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localjoost: Behavior to force TextBox model update to prevent trouble with the ApplicationBar

localjoost — 02/01/2012 20:12

A small quicky this time: Problem: TextBox, Text property bound to a string in my ViewModel I type text in the TextBox I click a “Save” button on my ApplicationBar The string in my ViewModel is not updated. It never gets updated. WTF??? It appears the TextBox only updates it’s value to a bound string when it loses focus. And a TextBox does not lose focus when you click an ApplicationBar Button. Meh. I have found a few solutions and workarounds, and in the end rolled my own: a very small behavior that updates the binding every time you type something in your textbox. That’s a bit wasteful, but it works for me. It builds on the SafeBehavior pattern I wrote about earlier, and it’s so small I post it in one go:using System.Windows.Controls; namespace Wp7nl.Behaviors { ///

/// A behavior to for text box model update when text changes ///

public class TextBoxChangeModelUpdateBehavior : SafeBehavior { protected override void OnSetup() { AssociatedObject.TextChanged += AssociatedObjectTextChanged; } protected override void OnCleanup() { AssociatedObject.TextChanged -= AssociatedObjectTextChanged; } void AssociatedObjectTextChanged(object sender, TextChangedEventArgs e) { var binding = AssociatedObject.GetBindingExpression(TextBox.TextProperty); if (binding != null) { binding.UpdateSource(); } } } }I have read amongst other things Prism has a UpdateTextBindingOnPropertyChanged behavior. Well this one will be in the next version of my #wp7nl library on codeplex

marcelmeijer: SQL Azure en Query plans / Performance

marcelmeijer — 01/31/2012 17:59

Enige tijd geleden heb ik al de verbeterde SQL Azure management portal laten zien. In den beginne (2008) hadden we helemaal niets en Project Houston was een grote stap in de goede richting. In December 2011 hebben ze de complete SQL Azure management portal onderhanden genomen en aangepast. Naast een meer Metro look-and-feel hebben ze ook allemaal extreem helpful tools en utilities toegevoegd. Als je klikt op de Administration in linker beneden hoek, krijg je een overzicht van de je database health etc. Informatie over onder andere de vulling van de database, aantal connecties en users. In dit geval is de database bijna nieuw en ongebruikt, dus is de query usage bijna leeg. Bij een database met meer activiteiten ziet dit gedeelte van de portal en iets spannender uit. Yep, mijn SQL Azure database zijn over het algemeen niet erg druk . Als je klikt op de Query Performance link, krijg je meer gedetaileerde informatie over de queries op je database en hun performance. Dit geeft natuurlijk al een eerste indruk van de overall performance van je SQL Azure instance. Stel dat je een probleem hebt met een bepaalde query. Ik bedoel dan natuurlijk een performance probleem . Om dan een goed beeld van de query te krijgen heb je vaak een Query plan nodig. Vroeger had je a

ClemensReijnen: 06. Getting Testing Done in the Sprint – PBI Implementation Sequence

ClemensReijnen — 01/30/2012 11:27

A challenge in getting testing done in a sprint is the fact that the software (PBI) isn’t ready to be tested till implementation/ coding is done. How To. Work on completing each item in the sprint backlog and finish one item after another, see task boards below. BAD -- Not able to start testing task board, every team member works on a different pbi. Testing can only start at the end of the sprint. GOOD -- Ready to start testing task board, team members work together on a pbi one after another till it’s done. Testing can start early. It is a good practice, but not often followed. it really helps getting testing done. Past Tips: 01. Getting Testing Done in the Sprint - The Team and Activities 02. Getting Testing Done in the Sprint – Regression Test Sets 03. Getting Testing Done in the Sprint – Test Automation 04. Getting Testing Done in the Sprint – Undone Backlog Item 05. Getting Testing Done in the Sprint – No Double, Triple Testing Next Tips: 07. Getting Testing Done in the Sprint – Risk and Business driven Tests 08. Getting Testing Done in the Sprint – Write Logical Acceptance Tests 09. Getting Testing Done in the Sprint – Test Tasks on the Board 10. Getting Testing Done in the Sprint – Done 11. Getting Testing Done in the Sprint - The Customer Test Team 12. Getting Testing Done in the Sprint – The Test Branch … … Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}

ClemensReijnen: 05. Getting Testing Done in the Sprint – No Double, Triple Testing

ClemensReijnen — 01/30/2012 10:23

One way of getting testing done in a sprint is making it [testing] as efficient as possible, meanwhile this also saves money. One way of getting more efficient is not doing things double or triple. An interesting thing with testing, we do test double or triple. We test it during unit, during unit integration, during functional and during acceptance testing, this can be done better, we could save a lot of time. I’ve seen teams which also automated all these types of tests, testing the same thing... not really efficient, they didn’t manage to get it done in a sprint. Each phase of the development process has its own test goals and depth of test coverage. The depth particularly depends upon the risks: higher probability of damage requires better test coverage. These test goals are especially aimed at discovering errors that can be found in that phase (“as early as possible”). during unit testing the internal logic of the unit is tested, the unit integration test needs to show that units ”understand” each other. the system test needs to prove/demonstrate that the system complies with the functional requirements that have been agreed to, finally, the acceptance test considers how the system fits into the environment in which it will operate. Test goals and (depth of) test coverage per phase are made compatible with each other using a Master Test Plan (see TMap® www.tmap.net). Every test must be able to rely on previous tests, only then will the complexity of errors be contained to errors that were introduced during the last step. Setting up a learning cycle makes it possible to correct shortcomings, if any, in the testing process chain. Each phase of the development process and its corresponding test goal introduces a specific role with specific abilities and tasks. These roles are supported by specific ways of testing, often visualized in the Agile Test Quadrants. http://lisacrispin.com/wordpress/2011/11/08/using-the-agile-testing-quadrants/ How the quadrants work Tests on the left-hand quadrants help the team know what code to write, and know when they are done writing it. Tests on the right hand side help the team learn more about the code they’re written, and this learning often translates into new user stories and tests that feed back to the left-hand quadrants. Business stakeholders define quality criteria for the top two quadrants, while the bottom two quadrants relate more to internal quality and criteria. from: http://readytohelpfortesting.blogspot.com/2012/01/ttesting-quadrants.html How To. All these types should work together, and as already mentioned

marcelmeijer: Silverlight vs HTML5

marcelmeijer — 01/30/2012 09:00

Een collega MVP-ers mailde eens: “I’ve got friends that were heavy into SL development that now do none. It’s gone from their #1 technology to now being banned for development within their company. What changed? The first time that one of their clients said “now show me how it looks on my iPad” and they had no answer.” Dit geldt overigens voor mijn gevoel voor elke plugin gebasseerde technologie (Flash, Java (tot op zekere hoogte)). Het succes van iPad en de combi iPad/Safari laat de kwetsbaarheid zien van tooling die afhankelijk is van functionaliteit van browser plugin's. Het lijkt mij niet verstandig om een plugin gebasseerde technologie nog aan te prijzen bij een SAAS product. Is het een on premise oplossing met strakke regie op hardware/software of de besturingsconsole van een groot apparaat (dat niet remote overgenomen hoeft te worden) dan zou ik zeker bouwen met Silverlight en valt de weegschaal naar de andere kant uit. Maar ook waar geldt ‘bring your own device’ (nb waarbij device ook een browser of choice zou kunnen zijn) maakt een plugin gebasseerde technologie niet meteen een first class choice of een no brainer. Kort gezegd: bij software in een SAAS omgeving dan is een plugin based technologie niet handig, tenzij je regie kunt uitoefenen op de client of hardware gebonden (zoals bijv Windows Phone, Xbox etc). Een klant van ons, deze heeft ook een SAAS product, heeft ervoor gekozen om hun product te ontwikkelen in Silverlight. Met als reden dat deze technologie voldoende volwassen is en zij hun klanten best tot de Silverlight plugin kunnen verplichten. Ook vonden zij het belangrijk dat hun klanten moesten kunnen kiezen voor een lokaal geïnstalleerde out-of-browser applicatie. Ten aanzien van mobiele devices zal het (vermoedelijk) nooit zo zijn, dat alle functionaliteiten van een client product via een dergelijk platform beschikbaar gemaakt zal worden. Meestal gaat het om delen of deelgebieden van een product, waarbij het device zijn pros ten volle kan benutten. iPad is bijzonder als het gaat om de web browser. De overige mobiele devices hebben vaak te kleine schermen, waar de volledige functionaliteit niet tot zijn recht komt en nauwelijks bruikbaar. Ik ben in elk geval wel van mening, dat de keuze tussen Silverlight en HTML5 geen zwart-wit keuze is. Ik hoor graag in de comments wat jullie mening is.

marcelmeijer: Windows Azure management via WP7

marcelmeijer — 01/29/2012 18:45

Op dit moment kun je je Windows Azure services monitoren en beherenvia de Windows Azure management portal. Maar deze portal is geimplementeerd met behulp van Silverlight, dit maakt de portal minder toegangelijk met een browser die geen plugins ondersteund. Het Windows Azure platform heeft een rijke API met management REST calls om je services te beheren en te controleren. The API is erg handig om gereedschappen te implementeren op andere platforms. Uiteraard zijn er ook PowerShell Cmdlets of Cerebrata Cmdlets waarmee je het meest van de management taken kunt uitvoeren via PowerShell. Als je de API vanuit een Windows forms app wilt gebruiken, dan is dat redelijk simpel. Hieronder is een snippet. Een groter voorbeeld kan gevonden worden in het Windows Azure Development Cookbook van Niel Mackenzie (Windows Azure MVP). Ik wilde altijd een implementatie maken op mijn Windows Phone 7 device. Maar… Enige weken geleden vond ik een erg aardige Windows Phone 7 app. Met deze app kun je je eigen Windows Azure services beheren vanaf je Windows Phone 7.

mauricedb: Deploying SqlServerCe with an ASP.NET MVC application

mauricedb — 01/24/2012 11:50

Using Entity Framework Code First together with SqlServerCe is a great way to work with small databases in ASP.NET MVC applications. I have several web applications running on shared hosting sites where SqlServerCe is the database engine under the hood. Deploying is also quite easy. I typically use the build in Publish Web option which works great over FTP. When using SqlServerCe you have to make sure you add the deployable dependencies. Forgetting those results in pretty clear error messages. However once that is done I always run into another issue. When a page actually tries to use SqlServerCe I will see a security exception: System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED)) The solution is simple enough. Go to whatever security portal your provider is using, mine is using Plesk, and make sure the user that is actually running the web site has the required read/write privileges to work with the Bin folder. Enjoy! TheProblemSolver DotNetEvents

mauricedb: HTML5, Internet Explorer and automatic updates

mauricedb — 01/23/2012 11:24

One of the problems with HTML5, or development at the cutting edge of the web, has always the need to support a large number of different browsers. Depending on who you ask the numbers will vary slightly but is usually boils down to Internet Explorer being the biggest and Chrome and FireFox each taking quite a big chunk of the stats and the remainder of the browsers filling up the gaps. So that means that any public facing website should at the very least support the three major browsers, not to bad right? Turns out that live isn’t quite as good as that. With Chrome and FireFox most users are at or close to the last revision of the browser but with Internet Explorer this isn’t the case. In fact as the chart below shows the majority is still using IE8 with IE9 only accounting for a little over a third of all IE users. So what the big difference? There are 2 reasons. First of all IE9 is only available on Windows Vista and Windows 7 and it turns out there is still a substantial number of people using Windows XP. For all those users Internet Explorer 8 is the latest version of the browser they can use. And that is not going to change when Internet Explorer 10 ships. However that number of XP users isn’t that large. The second and more important reason is that Microsoft doesn’t automatically update Internet Explorer when a newer version is available. You can download it if you want to but if you don’t explicitly do so nothing happens. And by contrast all recent versions of FireFox and Chrome are self updating, so whenever a new version is available it is downloaded without any explicit user action. The benefit is that with both Chrome and FireFox a web developer wanting to do cutting edge HTML5 stuff can be pretty confident that a user has an up to date browser. Well except with Internet explorer that is Microsoft has seen the update light Fortunately that won’t be a problem much longer. Recently Microsoft has announced that it will start auto updating Internet Explorer using Windows Update. So no longer are we dependent on users going in and manually doing an update, instead if they don’t take any action they will be automatically upgraded to the last possible version of IE. This means that we should soon see at leas two thirds

localjoost: JSON deserialization with JSON.net: basics

localjoost — 01/22/2012 20:35

I’ve been contemplating an article about handling JSON for some time now, but it turned out to be a rather long article and writing extremely large blog posts is someone else’s trade mark these days ;-). So I’d thought to try something new, and write a short series in three parts. Part 1 handles the basics Part 2 handles advanced deserialization with class hierarchies Part 3 handles a caching-and-updating scenarios. And this is part 1 ;-) This whole article actually boils down to one line of code, but I need to go to some hooplah to show you how to use it. It all begin with the data. Consider this piece of quite readable piece of JSON, describing a few recent Windows Phone models. [ { "Brand": "Nokia","Type" : "Lumia 800", "Specs":{"Storage" : "16GB", "Memory": "512MB","Screensize" : "3.7"} }, { "Brand": "Nokia", "Type" : "Lumia 710", "Specs":{"Storage" : "8GB","Memory": "512MB","Screensize" : "3.7"} }, { "Brand": "Nokia","Type" : "Lumia 900", "Specs":{"Storage" : "8GB", "Memory": "512MB","Screensize" : "4.3" } }, { "Brand": "HTC ","Type" : "Titan II", "Specs":{"Storage" : "16GB", "Memory": "512MB","Screensize" : "4.7" } }, { "Brand": "HTC ","Type" : "Radar", "Specs":{"Storage" : "8GB", "Memory": "512MB","Screensize" : "3.8" } } ]JSON is rather compact, which is a great feature when you are developing for a mobile devices. It has also a few downsides as far as client programming is concerned: generating client code for it that does all the parsing and calling, as for SOAP, is not a standard feature of Visual Studio, it’s almost impossible to read for an ordinary human being, deciphering it into classes is a lot of work, hand coding a parser for it is not fun. Which is why you don’t. There are several ways of generating classes from JSON, the simplest way is this website: json2csharp by Jonathan Keith. You copy a JSON result into the upper textbox, hit the “Generate” button and out come your classes:There are more sites that do the same, by the way, but this is what I use. Next steps:Fire up Visual Studio Create a new Windows Phone project (for instance JsonDemo) Plonk the classes generated above in the project. Bonus cookies if you split them in separate files and add namespaces to them. Bonus donut if you, like me, think “RootObject” is actually a pretty ugly name for an object and change it to Phone. Click Tools/Library Package Manager/Manage NuGet Packages for Solution (you do have the NuGet Package Manager installed, don’t you? If not, stop whatever you are doing now and get it