SpellCoder

Automatic Admin interface for SQL Server using Django

tayseer — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:51:00 GMT

A problem that we face everyday is creating CRUD interfaced for our databases. Creating a CRUD interface is always a boring and tedious job. Even if you want to initialize your data, you may break something by mistake if you use SQL Server Management Studio, because it doesn't know anything about your business rules. Django - A web framework for Python - gives you the solution. It has an application called "Django Admin" that provides a customizable, production-ready, nice-looking UI on top of your...(read more)

Snake oil and development methodology

admin — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 08:11:18 GMT

For the past 5 years agile development mantra have been drilled into programmers heads and great, now the meme says “no, it’s not working” (read: Decline and Fall of Agile Development) Do you know what this means? A new round of books written why Agile wasn’t that good anyway. A replacement for Agile Development is imminent. How about Kaizen for software development? A new round of books about how Kaizen is different from Agile development methodology and why the authors used it and it...(read more)

JQuery Magic Continues --> Enable Searching and sorting in GridView at the client side.

beckham — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 17:24:00 GMT

I geuss you heared about JQuery, Which is an amazing JavaScript library that makes it easy to create wonderful web effects in just a few lines of code. As the website says:
“jQuery is a JavaScript library that takes this motto to heart: Writing JavaScript code should be fun. jQuery achieves this goal by taking common, repetitive, tasks, stripping out all the unnecessary markup, and leaving them short, smart and understandable.”
there are a lot of jQuery plugins such as facebox.
there is also a 2 plugins that are very cute and neat:
1- The Table Sorter Plugin
2- The table search plugin.

today i'm gonna use these plugins to allow sorting and searching for the grid view control at the client side ( No Postback)
okay, Let's start,
first of all you need to download the jQuery, Quick Search & Table Sorter plugins.

1- Create a webpage and put in a GridView control.
2- bind your gridview to a data source. in my case i'll use a SQL Data source, that connects to the northwind db and get some information from the [Customers] table.

3- Now the cool part to enable the search into the grid view just add this nice piece of js code

just make sure to add the js files that you downloaded

4- To enable sorting is a bit tricky as the table sorter plugin is working with the standard HTML table with and tags but the grid view renders only without tag.

Okaay, how can we make the gridview renders the tag ??? We can do that by this line of code which tells the grid view to render the header row as tag.

Now to make your grid sortable at the client side just add this line

now you can search and sort your grid at the client.

Beckham

Windows Azure Overview

admin — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:47:30 GMT

Check out this excellent Windows Azure overview by Dare. The infrastructure looks nice and it makes available a lot of stuff that needed to be configured by hand. But still, the biggest work in making RESTful oriented application in .NET (cloud or no cloud) is still the mind numbing work required to properly provide support for REST APIs via proper error messages etc. Right now the work for parsing XML messages will have to be done by hand (LINQ for XML helps) if you care about...(read more)

Day 2: A Developer Case for M

admin — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 14:47:41 GMT

I am excited about two things in Microsoft PDC 2008, no it’s not Windows Azure or Windows 7. The cloud infrastructure is nice but cloud is just an infrastructure architecture problem – and frankly I trust Amazon to get this right than Microsoft. I am more interested in technologies that helps making software construction faster and more reliable, either in the way of libraries that bring useful capabilities or new languages that implement concepts that makes programming more fun and productive....(read more)

Here’s some “great news”

admin — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 13:20:51 GMT

Microsoft is killing LINQ To SQL and apparently WF 4.0 will not be compatible with WF 1.0. Here’s a rule of thumb of using Microsoft technologies. Trust the language guys and run time guys, be wary of everybody else especially the bloody data access team. Man, Matt Warren must be pissed. This is his second or third ORM effort got cancelled for the past 7 years....(read more)

Introducing M Language

admin — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:50:48 GMT

Download this video of Don Box and Chris Anderson running through M language (mp4) They discussed the high level concepts behind M. This is a must watch to get a traction in understanding the M language. ...(read more)

M Enumerator : Day 1

admin — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 23:39:31 GMT

So you have your OSLO SDK installed and your Intellipad running smoothing on your screen. Well, let’s get busy. Let’s remember a simple factoid: module is the basic organization structure in M language. The following code is the smallest unit of M language module Commerce { } In your Intellipad, press ctrl \ and type SetMode(“MMode”) to start your model mode. Off course right now it does nothing. In M, you define a type by using the type keyword and in this example, we are going...(read more)

C# 4.0 Tuple

admin — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 23:01:06 GMT

Finally there is a way on how to use tuple as it ought to be. In C# 4.0, you can do the following dynamic GetTuple() { return new { FirstName : “John”, LastName : “Adams” }; } dynamic myTuple = GetTuple(); Console.WriteLine (myTuple.FirstName); //Look at this beauty Update: Remember that anonymous type is an immutable type. Once you set the value at creation, they cannot be changed. ...(read more)

C# 4.0 Dynamic

admin — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 22:28:00 GMT

One word, wow. class C { public dynamic myField; public dynamic MyProp { get; set; } public dynamic MyMethod(dynamic d) { return d.Foo(); } public delegate dynamic MyDelegate(dynamic d); } You can find more https://blogs.msdn.com/cburrows/archive/2008/10/27/c-dynamic.aspx, https://blogs.msdn.com/cburrows/archive/2008/10/28/c-dynamic-part-ii.aspx and https://blogs.msdn.com/cburrows/archive/2008/10/29/c-dynamic-part-iii.aspx...(read more)

Join the group

admin — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:37:00 GMT

Join Mdsls group for in depth discussion about Microsoft M language (as part of Oslo technology), including mgrammar, mschema and mgraph. We'll talk smack about Intellipad there as well.

http://groups.google.com/group/MDSLs/

M Language team blog is located here http://blogs.msdn.com/mlanguage

M for Mind Boggling

admin — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:16:00 GMT

The Oslo technology is revolutionary. There I said it. I will dedicate the next four weeks dissecting the capabilities of the M language and the MGrammar languge for DSL buildling. I have been reading through the early language specification furiously and man, this is a real deal. For now, check out the marketing kids' word at http://www.modelsremixed.com/. Download the SDK (a tiny 15MB download) at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/oslo

C# 4.0 New Features

dodyg — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 22:09:00 GMT

Check out the new C# 4.0 language features here.

They are dynamic type keyword, optional and named parameters, dynamic import and variance.

They are nice but the biggest surprise maybe the IDynamicObject which allows an object to respond to dynamic properties/methods like method_missing in Ruby.

PLINQO: Professional LINQ to Objects

beckham — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:07:00 GMT

PLINQO, which stands for Professional LINQ to Objects, is a collection of Code Smith templates that are meant to replace and extend the LINQ to SQL designers that are included with Visual Studio 2008.

For more information about PLINQO Check out Paul welter's post here.

Beckham

Bashmohandes Blogs has moved!

Mohammed Hossam — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 08:27:00 GMT

Hey,
I have moved my blogs to MSDN blogs, so if you are interested in following up, update your address book, RSS reader or anything else with the new address
http://blogs.msdn.com/bashmohandes
Or you can use
http://www.Bashmohandes.com

Thanks for spellcoder for hosting my blogs for the last 2 years :)

Python Arabic Book

tayseer — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:53:00 GMT

A friend told me that there is an arabic book for Python, which is a translation of "Byte of Python", one of the most popular Python books.This is a good step toward popularizing Python, specially among children.Please go and download the arabic version. Read it, and tell the author about any enhancements that the book needs....(read more)

Help spread Firefox

tayseer — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 10:44:00 GMT

...(read more)

Funny bug in ASP.NET MVC While creating a new project

beckham — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:36:00 GMT

While i was playing with ASP.NET MVC CTP3 i met this funny bug while creating a new MVC project in visual studio 2008:

1- Create a new mvc project and choose to have a test project.

2- In the project name put "-".

3- Hit ok, The project will be created succefully, That's great but try to build.

Apperantly the "-" has been replaced With "_" in the namespace name but the odd thing they didn't use the right name in the test project :)

And here is the bug:

Beckham

My longest two weeks ever

Mohammed Hossam — Mon, 19 May 2008 07:44:38 GMT

Hey, It's been a while since my last blog post, I was somehow busy getting married, moving to another country, dealing with tons of paper work, however finally I had a weekend, and I am back to blogging, I have a lot to say, and I think it will be interesting enough for you to keep reading till the end

So basically this is what I am going to blog about today

Last days in Cairo
Moving to Canada & Vancouver City
Microsoft Canada Development Center (MCDC)
1. First Days
2. MCDC Cares Day

Last days in Cairo

The past two weeks started with my wedding arrangement and God, this is very exhausting, lots of stuff to deal with, writing a guest list, however Thanks to Facebook I didn't have to call everybody, and the result I came out of the wedding experience is, my kids whatever their IQ will be, they will have one of two options in their career life, either being a wedding planner or a hair dresser and/or make up artist.

The wedding was nice, it was a very nice opportunity for me to see everybody before being relocated to Canada, I really thank everyone for showing up that night, I was really proud of my friends.

Moving to Canada & Vancouver City

Couple of days after my wedding I was in the plane with my wife heading to Vancouver, we had a 20 hours journey from Cairo, we had a connection in London, the flight went smooth and very nice, however my back hurts when I recall sitting for 10 hours from London to Vancouver.

Once we arrived to Vancouver, we took a cab to our temp house, the first thing I noticed the high-tech cabs, the cab has a GPS with maps for the city, and also a very interesting fare counter, the counter was moving like a stop watch, even when the cab wasn't moving, the counter continues to move, the ride from the Airport to the temp house, which took around 15 mins cost about 27 CAD.

The city is wonderful, the streets are clean, nice and easy to learn, people are extra friendly, both cars and people are moving according to traffic rules, this is quite interesting for anyone coming from a country like Egypt :)

The temp house is in a very nice area, Map, I am in the 29th floor, so I have an amazing view of the sea and the mountains.

My first couple of days were very hard, because of the electricity here in Vancouver, the problem that the voltage range here is 100~110, while Egypt is 200~220 so many devices I had didn't work, also I found the strange outlet in the wall, which is different from the Egyptian outlets, so all devices like Laptops, Mobiles ... etc went out of charge during the first couple of days, I had to find a store where I can buy some adapters, in these days I felt like stone age, no mobile phones, no computers, no Internet, how could we live 15 years before today, Once I got the adapters I could communicate with my friends who arrived in Vancouver city couple of days before me (Haytham, Mustafa and Abdullah)

Also a nice tip, when I was changing money from Egypt, CAD was cheaper than USD, in Vancouver, CAD is higher than USD, so I lost some money when I exchanged some USD to CAD here in Vancouver.

Live/Google maps works great in Vancouver, and all Canada area, providing great help for directions and finding addresses, Google Maps though has a nice feature to give direction in public transit, so you can see which busses you'll need to take and at what time.

Microsoft Canada Development Center

In the picture from left, Abdullah, Mostafa and Me

In the picture from left, Abdullah, Mustafa and Haytham

Here comes the first day @ Microsoft, the first day started in a park nearby Microsoft, the day started with some introductory sessions about Microsoft Canada, and Microsoft future of Computing, and the future vision of MS.

After couple of hours we went to MCDC, we had a nice tour around the facility, the place is very amazing, simple and fun, some parts still under construction.

People there are from everywhere, it is like a small united nations, Egyptians are all over the place and we are increasing, in our batch there was 7 Egyptians out 31 new hires, this is quite nice number.

Then after the tour we had another session about the needed paperwork, lots of forms to fill, I had to write my name about 50 times later this night when filling in the forms, then we head to our offices.

My office is in Building 3, Office 1077B, I am sharing the same office room with Mostafa, every dev is using two machines, one for web surfing, email, IM, ... etc and the other for development, the machines are GREAT, I even found people working in triple machine setup according to their work needs.

In the first day my manager called me from Redmond, I IMed the other team mates, I found out that I am the only dev outside Redmond in my team.

During the first days, we were all busy finishing the paperwork, we didn't start working yet, however in the forth day we had a great experience.

MCDC Cares

Since our first day, we were asked to join this event, the event called MCDC Cares, is a community work program that Microsoft will help the Richmond city in building a 700ft long boardwalk in Richmond Park, the idea is that this part of the park is very muddy that no visitors can get inside, so Microsoft decided to help in building this boardwalk by providing manpower (150 computer geeks) for a whole day.

So early on May 15th, all Microsoft Canada Development Center gathered in the cafeteria where Parminder (Par) Singh, the Managing Director of MCDC gave a short speech to everybody

In the picture Parminder Singh

After this we all moved to the park, the park is quite big, it was my first time to actually feel being in the woods, were the trees are very high and land is either very green or very muddy.

In this picture the completed part of the boardwalk we were about to complete, the boardwalk goes very deep into the woods.

So first things first, we had to move 1500 pieces of wood from the parking area outside the park to the working place deep into the woods, about 800m distance, this part of the job took around 4~5 hours.

After this phase we had a lunch break and during this break

Then phase 2 started, the phase 2 was to nail the 1500 pieces of wood we moved in phase 1 with 6 nails per piece, so in a period of 3 hours we had to hummer about 9000 nails manually.

Then we head back to MCDC, very exhausted but very happy with the work we've done, this boardwalk will be there for ages, and this was a very nice opportunity to do something useful.

In MCDC we had a BBQ party for everyone so the day ended pretty much after the BBQ, then I believe that everybody slept like a baby for more than 9 hours :)

Here you can find the TV coverage of MCDC Cares day

If you read this line so you survived the whole blog post, thank you for reading this, I will be blogging again & again, so keep in touch :)

Stupid Type Systems - Innecessary Casting in C#

tayseer — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:22:00 GMT

If List<> inherits IList<>, and MyIdentity inherits IIdentity, then why the heck the C# compiler cannot cast from List<MyIdentity> to IList<IIdentity>??????It is the same, the compiler is not smart enough to know this.So to satisfy the compiler - acting as a good compiler slave - I have to write thisIList<IIdentity> returnList = new List<IIdentity>(); // A variable name cannot be stupiderforeach (var item in originalList){ returnList.Add(item);}return...(read more)

Silverlight and WCF

Hossam — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:54:00 GMT

today i had to make silverlight call WCF service so i made a normal wcf service and try to consume it with silverlight and it didn't work ,so i start the debug jury and it lead to no where ,then i serve the forums , blogs ,and documentation but no solution
you can check on silverlight forum.
http://silverlight.net/forums/p/1119/2597.aspx
then i suspected that maybe silverlight client access policy is a must to connect to web service even in debug mode so i added clientaccesspolicy.xml to my wcf service and it works fine now

the code for clientaccesspolicy.xml :
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<access-policy>
<cross-domain-access>
    <policy>
      <allow-from>
        <domain uri="*"/>
      </allow-from>
      <grant-to>
        <resource path="/" include-subpaths="true"/>
      </grant-to>
    </policy>
</cross-domain-access>
</access-policy>

Windows Live Mesh

Mohammed Hossam — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 09:23:50 GMT

Microsoft has just launched a new Windows Live service called Live Mesh, the service is still in Tech Preview, which means a limited number of users (10,000) and a waiting list for the extra users, the whole concept of this service is synchronizing all devices (PC's, Laptop, Mobiles, ... etc) as long as all of them are running any version of Windows.

If you watched Ray Ozzie keynote in Mix last March, he pointed to the Live experience, and I think this product is one a new series of products in this direction.

This strategy shift was also mentioned on TechCrunch from Ray Ozzie memo to employees

Central to this strategy is our embrace of both a world of the web and a world of devices. Over the past ten years, the PC era has given way to an era in which the web is at the center of our experiences – experiences delivered not just through the browser but also through many different devices including PCs, phones, media players, game consoles, set-top boxes and televisions, cars, and more.

Read the whole memo here

DLR Hosting Examples for IronPython Beta 1 on C# 3.0

dodyg — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 08:08:44 GMT

Well, DLR hosting API has been all over the place and some of the obvious convenient methods in IronPython 1.1 such as CreateMethod disappears. The latest DLR hosting spec was released on Jan 3, 2008 and it was out of sync from the latest IronPython 2 Beta 1.

I spent a couple of hours yesterday to investigate the new DLR hosting implementation in IronPython 2 Beta 1 and have successfully figured out the "new ways" of DLR hosting API.

Copy these codes and run it in your environment. Replace the "X2" or "2" suffix in some of the namespace. I had to do this because I am working on a CMS that works on ASP.Net Futures 2007 release with IronPython 2 Alpha 1 as the implemenation for the asp.net support and I have a code execution engine that I want to upgrade from IronPython 1.1 to the latest beta. Naturally those two IronPython runtime clashed and I have to recompile the IronPython Beta 2 with new namespace and assembly name.

The following codes demonstrate of the capabilities for the "hosting scenario level 2" (per DLR hosting spec). Enjoy.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using Microsoft.Scripting2.Hosting;
using IronPythonX2.Hosting;
using IronPythonX2.Modules;
using IronPythonX2.Runtime;
using IronPythonX2.Runtime.Exceptions;
using MbUnit.Framework;
using Microsoft.Scripting2;
using Microsoft.Scripting2.Runtime;

namespace HostingRunner
{

public class Simple
{

        ScriptEngine _engine;
        ScriptScope _scope;
        public Simple()
        {
            _engine = ScriptRuntime.Create().GetEngine("py");

            var sy = new SymbolDictionary()
            {
                { SymbolTable.StringToId("n"), 10}
            };
            _scope = _engine.CreateScope(sy);
        }

        public string ExecuteBLOCKED EXPRESSION
        {
            _scope.SetVariable("n", 10);

var code = @"
x = 1 + 1
";
var compiledCode = _engine.CreateScriptSourceFromString(code, Microsoft.Scripting2.SourceCodeKind.Statements);

            try
            {
                compiledCode.Execute(_scope);
                return _scope.GetVariable<int>("x").ToString();
            }
            catch (Microsoft.Scripting2.SyntaxErrorException e)
            {
                return e.Line + " : " + e.Column + " : " + e.Message;
            }
            catch (Exception e)
            {
                return e.Message;
            }
        }

        public string CreateMethod()
        {
            var code = @"
def function():
    return 1 + 1 + 200

";
var sourceCode = _engine.CreateScriptSourceFromString(code, Microsoft.Scripting2.SourceCodeKind.Statements);

sourceCode.Execute(_scope);

return _engine.GetVariable<Func<int>>(_scope, "function")().ToString();

}

        public string CallOneCodeMultipleScope()
        {
            _scope.SetVariable("n", 16);

var code = @"
def function():
return 1 + n

";
var compiledCode = _engine.CreateScriptSourceFromString(code, Microsoft.Scripting2.SourceCodeKind.Statements).Compile();
compiledCode.Execute(_scope);

var firstResult = _engine.GetVariable<Func<int>>(_scope, "function")();

var secondScope = _engine.CreateScope();
secondScope.SetVariable("n", 10);

var secondResult = _engine.GetVariable<Func<int>>(_scope, "function")();

return (firstResult + secondResult).ToString();
}

        public string CallMultipleExecutionOverASingleScope()
        {
            var code = @"
def function():
    return 1 + 1";

_engine.CreateScriptSourceFromString(code, Microsoft.Scripting2.SourceCodeKind.Statements).Execute(_scope);

            var code2 = @"
def function2():
    return 10 + function()
";
            var compiledCode = _engine.CreateScriptSourceFromString(code2, SourceCodeKind.Statements).Compile();

compiledCode.Execute(_scope);

return _engine.GetVariable<Func<int>>(_scope, "function2")().ToString();
}

        public string CallLoadExternalAssembly()
        {
            _engine.Runtime.LoadAssembly(System.Reflection.Assembly.LoadWithPartialName("SK.Framework"));

var code = @"
import clr
clr.AddReference(""SK.Framework"")
from SK.Framework import Unique
";

_engine.CreateScriptSourceFromString(code, Microsoft.Scripting2.SourceCodeKind.Statements).Execute(_scope);

            var code2 = @"
def function2():
    return Unique.Empty.Value
";
            var compiledCode = _engine.CreateScriptSourceFromString(code2, SourceCodeKind.Statements).Compile();

compiledCode.Execute(_scope);

            return _engine.GetVariable<Func<int>>(_scope, "function2")().ToString();
        }
    }
}

namespace HostingRunner
{
    [TestFixture]
    public class SimpleTest
    {
        Simple _simple;
        [SetUp]
        public void Setup()
        {
            _simple = new Simple();
        }

        [Test]
        public void TestScope()
        {
            var value = _simple.ExecuteBLOCKED EXPRESSION;

Assert.IsTrue(value == "2", "value must be equal 1 + 1 instead of " + value);
}

        [Test]
        public void TestDelegate()
        {
            var value = _simple.CreateMethod();

Assert.IsTrue(value == "2", "value must be equal 1 + 1 instead of " + value);
}

        [Test]
        public void TestCompiledCode()
        {
            var value = _simple.CallOneCodeMultipleScope();

Assert.IsTrue(value == "34", "value must be equal 1 + 1 instead of " + value);
}

        [Test]
        public void TestMultipleExecution()
        {
            var value = _simple.CallMultipleExecutionOverASingleScope();

Assert.IsTrue(value == "12", "value must be equal 55 instead of " + value);
}

        [Test]
        public void TestReference()
        {
            var value = _simple.CallLoadExternalAssembly();

            Assert.IsTrue(value == "-12", "value must be equal 12 instead of " + value);
        }
    }

}

SOA via WCF in CuttingEdgeClub (ITWorx)

Mohammed Hossam — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 20:55:00 GMT

Hey, I will be giving a presentation in ITWorx CuttingEdgeClub, the presentation is similar to the one I did in SKDD II (SOA via WCF), however I will add to it more slides about REST, ROA and WCF Restful services, I wish it becomes more exciting and interesting.

Here is the poster Thanks to Mostafa Mourad :)

Technorati Tags: WCF,SOA,REST,ROA

Wrap ContinuousText Inside Label

beckham — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 12:37:00 GMT

Hey guys, I was wondering if any of you has the situation of displaying a text in a label?? sure you did. but imagine the text is tooooo long that it's displayed in a long line, Now if you put it in the label it will be displayed in a long line too, to solve this problem there is a lot of solutions you will find if you google it. you can use a textbox and give it the look of a label and set the wrap property to true this will do the trick. but what if you have a devil user or actually " QE Teammate ", and the text he entered is continuous as it was one word in this case it will not be wrapped. so here is a littel extension string helper method that warps the string into lines of length given as a parameter.
The idea here is to devide the string into lines and put a line break tag at the end of the line.

Ofcourse it has some drawback such as the last word of the line might be splitted.but you can put "-" or something like this at the end of the line.

Hope this is helpfu, The source code is attached.

Beckham