Going on haitas for a while.

I cannot say why, but i am going on haitas for a while.

What is the easiest way to detect an iPhone?

Request.UserAgent.Contains("iPhone") returns true if the client is using their iPhone.

First time I saw that, I had a few hundred lightbulbs pop on over my head. It was blinding.

Dev Notes:

1. Use "px" for font size.
2. "div" and any block element has a smaller font size than non-block elements.
   I suspect that this size issue is a bug, that will be corrected.

June OCDOTNET UG meeting

http://cid-adde37ac346ca820.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/2008JuneLinqPresentation.zip

comments coming later.

XNA Studio 3 CPT

So far good news, and all the documentation that you expect to be normally missing is missing. Doesn't matter, you can do this without any extra documentation. Just use the information for PC and XBox game development.

The two big pieces of news:

• The new XNA studio supports Visual Studio 2008.
• There is Zune game developement included.

No real documentation for Zune loaded, so here is what I found:

• Controller pad is treated as the left thumb stick. Large zero surface. Code accordingly.
• Aspect ratio is 0.75; Expected and normal.
• Height: 320px & Width:240px. Nice but not awesome.
• Min Depth: 0 & Max Depth: 1. Also normal.
• WiFi: Peer-to-Peer only. Adaption of mesh, I suspect.

If you know how to do sprite games for PC or XBox 360 using XNA studio, then you are ready to develop for Zune.

I will post video of my first round exploration soon.

Almost forgot about RDBMSX news

For those who don't know, RDBMSX is the name I gave to a hobby project that I am working on. It is effectively an XML based DB system, with indexes and query language.

The key parts are:

• All unencrypted files are stored in XML format.
• The DB engine would be packageable and deployable with your web application.
• Query language would be xpath (2.0)
• Unlimited deployment licensing (Open Source project)
• Connection to the engine would be through XML call to a listener on a port, or through a custom DataProvider (System.IO.RDBMSX Namespace)
• The server itself would be extenable through it's namespace
  • RDBMSX.Core (All base classes)
  • RDBMSX.PlugIn (Write your own data direct communication)
  • RDBMSX.Client (A sample client that you can do all administration from.)
  • RDBMSX.Server (Common server components)
  • RDBMSX.Server.Host (Standalone server)
  • RDBMSX.Server.Host.StateManager (State Manager for IIS)
  • RDBMSX.Server.IIS (IIS Hosted Server)

Though I am detailing this quite a bit, this is still a hobby, and such may be years before I release anything.

I think all of us power developers need hobby projects.

Will be posting again soon.

I own several domains that I use to build and test technology against.
My hub for some of this is RPGAmerica.com.
As a temporary solution and a test to see how efficient it is to use static XML as a datasource, I used a pre-existing opensource web application from CodePlex (CodePlex Rocks).

The XML data source is a solid B+.
Under any volume though, it lags way too much.

My next attempt will be CPT of ASP.NET MVC. (Oh yeah, I expect to have to do a bunch of recoding everytime I do a release, after they post a release.

Expect several blog posts on what I find.

2nd note: Rant
DiscountASP is not realy a discount. But, they do seem to be one of the most stable companies. So I will put them at an A.

I was with WebSecureStores.com for the longest time, they actually were cheaper for what I needed than DiscountASP, but they kept monkeying with the provided service, and ticked me off. When I fired them, they offered to restore the features that they took away from me, but it was too late.

Brinkster is an unknown to me. They rocked when they started and all was ASP.NET 1.0, but they started sucking quickly by the time they got to .NET 1.1. When I fired them, it was like, "ok, what ever you want." Oh yeah, they wanted to keep their customers.

NetworkSolutions got fired when my web apps could not run on their servers, because I needed to write to the file system. They lied about my access, so I fired them.

There are other companies, but I do not want this to become a bitch site. :)

3rd Note: Cool Tech Note
The latest Safari for Windows is lightning fast, but still seems buggy to me. I have not put my finger on all of the issues.

The top issue seems to be that it renders fonts with size defined as pt the same way it does px.
pt is about 33% larger than px. So to minimize my cross browser support, I now just define all fonts as px.

If you are worried about supporting Konquorer, run against Safari, they render off of the same KHTML library.

Also, if it looks right on Safari, it will probably look right on the iPhone. (I like my iPhone.)

4th Note: New Tech Note
If your ASP.NET application fails to work on Win2k8 but works fine on Win2k3, look at your config file or run "%systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\APPCMD.EXE". This command line tool will modify your config file to run on IIS7.

Rick Strahl had an article on this back from June 2006. Still valid today.
http://www.americanparanoia.com/WebLog/posts/6075.aspx

Last Note: Announcements
I have no speaker engagements lined up for the rest of the year. If you want me to present something, give me a shout.

Again with the Internet Explorer issues

Going from IE6 to IE7 breaks a ton of stuff.
Well here we go again, IE7 to IE8 breaks CSS formatting again.

I just looked at my sites, google maps, and new egg with IE8, and wholy macrel what a mess.

IE8 Destroyed the functionality of new egg and google maps.

My sites were majorly messed up, but repairable.

It looks like IE8 renders the pages closer to how FireFox does than IE7 did.

I hate to say this, but I am thankful that Apple has released Safari to Windows. KHTML rendering engine seems to be consistant no matter what.

Here is a bit of wisdom to the MS guys: Stop breaking our sites and making life so expensive in forcing us to re-edit our CSS files with every version.

Getting started in Linq and Linq for SQL PPT File

http://cid-adde37ac346ca820.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/Introducing_Visual_Studio_2008.ppt

I will post most of my public files to here:

Key items for using XBAP to WCF

1. Get your WCF service running perfectly before coding against it.
2. An XBAP component that is running under partial security internet, must be running in the same domain and port number as the WCF service.
3. Under security tab, in the Application configuration, there is a button marked "Advanced...". Make sure that "Grant the application access to the site of origin" is checked.

At this point, you can build and deploy your application to your server for testing. Or if you WCF is on the same box as your XBAP, make sure that the host domain match.
In this case localhost is not the same as using your box name.
Make sure that you are either using your box name for both, or localhost for both.

Last key item, this is still for debugging. The default for debugging is that IE comes up with a file path to your XBAP which causes the connection to the service to fail. Here you have a problem with a simple solution.

1. Again to to your application configuration. Go to Debug.
2. Change "Start Action" to "Start external program", with the value of "c:\Windows\System32\PresentationHost.exe"
3. In "Start Options" => "Command line arguments" enter:
   -debug (Physical Path) -debugSecurityZoneUrl (Domain path)

IE: -debug "c:\Users\ThisUser\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Project\ThisProject\test.xbap" -debugSecurityZoneUrl http://www.tempuri.org

You may run into other issues, but these are the key ones that were hard for me to find.

To give credit where credit is due:
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2695012&SiteID=1&mode=1
Thx to: Matt Galbraith - MSFT & Chango V. - MSFT

Last night was fun - reviewing Southbay .NET UG

This group is ran very professionally. That is a good starting point.
Everything was timely. Attendance was free. Pizza was abundant. The crowd was lively.

Downfall: Some reason my gmail account emails got dropped at a rate of 1 out of 3. We do not know if that is from a spam filter or some other issue.

All in all, I want to forward my gratitude to the board, members, and attendees, for this opportunity I had to present.

I'll post slides and code shortly here.
I have also given copies to the group for it to be posted to their site.

Lastly, if you want to have me present at your group, I present up to 4 times a year, on various topics. Email me at BrianMinister@gmail.com with your questions or request, and we can see what we can do.

Some topics:
Getting started in Linq and Linq for SQL
Getting started in WPF
Getting started in Silverlight
Getting started in WCF
Getting started in XML and XPath
Style and Transformation in XML
Active XML - Practical use of XML

Topics that I am working on for future presentations:
Linq³: PLINQ, BLINQ, XLINQ
Enterprise design for database efficiency
Scaleable by design
UIs that Users actually like