1. Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Evaluation Edition x64, running as an Active Directory Domain Controller for the “CONTOSO.COM” domain with DNS and WINS
2. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition with Analysis, Notification, and Reporting Services
3. Microsoft Office Communication Server 2007 R2
4. Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
5. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition
6. Microsoft Office Web Applications
7. Microsoft FAST Search for SharePoint 2010
8. Microsoft Project Server 2010
9. Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010
10. Microsoft Visio 2010
11. Microsoft Project 2010
12. Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2

So fireup your free download manager and download this absolute SharePoint 2010 nirvana. If you are contrained on bandwidth then just to let you know that full download will set you back by approximately 18GB.

Here is the download link.

Post from: One .Net Way

Mother Of All SharePoint 2010 Virtual Machines

ClientIDMode can be set at Page level or at Control level. Let’s follow with an example of a GridView control. We will set it’s ClientIdMode property to all available options and view the markup. We will bind our GridView to a collection of cities. A city class looks like this.

public class City
{
  public string Name { get; set; }
  public string Country { get; set; }
}

The collection itself can be initialized using this code.

List<City> cities =
        new List<City>
        {
            new City{ Name = "Sydney", Country = "Australia" },
            new City{ Name = "New York", Country = "USA" },
            new City{ Name = "Paris", Country = "France" },
            new City{ Name = "Milan", Country = "Spain" },
            new City{ Name = "Melbourne", Country = "Australia" },
            new City{ Name = "Auckland", Country = "New Zealand" },
            new City{ Name = "Tokyo", Country = "Japan" },
            new City{ Name = "New Delhi", Country = "India" },
            new City{ Name = "Hobart", Country = "Australia" }
        };

Source for our GridView looks like this.

<asp:GridView runat="server" ID="gridViewCities" AutoGenerateColumns="False">
  <Columns>
    <asp:TemplateField>
      <ItemTemplate>
        <asp:Label runat="server" ID="Label1" Text='<%# Bind("Name") %>' />
      </ItemTemplate>
    </asp:TemplateField>
    <asp:TemplateField>
      <ItemTemplate>
        <asp:Label runat="server" ID="Label2" Text='<%# Bind("Country") %>' />
      </ItemTemplate>
    </asp:TemplateField>
  </Columns>
</asp:GridView>

ClientIDMode = “AutoID”

Using this mode will generate the IDs as it has in earlier versions of ASP.NET.

<asp:GridView
        runat="server"
        ID="gridViewCities"
        AutoGenerateColumns="False"
        ClientIDMode="AutoID">

HTML generated by AutoID (showing only relevant part).

ClientIDMode = “Static”

Static mode outputs the same ID in HTML as specified in ASP.NET source.

<asp:GridView
        runat="server"
        ID="gridViewCities"
        AutoGenerateColumns="False"
        ClientIDMode="Static">

Static Mode is not the best for controls such as GridView or any other data control which displays lists of data. As you can see above that all span tags have same IDs. Static Mode is best to be used with other common controls or User Controls.

ClientIDMode = “Predictable”

Predictable mode concatenates the ID of parent control with the bound value supplied by assigning ClientIDRowSuffix property.

<asp:GridView
        runat="server"
        ID="gridViewCities"
        AutoGenerateColumns="False"
        ClientIDMode="Predictable"
        ClientIDRowSuffix="Name">

Here we see that our span elements have been named by concatenating the name of GridView + value of Name property. Rather than setting ClientIDRowSuffix to Name property a better candidate would have been an ID property which could be some sort of unique field. But you get the idea, right?

ClientIDMode = “Inherit”

Inherit is the default mode for all controls. Assigning this mode a control will use the same setting as its parent control. This gives us an idea that we can have different settings for parent and children. Here we are setting ClientIDMode for our first label to be static while the GridView is using AutoID.

<asp:GridView runat="server" ID="gridViewCities" AutoGenerateColumns="False" 

  ClientIDMode="AutoID">
  <Columns>
    <asp:TemplateField>
      <ItemTemplate>
        <asp:Label runat="server" ID="Label1" Text='<%# Bind("Name") %>' 

          ClientIDMode="Static" />
      </ItemTemplate>
    </asp:TemplateField>
    <asp:TemplateField>
      <ItemTemplate>
        <asp:Label runat="server" ID="Label2" Text='<%# Bind("Country") %>' />
      </ItemTemplate>
    </asp:TemplateField>
  </Columns>
</asp:GridView>

We see that our first span uses static client ID but the second span uses inherited scheme for client ID.

Conclusion

In this post we saw a new feature of ASP.NET 4 which let’s you customize IDs generated in HTML elements. This feature is useful when we need to access controls from client scripts. ASP.NET has been lacking such a feature. Not any more.

Post from: One .Net Way

Working With Client ID In ASP.NET 4

Let’s follow this post with an example of a simple program which uses a loop to add a number to a List<int>.

static void Main(string[] args)
{
  List<int> numbers = new List<int>();
  for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++)
  {
    numbers.Add(i);
  }
}

We will now add a breakpoint to numbers.Add(i) line. A breakpoint can be added by clicking on gray area on the left side of code editor or by pressing F9.

Here we have added a simple breakpoint. Our program will break when we hit the breakpoint for the first time. Let’s say that we want our breakpoint to hit at 50 iteration of our loop. To do this we can right click on the breakpoint circle on left hand side and click Hit Count.

When we click on Hit Count we get a dialog where we can set the conditions when our breakpoint should be hit.

In our case we will select “break when the hit count is equal to” and enter 50.

If we now run our program we will hit the breakpoint when value of i = 49. Remember that we started i at 0 so when i is equal to 49 we are on the 50th iteration.

This comes in handy when debugging large loops and we are only interested in breaking when we have processed X number of iterations.

Post from: One .Net Way

Create Breakpoints With Hit Count In Visual Studio 2008

XSLT parser does not like the code above and gives me this error.

After scratching my head for a while and navigating through intellisense few times I found the right solution. The way to output DOCTYPE in XSLT is by placing in inside a CDATA. The following code works like a charm.

This I thought was worth sharing.

Post from: One .Net Way

Output DOCTYPE In XSLT

In this post I will use a simple Windows Forms application which adds two numbers.

By default a Windows Forms application does not output to a Console even if you write a Console.Write() or Console.WriteLine(). This shortcoming can be addressed by using Win32 API. In your Windows Forms application you can declare a class which provides a wrapper around Win32 functions.

public class Win32
{
  /// <summary>
  /// Allocates a new console for current process.
  /// </summary>
  [DllImport("kernel32.dll")]
  public static extern Boolean AllocConsole();

  /// <summary>
  /// Frees the console.
  /// </summary>
  [DllImport("kernel32.dll")]
  public static extern Boolean FreeConsole();
}

A Console must be started to accept input and display our messages. This can be done by calling Win32.AllocConsole() function. For my example I will start the console in my form’s constructor.

public Form1()
{
  InitializeComponent();

  Win32.AllocConsole();
}

Now when I write to Console, I will see data appear in the console window which was started in my constructor.

private void Add(int num1, int num2)
{
  int result = num1 + num2;

  Console.WriteLine(
    string.Format("{0} + {1} = {2}", num1, num2, result));
}

As a good practice you should also close the console window by calling Win32.FreeConsole() method before your application exits.

Post from: One .Net Way

Output To Console In Windows Forms Application

One thing to keep in mind is that filter expressions are case sensitive. And the syntax of applying filters in ADO.NET Data Services is

<url>?$filter=<your filter>

Let’s now look at all logical operators

Equal To

Parameter: eq

Equal To evaluates true when both operands have the same value. Here I am retrieving products where the value of Color matches “Yellow”.

http://localhost:6803/DataService.svc/Product?$filter=Color eq ‘Yellow’

Logical operator can also be applied in code through a LINQ query.

AdventureWorksEntities context = new AdventureWorksEntities(uri);
DataServiceQuery<Product> products = context.CreateQuery<Product>(@"/Product");

var query = from p in products
  where p.Color == "Yellow"
  select p;

foreach (var item in query)
{
  Console.WriteLine(item.ProductID + "\t" + item.Color);
}

Not Equal To

Parameter: ne

Not equal is opposite of equal to and evaluates true when both operands do not have the same value. Here I am retrieving products where the value of Color is NOT “Yellow”.

http://localhost:6803/DataService.svc/Product?$filter=Color ne ‘Yellow’

Following code will also achieve the same result through a LINQ query.

AdventureWorksEntities context = new AdventureWorksEntities(uri);
DataServiceQuery<Product> products = context.CreateQuery<Product>(@"/Product");

var query = from p in products
  where p.Color != "Yellow"
  select p;

foreach (var item in query)
{
  Console.WriteLine(item.ProductID + "\t" + item.Color);
}

Less than

Parameter: lt

Less than evaluates true when first operand is less than second. In this example I get all products where ListPrice is less than 20.

http://localhost:6803/DataService.svc/Product?$filter=ListPrice lt 20

Here is the C# version of Less than operator.

AdventureWorksEntities context = new AdventureWorksEntities(uri);
DataServiceQuery<Product> products = context.CreateQuery<Product>(@"/Product");

var query = from p in products
  where p.ListPrice < 20
  select p;

foreach (var item in query)
{
  Console.WriteLine(item.ProductID + "\t" + item.ListPrice);
}

Less than or equal to

Parameter: le

Less than or equal to evaluates true when first operand is either less than or equal to second operand. In this example I am retrieving all products where ListPrice is less than or equal to 9.5

http://localhost:6803/DataService.svc/Product?$filter=ListPrice le 9.5

And C# equivalent will look like this.

AdventureWorksEntities context = new AdventureWorksEntities(uri);
DataServiceQuery<Product> products = context.CreateQuery<Product>(@"/Product");

var query = from p in products
  where p.ListPrice <= 9.5m
  select p;

foreach (var item in query)
{
  Console.WriteLine(item.ProductID + "\t" + item.ListPrice);
}

Greater than

Parameter: gt

Greater than evaluates true if the first operand is greater than the second. In this example I am retrieving all products where ListPrice is greater than 9.5

http://localhost:6803/DataService.svc/Product?$filter=ListPrice gt 9.5

Greater than is a no brainer with a LINQ query.

AdventureWorksEntities context = new AdventureWorksEntities(uri);
DataServiceQuery<Product> products = context.CreateQuery<Product>(@"/Product");

var query = from p in products
  here p.ListPrice > 9.5m
  select p;

foreach (var item in query)
{
  Console.WriteLine(item.ProductID + "\t" + item.ListPrice);
}

Greater than or equal to

Parameter: ge

Greater than or equal to evaluates true if the first operand is greater than or equal to second. Here is  an example. I am retrieving all products where ListPrice is greater than or equal to 9.5

http://localhost:6803/DataService.svc/Product?$filter=ListPrice ge 9.5

C# example

AdventureWorksEntities context = new AdventureWorksEntities(uri);
DataServiceQuery<Product> products = context.CreateQuery<Product>(@"/Product");

var query = from p in products
  where p.ListPrice >= 9.5m
  select p;

foreach (var item in query)
{
  Console.WriteLine(item.ProductID + "\t" + item.ListPrice);
}

And

Parameter: and

“And” evaluates true when both operands are true. In this example I am retrieving all products where the Color is Black and ListPrice is greater than 1000.

http://localhost:6803/DataService.svc/Product?$filter=(Color eq ‘Black’) and (ListPrice gt 1000)

Same results can be retrieved in C# with this code.

AdventureWorksEntities context = new AdventureWorksEntities(uri);
DataServiceQuery<Product> products = context.CreateQuery<Product>(@"/Product");

var query = from p in products
  where (p.Color == "Black")
    && (p.ListPrice > 1000)
  select p;

foreach (var item in query)
{
  Console.WriteLine(item.Color + "\t" + item.ListPrice);
}

Or

Parameter: or

“Or” evaluates true when either operand is true. In this example I am retrieving all products where either the Color is Black or ListPrice is greater than 1000.

http://localhost:6803/DataService.svc/Product?$filter=(Color eq ‘Black’) or (ListPrice gt 1000)

Now with C#.

AdventureWorksEntities context = new AdventureWorksEntities(uri);
DataServiceQuery<Product> products = context.CreateQuery<Product>(@"/Product");

var query = from p in products
  where (p.Color == "Black")
    || (p.ListPrice > 1000)
  select p;

foreach (var item in query)
{
  Console.WriteLine(item.Color + "\t" + item.ListPrice);
}

Not

Parameter: not

“Not” evaluates true if operand is false. An example can be retrieving all products where the Color is not Black.

http://localhost:6803/DataService.svc/Product?$filter=not (Color eq ‘Black’)

While this can be achieved using not equal to operator they are not the same. I’ll leave C# code for this one for you :)

Conclusion

This article demonstrated all logical operators available for ADO.NET Data Services. In a future post I will cover other types of operators for ADO.NET Data Services.

Post from: One .Net Way

ADO.NET Data Services Logical Operators

In an earlier article I looked at how DO.NET Data Services can be used with ASP.NET. In this post I will talk about using ADO.NET Data Services to retrieve data via SQL Server stored procedure. Doing this is simple and I will follow a similar approach to hook everything up as I did in my earlier post.

I have created a stored procedure which retrieves data from Employees table in Northwind database based on city name. Here is the script I used to create the procedure.

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[GetEmployeesByCity] 

    @City NVARCHAR(15)
AS

BEGIN

    SELECT *
    FROM Employees
    WHERE City = @City

END

Creating Data Model

ADO.NET Data Services sits between the client and a data source, so the first thing I’ll need is a data source. I will use Entity Framework to create my data source.

To make things simple I will select Employees table only for my Entity Data Model.

Mapping Stored Procedure in EDM

My objective here is to retrieve data from a stored procedure. To this I need to expose the procedure through my data layer which I have created using Entity Framework. Mapping a stored procedure in Entity Framework can be done by following these steps.

Open Model Browser (View –> Other Windows –> Model Browser). Right click on Stored Prodecures under NorthwindModel.Store and click Update Model from Database.

Select the stored procedure (GetEmployeesByCity in this case) and click Finish.

Go back to Model Browser and under stored procedure right click the stored procedure and click Create Function Import.

Select Employees entity as the return type and click OK.

Entity Model is now setup to execute the stored procedure and return results. It can be called like this.

NorthwindEntities entities = new NorthwindEntities();
var employees = entities.GetEmployeesByCity("London");

My goal however is to retrieve data via ADO.NET Data Services so I’ll start creating my service.

And Now With a Service

Because I’d like to access this data through my ADO.NET Data Service so the first thing I’ll do is create a service called NorthwindEmployeeService. I will add a new item to my project of type ADO.NET Data Service.

Visual Studio creates a blank service with some scaffolding for me to get started. First thing I need to do is let my service know about my data source class and then configure appropriate rights to my entities and operations. To be simple I will just allow everything. Below is the code for my service after making changes.

public class NorthwindEmployeeService : DataService<NorthwindEntities>
{
  // This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies.
  public static void InitializeService(IDataServiceConfiguration config)
  {
    config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.AllRead);
    config.SetServiceOperationAccessRule("*", ServiceOperationRights.All);
  }
}

By default my service does not know that it should also work with a stored procedure. To do this i can write a method which will execute the procedure and return results. Such a method can look like this.

[WebGet]
public ObjectResult<Employees> GetEmployeesByCity(string cityName)
{
  NorthwindEntities entities = new NorthwindEntities();
  return entities.GetEmployeesByCity(cityName);
}

Method above tells the service to expose a GetEmployeesByCity method which can be called by clients. Note that the method is decorated with a WebGet attribute which indicates that this is a GET method which can be called by a web client.

Running Service and Calling Stored Procedure

To see my service in action I can hit F5

To see the results from the stored procedure I can use the following URL.

http://localhost:16147/NorthwindEmployeeService.svc/GetEmployeesByCity?cityName=’London’

Here I am passing in the parameter as a query string which is accepted by my service and appropriate results are returned.

Conclusion

In this article I used ADO.NET Data Services to execute a stored procedure and return results. I am not in favour of implementing a direct mapping between services and database and the design can be a little better whereby data layer can be sensibly abstracted away by service. However the idea was to demonstrate a concept. I hope you enjoyed reading this article.

Post from: One .Net Way

Execute Stored Procedure With ADO.NET Data Services

In this tutorial we will look at how ADO.NET Data Services can be used to create services which are consumed by ASP.NET client. We will use Adventure works Lite database as an example to demonstrate the concepts. Code for this article can be downloaded at the bottom of the article.

ADO.NET Data Services as the name says is a services layer between your application and an underlying data source. It uses REST principals to access and persist information to and from the data source. Services layer itself can be created very easily. Most of the work is done by  Visual Studio for you.

In this tutorial we will build an application for AdventureWorks Lite database. We will build a page which let’s a user browse through products. The reason for picking up AdventureWorks Lite as an example is so that we can work with a variety of data including images. If you do not have AdventureWorks Lite then you can download it here. For our application we will work with this data model

Creating Service

Creating a ADO.NET Data Service in Visual Studio is a no brainer. All we need to do is add a new item of type ADO.NET Data Service, give it an appropriate name and we are done.

Our ADO.NET Service will interact with some kind of data source and Entity Framework perfectly fits that purpose. We now need to create a EDM (Entity Data Model) which includes tables we want to interact with via our services. If you never worked with Entity Framework then this quickstart will get you going.

By creating a service and our Entity Data Model we have put together two major components of our solution. Before we can hit F5 to see our service running, there are few things we need to put in place. We must tell our service that there is a Data Layer that we want it to use. Now all ADO.NET Data Services inherit from DataService<T> which can be found in System.Data.Services namespace. The code produced by Visual Studio for our service leaves a placeholder for <T> with a comment. All we need to do is specify the correct type. Our class declaration for our service should look like this.

public class AdventureWorksService : DataService<AdventureWorksEntities>

Here we have established integration between our service and our data source. Next thing we need to do is configure appropriate access levels for our service and its operations. Code below when executed initializes our service to have all possible access over all entities defined in our EDM and all access over all operations. Note the asterix, basically we are saying here that include all Entity Sets and all operations.

public static void InitializeService(IDataServiceConfiguration config)
{
  config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.All);
  config.SetServiceOperationAccessRule("*", ServiceOperationRights.All);
}

We are now ready to go and hit F5. If we set AdventureWorksService.svc as a start page and run our project we can see our service running. Now that we have our service running, we will start building our ASP.NET pages which will query our service, receive and display data.

Creating Proxy Objects

Our ASP.NET application will need to access the service through a proxy. Creating a proxy is very easy. After making sure that our service is running, we need to add a service reference to our serivce. This can be done this way.

It is also a good idea to change the Namespace from ServiceReference1 to AdventureWorksService.

Creating Web Page To Display Data

We can now make calls to our service and retrieve data. First thing we need to do is load data from ProductCategory and bind it to a dropdown. But before that let’s have a look at what we will produce.

Getting back to binding our dropdown control. We should write a query which calls our service which in turns fetches data from database and delivers to us. One good thing about ADO.NET Data Services is that you can write LINQ queries with it. ADO.NET Data Services comes with a LINQ provider popularly known as LINQ To REST.  Without LINQ support ADO.NET Data Services will be just too complicated and IMO useless. However LINQ support is limited. Here are things you cannot do:

1. You cannot write queries which involve joins or sub queries.
2. You cannot create anonymous types in your queries.
3. Aggregates such as Count, Min, Max are not available.
4. There is no GroupBy support available.

Besides the list of can’t do above, LINQ To REST still makes working with ADO.NET Data Services much easier than otherwise. Following code will make a service call and bind our drop down.

private void BindProductCategories()
{
  DataServiceQuery<ProductCategory> productCategories =
    context.CreateQuery<ProductCategory>("/ProductCategory");

  var query = from p in productCategories
    orderby p.Name
    select p;

  ddlProductCategory.DataSource = query;
  ddlProductCategory.DataBind();
}

We’d also like to refresh data in our grid when the user selects another category. This is done by BindProductsGrid method.

private void BindProductsGrid()
{
  int productCategoryID = Convert.ToInt32(ddlProductCategory.SelectedValue);

  DataServiceQuery<Product> products =
    context.CreateQuery<Product>("/Product");

  var query = from p in products
    where p.ProductCategory.ProductCategoryID == productCategoryID
    select p;

  gdvProducts.DataSource = query;
  gdvProducts.DataBind();
}

The way I bind the image is by using another page which just does Response.BinaryWrite.  Here is the markup of default.aspx page which is the entire UI. You can play with it by downloading the entire solution. The markup is here just to make the post look good ;)

<form id="form1" runat="server">
  <div>
    <div>
      Product Category
      <asp:DropDownList ID="ddlProductCategory" runat="server"
        DataValueField="ProductCategoryID"
        AutoPostBack="true"
        DataTextField="Name"
        OnSelectedIndexChanged="ddlProductCategory_SelectedIndexChanged">
      </asp:DropDownList>
    </div>
    <br />
    Products
    <br />
    <div>
      <asp:GridView ID="gdvProducts" runat="server"
        CssClass="sample"
        Width="600px"
        AutoGenerateColumns="false"
        OnRowCreated="gdvProducts_RowCreated">
        <Columns>
          <asp:BoundField DataField="ProductNumber" HeaderText="Number" />
          <asp:BoundField DataField="Name" HeaderText="Name" />
          <asp:TemplateField>
            <ItemTemplate>
              <asp:Image ID="Image1" runat="server" ImageUrl='ImageHelper.aspx' />
            </ItemTemplate>
          </asp:TemplateField>
        </Columns>
      </asp:GridView>
    </div>
  </div>
</form>

Conclusion

This was a brief introduction to ADO.NET Data Services. We looked at how to create a service and consume it in a ASP.NET website. We also looked at some limitations of LINQ provider used by ADO.NET Data Services. In future posts I will talk about other features of ADO.NET Data Services.

Download Code For This Article

ADONETDataServices Sample Code Size 84.72 KB

Post from: One .Net Way

ADO.NET Data Services With ASP.NET

<StackPanel x:Name="LayoutRoot" Margin="10">
  <TextBlock Text="Your URL is: " />
  <TextBlock Text="{Binding AbsoluteUri}" />
</StackPanel>

In our C# code we can set the DataContext so that the second TextBlock above displays the information we desire.

private void UserControl_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
  LayoutRoot.DataContext =
    System.Windows.Browser.HtmlPage.Document.DocumentUri;
}

Here is my output which displays the URL at which my Silverlight plugin is hosted.

Post from: One .Net Way

Get URI Of Silverlight Plugin Host Page

Example

In this very basic example I will use two controls, a TextBlock and a Slider. When the slider is moved, the value in TextBlock changes accordingly.

<StackPanel x:Name="LayoutRoot">
  <TextBlock
    Width="100"
    Foreground="Blue"
    HorizontalAlignment="Center"
    Text="{Binding Value, ElementName=slider1}" />
  <Slider
    x:Name="slider1"
    Minimum="0"
    Maximum="100"
    Width="200" />
</StackPanel>

Here is a screenshot of the output produced by XAML above.

Element binding can come in very handy in certain scenarios. An example can be making all fields read-only based on a status flag. Rather than writing C# code, this can be done easily and cleanly with element binding.

Post from: One .Net Way

Silverlight 3 Element To Element Binding