Victor Stodell

The release of Silverlight 5 is allegedly the last major release of Silverlight , but it brought some great stuff that I have now incorporated in the latest release of The Cornball . There are a lot of good descriptions and even video samples of the new features in  What's new in Silverlight 5 . These are the two new features that I am using in The Cornball . Mouse Button Double Click Previously I have used a custom implementation with a timer to capture double clicks on the cards. But since this feature finally is included in the framework I decided to use that instead. The MouseButtonEventArgs now has a ClickCount property which simply indicates the number of times the mouse button was clicked. That leaves us with a much cleaner implementation of the single and double click scenario. private void CardMouseLeftButtonDown(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e) { switch (e.ClickCount) { case 1: // Handle single click break; case 2: ...

I have been privileged to participate in the  Lead Enterprise Architect Program  at Microsoft this spring. The Lead Enterprise Architect Program (LEAP) is a program that aims to give understanding of the strategic core components of the Microsoft platform. LEAP consists of five master class training sessions as well as three days of sessions at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Seattle. The direction of the classes are extremely appealing and I really hope that they will live up to my expectations: Application architecture on the Microsoft Platform Cloud computing for Architects Identity & Access Management Integration on premises and in the cloud Business Intelligence and Enterprise Search The program starts in February and ends with the trip to Redmond in the end of May. During this time I will try to write as much as possible about this whole experience, which I hope will be amazing!

I have been using the Team Foundation Services preview for a while now, and the least I can say is that I am impressed! The web interface has a nice Metro style design and gives a high quality experience overall. By installing the KB2581206  hotfix I can also access my TFS account from Visual Studio, which is absolutely fantastic. I might even sound a bit fanatic by saying that it is like a dream come true... The server appears as a traditional Team Foundation Server in Visual Studio apart from the logon process (a Windows Live popup window). Read more and try it out yourself! Besides playing around with the user interface I have actually tried to work a little seriously with the service as well. Partly by uploading my project the Cornball and developing against the TFS in Visual Studio. So far this experience is very positive and I have not found any issues or oddities at all, except that the environment is kind of slow. This whole thing also takes me one step further out i...

I recently worked on a project to integrate the search results from a Google Search Appliance into a .NET application. Although it seems like a pretty straight forward task, there were some small issues that I thought I might share. Background The communication with the Google Search Appliance is made simply with a HTTP GET request, which returns an XML formatted response. As for the Suggest service, the request looks about the same but the result returned is JSON encoded. For more information, please see the Google Search Appliance documentation , which is very extensive. Internationalization Since this solution was to incorporate several languages, the .NET application had to support and differentiate the languages. The GSA has very good built-in language support but there were at least one thing that was not completely obvious. The GSA uses either HTTP headers or query string parameters to determine in which language the request is made. If neither of these are supplied...

Yesterday I did my last working day at my previous employer and the next week I will begin my employment as a Microsoft consultant at  Connecta  in Stockholm. Of course this means that things will change, but only for the better I hope. Leaving a position that you like on a workplace that you like is a tough decision. But in my case there are some amazing possibilities and challenges that I just cannot turn down. The type of work I will be doing differs a bit from my previous position. I will be more focused on development, which also means that I will try to change the direction of this blog to be more development oriented. At the same time, I have come to realize that by blogging in Swedish I do not really contribute to the community as much as I could. Therefore I have chosen to translate my previous posts to English and continue to blog in English from now on. Furthermore I have decided to focus more on my blog. I have some interesting projects ahead, both perso...

There have been a lot of whining on Google from their Apps-users since the launch of  Google+  for everyone with a regular Google-account. The Apps-users have not been able to use  Google+ , until now! (actually  october 27 ) As usual I am impressed with most of the things Google accomplishes, but now when all of their services have gotten a visual and functional touchup I am getting really impressed. As someone at an early stage pointed out it is really sweet of Google to play naive and let me fill in my profile information when I create my profile (as if Google did not already know), but after a few clicks I am on the go. My albums from Picasa is automatically integrated and even the pictures I have uploaded to this blog is shown in  Google+ . But what happens next? Practically no one of my friends are on  Google+  so what do I use it for? I guess we will see. Hopefully there will be even more integration between the social networks in the...

When a person gets married or makes a name change for some other reason this usually means that the login name for the Active Directory-account changes as well. This is rarely a problem, but it turned out to cause some issues on our web server, where the  User.Identity  property was still returning the old login name. The user logged on with the new login name, but was identified by the web application as the old login name. The reason this occurs is because the  User.Identity  property relies on the  LsaLookupSids  method to convert the user SID to a login name. The method first calls the local  LSA-cache , which is not synchronized with the Active Directory. For this purpose a simple reboot of the web server to clear the  LSA-cache  propably would have sufficed. But since we didn't want to take the application offline rebooting was not an option. Instead, it is possible to set the registry value  LsaLookupCacheMaxSize in HKLM...