Excellence in Software

When it comes to content management in SharePoint, half the battle is figuring out the best angle of attack.  Why?  Well, because there are so many options and combinations of options that come into play when designing a solution. Take the SharePoint permissions architecture, for example.  There are 33 different permission masks divided into 3 categories: personal, list and site permissions.  These are combined into role definitions (permission levels) which may be assigned t... [read more]

Back in June, I announced the creation of FsTest, a testing Domain Specific Language for F#.  Since that time, the F# team has released the September 2008 CTP, which finally gives F# full citizenship within Visual Studio with real project files.  I felt it was time to update FsTest, and more in particular, FsxUnit, which uses xUnit.net as the back end for doing assertions.  Go ahead and pick up the latest bits here from the CodePlex site. What's Changed? Other than migrating th... [read more]

Lately, there has been a lot of momentum around functional programming.  While I was away on vacation for the past couple of weeks, I came across quite a few items that caught my eye.  This isn't meant to be a link blog by any means, but to show that there is a bit of new information coming out around functional programming and what it means to you. F# There has been a bit of excitement around F# since the release of the September 2008 CTP.  If you haven't already downloaded... [read more]

Don Syme just announced today the F# Community Technical Preview (CTP) Release September 2008 which is now available for download as well  the launch of the MSDN F#  Developer Center.  I've been playing with these builds lately and they are great improvements in usability as well as better integration into Visual Studio and MSBuild.  Be sure to check out Don's post on the matter on how the language has evolved and the changes that have been made.  Some of the big items I... [read more]

The August meeting for DC ALT.NET will be on August 28th, 2008 from 7-9PM.  Check our site and our mailing list for continuing updates and future meetings.  This month, Jeff Schoolcraft, ASP.NET MVP, will host a conversation on Ruby.  This will include some Ruby demos, a little bit of Ruby on Rails, as well as approaching it from the ASP.NET mindset.  This talk will go very nicely with our talk on ASP.NET MVC next month. Approaching Ruby One of the main intentions for the... [read more]

Let's face it, SharePoint is a huge development platform no matter what angle you approach it from.   As most of you know, I've spent the past year or so traveling and teaching SharePoint developer courses for the Ted Pattison Group, and my focus has been pretty broad, covering topics ranging from features to content types to workflow and everything in between.  Now, as the platform continues to mature and as developers become more and more familiar with the basics of Shar... [read more]

For the next part of my coverage of Asynchronous Computation Expressions, I'm going to talk about the things you get for free when you use them.  I was reminded of this during a recent chat with Greg Young about how hard it was during asynchronous operations to notify the controlling thread of an exception.  These asynchronous operations are meant to handle such things.  Let's get caught up to where we are today with regards to Async Computation Expressions: Task Parall... [read more]

Last month, I posted my Functional C# presentation for the Rockville .NET User Group (RockNUG).  Yesterday, I was able to finally present the material, although I was feeling under the weather and there was a lot of information in just that brief amount of time.  So, I'm going to repost the materials just in case someone missed them.  I'm adding a few things as well which may be of interest.  I'm hoping to expand this for upcoming code camps. Here are some resources that ... [read more]

In this continuing series of my back to basics, I've been talking about recursion, and various strategies around using it effectively.  This includes covering the basic types of recursion, whether it be linear, binary, and tail.  Then I took it a step further with topics on list recursion and memoization techniques.  This is an ongoing part of my back to basics series in which I hope is a refresher for many who don't use these things on a daily basis. Let's catch up to where we... [read more]

Mozilla Labs in partnership with Adaptive Path has released two concept videos of what the web browsing experience may look and feel like in the future.  It shows some pretty interesting concepts.  I particularly like the 3D interface where content continually recedes as time progresses – kind of like a push-down stack from front to back with the most recent items in the front. The little hand-held device looks remarkably similar to the iPhone, and the design team appears to have ma... [read more]

Ok, so first I need to give a shout out to John Miller, who read my last post and promptly encouraged me to check out the VMWare Fusion 2.0 beta, which adds a nifty feature called “AutoProtect”.  The idea is to have Fusion automatically save snapshots of your virtual machines as backups for easy rollbacks in exactly the same situation I find myself in now.  Unfortunately, I didn’t upgrade sooner, because it looks like this is one of those “must have” feat... [read more]

Asynchronous Computation Expressions are an extremely powerful feature in F#.  It's important to not only know how to use them, but also to extend the behavior so that other classes can bind and perform asynchronous behavior. What I want to show in this post is how easy it is to add this behavior to any custom web service that you may create. In Review We saw earlier in my post about Task Parallel Library and Async Computation Expressions, I briefly mentioned how I added some capabili... [read more]

The August meeting for DC ALT.NET will be on August 28th, 2008 from 7-9PM.  Check our site and our mailing list for continuing updates and future meetings.  This month, Jeff Schoolcraft, ASP.NET MVP, will host a conversation on Ruby.  This will include some Ruby demos, a little bit of Ruby on Rails, as well as approaching it from the ASP.NET mindset.  This talk will go very nicely with our talk on ASP.NET MVC next month. Approaching Ruby One of the main intentions for the... [read more]

Chalk it up to "bad karma".  Sometimes, we’re just destined to experience bad things.  Nasty, wicked, insanely cruel things.  I was on a roll.  I had finally carved out some "extra time" and was well on my way to tying up all my loose ends.  You know - pet projects, writing, research.  Life was good.  Even kind of dreamy. I'm not sure when it happened, exactly.  As I think back over the past 24 hours, there were definit... [read more]

Very recently, I've given a few talks on Asynchronous and Concurrent Programming in F#.  In this talk, I gave a brief overview of the options you have when dealing with concurrency and asynchronous behavior.  During these talks, I was asked a few times about where asynchronous computation expressions (workflows) fit and how it differs from doing things with the Task Parallel Library from the Parallel Extensions for .NET.  There are some differences worth exploring and I'll post so... [read more]

Lately, I've been heads down on a lot of concurrency items which will hopefully come out soon.  In the mean time, I want to get back to the basics one last time with recursion.  As I posted earlier, I've been talking about recursion in the past couple of posts, and this one will be one last on the topic.  I'll do my best to post the samples in both C# and F#.  As always, you can find my C# samples on MSDN Code Gallery at the Functional C# Samples. Let's catch up to where ... [read more]

Ok, I’m being melodramatic.  But if you do any kind of rich media publishing on the web and you thought the Flash FLV format was your only option – think again.  Microsoft has upped the ante quite a bit with their new free Silverlight Streaming service which is now part of Windows Live.  Did I mention it was free?  This is a big deal.  Until now, you had to use a paid service such as Techsmith’s screencast.com to host your streaming media files, or you had to setup a s... [read more]

Just as a reminder from the previous post, the July meeting for DC ALT.NET will be on July 24, 2008 from 7PM-9PM.  Check out our site and our mailing list for more information as it becomes available.  This month, K. Scott Allen, of OdeToCode and a co-host of Herding Code, will present a deep dive into LINQ and a code-along so that we can follow along.  The intent is to go as deep as we can with LINQ to find out what works, what doesn't and how to use it effectively.  So, bri... [read more]

Come join co-founder Andrew Connell on Thursday, May 15, 2008 for an interesting session on CAS.  As we all know, Code Access Security gets much less attention than it deserves.  Part of the problem is because it seems so, well, mysterious.  Here's AC's take on dealing with CAS: Understanding and Making Code Access Security Not so Intimidating Ever dealt with that SecurityException error in the yellow-screen-of-death?  That's fun troubleshooting.  The easiest way to address it is to just ... [read more]

When you have a lot of different content types attached to the same document library, it can be confusing for users.  Wouldn't it be nice to organize them into separate folders, so that users see only the content types they need to see?  Folder content types allow you to do just that.  Fellow MVP Mikhail Dikov has written a very interesting piece that explains how to create and use folder content types to organize your document libraries.  Click here to read the full article: http://www.mikhai... [read more]

Well, we're just a couple weeks away from TechEd 2008.  This year, I'm giving four presentations - three breakout sessions and one TLC session, so it should be a lot of fun.  Here are the dates and times: OFC10 - TLC 6/3/2008 3:00PM - 4:15PM Building Custom Routers for Records Management in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 This talk discusses developer aspects of records management in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Custom routers are an important extensibility poin... [read more]

If you want to beef up your Sharepoint developer skills, then here is something you shouldn't miss.  A new 10-part series of Live Meeting Webcasts by Andrew Connell and Robert Bogue covering the fundamentals of SharePoint development.  They will be broadcast every Tuesday and Wednesday from May 20 to June 18 at 9:00AM PST.  Here is the list of topics and registration links: Date Topic Registration Link May 20 Web Parts Register today! ... [read more]

[ via Reza Alirezaei ] Fellow MVP Reza Alirezaei has written a great article that provides a systematic approach to securing SharePoint applications.  What I like about this article is that Reza includes a well-written section on how to apply Threat Model Analysis to determine the appropriate level of protection for a given application.  Then he proceeds to lay out the different tools and coding techniques we have at our disposal to deal with the threat. This is such an important topic, I high... [read more]

Microsoft announced today that a future version of Office 2007 (due out in early 2009) will include direct support for popular document formats including PDF.  The list of supported formats will include ODF (the standardized Open Document Format), XPS (XML Paper Specification), and PDF (Portable Document Format).  It doesn't look like we'll be able to open and edit PDF files - only save them.  The big news is the native support for ODF, which will greatly extend the interoperability between Offi... [read more]

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer gave a recent demo of the new Windows 7 user interface at the D6 "All Things Digital" executive Conference put on each year.  Here is a first glimpse, compliments of YouTube.  Enjoy. Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Windows