By Euricom on
5/29/2009 1:04 PM
How to resolve a ‘To connect to this server you must use SQL Server Management Studio or SQL Server Management Objects (SMO)' exception.
By Peter Notenbaert, .Net Solution Architect
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By Euricom on
5/27/2009 11:27 PM
For probably the first time in any UI technology, Microsoft has succeeded in providing an out-of-the-box data binding framework that actually works and you may consider using outside of demo-environments. It works together very easily with RIA Services through the DomainDataSource control that just sits as an element in your XAML and you can be used to bind any other control to.
So far so great, but here’s the part they don’t tell you about: how do you get dropdowns to work with related entities and why do date/time fields get converted to UTC in your database?
By Nick Verschueren, .Net Solutions Architect
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By Euricom on
5/27/2009 10:40 PM
Whenever you see demo’s of RIA and Silverlight you come across the new DataForm control. The DataForm control is a completely new type of control in Silverlight 3 that aims to strengthen the of positioning of Silverlight on the line-of-business side of internet application development. You can equate it to a single line datagrid that displays it’s fields vertically, rather than horizontally, thus forming a single record entry form. Actually that is a very simplified description of a really powerful control that works with single object or collection of object, not just RIA ones.
By Nick Verschueren, .Net Solutions Architect
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By Euricom on
5/27/2009 9:56 AM
Previous Chapter: Part 3 - The Projects
As a manager, keeping track of projects is very important, but keeping track of the people working on the projects might even be more important than that. Where would projects be without the “human capital”? So keeping people happy and motivated is key for the success of projects. And believe it or not, but most people like their manager to talk to them, make them feel like he is there for them and can help them if needed.
Strangely, if you ask managers what motivates them in their jobs, the answers vary from “good atmosphere”, “good collaboration and communication with colleagues” to “interesting and challenging work”. Money comes in around the fourth or the fifth place. However, if you ask managers what they think motivates their staff “money” is the number one answer. Now why do they believe that their staff is motivated differently from themselves? By the way, I’m not making this up. This test has been done by a company that provides business courses in Holland. The moral of this story is that as a manager you can motivate your people by using the techniques that you would like from your manager. Money really isn’t everything.
Now besides motivating staff, as a manager you also like to keep track of who is working on what, until when, etc. You’ll need to have an overall resource planning too.
By Ronny Gabriels, Functional Analyst and ex-.net Solution Architect
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By Euricom on
5/18/2009 9:01 PM
The solution we put forward looks pretty complete so far: we’ve gained control over the UI so we could run automated tests and we’ve gained control over the front server so we could arbitrarily mock any of the backend systems. And we can do all of this from with a standard unit test. But there’s still more to do.
By Nick Verschueren, .Net Solutions Architect
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By Euricom on
5/15/2009 2:51 PM
But sometimes, writing them can be a serious pain in the ... you know where. Just the other day I had to write a little tool that does some serious find and replace stuff in generated code. At first I thought this would be a fairly easy job using regular expressions, but eventually I had to beat two issues that I really got stuck with for quite some time ...
By David Stroobants, .Net Solutions Architect
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By Euricom on
5/14/2009 2:04 PM
Previous chapter: Part 2 - The "Why?"
Obviously when your are managing a department it’s important to know what projects are currently in progress within your department. Furthermore, you will have to know the status of each of those projects, who is working on them, what progress is made, etc. In many organizations project managers make a weekly report for their managers to keep them up-to-date on all of this information. This however means that as a manager, the day after the project manager’s report, you are working with old data. Wouldn’t it be so much better if you had up-to-date information on a project whenever you needed it?
From another stands, it will also be very important for managers to have everybody working on a project in the same way. If every project team works its own way, it becomes nearly impossible to keep an overview on all the projects. As an added bonus, when every project team works in the same way, it’s much easier for team members to switch teams and help out in other projects or even for several teams to work together, without having a learning curve before every change in project or team.
The answers to these issues lies in one of SharePoint’s most documented possibilities, project management through SharePoint often called a PMIS (project management information system).
As mentioned before, the project management possibilities of SharePoint are well documented in whitepapers and even books dedicated to the subject. Therefore we will not go into detail about everything you can do when managing project in SharePoint. We will focus more on what you can get out of it as a manager or a team member and how this achieved with basic SharePoint features.
By Ronny Gabriels, Functional Analyst and ex-.net Solution Architect
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By Euricom on
5/8/2009 1:31 PM
As was discussed in part 3 of this series the purpose of our efforts was to set up a way to drive acceptance test from the UI on top of a complex legacy system. To make things more tempting the system contains a lot of dependencies to a several external systems.
This post will talk about some of the technical aspects of the solution.
By Peter Notenbaert, .Net Solutions Architect
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By Euricom on
5/7/2009 10:06 PM
I’m really quite taken with the preview of RIA Services, as I blogged a couple of weeks ago, but that is not to say that I don’t have some issues with it. One problem I’ve had is when I tried to have my data access and RIA web services in separate assemblies. I think this I quite a normal thing to want to do, because in this case I’m using Entity Framework and I may want to reuse this model in more than one application. My data assembly is called “MyProject.Data” and my web service project is called “MyProject.Web”. I’ve chosen to have the namespaces the same as my project names.
By Nick Verschueren, .Net Solutions Architect
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By Euricom on
5/7/2009 10:58 AM
Previous Chapter: Part 1 - Introdcution
The manager’s issues
The most important aspect that has to be looked at before we start thinking about SharePoint or whatever tool we want, is the “why?”. Because, if everything runs smoothly in your department and there are no problems (just kidding), then you don’t need any new tools. Believe it or not, you need a problem before you start applying a solution. In the spirit of Jeopardy we know the answer in this document is going to be SharePoint, now what is the question? Which problems can it solve, which areas of your department can it help managers with?
Without thinking, we could summarize and say “communication and collaboration”. And although it covers a lot of the load, there are many things, details if you will, that would be left out with a simple answer as that. And as we all know, the beauty is in the detail. We have to look at all the aspects of managing an IT department. If SharePoint is used as just another tool to solve the communication or collaboration problem, it will never live up to its potential. There are a lot of tools better suited to solve those problems specifically. SharePoint does become interesting if you take into account all the other aspects and position it as a central solution. ...
By Ronny Gabriels, Functional Analyst and ex-.net Solution Architect
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