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S.A. Architect Community Website Stats - April 2009

The stats are based off of IIS log parsing as well as off of the stats information from SharePoint (which powers it).

Previous Stats:

Some notes on it:

  • Compared to last month fairly flat - but that reflects the group this month. Not much has happened.
  • The Publications page remained at the top of pages, and despite other usage numbers going down - it went up. The content is a big draw card.
  • Distinct Users means people which can be identified through logs/tracking to be unique (it’s not an exacting science so there may be people who are counted more than once while others are grouped together as they come from behind a proxy). They are not members and can include things like search bots. I don’t care about the number too much on this but rather the trend.
  • Registered Members are people who have completed the registration form on the website.
  • New members climbed by 6 which is on par with the last 5 months or so.

Below is the pretty excel image stats - click it for a bigger version:

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Glimmer - jQuery IDE

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jQuery is a fairly easy to use if you understand CSS or been working with HTML for a while, but what if you are a drag & drop developer? Who never has done that? Or if you want to just whip up a nice effect quickly? Well the guys from Microsoft have recently launched Glimmer which is a free jQuery effects IDE. 

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When you launch the very good looking WPF application (read:SLOW) you get four templates, which 3 of them have a wizard interface to set it up.

  • Image Sequencer (click here for the demo of this effect): This creates a rotating image box. Think of use for banners where you want to have each image go to a different URL or for a picture rotate/slide show. This one has four steps:
    1. Description (where is the “Do not show this again” checkbox)
    2. Select the images and set the URL for them  image. What is nice here is the live preview window on the right hand side.
    3. Set how long to delay between images and what the image size should be (say if you need to resize)
    4. Lastly the save page. The UI is a little odd here, since there is no finish button. You need to use the (large) save button. When you save it you get a folder with an images sub folder (containing your images), a CSS file, an image for the button (to manually switch between images), jQuery 1.3.2, a minified js file of the effect you have done and a html page for testing/usage
  • Dropdown Menu Wizard (click here for the demo of this effect): This creates a drop down menu. It has 3 steps:
    1. Description (no “Do not show this again” check box again)
    2. Set up the top level menu options image
    3. Add second level options and save. The output is pretty much the same as with image sequencer - minified js file of your effect,  jQuery and an HTML page.
  • Custom: The non-wizard of the group. This guy is powerful and will let you build a lot of effects together, but you need to have an HTML file to start with as it will give you a list of the tags/id’s available - no page, no tags, nothing to work with: . If gives you a single page to wire up the events and I think this would be useful for people needing something special. image
  • Tooltip Wizard (click here for the demo of this effect): Two step wizard to add tool tips to text/images.
    1. Description (no “Do not show this again” check box again)
    2. On step two you put in the text/image and the tool tip and save it.

I do like the menu option “Clean Code Mode” (under the options menu) which disables the minifi-ing of the code it generates. This will be very useful for people using this to learn from.

Overall this is a good first drop, although it should be viewed as a beta. The performance is terrible, there is so much more you could do with jQuery that it doesn’t do, it is unaware of plug-in’s which is important for jQuery and the UI has many things that aren’t logical (there is no hint that the Custom needs a HTML page to actually do anything). However as a tool to train people, or give designers a tool to work with jQuery this will be very valuable and I will be demo’ing it at my jQuery talk.

Information Worker Looking Good

This week was a special week for the InformationWorker user group, because BB&D (the great company I work for) provided a huge box of t-shirts for the group. In the box were two types of shirts, the Wanna Collaborate? and the MOSS-A-SAURUS.

So how do you get one of them? Well they will be available as prizes for people helping the community, be that great blog posts, brining new members, helpful forum posts etc… Exact details will be on the Information Worker site soon, but if you start now you will still be able to qualify.

Don’t worry Cape Town IWer’s, because a batch will be shipped to Zlatan soon for dishing out at Cape Town events!

Lastly THANK YOU BB&D for this great gesture!

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MOSS is no more!

Yip, MOSS the acronym for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is no more, because it is now officially announced that the next version is Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. They’ve dropped the Office part of the name because “lots of folks associate the name Office with the Office client”. Not sure what we will use for the new acronym since MSS is Microsoft Search Server.

WSS appears to be staying the same though ;)

South Africa - We know search

Mark Stacey sent me a tweet the other day about Google searches of SharePoint. I changed it slightly since the MOSS parameter was bringing back a lot of non-SharePoint content. What Mark point out that is interesting is not the amount of searches but that South Africa ranks 3rd for regions doing searching just behind India and Singapore. No surprise that Gauteng leads the Western Cape and KZN in searches (guess where the big SharePoint companies are?)

To see the actual results see: http://www.google.com/trends?q=sharepoint&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=1

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Super hero's and villains - who are you?

Haven’t done one of these for ages so I thought it was time to find out what super hero and villain I would be.

Your results:
You are Spider-Man
Spider-Man
85%
Green Lantern
70%
Iron Man
70%
Superman
60%
The Flash
55%
Supergirl
35%
Wonder Woman
35%
Robin
35%
Batman
30%
Catwoman
30%
Hulk
10%
You are intelligent, witty,
a bit geeky and have great
power and responsibility.
Click here to take the "Which Superhero am I?" quiz...
Your results:
You are Mr. Freeze
Mr. Freeze
53%
Riddler
51%
Dr. Doom
49%
The Joker
47%
Venom
37%
Mystique
37%
Two-Face
37%
Green Goblin
33%
Magneto
32%
Apocalypse
30%
Lex Luthor
28%
Catwoman
21%
Dark Phoenix
21%
Juggernaut
17%
Poison Ivy
16%
Kingpin
13%
You are cold and you think everyone else should be also, literally.
Click here to take the Super Villain Personality Test

VSTT Reference Guide

If you are looking for some serious guidance on Visual Studio test, then the Rangers have come to the rescue (again) with a lovely 83 page document on VSTT. Get it from CodePlex

It sounds like a contraction that 83 pages is a reference guide but from my use this morning of it (couldn’t of come out at a better time for me), it isn’t. It is not meant to be read from beginning to end, rather you can easily skip between parts because the material is presented in a Q&A format which is easy to manage.

What’s in it?

  • SETUP CONSIDERATIONS 9
  • WEB TEST CONSIDERATIONS 14
  • WEB SERVICE TEST CONSIDERATIONS 35
  • UNIT TEST CONSIDERATIONS 36
  • LOAD TEST CONSIDERATIONS 42
  • LOAD TEST RIG CONSIDERATION 56
  • PERFORMANCE DATA COLLECTION AND USAGE 66
  • LOAD TEST RESULTS STORE INFORMATION 73
  • TEST CUSTOMIZATION 76
  • ITEMS CHANGED OR FIXED IN VSTS 2008 SP1 77
  • GENERAL COMMANDS AND TRICKS (NOT VSTS SPECIFIC) 79

How to convert a VS standard class library to a Workflow activity library

Introduction

image VS. image

If you are working in a workflow foundation project you may find you have created a class library (see image below) and want to put workflow activities into it but you may have issues with that because you didn’t create a Workflow activity library.

Issues

Some of the issues you may find are the add item menu doesn’t have the options you expect and the workflow designer interface doesn’t work.

image VS. image

Solution

To solve this you need to modify the class library project file very slightly. To do that simply open the file with a text editor such as Notepad or use the options in Visual Studio to unload and edit the project.

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The first thing is to add a ProjectTypeGuids node to the base PropertyGroup node. To get there you need to navigate to the PropertyGroup node (it is under the Project node) without any Condition attributes. On my machine that is on line 3

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Next add the following line in the node:

<ProjectTypeGuids>{14822709-B5A1-4724-98CA-57A101D1B079};{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}</ProjectTypeGuids>

Example: image

Next you need add a new project target into the Project node. You should already have one of these  around line 56

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Right below that you need to add a new one (so you will have two), the line to add is:

<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\Windows Workflow Foundation\v3.5\Workflow.Targets" />

Example: image

Now save the project file and re-open it in Visual Studio and the problems should be gone!

Troubleshooting

You may find that the designer is not working or you get errors when adding new activities still. In such a case it could be that you are missing the workflow foundation assemblies (System.Workflow.Activities; System.Workflow.ComponentModel; System.Workflow.Runtime):

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Once you have those added everything should be working fine.

S.A. Architect Community Website Stats - March 2009

Finally broke the bad habit of posting stats late! The stats are based off of IIS log parsing as well as off of the stats information from SharePoint (which powers it).

Previous Stats:

Some notes on it:

  • Definite climb this month over Feb, thanks to a few factors I think.
    • First there has been some renewed actions in the group - if you didn’t know about it, you can read it about it here.
    • Also I have heard via the grapevine it was mentioned at the DevDays/TechDays events!
  • A stat I keep but don’t speak about is the top page, which this month (for the first time since I started) is the Publications page. So it seems people are into downloading more content this month!
  • Distinct Users means people which can be identified through logs/tracking to be unique (it’s not an exacting science so there may be people who are counted more than once while others are grouped together as they come from behind a proxy). They are not members and can include things like search bots. I don’t care about the number too much on this but rather the trend.
  • Registered Members are people who have completed the registration form on the website.
  • New members climbed by 5 which seems exactly average for us now.

Below is the pretty excel image stats - click it for a bigger version:

image

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Boring Games Are Dead

figurebannerblog

Microsoft is running a competition for the most fun game to play and the winner gets a free trip to Tech-Ed 2009! Since it is Microsoft games need to be developed using XNA Game Studio, Visual Studio or Expression Studio and must run on Windows!

Since it is decided on by the community there is also a prize for one of the ‘judges’!

More information can be found at: www.boringgamesaredead.co.za