Here is a little cross platform gotcha that might save you some time, it certainly has bitten my colleagues a few times….

If you have a .NET WCF REST service, then it will by default use the DataContractSerializer. Now, imagine you have an iOS, Android or maybe a HTML client, calling that API with a JSON payload (or an XML payload), and hand constructing the HTTP payload. On the server (receiving) side, you see that some of your object properties are NULL, even though you can clearly see them being sent in Fiddler. You double check the spelling and capitalization ...

I recently spoke at the Windows TechConference in Baden, Switzerland, on moving Windows Mango applications to Metro. You can see my slides here.

With some very nice new features!

Instead of deleting and reconfiguring a whole new instance when you upload a new version of your service, now it is upgraded in place!

Even better, the deployment ID of the app (which is used in the DNS entry) doesn’t change, so no more having to update our DNS records every time I deploy a new version.

And best of all, if you have more than 1 instance of a role running, it takes turn upgrading them so your service is never down!

There are some nice new additions to the Visual Studio deployment ...

I have been using the new Http programming stack from Microsoft, WCF Web API, see http://wcf.codeplex.com/releases/view/73399. Very cool stuff! It works really well with their new HttpClient, JsonObject, and the dynamic keyword.

Here, I am calling a REST API to download a JSON object:

See how the string is the JSON string for the object?

Well, next I use the dynamic keyword and JsonValue.Parse to parse this into a dynamic Json object:

Note how it has keys for the two properties…

And notice how because I am using dynamic, I can reference these by property name!...

Right now, the DEMOgala event is running in the Sheraton Downtown Denver, and it is powered by EventBoard.

DEMOgala describes itself as follows: “Colorado is home to a vibrant technology industry and DEMOgala provides a peek into what makes our industry continue to thrive and excel. Industry leaders from across the nation will converge to relay expert insight on the influence of technology and how today's forward-thinking companies are reshaping our perspectives on business, science, entertainment and community”.

Our very own Mike Dugan is on site representing Falafel Software.

This is shaping up to be a very busy ...

If you read my previous blog post Two Good Ways to Work With Excel Files in C#, you will be excited to learn that there is now an even better way! Check out the EPPlus project on CodePlex. It is based off the original ExcelPackage, but is faster and adds in tons of new features, including support for formulas, cell styling, charts, pictures, shapes and much more, a huge leap in functionality. Also, it is actively being developed, where ExcelPackage kind of died. I was able to upgrade my code with hardly any change, all I needed to ...

Capitola, CA: Falafel Software cements its position as the Premier Platinum Sitefinity Partner by announcing the following two key contributions:

First, Falafel Software has partnered with Telerik in designing, authoring and delivering the entire on-demand developer training program, a set of in depth videos covering every aspect of the award winning Sitefinity 4 product. The training was built in collaboration with the same set of engineers that has gained industry recognition for their dedication to high quality Sitefinity Training and a host of Sitefinity Modules.

“We have been working tightly with the Telerik Sitefinity team since long before Sitefinity ...

Read more about it here. Among other things we will have live tiles, front and back, background processing via agents, Silverlight 4, mixed XNA and Silverlight, profiling tools, improved emulator, more sensors and sensor APIs, fast application switching, local SQL, IE9 and access to the calendar. Very exciting!

The actual download is here. You cannot install it side by side with the WP7 tools, but the new 7.1 can target both the new and old versions.

EventBoard is now loaded with the data for Microsoft TechEd 2011 in Atlanta, Georgia. You can use it on your Windows Phone 7, iPhone or Android device for free! Come visit our booth at TechEd, #1347.

TechDays Sweden 2011 is currently under way. The conference is powered by EventBoard. Mobile devices, including Windows Phone 7, iPhone and Android are running EventBoard, and the data is hosted in EventBoard’s cloud. In addition, the EventBoard data is served up on the TechDays ASP.Net site.

Attendees can use the software to plan attendance, bookmark favorites, and rate their sessions.

Falafel Software is pleased to announce that our popular EventBoard mobile solution is being used for the Midwest User Group Spring 2011 Conference in Oak Brook, IL, next week.

MWUG is the largest independent user group for QAD's manufacturing management and Enterprise Application software. The conference agenda is here.

MWUG chose to use Falafel’s EventBoard for all their User Group Conferences going forwards. EventBoard is the low cost, hassle free way for conference organizers to bring their conference catalog to life on a mobile device, supporting iPhone, Windows Phone 7 and Android handsets. Conference data is stored in the ...

I have long been a fan of LinqToExcel, available on Google Code here. It makes reading an Excel file a breeze. There are lots of different ways to write the code, but it can be as simple as this:

var excel =  new ExcelQueryFactory("excelFileName");  

var indianaCompanies =  

  from c  in excel.Worksheet<Company>()                         

  where c.State ==  "IN"  

  select c;

I recently needed to set up some C# code that would send out password reset emails using an external SMTP server. I was familiar with using the built in .NET framework MailMessage class, introduced in .NET 2.0, along with it’s buddy the SmtpClient. You can easily set the port and host of the SMTP server, and send messages, including HTML mail, attachments and al the other basic necessities of emailing. You can also set the SmtpClient.EnableSSL property to use SSL for your communication with the SMTP server, which is exactly what I needed to do.

Now, since the service ...

I was trying to find out why a Windows Azure Worker Role was having problems, so I enabled, Intellitrace, only to find this broke the RIA Services in the Web Role in that same cloud deployment.

I could see the IntelliTrace log included this very odd error message:

Operation could destabilize the runtime

Well, we certainly don’t want that to happen!

A little research dug up this very helpful blog by Kyle McClellan: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kylemc/archive/2010/06/09/ria-azure-and-intellitrace.aspx

Short story is, that it is a known issue with RIA Services in Azure, turning on Intellitrace on the RIA assemblies is ...