See http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=7a1089b6-4050-4307-86c4-9dadaa5ed018&displaylang=en

The new portal is a completely revamped Silverlight application, just log into your portal as normal and you will be given the option to go to the new portal.

I blogged from PDC about the new items in the SDK, including more of an Infrastructure as a Service approach, allowing you to remote desktop into instance, run installs in elevated permissions mode, use your own VMs, and much more.

This is a huge upgrade and we are very excited to start leveraging this for our Event Board and other Cloud Based solutions!

UPDATE: It took all of 30 ...

We are excited to announce that Microsoft Sweden will be using Falafel Software’s innovative Event Board conference software for TechDays in Sweden.

Falafel Software will be hosting the conference data in the Azure cloud, as well as providing the public web pages for the conference data, as well as mobile applications for all the major mobile platforms: Windows Phone 7, iPhone and Android.

This is the seventh major conference handled by the Event Board system. Previous conferences include MIX, PDC, DevReach, TechEd and Silicon Valley Code Camp.

Event Board is suite of a free mobile applications that make attending ...

I was going to write something about this myself, but I don’t really have anything to say that David didn’t say already. The default isolation level used by the default TransactionScope constructor is Serializable, which is way less concurrent than SQL Server’s default setting of Read Committed. Unfortunately TransactionScope’s setting, even if not specified and left at the default, will override SQL Server’s, greatly reducing concurrency and increasing deadlocks. The solution is simply to specify the Read Committed isolation level every time. For example code how to do this, and for additional commentary, please see the original article.

This is something I needed to to recently in order to diagnose a database deadlocking problem. The solution isn’t obvious, because there is no obvious system stored procedure or view to query for this information. The solution I found was to use the DBCC USEROPTIONS command. Here is one way to use it. There are two stored procedures here. The first one just selects either all user options, or a single user option. The second one calls the first, asking specifically for the current isolation level.

create  procedure UserOptions_Select
    @set_option  varchar(23) =  null  as  set nocount  on  create  table...

A question came up the other day: what is the best way to write a query that searches a nullable column but treats null = null, without setting ANSI_NULLS OFF? To answer this question, I set up a test table full of plenty of data to test query plans against. here is the SQL I used to generate the test table:

set nocount  on  go  create  table test (value  int)
go  declare @loop  int = 0
declare @rand  int  while (@loop < 10000)
begin  set @rand = rand() * 2000000
     if (@rand % 20 = 0)  set @rand ...

I was recently working on a project where I needed to open a web URL in a new browser window from a Silverlight application.  The trick was, I first needed to check some logic in code-behind to see whether the link should navigate to a page internally within the Silverlight app or externally to a web address in a new browser window.

Silverlight provides the HyperLinkButton control that allows you to set a NavigateUri and TargetName, but I needed to check my custom code-behind logic first, so that wouldn’t work for me.

The week of November 8th 2010, Telerik conducted a great Webinar presented by my dear friend Gabe Sumner, Sitefinity’s Chief evangelist at Telerik.

During the webinar, Gabe showed many features of the upcoming Release Candidate and also shared with the community, almost 1000 webinar attendees, the new pricing model, the new partners model and their new tiered approach.

I have to admit, I have been working with Telerik for the last 6 years on all their products as a partner, consultant, trainer and most of all a friend of the company and a close friend to their management and lots ...

The Template Method Pattern is a design pattern designed to facilitate centralization of the skeleton of an algorithm, while providing well-defined places for the behavior of the algorithm to vary. I wrote about this topic years ago, showcasing a class that encapsulated the Microsoft recommended usage pattern for a DbDataReader, using events to provide the custom behavior. I’m going to revisit the same class today to show the same template method, but using generic delegates.

Everyone who’s used a DbDataReader to access a data source is familiar with the recommended usage pattern. Here is my rendering of it:

using (SqlConnection ...

Amazon is buying Quidsi, owner of sites like diapers.com. See

http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2010/11/06/amazon-to-buy-diapers-com-for-540-million/

Congratulations to our friends at Quidsi! Falafel Software has developed some of the software that helps Quidsi plan it’s software development tasks, a custom Silverlight add-on to AxoSoft’s OnTime project management software.

Falafel Software’s Event Board product is now available for Microsoft TechEd Europe 2010 in Berlin, which starts next week.

With Event Board, users can quickly find Sessions by Speaker, Day, Track or Time Slot, view conference information, tweets, maps, etcetera, and save their favorites to their Windows Phones.

Event Board is a Windows Phone 7 applications, with a Windows Azure middle tier and a SQL Azure back end. For some conferences it is also available on the iPhone and Android. It can be configured to target any conference with an appropriate data feed.

We are also excited to include the ...

This evening I was working on our Event Board application, and needed to write some code that would check the version number of the running Windows Phone 7 application.

In the full .NET framework, that can be easily done like so:

But on the phone, access to Assembly.GetName is restricted to the .NET framework itself, and trying to call it throws a runtime exception (as you might guess from the [SECURITY CRITICAL'] on the tooltip above).

Well, long story short, here is a workaround that does work: calling Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().FullName is allowed, which will give you a string like ...

A new version of the toolkit was released yesterday (November 2) with the following new controls:

- AutoCompleteBox – Born again here from the standard toolkit, this control presents the user with options to automatically complete their text as they type it.  The completion list can be dynamic or static and be provided to the control in a number of ways.

- ListPicker – This control is essentially a ComboBox.  It automatically uses either a full-screen selection popup or a expand-in-place selection depending on the number of items in the list.  This control is similar enough the ListBox that ...

There has been a lot of talk the last week, since PDC in Redmond, about what was said and not said about Silverlight and HTML 5, and speculation as to what is the best technology to invest in going forwards. I was lucky enough to be attending PDC, and so I heard it straight from the horse’s mouth, and would like to weigh in with my 2 cents about where Microsoft is headed, and what our clients and partners should be doing long term and short term.

Silverlight is Not Dead

First of all, there are rumors that Silverlight is ...

The recorded content from our session at the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Developer Launch in Mountain View, CA, is here. Enjoy!

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 ...