.Net Links of the Day: Class Builder Wizard, OpenID. Visual WebGui and Patent Extortion

By

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution. - Hannah Arendt

CODEPLEX: Class Builder Wizard is a Microsoft Visual Studio wizard that generates data object classes and a full data layer implementation for Microsoft SQL Server database objects. It can also be used to quickly create custom classes (not necessarily based on a database object) by defining the structure of the class "manually." And, it works with Visual Studio 2008! If you've gotten frustrated waiting for updates to the Repository Factory and other GAT-based add-ins, then this is for you. It's simple, elegant and it gives you all the "DAL" code you need for your deal to work! All you do is "Add Item" and choose the template and follow the "Way of the Wizard"! It even generates a .SQL file with all the T-SQL Code to get your database in synch with the generated DAL code.

OPENID: I've UnBlogged about OpenID before, intimating that it was getting ready for Prime Time, and now I believe it is ready. There are several new .NET implementations that I really like, and I'm starting to actually use them (that's the real test!). Developers want to start here. Mads Kristensen did a real nice "less is more" openid implementation here, but if you want something more feature-complete, check out the ExtremeSwank offering. They even have some basics on the new extensions including MicroIds. This is getting really interesting; I like Microsoft LiveID but if you want something that is really vendor agnostic and already boasts some 120 million users (Yahoo, among others, have already gotten aboard), I am starting to think that OpenID is the way to go. Even has "pravatars" now, and a lot of really neat features on your custom OpenId "page" when you start an OpenId Identity here.

You get back an openid Identity that looks like "pbromberg.myopenid.com" and you can even set features like "always allow" that mean you never have to log in to an OpenId supported site after the initial logon. The ExtremeSwank ASCX UserControl returns the OpenId "Identity" along with the primary email and other data, unlike LiveId which only returns a GUID that is unique to the user and the application. Once again, I think it is important for developers to understand that an OpenID is NOT "an account" - it is simply a way to authenticate a provided Identity via an external service. You still need to have your authenticated OpenId user fill in a local profile including their email (which should come back in their oiu user object) and whatever other items you need to store. Their openid identity (e.g. joeuser.myopenid.com) becomes the primary key or username in your Users database table.

VISUAL WEBGUI: I stumbled across Visual WebGui a couple of weeks ago on Codeplex.com and passed it up, probably because I had my mind on other pursuits. However, I ran across it again today, downloaded the thing, installed the 3.5 Framework version and started playing with some of the samples. Good God! This is POWERFUL Stuff. Basically, you are going to work with Windows Forms and all the richness and goodness and the whole app is gonna run under ASP.NET over the web. Think Outlook Web Access and much, much more. Think Silverlight and AJAX, and you don't have to worry about any code. A little bit more about Visual WebGui: I downloaded a DiggApiNet "digg" .net API wrapper library from codeplex.com. In this solution is a complex Windows Forms Test Harness. I created a new Visual WebGui project with two required forms referencing the Gizmox base classes that extend Windows.Forms, copied in the "guts" of the original WinForms app to each new WebGui form, and changed all the namespace refererences appropriately to match. There was only one other change needed and it was minor. The new application ran perfectly over the web - all of it.

Check them all out!

Patent Extortion Gone Bonkers: Smartphone patented, everybody gets sued.

This past Tuesday, the US Patent and Trademark Office issued a patent on "a mobile entertainment and communication device."

When you read the patent, you will realize pretty quickly it describes the smartphone - something that every major manufacturer puts out and has been doing for years. It's simply a patent for a mobile phone with removable storage, an internet connection, a camera and the ability to download audio or video files and display same.

The company that has the rights to this patent didn't wait at all. The next day it filed three separate lawsuits against just about every manufacturer, including Apple, Nokia, RIM, Sprint, AT&T, HP, Motorola, Helio, HTC, Sony Ericsson, UTStarcomm, Samsung and a lot of others. You can get more details at Patent Troll Tracker blog.

As the link explains, the patent itself is based on a bunch of continuation filings, which are commonly used by patent holders who want broad patents to cover the latest technologies well after they've already come about in the market. Should the PTO EVER have issued this patent? Look, if you are going to issue patents on technology, then you need technology experts to review the applications, not nasty bureaucrats.

Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Some observations on Script Callbacks, "AJAX", "ATLAS" "AHAB" and where it's all going.

By
I've taken a more than cursory interest in the whole Remote Scripting (.NET species) vs. AJAX and now ATLAS discussion, mostly because I started using Remote Scripting since Microsoft first released it, and because I continued to refine it after seeing Brent Ashley's excellent work with JSRS, which was one of the first "real" cross-browser solutions back in 2000 (that's the turn of the Century for you history buffs). Now Bertrand Leroy, a Microsoft guy whose work I like , has authored some very interesting ASP.NET 2.0 script callback stuff that he points to on his blog, and he is obviously (at least, to me he is) involved quite heavily in the development of this new ATLAS infrastructure that they'll preview at PDC. Leroy's most recent post brings to the surface what I agree are the major differences between the "AJAX a - la .NET" approach as popularized by Michael Swartz with his AJAX.NET library, and Leroy's RefreshPanel, the ASP.NET 2.0 b...
Read more

IE7 - Vista: "Internet Explorer has stopped Working"

By
Image
This one was a bitch. All of a sudden for no reason at all, out of the blue, I get this dialog "internet Explorer has stopped working". I didn't install any new software, crap- I didn't do anything! So here I am using FIREFART to go on the internet and find out what to do! Damn! Good thing I've got the sucker on the same machine (I'm not "anti-Firefox", i just don't use it that much except to check my page renderings). The Fix The fix (at least for me): 1) Go into Control Panel, and choose "Internet Options". 2) Under the "Advanced" tab, press the "RESET" button at the lower right: Don't ask me why this happens, or why the fix works. That's a BUG, D00D - I don't care how you slice it!
Read more

FIREFOX / IE Word-Wrap, Word-Break, TABLES FIX

By
One of the most annoying things a developer (who would normally delight in writing code, not futzing with markup) can have is getting rendering issues between different browsers. The two biggest players are of course Internet Exploder and Firefart (as I lovingly like to refer to each). In most cases that's going to take care of 98 percent of your total site traffic. IE has had a proprietary "word-break" style attribute for a long time, and this made it into the CSS 3.0 spec. But that doesn't necessarily help you with Firefox right now. Firefox literally - (and I consider this completely idiotic, since it's been in their bug database for FIVE YEARS) does not have a reliable CSS style element to force table cell content to break in the middle of a word in order to stop the content from expanding your table / div off the page or over other content on the page. Here's a partial fix, which will work for most tables and browsers. The style declaration (I call it m...
Read more

System.Web.Caching.Cache, HttpRuntime.Cache, and IIS Recycles

By
Recently I chimed in on a newsgroup thread to an OP (Original Poster) who was questioning why he was losing Cache items. This individual would load a dataset from the Cache object into a local object to use to perform processing. He had been using httpcontext.current.cache and noticed that sometimes he was not able to get the dataset out of the cache. He tried switching to HttpRuntime.Cache and it seemed to help. The OP claimed that the application is under heavy hits, and once or twice every month he would see this error. He wanted to know why does the HttpContext.Current.Cache call work sometimes, while some other times does not. A couple of posters replied, one of whom is a respected MVP who usually makes very astute, high-quality posts. He posted," The cache is only valid during the life of the request. how is you[sic] code using the cache?" Somebody else (also pretty astute, usually) responded, "Cache is valid during lifetime of application not request.....". W...
Read more

FIX: Requested Registry Access is not allowed (Visual Studio 2008)

By
Symptom: in Visual Studio 2008, you attempt to add a new WebContentForm and associate it with a MasterPage. You receive an error dialog "Requested Reqistry Access is not allowed". Don't ask me what caused this; I'm guessing that the registry keys involved had their access denied due to removal of a previous version of Visual Studio, leaving the new guy (Visual Studio 2008) in the lurch. Here's the fix: Download "subinacl" here . This is a command-line tool that enables administrators to obtain security information about files, registry keys, and services, and transfer this information from user to user, from local or global group to group, and from domain to domain. After installing subinacl.exe (it will be in the C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools folder.), drop to a command prompt and run the following batch file, which you have saved in the same folder with the filename "FIX.bat": subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudi...
Read more