Chanh's blog

Do you want to develop application that can run in a browser and out of browser, using .NET technology, how to use professional data access like WCF, RIA Services, Entity Framework, use advanced UI (XAML markup language), separtion of designer and developer roles?

If your answer is yes to all the above question then this book is for you!

This book covers all the above subjects and more and even if it can’t cover more detail info it even has an “addtional resources” section where it will provide links to sites where you can find out more about the relevant subject.

What do you need to get the most of of this book?
You will need the following:
. Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 SP1
. Silverlight 5 Tool for Visual Studio 2010 SP1

Who is this book written for?
If you are:
. Developers who have worked with Silverlight
. Developers who have need to develop Line of Business applications
. Developers who want LOB applications based on Silverlight

If you want to know more about the book, here is the link to the book: http://www.packtpub.com/mastering-lob-development-silverlight-5/book

Packt Publishing Celebrates its range of Microsoft books/e-books all this May and slashed the cover prices up to 30%.

The titles include a variety of subject such as BizTalk, SharePoint, SQL Server, Silverlight, .NET Framework stack, XNA, Forefront, System Center and more…

Here is the link to the Packt Microsoft Carnival.

Over the years, I discovered that these are my must have features in browser whether through build-in features or extensions and they are:

. Developers tool for debuging html code, css, javascript, etc
. PageRank status

(Note: These 3 below should integrate with cloud services like Google or Live)
. Bookmarks that seamless sync to the cloud.
. Notes that seamless sync to the cloud.
. Auto sync to the cloud of info such as: preferences, login, etc.

Big bad NO-NO for a browser app is the ability to run outside of the browser security model.

I just finish reading the book title above and want to share some insight about this book.

First of all, don’t mind about the long name of the book considering it is a pick out chapters of 6 different books listed below:

1. Silverlight 4 User Interface Cookbook
2. Microsoft Silverlight 4 Business Application Development: Beginner’s Guide
3. Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook
4. Microsoft Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010 Integration
5. Microsoft Silverlight 4: Building Rich Enterprise Dashboards
6. 3D Game Development with Microsoft Silverlight 3: Beginner’s Guide

The book clearly show which chapter is from which book at the begging of each chapter. Although the chapters are from 6 different books the content flow pretty well and it has a summary on each chapter and the book have indexes as well.

I typically would get a book and only pick out the chapters that I want to read and skim through the rest of the book and this book seem like someone has done the job of picking out for me and put in a nice little book.

It is like you pay for 6 books in one price!

Here is the link to the book: http://www.packtpub.com/managing-data-and-media-in-silverlight-4-packts-bestselling-books/book

By default, The latest version of PHPUnit won’t run correctly with NetBeans 7+. The main problem is it can’t find Zend framework to load the class correctly. Below is my hack to make it works!

Here is what I have to do to get PHPUnit to run in NetBeans 7+

First you need to install PHPUnit this way:

pear config-set auto_discover 1
pear install pear.phpunit.de/PHPUnit-3.4.0
pear install phpunit/DbUnit phpunit/PHPUnit_Selenium phpunit/PHPUnit_SkeletonGenerator phpunit/PHPUnit_Story

Then once PHPUnit is installed you need PHPUnit file to make it works as follow:

#!d:\php\php.exe
/* PHPUnit
*/

if (strpos('d:\php\php.exe', '@php_bin') === 0) {
set_include_path(dirname(__FILE__) . PATH_SEPARATOR . get_include_path());
}

require_once 'Zend/Loader/Autoloader.php';
Zend_Loader_Autoloader::getInstance();

require_once 'PHPUnit/Util/Filter.php';

PHPUnit_Util_Filter::addFileToFilter(__FILE__, 'PHPUNIT');

require 'PHPUnit/TextUI/Command.php';

define('PHPUnit_MAIN_METHOD', 'PHPUnit_TextUI_Command::main');

PHPUnit_TextUI_Command::main();
?>

I have been long time user of Firefox since the beginning and has been depended on its useful extensions for a long time but now with the rate Firefox is going with how badly it not able to solve the memory leak and performance issue and I am just fed up with it now!

Just make a long story short, Firefox has been doing very rapid release lately and every release is getting worst and worst. Case in point the latest version of Firefox 10 is leaking memory so bad that if I use it for about a few hours the memory consumption is so high that make my reasonably fast computer become unusable.

I have to do an end task to kill of Firefox to bring my computer back to it normal self!

Glary Utilities is the case of the good guy has gone bad!

I used to recommend Glary Utilities to anyone that has problem with their computer that infected with some kind of virus or spyware but today I discover that the latest version of Glary Utilities has done something that I did not know about it until after I installed.

It changes my IE home page without my knowledge and the worst thing is I can’t change it back by click on “use default” I have to manually type where I want to be the home page on IE. That is terrible thing to do, “Glary Utilities”!

With this, I would not recommend anyone to use this utility any more and be warned of “Glary Utilities”

3 months from my previous blog about Firefox 7, they release version 8 which is ok from a user perspective even though Firefox list lot of improvements but the sad fact is Firefox 8 was still slow!

Now comes Firefox 9 which is just released and it is a presently surprise!

It is compatible with all of my add-ons, it is snappy! The memory footprint is still big when open with lot of tabs but the good news is it has no impact to the performance of Firefox!

I think this Firefox 9 has regain my faith with this browser!

You can read the full list of bug fixes and a full list of features here..

I have been using Firefox since the beginning and it was a pleasant experience to use it with so many add-on but Firefox has been going down hill as a bloated browser!

On http://blog.mozilla.com/, it said: “Mozilla Firefox Significantly Reduces Memory Use to Make Web Browsing Faster…” but I don’t know what to believe!

The latest version of Firefox 7.01 claim to be reducing memory, improve performance but it is no longer a fast, lean browser! It is consuming too much memory and now too much CPU. It keeps get stuck on “no respond” when look in task manager. It is just unusable!

I am reliant on some of the Firefox add-on that I must still use it for those add-on but for most of my browser need I will now switch to other browser like IE 9 or Chromium until Firefox clean up its act!

With the latest release of Silverlight and .NET that support dynamic scripting you can now doing straight text scripting with IronPython or IronRuby, no more compile code and dll stuff!

With the Visual Studio integrated Shell and IronPython Tool for Visual Studio that make develop web site with either IronPython or IronRuby scripting very easily but…

It works great in Visual Studio integrated Shell but when you try to deploy it in production IIS server it just does not work!

All you have to do in IIS is either one below:

. Must define .py minetype in IIS for IronPython to load external py script and .rb for IronRuby
. or define in web.config like below

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"? >
< configuration >
< system.webServer >
< staticContent >
< mimeMap fileExtension=".py" mimeType="text/python" / >
< /staticContent >
< /system.webServer >
< /configuration >

It took me quite a while to figure this out and I hope this will help you save some time!