Tuesday, November 23, 2010

DropMocks: Share images instantly

Do you ever want to share some photos, mockups or screengrabs with somebody else online quick and dirty? Go to DropMocks, drag and drop your images, and you are done. You get an instant image gallery that displays in CoverFlow style, along with a short URL to share it.

Monday, October 4, 2010

BizTalk Step-By-Step


BizTalk Step-By-Step

An easy way to learn BizTalk development & deployment

Blog to keep in mind if you are a BizTalk developer.


Cloud computing for finance firms


Cloud computing for finance firms - is it compliant?

The devil is in the detail


Financial services organizations are warming to cloud computing, despite the regulatory hurdles. Lawyer Andrew Scott explains what to watch out for.







Friday, October 1, 2010

Time's Top 10 Everything of 2009, 2008 & 2007

Time Magazine's Top 10 Everything for 2009, 2008 and 2007


All-In-One Code Framework


Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework delineates the framework and skeleton of Microsoft development techniques through typical sample codes in three popular programming languages (Visual C#, VB.NET, Visual C++). Each sample is elaborately selected, composed, and documented to demonstrate one frequently-asked, tested or used coding scenario based on our support experience in MSDN newsgroups and forums. If you are a software developer, you can fill the skeleton with blood, muscle and soul. If you are a software tester or a support engineer like us, you may extend the sample codes a little to fit your specific test scenario or refer your customer to this project if the customer's question coincides with what we collected.

The project has more than 450 code examples that cover 24 Microsoft development technologies such as Azure, Windows 7 and Silverlight 3. The collection grows by six samples per week. You can find the up-to-date list of samples in All-In-One Code Framework Sample Catalog and all KB articles here.


Tuesday, September 28, 2010

MVC or MVP Pattern – Whats the difference?

Very nice article by Todd Synder... explains the differences in simple and easy to understand language.



Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Unleashing the Power - Tony Robbins

Helping people reach their greatest potential...


Tony Robbins has coached U.S. presidents, Fortune 500 CEOs, sports and entertainment superstars—all seeking strategies to reach the next level in their lives and careers. People often call upon Robbins to help remove barriers holding them back and to inspire them to take action. This master motivator is equally adept at keeping a crowd of 10,000 people on its feet for hours. He's also addressed the World Economic Forum, British Parliament and Harvard Business School.

Robbins' message goes beyond positive thinking; intelligent thinking is what drives him. He understands that when people are feeling overwhelmed, frustrated and fearful, they're rarely capable of brilliant analysis and decision-making.

"Confidence and competence is not the same thing," Robbins tells SUCCESS, following his return from a recent seminar tour through Australia and India. "No one should go into their garden and chant, "There are no weeds. There are no weeds. There are no weeds." For people to be true leaders, they have to first see things as they are, not worse. Then see it better than it is, and then make it the way you see it.

"The bottom line is that people have within them a force that is so powerful, there is nothing that can keep them from doing, being, sharing, creating and giving whatever they envision in life," Robbins continues. "My entire life is helping people unleash that power. Nothing drives me more than to see someone or an organization transform and begin to pursue goals with a purpose that inspires them, and gives them a greater sense of meaning—in not only what they do, but who they are."


Read the entire article...




Zig Ziglar's Lessons From The Top


From Zig Ziglar’s perspective, success is only real when it encompasses every area of life. Physical, mental, spiritual, relationships and, oh yes, career and finances. True success requires balance, an ingredient missing in many people’s busy lives. And while we may acquire the trappings of success—a nice car, a beautiful home, designer clothes— the truth is they may only be traps if the pursuit of obtaining them leads to greater imbalance and skewed priorities.


Friday, May 21, 2010

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

72 Questions to Ask Your New Web Design Clients



Here is the list by Douglas Bonneville of bonfx.com

10 UI Design Patterns You Should Be Paying Attention To

Very interesting and informative article by "Janko Jovanovic" from Smashing Magazine.

Design patterns were first described in the 1960s by Christopher Alexander, an architect who noticed that many things in our lives happen according to patterns. He adapted his observations to his work and published many findings on the topic. Since then, design patterns have found their place in many areas of our lives, and can be found in the design and development of user interfaces as well.

In short, design patterns are solutions to recurring problems. By extension, UI design patterns are solutions to common user interface problems. This article goes over 10 interesting UI design patterns that you can use in your own projects.

If you are into Web Design/ Development, you should check out this article.


Wanna learn WCF?


Check out Dennis van der Stelt's blog if you are interested in learning about WCF.


Monday, May 3, 2010

About Texas Hold'Em

Lately I have been obsessed with No-Limit Texas Hold'Em... So here is a totally random musing...

No matter how much you may want to think of Hold'Em as a card game played by people, in many respects it is even more valid to think of it as a game about people that happens to be played with cards.

This becomes more and more true as the stakes get higher and the games get tougher.


Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Log4Net

If you wanna know about log4net, check out the following sites... they are good starting points.

Using log4net

log4net introduction

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

ESB Guidance: Creating and Publishing Fault Messages

To help you understand how you can use the features of the Exception Management Framework to manage exceptions, this section walks through a common scenario based on the submission of a message to an ESB application.

The scenario consists of a user submitting an invoice to the system. During the course of processing the invoice in an orchestration, the BizTalk Business Rule Engine throws an application exception because some part of the data is incorrect. The business process should catch the exception, send the offending message to another person or system that can correct the message, and resubmit the message for processing.

When using the ESB Failed Orchestration Exception Routing feature, the process steps are the following:

  1. Code in the exception handler that detects the error creates a fault message by calling the CreateFaultMessage method, as shown in the following code example.

    // Create fault exception message faultMsg = Microsoft.Practices.ESB.ExceptionHandling.ExceptionMgmt.CreateFaultMessage();
  2. The ESB Exception mechanism automatically inserts the error description into the fault message context (for example, “The Business Rule Engine threw a divide by zero error processing the LoanProcessing policy”).

  3. The ESB Exception mechanism automatically promotes failure-specific and application-specific properties into the fault message context, setting the values from the current environment. These properties are the following:

    Application
    (auto-populated)
    DateTime (auto-populated as a UTC value)
    Description (auto-populated—the exception message)
    ErrorType (auto-populated—the exception type)
    MachineName (auto-populated—the current server name)
    Scope (auto-populated—the Scope shape containing the current exception handler)
    ServiceName (auto-populated—the orchestration name)
    ServiceInstanceID (auto-populated—the orchestration instance ID as a GUID)

  4. Code in the exception handler sets other properties of the fault message as required, as shown in the following code example.
    // Set fault message properties faultMsg.Body.FailureCategory = "MessageBuild"; faultMsg.Body.FaultCode = 1000; faultMsg.Body.FaultDescription = "Some error occurred"; faultMsg.Body.FaultSeverity =    Microsoft.Practices.ESB.ExceptionHandling.FaultSeverity.Severe;

  5. The ESB Exception mechanism automatically serializes the current Exception object into the fault message.

  6. Code in the exception handler can optionally add current orchestration messages to the ESB fault message using the AddMessage(faultMsg, messageToAdd) method. This serializes and persists the message, including all the context properties, as shown in the following code example.

    // Add other current orchestration messages to the fault message Microsoft.Practices.ESB.ExceptionHandling.ExceptionMgmt.AddMessage(                             faultMsg, approvedRequestMsg); Microsoft.Practices.ESB.ExceptionHandling.ExceptionMgmt.AddMessage(                             faultMsg, DeniedRequestMsg, @"c:\temp");  
  7. Code in the exception handler publishes the ESB fault message through a direct bound port into the Message Box database.

  8. If publishing succeeds, the following events occur:
  • Orchestration or send port subscriptions can process the ESB fault message, rehydrating the Exception object, and extract any added messages complete with their context property values.
  • A global exception handler (a send port) automatically publishes the ESB fault message to the ESB Management Portal.


Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Test-Driven Development Links

Test-driven development (TDD) is an advanced technique of using automated unit tests to drive the design of software and force decoupling of dependencies. The result of using this practice is a comprehensive suite of unit tests that can be run at any time to provide feedback that the software is still working.

Methodology / Approach

TDD Blog Roll

Software – Commercial Test Runners

Software – Open-Source Test Runners

Software – Open-Source Test Runner Complements

Software – Open-Source Mock Objects

Software - Unit Testing & Tools for Xml Web Services

Books (Linked to the greatness that is www.bookpool.com )

Articles

Software - Code Coverage (How much code actually executed?)

Refactoring:

Sites:

Software:

Books:

Development Methodologies Links

MSF - http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/enterprise/msf/

FDD

Agile - http://www.agilemanifesto.org/

xP –

SCRUM

Visual Studio 2005 Team System Links


Monday, March 8, 2010

ASP.NET Starter Kits and Community Projects

The ASP.NET 2.0 Starter Kits for Visual Web Developer are fully functional sample applications to help you learn ASP.NET 2.0 and accomplish common Web development scenarios. Each sample is complete and well-documented so that you can use the code to kick start your Web projects today! These kits, once downloaded are integrated directly into the Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition or Visual Studio 2005 experience.



IIS Issue: Unexpected Error 0x8ffe2740 Occurred

If you are using IIS 5.1 on XP and are being presented with an "Unexpected Error 0x8ffe2740 Occurred" error message when trying to start your website from the IIS Admin panel, then it is likely that you have a port conflict on your system. That's the easy part, now what do you do to track this conflict down and fix it?

Well, that actually isn't that hard either. By default IIS will try and bind itself to TCP port 80, so the first thing to do is track down which process is binding itself to this port. This could be anything from another webserver (such as Skype), or in my case Apache. To do this, open a command prompt window and type in the following;

netstat -anop TCP|find ":80 "

This will give you some details of what process is using TCP port 80, and unless you have a multihomed system you should only get one result here. The only information that you really need to be concerned about is the number that is display on the far right hand side. This is the PID (Process Identifier) which is a unique number given to a process by the system when it is initiated.

The next step is to match this PID with an actual process that you can identify. There are several ways you can do this, but probably the easiest way is to go back to your command prompt window and type this in (where the number 1234 is the PID number from the previous step);

tasklist /SVC /FI "PID eq 1234"

What this will do is associate the PID number you enter with a process name which will be displayed on the far left, and on the far right will be the name(s) of any related services.This should give you a pretty clear picture of what software is binding itself to TCP port 80, and from there it is a matter of either reconfiguring that software to use a different port number or disabling it while IIS is in use. Of course on the flip side you could always reconfigure IIS to use a different port number as well. Either way, you should now be able to take action so you can start your website from the IIS Admin panel.


Sunday, February 21, 2010

20 Coolest Cloud Platform Vendors

Cloud computing platforms (affectionately called Platform-as-a-Service, or PaaS) facilitate and ease the deployment of applications into the cloud, limiting the cost and complexity by cutting the need to buy and manage hardware and software. As cloud computing continues to gather steam and more VARs and their clients are looking to design, develop, test, deploy and host apps in the cloud, a robust, flexible platform has become a must-have. As per ChannelWeb, these are the 20 coolest cloud computing platform vendors.

  1. Amazon EC2
  2. Appistry
  3. AppScale
  4. AT&T
  5. Engine Yard
  6. Enomaly
  7. FlexiScale
  8. GCloud3
  9. Gizmox
  10. GoGrid
  11. Google
  12. LongJump
  13. Microsoft
  14. OrangeScape
  15. RackSpace
  16. Salesforce.com
  17. Terremark
  18. Ubuntu
  19. VMware, Cisco Systems And EMC
  20. Verizon