The Azure Services Training Kit

The first Azure Services Training Kit was released during the week of PDC and it contained all of the PDC hands-on labs. Since then, the Azure Services team has been creating new content covering new features in the platform.

The Azure Services Training Kit April update now includes the following content covering Windows Azure, .NET Services, SQL Services, and Live Services:

1. 11 hands-on labs – including new hands-on labs for PHP and Native Code on Windows Azure.
2. 18 demo scripts – These demo scripts are designed to provide detailed walkthroughs of key features so that someone can easily give a demo of a service
3. 9 presentations – the presentations used for our 3 day training workshops including speaker notes.

The training kit is available as an installable package on the Microsoft Download Center.

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Book Review :97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know by Richard Monson-Haefel, is a very nice book for aspiring architects. It covers the real time problems architects face while architecting any solution. You can get this book from Amazon .
Some of the unedited text of the book is also available in following site
http://97-things.near-time.net/wiki/97-things-every-software-architect-should-know-the-book

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Code Contract in Visual studio 2010

Microsoft has included the Code Contract feature in Visual Studio 2010 with .NET Framework 4.0 which was earlier published by Microsoft Research team.Code Contract is a language-agnostic way to express coding assumptions in .NET programs. The contracts take the form of pre-conditions, post-conditions, and object invariants. Contracts act as checked documentation of your external and internal APIs. The contracts are used to improve testing via runtime checking, enable static contract verification, and documentation generation. Code Contracts bring the advantages of design-by-contract programming to all .NET programming languages.

The VS.NET 2010 CTP includes a CodeContracts class in the System.Diagnostics.Contracts namespace that allows you to write contracts in your code. All contracts are static methods that return void. They take a Boolean expression which encodes the condition that must be true. They also have an overload that takes a string parameter as a message for when the contract is false. Contracts are declarative and come at the beginning of your method. You can think of them as part of the signature.

To know more details visit the Microsoft Research site

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/contracts/

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Microsoft Social Desktop

In the computer world there is clear difference between WEB platform and PC. It will be really good if we will have a technology which will allow every document in the PC to have the ability to have a backing social URL for sharing without having to upload or copy or move it from its natural location.

Microsoft Research team came up with a new technology named “Social Desktop” which will blends the Web and PC by embedding Web oriented sharing inside your desktop.
To know more about social desktop visit Microsoft research website
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/socialdesktop/

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Unbinding the source code from VSS/TFS

One of the problem most of the developer faces is to unbind the source code from Visual Source Safe or TFS before releasing it or transferring it.

Following steps can be followed to unbind the source code.

1. Go to the Root folder of the Source code
2. Remove the read only attribute of all the folders and files inside the folders by going to the property window
3. Search for *.scc ,*.vssscc,*.vspscc and delete those files
4. Open the solution file in your favorite text editor and remove the following section: GlobalSection(SourceCodeControl) = preSolution
   ...
   EndGlobalSection
5. Open all the projects in your solution one by one in your text editor and remove the following lines:
   

SccProjectName
SccLocalPath
SccAuxPath
SccProvider

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Visual LINQ Query Builder

For the beginners writing LINQ queries is not so easy as it is a different way of writing .net code. It need lot of practice and developers need to remember the syntax of the query like which statement comes first and which one next also the operators that needs to be used. There is free tool available which will work as an add- in to visual studio 2008 IDE that will help you visually build LINQ to SQL queries.

Visit http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/vlinq to learn more about this tool.

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LINQ : IEnumerable and IQueryable

IEnumerable and IQueryable are the two most used interfaces in . What I am trying to do here is that I am trying to differentiate the two interfaces depending on their behavior. In LINQ we generally have few providers available within .NET Framework, like LINQ to Object, LINQ to SQL, LINQ to XML.

All the LINQ query statement returns an object of type IEnumerable.This holds good for LINQ to Object and LINQ to XML.But LINQ to SQL is something different as the query statement will be convered toa SQL statement internally while execution.So LINQ to SQL queries return object of type IQueryable which is again inherited from IEnumerable.

To check what are the different methods and properties this interface have, visit the following URL.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.linq.iqueryable_members.aspx

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Pragmatic Programmer, The: From Journeyman to Master

For all my developer friends I have book recommendation.

“Pragmatic Programmer, the: From Journeyman to Master” by Andrew Hunt David Thomas.

It’s a very nice book which covers everything that you need to know to become a good programmer. Authors explained each Tip extensively with short stories which really helps in understanding the importance of the Tip. It is not a technical book; it explains what a programmer should do besides talk in programming languages.

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