If you’re an avid reader of this blog, you probably now that I’m quite a big fan of the jQuery Javascript library, especially in combination with SharePoint sites. For a while I’ve been trying to find a mechanism to deploy jQuery and add a reference to it on all SharePoint pages of a site, by just using a Sandboxed Solution. The first part, deploying the jQuery file, is really easy; this can be done in a Module in

An application that consumes one or more WCF services needs to provide the address, binding protocol, and contract (ABC) of each end point in its app.config file. This article shows an easy way to let the application get its WCF client configuration data from anywhere: a flat file, a database, even pigeon post if you like. The approach leverages the native XML configuration schema as well as the proxy generated by Visual Studio.NET. The following is a screenshot from the attached sol

SharePoint 2010 and Silverlight is a fantastic combination, especially when you use the Client Object Model for Silverlight to access SharePoint data. But maybe you’ve encountered the following situation: your Silverlight application works great when it’s hosted in the out-of-the-box Silverlight Web Part, but when you build your own custom Web Part to show the Silverlight Application it just doesn’t work anymore: the browser tells you there is an Error on page

Duik erin met MSDN.

Microsoft Belgie heeft een aantal zelf-trainingen staan om je

If you have developed Features for SharePoint 2007, you’re probably aware of a very serious limitation of Feature Development: upgradability. Deploying version 1 of your customization is no problem, but If you want to deploy a bug fix or additional functionality in version 2, you’re basically on your own. The good news is that in SharePoint 2010, this problem is solved: as a developer you can now build features that are upgradable. The basic concept goes as follows, you built

Duik erin met MSDN.

Visual Studio 2010 now comes packed with too many assemblies. The list of assemblies to pick from in the Add Reference dialog is now a little too large for my taste. Today, while browsing around in the Visual Studio 2010 Extension Manager, I found the Search References extension:

INotifyPropertyChanged is an interface which is very important to do proper databinding and is heavily used in the MVVM pattern.

However, to implement it you have to raise the PropertyChanged event whenever a data-bound property changes value, and you have to pass the name of the property to it. This results in string based programming and this generally is not good for maintenance. Some people create a RaisePropertyChanged method in the base class and then invoke this method in each property setter. Again this is not ideal because you cannot always derive from this base class, especially if you already have a base class. In this post I want to show you an alternative way of implementing INotifyPropertyChanged that doesn’t require a base class (you simple implement the INotifyPropertyChanged on each class) with a nice, string-less way of raising the PropertyChanged event. For example, look at this class:

MIX 2010 must be one of the best events Microsoft organizes for web folks. Since not everyone can make it to Las Vegas for this we at Microsoft Belgium together with the Belgian Silverlight User Group have a solution for you. We will organize a live keynote streaming on a big screen in a cool Vegas style. Expect a live intervention from some Belgians at MIX and cool prizes to be won.

For those who forgot it, tonight Frederik and I invite for our Silverlight user group new years drink. Please check the besug site for more details.

There will be some silverlight, geek or normal talking with a glass of beer, wine or whatever you like, which is totally for free.

Today, during a Live session @ Microsoft,  I talked about how you can use VB.NET 9.0 XML Literals to parse, create XML documents.
As promised, I’ve uploaded the demo’s and the slides to my skydrive, which you can find here. Note that the session was in dutch, but the demos were in english

An application that consumes one or more WCF services needs to provide the address, binding protocol, and contract (ABC) of each end point in its app.config file. This article shows an easy way to let the application get its WCF client configuration data from anywhere: a flat file, a database, even pigeon post if you like. The approach leverages the native XML configuration schema as well as the proxy generated by Visual Studio.NET. The following is a screenshot from the attached solutin, showing a WPF client that calls the canonical Hello World service synchronously and asynchronously, but using an end point configuration from a local string variable:

This article describes where, why, and how to use TransactionScope in the Entity Framework 4.0. The proposed best practices apply to a medium to large data access layer, e.g. a DAL that is implemented as one or more WCF services with lots of internal calls. Allow me to start with the conclusions:

This article explains how to implement optimistic concurrency checking using a SQL Server DateTime or DateTime2 column. It's a follow-up of my previous article on using a TimeStamp column for that same purpose. In most -if not all- concurrency checking cases it actually makes more sense to use a DateTime column instead of a TimeStamp. The DateTime data types occupy the same storage (8 bytes) as a TimeStamp, or even less: DateTime2 with 'low' precision takes only 6 bytes. On top of that: their content makes sense to the end user. Unfortunately the DateTime data types are 'a little bit' less evident to use for concurrency checking: you need to declare a trigger (or a stored procedure) on the table, and you need to hack the entity model.

If you’re an avid reader of this blog, you probably now that I’m quite a big fan of the jQuery Javascript library, especially in combination with SharePoint sites. For a while I’ve been trying to find a mechanism to deploy jQuery and add a reference to it on all SharePoint pages of a site, by just using a Sandboxed Solution. The first part, deploying the jQuery file, is really easy; this can be done in a Module in

SharePoint 2010 and Silverlight is a fantastic combination, especially when you use the Client Object Model for Silverlight to access SharePoint data. But maybe you’ve encountered the following situation: your Silverlight application works great when it’s hosted in the out-of-the-box Silverlight Web Part, but when you build your own custom Web Part to show the Silverlight Application it just doesn’t work anymore: the browser tells you there is an Error on page

If you have developed Features for SharePoint 2007, you’re probably aware of a very serious limitation of Feature Development: upgradability. Deploying version 1 of your customization is no problem, but If you want to deploy a bug fix or additional functionality in version 2, you’re basically on your own. The good news is that in SharePoint 2010, this problem is solved: as a developer you can now build features that are upgradable. The basic concept goes as follows, you built

Note: if you’re looking for lamb curry, you came to the wrong place. This post is about C# programming techniques.

Currying a function is a technique named after Haskell Curry, to transform a function with multiple parameters into a series of functions having one parameter each. The technique is important, because it opens the door to an optimization technique called partial evaluation. Let’s look at an example.

A few weeks ago, I talked about static reflection and its advantages. You’ll remember that the main advantages, compared to the normal reflection API’s, are the compile time checking of parameters and IntelliSense support.

A long time ago, I wrote a blog post about the problems with String.Trim(). I’m happy to see that all three issues have been addressed in the .NET Framework 4.0.

To start with, Trim() will now be consistent with Char.IsWhiteSpace(). Theoretically, this is a breaking change, but I don’t expect many programs to have a problem with this change. Note that the change is very well documented in the online help.

A couple of weeks ago, I did a webcast on Parallel Computing available on channel9 at http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/adebruyn/MSDN-Live-Meeting-Visual-Studio-2010-and-NET-4-Update

Last week, I did a presentation on Windows Azure at HOWEST, University College West Flanders. As promised, my hands-on-labs of this session.

1. A file archive application to upload/download files into a database in the cloud.  This application consists out of a webpage (UploadFile.aspx) to upload files into a SQL Azure database, and a REST service to dowload your files as a stream. You can dowload the sources at : CodeArchiveService.zip

1. Configuring and Tracing

WCF can send messages in buffered mode and in streaming mode. The default is buffered mode, which means that the whole message needs to be transfered and received before the client can start processing it. When messages get too large to be send as one big blob and when those messages can’t be split in different message parts, streaming is your option. To use streaming (both on input and/or output parameters), define the parameters as type of stream (you should use the base class here, not a derived one like eg. FileStream), Message or IXmlSerializable. This should be the one and only parameter, no extra parameters are allowed !