Jean Hibbert's Blog

Useful resources on Wix & MSBuild

2010-07-26T19:46:00Z

Rob Mensching's Blog http://robmensching.com/blog/posts Wix Edit on Sourceforge http://wixedit.sourceforge.net/ General forum for Wix users http://windows-installer-xml-wix-toolset.687559.n2.nabble.com/ Primary tutorial for Wix development http://www.tramontana.co.hu/wix/lesson5.php#5.4 http://www.installworld.com/index.php?view=article&catid=41%3Awindows-installer-xml&id=113%3Awindows-installer-xml-standard-custom-actions&option=com_content&Itemid=137 http://stackoverflow.com...(read more)

Adventures with Wix 3.5, Visual Studio 2010 & Team foundation build 2008

2010-07-26T18:48:00Z

Lately I have been having a look at the Microsoft Open Source project named Wix. The goal of this project is to provide an Xml DSL that allows the user to build deployment packages that are wrapped up in a Windows Installer package or ".Msi" file. The user can declare user interfaces that allow for additional meta data to be handed down to the installer and conditional information that will influence the deployment process. The meta data along with the components installed on the machine...(read more)

Interesting Finds - 04/07/2010

2010-07-04T19:42:00Z

New features in MVC2 http://www.asp.net/learn/whitepapers/what-is-new-in-aspnet-mvc ASP.Net MVC architecture Video by Rob Connery http://www.asp.net/mvc/videos/what-is-aspnet-mvc-80-minute-technical-video-for-developers-building-nerddinner DevExpress Asp.Net MVC extensions http://mvc.devexpress.com/GridView/Scrolling DevExpress online demos http://www.devexpress.com/Downloads/NET/OnlineDemos.xml DevExpress MVC controls integration Video http://tv.devexpress.com/#MVCsupport.movie Great blog post by...(read more)

WCF NetTcpBinding ProtectionLevel security performance test

2010-07-04T14:43:00Z

Normally within 3 Tier applications that leverage the NetTcpBinding behind a firewall within an intranet environment I prefer to switch off security altogether since this is a trusted network zone and performace should be maximised in this case. There are times when this environment may not be trusted in which case you will need to start tweeking the relevant WCF security settings. Understanding the performance ramifications when enabling security is very important in my opinion. I was recently interested...(read more)

Using Rx for Event subscription

2010-06-04T15:39:00Z

I thought I would have a quick look to determine wether Rx would create a strong reference under the hood or not when one object subscribed to another objects events. In this case the Consumer object subscribes to the SampleData objects's SampleDataChanged event. This type of strong reference causes memory leaks in applications because the garbage collector will not clean up the event consumer even though the consumer may be out of scope. The result of my testing indicates that unfortunately...(read more)

The enemy within. A bleak view into the lack of regulation in the IT industry.

2010-05-31T15:37:00Z

“I value simplicity over everything; I always look for simplicity.” Anders Hejlsberg quote As a programmer I love writing code. Make no mistake. I love flexing my mind and seeing if I can find a short and elegant route to the solution required to resolve a problem or satisfy a business requirement. The key words in that sentence are "short" and "elegant". What I mean by those words are that I prefer the fewest lines of code possible and I feel a strong need to leverage the available...(read more)

Interesting finds - 24 May 2010

2010-05-24T14:26:00Z

Great Ildasm.exe tutorial from MSDN http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa309387(v=VS.71).aspx Rx Extensions - Good blog post by Haacked. http://haacked.com/archive/2010/03/26/enumerating-future.aspx Eugene Prystupa's Blog: - Short simple and powerful ideas regarding Rx, Serialization, and MVVM http://eprystupa.wordpress.com/ Matt Hidinger's Blog - Great MVC / Unit Testing / Entity Framework T4 Template posts http://feeds.feedburner.com/mhidinger AutoIT Great UI automation testing tool...(read more)

Loading and executing .Net code from an external file dynamically

2010-05-20T23:21:00Z

I've recently been tasked with writing a service which will allow me to dynamically load code from a file and inject it into an assembly at run-time for execution. The injected code will need to implement the IXmlQueryService interface. The input stream will contain the original Xml and the output stream will contain the enriched Xml. Linq to Xml is used to update the Xml from the input stream and write out the results to the output stream. [XmlEnrichmentService.cs] using System; using System...(read more)

Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) : Resources

2010-05-09T22:35:00Z

I have recently started playing with the new Rx Extension Libraries for .net. These extensions provide the programmer with a new model for event subscription where by we can write a linq statement to query a future set of events. The power from this model is that code for event subscription is more clear AND events are handled in an asynchronous manner within the subscriber. A set of Rx extension libraries have also been made available to Java Script programmers. The IEnumerable's counterpart...(read more)

Interesting Finds - 9 May 2010

2010-05-09T21:05:00Z

OData - The official team blog http://blogs.msdn.com/astoriateam/archive/2010/03/16/announcing-the-odata-sdk.aspx Great channel 9 video on WPF development / Southridge starterkit download information (Datagrid / WPF Ribbon) http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC45/ Marcin Nadjer Reactive extensions Blog (This guy knows his stuff ;-)) http://mnajder.blogspot.com/search/label/Rx Great blog post on WPF 4 and New WPF controls by the one and only Scott Gu http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/10/26...(read more)

Global Visas UK - Fraud

2010-05-05T15:30:00Z

I have recently had a bad experience with a company called Global Visas here in the UK. My fiance and I approached Global Visas hoping to learn what it would entail to obtain a particular Visa. The following set of events occurred: 1) I phoned global visas and requested information what was required to kick off the Visa application process. I got put through to an "agent" who said I needed to open a case at the cost of 100£ and my case would be put forward to a "case worker"....(read more)

Find a user's Active Directory groups.

2010-04-18T16:19:00Z

I like simple solutions. Fortunately the .Net Framework API's are slowly evolving to make life simpler for the architect and programmer. One new .Net 3.5 framework library which I am very happy with is System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement. Have a look at how simple it is to find the groups an AD user belongs to. Add a reference to System.DirectoryServices and System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.DirectoryServices...(read more)

Interesting finds - 15 April 2010

2010-04-15T19:13:00Z

Security: Some great security code examples entailing encrypting and decrypting messages and files compliments of Channel 9. http://channel9.msdn.com/Wiki/SecurityWiki/CodeExamples/ Euler: Depth First Search Algorithm for Tree Data structures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth-first_search Project Euler solution for top to bottom summing in tree data structures http://blog.singhanuvrat.com/problems/project-euler-maximum-sum-traversing-top-to-bottom-in-a-triangle Visual Studio 2008 Web deployment...(read more)

Interesting finds - 8 April 2010

2010-04-08T08:38:00Z

I sometimes find that surfing the internet results in information overload. I end up with 20 open tabs in Chrome, a double Latte at my side and not enough time to investigate all my "interesting finds". So I've decided to post my finds in a similar manner to Jason Haley's blog so that I may reference them at a later date and share them with you at the same time. :-) ASP.NET: Custom paging with the Repeater Control and the PagedDataSource http://www.dotnetcurry.com/ShowArticle.aspx...(read more)

Superman's alter ego - Quintin Tarantino's analogy

2010-03-18T17:47:00Z

Here is a small section of the Kill Bill script that I enjoyed very much. In true Tarantino story telling style, Tarantino analyses superman's alter ego and makes a few interesting deductions. "...l'm quite keen on comic books. Especially the ones about superheroes. I find the whole mythology surrounding super heroes fascinating. Take my favorite super hero, Superman. Not a great comic book. Not particularly well-drawn. But the mythology... The mythology is not only great, it's unique...(read more)