Have you ever wanted to dynamically choose from many potential implementations of some code? Would you like to have the power of metadata filtering and lazy instantiation of the selected implementation? Here is how to do just that using Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) and also a neat trick to handle your implementation/metadata pairs that I recently put to good use. Code samples and optimizations follow so don’t worry; I won’t remain all theoretical in this post. (MEF is part of .NET Framework 4.0 but is available also on CodePlex for other releases – MEF Community Site.) Up front I...

The main points of our Effective and Infinite Storage in the Cloud session at TechDays 2010 in Sweden are listed below as well as links to all of our related material and the zip with our demos. The slides are here too but they are in Swedish only. Our session at TechDays 2010 gave an overview of what storage in the Cloud is, according to Microsoft at present date, and some of the goals for the future in this area. We intended our session to provide the basis for companies to be able to evaluate if and how moving...

There are a whole bunch of changes in the just released Microsoft Enterprise Library 5.0 Beta 1 and in Microsoft Unity 2.0 Beta 1. I have been using these libraries for years and have greatly been looking forward to this new release. The list of changes for Enterprise Library is very long indeed and going into specific changes here on this page seems redundant when you can go check it out for your self. Regarding Unity it seems it is not required any more to reference the ObjectBuilder assembly when using Unity; any functionality previously required from this...

Being a C#:er the one and only refactoring tool for me is ReSharper by JetBrains. In fact I would go so far as to disclose that I held off on upgrading to Visual Studio 2010 because the early builds of this great refactoring tool were not very useful and didn’t really help me. With the 5.0 (Beta) version for VS 2010 the world has become much more stable and my brand new machine has only VS 2010 installed. No old and moldy VS 2008 for me! I’d like to draw attention to a new feature in ReSharper 5.0...

Here it is the definite resource: New Features in .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010, (Beta 2). That is if you have 8 hours to kill. Might certainly be worth the time. I’m looking forward to it. Cheers, Magnus Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Visual Studio,IDE,.NET Framework

There is a new release for Windows Azure today with a refresh of the Windows Azure SDK (1.1, February 2010) and the Windows Azure Visual Studio Tools (1.1, February 2010). If you want code samples, as usual, go to Windows Azure Code Samples on Code Gallery. UPDATE: So as not to mislead; If you are using Visual Studio 2010 only on your system the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio requires Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 RC which is not yet released. But with Visual Studio 2008 you are safe. The biggest news in there is that you can...

Soon it it is time for Microsoft TechDays Sweden 2010. Lots of things will happen, lots of great presentations will take place. I will be there! Note: I am now on ½ time parental leave for a while – which is great. Weird but great. This, among other things, greatly impacts how often and what I have time to blog. (In case you were wondering why my blogging is a bit slow these days. Regarding TechDays there are several things I’d like to call out: My blog is blinged with the official speaker badge: ...

Uninstalling and installing Beta 1 and Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010 was a breeze. No fear of dragons here! I remember the times when installations of just about anything could suddenly crash or hang. That dreaded rollback of an installation where you had to helplessly watch when the installation pulled itself back out of your machine still gives me the creeps. Yesterday I uninstalled Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1… and it was a snap. SNAP! Just to be sure I rebooted my machine. Don’t think I really would have needed to. Then I installed Visual...

Here are how Named Arguments in C# 4.0 works. This is a very nice feature that enables better code readability and also is a must combined with Optional Arguments. We have now dug ourselves out of the crazy “method overload overload”… If you catch what I mean? I posted about Optional Arguments here: Visual C# 4.0 Optional Arguments – FINALLY Here are my sample on Optional Arguments from the last post again: public Person(int shoesize = 8, string name = "Eve", Gender gender = Gender.Female) {   } The great thing about it...

There is a set of new language features in the upcoming C# 4.0 release. This is probably my favorite new feature. Not only does it warrant a post in it’s own right. It also gives me a chance to point out the Swedish Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 launch site and point to all the other great bloggers on that site. Most of them are personal friends of mine and all are worth reading. So… Optional Arguments in C# 4.0. First an anecdote. I was sitting in the audience of the PACKED and overflowed (and and...

My three sessions at Tech Ed Berlin 2009 are on line. Here are the tree abstracts: Building extensible systems in .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4 Are you tired of building monolithic style apps? Are you tired of hacking your app to bits to meet just one more requirement. Do you want to enable third parties to provide add-on value to your apps? If the answer to any of these is yes, then come learn about the new Managed Extensibility Framework which ships in .NET 4.0, and in Silverlight 4. Come to this chalk talk and you'll see how...

Here is how to enable a rich extensibility model for Windows Azure projects and how to run create jobs on Windows Azure Storage only once in your Windows Azure Projects. This sample and related AzureContrib release leverages Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) – an upcoming .NET Framework component in .NET Framework 4.0. We have made a small project at Dotway where I work on making the basic Windows Azure project template a bit more rich and intelligent. This has lead to three releases in the AzureContrib project, each one building on the last to make the functionality one more step...

The third and final post in our blog series on basic usage of the Cloud Storage API (CloudStorage.API). This time we will show how to interact with the Cloud Entity Storage. The implementation we use for the API is developed against Azure but the API should be reusable for any type of Cloud Storage. While doing this our main goals are to: Enable testability Abstract away storage Create an extensible and easy to evolve application that supports good developments practices Here are other posts...

We continue our blog series on using the Cloud Storage API (CloudStorage.API) by showing how it interacts with Cloud Blob Storage. As in the previous post we will use a short example focusing on basic usage. The implementation we use for the API is developed against Azure but the API should be reusable for any type of Cloud Storage. While doing this our main goals are to: Enable testability Abstract away storage Create an extensible and easy to evolve application that supports good developments practices ...

Today I did a seminar with msdn.se. I was on stage with Johan Lindfors and Robert Folkesson talking about Windows Azure devlopment. I was asked to produce my slides so in an effort to please the crowd here they are. Several of them are copies of slides from Steve Marx, Manuvir Das and Brad Calder. This is my angle on their work so to say, thanks guys. DevelopmentOnWindowsAzure.pdf (First three slides are in Swedish but not the rest.) Cheers, M. Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Windows Azure,Software Architecture,Cloud Computing,Cloud Storage

Now that you have an understanding of the idea behind the Cloud Storage API it’s time to show it in action. We will start by writing a simple application accessing the Message Queue using the API. Note: Premier time for a guest blogger at Techie.notepad! WooHoo! Peter von Lochow is the man behind this post. The implementation we use for the API is developed against Azure but the API should be reusable for any type of Cloud. While doing this our main goals (just to reiterate) are: Enable testability Abstract...

The Common Service Locator project has a bunch of adapters. One of them is the one for Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF). I’ve updated the adapter to run on MEF Preview 6 and uploaded the result to the Codeplex site for the CSL. Common Service Locator MEF adapter Note: I’ve been nagging on Glenn Block to update the adaptor project that hooks up MEF to the Common Service Locator. Not so much nagging on him to do it, the man has enough to do, but rather nagging on him to add med as a developer on the CSL project...

And naturally LOTS of more sessions from Microsoft TechDays in Sweden. There are some sessions that are in English as well since there were quite a few international speakers. I really have to recommend Christian Weyers session WCF Tips and tricks and… My MEF talk (in Swedish). Here is the full list: http://www.microsoft.com/sverige/techdays09/sv/sessionplanner.html Cheers, M. Technorati Tags: Services,.NET,Extensibility,Microsoft,talksThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons license.

During my tow week vacation the MEF team shipped a Preview 6. The team has posted all the facts and changes in this preview release so I won’t reiterate in detail but rather link to their posts on the subject. However; before I do that here are a few comments from me on the release: First comment: Congratulations! The release is looking good as usual! Second comment: I know for a fact that MEF has bounced about a bit within the Microsoft organization. It has to support this. It has to integrate with that. It should be...

If you create a class library and add a reference to it from an Azure Web Role or Azure Worker Role you get an error. Here’s how to get around it. The problem is that the class library template for Visual Studio 2010 creates a .csproj file with too few configuration settings. In Visual Studio 2008 the default target platform is AnyCPU. In Visual Studio 2010 it’s x86 and the configuration for AnyCPU is not included. It seems to me this is an error in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1. This is what a standard .csproj file excerpt...

At a moment of weakness I promised to use Bing for a month. That was a promise that even brought the connection to my blog server down: Funny Story: The day Scott Hanselman dosed my blog I would just like to say that I’ve remained true to my word and a month has almost passed. For comparison I’ve searched some times both on Bing and “the almighty”. The main issue with Bing is that the search results are smaller and less accurate than the big guys. Small wonder but still! The real question becomes if we want one almighty...

My colleague Håkan pointed me last night to the Beta of Microsoft Security Essentials. I’ve installed it and it’s now running on my machine. To get it you first have to pass by the Microsoft Connect Gal in a form. I have no idea what that model got paid for putting her face on Microsoft...

Tests fail when you reference the wrong version of Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.UnitTestFramework.dll in Visual Studio 2010. I just tried to run a suite of tests in Visual Studio 2010 that had a reference to the 9.0.0.0 version of Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.UnitTestFramework.dll. It turned out that the test runner that runs the tests did not want to recognize my version of the ExpectedExceptionAttribute and consequently failed my tests that expect exception. This is a thing to keep an eye out for since it appears to me it is a bug in the current build of Visual Studio 2010. There is no failing run or...

I will show below hot to enable Code Coverage in Visual Studio 2010, how to view the results and also how to avoid a strange pitfall that I myself fell into. Just spent the better part of an hour trying to figure out how to get the code coverage results in Visual Studio 2010. Eventually I found out that there was no problem at all. The issue was that I had edited one set of test settings and ran my tests on another set of test settings. Update: I solved this issue and the reason for there being...

The new Visual Studio 2010 IDE now support a bunch of new code generation features under the umbrella name of Generate From Usage. It is good to see that Microsoft is taking steps in the direction of including very useful features like this in the IDE for all developers to use. Note: This is a matter of carefully selecting which raisins to pick from the cake of very many features like this that third party IDE refactoring tool vendors have been supporting for a long time. I see nothing wrong with this. It is a symbiotic relationship Microsoft has...

OK – so perhaps it opportunistic of me to try to get traffic to my blog because Scott Hanselman just blogged that he will use Bing! for a month. Fine! But I will try for my own reasons just to see what it feels like not to use “the Almighty”… Note: This post had a really funny side effect. Please also read - Funny story: The day Scott Hanselman DOS:ed my blog Scott Hanselman: Bosom Buddies: How to make Google Chrome use Microsoft Bing for Search Go give Bing! a try. I'm going to use Bing for the whole month of June and...

It’s in Swedish and on Channel 9 – recorded on Tuesday by the Swedish MSDN evangelists: Johan, Robert and Dag (recording). Here’s my twitter too… http://twitter.com/noopman http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/johanlindfors/MSDN-Radio-ppna-ditt-Windows-slpp-in-lite-sol/ We’re really just sitting around chatting a bit… maybe a little interesting. Maybe not. Just thought I’d post my radio interview. Gotta love the comment on Twitter by Robert: “new MSDN radio episode up on channel9 (all in Swedish I'm afraid) - with guest dev celeb Magnus Mårtensson” Celeb… you crack me up! ;~) Cheers, M. Technorati Tags: MSDN,Microsoft,pod castThis work is licensed under a...

At SDC 2009 in Sweden I presented a classic “What is ASP.NET MVC and how does it work”? Here are my slides and code demos. Judging from the crowd feedback and also the questions afterwards I am very pleased with the outcome of this session. It appeared to me very much like the audience got what they came for; a show and tell on ASP.NET MVC to get a look at what it is and what useful features it gives us. Also why it is radically different from standard ASP.NET WebForms. I did one sort of unexpected thing...

The following post will give you a resource with a good run through of how to begin coding with the core functionality of Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) which is part of .NET Framework 4.0. Background At Microsoft Tech Days Sweden this year I presented an upcoming key part of .NET Framework 4.0; MEF. Though it might just get another product name before it ships since the abbreviation is too close to METH for comfort. ;~) I got involved with MEF because I became friends with MEF Program Manager Glenn Block just prior to his joining the MEF team....

Somebody explain this to me: Why is it that the marketing team at Google decided to make their new logo a Windows look alike? Is Google secretly in love with Microsoft and we just haven’t seen it yet? Or will Google make a hostile bid for Microsoft soon? This is what the logos look like in birds eye view: Too similar or just a coincidence? What do you think? Cheers, M. Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Google

An ALT.NET Community for Oresund is created! I hinted at a project I’ve been working on when I announced that my son Elvis is born on Dec 23. Let me just briefly give my HUGE thanks to all the warm wishes my family and I got from that post – 68 wishes to date! So what’s the project? OK… hmmm… title sort of gave it away didnt’ it? Announcing the ALT.NET Community Oresund! You join at our forum: http://groups.google.com/group/oresund-altnet. Later you will be able to register as a member at our site. We are...

OMG!! WTF!? Dude, I totally feel like an ignorant moron! (Sorry for the childish and cheesy intro but I have the worst brain overload since PDC05!) Fortunately I’ve had a few days to think about it and now I feel I am slowly landing on my feet again. Here is my summation of PDC 2008! Future looks promising with the cloud and all that surrounds it! I’ve got to say that I can’t wait to build my first live service in the cloud. I already have a service in mind as a demo. However I will have to...

All of the sessions are online at Channel 9: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/ Here is a very cool list by Greg Duncan: PDC2008 Quick Video Link List (Updated: Now with link verification, MP4/ZIP links and Channel 9 session page links) I’m impressed and even more impressed about all the sessions online and accessible like this! Cheers, M. Technorati Tags: PDC2008,MicrosoftThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.

It is inspiring to se how Microsoft act in academia (15% of MS Research budget goes direct to grants and mor) and to see the number of areas where they are active. MS as 850 PhDs employed all over the the world to day! A research project is to project two images in parallel from underneath the surface. In fact the images flicker faster than you are able to detect. This means you can project an image on the surface of the Surface and a second image on a piece of plastic or paper being held above the surface....

Be green with envy… ;~) I can’t wait to install Windows 7 with Visual Studio 10 and give it a spin! M. Technorati Tags: PDC08,Microsoft,WindowsThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.

No PDC would be true to form if it didn’t leave you really really baffled and breathtaken. Anders talks tend to do that to you. This year certainly was not exception to that rule. Neither Anders talk nor PDC for breathtakenness (is that even a word?)! I just saw Anders demo cool stuff from the upcoming C# 4.0 and C# 5.0! Even though I’d already seen some of the stuff from Anders earlier talk on the languages I was still blown away! All of what I wrote in that post still applies and here are a few added points: ...

OK – the Identity Roadmap for Software + Services session at PDC by Kim Cameron and Vittorio Bertocci delivered. And they delivered good! I have a problem with this offering, please read below! They are the First Two Lines of Every Connected Application are: 1. Who are you? 2. What are you allowed to do? The solution is to utilize a claims based system. A claim is a statement made about one party about another party. A claim in itself is useless. What is important however is if your app, coded by you, decides to act...

(This .NET Performance by Design review turned out to be a summary of resources, tools and tips & tricks surrounding .NET Performance and Designing for Performance. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did writing it.) There is a lot you can do in respect to taking the correct steps to make sure you have considered performance to a big enough extent in your design of an application in .NET. What’s with the belt and suspenders mumbo-jumbo in the opening sentence here? Well. First of all; it depends. Second I don’t want to offend the YAGNI/premature optimization guys...

I’m very impressed with the genetic algorithm used to create the Master Session List for PDC 2008. It worked near perfect for me! Approximately 55% of all attendees entered their session preferences in the MySessions section of the PDC site. Mike - he’s the content owner for PDC - used this data and a bunch of other factors to arrange all the sessions in an as optimal solution as possible. Optimal being the most satisfactory solution for all factors involved. Attendee satisfaction was a factor in the calculations. Meaning if I as an attendee am able to attend...

Tomorrow the journey begins once again: It is time to cross the Atlantic once more for this Swede heading for a major conference in the U.S! And it’s not just any conference – It’s the PDC baby! ;~) L.A. here I come! I will be blogging here (blog.noop.se) and here blog.dotway.se I will be twitting here: twitter.com/noopman I will bring to you my reviews of the sessions I attend. I will recommend what sessions you should take your valuable time to look at. I will meet and greet with a whole bunch of speakers...

According to Hejlsberg the three major trends for the future of programming languages are: Declarative, Concurrent and Dynamic. Here is a brief description of these trends: Today most programming languages are imperative in nature. Declarative programming concerns itself more with the what of the programming than the how. In the talk Hejlsberg gave the great and kind of classic example using LINQ to declare what we mean for a piece of code to do rather than imperatively in standard C# code it up in a mess of code that is very hard to read for later...

Sorry you guys but this is really funny. I’ll try to keep these kinds of posts to a bare minimum but… still… funny shit! Cheers, M. Technorati Tags: MicrosoftThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.

Now that’s funny! Sorry you guys… I’m such a geek: http://vimeo.com/1873174 More seriously: It’s gonna be so cool getting one of the first Windows 7 copies. Being the true bleeding edge nut that I am I will try to run it as a developer environment and see what happens! ;~) Goes without saying that I will live blog from PDC, and twitt of course: http://twitter.com/noopman Cheers, /Magnus Technorati Tags: pdc08,Microsoft

Today was the final stop of Dotways Visual Studio 2008 & .NET Framework 3.5 Open Space tour! It is sad that such a fun event happening tour is over. Yet it is good to know that in each event participants seemed very pleased with the outcome. Stockholm tonight was no exception. The arrangements were exquisite and the meeting venue was really good! Two Microsoft participants joined our merry bunch: Robert Folkesson and Dag König. I repeat that in Sweden Open Space is a novel thing and some aspects of the Swedish folk mentality makes it hard for us to...

Rod Trent reported all the things the Chrome uninstaller leaves behind if you try to uninstall. Håkan is thinking conspiracy. He may be right. What should Google care if Windows seems insecure? So much more reason for people to move to online applications right? But if he's not right it's a real sloppy piece of application we've just been handed! I say piece because it is just that. To release a beta is one thing but this is not even that. If Microsoft released a beta this sloppy... well do I even have to go there? It would...

A while back I happily announced that I will be going! See you at the PDC 2008! I've also blinged my blog properly http://blog.noop.se. Now the time has come to begin building up my own expectations about PDC and to share my sentiments about this great event! But first a recap: Our company (Dotway) went 14 people to PDC 2005 and it was really cool! After my girlfriend at the time came over to California and we drove around (a big drive through San Diego, Tijuana, Rosarito (Mx), Palm Springs, Lake Havasu City, Grand Canyon, Las Vegas and back...

It seems Chrome is not located in Program Files. There are some major implications with this! I posted last night about some things regarding Chrome: Google Chrome the good and the petty. I point out that unfortunately searches in the address bar are severely weighted. A fact which perhaps does not mean all that but it is a sad fact that the giants can't keep the competitive game above the edge of the sand box. One thing immediately got commented by my friend and colleague Håkan Reis. I thought he'd comment more on the UX bits...

Gathered up some first impressions about Chrome and also a detail which is petty by google that pretty much mangles a great UX feature they have! It's slick! It's cool! It's fresh, minimalistic and new and all that. Freshness is not bad at all. Yet... It's tabs with no frame. I'm more impressed with the cocky idea that all you need is the browser and nothing else than I am with the look and feel. It's speedy. Real fast actually. The memory footprint is not small but the CPU usage worries me. I have a...

The new beta of Internet Explorer is out - (Internet Explorer Beta 2). As must-test-everything-first-especially-betas freak geek naturally I had to install it and take it for a spin. But how do you uninstall a beta of IE? This is not one of the common tasks since normally betas are not part of the OS integrated features. Normally you find uninstalls in the Programs And Features section. You almost do here too. What you have to do is switch to "View installed updates" view: Then you find the beta in the updates list: ...

This just in: Microsoft Gold Sponsors Øredev 2008! Wohooo! We the organizing founders of Øredev, particularly Dotway and the Øredev program committee are proud, happy and try to appear humble on this VERY great day!   I don't know if you understand how great grand super HUGE this is for us! Cheers, /Magnus Technorati Tags: Øredev,.NET,Microsoft

Just 'blinged my blog' with the fact that I AM GOING! To the PDC 2008! (And I added a new tag for all the posting I will be doing about the event!) Get your own PDC bling here and I'll see you there! Sound off in the comments if you want to hook up at the event! Cheers, /Magnus Technorati Tags: PDC08,Microsoft