ORM Profiler

Solutions Design released the beta version of it's new comer ORM Profiler.

I enjoyed working with Frans Bouma in this project. It's not the first time to work with Frans, but this time was the best development experience so far. I enjoyed the discussions the most :)

The ORM Profiler, profiles the DAL of your application, analyzes the outcome, and warns you about probable weak points in your DAL.
It should save you big time, tuning your DAL.


By the way if you want a free license of the ORM Profiler, register for the first 50 beta testers.
Read Frans Bouma's post about it.

WP7 Session for the Start-up Summer Camp

Yesterday I was pleased to deliver a session at the American University in Cairo, for young Egyptians digging their way in the software industry.
I started by dropping some show of hands question to know what background does the audience have.

I had almost 3 hours and wanted to go through the following items:

1- Problems faced when developing for the mobile. (Opposed to the PC).
2- What are Silverlight and XAML?
3- What files to expect in a WP7 project.
4- Some Design tips
5- Layout Controls (Grid - Stack - Canvas)
6- Pivot and Panorama controls/projects
7- Application Life-Cycle (before and after Mango).
8- Multitasking capabilities and limitations.
9- Push Notification
10- Q&A.

I succeeded to squeeze the above subjects in 3 hours with few demo projects, but I had no time for live coding.

I wish the attendees had brief background about WP7 so I could have skipped some of the above list and did one or 2 projects from scratch, I was ready to show them one simple game developed using Silverlight. But the show of hands questions on the beginning of the session showed there was only couple of attendees who had some knowledge with WPF, Silverlight and/or XAML.

Very few seemed to have experience with other mobile platforms. But many others did not seem to know what an "Exception" is, or maybe they did but were too shy or too tired to speak. (Might have been a side effect of fasting)

But that was my main issue in the session, the lack of responses from the audience. I could hardly get any solid feedback and so I had no idea if I was making any sense to the majority or I was completely out of context. I even asked the questions I thought they would normally ask. Only 5 or 6 out of 40 something were active every now and then. But the majority was silent.

Although some came to me praising the session or asking for more details after I was done, but I felt the majority were bored, and that the session was not for them. Even I was bored, so I can’t blame them.

** To any of you who felt the session was boring, I’m sorry for that, but I really do need to hear from you. Even if you were not into development but it happened that you were there, please leave me a comment, and tell me what you expected from this session, your input will be much of a benefit to me, and to others who will attend my next sessions.

* Some of the people I spoke to after the session thought I'm a Microsoft Employee :)
Sorry guys I’m not.

* One comment made my day: "Well, it’s all about marketing their product" :>
I wish MS guys can hear you; maybe they'll hire me for a job well done :)

I won't speak for MS, coz it makes full sense they want to market their products.
But as for me, I believe the main job of any presenter, public speaker or an instructor, is to sell the idea.

But in case the comment meant, I was honest, speaking about the Pros and ignoring the Cons, well this could be understandable without being dis-honest unless the speaker did lie, but even that I claim innocent.

As far as I remember, I've spoken about the current issues of WP7, I even spoke about the past ones, which are already solved by Mango.
For those who have missed it, here are some of the Cons I spoke about.
1- Native Arabic Support missing.
2- There were no multitasking or back-ground services available.
3- Now there is, but still not 100% what you can call multitasking.

Anyway, hope to hear from you guys, thanks in advance.

Windows Phone 7 Resources

Development tools:
Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.0

Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 (Beta)

Silverlight Toolkit

Still WP7 doesn't support Arabic, but you can use the following library of controls to display Arabic text.
Arabic for WP7

Important Documentation:
Microsoft Windows Phone Developer Documentation - Offline Version (CHM Format)

User Experience Design Guidelines for Windows Phone

Windows Phone 7 Localization Explained (a previous post of mine).

Application Certification Requirements for Windows Phone

If you live in a country not yet eligible tosubmit apps to the AppHub, you may use:
Yalla Apps

(EDIT)
The Presentation

Login and Main Forms

Many Windows Forms Developers are confused about a simple Use Case.

The use case is:
- User starts an application.
- Login Form appears.
- Application Exists if the user closes the Login Form.
- Upon successful login the Login Form closes and the Main Form of the application shows.
- Application Exists if the user closes the Main Form.

Many developers suggests complex implementations including deriving from the ApplicationContext and use the derived class in an overload to the Application.Run() method.
Examples of what have been discussed:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1629205/windows-forms-create-the-main-application-after-login-which-form-to-run
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vbgeneral/thread/73aeabe3-42db-4747-b3c7-9a5e4ea393ac/
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/applicationcontextsplash.aspx

The implemntation can be much easier than this.
The ide is to open the Login Form as a modal dialog in the MainForm Load event.
And close the main form if the result was not OK.

Try this:

Here is the entry point (nothing done here):
static void Main()
{
Application.EnableVisualStyles();
Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault(false);
Application.Run(new MainForm());
}
Login Form:
public partial class LoginForm : Form
{
private bool _authenticated = false;

private void _loginBtn_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if (AUTHENTICATION LOGIC)
{
_authenticated = true;
this.Close();
return;
}

MessageBox.Show("Login Failed", "Error", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Stop);
}

private void LoginForm_FormClosing(object sender, FormClosingEventArgs e)
{
if (_authenticated)
this.DialogResult = DialogResult.OK;
else
this.DialogResult = DialogResult.Abort;
}
}
Main Form:
public partial class MainForm : Form
{
private void MainForm_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
var loginForm = new LoginForm();
if (loginForm.ShowDialog() != DialogResult.OK)
{
this.Close();
}
}
}

That's it.

ASP.NET Menu RTL

The ASP.NET Menu (asp:menu) has inline styles that forces left foating. You can find this out by examining the source of any page which has asp:menu tag. I don't know why this is forced, but anyway for right-to-left languages, you might need to float the menu to the right side. Now if you used tried to use float:right in the CSS, it on't apply as the inline style will overrule. To overcome this you have to modify the CSS style to the following: float:right !important;The !important keyword denotes that this style should overrule the inline style.

You will need to do the same thing in the .menu ul li style.
To let the menu items to start from the right. Otherwise you will find the last menu item comes first.

WP7 Localization Explained

I believe you are going to create a new Windows Phone Application to follow me in this article.
I’ll assume you understand that everything that applies for a language, also applies for the language-Culture.
I.e. you can use “en” for English or “en-UK” for English and United Kingdom culture.
The language will affect the translation and what’s written in the resource files will be used for that sake, and the culture will affect the formats of date, currency…etc.

Step 1 – Add Resource Files:
Anyone who has brief experience with localization in .net, will guess the first step.
You have to add a Resource file for each language you need to use in your application.
You should have a file for the default language and others for each other language used, having the same name as the default language file but with a small extension using each language abbreviation.
Let’s say I’m going to support English (default) and Italian. Then I should end up having something like:

MyResources.resx
MyResources.it.resx

If it’s your first time to use a resource file, this is added from: Project (right click) => Add => New Item => (pick Resource File).
- Needless to say, when you fill the resource files, the Name of each resource should match, and only the value should reflect the translation.
- So say I’m going to have (Hello/Hello) & (Hello/Ciao) as the English & Italian (Name/Value)s.

Step 2 – Declare the Languages you support:
We should tell the application which languages we are supporting. Guess it’s not smart enough to figure this out by itself.
And for this you we’ll have to close the project/solution. Then open the project file in notepad, and add the supported languages (except the default one) in the supported cultures tag, using semi-colon as a separator, as follows:
<SupportedCultures>it;</SupportedCultures>You’ll also need to define the default language in case the user is using a language you don’t support, and thus the default language should be used then.
For that you need to go to the Project Properties => Application (Tab) => Assembly Information (button) => Set the (Neutral Language).

Step 3 – Use Resource-File in code behind:
Let’s see if this is going to work.
In the MainPage.xaml.cs, I’ll write the following in the CTor of the page.
PageTitle.Text = MyResources.Hello;
Step 4 – Test:
Now you can test this on a device, and it should display the “Ciao” if you went to the phone settings and set “Italiano” as the display language.
But the Emulator won’t let you change the “Display Language”, so if you want to test this in the Emulator, you will have to set the language-culture in code. (Just for testing).
So go the App.xaml.cs and write the following in CTor or in the Launching event handler.
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("it");You may also add the following if you are testing the culture (format of dates, currencies…etc.)
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("it");** Don’t forget to remove these when you finish testing.
Now you should see the localization working. I hate to say it but that’s not the end of it.

(UPDATE)
Now you can change the display language in the emulator, all you have to do is to click on the: "tap here to accept changes and restart your phone." link, which appears when you select a different Display Language.
Still this might be consume more time than applying the change in code.

Step 5 – Access the Resource Files in XAML:
To use the resource files in XAML, you need to map them to a Static Resource, to able to bind to them.
Say you have a TextBlock as follows.
<TextBlock Name="textBlock1" Text="Hello">And instead of hardcoding the Text, we want to use the resource files. In other words we want to bind the Text property of the TextBlock to the appropriate key/property of the resource files.
We will go and define the generated Resource class as a static resource in the App.xaml, as follows:
<Application.Resources>
<local:MyResources xmlns:local ="clr-namespace:MyNamespace" x:Key="AnyGivenKey" />
</Application.Resources>Please make sure you replace MyNamespace with the namespace under which MyResources is defined.
If you try to run the application now the following exception will blow right in your face:
AG_E_PARSER_UNKNOWN_TYPE [Line: 10 Position: 65]
Of type: System.Windows.Markup.XamlParseException
This issue has been reported here: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/628281/silverlight-wp7-resource-files-and-binding

That’s because the class generated for the resource file was marked internal, and to access it from the XAML we need it to be public.
If you open each of the resx files, you will find an option in the toolbar to change the access modifier.
This should change the access modifier of the classes, but we still need to change the access modifier of the CTor. So you will have to open the default language resx.cs file, and look for the CTor and change the internal to public.

Now the application can run safely without weird exceptions.
And now it’s safe to go back to the TextBlock and change it to the following to use the Static Resource we just defined in the App.xaml:
<TextBlock Name="textBlock1" Text="{Binding Path=Hello, Source={StaticResource AnyGivenKey}}"/>That’s all? You wish…
The problem now is: whenever you add extra resources to the resource files, the resx.cs class is re-generated and the modifier of the CTor gets set back to internal. So if you are happy with manually changing it each time you add a new resource and build your application, then you are done.
If it’s cumbersome tedious thing to manage, then we need to find another solution.

Step 5.2 – Access the Resource Files in XAML:
To overcome this internal access modifier thing, we will create a class that wraps the generated resources class, and use that as our static resource in the App.xaml, as follows:
public class MyResourcesWrapper
{
public MyResourcesWrapper()
{
}

private static MyResources _myWrappedResources = new MyResources();

public MyResources MyWrappedResources { get { return _myWrappedResources; } }
}And then our TextBlock should be changed to:
<TextBlock Name="textBlock1" Text="{Binding Path=MyWrappedResources.Hello, Source={StaticResource AnyGivenKey}}"/>You will need to modify the Resource definition in the App.xaml into the following:
<Application.Resources>
<local:MyResourcesWrapper xmlns:local ="clr-namespace:MyNamespace" x:Key="AnyGivenKey" />
</Application.Resources>
One extra step to go (if you need to localize the application bar).

Step 6 – Localizing the ApplicationBar:
The application bar is not growing out of the Silverlight, it’s a shell system tray.
So using the binding method in the xaml file won’t work.
We will have to add items to the application bar in the code behind and set the required localized text as we’ve done earlier in step 3.
e.g.
MainPage.xaml
<phone:PhoneApplicationPage.ApplicationBar>
<shell:ApplicationBar IsVisible="True" IsMenuEnabled="True">
</shell:ApplicationBar>
</phone:PhoneApplicationPage.ApplicationBar>MainPage.xaml.cs

ApplicationBar = new ApplicationBar();

var appBarButton = new ApplicationBarIconButton(new Uri("/Images/appbar_button1.png", UriKind.Relative));
appBarButton.Text = MyResources.Hello;
ApplicationBar.Buttons.Add(appBarButton);

var appBarMenuItem = new ApplicationBarMenuItem(MyResources.Hello);
ApplicationBar.MenuItems.Add(appBarMenuItem);

References:

How to: Build a Localized Application for Windows Phone:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff637520%28v=VS.92%29.aspx
CultureInfo Class:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.globalization.cultureinfo(VS.95).aspx
Extra link for the WP7 toolkit controls:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/delay/archive/2010/12/20/quot-and-she-d-say-can-you-see-what-i-m-saying-quot-how-to-localize-a-windows-phone-7-application-that-uses-the-windows-phone-toolkit-into-different-languages.aspx

Stopping IIS 6 Caching

One issue that I faced when deploying an ASP.NET 3.5 web application on IIS 6 (Windows Server 2003), was that web-pages always showed old data.

For example a GridView didn't show inserted or updated data unless we refresh the page (F5). Or if we restart IIS (iisreset).

After some googling it was apparent that this is an IIS6 issue.
And every try to solve it by setting caching and expiration settings in IIS 6 failed.

The only solution we found working is to hardcode the following in Global.asax

protected void Application_EndRequest(Object sender, EventArgs e)
{
HttpContext.Current.Response.CacheControl = "no-cache";
}