OCEG Technology Blog

Scott Guthrie coming to Arizona

2011-04-12T11:06:00.000-07:00

My good friend Scott Cate is organizing his 8th annual .Net day on April 22nd. Once again, Microsoft superstar Scott Guthrie will do his thing for half the day. The event is free, food is free, wifi is free, and the content is always top-notch. It's the best Microsoft event in AZ, period.If you live in the Phoenix metro and have any interest in the .Net stack, you have to attend. Register now!

TIP OF THE DAY: Creating nice looking animated gifs using Flash

2009-11-17T10:58:00.001-08:00

So today I wanted to pretty up our “loading” animations. We’ve been using the AjaxLoad web app to create candy canes-type loader icons (nice site, btw), but wanted to brand it and stay consistent between our flash and HTML UIs. I already had the animation in Flash. A simple, 40-frame thingy using parts of our logo. 5 plain colors. I thought exporting it to .gif would be a no-brainer. But of

GoGrid MyGSI vs Amazon AMI

2009-10-30T12:06:00.001-07:00

For the past couple of days I've been working on setting up a GoGrid MyGSI image (the GoGrid equivalent of an Amazon Machine Image - AMI) for our app. The benefits are obvious - instead of manually preparing each new instance with the right apps, roles, configuration etc..., create a bootable image. This would speed up deployment time and would be invaluable whenever scaling up our grid

Best Of Mix ‘09 (MSDN event)

2009-05-19T10:18:00.001-07:00

I went to this free MSDN event yesterday, a 3-hour recap of the most interesting technologies unveiled at Mix ‘09. The event focused on Silverlight 3, Windows Azure and ASP.NET MVC (we skipped that introductory lecture since we’ve been using the framework for quite a while). Here’s a quick recap. Silverlight 3 / .Net RIA services The MS demo guy really just focused on the RIA services

WCF REST & ASP.NET MVC authorization

2009-04-28T09:36:00.001-07:00

Last week I needed to implement an authorization scheme in our MVC and WCF apps. I found a bunch of resources on how to implement Role or Claims-based authorization in both frameworks, but they all required adding CLR attributes on controller actions and service operations - a bit of messy for my taste, and required hard-coding your authorization rules, which didn’t fit my requirements. We

WCF, REST & POX – a few notes about serialization

2009-04-28T08:25:00.001-07:00

I usually use 2 types of endpoints when using WCF: SOAP for server - server communication, and REST/JSON for browser – server service calls. But yesterday, while trying to debug some POST & PUT HTTP calls in Fiddler, I decided to use a REST/XML endpoint. After all, POX is a bit easier on the eyes than JSON, and this would give me an opportunity to test my XML endpoints, which I had created but

Amazon EC2 for Windows is out

2008-10-24T10:55:00.001-07:00

I was pretty excited when I received the email this morning (here's a link to the announcement). After looking at the details though - not so much. The good news is their pricing is cheaper than I originally planned, with basic offering starting at $.125/hour (without authentication). The SQL Server instances are pretty pricey though, starting at $1.10/hr. That's roughly $750/mo. But for a large

Windows Cloud

2008-10-03T09:56:00.001-07:00

Back in January I wrote about our serious need for EC2 to run Windows OSes, and since I couldn't get more info from Amazon (although Flexiscale's CEO was kind enough to post more info in a comment) I pretty much gave up and started looking elsewhere for a pay-as-you-go clustering platform to run our .Net code and SQL Server database. We built our architecture to run certain conversions on Linux

MS AJAX, ScriptManager and ASP.NET MVC

2008-09-01T09:08:00.000-07:00

Note: this post is NOT about whether or not to use MS Ajax in ASP.NET MVC, nor is it a comparison between various JS frameworks. I'll discuss this issue in another post. Also, this code will only enable MS Ajax for true Ajax apps that rely on javascript to render the UI and communicate with the server using services. This tutorial does NOT enable UpdatePanels. Introduction We've been

Mix - Conclusion

2008-03-07T15:26:00.000-08:00

The bad:UX track needs some work. Business panelists were not very impressive and forward-thinking. I found the 2006 sessions with Ebay, MySpace and Amazon to be more interesting. Those guys actually had profitable businesses. Web 2.0 guys make cool stuff but still have no idea how to make a buck out of it other than ads.Keynote was too demo-centric. I understand the need for some wow-factor in

Mix 08 - Day 3

2008-03-07T11:56:00.000-08:00

SilverLight / Ajax integrationSome good ideas there, like how to integrate your siliverlight app with the Ajax history manager. I was impressed with how transparent the integration is.Not only can you can access any DOM element or JS object from SilverLight, but you can even register managed code event handlers for javascript events. That's pretty cool. The JS to SilverLight integration is really

Mix 08 - Day 2

2008-03-06T15:37:00.000-08:00

Out of the 3 sessions I attended yesterday the SEO one really stood out. Great session. I got a ton of cool tips out of it. It pretty much paid for the trip. I'll post the link to the video as soon as I find it.Oh yeah, and the TAO party was really great.Steve Ballmer keynoteGreat keynote today. Ballmer is a fun guy, and answered tough questions with a smile. He looked like a motivated, smart,

Mix 08 - Day 1

2008-03-05T10:26:00.000-08:00

I'm attending the Mix 08 keynote in Vegas right now.StrategySo far, nothing really new. Microsoft is basically playing catch-up with other industry leaders. MS seems to be focusing in 3 areas:- Advertising platform (desperately trying to grab some of Google's insane market share)- Device management unification (Zune/XBox/MediaCenter etc...)- Virtualization and utility compupting both at the

ASP.NET MVC

2008-02-29T10:23:00.000-08:00

Microsoft is finally admitting ASP.NET is now an outdated web framework. It makes testing very complex, working around the ViewState is a big waste of time, and the webform metaphor makes zero sense to most web developers. Most web front-end developers don't use the designer, and want complete control over rendered HTML and styles. You can do this in ASP.NET, but it requires workarounds like CSS

VS 2008 - Javascript Intellisense

2008-02-29T10:11:00.000-08:00

It's a big step in the right direction, but there are still some things that need to be figured out. My biggest problems are:Lack of intellisense support within the prototype. Let's say I'm writing a JS "class". Intellisense seems to work well for all external libraries that are properly referenced, but I can't access the current class methods and properties within its prototype. "this" doesn't

XSD.exe

2008-02-13T14:14:00.001-08:00

I've been using a neat little Visual Studio command-prompt tool lately: xsd.exe. It lets you create XSDs from XML (though it seems to generate some dataset-specific code that I had to clean up), classes from XSD (very useful), and other little things.http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/x6c1kb0s(VS.80).aspx

The beauty of IoC and DI

2008-02-06T13:15:00.000-08:00

I had been reading about Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection for a while. It looked interesting, but I never took the time to implement it in any of my projects. I think I just never had the perfect scenario that would greatly benefit from that kind of configurable component-oriented architecture.If you're an ASP.NET programmer and have never heard of those terms, they're basically the

.Net source code debugging

2008-02-06T13:00:00.001-08:00

Shockingly, Microsoft released the entire .Net framework source code a few weeks ago. More here. This is really amazing; a great, great move. A full downloable version will come out soon. It'll really help debugging, and gives me better visibility in the inner workings of various components. I don't have to use my favorite decompiler anymore, and even have access to developer comments. I'm also

VS 2008 Team System Rant/Rave

2008-02-06T12:38:00.000-08:00

After using VS 2008 and TFS 2008 for a few weeks, here are a few initial impressions.Pros:- TFS 2008 merging is working great- Unit test creation is much, much faster (UI used to freeze for 2 solid minutes)- Thanks to Vishal Joshi for giving me access to the latest build of WDP 2008 before official release. You saved the day.- ASP.NET ListView control is pretty cool- LINQ is amazing. Just utterly

Amazon Web Services + Microsoft = My Dream Platform

2008-01-25T10:21:00.001-08:00

We're implementing some changes to move our processing and file storage components to Amazon Web Services (more on that later). We're using S3 for file storage, EC2 for report processing and SQS for report queuing. The end result will be a very exciting, cheap, virtualy infinitely scalable platform that will remove a lot of day-to-day maintenance headaches and gives us cost predictability.But I

TFS 2008 upgrade process

2008-01-08T12:04:00.001-08:00

After using Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2005 for a few months now, we recently ran into the well - documented merge bug: "TF14087: Cannot undelete 'filename here' because not all of the deletion is being undeleted.". This was the second it happened to us, and resolving this conflict is quite difficult (More info about this issue). We found a hotfix that might fix the problem, but since we were

Migrating to IIS 7

2007-09-25T17:48:00.000-07:00

Just received my new laptop last week. I decided to go ahead and install Vista Ultimate 64-bit (I have 4 GB of RAM - the 32 bit version only sees 3).Overall, considering how many rants I've read about Vista, I have to say I'm quite pleased. My machine is pretty speedy, apps are pretty snappy. The only headache was to get our web app to run on IIS 7 (64-bit).Here are a few things to keep in mind:-

Control of the day

2007-09-25T17:33:00.000-07:00

We are implementing a Flash Banner rotator on our web site. To render the flash movie we've been using the following web control:http://www.flash-control.net/Very happy with it. Some feature I've found valuable:- IE security alert workaround is built in.- Plug-in detection, redirection etc... built in.- Ability to access Flash Vars as a collection in your code-behind.Well worth the $15!

Visual Studio 2005 web site publishing nightmare (2)

2007-09-25T17:00:00.000-07:00

We've been using Visual Studio Team Suite for over 6 months now, and I have to say - it solved most of my problems. Yes, it's very pricey. But for our small team releasing very often, the man hours it's saved us so far paid for the heavy licensing costs.Database Schema SynchronizationVS for Database Developers is my new friend. The Schema Compare tool saves me at least 4 hours per release, and a

Web Deployment Project is the answer!

2006-07-14T14:31:00.000-07:00

Well, I finally figured out a solution to my deployment issues. Until a couple of days ago, I thought Web Deploymetn and Web Setup projects were the same thing. Why? Well, maybe because Web deployment projects were an added feature that didn't make it to the final release of VS 2005Even after installing the add-on, the project type doesn't appear in the traditional project template selector.

Visual Studio 2005 web site publishing nightmare

2006-07-12T10:55:00.000-07:00

During every release, my stress level used to go up 10x. It shoudn't have to be that way. Here are my main deployment issues, with workaounds when applicable.Did I change my config settings to reflect the production environment? Not an easy one. Maintaining mutliple web.config files is a pain, so I'm using only one, with development, testing and production settings. I comment them out and

Flash video and IIS

2006-06-30T14:50:00.000-07:00

Quick note: when serving flv files on a Windows 2003 server, remember to add the flv MIME Type: .flv video/x-flv

NUnitAsp, ASP.NET 2.0 and Master Pages

2006-06-29T14:48:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to use NUnitASP to write some test fixtures for http://www.oceg.org (registration process in particular), but for the life of me I couldn't get it to work. It just could not find any of my controls.I thought maybe there was no support for ASP.Net 2.0 yet; the latest news I could find dated from Nov. 2005 and mentioned a future 2.0 release of NUnitASP with full .Net 2.0 support.

ASP.NET 2.0 themes URL mapping

2006-06-23T21:16:00.000-07:00

Here's a non-trivial ASP.NET 2.0 feature I've always taken for granted. Let's say you define a skin for an ImageButton web control, using an ImageUrl attribute relative to the theme.The skin is located in App_Themes/MyTheme/MySkin.skin.The image is located in App_Theme/MyTheme/Images/

ASP.NET 2.0 WebResource.axd and browser caching

2006-06-23T16:12:00.000-07:00

We've launched our new public site (http://www.oceg.org) about a month ago now. Everything seems to be running smoothly, we're getting about 600 unique visitors a day, it's a pretty good start. However, we haven't been pleased with the overall performance. Page loads seemed abnormaly long, bandwidth useage unexpectedly high.I found this neat little tool: Fiddler. Your can download it at http://

Firs post (hello world)

2006-06-23T15:47:00.000-07:00

This is my first post, so first here's a quick introduction to this blog, what I'll be talking about, and our purpose.I am the CTO of the Open Compliance and Ethics group, a non-profit organization whose mission is to integrate corporate governance, risk management and culture. In short we deal with business ethics; our goal is to provide a solid, flexible framework that will prevent future