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 Friday, September 21, 2007
I often find myself having to upload data in Excel files into temp tables in SQL Server in order to do ad hoc updates or comparisons. Users will commonly submit an Excel file containing data to verify, insert, update or what not. I know there is a way to have SQL Server read data directly form Excel, so finally I got round to trying that out to make these ad hoc tasks easier. Here is how you do it:
posted on September 21, 2007  #    by John Waters  Comments [0] Trackback
 Monday, September 17, 2007
San Jose, CA – September 17th 2007 - Software Architect Steve Trefethen passed his first Microsoft certification exam last week to become the latest Falafel team member to be Microsoft Certified. “I am very excited to see the entire falafel team Microsoft certified again” said Lino Tadros, President & CEO of Falafel Software “Steve, is a high caliber Architect and I look forward to seeing him continue to pass the Microsoft certification exams to reach the highest level of their certifications.”
posted on September 17, 2007  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0] Trackback
Here is an interesting thing I noted the other day. I have an ASP.Net 2.0 application, and in one of the forms, I store the search criteria that you enter on that page in an instance of my ScheduleSearchCriteria class:
posted on September 17, 2007  #    by John Waters  Comments [0] Trackback
 Saturday, September 15, 2007
San Jose, CA - September 14th 2007 - Falafel Software is excited to announce the first update to ActiveFocus 2007 Q2, which adds a much asked for filtering capability to most of the columns in the main artifact grids, and a rewrite of the discussion component, designed to make project and artifact level discussions even easier to use. The release also includes some bug fixes and minor changes, see the release notes here for more details. A free one-user trial version of the new release is available for immediate download from the Falafel community site and Falafel’s demo site is also running the new version. You can take if for a spin at www.activefocus.net/afdemo. Our hosted sites are upgraded to the new version as of today. Please check our roadmap here for details of the next release scheduled for Q3.
posted on September 15, 2007  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0] Trackback
 Thursday, August 30, 2007
I was debugging some ASP.Net 2.0 code that renders a PDF to the response buffer of a page request, using code like this (byte[] bytes is the PDF file, which was rendered using Microsoft Reporting Services Web Service interface) :
posted on August 30, 2007  #    by John Waters  Comments [0] Trackback
 Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Falafel software is proud to announce the successful launch of version 2.0 of its custom built ERP system Velocity. Velocity handles billions of dollars of business for America’s leading organic produce company. Version 2.0 provided a rewrite of key parts of the user interface, using Web 2.0 technology like AJAX and Web Services to provide the data entry performance of a desktop application combined with the ease of deployment and central manageability of a web application. The system handles hundreds of users, hundreds of thousands of sales orders and invoices, and provides 24/7 availability and high performance using a scale-out Microsoft architecture.

posted on August 29, 2007  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0] Trackback
 Monday, August 27, 2007
If you need to share resources across multiple pages you can use global resources as opposed to the local resources shown in the previous blog. Global resources are implemented using explicit binding, i.e. server tags like this one:
posted on August 27, 2007  #    by Noel Rice  Comments [0] Trackback
Discover some strange but sadly true limitations of the Virtual PC support for ISB devices...
posted on August 27, 2007  #    by John Waters  Comments [1] Trackback
 Saturday, August 25, 2007

I had the privilege of attending a two-day training for Expression Design and Expression Blend this week in San Jose, CA.  The trainer, Joshua, was knowledgeable and fun to learn from.  We enjoyed his training and personality.

Unfortunately, the product is just NOT ready for prime time.  I was shocked! Really shocked! Poor guy had to apologize almost every three minutes for two days on how the product works and why he has to do things in a very awkward way to get it to behave.
First the IDE is not intuitive at all.  I thought, hey I am a developer, maybe this is just not for me, but all the designers in the room were shaking their heads as well.

There was total confusion between canvas and layers in Blend, disturbing implementation for differentiating between selection and scope that could easily waste hours of work. There lacked in the IDE a clear path to redirect the effort to the correct path.
Look at the Trigger clickable button in the IDE in the picture below.

image

I thought you click that to access the Trigger page, nope, if you click on that Trigger button, you will delete the only trigger you have on your WPF form.  Who designed this IDE?
Yes I can see now the + sign and the minus sign but that is just not the way it is done guys.
At some point the IDE will be so cluttered with docked windows that it rendered the experience of working in the IDE totally useless.
You can save your designs as .Design files in Expression Design and export the XAML to Blend. That is a one way street; blend can not send the xaml back to design.  Expression Design does not know anything about .XAML files either and can not open them.  Just make them!
The scrollbar in the properties window disappears often and the user can no longer get to the properties off the screen space currently visible. Eventually, resizing the docked windows brings back the scrollbar.
Modifying XAML code in the editor sometimes does not reflect the change in the designer unless you close down the project and reopen.
Ok, that is enough, you get the picture.  Great idea, powerful product, long way to go to get it to be productive and useful.

posted on August 25, 2007  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0] Trackback