First blog entry for March 2009!

Mark this one as problem solved.

I am working on a project that uses ASP.NET Master Pages. I added an Ajax ModalPopupExtender to a Content page, but it was not rendering properly.

The modal panel was displaying at one location, not at the center of the page, and the shadow was displaying somewhere else. I discovered that the following DOCTYPE declaration was missing from the Master page.

Now the modal is displaying properly.

This page supported by ACRITECH Corporation .

We have Chris Hammond coming to talk with us at the Capital Area DotNetNuke User Group (http://www.capitaldug.org) meeting this coming Wednesday, May 21st. Chris is a core team member of the DotNetNuke development team.

This will be a great meeting for those interested in developing DotNetNuke Modules!

The meeting starts at 7pm at the ATT offices in Tysons Corner, in Vienna, Virginia.

Working with Microsoft MVP, Jeff Schoolcraft, we have organized a wonderful developer learning event on Saturday, March 29th at Strayer University in Woodbridge, Va.

CodeCamp SOUTH

Speakers include:

• Brian Noyes, Microsoft MVP
• Jonathan Cogley, Microsoft MVP
• Sahil Malik, Microsoft MVP
• Frank LaVigne, Microsoft MVP
• Antonio Chagoury, DotNetNuke Team Lead

and many more.

Topics to be covered include a host of new technologies along with some introductory courses. Here is a sample (you can see the rest at the NovaCodeCamp site).

• Visual Studio 2008
• SQL Server 2008
• SharePoint 2007
• DotNetNuke Module Development
• Office 2007 Development
• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Development
• Ajax
• Silverlight

For you developers, this is a golden opportunity to see presentations that would typically be presented at high priced conferences like Microsoft TechEd and VSLive. And it is FREE. However, registration is limited to the first 100 that sing up - so make your reservation today!

OK, I'm a little slow. But, here are the two presentations I made at the Richmond Code Camp two weeks ago. These are in Microsoft Powerpoint.

XQuery for DBAs and Developers (Powerpoint)

Richmond Code Camp XQuery for DBAs and Developers.pptx (980.39 KB)

XQuery SQL Demonstration File (.SQL)

XQuery Presentation.sql (42.59 KB)

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; SQLCLR for DBAs and Developers (Powerpoint)

SQLCLR Richmond Code Camp Oct 6.pptx (620.63 KB)

First, let me congratulate our fearless leader, Scott Lock on being selected as a Microsoft MVP. This is a wonderful accomplish and it is about time Microsoft got around to recognizing all the people who organize events and connect developers together. Scott's recognition is long overdue. He's not only a technologist, but a community leader.

On most nights there is a user group somewhere in the Washington DC metro area with someone presenting technical content that would typically cost significant monies in travel, lodging, and registration fees to see the same content at a conference or training scenario. Without a doubt, the CAPAREA user group has had a stellar list of presenters and topics. Without people like Scott, who work tirelessly to make these presentations happen - and for no compensation - the developer community would not have access to these wonderful resources. Thanks Scott - and kudos for a job well done.

Scott is giving a presentation tonight at the Capital Area .NET User Group (CAPAREA) on VSTO - Automation and Customizing Excel 2003.

Here's the summary:

Tuesday, July 24, 2007 at 7:00 PM

Building office applications has never been better.  You've heard all of the hype about Office 2007, Ribbons, etc.  This session is based on what the majority of us are in today...Office 2003.  Customizing and automating Excel 2003 is a great way to build dynamic workbooks that solve some cool problems.  This presentation is an overview of what Visual Studio Tools for office is about and how it applies to Excel 2003 and Office 2003.

Located below are the SQL, data and VB project files from my presentation at the Richmond Code Camp

RichmondCodeCampXquery.zip (12.6 KB)

Here is my powerpoint presention. It is more than a little light because the focus of CodeCamp is the CODE!

Richmond Code Camp XQuery Tips and Tricks.ppt (2.34 MB)

I would like to thank Andy Leonard, Susan Lennon, and the rest of the Richmond crew for a well run operation.

OK. I'm a slacker.

I promised to get this up back a month ago. Here is my powerpoint presentation on developing user defined aggregates in SQL Server 2005 using .NET CLR. I gave this presentation at the NovaSQL user group. The group is managed superbly by Jeremy Kadlec, who also does MS SQL Tips.

I was recently engaged in a project to create some SQL Server 2005 user-defined aggregates. These would be used just like the standard set of SQL aggreates (shown below):

SELECT SUM(product_prices) FROM someProductTable

I'll write more about the project later, but suffice to say I learned a couple of things.

1. UDAs can only take one value (at this time). Of course, my project involved multi-column values.

2. If, after installing your assemblies, you then try to install your components (UDTs, UDAs, UDFs, etc.), and get the dreaded the following message:

Msg 102, Level 15, State 1, Line 2

Incorrect syntax near 'WeightedAverageAssembly'.

[WeightedAverageAssembly is the name of my assembly]

then check the compatibility level of your database. I found I was installing my assemblies into a database that was originally created in my old SQL Server 2000 environment.

You can modify the compatibility mode via this screen (see Compatibility level is set to SQL 2000).

I have run the DNN installs several times, but I ran into a few problems on the 4.4 - that I was able to figure out.

First problem: You may run into is when the install says it can't find the Compression.config file. Those are purposely placed in a Config directory until needed. Guess what? You need the Compression.Config during the initial installation.

Solution: Move or copy the Compression.config to the root directory of your DNN website.

Second Problem: I get the dreaded exception of Object reference not set.

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

Source Error:

An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.

Stack Trace:

[NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.] DotNetNuke.Entities.Portals.PortalSettings.GetPortalSettings(Int32 TabId, PortalAliasInfo objPortalAliasInfo) +127 DotNetNuke.Entities.Portals.PortalSettings..ctor(Int32 tabId, PortalAliasInfo objPortalAliasInfo) +93 DotNetNuke.HttpModules.UrlRewriteModule.OnBeginRequest(Object s, EventArgs e) +3718 System.Web.SyncEventExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication+IExecutionStep.Execute() +59 System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep step, Boolean& completedSynchronously) +87

For more information, check out Shaun Walker's installation directions at the following post.

CAPAREA was visited by none other than Mr. VB, himself, Paul Vick. He is the Microsoft VB language architect on Tuesday, September 26th.

Paul's topic was "Visual Basic 9.0: Language Integrated Query (LINQ), XML integration and beyond...". Paul is also author of The Visual Basic .NET Programming Language.

The speaker was a huge draw for our group. We had over 65 people in attendance last night.   

Sahil Malik's book is on the shelves, and well worth the investment if you are building or upgrading your applications to .NET Framework 2.0.

In case  you missed it, Sahil Malik stopped by CAPAREA to make a presentation on Transactions (SQL Server 2005 and ADO.NET 2.0).

Sahil will be speaking at TechEd. You can find out more at his blog.

Below are a few shots from the meeting.

Here is Sahil presenting.

Scott Lock holding an impromptu discussion during the meeting. Looks like he's trying to figure out how to get more money for CAPAREA. Go, Scott, Go

Attendees watching the presentation.

http://www.caparea.netBrian Noyes' book, Data Binding with Windows Forms 2.0, has recently hit the street. Brian is the Executive VP at CAPAREA.NET and responsible for managing our speaker series (which has been excellent). Brian is also a Microsoft MVP and Regional Director. Brian is also a chief architect at iDesign, and works with Juval Lowry and Michelle Bustamante. I understand that Brian will be speaking at Microsoft's TechEd this year.

If you are intersted in getting Brian's book, you can find it here on Amazon. Of course, we are giving a couple away for some lucky prize winners who attend our CAPAREA.NET user group meetings over the next couple of months.

Great show by Carl and Richard, of the .NET Rocks Show.

Carl showed some great features in VB.NET for VS2005, including asynchronous programming. Richard concentrated on Mobility Development including a great overview of the technology currently available and soon to be released stuff, and how Microsoft's .NET plays in that arena for developing applications.

Their presentation was hosted by CAPAREA and Microsoft in Reston.

Kudos to Scott Lock, CAPAREA President, for getting Jasper Johansson , Microsoft Security Expert, as a presenter on December 13th.

The presentation that he will give is still being discussed, but needless to say, his "How To Get Your Network Hacked in 10 Easy Steps" and other presentations were SRO (standing room only) at recent Microsoft TechEd conferences. Not only are his topics critically important to IT developers and administrators, but he is one of the best presenters I have seen (and I have seen a few).

See you there!

I am attending the .NET Framework 2.0 - The Smart Client Perspective. Great stuff. This one is being presented by Rocky Lhotka and Billy Hollis. I highly recommend checking out any presentation these two guys do -- they have some great material and they are very good speakers. Anyway...

Rocky was discussing architectures, basically where the business and data objects on what tiers (client, back end server, etc.) and what type of applications those create (browser based, rich client, etc.), and he expressed an idea on something I and many others have obviously have thought about... Building a presentation tier/client that accepts both data and metadata.

The purpose of the metadata is to provide information to the UI so that controls...probably smart controls...can populate themselves and handle validation --- without having to know anything about the business rules. So, the client has no business object at all, it communicates (perhaps remotely) with the business layer.

The smart controls would get data to help populate things like combo box items, and just enough validation logic to assist the user in entering valid data and prohibiting invalid information. This system would allow the UI to "reconfigure itself" within bounds to adapt to a slightly different domain (different user roles, different but similar data sets).

We developed something similar to this for a VB6 application that used a custom web-services layer for communication. We not only handled the validation issue, but we also handled event operations. An example was the population of a tree control from the data, purely handled by the UI, but we had metadata that determined not only what events were available, but also what operations were available on a per-element basis. The UI interpreted the operation information by turning on or off menu items, or revealing or hiding controls - like buttons.

While this scheme could handle a host of validation issues, there were some business cases that could only be resolved by comparisons against various tables within the datastore. Therefore, when an input operation was made to the business layer, we had a return call that told the client whether the operation had succeeded, and if not, why it did not. Also, calls made via these operations might inform the UI to "refresh" its overall data-representation (repopulate the tree control, for instance) since the data may have changed. This refresh reference could apply to a single entity type or for the entire tree.

Rocky hinted that Billy Hollis was going to talk about an implementation of such a system that he had done.