Attending talk the future of connectivity, the cloud and WCF by Glenn Block. Talking about where things are headed, with HTTP, REST, WCF etc. New funny term: “RESTafarians!”.

First out, using Excel Power Pivot plugin to read an RSS/Atom Feed.

Wow! News in WCF….add a [QueryComposition] attribute to a WebMethod, return an IEnumerable<T> using the AsQueryable extension method, and BOOM Baby, your web method can be queried just like OData…. kind of like brining RIA services and OData into standard WebGet, Nice!

New addition for supporting different formats for a given WCF method. You can now add something called Processors ...

Can be found here on the Windows Azure Team Blog.

Day 1, attended the keynote with Steve Ballmer, Scott Guthrie and Bub Muglia, among others.

Steve was loud and bouncy as usual! The man does not need a microphone. Amazing energy! He didn’t do Developers, Developers, Developers, but he did joke about it. He did have a new one though…”People ask us [about the WinPhone 7] well what about if bladitibladitibla…[yes, he said that] what will you do then? I’ll tell you what we’ll do then…BOOM! Baby! That’s what we’ll do!”, he says, making an explosive jab with his elbow and forearm…this one will go down in history! Just search ...

We are excited to announce that Falafel Software’s popular Event Board conference software is now available for Microsoft PDC in Redmond, which starts today. Search for Falafel Software or EventBoard in the market place, or click this link.

Event Board allows you to quickly find sessions by speaker, timeslot or track, save your favorite sessions, see session details, and conference overview information.

Here are a few regular expressions that tend to stay in my Find and Replace history due to their usefulness. I’ll explain each one’s usage as I go. When using these, make sure to check the Use: Regular Expressions box in the Search and Replace tool window.

Replace CREATE/ALTER PROCEDURE with IF EXISTS … DROP PROCEDURE … CREATE PROCEDURE

I use this pattern a lot, because sometimes you just don’t know whether a procedure already exists to ALTER or if it needs to be created. This regular expression turns any CREATE or ALTER PROCEDURE into a multi-line statement that first ...

Today I spoke on Windows Phone 7 Application Development at the Grand Rapids Day of .NET.  We had a great group in the session.  I was very happy to see their level of interest, excitement, and great questions.  I hope that they found the session useful. 

As promised, here are the slides and code for download:

- Download Slides (PowerPoint 2007)

- Download Sample project (VS 2010)

I’ve also included some links below to more WP7 resources.  Feel free to contact if you have any questions.

Additional Reading:

- Using Push Notification from Your Windows Phone Application

- ...

A few years ago, I posted a few iterations of a Visual Studio macro that would create a region around a selected block of code. It worked pretty well, but I was never quite satisfied with the logic that it used to extract default region names. I’ve rewritten it and added a few new features. Now, it will automatically expand the selection to the beginning of the top line and the end of the bottom line, extract names with better accuracy, and move the edit point to the end of the region when finished. It is also now completely enclosed ...

We are proud to announce that the EventBoard and Falafel 2 Go applications have been approved and released on the Microsoft Marketplace for Windows Phone 7.  EventBoard is a conference productivity application for attendees utilizing ODATA and the Azure Cloud to provide users with live information about any specific conference regarding speakers, sessions, news, agenda, rooms, times, tweets, facebook, maps, etc…

Falafel 2 Go is a simple application that allows users to follow Falafel Software training agendas, blogs and Tweets on the Windows Phone 7 device on the go.

Hope you enjoy both FREE applications and we can’t wait to ...

This weekend Lino Tadros and John Waters will be heading out to Sofia, Bulgaria, to speak at DevReach, the premier developer conference on Microsoft technologies in Southeastern Europe. This is the fourth time Falafel Software has presented at DevReach, and we are greatly looking forwards to meeting our good friends at Telerik, and to refueling with some Rakia (fuel being the operative word….as in jet fuel!). Many thanks to Martin Kulov for inviting us!

Our talks will range from Windows Phone 7 to Advanced RIA Services, Silverlight, and some fun topics too, stay tuned for some interesting Wiggle ...

Here’s an interesting use for the windowed ROW_NUMBER() function in SQL Server. Let me set it up with an example scenario. Let’s say you have a table that contains order information, including product, order date and order amount. The products get ordered frequently, so each product has many rows with the same date. You want to write a query that will output the latest date each product was ordered, and the largest order amount on that date. Now, you can’t just go writing something like this:

select
    ProductID,
     max(OrderDate)  as OrderDate_max,
     max(OrderAmount)  as OrderAmount_max
from Orders
group...

We are excited to announce that Falafel Software is speaking about their popular conferenceware product EventBoard at the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Developer Launch Event, currently underway at Microsoft’s Campus in Mountain View, CA.

The event is being streamed live at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/events/gg261723.aspx.

Lino Tadros, Chairman and CEO, and John Waters, President and CTO, will be speaking for an hour at 1.15 PM.

The session will cover a range of real world development stories and deep dive into using Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend to build Windows Phone Applications with Windows Azure Cloud Services and Push Notifications.

EventBoard is ...

I recently found myself using #ifdef preprocessor directives to turn on and off the same pieces of diagnostic code in multiple files all across a project.  We have all used Debug methods, which are turned on and off universally by defining (or not defining) the DEBUG constant.  Isn’t that convenient?  All the lines of code that we want removed at compile-time when not debugging are controlled just by one constant – for an entire project at once!

We can do the same thing using conditional methods.

Define a conditional method using the Conditional attribute before the method ...

I came across an interesting behavior today. I was dynamically loading a user control into a RadTooltip using Page.LoadControl("MyUsercontrol.ascx")

Canceling the tooltip causes a partial-page postback. If I then reopen the tooltip before I do something to cause a full-page postback, the user control in the tooltip loads with the cached control state from the canceled instance. It appears that the second call to Page.LoadControl() returns an object with the same ID, and ASP.NET automatically wired it up.

My solution: in an event handler for the user control's Cancel button, I change the user control's ID to some throwaway text, like ...

Our final release of Silicon Valley Code Camp app for the Android platform is now available on the Android Marketplace.  Falafel now has all major platforms covered (iPhone, Android and WP7)

If you are an Android user please head to the market place and get your Free app today to manage your sessions, speakers, favorites,  and others made for ease features to make this fun and simple for everyone under all platforms.

If you have an Android phone you can scan the QR barcode below and it will download the app automatically.

Hope you enjoy!  See you on Saturday!

 ...

Falafel Software is very excited to be sponsoring the Silicon Valley  Code Camp for the 3rd year as a Platinum Sponsor. This excellent Code Camp at the heart of the Silicon Valley, in Los Altos CA, at the beautiful Foothills College has always been a well organized event full of great sessions and great speakers.

This year Falafel Software is showing up in force :) by having 5 speakers present 12 technical sessions during the 2 day event:

Lino Tadros

• Mobile Development with iPhone, Android and Phone 7
• How to Test Silverlight apps the right way
• Silverlight 4 Out ...

C# programmers who haven’t dabbled in VB-land for a long time may not be familiar with one of the best (and few) language features that VB had and C# didn’t for years—named and optional parameters.  With the advent of C# 4 and Microsoft’s adaption of a co-evolutionary strategy for VB and C#, this feature has finally made the jump in C#.  I thought I’d give a quick  overview of these features here for those that may not be familiar with them, and for those that have grown up with C# and may forget they are now an option.

Optional ...