Opera Unite - Reinventing Web?

Opera Unite : “A new technology that shakes up the old client-server computing model of the Web”.

Opera unite provides the following services:

Here is good post on installing and configuring these services. The only service that I felt interesting was the ‘Web Server’. So I tried it and the first cut really went well. Below is the link of a file hosted on my laptop by unite:
http://home.jomitvaghela.operaunite.com/webserver/content/

My first impression:
While the services being offered are not at all new, the crux here is the ease of sharing this from your own device using a simple browser.

Try it out yourself and share your thoughts. . . . .

Rebuilding Microsoft.com/SharePoint

Since last couple of months I, along with my wonderful team including Todd, Vivek, Meeta and Ritu had been working with Tony on rebuilding the Microsoft's SharePoint web site.

The web site went live last month : http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint . . . .

and now, there is also a 'How we did it' article on MSDN describing goals and technicals details of how we developed all the pieces and fitted it together.

Loading .xap files OnDemand using Composite Client Application Guidance (PRISM)

One of the challenges of porting large business applications on silverlight is the size of .xap file. A typical business app would have multiple screens, rich data visualization and lots of user interaction which would in turn increase the overall size of the xap file. Also it would have users with multiple roles and each role would have specific permissions to specific screens. 
So wouldn’t it be nice to divide the entire app into multiple silverlight modules and than load them only when required  ? This is where PRISM can help us . . .

Composite Client Application Guidance (PRISM) provides us a rich framework to divide a silverlight application into various Modules and also load them ‘on demand’. A module can be a separate silverlight app. You can watch Erick’s video for creating the basic structure of a PRISM Project.

The solution structure for our scenario would be a bit different with multiple Silverlight Applications linked to a Single Web App as below :

Now what we need is a Default View which would be loaded first and than some triggers/events which would load the other on-demand views. 
In our case “DefaultView” is in “MyPortal” app and the “VoterModule” inside MyVoterModule Application would be loaded on-demand when a button is clicked from “DefaultView”.

Next, we need to add our Modules into the ModulesCatalog :

ModulesCatalog.xaml

 

The important thing to note here is that we can create groups of modules and than can specify when do we want to initialize the modules being loaded in that particular group. We can also add modules via code instead of loading it from a xaml file.

Than we need to create some event on the DefaultView which would load the VoterModule. I have created a simple button as under, but we can also add more complex business logic to drive the loading of modules :

That’s all we need. The VoterModule would add the appropriate view onto the region and since we have specified to load this “OnDemand” the entire .xap for that application would be loaded when we click on the button.

We can also verify this using Fiddler . . .

Diving & Exploration

Internet is like a deep ocean with many hidden gems so I just thought to wear my scuba suit and find those gems and share them. This is what I found last month :

• 10 Tips to Improve your LINQ to SQL Application Performance
  
• SOAP vs. REST: Complements or Competitors?
  
• Cloud Platforms Today: A Perspective
  
• Performance of content aggregation queries on multiple lists revisited
  
• FxCop Rule for Multi-Targeting (this includes details on greenbits and redbits as well) 

Re-Sizing .VHD Files

While creating a Virtual Disk (.VHD) for Virtual PC we need to allocate a maximum size for both Dynamic and Fixed sized disks. Now once we set this size it’s really difficult to change it. I had a similar issue last week and luckily I happen to find a solution for it which I am going to share here.

Firstly we would need the Vhd Resizer tool from the vmToolkit. This tool would copy sector by sector all the contents of a VHD and create a new VHD with the new size.



Once the resize is complete the added GB’s/MB’s would be shown as an unallocated partition in the new VHD file. (To view the partitions, start the VPC (with the new VHD) -> Right Click My Computer > Click Manage -> Disk Management)
Now to merge this unallocated partition we need to use a command line utility ‘diskpart’ as follows:

Open command prompt and type diskpart, press enter and you would get this prompt

· Type list disk (this would list all the disks)

· Type select disk # (select the disk number in which you want to merge the unallocated partition)

· Type detail disk (this would display all the volumes of the disk)

· Type select volume # (select the volume number in which you want to merge the unallocated partition)

· Finally Type extend (this would merge the unallocated partition on the selected disk & volume)

Open the Disk Management again and you should see the new size of the VHD. We can also use other tools like Partition Magic for merging the unallocated partitions.

How to create context menus and capture right click event in Silverlight

Context menus & right click event is something which is not out of the box supported in silverlight but I think they prove to be very crucial while developing LOB applications. So here is a workaround on how you can create them. Basically I am using HTML/Javascript to create and render menus on top of silverlight but it involves a few tweaks which are listed below.

First tweak is – How to display a HTML Menu on top of silverlight control.
For this we need to change 2 properties on the .aspx or .html page where the silverlight control is being hosted.

      <param name="background" value="transparent" />
   <param name="windowless" value="true" />


Than capturing the right click event in HTML and displaying our menu.

<script language="javascript">

  function click(e) {
     if (navigator.appName == 'Microsoft Internet Explorer' && event.button == 2) {

                var menu = document.getElementById('myMenu');
                menu.style.left = event.clientX + 'px';
                menu.style.top = event.clientY + 'px';
                menu.style.visibility = 'visible';
                return false;
            }
            return true;
  }
  document.onmousedown = click

</script>

'myMenu' is a <div> I have created on the html page which contains a simple table as below:

<div id="myMenu" style="position: absolute; visibility: hidden; width: 75px">

   <table width="100%" style="background: #000000" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="1">
     <tr style="background: #FFFFFF">
         <td onclick="SomeFunctionWhichCallsSilverlight()" style="cursor: hand">
              Edit
         </td>
     </tr>
     <tr style="background: #FFFFFF">
         <td onclick="SomeFunctionWhichCallsSilverlight()" style="cursor: hand"> 
              Save
         </td>
     </tr>
     <tr style="background: #FFFFFF">
         <td onclick="SomeFunctionWhichCallsSilverlight()" style="cursor: hand"> 
              ________
         </td>
     </tr>

     <tr style="background: #FFFFFF">
         <td onclick="SomeFunctionWhichCallsSilverlight()" style="cursor: hand"> 
              Exit
         </td>
     </tr>

   </table>

</div>

The SomeFunctionWhichCallsSilverlight() function would be the interop function to call the relevant Silverlight function as described in my earlier blog.

Now the last thing is to disable the default ‘SilverlightConfiguration’ menu

<body oncontextmenu="return false">


You can download the sample code from here

‘OneNote on Cloud’ – First bits deployed on MESH

I have deployed the first bits of my OneNote application on Cloud. Currently I have created a very basic version with Pen / Text for writing the notes.

Overall the aim is to get the know how of Windows Azure platform including .Net Services, Mesh Enabled Web Applications (MEWA) and SQL Data Services.

 

I have already created the SDS Proxy WCF Service. So the next step is to configure and deploy it on Azure. Than finally to tie all the pieces together . . .

Accessing SQL Data Services from Silverlight

“OneNote on Cloud”…  This is something I have started exploring on since last couple of days. 
The idea is to have a OneNote type application experience on web, using Silverlight and SQL Data Services.

The first hurdle was to access SDS from silverlight. We can’t directly use the SDS from silverlight because of some known limitations. So the option that I thought of was to use some Proxy Services in between the Silverlight Client and SDS, which was also suggested by the guys who developed the Omega.SDSClient

Now there are few gotchas while developing these proxy services for silverlight client which I am listing below :

1. We need to Change the service bindings to ‘basicHttpBinding’ as silverlight doesn’t support any other bindings.
2. We need to set the AspNetCompatibilityRequirements attribute to ‘Allowed’ for all the service implementations
   
(If we add the services using the ‘Silverlight-enabled WCF Service’ template than the above changes are done automatically.)
 

3. The last thing is to add the cross-domain policy file at the root of in case of IIS hosted services it should be on the root of the mapped directory. 
   
    
   
   The important thing to note in this file is the SOAPAction headers which are required to be enabled for SOAP based messages transfers from silverlight.

Getting started with ‘Microsoft Surface’ development

This week I went on a roller coaster ride of formatting & configuring my laptop for Surface development. I will just brief out the steps that I had to do before installing the Surface SDK 1.0 :

• Install Windows Vista Service Pack 1
  (If you get any errors while installing SP1 than first install the System Update Readiness Tool for Vista and than try installing the SP1 again. My machine just crashed after installing the SP1 and I had to repair it using the boot disk so be prepared for this.)
• Install Visual C# 2008 Express Edition
• Install Microsoft XNA Framework Redistributable 2.0
• Finally installing the Surface SDK 1.0 . . . . 

(You would need a monitor that is capable of 1280 × 960 screen resolution or a widescreen monitor that is capable of 1440 × 900 screen resolution to start the Surface Simulator)

Now lets build our first surface application using Visual C# 2008 Express Edition :

1. Under the Create New Project you should be able to see couple of VS Templates for surface apps:
   
    
   
2. Select the Surface Application (WPF) and you would see the default template as below :
   
   
   
3. The First interesting control to look at is the ScatterView control.
   (The ScatterView control is the control that you should use when you have one or more UI elements that you want users to be able to move, rotate, or resize freely within a fixed area)
   
   
   
4. Once you build the application first open the Simulator and than press F5 to run the application and it would automatically get displayed on the simulator . . .
   
   
   As you can see I have added multiple fingers on the screen so you can use your mousepad (on laptop) and your external mouse as two fingers and than can stretch or rotate the images . . . .

Enjoy Learning !!!

Disposing SharePoint 2007 and WSS 3.0 Objects

Here is an excellent article by Roger Lamb explaining the various design patterns to be used for disposing various SharePoint and WSS objects before deploying to the production environment.
Some of these may cause serious implications and memory leaks if not addressed correctly. In particular there are 3 objects to be taken care of,  Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite , Microsoft.SharePoint.SPWeb and Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing

There are also couple of White Papers by Scott Harris's on MSDN for more details:
Best Practices: Using Disposable Windows SharePoint Services Objects
Best Practices: Common Coding Issues When Using the SharePoint Object Model.

Also recently there is a Tool published on the MSDN Code Gallery which provides assistance in correctly disposing of certain SharePoint objects to help us follow these best practices.

SPDisposeCheck.exe is a command line tool which takes the path to a managed .DLL or .EXE or the path to a directory containing many managed assemblies. It will recursively search for and analyze each managed module attempting to detect coding patterns based on the MDSN article.

Below is the screenshot of the actual output generated which running the spdisposecheck on the sample exe. Reading the command line output is a bit tedious. Although the documentation states that this tools has an -xml option to output the details to an xml file but it doesn't seem to work for me..