Also, wouldn’t it be great if you could have random test data to go with it? Well folks, I’m proud to announce the imminent release of my SQL Connector for MS Excel product.

Using this utility you can edit, generate and update your SQL server data easily and quickly without leaving MS Excel. I’ve uploaded a short video to YouTube to illustrate the basic functionality.

Keep watching this space for more news!

My latest post on Add-in Express has been published. This week I show you a nice way to extend the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Outlook Client using Add-in Express.

Read more here.

To see all my Add-in Express blog posts visit my author page.

I’ve posted this weeks’ post on Add-in Express. In this post I demonstrate how to use WPF in your Add-in Express 2010 Office Add-ins.

Read more here.

To see all my Add-in Express blog posts visit my author page.

I had a spate of spam attacks for a while now, with the installation of WordPress I activated the reCaptcha plugin. Unfortunately it worked too well, and no comments were saved.

So I’ve now activated the Akismet plugin, so let hope that works and I’m looking forward to your comments.

Take that you spamming SOB’s!

Based on our experience on projects and specifically the one we were currently working on, we came up with the following challenges when not using such a shared framework.

• A lot if not most development time is spent on plumbing code instead of business logic.
• No reuse of code across different projects.
• Most projects are difficult to maintain and upgrade due to custom development.
• There is multiple architectures and development patterns across projects, so no consistency.

We proposed a framework that could be shared across all departments and/or custom development projects. Of course, I insisted to base the design on CSLA. I’m not going to go into the reason for my decision, other than saying read my posts regarding CSLA and the frameworks’ definition. We’ve also suggested to use T4 as the code generation technology for the proposed framework.

Some of the benefits we’ve identified are:

• Flexibility
  • Choice of data access technology i.e. LINQ, ADO.Net and even Entity Framework
  • Choice of any frontend technology i.e. Silverlight, WPF, Windows Forms, ASP.Net
  • Plug in any service layer/use any pattern with minimal changes
• Standardized Framework – Any developer can support it. Reduced knowledge transfer time.
• Decrease Development Time higher GP’s.
• One click generation of stored procedures and business objects using T4
• Can be used with DSL(Domain Specific Language) tools for VS.
• Solid Object Orientated Concepts.

We were pretty excited about the idea, for our proof-of-concept we showed how you can create your business objects using T4 and a Linq2SQL dbml file for the metadata.

To put it lightly we received a muted response. I think mostly we might have shocked and awed them with our demo app. The thing is (in my experience so far), it seems only a few IT professionals working in the .Net space have ever used business objects and even less of them have ever data bound it to a form. Nonetheless, that’s for another post.

Back to our shared development framework…a month or so after our presentation, a young developer gave a demo of an innovation that would generate a certain amount of helper functions to streamline unit testing. Only problem was, this innovation only applied to the architecture on the project he’s currently working on…all other projects currently underway in the organisation would not be able to benefit from this innovation.

To conclude; despite receiving a muted response, we are seeing a shift towards a more object/code-generation approach in the organisation, people do see the benefit of a layered architecture as they work on more complex projects. So, there is hope

The few words I tried out, were pluralized perfectly:

Address => Addresses
Wolf => Wolves
Entity => Entities

For regular readers of this blog, it’ll come as no surprise that I’m a bit of a CSLA fanboy; but I do prefer the Object Orientated/Business Object approach to tackling development challenges. With this architecture there is no separation between the data access layer and the business layer. i.e. business rules and custom logic resides in the dataset’s code behind. A few things irks me about using datasets and the NOA approach:

• Changes to the database can not be automatically generated, the datasets need to be manually refreshed/configured.
• NOA does not lend itself well towards code generation
• Business Rules can not be separated to another layer easily
• When building program logic code, it is near impossible to access object level properties. i.e. Have to work with dataset row, rather than object.

I’m nowhere perfect, nor can ever know nearly enough IT kung fu, so would love to hear a few opinions about this approach or any examples where it was used successfully. Also, does anyone know if this is an accepted Microsoft pattern?

I’ve realized the awesome power of XAML,here’s how you can see for yourself. Make sure you have MS Visio installed, download and install Visio Export to XAML add-in (read more here). Next, drag any shape(I used the Mainframe shape) onto the design surface. Make sure the shape is selected and click on File> Export to XAML and click on the Export to XAML button.

Open the generated file in any xaml viewer and tada! The image is now completely programmable. Check a very silly example here. Click the button and you’ll notice that the lights on the mainframe starts flashing.

The ability to program the image is because of Visio’s Scalable Vector Graphics(SVG) format. The add-in converts the SVG into usable XAML. So in theory, you would be able to convert any SVG file into XAML and have your programmatic way with it.

Pretty cool, isn’t it?

http://www.daniweb.com/code/snippet184.html

DateTime CurrTime = DateTime.Now;
Console.WriteLine("DateTime display listing specifier and result:\n");
Console.WriteLine("d = {0:d}", CurrTime ); // Short date mm/dd/yyyy
Console.WriteLine("D = {0:D}", CurrTime ); // Long date day, month dd, yyyy
Console.WriteLine("f = {0:f}", CurrTime ); // Full date/short time day, month dd, yyyy hh:mm
Console.WriteLine("F = {0:F}", CurrTime ); // Full date/full time day, month dd, yyyy HH:mm:ss AM/PM
Console.WriteLine("g = {0:g}", CurrTime ); // Short date/short time mm/dd/yyyy HH:mm
Console.WriteLine("G = {0:G}", CurrTime ); // Short date/long time mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss
Console.WriteLine("M = {0:M}", CurrTime ); // Month dd
Console.WriteLine("R = {0:R}", CurrTime ); // ddd Month yyyy hh:mm:ss GMT
Console.WriteLine("s = {0:s}", CurrTime ); // yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss can be sorted!
Console.WriteLine("t = {0:t}", CurrTime ); // Short time hh:mm AM/PM
Console.WriteLine("T = {0:T}", CurrTime ); // Long time hh:mm:ss AM/PM
Console.WriteLine("u = {0:u}", CurrTime ); // yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss universal/sortable
Console.WriteLine("U = {0:U}", CurrTime ); // day, month dd, yyyy hh:mm:ss AM/PM
Console.WriteLine("Y = {0:Y}", CurrTime ); // Month, yyyy
Console.WriteLine();
Console.WriteLine("DateTime.Month = " + CurrTime.Month); // number of month
Console.WriteLine("DateTime.DayOfWeek = " + CurrTime.DayOfWeek); // full name of day
Console.WriteLine("DateTime.TimeOfDay = " + CurrTime.TimeOfDay); // 24 hour time
// number of 100-nanosecond intervals that have elapsed since 1/1/0001, 12:00am
// useful for time-elapsed measurements
Console.WriteLine("DateTime.Ticks = " + CurrTime.Ticks);