John Reynolds' Tech Blog

Programmatically complete Sharepoint out of box Approval Workflow

johnrey — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 20:13:40 GMT

I have not seen anyone else on the web do this, and I spent a couple days trying to figure this out. Given an out of box Sharepoint Approval workflow, I wanted to be able to update the Approval task programmatically, and have the status update to Approved or Rejected as appropriate. Simple, right? Not so much. You can't update the task directly, and there is no documentation to speak of on the workflow. I compared the extended properties of an approved & rejected task and found out that...(read more)

Presenting like Steve Jobs

johnrey — Fri, 16 May 2008 09:43:49 GMT

I ran across a blog post on http://www.twistimage.com/blog today; it was a link to a YouTube video about presenting like Steve Jobs. Most people would agree that Steve Jobs is dynamic, exciting, and entertaining presenter. I always enjoy watching him speak, and this video gives a nice 10,000 foot view of the components that make up the Steve Jobs magic. Many people will never have the personal aura and charisma that Steve Jobs has, but learning how to simplify and streamline presentations, Steve...(read more)

Writing with LiveWriter

johnrey — Mon, 05 May 2008 20:34:00 GMT

I haven't used standalone blogging software before, but wanted to try to consolidate my blog posting, manage posts, and have a nice UI to generate new posts. The first software I've tried out is Microsoft's LiveWriter Has a nice interface, picked up my Community Server blog and my Blogspot blog with no problems... Try it out, it's free!...(read more)

Developer Rules to Live by: Part 1

johnrey — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 21:34:00 GMT

I'm just going to aggregate a few of things that I have learned over my short time as a software developer: 1) Dont join a project that doesnt have a development process in place, or where you wont be able to easily implement one. More specifically, I'm concerned with change control. This is the classic scope creep case everyone talks about. Everyone talks about it because it happens all the time, and I have let it happen on my current product. We are in a position where the client is demanding features...(read more)

Visual Studio TFS 2008 Build Object Model and Test Results

johnrey — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 20:20:00 GMT

Buck Hodges posted a very useful CHM for those of us developing against the new TFS 2008 object model. I was looking for a way to get test data out of the object model, and it is much improved over 2005!To get data you need to do the following process:1) get an instance of team foundation server2) get an instance of the IBuildServer service3) retrieve an instance of IBuildDetail associated with the build uri4) retrieve an instance of the IConfigurationSummary for the specific platform and flavor...(read more)

USC Tech Demo - Wii Links

johnrey — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 11:06:00 GMT

Thanks to all who came out to the tech talk at USC last night!Here's links to the software Mike Jablonski demoed and/or talked about:WiimoteLib Brian Peek Managed Library for Nintendo's Wiimote http://www.codeplex.com/WiimoteLib/ Wiimote Drum Kit Evan X. Merz http://www.thisisnotalabel.com/My-Wiimote-Drum-Kit.php Wiimote Whiteboard Johnny Chung Lee http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/ Wiibrew Wii hardware documentation http://wiibrew.org/index.php?title=Wiimote...(read more)

USC Tech Demo - 2/27/08!

johnrey — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 19:40:00 GMT

We will be walking through some code from the Video.Show folks. Additionally, Mike Jablonski will be demoing some of the cool WiiMote applications from Johnny Lee We will be giving away a couple free WiiMote/Bluetooth development starter kits! The demo is at 6:30 pm at USC, Kaprelian Hall #140 Free food & drink! Hosted by UPE Honor Society and Avanade For students! Free download of Microsoft VS2008, Server 2003, Expression Studio, and XNA Game Studio A great getting started on Silverlight...(read more)

RSS Dot Net

johnrey — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:43:00 GMT

Recently, I was on a project which required creating an RSS 2.0 feed using Java, which essentially amounted to mapping our data entities to the appropriate fields in the RSS xml spec. More generally, I want to be able to somehow turn any List of Stuff into an RSS feed easily. Lo and behold, in VS2008, WCF has a 'Syndication Service Library' project type, which has entities already created for feeds (and can do RSS 2.0 or ATOM with no problem). I decided to create a 'ISyndicatable' interface...(read more)

USC Tech Demonstration - Creating a Windows Vista Gadget for Facebook

johnrey — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 19:48:00 GMT

Thanks to everyone who attended the Avanade Technology Presentation hosted by the UPE Computer Science Honor Society at the University of Southern California. Attached, please find the code and presentation slide deck used at the event The code was originally created by Jesse Hsia, Greg Ferguson and Amber Israelsen of Avanade, and used in a technology presentation at UCI as well. Win an Ipod Nano (Silver 4GB) - open for current USC students only. Download the code from the presentation and...(read more)

Microsoft releases source code of some of the .Net framework

johnrey — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 17:48:00 GMT

According to Scott Guthrie's web posting at http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/03/releasing-the-source-code-for-the-net-framework-libraries.aspxMicrosoft has released the source code to specific .Net Framework components.This is intended to allow developers to debug and step into the code of commonly used components and verify there are no bugs in framework implementation.Obviously, this code is not free to use in any other software, the license is provided to use the code...(read more)

Clearing the Event Log while running under a service account

johnrey — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 21:04:00 GMT

I ran into a situation recently where I had a Windows service running under a domain service account, e.g., MyDomain\SvcUser. As part of its operation, the service needed to clear the Event Log after reading its contents. By default, non-administrative accounts cannot clear an event log.Granting 'clear' access on an event log to a service account is not as simple as it might sound.After reading this post by Rory McCaw, I learned that the permissions are controlled by a custom security descriptor...(read more)

Repost for the Xbox

johnrey — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 11:44:00 GMT

Technorati isn't picking up my post, and i'm running out of time! My career manager posted this article about a promotion the Microsoft evangelists are doing for their web expressions tour. Promote the event and get a chance to win an Xbox360! So here's my entry. (and I am currently writing this from the Los Angeles event). I'm stealing the text from Bryant's blog :) Microsoft is hosting free Microsoft Web Experience events at the Los Angeles Microsoft office on June 8th and the Denver Microsoft...(read more)

T-Mobile Dash Data Connection to Laptop

johnrey — Thu, 17 May 2007 19:26:00 GMT

It took me a little while to figure out how to share the data connection on the Dash with my laptop. It's not blazing (EDGE ~128k) but it's better than nothing!

It's very simple, (i'm using Window Mobile 6, but steps should be the same for WM5); go to Start->Accessories->Internet Sharing

Click connect! That's it! I'm using the USB cable connection for a more reliable connection than Bluetooth, but you can use Bluetooth too.

Yes, it's simple, but it took a little bit of digging for someone new to Windows Mobile; hopefully this saves someone else a few minutes to figure out.

Windows Mobile 6 is here! At least for T-Mobile Dash users :)

johnrey — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 19:46:00 GMT

Windows Mobile 6 is confirmed to be released May 4th for the T-Mobile dash (the HTC Excalibur). But of course, you can download it here (queued download, I had to wait about 40 minutes)

Notably, WM6 comes with Windows Live built-in. The alarm also has a weekday / weekend option. Although not as nice as the multiple alarms of Pocket PC 5.0, it's definitely an improvement.

The upgrade process was very simple; as long as you have Active Sync installed, just hook up your phone and run the installer. It will take a few minutes and your phone will reboot a couple times. Make sure to backup any important data, as the installation will wipe all your old data off your phone.

Passing the MCPD EA; upgrade exam 70-554

johnrey — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 19:39:00 GMT

The second time was a charm. On Friday 4/27/07, I passed the 70-554, part two of two in the MCSD.NET upgrade to MCPD EA series. This was my second time taking it as I narrowly missed passing it two weeks ago by about 3 questions.

The first part of the exam was fairly straight forward for me: 28 questions on "Distributed Applications Development" (70-529) - a lot of questions about WSE 3.0, SOAP headers, and the difference between SoapRPC and SoapDocument encoding. Transcender exam prep worked very well for those questions.

My trouble came with the second half of the test, "Designing and Developing Enterprise Applications by Using the Microsoft.NET Framework." (70-549) One question described a process and required a flowchart to be filled in for that process. Questions around performance testing require one to determine which performance indicators are relevant, and to infer importance from any subtleties in the problem statement. For example, a question about which methods should be unit-tested on a third party component might mention that "new methods were added, and overall performance has been improved." The developer should infer that this means the components internals must have changed and thus one should unit test all the methods, not just the new ones.
It is important to read the questions in this second half thoroughly and to consider your answers carefully. There is plenty of time (about 90 minutes for 28 questions), so make use of it and good luck.