May 2009 Entries
The boards given away at WinHEC and PDC for Windows 7 sensor development are now available for sale from Freescale: http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=JMBADGE&tab=Buy_Parametric_Tab&fromSearch=false These are a great way to experiment with the new sensors such as light, gyroscope, and accelerometer. The price is pretty fair, and it’s a nice compact board. Even better, the Windows API Code Pack support it nicely in managed code. Have fun!
So how do you query in the text-based Where clause of an LINQ to Entity query? This question drove me up the wall! I’m used to the CONVERT function, or just passing a string, or with a full-on LINQ query, using a DateTime object. With an EntityDataSource, though, you specify the where clause using the Where property which is a string. First, I couldn’t even figure out how to refer to a column. “IsCancelled” (my column name) didn’t work. The Visual Studio expression editor did not help one bit. Finally, I came across some samples. You need to prefix...
So far, my volunteer registration system for non-profits has been coming along well, but I’d love some help! I’m hosting the project at CodePlex. You need to be able to view upcoming volunteer events, register as a member, and then volunteer for specific events. Administrators can create events, manage the list of volunteers in an event, and define related entities (neighborhoods and organizations). Most of this is working, but there’s very little error-checking, the design is very ugly, and some of the smaller features aren’t in place (filtering for active, future events for instance). Anyone interested in working on an...
Well, upper level support has confirmed that they are indeed running .NET 3.5 SP1 on their shared hosting servers. This seems unlikely since the Entity assemblies are missing. I’ve replied yet again so we’ll see what happens this time. I hope it ends up being a simple fix.
Aargh! Very frustrating. I tried setting up a site on Godaddy. The site uses Entity Framework. Site failed. Even though they claim .NET 2.0/3.0/3.5 it’s missing all the Entity classes. Even when I copied them to my bin folder it fails since the System.Runtime.Reflection assembly is missing some attributes, The compilation error tells me that it’s the 2.0 compiler. Maybe that’s right, I don’t know. They tell me EF is not supported though which is really strange. After looking closer I noticed that EF is part of 3.5 SP1 (release last November). Perhaps though don’t do service packs. I’m not...
I should have blogged on this beforehand… but on Saturday I gave a talk about Windows 7 for developers at the Iowa Code Camp, and last night I gave another similar talk to the Cedar Rapids INETA group. There are lots of neat new features to take advantage of. The taskbar alone offers peeks and previews, custom buttons on preview, alerts/progress, even icon overlays (something that would have really come in handy with Notification Icons!). The intent is to move away from the notification area now and they’ve really provided some good tools for it. I always have fun...