Planet Software Blogs

The Revolving HashSet

Andrew Best — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 05:09:13 GMT

A project I was working on had a fairly unique storage requirement: I needed a storage medium in which I could query its contents VERY quickly with Contains(), even when the set was relatively large; and when it reached a set size, it should start replacing its oldest values with incoming values – essentially a queue where the oldest values get trimmed once the queue reaches a certain size. Lets take a look at the solution achieved.

Custom WCF Services in SharePoint 2010–Part 2

Paul Reynolds — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 01:32:09 GMT

As promised at the end of Custom WCF Services in SharePoint 2010 – Part 1 we take a look at another approach to configuring our custom service. This approach also has another benefit that allows us to get around an issue that appears to exist with the Microsoft implementation of the Factories provided in the Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Services namespace...

Custom WCF Services in SharePoint 2010–Part 1

Paul Reynolds — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 02:04:48 GMT

It has always been the case with SharePoint that you sometimes need to develop custom ‘services’ to get a particular job done, and this is no exception with 2010. The provided services have continued to expand/improve over the years when compared back to earlier versions of SharePoint, but they are obviously general and not going to perform every function we might require. Enter custom WCF Services...

Web.config transforms (XDT) with Visual Studio setup and deployment packages (vdproj) and Team Build 2010

Andrew Best — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 03:39:04 GMT

I have spent some time binging for solutions to the following issue: You have a product which leverages visual studio setup and deployment packages. You wish to build the MSI as part of your automated build process in Team Build 2010, and you want the built MSI to include transformed configuration files.

Web.config transforms (XDT) in Team Build 2010

Andrew Best — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 01:10:29 GMT

I thought I would do a short but sweet blog post about getting web.config transforms (and any other XDT transform) working when automating your project builds with Team Build 2010.

WaitControl / Loading Spinner / Progress Display not showing / not visible / not displaying with ReportViewer 10.0 for ASP.NET

Andrew Best — Mon, 23 May 2011 02:48:23 GMT

Now there is a fragmented headline! The reason for it is to hopefully guide people searching on this issue to this post, because it took me about a day of flexing my Bing-Fu before I finally came up with the correct search term that directed me to a solution.

Securing your online identity

Andrew Best — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 10:55:57 GMT

Today I did something I should have done a long time ago. I took the steps that everyone (yes, that means you) who has a significant amount of information stored online should do – I researched and then implemented a password manager. This allows us to create strong, unique passwords for each individual portal we sign in to online, from banking to email to the various forums many of us frequent.

The last RegEx tool you will ever need

Andrew Best — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 10:42:18 GMT

This is just a quick post – but one I hope helps many people. It seems every time I return to regex, it is after not using it for 6+ months, and I have to separately look up code examples, find a tool to verify the somewhat dodgy regex I knock up, test it out in code to see if it verifies my input the way I intend it to… sound familiar? If so, your problems have now been solved. Check out http://www.gskinner.com/RegExr/ – a FANTASTIC online regex builder / tester / expression repository, all combined into one neat little interface.

Creating a Web Application Installer with WiX 3.5 and Visual Studio 2010–Part 5

Paul Reynolds — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 02:30:08 GMT

Continuing from Part 4, we look at the creation of a custom action assembly to populate our custom dialog, and apply the selected values...

Creating a Web Application Installer with WiX 3.5 and Visual Studio 2010–Part 4

Paul Reynolds — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 04:52:17 GMT

Continuing from Part 3, we look at providing a user interface to get information from the user and apply that to our structure and definitions...

Creating a Web Application Installer with WiX 3.5 and Visual Studio 2010–Part 3

Paul Reynolds — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 02:37:09 GMT

Continuing on from Part 2, we get into the bulk of the functionality, defining the structure and dealing with IIS...

Creating a Web Application Installer with WiX 3.5 and Visual Studio 2010–Part 2

Paul Reynolds — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 07:17:37 GMT

Continuing on from Part 1, we take a look at applying some general settings, and checking of prerequisites...

Creating a Web Application Installer with WIX 3.5 and Visual Studio 2010–Part 1

Paul Reynolds — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 01:53:02 GMT

So you’ve just finished creating a lovely shiny new web application. As you’re putting on your jacket, you think ‘Ah! I should quickly create an MSI installer…will only take a few minutes’…you sit back down, and remember the latest company directive that stated that Visual Studio Setup projects should not be used anymore…

Using WIX 3.5 with Visual Studio 2010

Paul Reynolds — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 05:48:15 GMT

Given the imminent demise of Visual Studio Setup and Deployment Projects, I’ve started to take a look at using Windows Installer XML (WIX) 3.5 as our installer of choice. In this initial post, I’d just like to ensure others are not ‘bitten’ by an issue that took up way too much of my time relatively early on during my exploration...

EF4 part 9: Tweaks to deal with Oracle and WCF DS

Paul Reynolds — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 03:50:26 GMT

We have recently just finished the final stages of testing our new product version that makes use of .NET 4, Entity Framework 4 (EF4), WCF Data Services (WCF DS), Task Parallel Library, etc. When we switched from testing the MS SQL version to the Oracle version, a few new issues arose that I’ll note in this post...

Binding Entities to Selector Derived Controls

Paul Reynolds — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 02:01:36 GMT

Binding an entity (business object) to a selector derived control such as a ComboBox is quite a common task in WPF. A quick google would lead you to believe that you either have to implement IEquatable on all your entities so you can bind on SelectedItem, or you have to bind on SelectedValue. Neither if these approaches quite tick all the boxes for us: we want to write minimal code, bind the entity not just the value...

Waiting for a Task: Don’t block the main UI thread!

Paul Reynolds — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 23:36:37 GMT

This small post covers an old issue that’s still relevant today: accidentally blocking the main interface thread. In fact, it’s likely to be even more noticeable these days given the excellent job done creating the Parallel library in .NET 4 and the elegant simplicity it provides in its use...

Unit Testing Entity Framework 4.0 – An architectural solution

Andrew Best — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 02:26:22 GMT

It being a beautiful Sunday morning at the moment, I figured it would be as fine a time as any to compile my thoughts on the solution I have implemented to provide a testable EF4 architecture. Edit: Its not Sunday anymore :(

RadTileView, RadFluidContentControl and RadContextMenu

Paul Reynolds — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 00:33:09 GMT

Until recently we have been using a highly customised version of the RadGridView to achieve a tile view approach in particular scenarios. Although this has worked well, every new release from Telerik seemed to result in ‘breaks’ in our custom code, and time spent correcting. Given that we now have access to RadTileView in the Telerik WPF library, we were keen to replace our customisations with this Telerik supported control...

EF4 Part 8: Database Agnostic LINQ to Entities

Paul Reynolds — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 02:29:17 GMT

Generally speaking, when you write LINQ to Entities the generated queries seem to work on both MS SQL and Oracle. There are some Microsoft published Known Issues and Consideration in LINQ to Entities, but we also found a number of issues that occur when targeting Oracle via the Devart provider that do not affect MS SQL...

Unit Testing Entity Framework 4.0 – A Solution?

Andrew Best — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 04:36:38 GMT

I will update this once I have had a chance to test the proposed solution out, but I have a feeling that Moses Of Egypt, although his english may be at times hard to piece together, may be my saviour with this post on TypeMock Isolator.

Unit Testing Entity Framework 4.0 – A Critique

Andrew Best — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 04:17:40 GMT

I’ve spent the past few days looking at (and in some ways implementing) unit and integration testing in Entity Framework 4. In this article I am going to talk about unit testing. So for those currently researching the same topic, I figured I would save you some time and compile my thoughts on the matter.

EF4 Part 7: SSDL Adjustments

Paul Reynolds — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 04:11:49 GMT

To be honest, this post is pretty self-serving in that I want to list the adjustments needed to apply to a copied MS SQL SSDL that result in a working Devart Oracle SSDL...

EF4 Part 6: Database Caveats

Paul Reynolds — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 09:14:45 GMT

Towards the end of the previous post I made a comment about the only issue we experienced was the 30 character restriction. There are some other less obvious caveats that appear when you go from theory to practice...

EF4 Part 5: Preparing for Multiple Databases

Paul Reynolds — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 00:57:47 GMT

The main driving factor for us using EF4 in our application is so we can easily support multiple databases (please refer to EF4 Part 1): we currently use Microsoft SQL, and we have a client that wants to use Oracle. Although multiple provider support is used to promote EF4, there is surprising little about that provides a clear guide on how to achieve this goal...