Paul Laudeman

May 2005 - Posts

• Avalon and Indigo bits for VS.NET 2005 Beta 2 Released!

  For those of you eager to get your hands on the latest and greatest Beta 2 compatible bits for Indigo and Avalon, head on over to the MSDN download page and get ready to have some fun!  If you're interested in using MSMQ as a transport for Indigo queued channels, you might be interested in MSMQ 3.5 beta, available here. Btw, the new Beta 2 door hangers that have been appearing in magazines is pretty cool... unfortunlately, though, it doesn't seem to keep people out! :-) Posted May 23 2005, 06:10 PM by paul.laudeman with 1 comment(s)

• Get the Visual Studio .NET 2005 Beta DVD while supplies last

  Head on over to Microsoft's Get The Betas page and order your copy for free while supplies last. You can also sign up to receive alerts of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 educational events and release details. (Thanks to Brian Keller of Coding4Fun fame for the link!) Posted May 18 2005, 06:33 AM by paul.laudeman with no comments Filed under: .NET General

• Workspace for DsoFramer Enhancments created

  Victor Feintuch and I have created a new DsoFramer Enahcments Workspace over on GotDotNet for enhancements to Microsoft's DsoFramer control. Victor has already made some enhancements by fixing an event bug for events generated by hosted Office applications. We also plan to list known issues, workarounds, samples, etc., for community benefit. The DsoFramer control is an ActiveX sample provided by Microsoft that allows you to host instances of Office applications inside your ActiveX-capable application, including Windows Forms. Since Microsoft has dropped the ActiveDocumentHost control from Windows Forms 2.0, this is your only real option of hosting Office applications inside of your applications today and into the near future. If you would like to see the ActiveDocumentHost control released as a sample when 2.0 ships, please add your vote! Technorati Tags: dsoframer  Posted May 18 2005, 06:12 AM by paul.laudeman with 21 comment(s) Filed under: Windows Forms

• Looking forward to Community Server integration with SharePoint!

  In my last blog post, I wrote about two new tools for SharePoint that have come out that let you do a wiki and blog engine. Rob Howard, founder of Telligent Systems who builds Community Server, posted a comment to my blog with some very interesting news that was worth sharing: "Sharepoint integration is high on our list of important features. Our Roadmap: http://www.communityserver.org/i/roadmap.aspx Lists it as something we'll start on within the coming months. We've just hired a new developer specifically to focus on our Sharepoint integration efforts." Woohoo! That's fantastic news! Community Server is a great platform in and of itself and will be a great compliment to SharePoint's feature set. We use blogs internally within our organization with Community Server and could definitely benefit from better integration, administration, and overall (especially) user experience. Besides the blogs feature, I'm also looking forward to replacing SharePoint's discussion and content management web parts outright. I think Community Server has a lot of potential in this space and I'm glad to see that Rob and the other CS folks are angling to capitalize on it. Even more interesting is the an announcement that Microsoft has added Community Server to their Windows-Based Hosting Web Site Starters, along with the ever increasingly popular DotNetNuke portal system. Very cool! Technorati Tags: sharepoint, community server  Posted May 17 2005, 03:36 PM by paul.laudeman with 5 comment(s) Filed under: SharePoint

• Interesting new SharePoint Wiki and Blog engine tools

  WikiSharePoint - "A set of SharePoint web parts which make it possible to create a Wikipedia-like application in SharePoint Portal Server or Windows SharePoint Services. The project is in beta, but I would like share it and invite you to use and test it!" cBlog - A custom site definition to create a blogging engine in SharePoint (example) We are currently using a Community Server and FlexWiki with our SharePoint Portal server, but I have always wanted something a bit more integrated into the overall look and feel of SharePoint, with a consistent navigation, usability, and administration interface. These look promising! Technorati Tags: sharepoint, community server  Posted May 16 2005, 06:19 AM by paul.laudeman with 15 comment(s)

• Windows Forms Quick Tip: Use your Tag property!

  A question I frequently come across is how to add some type of context information to UI controls in a Windows Forms project. For instance, you might have a textbox where you want to revert to the original value if a user decides to cancel edits, you could store the original value in the Tag property and pull that out when needed (if you're not using data binding). Another example might be if you have a TreeView control and need to add information about the nodes to help perform some action when a user clicks on a node. In either case, and many more, you should consider using the Tag property of the Control object. As you know, all Windows Forms controls (and even Forms!) inherit from the Control class which offers the Tag property. Since the Tag property is of type Object, this means that you can use it to store anything you want! You could use it to store a string, an array, a full blown class, etc., depending on your needs. For bonus points, consider extending your Control and creating your own strongly typed properties. Just as the "Tag" property is available to you, you can create your own properties on your derived control that are strongly typed and easier to manage. Thanks to my readers for suggesting this alternative! Posted May 13 2005, 04:26 AM by paul.laudeman with 6 comment(s) Filed under: Windows Forms

• OpenNETCF Application Blocks for Compact Framework released

  This is great news for any of you who develop applications with the Compact Framework! The Microsoft patterns & practices team has joined forces with the OpenNETCF team to deliver high-quality p&p approved Application Blocks that address common challenges developer face when writing smart client applications for mobile devices. If you haven't heard of OpenNETCF, it is a web site like SourceForge that hosts open source projects for the CF including the Smart Device Framework, a set of freely reusable components that help fill bridge the gap between the CF and Windows Forms API's. Technorati Tags: opennetcf, compact framework   Posted May 12 2005, 12:39 PM by paul.laudeman with 3 comment(s) Filed under: Smart Clients, Smart Devices

• SharePoint Advisor Magazine launched

  SharePoint Advisor Magazine was launched recently and has a good amount of high-quality articles that make it worth checking out. Here's a list of highlights from the premiere issue:   Better Collaboration: Site Collections in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Site collections give Microsoft SharePoint users a place to collaborate and share information. Find out how to choose between stand-alone and embedded site collections. Secure SharePoint Code Using Credential-less Impersonation The SharePoint security model gives you features that avoid all the pitfalls of traditional security models. Find out how you can create a bullet-proof security environment using credential-less impersonation. Integrate .NET and Windows Applications With SharePoint Learn how you can use, share, and manage your .NET and Windows applications as Microsoft Office 2003 does. Create a SharePoint Web Part in 60 Minutes Learn how to go from installing Windows SharePoint Services to debugging a Web Part in less than an hour.   If you're interested in checking it out, pick up a copy at your favorite bookstore or head on over to the SharePoint Advisor website. You can also signup to receive a complimentary free issue. In addition, this magazine is published by the same folks who are putting together the SharePoint Advisor Live technical conference next month in Las Vegas. Technorati Tags: sharepoint advisor  Posted May 10 2005, 06:25 AM by paul.laudeman with 1 comment(s) Filed under: SharePoint

• One of the many reasons why RSS Bandit rocks!

  One of my most favorite features of RSS Bandit is the ability to define 'Identities' that will highlight certain blog posts that mention your name (detected by a link to your blog) in them. For example, I was mentioned in the Daily Grind for my news announcement about NHibernate 0.8 -- take a look at the blog post highlighted in blue: If you're like me and subscribe to hundreds of feeds, this can be a really great way of quickly locating blog posts where you are mentioned. All around, RSS Bandit is simply a *fantastic* rich client application that you can use to consume and organize your RSS/ATOM feeds. What is even better is that you can take a look at the source code (C#) that drives the interface and logic to see how they do all of their cool stuff. To grab your copy of RSS Bandit, just head on over to the RSS Bandit website and download the latest release. You'll be hooked! :-) Posted May 09 2005, 07:56 AM by paul.laudeman with 6 comment(s)

• Enabling SSL encryption with SQL Server 2000

  Microsoft has several articles (see below) on how to enable SSL communication with SQL Server 2000. This is useful to do if you want to ensure that the communication to your database server is encrypted and cannot be snooped with packet sniffers. If you are running SQL Server as a limited privilege domain account you’ll need to perform an extra steps to get everything to work. If you don’t, your likely to get several error messages posted to your event log and SQL Server will not be able to run in encrypted communication mode. On your SQL Server, you must grant the SQL Server service account Full Control permissions to the following directory: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Crypto After assigning the new permissions, be sure to check the Replace permission entries on all child objects with entries shown here that apply to child objects option. For more information about how to set up SSL with SQL Server, see the following KB articles: How To: Use SSL to Secure Communication with SQL Server 2000 How To: Enable SSL Encryption for SQL Server 2000 with Certificate Server How To: Enable SSL encryption for SQL Server 2000 with Microsoft Management Console If SSL isn't an option for you, see also: How To: Use IPSec to Provide Secure Communication Between Two Servers Technorati Tags: sqlserver 2000, sqlserver ipsec Posted May 08 2005, 12:07 PM by paul.laudeman with 1 comment(s)

• NHibernate 0.8 released

  NHibernate 0.8 has been released! If you haven't heard of NHibernate before, it is a .NET port of the popular Hibernate for Java object relational persistence library for databases. While I still haven't found a project to use NHibernate for my data access needs, it does seem like a very promising technology and is fairly well supported. I'd be interested in hearing about any positive or negative experiences in using this for production applications. If you've used it before and have any thoughts to share, please leave a comment or drop by the CodeBetter.com forums and share your thoughts. Technorati Tags: nhibernate  Posted May 07 2005, 03:46 PM by paul.laudeman with 11 comment(s) Filed under: NHibernate

• Using advanced search techniques with Google Groups

  If you have ever had the chance to browse through the Usenet newsgroups, you'll find an incredible resource of posts on a variety of technical topics, including just about every imaginable facet of .NET development. Google Groups is a web-based Usenet browsing application that lets you read and search through the Usenet posts. Before Google went to their "beta" version of Google Groups, you could narrow your search focus down to a particular group, or subset of groups, to return results matching a particular topic area. For example, if you wanted to search only Usenet posts that were .NET related, you could enter a search query using the "group" operator like: Control.Invoke Control.BeginInvoke group:microsoft.public.dotnet.* If you wanted to further narrow your search scope to just the Windows Forms newsgroups, you would change your group operator like so: Control.Invoke Control.BeginInvoke group:microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.windowsforms.* You can also easily explore the newsgroup hierarchies by just entering the group operator and no search terms and then clicking through the links that are displayed. Unfortunately, with the latest version of Google Groups they have dropped the functionality that lets you search like this. I've sent numerous feedback suggestions asking them to either restore the old functionality or provide a similar means of searching, but so far I've had no response. Feel free to send them your thoughts, too. Until Google restores this functionaly, you can access the older version of Google Groups by pointing your browser to a different language homepage: http://groups.google.es/grphp?hl=en or to a subset of groups like http://groups.google.es/groups?q=microsoft.public.dotnet.*&hl=en In addition, I also like to set up several hotkeys using WinKey to automatically open up FireFox and take me directly to a pre-defined newsgroup. Once there, I just check the "Search only in xxxxxx" radio button and click Search and find all the results filtered to my specific topic area. This saves me from finding my shortcut to launch the browser, navigate to the groups, and enter my query. Definitely a time saver for those who love shortcuts! Technorati Tags: google groups  Posted May 07 2005, 05:43 AM by paul.laudeman with 9 comment(s)

• If you haven't heard yet, CodeSmith 3.0 RC1 is out!

  CodeSmith 3.0 enables software developers to efficiently: Reduce repetitive coding Generate your code in less time with fewer bugs Produce consistent code that adheres to your standards Create your own custom templates for any language I've used CodeSmith in the past with great success to automate generation of stored procedures, classes, etc., and look forward to giving this new version a spin. The CodeSmith IDE is a great development environment and promises to be even better in this new version. If you haven't tried CodeSmith before, consider using it for your next project. It will definitely make your development experience easier, repeatable, and more productive. Check it out at http://www.codesmithtools.com/ Technorati Tags: codesmith, code generation, codegen Posted May 05 2005, 08:12 AM by paul.laudeman with 1 comment(s) Filed under: .NET General

• Migrate your VB6 apps to .NET with this guide

  From MSDN... Summary: This article explores the complete process of a Visual Basic 6.0 to Visual Basic .NET migration project. It covers all the aspects of migration, from the analysis of the business and technical requirements, to the guidelines for selecting a migration approach that include proven strategies and best practices. You will learn how to minimize the time and effort required for your migration through the application of proven strategies. (22 printed pages) http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dv_vstechart/html/appmigrationstrat.asp Technorati Tags: vb6 to .net Posted May 05 2005, 06:41 AM by paul.laudeman with no comments Filed under: .NET General