Mixer prototype v.0.1

Če ste že instalirali SQL Server 2008 (ali pa ga še boste) in nimate na voljo vzorčne baze s katero bi se lahko igrali, si oglejte vzorčne baze na strani Codeplex. Na voljo imate scenarije OLTP, skladiščenje podatkov in eno zelo enostavno bazo, ki jih lahko testirate na lokalni instalaciji SQLa. Narejene so baze za platforme x86, x64 in Itanium. Tomaž

Did you know you can create cool looking splash screens for your WPF application right there with the Expression Designer? Of course you did. Expression Designer provides you with all you need to create free-shaped, part-transparent, drop-shadowed graphics and I bet the the WPF splash screen support is going to be baked into the next release of Expression Blend as well. This is a quick walk through designing a splash screen with the Expression Designer. 1. With Expression Designer open, create a new rectangle and set its Corner Radius property to about 30px (depending your rectangle’s size). 2. Set rectangle’s color to match your application theme and make it a bit transparent by setting Opacity to around 70%. 3. Find the Effects property section and click the Add Effect button. Choose Effects | Drop Shadow. 4. Decrease Softness and Offset and increase Opacity properties to make the shadow more compact. You will end up with something like this: 5. Create a new layer and put a new rectangle on it. Make it the same size as the first one and put it on the same spot to make them both aligned exactly. 6. Set its stroke to None and fill it with a transparent gradient: First Stop Alpha: 80%, Second Stop Alpha: 0%. 7. Move gradient’s origin more to the side and make it larger. Your rectangle should now look just a little bit more exciting: 8. Time for some text… With the Text tool, create your application title. I’ve chosen 3...

Ponudnik informacijskih tehnologij najboljši primer uporabe sodobnih tehnologij Skupina FMC nudi celovito ponudbo, od prodaje in distribucije opreme ter sistemske integracije do izobraževanja in podpore strankam. Skupina vsem šestim vključenim podjetjem zagotavlja več skupnih služb, med katerimi so kadrovska služba, računovodstvo ter trženje. Podjetje se je srečalo s potrebo po nadgradnji strojne opreme v svojem podatkovnem centru. Obstoječi sistem namreč ni več zagotavljal visoke zmogljivosti, ki jo je potrebovalo hitro rastoče podjetje. Ob nadgradnji strojne opreme so začeli načrtovati tudi nadgradnjo programskih rešitev in platforme. Podjetje je uvedlo operacijski sistem Windows Server 2008, podatkovni strežnik SQL Server 2005 in sporočilni sistem Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. Celotno študijo primera si oglejte na http://www.microsoft.com/slovenija/resitve/stranke/fmc.mspx Tomaž

As promised, here’s my Live Europe Weather Map in action. This is still just a basic example of displaying icon pushpins on a map, and because I’m using Virtual Earth ASP.NET Map Control, I don’t need to worry about how map is handled and pushpins are displayed, I only need to provide data for the pushpins.   The first version of the Weather Map from a couple of years ago used to scrape the data off a Html Page. Recently, the National Environmental Agency started publishing weather data in a more collection-friendly data formats, so I switched to these. The current version of Live European Weather Map collects Xml files, containing weather observations for European Capitals and additional cities. Data Collection I decided to go with LINQ to SQL option for shaping my data entity. Some may argue that LINQ to SQL isn’t a serious technology, but for small, compact projects like this, it gives me just what I need: 1. Instead of generating my data classes manually, I can create a table in my database (SQL Express in this case) and pull my classes out of that. 2. I can create my data entity by drag and dropping a table from the data source to the LINQ to SQL Class Designer in Visual Studio 2008, and my data class would get generated automatically. Here's what I’m currently collecting for weather conditions: 3. I can use this class to collect the data and store in into the database, or I can simply just store the collected data into ASP.NET Cache and forget the d...

Want to tune into 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games with Silverlight? Not in the United States, you say? Well, tough luck ;) This IP restriction thing is getting sillier by the day... Isn't Internet supposed to be global? What happened to World Wide Web? :)

SQL Server 2008 RTM is out! Microsoft Sync Framework v1.0 RTM is out! Sync Services [now @ v2] is “synchronized” with Sync Framework Peer 2 peer database sync support Sync with device’s Database SQL2008 Change Tracking supported Sync process tracing A couple of features of the above products require VS2008/.NET 3.5 SP1, which means VS2008 / .NET 3.5 service pack duo should be released real soon now [by August 11th, as stated on MSDN). Like it’s not hot enough already… turning my air-con down to keep my boxes cool and running… [Update] SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 is out! [Update] .NET FX 3.5 SP1 is out! ADO.NET Data Services Entity Framework ASP.NET Dynamic data [Update] Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is out! [Update] Need to update Silverlight Tools for VS2008 too. Sources: here, here, here, here

A while ago I built a sample weather map using Atlas [now Microsoft Ajax] and VirtualEarthMap control, which used real-time data to display current weather conditions. VirtualEarthMap control was steadily progressing all this time as a part of a separate SDK, until released as a new ASP.NET control with the latest Windows Live Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio release last week [July CTP, download here]. Working with the control appears to be easy. It took me about 15 minutes [including Tools’ download+setup] to port the previous version to use this new control. No RTFM, just drag and drop, set properties and copy/modify some relevant code. And still, the current implementation consumes only small part of functionality this control offers, leaving a lot of space for additional enhancements. Here’s a screenshot of the control in action: What the application does is capture the weather data from the national Environmental Agency and display them on the map as custom pushpins, each pushpin representing a city, where the readings are being collected; hovering over each pushpin will give you more information about that city weather station’s readings. I’m going to post a live example with some code after I give this control some more time to show me what it can really do.

Following my previous example, this is another experiment with the Label.Target property. Suppose you want to restrict user’s progression with data input on a form by disabling some crucial input fields, which input depends on some other fields on the form. There’s more than a couple of ways for doing this and the first solution that springs to mind would be doing it by employing business object data validation. But if you need a pure UI/XAML solution, this can be the alternative:   [See it live – loose Xaml page ahead ] What’s happening in the sample above – the second TextBox gets enabled only when the first TextBox is not empty. The same goes for the third box, except here’s the second box that has to have some text entered into it. This was done with the help of data triggers: 1: <Label Target="{Binding ElementName=firstBox}" Content="_1st:" />
2: <TextBox Name="firstBox" Grid.Column="1" Margin="2" />
3: <Label Target="{Binding ElementName=secondBox}" Content="_2nd:" Grid.Row="1" />
4: <TextBox Name="secondBox" Grid.Column="1" Margin="2" Grid.Row="1">
5: <TextBox.Style>
6: <Style TargetType="{x:Type TextBox}">
7: <Style.Triggers>
8: <DataTrigger Binding="{Binding Path=Text.Length, ElementName=firstBox}" Value="0">
9: <Setter Property="IsEnabled" Value="false" />
...

In my previous post I've shown how to create a named brush resource in WPF, which can be used and reused through whole application. Although I gave a brush a meaningful name (WindowBackgroundBrush), it can as well be used to paint areas other than window backgrounds. Naming brushes this way is more of a visual hint to me: whenever I feel the need to change the looks of windows' background, the WindowBackgroundBrush would most likely catch my eye first. If you ever looked at the SystemColors class in Windows Forms (that's in System.Drawing namespace), this convention will feel familiar; the difference is that here we're dealing with brushes, while with SystemColors it's plain colors that we were using. To make the transition easier, the equally named class is also available in WPF (it's in System.Windows namespace). While still referencing all system colors, this new class incidentally includes additional properties to make those system colors available also as solid color brushes.To conclude - creating custom brushes and naming it by their purpose is a lot like building a closed set of named colors you'll be using in your application. If you already have an idea of how your application should (visually) look like, or your designer has already come up with a theme or a style book, this kind of convention can constrain you to pre-chosen color set and and the same time keep you away from experimenting with so...

Če vas zanima poslovna inteligenca si poglejte kako so pri Studiu Moderna nadgradili obstoječo BI rešitev s PerformancePoint Serverjem 2007. Tudio primera si lahko ogledate na http://www.microsoft.com/slovenija/resitve/stranke/studio_moderna.mspx. Studio Moderna - Visoka učinkovitost načrtovanja poslovanja Studio Moderna že več kot 16 let izvaja in vodi celovite trženjske akcije v 20 državah srednje in vzhodne Evrope. Holding, kjer je zaposlenih že več kot 1200 ljudi, združuje specializirana podjetja za zagotavljanje storitev s področij oglaševanja, prodaje, klicnih centrov, transporta in poprodajne podpore. Podjetje je iskalo rešitev, s katero bi lahko zagotovili integracijo finančnih podatkov iz različnih podružnic in poenostavilo načrtovanje in predvidevanje finančnih tokov. Pri tem je pomemben izziv predstavljala integracija podatkov iz različnih sistemov. Studio Moderna je poskusno vpeljala strežnik Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, ki služi za integracijo različnih podatkovnih virov in podpira postopek poslovnega načrtovanja. Visoka učinkovitost načrtovanja poslovanja Tomaž

This is the first post of what I would like to believe will be a series of thoughts on creating a good User Experience with Windows Presentation Foundation. I have no idea where this will take me, but I'll start with a color. You like black? We've got black. Black How about using it as a background color in a WPF application? <Page
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
Background="Black">
</Page>
That's a nice black page, isn't it? But wait a minute! Is this way of hardcoding the color into the Page really a good idea? What options do we have here?
First, it's important to know that when setting Background="Black" in XAML, it's a solid black brush that you're actually setting to the Background property. This is possible with the help of a type converter called BrushConverter, which is responsible for creating a brush from as many string representations of a color as possible.
Now we're talking brushes... There are six kinds of brushes in WPF and we'll eventually get to know and use all of them. For now, it's the SolidColorBrush we're interested in [no need explaining what this one looks like I presume].
So, instead of painting our background with a solid black color, we can just paint it with "a brush" and define what "a brush" looks like elsewhere:
<Page
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml...

Hecen naslov, ne? To je naslov epošte, ki sem jo dva dni nazaj dobil od Luke Manojloviča enega naših MVPjev (most valuable proffesional). Pravi, da je preizkušal Hyper-V in da dobro deluje tudi na nekaterih nepodprtih operacijskih sistemih kot je Ubuntu. Več o njegovih testih si lahko ogledate na njegovem blogu: http://luka.manojlovic.net/2008/06/29/virtual-machine-additions-in-virtual-pc-virtual-server-vs-integration-services-in-hyper-v/ http://luka.manojlovic.net/2008/06/29/understanding-virtual-network-manager-in-hyper-v/ http://luka.manojlovic.net/2008/06/29/hyper-v-final-version-is-here-lets-install-it/ Tomaž

Dobrodošli Tech·Ed EMEA IT Professionals – v preteklosti Microsoft Tech·Ed IT Forum. Želite resnično vplivati na delovanje vaše organizacije? Bodite del Izkušnje! Tech·Ed EMEA 2008 IT Professionals bo tudi letos potekal v Barceloni med 3. in 7. novembrom 2008. Dopolnite svoje znanje v petih dneh izobraževanja na teme načrtovanja, vpeljevanja, upravljanja in zavarovanja virov v vaši organizaciji. Doživite več kot kdajkoli! Povežite se s 5.000 kolegi, vrhunskimi predavatelji, strokovnjaki za posamezne izdelke in člani skupnosti z vsega sveta. Pridobite konkretne izkušnje in raziščite nove rešitve ter ideje za povečanje učinkovitosti. Administratorji podatkovnih baz, administratorji namiznih računalnikov, administratorji za shranjevanje podatkov, strokovnjaki za podporo strankam, vodje IT, administratorji sporočilnih sistemov, mrežni administratorji, strokovnjaki za varnost, administratorji strežnikov, sistemski administratorji, trenerji/učitelji informacijskih tehnologij in spletni administratorji: Prisluhnite viziji strokovnjakov z izbiro med 190 različnimi predavanji Izboljšajte razumevanje vplivov in priložnosti uporabe informacijskih tehnologij v vašem poslovanju ali ponudbi Pridobite izkušnje Microsofta in panožnih strokovnjakov o izdelkih, s katerimi delate vsak dan in izboljšajte varnost, povezljivost, reševanje težav ter upravljanje vaš...