Sunny Nagi

VS2010 Beta 2 ISO downloads available now

Sunny Nagi — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 23:20:09 GMT

Following the release of VS2010 and .Net 4 Beta 2 two days ago they are now available for general download.

Following are some of the ISOs that have been made available

Visual Studio

Team Foundation Server

Visual Studio Extensibility

.NET Framework

Express

Enjoy!

VS2010 and .Net 4.0 Beta 2 available, end of the road for SourceSafe ?

Sunny Nagi — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 04:53:34 GMT

Today Microsoft announced release of Beta 2 of visual studio 2010 and .net framework 4. This is immediately available to all MSDN subscribers.

Most importantly this release also includes “go-live” license which means you can start using the products for production projects.

Interesting thing to note was availability of TFS basic edition. Seems to me that a lot of functionality has been stripped out of the full fledged version of TFS and put on diet to serve the needs of small developers who would just like to work on small projects shared between small group.

Google Wave invite

Sunny Nagi — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 07:50:04 GMT

Anyone after a google wave invite I have about 4 left. Email me your gmail address.

Secure password

Sunny Nagi — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:32:14 GMT

With recent attacks on Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo! mail accounts need for secure passwords has become much more evident. Gmail team have put together a really nice blog entry about some of the best practices that should get utilised when choosing a secure password.

There are also many software out on the web that allows you to manage all your usernames and passwords in one central location. One of my favourite one is KeePass Password Safe.

History of Visual Studio

Sunny Nagi — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 01:59:55 GMT

Following up from history of Microsoft videos, channel 9 are about to embark on series of documentary videos explaining the history of Visual studio. For those who don’t know about Visual Studio, it is considered one of the most critical tools that all microsoft platform developers have used for years now.

The first 2 videos of the documentary can be found here and here

Office 2010: Outlook First impression

Sunny Nagi — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:48:46 GMT

For last week or so, I have been running Office 2010 Technical preview now. I received my connect invite over a week ago and after hour long download and install process I got my office 2010 32 bit version working on win 7 install :).

One thing that you will notice straightaway is that Outlook now has ribbon interface. And in fact it was much needed in outlook IMO.

Some of the new things that I really like about new outlook are:

Conversation View

This was much needed feature especially if you are lazy person like me in clearing your inbox. Conversation view actually groups all your emails based on the relevancy of the messages. All emails are grouped based on the subject and outlook automatically works out redundant content of conversations and shows you only most important messages.

Clean up conversation

Another brilliant feature that allows you to delete unnecessary messages from your mailbox without having to loose the latest copy. One of the major benefits of cleanup conversation is that it allows you to trim down the size of the mailbox and keeps all relevant messages for your record. It also keeps track of who replied to which messages.

Quick Steps

Another much needed feature that I think is going to make people hooked to outlook 2010 (like me… who now hates using 2007 at work).

The ribbon in the inbox has a new section for quick steps that allows you to perform multiple actions with single click.

For instance, I like to store some of my important emails into another folder which is part of different outlook file. Moving an email into that locations generally involves a series of steps but with quick steps it is just a single click on the toolbar. The best bit is that you have full control over these action steps so if you want outlook to provide you with a single click step and it is not available you can create your own quick step. You can even manage/customize existing Quick steps which is just awesome!

So far outlook 2010 experience is looking very promising to me.. I am really amazed that how stable is this CTP release. I guess lot of it is due to improvements that Microsoft development teams have brought in with their development process.

Well done MS.. looking forward to future release :)

History of Microsoft Part 2

Sunny Nagi — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:12:53 GMT

Following up from my previous post about series on channel9 about world’s most amazing software development firm. Here are some of the recent episodes:

1989, 1990, 1991,1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998

Enjoy :)

Windows 7 developer contest

Sunny Nagi — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 23:37:40 GMT

Microsoft have announced a developer contest (code7contest) that challenges developers to write an “amazing windows 7 application” the competition price is trip to LA for PDC09 and upto $17,777 in cash. According to windows team blog

“To enter, you must:

Build an original, consumer-oriented client application prototype that runs natively on Windows 7 (for example Win32, WPF, MFC or WinForms – not an Air application or just a gadget) and addresses one or more of the following topic categories:

Simplify My Life

More Media, More Places

Gaming

Work From Anywhere

Safeguard Your Work

Applications for a Better Tomorrow

The application must use at least one of the following Windows 7 technology features; however, judging will give more weight to entries that take advantage of more than one of these features:

Libraries

Windows Touch

Shell Integration

DX11 (DirectX 11)

Sensor and Location Platform”

The contest closes on October 10, 2009 :) so get started!

ERROR: WCF deployment on shared hosting: This collection already contains an address with scheme http

Sunny Nagi — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 05:08:35 GMT

I have been lately working on a WCF version of the gallery engine that I use for my photo gallery. Since I have been using shared hosting server, I had few issues in getting WCF services working on my account.

First up seems like few of the DLL’s were missing, and I when I finished up sorting everything I came across another error This collection already contains an address with scheme http.

Well it seems like WCF doesn’t like to have IIS serving service on address more than one address for instance, http://www.mydomian.com.au and http://mydomain.com.au.

Easiest way to fix this issue is to specify your base address prefix in the web.config file. To do so, you just need to specify following lines in the serviceModel section.

    <system.serviceModel>
    <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true">
      <baseAddressPrefixFilters>
        <add prefix="http://mydomain.com.au"/>
      </baseAddressPrefixFilters>
    </serviceHostingEnvironment>

and once you deploy the service, everything starts working :)

Enjoy!

IIS 7.5 :: HTTP Error 500.19 - Internal Server Error

Sunny Nagi — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:14:36 GMT

I have been using windows 7 for quite a while now but I didn’t need to run a website in IIS. On most occasions, I simply use cassini to test out various applications. If you are planning to setup a new application on IIS 7.5 you are in for a surprise.

HTTP Error 500.19 - Internal Server Error

The requested page cannot be accessed because the related configuration data for the page is invalid.

Detailed Error Information

Module IIS Web Core

Notification BeginRequest

Handler Not yet determined

Error Code: 0x80070005

Config Error: Cannot read configuration file due to insufficient permissions

Basically what this error means is that IIS_User cannot access web.config file of your web application. So what would have caused this issue.. well a little feature called UAC which was introduced by microsoft with the release of windows vista.

The best solution to get around this issue is by applying correct permissions to the web.config file. To do so, simply follow the following steps:

In Windows Explorer, locate the web.config file that is associated with the Web site.
Right-click the web.config file
Click Properties.
Click the Security tab, and then click Edit.
Click Add.
In the Enter the object names to select box, type computername\IIS_IUSRS, click Check Names, and then click OK.
Note Computername is a placeholder for the computer name.
Click to select the Read check box, and then click OK.
In the Web.config Properties dialog box, click OK.

And that’s it you are done :)