Recently I started looking for jobs, because my master thesis will come to an end and I am too dynamic to loose time after graduation searching for the perfect job.

Since I am a certified ASP .Net 3.5 professional, I started looking in this direction – but almost anyone associated ASP with SharePoint. Since I didn’t had any clue about SharePoint, I enjoyed very much the opportunity to take part in a technical workshop on this theme.

So on a very beautiful day of 8^th of March (yes, on the Woman’s day), I woke up and traveled to Köln, where the workshop was held. At 10 AM the workshop, presented by Šenaj Lelic, maguro DataAssist GmbH and seconded by Peter Kirchner, Program Manager ISV for Developer Platform & Strategy Group.

The workshop was focused on different features, starting with a technical overview of SharePoint 2010 which prepared the audience including the presentation of new features in SharePoint 2010 which were interesting for us, developers.

Then the talk was focused on visual features like ribbons, client object model, Silverlight, Workflow. Then, because everything is now related to the Cloud, the next point in line was the overview of the way in which SharePoint 2010 can collaborate in the cloud with Office 365 and the new platform for SharePoint solutions.

Digging deeper into the subject, we were presented also some development tricks and then Mr. Lelic discussed about Visual Studio 2010, Sandboxed Solutions, Developer Dashboard, Office Integration and Development, how to use Visio to enhance SharePoint.

The last part of the workshop was done buy Mr. Kirchner and was composed from a introduction to the business side of Sharepoint: a quick 1-2-3: SharePoint presentation to your clients which I found very instructive, being the distillation of the entire workshop, followed by a small presentation from the sales person’s view about knowledge development: what should you know to inform and when?

It was a really cool event, a gradually insertion into the subject, presenting both the advanced features (from the developer point of view) but also a nice sales perspective on the product, allowing us, the devs, to have a perspective on the value and business opportunities that SharePoint 2010 has.

I also have to mention the quality time in lunch break that we had with XBOX 360 with Kinect:

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

SharePoint 2010 – a technical overview for software developer

As part of the Microsoft Student Partners  I was invited to take part yet again from a Social Media Reporting team. This time is the CeBIT, a huge conference about consumer electronics. We arrived yesterday, on 2nd of March, to prepare ourselves for the challenge.

In the morning we just scouted the area, looking for interesting places to blog, tweet and make movies about. If you haven’t been to CeBIT, you should understand that it is really HUGE – there are around 30 big display areas in which you can be lost without a map.

There were a lot of nice prizes there :

And people involved in the document copy are really dedicated:

Turkey is the partner country this year:

Canon and Oce had an even nicer prize:

There were a lot of interested people who got tired after a day of walking:

:

Consumer technology doesn’t refer only to computers, here are some samples of massage tables:

Fujitsu had a very big presence with both hardware and software products:

At Dell stand, there were both Dell Venue Pro and Streak presented side by side:

IBM had the most impressive stand (in my oppinion):

And of course, a little Apple in a sea of Microsoft products:

First day looked good – let’s see what will come next!

Cheers from CeBIT 2011!

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

My first day at CeBIT

I am a certified SQL 2005 Technology Specialist. While this means a lot from a professional point of view, the new technologies come toward us, developers, too fast sometimes. It is quite a while since SQL 2008 was launched, and now SQL 2008 R2 brings its novelties. One good developer must keep up to date with its skills, otherwise the quality and quantity of his or hers work will suffer. New technologies means usually more productive developers – and I wish to stay on the wave instead under it.

When the invitation to this workshop came into my e-mail I knew that I must go. Since for us, Microsoft Student Partners, were some places reserved, I couldn’t resist and I enrolled for this – the event was booked for 7 February.

For me, it had an additional bonus: this talk was completely given in German, so I looked forward also for my language skills improvement.

It proved to be a very good idea – Not only that I got the update of my knowledge on SQL 2005 to 2008, but I learned a lot on SQL Azure, the new version of it.

We started at 10 am with a overview of SQL Server 2008 R2 and learned what is in it for me as power user / developer of Microsoft SQL Server. Then the presentation moved into the direction of efficiency both in dev time and fast running operations, evaluation of the technical potential of new version of SQL 2008 and then a little bit of marketing to our customers – learning about cost-benefit ratio and of course how can they can save money, time, server capacity by using the improvements in this new release.

The next point in the workshop was about Project Gemini, a new feature in SQL Server 2008 R2, which enable Excel users to use real Self-Service Business Intelligence. Users who are more confortable to use Excel are now able to import directly data from different sources, create relations and then they can share and evaluate interactive pivot tables and charts – and this is possible even when using huge data sets. There are also a lot of improvements in other areas like Reporting Services, Master Data Services.

Another technology that I found very interesting was Stream Insight, which enables users to create streams of event data. This data can be acquired from different sources such as RFID, sensors and web logs across different businesses in manufacturing, financial services and utilities.

We continued on the soft skills side – understanding the customer and his expectations in the context of the new introduced features – how to create the best solution for a given business based on SQL Server 2008 R2. That included a small talk about how to draw the architecture from the customer’s point of view and set the right expectations of the customer.´

Then we dived lightly (after all, most of us were developers, but to add to my skills a little experience in consultancy is not bad) in to the know-how required to architect a solution based on the needs and particularities the partner and also a some hints for leaders on what expertise should build your developers.

I left with a big bag of new knowledge and my only regret was that it was just one day event!

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 – a business overview for software developer

While creating the Windows Phone7 version of my Master Thesis project, I needed to show some custom dialogs. Since Coding4Fun has some very nice dialogs, I explored the way that they might be customized to fit my needs. I needed a quick solution to a pressing problem.

I got in touch with this controls through WinPhoneGeek’s article Coding4Fun Toolkit for WP7 Overview and Getting Started, where he presented from the eagle’s eye the controls in the package. I was interested more in AboutPrompt control, but unfortunately he didn’t had it presented in the detail.

After opening the assembly and navigate to the class, you can see this:

What is the most interesting is that we can have access to the (String)Title, (Object)Body and  (Object)Footer properties. This opens a lot of possibilities, since what I wanted was to create a custom body in which to show an Error, Warning or Notification.

So let’s dig into some code!

First, create a new Windows Phone 7 application in Visual Studio 2010 (if you are tired and just want to read this article, please do so – the full code is attached at the end of the article). You can create any flavor of WP7 application, as my code will be as unobtrusive as possible.

Then, download and add references to the Coding4Fun assemblies. You can read how to do this in the WinPhoneGeek’s article. Next add a button on the MainPage.xaml (or any desired xaml page) and then hook it to the code.

Next, in the button click we need to create the message view, hook its Completed action and show it. The Completed event is very important – will give you the possibility of interacting with the user, recover from the error by restarting the erroneous action or just navigate through your app to a e-mail submission form, allowing user to describe the issue encountered while using your app – very important, while you want your WP7 application to get only high reviews and this can be accomplished only keeping the users happy.

Since the customization is quite simple, I took the pattern of the desktop messages, displaying only the essential:

• Title of the notification,
• a icon describing the gravity of the notification,
• a succinct description of the notification
• more detailed description

The code to do this is the following (double click to select all code):

private void button1_Click ( object sender, RoutedEventArgs e ) {
    ModalNotification( "My Fancy Error", "Error while coding", "Silence! I will debug you!", Notification.Warning );
}

private void button1_Click ( object sender, RoutedEventArgs e ) {    ModalNotification( "My Fancy Error", "Error while coding", "Silence! I will debug you!", Notification.Warning );}public void ModalNotification ( string title, string semiTitle, String message, Notification notification ) {
    var about = new AboutPrompt( );
    about.Completed += new System.EventHandler>( about_Completed );
    about.Title = title;
    var panel = new WrapPanel {
        HorizontalAlignment = HorizontalAlignment.Stretch,
        VerticalAlignment = VerticalAlignment.Stretch
    };

    Uri myUri = notification == Notification.Error ?
        new Uri( "images/error.png", UriKind.RelativeOrAbsolute )
        : new Uri( "images/warn.png", UriKind.RelativeOrAbsolute );
    ImageSource imgSource = new BitmapImage( myUri );
    var imgVisual = new Image { Source = imgSource, Height = 64, Width = 64 };

    var tbSemiTitle = new TextBlock {
        Text = semiTitle,
        Margin = new Thickness { Top = 8, Left = 18 },
        FontSize = 30
    };

    var tbMessage = new TextBlock {
        HorizontalAlignment = HorizontalAlignment.Stretch,
        VerticalAlignment = VerticalAlignment.Stretch,
        TextWrapping = TextWrapping.Wrap,
        Margin = new Thickness { Top = 20 },
        Text = message
    };

    panel.Children.Add( imgVisual );
    panel.Children.Add( tbSemiTitle );
    panel.Children.Add( tbMessage );
    about.Body = panel;

    about.Show( );
}

void about_Completed ( object sender, PopUpEventArgs e ) {
    // Implement here the logic to handle the return from Modal AboutPrompt
    throw new System.NotImplementedException( );
}

public enum Notification {
    Warning,
    Error
} ;

Now let’s see what code does: First, it instantiates a new instance of AboutPrompt and hooks its Completed event to a proper handler. Here you can write your logic to handle the user confirmation.

Because  I wanted a clean, nice look which would be also familiar, I choose the layout of the Windows MessageBox. As for the main title it was pretty easy, since I had access to the about.Title string property. But with the rest it got a little complicated, since about.Body doesn’t specify which kind of control desires. By looking into the sources of the project, I noticed that it needs a Container – so I provided a Wrap Panel, in which I added a Image and two TextBlocks. The visual can be seen in the left:

The code can be freely downloaded from here.

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

Improving Coding4Fun’s AboutPrompt

I use my blog to record and share my knowledge, but also to present to possible employers my skills. I use it like a marketing tool for my persona. For this, I need to make available not only the RSS and Twitter account, but also resume profiles like Xing, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Since I am using WordPress and I know a little bit of PHP and MySQL I wanted to customize my current theme.But some time ago I’ve read that they don’t encourage you to customize directly the chosen theme, but instead create your own child theme, with the desired customizations. This way, when the theme will be updated, you won’t loose neither time nor brains trying to redo all the modifications.

Creating a child theme, directly from the developers of WordPress

Making a child theme is very simple. Create a directory, put a properly formatted style.css file in it, and you have a child theme! With a little understanding of HTML and CSS, you can make that very basic child theme modify the styling and layout of a parent theme to any extent without editing the files of the parent theme itself. That way, when the parent theme is updated, your modifications are preserved.

For some time ago, I started using child themes. At first, it seemed a useless time investment, but since then the theme was updated 3 or 4 times, so imagine each time creating a list of modifications to the original, implement them again and again in the new version!

Let’s see some code!

The modification that I will present now is how to add new icons for job websites, up on the bar. The steps are:

1. Using your preffered image editing tool (I preffer using Paint .Net, very smart and effective PNG producer) I modified the nav-icons.png file :

From : To:

The extra icons are taken from a royality free icon pack. They are 64 by 64 pixels. You can modify their sizes, but you’ll also have to update the javascript code that moves the images up and down.

Note: To make your life easier and keep the modifications to a minimum, keep the Twitter icon first and the RSS last, otherwise you’ll have to override the entire $nav_extra underneath.

2.  Add the icons in your child theme, by concatenating the script that shows new buttons with the one which is already present, containing the Twitter and RSS. If you want to change the order of the icons, you can change the lines order. If you want to make the RSS icon first, instead of adding strings to $nav_extra, you’ll have to recreate also the RSS and Twitter strings and insert them in the string variable. Don’t forget to add the action to WordPress queue, such that your function to be called:

function mystique_navbuttons_pics($nav_extra)
{
  $nav_extra .= '<a href="http://www.facebook.com/radu.poenaru" class="nav-extra facebook" target="_blank" title="Contact me on Facebook!"><span>Contact me on Facebook!</span></a>';
  $nav_extra .= '<a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/radupoe" class="nav-extra linkedin" target="_blank" title="Contact me on LinkedIn!"><span>Contact me on LinkedIn!</span></a>';
  $nav_extra .= '<a href="https://www.xing.com/profile/Radu_Poenaru" class="nav-extra xing" target="_blank" title="Contact me on Xing!"><span>Contact me on LinkedIn!</span></a>';

  $nav_extra = str_replace("title", "target='_blank' title", $nav_extra) ;

  return $nav_extra;
}
add_action('mystique_navigation_extra', mystique_navbuttons_pics');

3. Add the CSS required by the icons. This requires each icon to know where to start cutting from main PNG file its own appearance. We will create and inject the CSS in the corresponding file.

function mystique_navbuttons_css(){
 $i = THEME_URL.'/images'; ?>
/* Extra navigation icons */
#header a.xing{background: url(<?php echo $i; ?>/nav-icons.png) no-repeat scroll -192px top transparent}
#header a.linkedin{background: url(<?php echo $i; ?>/nav-icons.png) no-repeat scroll -64px top transparent}
#header a.facebook{background: url(<?php echo $i; ?>/nav-icons.png) no-repeat scroll -128px top transparent}

<?php
}
add_action('mystique_css','mystique_navbuttons_css');

That’s all guys, now you have a child theme wit your customizations and never afraid that you’ll have to spend time again when the theme will be updated!

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

Adding new Social icons to the Mystique theme

Almost all good developers that I know have some kind of repository of their code. Mine is my blog, this blog. Stay with me and you’ll find out how to easily be able to create your local version of WordPress, customize and test your plugins.

For´this you’ll need to follow the next steps:

1. Go to Webmatrix official website and download the Web Platform Installer which will install for you not only Webmatrix itself, but also a lot of useful tools like an integrated webserver, Internet Information Services Express, PHP interpretor and its connectors just to name a few. But you can also use it to add new features like ASP .Net MVC3!
2. Because now the install of MySQL server is not any more supported, you’ll have to install it by yourself – go to their official website and download it from there. Choose the MSI Installer essentials and the process will be very easy. I prefer to install it as a service and then, from Control Panel –> Services, to set it to start manually. This way won’t eat resources when it is not needed.
3. Next, we’ll download a MySQL GUI called HeidiSQL – free and smart product. One might say that command line is enough, but I would rather concentrate on development instead of memorizing all those commands.
4. Create an empty database and a user. I personally like to set the database name, user and its password to the ones that I use on my production WordPress website. This way, I only have to modify only the DBHost in the WordPress’ configuration file.
5. Create a production database backup using your prefered tool – I use for quite a while the WP-DB-Backup plugin for WordPress to generate my scheduled backups. Import  the content of the backup (using HeidiSQL is very easy – just point it to a zip, gzip archive or a sql file).
6. Now that we setup our database, let’s go to the code – download locally the sources of your website using FTP or other tools that your hosting provides, open Webmatrix and create a new website using local files. This way you will setup your development workspace wherever you like – I prefer to use D: drive. Otherwise, you’ll be prompted to use your MyDocuments folder which will not be available any more in case of windows clean reinstall – the entire c: drive will be wiped-out.
7. Make the proper changes to the wp-config file (if you followed my advice you’ll just have to replace in DBHost your production server with localhost). Hit Run (the small green arrow from the Webmatrix top ribbon) and you’re good to go!

If by any change you get a blank window in your prefered browser stating that “

Error establishing a database connection

” or something like this, go and check that in your hosts file (found in c:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\) you have uncommented the line with localhost:

# For example:
#
#      102.54.94.97     rhino.acme.com          # source server
#       38.25.63.10     x.acme.com              # x client host

# localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself.
    127.0.0.1       localhost
#    ::1             localhost

Happy coding!

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

7 easy steps to use Webmatrix and WordPress local development

In my latest Windows Phone 7 workshop that I presented in UniBonn, I promised that we will have a contents. By now two people created and submitted their applications. What makes me happy even more than their interest is the fact that they used techniques not presented in the workshop – location services, WP7 sensors, persistence in IsolatedStorage database as alternative to IsolatedStorage file.

While reading the code, I realized that would have been better to have a two day workshop in which to also present and demo other features of the Windows Phone 7 like geolocation and its mocking, shakes, tile updates, push notifications being only few of the examples. But fortunately there is still time, so I will plan this for my future workshops.

  Here they are in their submission order:

1. TrashPlanner by Simon Guido

Description (by app author): It's a trash planner for the city of Bonn. I personally miss almost every day of garbage collection at home.

The App will help people by location their position using GPS (simulated, if the code detects to be run in the emulator). With the GPS-Position it will do a reverse geolocation lookup, to give the user the choice of the street names around his location. The list of street names calls the Google-Maps API to get an image of the street position. Further one can select which kind of dustbins has to be listed (i don't want to see things, that i do not use).

On selection of a street the Webpage of City of Bonn is queried, and parsed using some regular expressions, to list all collection dates, that match my street, my selected dustbins – and of course are not in the past.

Of course all settings will be saved for the next start, so that the positioning has not to be done again.

Video:

Screenshots:

Sources can be found here. Note: the creator of the application has the copyright and the full responsibility for the files included in the archive.

2. “Do This Now” by Loredana Ene

Description (by app author): The main purpose of the application was to familiarize with the development environment. The initial idea was to implement more functionality, but from lack of time and experience some were are not completed – they are marked in the interface with a green "< not implemented>" sign.

I want to mention that:
1. The idea of the application is not new, there exists applications with a similar idea.
2. The SilverlightPhoneDatabase project used for persistence was downloaded from the Codeplex site – http://winphone7db.codeplex.com/.

Video: no video available

Screenshots:

Sources can be found here. Note: the creator of the application has he full responsibility for the files included in the archive.

Thank you for your efforts!

Because there are only two contestants, I will change a little bit the rules by allowing to all participants that were present in the workshop to vote for one of the two applications. The vote would consist in 1 to 5 points for each application, where 5 is the best.

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

Applications for Windows Phone 7 Contest

Back to the Student Technology Conference 2010 – second day – again I had a full schedule: attending web development session and after lunch the company startup coaching event. After a nice over-night sleep, I was full of energy to continue attending the presentations! You can read about the first day here.

First I went to the Axel Schulz’s presentation about Cloud computing, where he presented us the options that we have when using the Cloud system – Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS), Platform as a Service (PAAS) and Software as a Service (SAAS)

Next was Wolfgang Gallo’s presentation – “Web development”, which was a thoroughly nice overview of what web development was at its start and how it evolved – from editing with Notepad static HTML pages to ASP, AJAX, ASP .Net, MVC, WebMatrix and Razor syntax. Was an amazing history lesson!

After a delicious lunch and conversation, I joined the Coaching track, where Dr. Richard Geibel presented us the steps to create a powerful Business plan, allowing our application to get the full attention of the possible investors. We all had also the possibility to schedule a meeting with Dr.Geibel to ask particular questions, Was indeed a good thing, because I found out htat there are quite a few associations in Germany who have as a goal the help of young entrepreneurs. One of them is NUK – they have a 6 month- plan to put you in business!

After this, sadly, we had to head home – a very nice event was ended. I learnt a lot of new stuff, connected with my fellow Microsoft Student Partners and enjoyed a high quality event!

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

Imagine Cup STC 2010 day 2

Microsoft Student Partners organized this weekend a very cool event, meant to make easier for the students to enroll to Imagine Cup 2011 and have also good results at it. The agenda was pretty condensed, having 3 tracks in 2 days. The tracks were wisely organized, allowing each one of us to focus on its own area of interest.

But don’t imagine that all was about technology. It really was more than this – we got coaching also for improving presentation skills and creating a business plan – Microsoft offers not only BizSpark project for startups, but also coaching so this startups would turn into a success!

So in a beautiful yet snowy winter morning me and two or my MSP colleagues left Bonn in Frankfurt direction. After two hours and some stops for unfreezing our car’s windshield (the owner forgot to put in some anti-freezing liquid such that the sprinklers didn’t work because of the frozen water along the tubes) we arrived in the beautiful Castle Hoechst.

There the organization of event was perfect: we were surrounded by breakfast. Coffee, tea, cakes, fruits – everything one needs to start a good day.

At 11 the conference started with the Keynote of Dr. Lars Lippert, Academic and Start-Up Team Lead, and Henrike Röse, Academic Event Manager, which presented us some of the key facts about the competition:

We had afterwards a small lunch break in which I also enjoyed the XBox 360 with Kinect. Everybody enjoyed it so it was quite a large queue for using it.

Later on, I had followed the Track 1 by attending Alexander Galkin’s “Introduction in the .Net platform and the .Net 4.0 framework” where he presented a lot of interesting facts about LINQ, PowerShell and .net in general. Additionally, there were presented tools that improve the usability of Visual Studio 2010, like ReSharper and Refactor and some addins that help you in your daily work.

Next workshop was “Tools session: TFS, VS, Live Services uvm.” presented by Tom Wendel, Development Evangelist in Microsoft Germany, focusing on tools that complete the already used Visual Studio environment, like communication and collaboration over Skype, office Communicator / Live, TeamViewer, Problem steps recorder, uploading files to FTP using Filezilla, debugging with Sysinternals and many more.

Then a small relaxing coffee break allowed us to fill our batteries for another set of presentations and hands-on demos. This time XNA with Tom Wendel,  where I’ve learnt some tricks in games development.

Afterwards, we were invited to dinner and relaxation. It was already 18 o’clock and I was tired but full of information. I had nice conversation and a gourmet meal. Here is an example of the nice dishes that were served:

And of course, afterwards we played with XBOX 360 and Kinect again:

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

Imagine Cup STC 2010

After presenting my latest WP7 workshop, I have quite a few nice impressions: all students were eager to learn, to discover, lots of questions were asked. We created a nice Twitter application based on the default Panorama template, learning about XAML and its advantages, how to use Blend to enhance the user visual experience, how to help our designer colleagues by creating mocked data such that while we develop they design on real data, how to use MVVM – in one word, a real startup in Windows Phone 7 developer career.

And, as usual, we didn’t finish at 16 as proposed because the enthusiasm of the participants. Eager to know, eager to learn- how can we possible fix a deadline?

The thing that spiced up our workshop was the nice contest that me as representative of Microsoft Student Partners and our Microsoft leaders setup for our colleagues: the chance of winning a Microsoft Certification Voucher!

Underneath are some pictures from the event:

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

Follow-up of Windows Phone 7 workshop