Signs on the Sand

Hot, hot, hot! Microsoft Pre-release Software Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" - March 2007 Community Technology Preview (CTP) is available for download. This is the first mostly feature complete Visual Studio v.next version (Visual Studio 2007 I bet). 6Gb download, so before click on the link take a look at what's new ...

• LINQ
  The LINQ Project: this CTP represents a major milestone in the LINQ project. For more information about LINQ click here.
  • VB 9.0 Language Support: This CTP contains the following language features:
    • Query Expressions: Basic querying, filtering, and ordering support
    • Object Initializers
    • Extension Methods
    • Local Variable Type Inference
    • Anonymous Types
    • XML literals
    • XML properties
    • New Line and Expression IntelliSense
  • C# 3.0 Language Support: This CTP implements all of the C#3.0 language features from the May LINQ CTP including:
    • Query Expressions
    • Object and Collection Initializers
    • Extension Methods
    • Local Variable Type Inference and Anonymous Types
    • Lambdas bound to Delegates and Expression trees
    • Complete design-time support: Intellisense, Formatting, Colorization
  • LINQ to ADO.NET
    • ADO.NET is fully integrated with LINQ and offers many options for using LINQ in various scenarios: LINQ to SQL provides direct access to database tables from the programming environment, LINQ to Entities enables developers to use LINQ over EDM models, and LINQ to DataSet allows the full expressivity of LINQ to be used over DataSets.
    • LINQ to Entities enables developers to program against a relational database using a view of the data that is appropriate for the application they are building, independent of the structure of the underlying database. The use of the Entity Data Model (EDM) enables developers to design models that follow the concepts built into the application, instead of having to map them to constructs available in relational stores. LINQ to Entities is built on the ADO.NET Provider model and will support working against different back end relational stores in addition to Microsoft SQL Server. This CTP includes a LINQ to Entities provider for SQL Server and SQL Server Compact Edition.
    • LINQ to SQL (previous name DLinq) has enhanced the functionality from the May 2006 LINQ CTP. You can find it in System.Data.Linq namespace in System.Data.Linq.dll. New in this release is that DataContext provides optimized modes for read-only use and serialization . Also new is that DataShape streamlines eager loading capabilities and adds the ability to set queries on relationships
  • LINQ To SQL Designer
    • Methods can be created from stored procedures and functions within the designer.
    • Better handling of database schemas.
    • Improved inheritance support in the designer.
  • LINQ over XML (XLinq)
    • System.Xml Bridge Classes added – There is a set of extension methods allowing XPath / XSLT to be used over LINQ to XML trees, allow XSLT transformations to produce an LINQ to XML tree, and to validate an XElement tree against an XML Schema.
    • Event Model - This allows LINQ to XML trees to be efficiently synchronized with a GUI, e.g. a Windows Presentation Foundation application
    • Class hierarchy changes - XObject class added, XStreamingElement class (temporarily) removed
    • Various understandability / usability improvements – There have been a number of relatively minor changes done in response to internal reviews, usability studies, and external feedback to make the API more clean and consistent.
  • LINQ to Objects API
    • The LINQ to Objects API supports queries over any .NET collection, such as arrays and Generic Lists. This API is defined in the System.Linq namespaces inside System.Core.dll.

• ADO.NET
  • Extended, more powerful data APIs with the ADO.NET Entity Framework
    • With the ADO.NET Entity Framework developers will be able to model the view of the data that is appropriate for each one of the applications they are building, independently of the structure of the data in the underlying database. The use of the Entity Data Model (EDM) enables developers to design models that follow the concepts built into the application, instead of having to map them to constructs available in relational stores. Once the model is in place, the powerful ADO.NET Entity Framework API is used to access and manipulate the data as .NET classes or as rows and columns, whatever is appropriate for each application.
  • Added paging and stored procedures for update (“update customization”) for ADO.NET Entity Framework:
    • Paging: the paging support in the ADO.NET Entity Framework allows developers to “page” over data in a database by indicating the start row and number of rows to be included in the result. Paging is available through Entity SQL (using the LIMIT AND SKIP keywords) and through the query-builder methods in the ObjectQuery &ltT> class (Top and Skip). In a future CTP the feature will also be enabled to be used in LINQ queries by means of the standard Take and Skip LINQ operators.
    • Stored-procedures for update customization: the Entity Framework by default automatically generates SQL statements for insert, update and delete operations when processing changes to entities in memory to be sent to the database. With the stored-procedures update customization feature developers have the option to override the automatic SQL generation and instead provide stored-procedures that will perform the insert, update and delete operations, which the system will call during entity change processing. Among other things, this enables scenarios where direct access to tables is restricted in the database and the only way to make changes to the data is through stored-procedures.
  • Microsoft Synchronization Services for ADO.NET
    • Provides an application programming interface (API) to synchronize data between data services and a local store. The Synchronization Services API is modeled after the ADO.NET data access APIs and gives you an intuitive way to synchronize data. It makes building applications for occasionally connected environments a logical extension of building applications where you can depend on a consistent network connection. For details please visit http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=80742 .

• Web
  • Improvements for web development in this CTP include:
    • New ASP.NET WebForms design-surface with advanced XHTML and CSS features
    • JScript intellisense for ASP.NET AJAX and browser DOM
    • Multi-targetting for .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5 in websites and web applications
    • LINQ to SQL designer integration in websites and web applications

• Client App-Level Services
  • Enable client application developers to use the same user profile and login services as your Web applications. This enables customers to utilize on set of backend storage for user personalization and authentication regardless of the applications type.

• C# Workflow Rules
  • Workflow Rules allows users to enter rules (and conditions) in a code-like manner
    • Support the use of the new C# Extension methods features in their rules
    • Enable operator overloading and the new operators in their rules

• XML
  • XML Tools: XSLT Debugger
    • Enables Input Data Breakpoints allowing the user to break the execution of the style-sheet whenever a certain node in input document is hit.
  • XML Editor Performance Improvements
    • Performance in the Xml Editor for Intellisense, schema validation etc is improved by implementing incremental parsing of the XML Document.
  • Seamless transition between XML Editor and XSD Designer
    • Improves the experience a user has when working with an XML Schema in textual and graphical mode at the same time.

• MSBuild
  • Parallel/Multi-Processor Builds
    • Building multiple projects in parallel, as much as possible based on the use of dependency information in projects to parallelize
    • Allowing the developer/builder to control the parallelism by providing them the ability to specify the number of processors to use for build.

• UAC Manifests in the Managed Build Process
  • Support for manifests that are embedded into the final executable via the Build process.

• IDE
  • Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Designer (“Cider”) & Application Tools to deliver the ability to:
    • Create, edit, build, run and debug WPF projects
    • Use the WPF Designer to:
      • Preview any XAML in the designer including user defined controls and types
      • Design Windows, Pages and UserControls
      • Do basic layout tasks in a Grid
      • Do basic property editing using the new property browser
      • Easily understand and navigate “document structure” using the Document Outli
      • See changes in the designer immediately in the XAML
    • Use the XAML Editor to:
      • Edit XAML with intellisense
      • See changes in the XAML immediately in the designer
      • Build design time for WPF controls
  • UAC manifests in the IDE for Windows Vista applications
    • Enable developers on Windows Vista to easily include the UAC manifest as an embedded resource.

• CLR
  • Add IRI support (RFC 3987) to URI related classes
    • This allows resource identifiers to be specified using a character set that supports all languages.
  • New Async model on Socket class
    • A new Async model is reduces the per I/O overhead compared to the current I/O model
  • Peer Networking Classes
    • Delivers a set of peer-to-peer network APIs that allow a developer to easily extend an application with compelling collaboration functionality.
  • WMI.NET Provider Extension 2.0
    • WMI.NET Provider Extension 2.0 simplifies and enhances the development of WMI providers in the .Net framework to enable the management of the .NET applications while minimizing the impact on the development time.
      • Delivers equivalent access to WMI features and functions available to native code providers.
      • Exposes property updates and methods to managed code.
      • Improved scalability for large collections of WMI entities.

• Office
  • Enable ClickOnce deployment for Microsoft Office applications
  • Developers now have an easy to use and version resilient security model for their applications that will exist for future versions of Visual Studio and Office. With full support for ClickOnce deployment of all Office 2007 customizations and applications, developers and administrators now have the right tools and framework for easy deployment and maintenance of their Office solutions.

• Team Architect
  • Top-down service design
    • Top-down system design allows an application architect/lead developer to perform the design of a business solution without having to be confronted with technology decisions. It enables the user to progressively refine a high-level system design, designing new sub-systems and applications in the context of the system in which they are to be used.
  • Architectural Roles on System, Applications and Endpoints
    • Enables an architect, while working on the high-level design of a system’s architecture using the System Designer, to introduce elements into the design that play a specific pre-defined architectural role(s) within architectural patterns.

• Team Developer
  • Profiler Support for WCF Applications
    • Enable profiling of WCF based applications to improve application performance
  • Customize and extend code correctness policies
    • Code Analysis Check-in Policy improvements to communicate to a developer why the check-in policy failed and to provide guidance on how to pass the policy requirements.
  • Customize and extend code correctness policies
    • Code Analysis Check-in Policy improvements to communicate to a developer why the check-in policy failed and to provide guidance on how to pass the policy requirements.
  • Performance tune an enterprise application
    • Enables developers to run profiling during load and test procedures for a system, to see how it behaves, and use integrated tools to profile, debug and tune. This also enables performance base-lining, so that users can save a baseline profile and then, if the performance degrades, compare up-to-date traces to identify the source of the regression

• Team Test
  • Unit Test Generation Improvements
    • Improvements to unit test generation provide an easy way for the user to specify what methods to test, and generate test methods and helper code to do unit testing, as well as providing unit test support for generics.
  • Web Test Validation Rule Improvements
    • Web Test rules improvements enable testers to create more comprehensive validation rules for the application being tested. These improvements include the following functions:
      • Stop test on error
      • Search request and response
      • Add validation rule for title
      • Redirect validation
      • Provide test level validation rules
      • Expected HTTP code
      • Warning level for errors on dependents
  • Better Web Test Data Binding
    • This feature allows users to data bind .CSV and XML files, as well as databases to a web test, using a simple databinding wizard.
  • Improved Load Test Results Management
    • With this feature user can open or remove an existing load test result from the load test repository. User can also import and export load test results files.

• Team Foundation Server
  • Team Build
    • Support multi-threaded builds with the new MSBuild.
    • Continuous Integration – There are many components to this, including build queuing and queue management, drop management (so that users can set policies for when builds should be automatically deleted), and build triggers that allows configuration of exactly how when CI builds should be triggered, for example – every checkin, rolling build (completion of one build starts the next), etc.
    • Improved ability to specify what source, versions of source, etc to include in a build.
    • Improved ability to manage multiple build machines.
    • Simplified ability to specify what tests get run as part of a build
  • Version Control support
    • Destroy- The version control destroy operation provides administrators with the ability to remove files and folders from the version control system. The destroyed files and folders cannot be recovered once they are destroyed. Destroy allows administrators to achieve SQL server disk space usage goals without constantly needing to add more disks to the data tier machine. Destroy also facilitates removing versioned file contents that must be permanently removed from the system for any other reason.
    • Annotate - Annotate is a feature that allows developers to inspect a source code file and see at line-by-line level of detail who last changed each section of code. It brings together changeset data with difference technology to enable developers to quickly learn change history inside a source file.
    • Folder Diff - Team Foundation Server now supports compare operations on folders, whereby the contents of the folder are recursively compared to identify files that differ. Folder diff can compare local folders to local folders, local folders to server folders, and server folders to server folders. It’s a great way of identifying differences between branches, files that you’ve changed locally, and files that have changed between two points in time.
    • Get Latest on Checkout - As an optional setting on a team project or on an individual basis, you can have Team Foundation Server always download the latest version of a file when you check it out. This helps ensure that you don’t have to merge your changes with somebody else’s when you check the file back in.
  • Performance and Scale
    • This release includes numerous improvements in performance and scalability of Team Foundation Server.

• Visual C++
  • Easily add the Windows Vista “Look and Feel” to native C++ applications
    • Developers can use Visual Studio to build ISV applications that exhibit the Windows Vista “look & feel”. A number of the Windows Vista “look & feel” features are available simply by recompiling an MFC application. Deeper integration that requires more coding or design work on the part of the developer is also simplified with Visual Studio’s integrated support for the Windows Vista native APIs.

Google launches Premier Edition of the google.com/a - Google Apps. It's: Gmail (10Gb mailbox), Google Talk, Google Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheets, Page Creator and Start Page  99.9% uptime guarantee for email (only for email?) opt-out for ads in email - doh! Shared calendar Single sign-on User provisioning and management Support for email ...

Here is a list of 65 Math books available online for free, compiled by George Cain of Georgia Institute of Technology. Including really interesting ones such as: Algorithms and Complexity by Professor Wilf A = B, by Marko Petkovsek, Herbert Wilf, and Doron Zeilberger A Course In Algebraic Number Theory by Professor Ash ...

Microsoft decided to shut down GotDotNet site by July 2007. The official announcement goes like this: Microsoft will be phasing out the GotDotNet site by July 2007. Microsoft will phase out all GotDotNet functionality by July 2007. We will phase out features according to the schedule below. During the ...

We spent half of today in the "Leumi" park of Ramat-Gan. The weather was just wonderful lovely. Here are some photos to let you feel Israel winter:     ...

According to the Official Google Reader Blog Google feed crawler, Feedfetcher, started to report subscriber counts. "The count includes subscribers from Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage, and in the future may include other Google products that support feeds." What I found it interesting is that they do it ...

I was looking for Ruby on Rails hosting and found this amazing offer from DreamHost. This is just unbelievable. Consider this: Disk Storage at signup - 178.5 GB, automatically increases weekly by 1 GB Monthly Bandwidth at signup - 1.785 TB, automatically increases weekly by 16 GB MySQL Databases: unlimited E-Mail Accounts ...

Kzu, being also one of the Mvp.Xml project users has this wild feature request. He wants to reverse XInclude resolving back. The scenario is simple: you load XML document A.xml containing XML Inclusions for B.xml and C.xml, XInclude processor resolves XML Inclusions, you get a combined document, edit it and then you save ...

Kurt Cagle launched XForms.org - The XForms Community Forum as well as XForms.org News Portal and XForms_Dev mailing list. Welcome to the new XForms.org Community Web Portal, a central clearinghouse for articles and resources on XForms based technologies. This site is intended as one gateway into the XForms community (the other ...

If you were thinking about learning Ruby - this is what you need to get started smoothly. Just released One-Click Ruby Installer 1.8.5-22 Final for Windows is "A self-contained installer that includes the Ruby language, dozens of popular extensions, a syntax-highlighting editor and the book "Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide ...

openxml.biz announced the availability of the OpenXML Writer - open source text editor for creating OpenXML WordprocessingML files (.docx). Supported features include "text formatting options like bold, italic, underline, font color, font name , font size,  paragraph justification and text indentation.  Basic editing functions like cutting, copying,  pasting and spell ...

OpenXMLWriter is .NET 3.0 application, so you might need to install "Microsoft(TM) .NET Framework 3.0 Redistributable Package   (For Win XP/2K users)" in order to run it.

It's not immediatelyt clear for me if this application is just a sample from some microsoftie or free component from one of C# hackers. The site is basically empty and I have no idea who is behind this.

Anyway the idea sounds interesting:

OpenXML Writer is a .Net 3  project that shows how you can create .docx (OpenXML WordProcessingML) documents with the RichTextBox. The RichTextBox exposes a wide range of features that are easily tapped to create a fairly powerful editor. For example, you can turn on the spell check feature in the RichTextBox by simply setting a property.

OpenXML Writer works by transversing the contents of the RichTextBox and converting each of the elements into OpenXML format. It also package the relevant resources into a .docx  file based on the OpenPackaging Convention.

OpenXML Writer has the potential to turn into a full fledge editor in the near future by taking advantage of the many features that the RichTextBox itself supports. Already, many features are being planned, such as the support for lists, images and tables in  OpenXML Writer.

The source code for OpenXML Writer is available for download. It illustrates the techniques of

1. Using the RichTextBox as the editor to format text data
2. Traversing the contents of the RichTextBox and converting them into OpenXML format
3. Packaging the contents using the OpenPackaging Convention into a .docx file

Web-based OpenXML editor would be even cooler.

If you like the "Daily Grind" by Mike Gunderloy you might like its Microsoft-free version "Quick Links" at the "A fresh Cup" site ("Notes from a recovering Microsoft addict") too. Worth subscribing anyway. ...

If you were using my little AdSense Watch Toolbar 1.0b version and it expired, I'm sorry about that, go and download new version 1.0, which has no time limitation. After 6 months in beta I can say AdSense Watch proved to be pretty stable, which is kinda unusual for screenscraping applications ...

Here is a problem: XSLT 1.0 sucks on generating XML character or entity references. I mean getting &foo; out of XSLT 1.0 is hard. The only ugly solution is disable-output-escaping hack, but it's a) optional, b)doesn't work in all scenarios (only when XSLT engine controls output serialization into bytes and c) works only on ...

In XSLT 2.0 disable-output-escaping is deprecated. New facility for the problem is called Character Maps. Character maps are simpler, better and don't mess with data model. Formal definition:

A character map allows a specific character appearing in a text or attribute node in the final result tree to be substituted by a specified string of characters during serialization. The effect of character maps is defined in [XSLT and XQuery Serialization].

This is basically declarative replace for XSLT output.

Let's say you want to generate this XUL fragment (real world question):

<menuitem label="&context.add.building;"/>

XSLT 2.0 solution would be to define a character map, which maps ampersand character to ugh... ampersand character :) For this to make sense you should realize that mapping a character effectively disables its XML or HTML escaping. It's like you say "I want this character to be outputted as this string and don't mess with it you, the engine". That's powerful enough even to disable escaping of reserved characters such as & and <.

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="2.0">
    <xsl:output use-character-maps="xul" />
    <xsl:character-map name="xul">
        <xsl:output-character character="&amp;" string='&amp;'/>
    </xsl:character-map>
    <xsl:template match="contextMenu">
	<menuitem label="&amp;context.add.{name()}"/>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Awesome. I can't wait, I want this in XSLT 1.0 too. I think I'm going to implement character maps for nxslt.exe tool. The only problem is how to provide mapping info. I'll post about it next time.

[Tested with Saxon 8.8B for .NET].

Google somehow seems to be inaccessible (down?) from my place for at least 15 minutes now and I already feel uncomfortable  if not desperate. I want my mail, news and search back! Seriously, WTF? How come can I be so dependent on google? Ok, great, who else does search on the ...

Everybody who speaks English can communicate with anybody else who also happens to speak English. You can talk, you can mail, you can read books written in English by others. Sure you can invent your own language, no big deal. You can even make somebody learn it and then ...

I'm blogging since March 2003 and as time goes I noticed my blog archive list became way too long and ugly. Finally I figured out how to generate it in a nice expandable list form you can see on the right. Here is a my small how to for MovableType powered ...

1. Install Archive Date Header Plugin from Adam Kalsey. This allows to generate year headers.

2. Insert this piece of Javascript somewhere - if you have common js file that would be the best, but at worse just paste it before </head> in your template. It's a function to handle expand/collapse year clicks.

<script type="text/javascript">
  function ec(e) {
    var targ;
    if (e.target) targ = e.target;
    else if (e.srcElement) targ = e.srcElement;
    if (targ) {
      rows = targ.parentNode.getElementsByTagName("DIV");
      collapsed= targ.className == "year-hdr collapsed";
      targ.className = collapsed?  "year-hdr expanded" : "year-hdr collapsed";
      for(i=0; i < rows.length; i++)
        rows[i].style.display = collapsed? "block" : "none";
    }
  }
</script>

3. Use the following snippet in your template to generate expandable archive list. It generates nested list of archives with year headers.

<div class="side">
  <div>
    <MTArchiveList archive_type="Monthly">
      <MTArchiveDateHeader>
        </div><div>
        <p class="year-hdr collapsed"
          onclick="ec(event)"
          id="archive<MTArchiveDate format="%Y">">
             <MTArchiveDate format="%Y">
        <p>
      </MTArchiveDateHeader>
      <div class="month-row">
        <img src="images/folder.gif" align="middle"/> <a
          href="<$MTArchiveLink$>"><MTArchiveDate format="%B"></a>
       </div>
    </MTArchiveList>
  </div>
</div>

4. If you prefer the current year to be expanded by default, insert this piece of javascript after above template:

<script type="text/javascript">
  year = document.getElementById("archive" + (new Date()).getFullYear());
  if (year) {
    year.className = "year-hdr expanded";
    rows = year.parentNode.getElementsByTagName("DIV");
    for(i=0; i < rows.length; i++)
        rows[i].style.display = "block";
  }
</script>

5. Define CSS styles. Here are my definitions:

.year-hdr {
  cursor: pointer;
  cursor:hand;
  font-size: 120%;
  font-weight: bold;
  background-repeat: no-repeat;
  background-position: top left;
  padding:2px;
}

.collapsed {
  background-image: url(images/plus.gif);
 }

.expanded {
  background-image: url(images/solid.gif);
}

.month-row {
  display: none; 
  padding-left: 2em;
}

Done.

I was writing about loading XSLT stylesheets embedded into assemblies (dll or exe) recently and Richard Quinn asked this very legitimate question: But why oh why would anyone embed their XSLT in the assembly? The point is to separate design from logic. Even if the xslt does a non-presentational transform ...

Well, having XSLT stylesheets externally no doubt has many benefits. But embedding XSLT stylesheets into deploy units (be it dll, exe or jar) is also done not without a reason. After all two the most often used in the wild XSLT stylesheets are embedded. I'm talking about res://msxml.dll/defaultss.xsl (technically not XSLT stylesheet) and chrome://global/content/xml/XMLPrettyPrint.xsl  - respectively Internet Explorer and Firefox XML pretty printers.

Embedding stylesheet doesn't necessarily mean coupling presentation and logic layers, in fact it has nothing to do with any application design issues. It's just deployment strategy and in that sense XSLT stylesheets aren't different from images or scripts.

Sure, when your XSLT file is just laying around you can tweak it without reinstalling application (sometimes even without restarting it). Sometimes that's useful and sometimes you don't want users to play with your stylesheet, because allowing that means:

1. more code to write - you have to anticipate possible stylesheet changes, corruption or removal
2. more testing
3. potential security hole, because don't forget XSLT is a programming language and if that's not enough it can include extensions so that enables lots of interesting code injection scenarios for black hats. Sure with .NET 2.0 XSLT security options you can limit what XSLT stylesheet can perform, but then - it's your stylesheet and you are limiting yourself in the first place.

Again, sometimes deployment is easier if you don't have to bother about all that little files to be placed into the right place.

Some people embed, obfuscate and encrypt XSLT stylesheets trying to prevent reverse engineering. Well, apparently they do it for a reason too.

Performance is another interesting point. I think loading string resources should be a little bit faster than loading from the disk. Didn't test it though.

But the whole new era of XSLT embedding is going to start when XSLT finally becomes widely compilable into executable code. Next Visual Studio (codename Orcas, expected later this year) will include XSLTC.EXE - XSLT to MSIL compiler. That would add another benefit - save on XSLT compilation, which is time and resource hog.

If you do embed your XSLT stylesheets, I wonder what are your reasons?

Here is a nice trick how to build category cloud for your MovableType blog. No plugins required, just past this snippet into your template. <div class="side" id="CategoryCloud" style="line-height:1.6em;"> <MTCategories show_empty="0"> <a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>" class="<$MTCategoryCount$>"><$MTCategoryLabel$></a> </MTCategories> <script type="text/javascript"> e = document.getElementById("CategoryCloud").getElementsByTagName("A"); for(i=0; i < e.length; i++) { if(e[i].className != "") { t ...

It's blooming time in Israel. Really nice around. My favorite time. The photos are taken by Alenka, my wife. I think she's outgrown out little Canon S70 and needs some SLR camera. Anybody has any advices for buying first digital SLR thing? ...