Sticking with the tradition established over the past few years, we have another great opportunity to touch base with developers across the valley at our bi-annual Utah Code Camp.  The Spring Code Camp will be held this coming Saturday (April 26th from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM) at Neumont University.

These events have been getting better and better each time.  There is a great group of speakers this time as well (not that we didn't have a good group in years past :), but it seems that the Code Camp is diversifying as well - which is great!  We have talks on Scrum, CakePHP, Developing on Windows Vista, TSQL, Windows Services, XNA development, Silverlight, Mac OSX programming, and much more!  Personally, I'll be sharing my thoughts on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).

So, come on out and join the vibrant Salt Lake community of developers and have a great time!

What: Utah Spring Code Camp
When: April 26th, 2008, 9:00-5:00
Where: Neumont University (10701 South River Front Parkway, South Jordan, UT 84095)
Registration: http://utcodecamp.com/event/

That's right, folks, we have the distinct opportunity to once again gather as a community of developers and share our insights and thoughts on the world of .NET.  The time has come once again to convene for our monthly .NET User Group Meeting!

This month's meeting is sure to be an exciting one as we're hosting a Heroes Community Launch! With this particular event we have volunteers from the group willing to share on three distinct topics: Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008. You won't want to miss it!

In the coming months we'll take the various topics and do some additional deep dives into each one.

Come on out, invite your friends and co-workers and be among the first to receive technical demos, readiness kits, and much more. We have several Not-For-Resale copies of each product to be given out as well to some lucky winners!

Time: 6:00 PM
Date: Thursday, April 10th, 2008
Place: Digital Draw Network (10897 South River Front Parkway, South Jordan, Suite 300)

Today I set out to create a TextBox that would provide the user with a built-in prompt.  I didn't want a TextBox control that included a Label.  Instead, I wanted something akin to the password field in Windows Vista's logon screen; the field has the prompt built-into the TextBox in a faint, perhaps italic font when the control is empty.  Once the user performs an action that causes text to appear (i.e., typing, pasting, etc) the faint prompt disappears to accommodate the text.

Now there may be tons of implementations of a similar control out there; I didn't look.  Instead I wanted to 'reinvent the wheel' as it were and figure it out for myself.  Fortunately it only cost me between 5 to 10 minutes and I had something up and working.  The code I've included below is very raw and doesn't include many customizations (you're on your own there

public sealed class PromptingTextBox : TextBox {
  public PromptingTextBox() {
     userPaint(true);
  }

  private Font _promptFont = new Font("Arial", 9.0F, FontStyle.Italic);
  private string _promptText = "Enter text here...";

  ///

  /// Sets or returns the text to display when the TextBox is empty.
  ///

  public string PromptText {
     get { return _promptText; }
     set { _promptText = value; }
  }

  protected override void Dispose(bool disposing) {
     if ( disposing )
        _promptFont.Dispose();
     base.Dispose(disposing);
  }

  protected override void OnTextChanged(EventArgs e) {
     base.OnTextChanged(e);
     userPaint(0 == TextLength);
  }

  private void userPaint(bool enabled) {
     if ( enabled != GetStyle(ControlStyles.UserPaint) ) {
        SetStyle(ControlStyles.UserPaint, enabled);
        Refresh();
     }
  }

  protected override void OnPaint(PaintEventArgs e) {
     Graphics g = e.Graphics;
     g.TextRenderingHint = TextRenderingHint.ClearTypeGridFit;
     g.DrawString(_promptText, _promptFont, SystemBrushes.ControlLight, 0.0F, 0.0F);
  }
}

That's all there is to it - at least for a simple start. Enjoy!

Customer Dynamics, a local Microsoft partner that focuses exclusively on Microsoft CRM, is hosting a special Microsoft CRM 4.0 Open House today (03/19/2008).  The event takes place at our local Microsoft offices and runs from 3:00 PM to 7:00 PM.  Customer Dynamics has invited us (Experlogix) to come share in the event.

It's my privilege, therefore, to attend the event and provide a short presentation on Experlogix's Product Configurator solution for CRM and interact with customers.  I'm very excited as I look forward to this event.  If you haven't already registered and your company uses (or is investigating the usage of) Microsoft CRM, please sign up and we'll see you there!

Microsoft Corporation
123 Wright Brothers Dr. Suite 100
Salt Lake City, UT 84116

In the world of AJAX and JavaScript, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is ubiquitous; that is, it's everywhere.  JSON is, in a nutshell, a terse, convenient mechanism for representing objects and their property values in a manner that the browser (via JavaScript itself) can reconstruct as an object.  I'm not going to go into the details of JSON and its intracacies here as there are plenty of other discussions on the topic online elsewhere.

I just wanted to point out that there is some first-class support for JSON serialization in the .NET framework v3.5.  I bring this up because a while back I was about to create my own attribute-based JSON serializer but I figured there had to be something already in place for it.  I'm glad I looked.

Using the [DataContractAttribute] and [DataMemberAttribute] which are usually associated with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) you can easily serialize your objects to/from JSON form.  The object that provides this support (not coincidentally named DataContractJsonSerializer) is found after referencing the System.ServiceModel.Web assembly in the System.Runtime.Serialization.Json namespace.  When (de)serializing your objects, you do so against a stream.

Say, for purposes of the discussion, that you wanted to create an HTTP Handler that returned product information to the caller.  You could very easily serialize your product set in the following manner:

void IHttpHandler.ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) {
  HttpResponse res = context.Response;
  res.ContentType = "application/json";
  DataContractJsonSerializer jsSer = new DataContractJsonSerializer(typeof ( Product[] ));
  jsSer.WriteObject(res.OutputStream, getProducts());
}

The JavaScript client could then parse the result and do with it as it sees fit.  Pretty handy!

This past week I've been in Orlando, Florida attending the Microsoft Convergence 2008 conference.  This marks my fourth such conference and they keep getting better and better!  My primary responsibilities at this conference (and the MS Partner Conference for that matter) revolve around the booth that we have in the Expo hall.  Five of my team and co-workers were in attendance, manning the booth (Christian, Jeff, Gwyn, David, and myself) as well as an associate, Scott.  It was a good thing all five of us were there because we hardly had a moment to breathe what with the traffic our booth brought in.  It was awesome.

Not only was the week full of activity in the conference proper, we had the opportunity to witness the Space Shuttle Endeavour launch on Monday evening/Tuesday morning, hang out with partners and customers, and all-in-all have a great time.  We keep hearing how much our customers and partners LOVE our product; that sure makes a developer such as myself feel even better about what I do.

I already look forward to the next conference.

When I came to Orlando, Florida for the Microsoft Convergence 2008 Conference I didn't expect to get such a treat.  I found out yesterday, shortly after my arrival that we were going on an outing to watch the Space Shuttle launch.  Boy was I excited!  I had no idea it was going to launch in the first place, but was even more excited to be able to witness the launch in person, and at night.

I vividly recall when the Space Shuttle Columbia landed just 30 minutes from my house (a night landing) at White Sands in NM but I wasn't able to attend that event.  In fact, I have wanted to see a shuttle launch since the Columbia first went into space; it set many of my dreams into motion, few of which will ever come true - though seeing a launch in-person has just now!

The event was amazing.  We were situated across the water from the launch pad (geographically, I'm not sure how far it actually was).  Right at 2:28 AM we saw the first billows of smoke rise from the launch pad, then the bright flare of the flames from the rockets.  The rocket, the size of a lit match's flame at arm's length, ascended rapidly but very silently into the night sky.  Perhaps most astounding and brilliant was the entire sky...not just the horizon where the launch took place, but the ENTIRE SKY turned a bright orange during the launch.  It appeared as though a small sun had risen.  The rocket was then engulfed in the low cloud coverage.

The rocket disappeared.  After a small delay of about 10 seconds or so we began to hear and actually feel the trembling and roar of the rocket boosters.  This got increasingly louder and more rumbling before waning.

Poetry in motion.

I've been putting together a small WCF service that allows a client to upload a file to a server for processing.  While the details of that are for another discussion, I want to focus on what should have been a simple operation but turned out to take up most of my afternoon and some of my evening: the generation of a client proxy class and configuration file.

By way of background, this particular WCF service is hosted by a simple Windows Service, runs (by default) under the Network Service account, and exposes a TCP end point for communication.  I have a setup project that takes care of the installation and registration of the Windows Service and auto-runs it when installation is complete.  This has been running great.

However, anytime I attempted to generate a proxy class for my service via the following command line, I would get some nasy error indicating that it “Cannot obtain Metadata from net.tcp://localhost:9999/myservice”.

svcutil net.tcp://localhost:9999/myservice/mex

My configuration file was as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
   <system.serviceModel>
      <behaviors>
         <serviceBehaviors>
            <behavior name="mex">
               <serviceMetadata />
            </behavior>
         </serviceBehaviors>
      </behaviors>
      <services>
         <service name="MyService.ExampleSvc" behaviorConfiguration="mex">
            <host>
               <baseAddresses>
                  <add baseAddress="net.tcp://localhost:9999/myservice" />
               </baseAddresses>
            </host>
           
            <!-- default endpoint -->
            <endpoint
               binding="netTcpBinding"
               contract="MyService.IExampleSvc" />
           
            <!-- metadata exchange (MEX) endpoint -->
            <endpoint
               address="mex"
               binding="mexTcpBinding"
               name="MEX"
               contract="IMetadataExchange" />
         </service>
      </services>
   </system.serviceModel>
</configuration>

However, as I mentioned, everytime I attempted to retrieve the metadata via the /mex endpoint it failed.  Right off the bat I suspected that the error had to do with the types used in the [ServiceContract] class, but I brushed that idea aside thinking that for sure it was something in the configuration file.  So I kept on battling with it.

To that end, I created a very simple WCF service (in the same application) this time with an HTTP endpoint.  I had to change the Windows Service credentials to a user with elevated permissions to register the HTTP channel (Network Service won't cut it) because I didn't want to manually mess with my HTTP security settings.  Anyway, this was just a test.  To my chagrin, it worked first try; I was able to retrieve the metadata.

So I returned to the TCP service.

Fortunately (and I'm no WCF whiz...yet :), I found a helpful behavior that I could add to the .config file that saved the day for me.  By simply adding the <serviceDebug /> element with the includeExceptionDetailInFaults attribute to the mex behavior element I was able to get some diagnostics.

<serviceBehaviors>
    <behavior name="mex">
       <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="true" />
       <serviceMetadata />
    </behavior>
</serviceBehaviors>

Now, in the big, fat, honkin' exception stack that was output I saw immediately that one of the embedded types used in my [ServiceContract] implementation had a nested type that was not serializable.  Once I added [Serializable()] to the offending types (there were a few of them) and recompiled it worked like a champ!  So it turns out that my initial suspiscion was correct...I need to listen to my intuition more often!