engineering side, have been here as well and are even a Gold-sponser of the event. It was indeed an honor and great pleasure for me to be part of this summit here … and great to finally have a technical session at a non-Microsoft conference, again:)
Indeed, one reason for that blog-post is because I ran out of time during my session and was able to show only small parts of the last demo.
Anyways, let’s get to the more techncial part of this blog-post. My session was all about running CF in Public, Private as well as Hybrid Clouds with Azure being involved in some way. This is highly relevant since most enterprises are driving a multi-cloud strategy of some way:
Either they are embracing Hybrid cloud and run deployments in the public cloud as well as in their own data centers for various reasons or
they want to distribute and minimize risk by running their solutions across two (or more) public cloud providers.
Despite the fact my session was focused on running Cloud Foundy on Azure, a lot of the concepts and architectural insights presented, can be re-used for other kinds of deployments with other cloud vendors or private clouds, as well.
At SAP Sapphire we announced the availabiltiy of SAP HANA on Azure. My little contribution to this was working on case that was shown as a demo in the key note at SAP Sapphire 2016: Sports Basement with HANA on Azure. It was meant as a show-case and proof for running HANA One workloads in Azure DS14 VMs and it was the first case of HANA on Azure productive outside of the SAP HANA on Azure Large Instances.
While we proved we can run HANA One in DS14, what’s still missing is the official Marketplace image. We are working on that on-boarding of HANA One into the Azure Marketplace at the time I am writing this post here. This post is about a very specific challenge which I know is needed by many others, as well. While Azure will have a built-in solution, it is not available, today (August 2016), so this might be of help for you!
I am currently working with one if my main Global Independent Software Vendor (ISV) partners for on-boarding their solution into the Azure Marketplace. The main challenge that we face there is, that the solution needs to do some post-provisioning steps in the end-customer’s target subscription as well as Azure Active Directory tenant:
Creating a Service Principal that can be used by the Software inside of the provisioned VM in the end-customer’s target directory.
Using that service principal to read data from the end-customer’s Azure Subscription.
Note: the end customer in this case is the customer, who purchases the product published by the ISV in the store!
Such cases typically require the creation of “multi-tenant” Azure Active Directory applications. And this application then needs to access the end-customer’s target directory using the Azure AD Graph API. At the same time, creating service principals is not an easy task.
This week I got the chance for my first attempts with Cognitive services and image search - based on a request from my Global ISV partner:) While the services are actually easy to use for a developer, documentation is behind and Internet Search is highly miss-leading (since it mostly points to a previous Bing-search API that does not exist, anymore). That’s why I decided to blog about it and point people into the right direction.
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NServiceBus is a very popular messaging and workflow framework for .NET developers across the globe. This week a few peers of mine and I were working for one of our global ISV partners to evaluate, if NServiceBus can be used for Hybrid Cloud and portable solutions, that can be moved seamless from On-Premises to the Public Cloud and vice versa.
My task was to evaluate, if NServiceBus can be used with both, Microsoft Azure Service Bus in the public cloud as well as Service Bus 1.1 for Windows Server in the private cloud. It was a very interesting collaboration and finally I got to write some prototype code for one of our partners, again. How cool is that - doing interesting stuff and at the same time it helps a partner. That’s how it should be!
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I really do like Git a lot and even for my private projects I use it as the default. But some aspects of it are quite tricky. A well-known practice is, that you should never check-in secrets or things you don’t want to share with others into a Git-repository. That is especially interesting with public repositories hosted on e.g. GitHub.
Well, saying you should not and actually not forgetting about it are two different things. Sometimes it just happens. And even if you are careful with secrets, it can also be other stuff you checked in but didn’t want to share with others. So it happened to me when I wrote the last blog-post about automating my developer machine setup and published my Machine Setup Script.
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I know, I wanted to blog more often… but then a happy event came in between which was the birth of my little baby daughter - Reinhard’s 2 year younger sister Linda. Now I am sitting here at the registry office for her documents. What could be a better thing to write a blog-post while waiting for the next steps!?
Since my brand-new Surface Book arrived, yesterday, one thing I have to do is setting it up for my daily use. That means installing all the handy tools that I use on a daily basis such as PDF readers, KeePass and the likes. It also means setting up the many tools and development environments I use (some of them more often, others less often).
Well, now the cool thing is that I’ve automated most of these setup procedures using Chocolatey and PowerShell. And given the situation I am right now in (new daughter, waiting at the registry office, Surface Book arrived) I thought why not share my script with the rest of the world and explain it a bit…
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It’s been a while since I wrote my last blog-post. When I re-launched my blog on Azure Web Sites I just moved into a new team and a newly formed organization inside of Microsoft Corp.
That organization - DX TED (Developer Experiences, Technical Evangelism and Development) - was meant to bring the technical depth back to Microsoft’s evangelism unit. Indeed we were all moved to engineering roles (Program Managers, Software Development Engineers) since that was added as the main ingredient to the evangelism-parts of our role. At least speaking about DX Corp. I can say that mission is progressing at huge steps. I’ve spent more time in Visual Studio in the past 3 years than ever before since I left Microsoft Consulting Services back in 2011.
At that time, after being absent as a blogger for a while, I thought it is a good opportunity to re-start blogging. And given we were supposed to be the spearhead for Azure as a platform with Global Software Vendors I thought ‘how could it be better than running it on Azure’ … which I did and which is still the case. You’re reading a page served from Wordpress backed on Azure Web Apps with ClearDB MySQL on Azure.
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A few months ago I did blog-post about how-to detect whether a virtual machine runs in Azure or not. This is vital for many independent software vendors who are planning to offer their own software through the Azure Marketplace for Virtual Machines.
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Last December I started working with two of my peers, Max Knor and Igor Pagliai, with a partner in Madrid on implementing a Cross-Data Center SQL Server AlwaysOn availability group setup for a financial services solution which is supposed to be provided to 1000s of banks across the world running in Azure. Igor posted about our setup experience which we partially automated with Azure PowerShell and Windows PowerShell – see here.
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Our team started working more and more with software vendors we categorize as “Enablers” at a global scale. Such companies are providing building block services which can be used to build finished software services that do run in the cloud (or on-premises).
For such “Enablers” the Azure Marketplace is a key-instrument to gain visibility and traction as well as for instantiating their services in their customer’s Microsoft Azure Subscriptions.
At the moment most of the partners are working with us to deploy offerings based on templates with single or multiple Virtual Machines that do run their software. Later down the path we will also enable on-boarding of “Application Services” where customers do not have to instantiate and manage Virtual Machines, anymore.
One of the main challenges our partners do face when putting their software into Virtual Machine templates which can be instantiated and/or purchased through the Azure Marketplace is protecting their software from being operated outside of Azure since this would enable malicious people to operate the software without charging for it.
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Batch processing is something nearly everyone I have been working with is doing in some or the other way on Microsoft Azure. Last year some colleagues and I did work with several global partners that had this requirement. Therefore since nothing at the scale of Azure Batch was available, yet, we created GeRes2 as an open source project. GeRes2 covers batch processing in a simple, pragmatic yet scalable way (at full scale of Web/Worker roles as opposed to the limited scale of WebJobs SDK in WebSites). But now, the times when you need GeRes2 are over. Instead you definitely should consider Azure Batch, directly.
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Our global team is running several industry subject matter working groups with different focus areas. One of them is targeted to Internet-Of-Things (IoT).
The charter of this working group is the exploration of IoT standards, protocols and frameworks across various industries with the goal of developing recommendations, reference architectures and integration points to and on the Microsoft platform as well as feeding IoT-related product groups of Microsoft with input for technologies, services and features we’re building as a company.
Together with peers from this working group including @joshholmes, @tomconte, @mszcool, @reichenseer, @jmspring, @timpark, @irjudson, @ankoduizer, @rachelyehe and daniele-colonna we explored AllJoyn as a technology.
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Over the past months I’ve spent some time working with Janet the UK’s National Research and Education Network. As well as managing the operation and development of the Janet network, Janet runs a number of services for educationand research including operating eduroam(UK), the UK part of a large, global network established between all sorts of research and education facilities and institutions.
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A few weeks ago, we published an open-source framework that covers a scenario required by many partners I’ve been working with on Azure over the course of the past 4 years: asynchronous execution of jobs on compute instances in the background – or simple batch processing. Finally, now I found the time (on the plane) to blog a bit about it and point you to that framework.
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If you plan to use vFabric TC Server as a container for your Java applications in Windows Azure PaaS Cloud Services Worker Roles with the help of the Azure Plug-In for Eclipse, you need to do some customization to the Azure plug-in for Eclipse and add component configuration. This blog-post shows, how you can do it and also gives some background information and context on the scenario.
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Over the past weeks I did work with several software vendors all having the same question: how does the integration of OAuth2 really look like in ASP.NET 4.5.1?
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While software vendors are looking to spend less time on infrastructure management by leveraging Platform Services (PaaS), this is not always possible. In this post, I’ll talk about combining fully managed platform services with infrastructure services (IaaS) for which customers are having more responsibilities of managing them for an increased level of flexibility.
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I am currently working with a software vendor in the media space who has some really valuable software assets implemented as console applications, today. These command line applications are used for some high-performance image transcoding/encoding jobs and are implemented with C/C++ (originally built for Unix/Linux environments).
Now the partner wants to run this application as part of a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) deployment on Windows Azure using Web/Worker Roles for a new online service they’re currently building. But a requirement is to enable that scenario without rewriting the application and re-using it as it is.
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It is about a year ago since I’ve published my last blog post on my old blog, but finally I decided to re-launch my blog based on Windows Azure Web Sites during summer.
I am a strong believer in claims-based security - those who’ve read my postings over the past years know that, already. At this year’s Basta 2012 Spring Edition I’ve been giving a presentation on that topic again. It was primarily based on experience from my past years within Microsoft Services and some projects I’ve been involved in there.
In my previous posting I outlined a number of thoughts, considerations and technical options for building hybrid-cloud solutions. This types of applications and services operate and run assets on public cloud platforms such as Windows Azure while keeping other assets in private data centers on-premises. That way such kinds of solutions enable you to leverage the benefits of public cloud platforms while at the same time keeping assets you cannot or do not want to move to a public cloud on-premises in your own data center.
In the past two months several of our partners and customers confronted me with the topic “hybrid cloud”. Seems that due to my experience from the last 2 years in a sensitive public sector organization as an enterprise architect people think about me as a hybrid cloud expert. Well, I am starting to be one because I am really spending a whole lot of my time thinking about this topic. First thing I want to publish is a mind map with some thoughts that I typically tend to take into consideration when it comes to hybrid cloud.
After a little bit more than 1.5 years as a Microsoft enterprise architect working for a United Nations organization with its headquarters based in Vienna I decided to take on the next big challenge in my career. This month, November, I started my new role as a Platform Strategy Advisor for Windows Azure as part of Microsoft’s Global Windows Azure ISV Incubation Team.
Reading books such as “The Process of Software Architecting” you will see statements such as “architecture focus on significant elements” a lot. Given my recent experience I can’t tell you more how important this is! Therefore I thought it’s worth posting a bit from my recent experience…
My last blog entry is quite a while ago… November 2011 after my two sessions and Track Ownership at TechEd Europe in Berlin. Indeed now that the Austrian Big>Days 2011 are over and some people were wondering and asking my colleagues why I was not part of that road show it is a good time to comment and try re-starting with blogging efforts again.
As promised in the last session of this year’s TechEd Europe which I had today on WCF Data Services, here you find the complete demo-code for download.
I was just coming back from my first session at TechEd on parallel programming before I started blogging again. That might be because I fell much better after this first session at the conference. It was such a great fun doing it, I was in a room that was for more than 900 people and the room was packed with attendees until the very first minute, I think no one left. So I finally hope the people liked the session… given the fact that I am also responsible for the architecture track it is really a challenge doing that all together in a week…
Wow, it was a busy time the past months since I switched from Developer&Platform Evangelism to Microsoft Services for becoming a senior architect working with the largest enterprise accounts. At the same time I delivered this presentation at JAOO and took, for one last time, a track ownership responsibility for TechEd Europe.
Im my last posting I published the first set of downloads on my sessions at TechDays 2010 in Switzerland, Basel. Basically I delivered two sessions at the conference:
Well, I know, it’s a few weeks ago, already when we had TechDays Switzerland in Basel. Finally now I was able to publish the material of the two sessions I delivered there:
As many of you might know, in Austria we are currently running a Windows Azure Contest where it’s possible to win a Samsung flatscreen TV together with an XBox 360 as well as 10 external 500GB hard disks for all participants successfully completing the contest.
At my session on parallel computing at BigDays 2010 during my first demo I mentioned a potential trap with lamda-expressions and ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(). Thanks to Philipp Aumayr from timecockpit.com – based on a question he asked when he watched the demo in Graz, in the break afterwards together we uncovered a very dangerous trap when it comes to lamda-expressions and ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem!
Wow, what I time was that the past four weeks – BigDays 2010 preparations and rehearsals, then two-week long BigDays-tour through Austria with four sessions + key note demos on each location and now I am sitting at the airport in Zurich heading back from TechDays in Basel where I had two sessions, as well. It was such a great time, I tell you!!
If you’re experiencing problems upgrading your MVC-projects, check out this blog post. It shows a solution for the upgrade-problems you typically run into:
In my last posting on the MSDN Briefing I outlined, that I migrated a sample that uses ASP.NET Membership API and Roles API for authenticating and authorizing users. Unfortunately the ASP.NET Membership and Roles API database as we know it does not work with SQL Azure as it uses some features not supported on SQL Azure.
On January 26th I presented at our MSDN-Briefing on Cloud Computing and Windows Azure. During the session I introduced our (and my) point-of-view on Cloud Computing. Within the demos I migrated my good old MicroBlog sample I created for a presentation at the technical university of Vienna last year to run on Windows Azure.
Today I am ill and lying in the bed with a medium temperature… but honestly, I can’t lie in bed the whole day doing nothing, even when being ill… so I tried something…
Yesterday someone during our Cloud-Computing chat at derstandard.at (see here) someone asked me why his JavaScript and HTML work in any browser but not IE incl. IE8… See the problem in his code and a solution below (you can download the solution here)…
Yesterday I had the great pleasure of giving a session on Microsoft’s strategy on modeling, model driven architecture and it’s software factories idea. As last year it was great giving the session and I had much fun with it.
If you’ve read my previous post on Windows 7 God-Mode, there are a number of further special folder short-cuts you can use in a similar way. The complete list of GUIDs for the special folder short cuts can be found on MSDN here:
Sometimes live as a Microsoft-employee is really strange, especially when you find something from Microsoft (!!) that you’ve never heard about as an employee, before – in particular if the thing you’ve found is cool as well.
At PDC in the expo-hall they have a container as it will be used as deployment-unit in the new Microsoft-Data Centers such as the Chicago data center. Pretty cool, we’ve been looking at this one… pretty funny;)
While Max is blogging on codefest.at about todays key note, where Steven Sinofsky came up with a Windows 7 Acer Laptop as a gift for every attendee, I thought it’s a good time for a short note.
This morning at PDC 2009 I joined a session from Mr. Identity himself, Kim Cameron. Kim gave a very interesting update on Microsoft’s Identity strategies.
Right before my session is going to start here in Berlin at 5.30 p.m. I found time to upload my demos and slides. The session is all about approaches and thoughts we implemented in a project together with Frequentis AG, a globally active ISV building solutions for public safety. These solutions span air traffic control, maritime communications, police- and fire-department control and communication etc.
Last week, on November 5th 2009, we had our 3rd Interoperability Council in the Microsoft Innovation Center in Vienna. The council is an independent group of technology experts that discusses current interoperability-challenges between the Microsoft platform and other platforms.
As today we’re going to host our 3rd Microsoft Austria Interoperability Council, I thought that in addition to our existing results we’re presenting today, it’s a good time to publish an update of my Identity Interoperability Demos and samples I created earlier this year.
Today based on some customer project requirements, Max and I together created a very simple and easy-to-understand all-in-one demo to show, how-to integrate Internet Explorer 8 features into your own web sites.
My cousin wanted to update the registration-information specified while installing Microsoft Office 2007. When he asked me I realized, that for the default values of user name and the initials Office 2007 offers a UI – but it doesn’t provide a possibility to update the company name. Furthermore I realized, that PowerPoint reads the information from the Installer-Data registry-hive.
As some of you know I am the founder and owner of the Austrian Microsoft Interoperability Council. The council itself is a group of experts and influencers on the Austrian market that is working together with us for identifying interoperability challenges between the Microsoft-platform and other platforms based on local, regional and global standards.
Maybe some of you have read the Whitepaper I’ve written together with two architects from Frequentis AG (Ulrich Hüttinger and Stefan Domnanovits) a few months ago. At the DevCamp 2009 Conference I baked that into a session now!
It was a great pleasure for me to be part of the opening key note at our 3rd Developer Camp conference organized by some of our key partners in Austria (Techtalk, Cubido, CSS and Kentiko).
Yesterday we had our Austrian version of the Re-MIX conference in the Hilton Hotel at Stadtpark in Vienna. It was a great conference combined with a superb architect forum together with Simon Guest, who unveiled his thoughts on cloud computing… but more on that in a separate post, this one is about the ASP.NET MVC session I delivered in the late afternoon in the web dev track!
Today in the morning I gave a presentation at Microsoft’s largest internal conference for employees in Seattle, WA (called TechReady, about 5000-6000 Micorsoft employees are there on technical education).
While being here in Redmond with customers at our Lead Enterprise Architect Conference I realized that I still owe students from a lecture I gave last week the presentation and demo-downloads. Therefore I am catching up with this now;)
The .NET Client Profile is a very interesting extension made available with the release of .NET Framework 3.5. If you’re interested into more details, follow these link to the official documentation!
Yesterday Max and I had the last delivery of our .NET Web Developers Road Show. Again we applied our new concept of building a complete application in a whole day. This time we built the event management application using…
Yesterday we had the last delivery of our BigDays road show for 2009. It was a pleasure participating for me being a part of this largest road show through Austria, again.
By “accident” I’ve found two older articles on some extensions and tools for Internet Information Services 7.0 and web developers in general that help improving security of web applications.
In October I published a posting on Identity Interoperability based on a PoC I created of TechEd Europe Developers 2008 and our local DevCamp 2008 conference. The prototype was based on Codename “Zermatt” on the Microsoft-side and on NetBeans 6.5 Beta 2 as well as Metro 1.3 / WSIT Beta at this point of time… As I had to demonstrate the prototype within a customer engagement I updated the stuff to Microsoft Geneva Framework Beta 1, Netbeans 6.5 RTM and Metro 1.3 / WSIT RTW. Well, there have been some changes which essentially where driving me crazy… therefore I thought I’ll give you an update and show, how you can make identity interoperability reality between those platforms with
First of all I wish all the readers of my blog a happy new year 2009, good luck and especially healthiness (I think that’s much more important than success;))…
Last week I did a presentation at the technical university of Vienna on Microsoft’s strategies for modeling and Software Factories. It was a great pleasure and fun for me to deliver this presentation as we had really interesting discussions afterwards with students on these topics.
Right immediately after my previous post the next one is following;) Last week on Friday, December 12th, we had a great event together with David Chappell in our new conference center right above our M.I.C. in Vienna.
A little late but nevertheless I managed to publish my demos from this year’s TechEd Europe 2008 in Barcelona from my session on the identity meta system applied to real world projects in Austria.
Last Tuesday a few of our biggest partners (CSS, Cubido and TechTalk) organized their second DevCamp conference in Vienna… and again I have to say it was a great event. While most of the sessions where delivered by peers from our partners, Max and I delivered several presentations and the key note as well.
While the feedback for yesterday’s forum was in the good average range for all architect forums (typically the architects are more critical than others;)), I really started thinking about the future of the platform and the way we are driving this platform.
This actually was my first year as a speaker and participant at JAOO in Aarhus… and I have to admit - it’s very cool but different to any other conference I’ve been so far as a speaker.
For a long time the application architecture guidance from the patterns & practices team remained unchanged… and it was inherently necessary to give it an update with all the new technologies and also trends appeared on the market.
This week we started a road show through Austria for developers which are rather new to the world of .NET that want to see and learn, how modern applications will be developed with the .NET Framework.
Last week, just one week after my vacation, I had it in my inbox - the announcement that Issue 16 of the Architecture Journal about Identity and Access Management has been published.
Actually this is going to be one of the most exciting things for me this year - I will have one session and a whole-day tutorial at JAOO Conference in Denmark / Aarhus (JAOO originally stands for Java and Object Oriented… the conference itself has really been established to a well known conference for software architects now). That means talking side-by-side with industry leaders such as Anders Hejlsberg, Frank Buschmann, Gregor Hophe and lot’s of other great people… personally for me that’s a real challenge and I am really looking forward to it with some kind of nervous excitement in my stomach;)
Finally, after the Composite Application Guidance for WPF (codename “Prism”) was released last week, I started thinking about necessary steps for migrating CAB/SCSF based solutions to the new Smart Client framework built with WPF. I also started migrating the solution I’ve created for last year’s TechEd and for the HP banqpro/ case study to Composite WPF guidance.
This is the first part of the sample from last year’s TechEd Europe 2007 Developers where I started migration from CAB/SCSF to Composite WPF Guidance / Prism for a customer workshop a few weeks ago. I will post a separate, longer article on the thoughts behind the migration in a minute…
Thanks to Jim Wooley I have to extend what I wrote about my LINQ-Architecture thoughts before. Actually LINQ to SQL supports putting the OR-Mapping definitions into a separate XML file instead of having the mapping meta data applied as attributes on your classes and properties. Just take a look at the following blog-entry:
Two weeks ago I did an MSDN Briefing about Windows Communication Foundation. While we are still post-processing the recording for this briefing we wanted to make the downloads available, earlier. Here you can find the material from the briefing:
While preparing the workshop and discussing the variety of LINQ technologies in the aforementioned workshop I really started thinking of when to use which technology in the big landscape of data access possibilities on the Microsoft platform. Summarizing the technologies we have there you see the following now:
Yesterday I visited Ernst & Young in Prague for a Workshop on the variety of LINQ technologies. Thanks to my TechEd Presenters of the Tools & Languages Track last November 2007 (Luca, Luke and Mike) I was able to give a good workshop based on their deliverables. You can download the demos I’ve created by clicking the following link:
I know it’s a few weeks ago, already, but now I managed to get the demos and presentation of MiX Essential and the ASP.NET workshop on the technical university of Vienna published. You can find for download them at by clicking the following links:
I am especially proud to announce this next technical paper: during the past months we’ve been working with www.derStandard.at on designing and implementing a Silverlight-based application platform for building InfoScreen applications.
I have totally forgotten to mention that the HP banqpro/ paper was the reasion why I updated my samples from last year’s TechEd Europe 2007. Actually I created this examples not just for TechEd but also based on the requirements I’ve been told by HP in mind to evaluate how hard integration of Workflows in composite smart clients is.
As announced in the previous blog, publishing technical papers about interesting architectural concepts from customer and partner engagements is going to be a focus for me from this time forward.
Yes, you may have noticed - except my blog from yesterday I left my blog alone for several months now. Well the main reason really was that I started thinking about what should I blog!? Should I blog about all these standard topics (yet another ???-technology tips&tricks blog)? My clear decision was: NO, it is not useful doing the same thing many other people are doing, already, and maybe even better than I because they are better experts in technology “X”.
Attached you can find an updated version of the demos I’ve presented at TechEd Europe 2007. I figured out that under some circumstances the downloaded demo does not really work and so I included some fixes as in the following bullet-list.
Again one blog entry from the future;) I hope you enjoyed my session about Composite UI Application Block and Smart Client Software Factories at TechEd Europe in Barcelona, as well.
As I just answered this question for a customer: of course it is possible to digitally sign Office Open XML file format packages. This is a core part of the Open Packaging Convention which is based on open standards such as W3C XML Digital Signatures and X.509 certificates. You can even apply more signatures on one document - programmatically or directly from within Office (Word, Excel or PowerPoint). For more information take a look at the following links:
This blog entry is all about dynamically adding content controls on the server to a word document and binding them to content of a custom XML data island which is generated on the server as well! You can download the sample code here.
In my last workshops together with Andreas about ECMA Office Open XML file formats I demonstrated a way for generating Word documents using the packaging API and custom XML data islands. But actually the possibility I presented in the workshop is not the only one… and I have to admit… it’s not the easiest one.
Last Monday I did a 2 hour nearly demo-only session at the technical university in Vienna to show some of the nitty-gritty details of ASP.NET AJAX. It was a more detailled version (especially in demos on the AJAX stuff) of the portal I created at our last Big Days road show. As the task was building a web site from scratch I started building this site with Expression Web designer and then completed it using Visual Studio ORCAS. Although - because still in early beta - ORCAS sometimes has some stability issues the roundtripping between these two worlds, Expression Web and ORCAS worked seamless although ORCAS ships with a new version of the AJAX Extensions integrated into the .NET Framework 3.5.
Maybe some of you know this for a longer period of time, already. But for me it was just new - a plug-in for Mozilla Firefox that allows you to install .NET Framework ClickOnce applications. That’s a nice tool…
Last week in our team JourFixe we had a short presentation from Barbara, event owner of the Big>Days 2007 road show, on statistics and event evaluations. I am really very happy that - in terms of session and presentaiton quality - the four top-sessions are from the developer sessions Max put together and organized for our tracks - congratulations:)
Finally it’s out - the successor of Smart Client Software Factory and Composite UI Application Block is released in a first CTP. Since September 2006 I’ve been waiting for that moment - that was the time when I saw the first version of Acropolis and it’s little :) Domain Specific Language in action for the first time.
Yesterday Andreas and I delivered a developer-workshop on the ECMA Office Open XML File Formats together with Austria PRO, one of Austria’s leading standardization organization in cooperation with Austria’s chamber of economics, and the Technical University Vienna. Thanks to Univ. Prof. Christian Huemer from Austria PRO and TU Vienna and to Gerhard Göschl from Microsoft Austria who organized the workshop.
Last weekend two of my best friends got married within a wonderful wedding in Altenburg close to Horn… the Austrian’s would say “in the good old wood quarters”. Tanja and Dominik finally took the challenge for the…most beautiful project we can start in our life:)
During the break here I tried to search the web for mszCool - just for curiosity;) There are a couple of interesting links. I am especially proud that the last paper I’ve written in the meantime appears at the BPM architect and SOA business analyst blogs, already. Hopefully that’s a good sign…
Today I spend nearly the whole day at the Global Knowledge Take Off Developer event organized by Global Knowledge and Christian Nagel. I had the honor to deliver today’s key note as well as foundation-session on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).
The last three weeks we primarily spend with our official launch tour for Windows Vista and 2007 Microsoft Office system for IT professionals, developers and architects traveling through the whole country.
On Thursday and Friday I spent the whole day at the technical university in Vienna doing a VSTS prototyping workshop with about 8 tutors of the university. It was really great fun as the environment is much different from what I am used to (when setting up and working with TFS/VSTS there are usually not 8 TFS admins which are at the same time architects, developers, project managers and testers:)).
The European Union developers conference last Thursday and Friday was really very exciting. It’s the feeling that makes this conference different to other conferences and sessions I’ve given so far. I’d like to share the prototype (with all sources etc.) I did at the presentation for the EU as I really think it hits the spot for one, very important message: the capabilities of interoperability of Office through the .NET Framework and especially through it’s new file format, the ECMA Office Open XML File Formats.
Tomorrow, after a customer meeting in Linz, I’ll directly head to the airport traveling to Brussels for giving a presentation on Office in a Service Oriented World for the European Union. I’ve prepared a bunch of interoperability demos I’ll share after the conference on my blog for really showing interop of Office with other platforms at several levels. I’ll access (self-written) Java Web Services from within Office, I’ll access SharePoint Web Services from within Java and finally I’ll use Java to automatically generate Office Open XML File Formats. Wow, it was a long time ago when I touched Java for the last time, but for these interoperability demos I’ve written my first Java applications after more than 5 years of Java-break… that was fun (and sometimes pain)…
Of course there are lots of articles on MSDN or the Microsoft Architecture Journal on Service Orientation, Business Process Management and finally Enterprise Service Bus. Many of them are really good but almost all of them dig into some details of a specific topic (such as Service Oriented Modelling or BPM implementation details specific to a technology etc.).
While researching and preparing for the upcoming 18. Architect Forum on January 24th next week on SaaS I have made an interesting discovery, that really shows, how successful a company can be betting on SaaS and how they are providing business services in a clean, service oriented fashion to their customer through Phil Wainewright’s blog-posting. My first thought was that this is a really good example showing, how Service Orientation can help building a SaaS-ready solution to catch the long tail (see Gianpaolos whitepaper here). In fact I think, for many business-scenarios, Service Orientation is an important pre-condition for building SaaS/S+S ready software (but don’t get me wrong, as it is always the case with architecture, of course this has not to be true for each and every case).
About two months ago I discovered the Windows Automated Installation Toolkit (Windows AIK or just WAIK) to be able to work with different demo images for the sessions I did at TechEd Europe with physical machines instead of the (still much slower:)) Virtual PC images. The WAIK includes imagex.exe, which is a tool that allows you to create images of a partition of your machine and package them into the new Windows Imaging Files (WIM).
In the past months I worked with RACON Software GmbH. on an architectural design and prototype for a composite smart client based on Composite UI Application Block and Smart Client Software Factory. RACON Software GmbH, a Software house of the Raiffeisen Banking Group in Upper Austria. This paper has now been reviewed by and Eugenio Pace and his team of the Microsoft Patterns & Practices Group of Microsoft Corp. in Redmond and is available as a public download here.
Three weeks ago I’d did a presentation in Ireland at an architects forum on user experience. This presentation was for the LEAP (Lead Enterprise Architects Forum), which is a type of forum held in just a couple of countries across EMEA. It was really a special experience for me as it confirmed some thoughts and learnings I had in the past couple of years - and especially since I started the new role as an architect evangelist. …And… as I still meet too many geeks which tend to drive decisions “just” on “cool technologies”, I want to share this experience…
Do you remember my posts back from April 2006… during my prep-works for our local BigDays 2006 road show I discovered - with some limitations in mind - that sidebar gadgets can be created with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) via an IFRAME work-around.
Finally as an attachment of this post you can find the demo I did in my session DEV412 about Composite UI Application Block at TechEd Europe Developers 2006 in Barcelona. I know, it took me some time, but as you’ll read in my next post I’ll do during this week-end, it was still stressy after TechEd as well.
Yesterday I had the hardest session I have ever done at an international conference - a 75 min. demo-only session on developing a solution based on InfoPath, InfoPath Forms Services, Windows SharePoint Services and Windows Workflow Foundation. Actually the interest in that session was so high that it is going to be repeated on Thursday after lunch.
Within this little blog-post you can find the SharePoint Workflow Project Templates that I have used in my Demo Extravaganzza session on Tuesday - they are also available within the ECM Starter Kit as an installer-package. As I have used these templates with a build very close to the final release I expect those templates to work with the final release as well. To install the templates, please follow the following steps:
Yesterday Eric Carter, Martin Sawicki, both are Program Managers of the VSTO team at Microsoft Corp. in Redmond and I delivered a whole pre-conference on VSTO at TechEd Europe: Developers in Barcelona. I delivered a pre-conference with deep technical details on Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office. You can find the downloads here within this blog-entry.
This week we have a virtual team meeting for Architects of the Developer and Platform Group across Europe in Poland. At the same time, the Microsoft subsidiary in Poland ran their Microsoft Technology Summit - a conference with about 2500 attendees (damn, that’s a large one;)).
Finally Matthew and I did it - it’s out. This summer during my vacation we finished our work for the special edition of Pro ASP.NET 2.0 in C#. And it’s available on Amazon already. It was really hard work as Apress wanted us to do this in a very short amout of time. We extended the book with some great content based on the feedback we’ve got in the past months from readers and during real-world projects. And we addressed the AJAX hype and unveiled more technical details on AJAX in ASP.NET incl. ATLAS preview. And it’s finally our first paper-back book:)…
Just one hour, then I’ll start talking about Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals in our first MSDN Briefing. The software life-cycle management topic really hunts me for the next couple of years as an Architect in our group - but I actually love this topic (it was one of the first roles I have taken on, partially, in my first really big project with 22 members in our team about 8 years ago).
I am really looking forward to our next architect forum this Thursday. Our special guest star this time: Dave Green, architect within the Windows Workflow Foundation team at Microsoft Corp.
Last week I was faced with some sort of a special challenge. I went to the south of Austria for developing a prototype on Windows Workflow Foundation for one of our customers. They have successfully established a first version of their product based on .NET 2.0 and Composite UI Application block, already. This product has its own state machine component (they call it RuleEngine) as well. This component does the following things:
I am currently setting up my Windows Vista 5472 for the upcoming customer meetings this week and next week. When I wanted to install the typical sysinternal tools I figured out that that’s not necessary anymore for some of them. Through Windows Task Manager you can launch the Resource monitor… just cool:))
I am currently working on the Demos for our local Big>Days 2006 road show for Windows Vista and Windows Presentation Foundation. Originally the Windows Vista team claimed, that they will have no support for WPF in the SideBar. That was actually very disappointing for me.
Although it’s nearly a week ago I feel as it was yesterday. On the second day (last Tuesday) for the train-the-trainer of our security technical briefings for customers and ISVs we covered the most important part for the briefings - security architecture.
As some of you might already know, in Austria we are going to do Security 1:1 customer workshops for ISVs and customers. Target of our activity is bringing really in-depth know-how about Secure Software Development to our enterprise customers and independent software vendors.
Another question I got from the VSTO 2005 event in Denmark in February was a really interesting one. In short words the customer wants to create a central document template with a VSTO 2005 customization with the primary logic. Every outpost or department then should have the possibility to create a template that inherits functionality and basic layout from the central template. The primary reason for having this type of “inherited” templates is that the departments and outposts want to add some additional standard texts and logos in dedicated sections of the document.
This is a little follow-up from the VSTO workshop I did in Denmark on February 23rd and 24th. The two big questions I got of course where about deploying VSTO 2005 solutions:
I have just finished putting together the content four our next MSDN Flash - except the editorial. Actually I wanted to write some more things about user experience.
Yesterday I did a VSTO 2005 event in Denmark - Aarhus for about 150 attendees there. It was really a great run and much fun for me. Actually for two reasons:
Wow, my last blog is sometime ago. Therefore you even don’t know that one week after my first flight experience (my last blog entry) I had the second one:). They just canceled my flight to Netherlands for the Office 12 Ascend Dry Run. But finally KLM saved my life. Okay, let’s get back to something technical. The Composite UI Block (CAB) is finally released and after that I built a little sample to modify the behavior for loading Modules and Module security information.
Yesterday I planned to go to Redmond for the second part of the Office 12 TAP workshop that the Microsoft EMEA Office 12 Virtual Team (Hans VB, Dave Webster & I) will redeliver for ISV DEs as well as TAP ISVs here in Europe. But as it is the case very often - it happens different than originally thought…
I have created a little session voting tool for the launch conference in Austria to get a feeling of how many people will attend which sessions. With that we can split the rooms appropriately… Currently my session about web parts is on the third position with 70 votes:)) SQL CLR is the top session (86 votes) followed by SQL Server Reporting Services (75 votes).
Wow, the tournament we launched with our cinema event last friday is already full in action. We have a number of .NET golf players who already solved the problems with amazing code-size (663 bytes)…
Yesterday we had our MSDN connection cinema event in Vienna. Actually we have shown one of the episodes of the Dotnetprotv and we had a special guest for our community in Vienna: the director and producer of Dotnetprotv himself, Ralf Westphal. It was really a cool event and the attendees really liked the way Ralf presented Code Access Security (yes, that was the episode we have shown).
I have just finalized writing an article about web parts and then I was wondering if my second book is already available at Amazon. Actually it is … although first I have seen it at PDC 2005 in L.A. in the conference shop:)
As I have had a number of problems installing the PDC “The Goods” set on a Windows Vista PDC build on my second machine here are a number of links that might help you not falling into the same problems…
Today (or better tonight) I have prepared a Virtual PC with a huge amount of demos for customer briefings. Of course I had to do one devices demo as well. So far so good. The new device emulator even works within Virtual PC … great improvement … but … if you are not connected to a network (or better to a DHCP server) you have to complete the following steps:
Today we celebrated Alex Holys move to Microsoft EMEA where he is responsible for Windows Vista Platform evangelism now! It was really a cool party and Alex had really cool surprises for us in his pocket:)
…we are doing another one together with MSDN Connection Austria. But this time we are doing it the other way round: first go to cinema, then code something and finally win one of three really cool prices if you are one of the three best coders…
Wow, what a hard week. But we are nearly ready with defining the most important details for our launch event on November 22nd in Vienna. Currently we have planned two tracks for .NET developers and web developers, one track for database developers (SQL Server 2005 CLR, XML…) and 3 tracks covering SQL Server 2005 (DBA, BI and Upgrade, Migration and Integration) … and of course a special track for VSTS.
Well, just back from vacation and I am finding myself deep in content planning for our big launch event on November 22nd 2005 in Vienna (yes, if you are interested, save this date because it’s already fixed!!!). We really want to do a one-day developer conference with in-depth content for our developer and architects community. Actually it would be really helpful getting some input from anybody out there in the Austrian developer community. So if you have any topic you’d prefer having in a session at our launch conference just post a comment to this blog entry and I’ll keep it in mind for the content plan.
Just before I go on vacation for a week (yes that’s short:)) - this is really a cool site. When you take a look at it first you won’t even believe that it has something to do with SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005. Explore it, it’s really funny:). Play a little bit with it, maybe you find clips like this one there…
Last week I got my first copy of Christian’s new book, Enterprise Services with the .NET Framework. This is really a cool book with lots of great content about Enterprise Services. From my perspective it’s one of the few books that describes a couple of things in a really clear and understandable way you cannot find in other books (I did the technical reviews of the first chapters of this book:-)):
Wow, what an amazing week. TechEd Europe was really great and I enjoyed it (I am happy about the feedback for my Smart Documents session;)). Finally I have developed an updated version of my Smart Documents Framework - this time for Visual Studio Tools 2005 for Office. This framework covers the following things:
Currently I am using both, Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio 2005 for creating Smart Document solutions. I have installed Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 side-by-side on one machine and when you want to debug solutions written with .NET 1.1 you have to bare in mind, that Office 2003 (winword.exe and excel.exe) always loads the newest version of the .NET Framework into it’s process. Therefore if you want to debug solutions with Visual Studio 2003, you have to create a configuration files for winword.exe and excel.exe called winword.exe.config and excel.exe.config and put it into the program files directory of Office (\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11). These configuration files specify the runtime that should be loaded for an executable as follows (contents of winword.exe.config and excel.exe.config):
On Tuesday I had an email in my inbox - “Just released, Composite UI block”. And actually yesterday Alain Leroy and I did a demo about that thing in the Architecture session “Demystifying the Smart Client” at TechEd. Actually this block provides you with a web-part like framework for creating Smart Client applications that allows you to focus on
Today Alex and I did a full-day workshop about .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 for the International Atomic Energy Agency … and the great thing about that is when doing such a whole day workshop there for the development teams across their departments they book their Boarding Room for this event. That’s really great - I still remember the first presentation there together with Beat (our Security talk). Doing a presentation in the boarding room where international decisions are done is really cool … and much more I like the chairs and tables there. Those large, comfortable, huge chairs are just great (and honestly it’s they really lead into temptation of relaxing a little bit too much:-))… And as you have the translation-rooms on top of the room around you, I really had the feeling of being translated into 6-7 different languages. Here you have a picture of it. Maybe you get a feeling what I am talking about (but don’t forget - we had those huge chairs and not this simple chairs from the picture - those huge chairs similar to the ones in a parliament…).
Two weeks ago we started with our local road show called Big>Days through Austria. For our developer track I have prepared three sessions full of “exploring new things of Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0” and Alex has prepared a session about SQL Server 2005. While today we start traveling to the last two locations, Linz and Graz, this week, I have uploaded my persentations for Teched Europe in Amsterdam.
As you probably know Beta 2 is shipping as DVD-Box around the world now. It also includes the WeFly247 trainings DVD. If you have any feedback or questions to my recordings on the DVD (I have done the whole XML and Security track as well as some of the Smart Client track sessions) feel free posting the feedback and questions here on my blog!
Next Tuesday I have my first User Group talk (more information: here) about .NET Remoting 2.0 in Vienna since Ingo and I have published our book (Advanced .NET Remoting 2nd Edition). Primarily I’ll demonstrate new things for .NET Remoting with .NET 2.0 like the IPC channel as well as the integrated security infrastructure. And – as there are always some discussions around this – I think I’ll discuss some best practices as well as typical usage scenarios for the technology…
I am currently preparing my developer track talks for the local Big>Days 2005 road show and - oh what a surprise - the key topic for the dev-track will of course be a lap around important new things in Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0.
Well and currently I am thinking about a useful demo for Generics … and guess what … I don’t want to tell the people that they should create their own generic collections. That’s not only boring, I think Generics exist that people don’t have to write their own collections anymore because they already exist in the framework and, due to the fact they are generic, they can be used in any different situation. Okay, so when writing my own collection for my “Person” class or what so ever is over, what are some other additional usecases.
This week I have published my Smart Document Framework (download here) as User Sample on www.gotdotnet.com. I have created this framework for a customer to simplify development of Smart Docs with VS 2003 and VSTO 2003. Okay, it’s shortly before Visual Studio 2005 ships but I have created that for a customer who wants to go into production this summer (that’s the case for our customer), and I think I would not want to roll out beta software to hundrets of clients (although the build is really very stable…). The framework brings the paradigm of controls to the ISmartDocument interface and adds a couple of things for faster and easier development like
The dinner with the MVPs was really funny yesterday. After a really heavy dinner we just had some great ideas about our interoffice mail (well I think Peter and Christian know what I am talking about…:-)). Oh yeah, I was espeically happy meeting Christian (Wenz) again yesterday at the MVP summit as well. I remembered the great road show we did last year in October / November through Austria (ASP.NET for Web Developers … or … ASP.NET for PHP Developers;-))… with some (very) long Long Island Teas.
This week I meet more cool geeks and speakers from Europe than the whole last year;-) First we had our Whidbey Ascend training which was really great and ISVs and Enterprise customers participated on the training really liked it. Of course no surprise when having Christian Weyer, Christian Nagel and Clemens Vasters as trainers … they have really delivered hard core cool content. Oh yes, and I think we (as the small sub;-)) are the only sub where every single attendee (44!!) got a specifically for the training prepared VPC image on DVD I prepared together with a colleague overnight (thanks to Stefan from our IT department;-)).
Okay, it’s time to enlighten things about my IIS debugging experience. Jeff was quite near at the solution when thinking about some issues with the worker process. Actually the day before I did this demonstration I played around a little bit with the process model of IIS 6.0. You probably know that IIS 6 supports web gardens. Web gardens actually enable you configuring an application pool so that it starts more than one process. These processes share the work load for applications configured in the application pool. This is especially cool if you have more CPUs installed on your web server box as every process can be configured to run on a separate CPU for a better workload-sharing (the CPU mask can be configured through editing the metabase directly, only – the property is called SMPProcessorAffinityMask which is a part of the IIsApplicationPool configuration and therefore can be found at /LM/W3SVC/AppPools/YourAppPoolName).
As I had some funny experience last week with IIS (on my own fault) I thought about posting this as some sort of quiz (greetings to Beat, I really like your quiz series:-)). Actually I have done some ASP.NET / Office demos (generating Word documents in an ASP.NET web application). For explaining the details to my audience I have set a break point to the code that generates the document. Although the code worked and really were executed by the runtime (I got the generated document), sometimes the breakpoint where hit and sometimes not. And it was completely unintentional.
Wow, it was really hard for me blogging something in the past weeks, so many things to do… First I had to prepare content for our local VB.NET Trainingstour we are doing with VS 2005 and then the ISV Community day (that’s gona happen tomorrow and … well … IBF is sooo cool but hard as well:-)) and of course some Web Casts for our trainings tour in between the actual trainings.
Together with George from Microsoft Austria I am working on a demo for Visual Studio Team System. The Demo has been originally prepared by Eric Lee (here durinig a VSTS presentation…) from Microsoft … and … it rocks like hell. Thanks to Eric Lee who has really created superb instructions for setting up and testing the whole thing…
When I read that the first time I simply couldn’t believe it. But it’s true … cars can be infected by mobile viruses via mobile phones - just take a closer look at the following article: http://www.infosecnews.com/news/index.cfm?fuseaction=newsDetails&newsUID=bc5789cf-e448-4a6e-bee9-a5dd291405ed&newsType=News
Even though I think it’s better developing with non-admin privileges (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dv_vstechart/html/tchdevelopingsoftwareinvisualstudionetwithnon-administrativeprivileges.asp) for all of you, who don’t want to do that and still don’t know about this article - check it out:
I think in general it’s very interesting taking a look at the vulnerabilties list on http://www.securityfocus.com/bid. Just great, you even can filter by vendor. Some other interesting vulnerabilities:
As I did a code hacking demo on one of our events hacking an application through a SQL Injection attack and getting control of the whole machine through xp_cmdshell and netcat I have got many questions about the tools and how-tos from customers for security penetration tests (although doing this test alone is definitely not enough).
As last week I got a question about how we can configure remote debugging on a Windows Server 2003 running with IIS 6.0 together with source control if Visual SourceSafe cannot work together with FrontPage Server extensions I thought… just try it.
A long time ago when I wrote my last blog entry, but I am still very busy. Actually we Alex and I are on-the-road again. In my case I am doing two road shows at the same time… Big>Days 2004 developer track and ASP.NET for Web Developers.
I only can say - as an old Star Wars fan - it’s just great: rendering for Episode III - Revenge of the Sith will happen on Windows XP and AMD64. Just click here (another German announcement here) to get the info :-))
As Windows XP SP2 has released a have taken the chance to update my machines not just with the service pack but also install some other tools I have found while searching the internet as well as reading an article of one of the last MSDN mags. Some of my favourite tools and controls are listed here (some of them I have found by myself, others are from the MSDN article) …
Well this week I returned from my vacation - completely relaxed and ready for new things. During my vacation (last week) I had time to browse a little bit through the web and found this:
Microsoft published the technology preview versions of the newest service packs for the .NET Framework a few weeks ago, .NET Framework 1.0 SP3 as well as .NET Framework 1.1 SP1. This gives anyone the possibility for starting testing applications with the new SP versions (although of course I’d not suggest installing on production environments:-)). The previews are available at the following links and feedback can be posted at http://communities.microsoft.com/newsgroups/default.asp?icp=techpreview&slcid=usxml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /?:
TechEd Europe is quite cool till now. Some interesting sessions (especially things about Team System and Web Services) and - if you have read one of my older blog entries - I am at the ask the experts getting some interesting questions from attendees. Well, one of the more interesing questions I got was how to access the web.config through an Add-In or Control Designer at design time from within Visual Studio .NET. Therefore I decided to publish some code to demonstrate that.
Many applications have the need of being extensible either through an add-in or a scripting mechanism. Technically both can be implemented very easy using the .NET framework at all:xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /?
Finally I made it to get to the TechEd Europe 2004 in Amsterdam - but not just as attendee :-)). If you have any questions according to .NET, ASP.NET, Web Services, security (my current favourite and special topic) or some other developer related topics you’ll be able to find me at the Ask the Experts booths. Yes, that was the ticket to get there :-))
It’s quite a long time ago when I have written my last blog entry, but the last weeks where quite busy for me. First of all starting with a security road show for developers through Austria with my colleague Beat and afterwards doing some workshops (a couple of days in UK, immediately afterwards in Salzburg, then in Graz…).xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /?
I have posted the latest version of the sources for my MSDE Deployment Toolkit in Action article on our local community site www.dotnetexperts.at. Click here to navigate directly to the download.
In my opinion that is a common misbelief that can lead to grave consequences!xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /?
Yesterday during one of my UserGroup sessions in xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” /?Vienna I had very interesting discussions about usage scenarios for some of the new features of SQL Server Yukon - especially about User Defined Types with .NET and XML. SQL Server Yukon will have the possibility of creating complex User Defined Types with .NET as well as includes support of XML through a native XML data type with XML Schema support. But what are the usage scenarios for these things?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /?
While researching for the new manageability enhancements I downloaded the IIS 6.0 resource kit tools … and believe me … they include some really cool command line tools and manageability objects.xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /?
During an internal conference – Envision – this week I have attended several architecture sessions about Service Oriented Architecture, Architectural patterns and so forth. Most of them have been interesting, but two have been a far-reaching experience for me. The sessions I am talking about are Metropolis from Pat Helland (haven’t found a blog - if there is one, I’d be interested in) and an architectural site meeting hosted by Michael Platt and Keith Short. Those sessions started me thinking about how my understanding of architecture has changed in the past and currently is changing at all.xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /?
Last week I had a workshop with a customer about XML Schema and XML Security as the core agenda topics. There where two funny things about this workshopxml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /?
As I will hold an XML Workshop focused on XSD, XPath and XSL/T for a large group of employees of a customer tomorrow, I have tried many things with XSL/T during the last few days. The annoying thing with XLS/T is not only, that it is hard to read when getting more and more complex (remember my last posting), but you even don’t have IntelliSense in Visual Studio .NET.xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /?