Net

A bit of context Windows Phone 7.5, codenamed “Mango”, was the version of WP7 that finally felt complete. It shipped in late 2011 with a serious upgrade story: multitasking, deep Twitter and Facebook integration into the People hub, threaded messaging across SMS / Facebook chat / Windows Live Messenger, IE9 with hardware-accelerated rendering, and a new Marketplace flow for both users and developers. For developers, Mango added Silverlight + XNA combined projects, Live Tiles you could update from the cloud, push notifications, background agents, and full SQL CE access on the device. ...

The other day I played around with the newest release of the Windows Phone 7 SDK (7.1 Beta 2) and started by using the base application template. I created a new class that serves as the entity definition for the view model. The data is bound to a list box. Nothing spectacular. In design time (Visual Studio) my static sample data that I created showed up just fine. During application start I created some “real” data and bound it to the list box. As a result, the list box is empty and does not show any data at all … no exceptions or other runtime errors. After a bit of testing I found out that the problem is with the entity class definition. The class was specified to be private instead of public. This little keyword led to an empty list box.

Why schema management was painful in 2011 Before Entity Framework Code First Migrations, keeping a database schema in sync with your application code was one of those problems every team eventually built their own answer for. The typical setup was a folder of hand-rolled SQL scripts named with version numbers, plus a small home-grown runner that tracked which scripts had already been applied. It worked, but every project re-invented the wheel slightly differently, and merging schema changes between branches was a recurring source of pain. ...

For all you Java developers out there, have a look at this link in order to learn more about C# and the .NET framework.

Last week I learned a very interesting lesson. I am just in the end phase of a custom software delivery project. Using OLIVANOVA’s model driven software development approach, I created a three-tier application with an ASP.NET client, a COM+ based server tier and MS SQL Server as the persistence layer. The COM+ application is deployed to a dedicated server along with the SQL Server database management system. The ASP.NET application is created on another server that lives in a DMZ (demilitarized zone). This web server does not have access to the Internet from inside, but is accessible from outside of this company. A connection (HTTP) from the web-server to the database server is then responsible for communication between the user-interface and the server tier. ...

Microsoft has released a security advisory about a vulnerability in ASP.NET. A security patch is already available here. Below are some details on how the vulnerability works: “To understand how this vulnerability works, you need to know about cryptographic oracles. An oracle in the context of cryptography is a system which provides hints as you ask it questions. In this case, there is a vulnerability in ASP.NET which acts as a padding oracle. This allows an attacker to send cipher text to the web server and learn if it was decrypted properly by examining which error code was returned by the web server. By making many such requests (and watching what errors are returned) the attacker can learn enough to successfully decrypt the rest of the cipher text.” (quoted from Scott Guthrie’s blog)

As stated in a recent post, I’ve been able to create a Silverlight 4 client that accesses an OLIVANOVA generated business logic using WCF RIA Services. Well, the actual code to enable this scenario is in fact not that complicated (once you learned how to write Silverlight enabled WCF RIA Services). The big advantage for me is that the complete business logic can be generated with OLIVANOVA’s model driven software development approach. ...

OLIVANOVA can generate code for application information logs automatically: for .NET environments OLIVANOVA uses the System.Diagnostics.Trace class included in the .NET Framework for J2EE platforms OLIVANOVA uses log4j

To me, Silverlight has always been a fascinating technology. I started playing around with Silverlight back in September 2007. Since then, I always wanted to create a Silverlight user interface for OlivaNova. With the first versions, the lack of standard data controls made it really difficult to implement a data-driven application. A lot has changed since then and today the time is ripe to begin afresh. The software architecture basically looks like this: ...

I finally managed to add this project on sourceforge … here is the link