Mesh of Technology Blog

In this episode, the one and only Windows Azure Tactical Strategist, Steve Marx, joins Dmitry and Peter to give us an update on the Windows Azure platform. Steve talks about common real world Windows Azure use patterns, including storage and compute instance configurations.

Steve uses some strategic tactics to tell us what’s in the tea leaves for the future of Azure. Peter also responds to “cat ladies & acne-laden teenagers” by sharing “The Memo”.

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If you’re developing a Windows Phone 7 application you might run into this nasty error when trying to run your application:

System.Windows.Markup.XamlParseException occurred
  Message= [Line: 0 Position: 0]
  LineNumber=0
  LinePosition=0
  StackTrace:
       at MS.Internal.XcpImports.CheckHResult(UInt32 hr)…

The cause here isn't obvious from the exception, but actually its very simple once you know what to look for. In my case a basic cut-n-paste error caused bad binding code to get written:

Bad code

<Image Source="{Binding RelativeSource=ImageUri}" Grid.Column="0" />
<TextBlock Text="{Binding RelativeSource=Description}" Grid.Column="1" />

Correct code, error resolved!

<Image Source="{Binding Path=ImageUri}" Grid.Column="0" />
<TextBlock Text="{Binding Path=Description}" Grid.Column="1" />

(should have Path instead of RelativeSource, doh…)

So why so generic?

Windows Phone 7 is based on Silverlight 3 which from what I’ve been told has this as a known limitation, XAML error just don’t report great amounts of exact information.

Honestly its not something I noticed during my few projects around SL3 and now in SL4 there is better handling of reporting the exact issue.

What does this mean for WP7 developers?

This means that WP7 will have this issue for now. Hopefully WP7 will eventually move to Silverlight 4+ and we will see a better experience.

For now when you get this error simply try to look for some bad XAML that isn't breaking during Compile but will mess you up at runtime.

Today I had to write some code that would detect the Emulator we use to test WP7 Silverlight applications. For some reason though I had a really hard time finding the answer. Therefore I decided to post the solution here and to link the thread I finally did find which helped me find figure it out, which is this thread here.

Solution:

string DeviceTypeDetected = string.Empty;

switch (Microsoft.Devices.Environment.DeviceType)
{
    case Microsoft.Devices.DeviceType.Device:
        DeviceTypeDetected = "Real Device Detected!";
        break;
    case Microsoft.Devices.DeviceType.Emulator:
        DeviceTypeDetected = "Emulator Detected :(";
        break;
}

In this episode, guest host Andrew Brust is back again, joining Dmitry & I to talk about all of the tech news from Microsoft’s Wordwide Partner Conference in Washington, DC. The trio talks about WebMatrix, Internet Explorer 9 Preview 3, Windows Phone 7, and the newly announced Windows Azure Appliance.

A raging Dmitry also shares his poppin’ passion for HTML5.

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Today I was working with RowVersions (aka TimeStamp, aka binary(8)) and tried to update a table with a value I had retrieved and stored by doing select @@DTBS

My stored notepad value was ‘0x0000000027A3CC07’ so I had run a query to update a table with it, but it didn’t work, the set value was different (‘0x3078303030303030’).

Being puzzled I tried a few queries and all of them returned this unexpected result which explained why my update set the wrong value, examples:

Queries

select CONVERT(rowversion, '0x0000000027A3CC07')
select CONVERT(timestamp, '0x0000000027A3CC07')
select CONVERT(binary(8), '0x0000000027A3CC07')

The above returned a result that did not match the RowVersion im passing in, causing me a lot of pain

Result:

Solution

I asked some of my MSFT colleagues and they pointed out the basic mistake I was making, remove the quotes! This value is not a string, it’s a hex.

Example of a good query:

select CONVERT(rowversion, 0x0000000027A3CC07)

This will return the same exact value as the one I passed in. As you can see, CONVERT (and cast) does not convert properly if you pass in a string for this datatype, instead remove the single quotes and you’re all set.

Today I started Bitlocker (Windows 7 x64 bit OS) on an external drive but noticed something, the normal UI notification in the system tray that shows the progress indicator was missing. A bug? Perhaps.

When BitLocker starts it takes up the majority of the drive space to do the encryption, so to me it was clear the encryption was in progress but I couldn’t figure out how far along it was without the UI element.

Example: How I suspected encryption was still in progress (big red bar)

To try and figure out what’s going on I reached out to my colleagues and was given a suggestion, “start the command prompt in administrator mode and run ‘manage-bde.exe –status’ command to see the status of encryption. Sure enough it provided me both the ‘conversion status’ and ‘percentage encrypted’ as shown below:

In this episode, guest Garrett Serack from the Microsoft Open Source Technology Center joins me to discuss CoApp, a new package manager for the Windows platform. Garrett tells us how CoApp will help make it easier for developers and users to build and install open source software on Windows.

(Interview starts at 34:15)

Also, Dmitry and I rap about Windows Phone 7, WCF, Outlook PST files, Visual Studio 2010 Power Tools, and IQueryable killing his cat.

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Today I put together some notes around what the main differences are between a Silverlight 4 application running in-browser Vs. out-of-browser (OOB) with elevated trust enabled (elevated trust is new in SL4). After compiling them i realized it would make a good reference blog post, so here it is:

Some additional notes:

• You can design your application to force people to install it or have no access to features, I’ve done this in my prototype as the application would be useless
• OOB applications must be signed in order to be updated using self-update feature
• One of the best SL4 feature reference posts I’ve found: http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/11/18/whats-new-in-silverlight-4-complete-guide-new-features.aspx

If anything above is incorrect please let me know folks, I’d love to improve my own knowledge. In the end which scenario you go after gets down the details and what the developers need to accomplish.

One of my recent fascinations has been with the “Metro” UX concept from Microsoft. This is the user interface concept that is being developed for Windows Phone 7 and often is talked about when describing the idea behind Zune software UX.

In my quest to understand what Metro style applications should look like i’ve collected some good links, so here they are in case you’re also interested. (Have more examples? email me using the Contact link in this blog)

Metro User Interface Related Links:

• Tim Heuer talks about Silverlight themes (Windows 7 and Metro style Silverlight themes)
• MetroTwit Application (Windows Twitter application with Metro inspired theme)
• Windows Phone 7 – Show and Tell (Blog post on WP7 talking about various hubs, includes a video too)

Screenshots (from links above)

In this episode, guests Kanwaljeet Singla, Don Raman, and Wade Hilmo from the Microsoft IIS team join Peter to discuss the evolution of PHP on the Windows Platform. The IIS folks tell us about the improvements made to Windows in order to support PHP, including: Fast CGI, WinCache, PHP 5.3, the Web PI, and the SQL Server driver for PHP. (Interview starts at 24:31)

Also, Dmitry and Peter rap about Windows Azure, Bing Maps, Expression Studio 4, & some “select developer” news about Windows Phone 7! All in Klingon to boot!

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