WinSpark Network » .NET

Download Free eBook: Microsoft Office 365

Rahul — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 16:45:13 +0000

Microsoft Office 365: Connect and Collaborate Virtually Anywhere, Anytime is all about cloud solutions for small businesses, focusing on the core software services (Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Office Web Apps, and Microsoft Lync), and demonstrating ways you can create, manage, and lead teams effectively using the communications and collaborative online tools. This book is worth for the people who are seeking for the basic idea behind the Cloud computing and willing to know about the sharing and collaboration of Office 365. Download the free PDF version from here.

This free ebook consist of following chapters:

Part I Finding Your Place in the Cloud

Chapter 1 What’s Happening with the World of Work?
Chapter 2 Getting Started with Office 365
Chapter 3 Administering an Office 365 Account

Part II Teamwork in the Cloud

Chapter 4 What Your Team Can Do with Office 365
Chapter 5 Creating Your Team Site with SharePoint Online
Chapter 6 Posting, Sharing, and Managing Files
Chapter 7 Adding and Managing Workflows
Chapter 8 Working with Office 2010 Web Apps
Chapter 9 Going Mobile with Office 365

Part III Connecting in Real Time

Chapter 10 Email and Organize with Office 365
Chapter 11 Talking It Over with Microsoft Lync
Chapter 12 Designing Your Public Website
Chapter 13 Integrating All Parts of Office 365

Upgrade your Development environment with this free ebook

Rahul — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 09:57:22 +0000

Most of the developers are concerned about their application upgradation. They develop an application and after some period of time it seems there should be much more functionalities and features in that application which can be made available through the latest development environment. Then they have to migrate from their old development environment to the new system. This tedious work may be much more time consuming and developer should get all the knowledge regarding migration. Microsoft is now offering another ebook : Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 which is made available to the public for FREE.

This guide will help all the developers to getting started with their migration process and stepwise procedure to upgrade their environment. This ebook contains three sections.

Part I is for developers moving from Visual Studio 2003 to Visual Studio 2010.
Part II is for developers moving from Visual Studio 2005.
And Part III is for developers moving from Visual Studio 2008.

More details about the book can be found here. Download the ebook : PDF | XPS Download the sample source codes of the book.

Get Windows Azure AppFabric June CTP

Rahul — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 14:53:35 +0000

Microsoft just announce the release of the Windows Azure AppFabric June CTP which supports developer to build, deploy, manage and monitor multi-tier applications across web, business logic and database tiers as a single logical entity on the Windows Azure Platform. This CTP release includes:

AppFabric Developer Tools
AppFabric Application Manager
The Composition Model – a set of .NET Framework extensions for composing applications on the Windows Azure platform
Formal support for executing Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) on Windows Azure and the composition of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and WF services, as well as custom code, into a composite application.

To request access to the CTP follow these steps:

Sign in to the AppFabric Management Portal at http://portal.appfabriclabs.com/.
Choose the entry titled “Applications” under the “AppFabric” node on the left side of the screen.
Click on the “Request Namespace” button on the toolbar on the top of the screen.
You will be asked to answer a few questions before you can request the namespace.
Your request will be in a “pending” state until it gets approved and you can start using the CTP capabilities.

More resources and official release details available here

What is COM? Evolution of .NET and DCOM

Rahul — Wed, 18 May 2011 14:30:27 +0000

This post aims at explining the component model proposed by Microsoft, namely, Component Object Model (COM). This technology of Operating Systems enables software components to communicate with each other. The component model evolved from clipboards, which evolved to DDE. OLE 2.0 removed the defects in DDE and later OLE evolved into COM. To enable communication between components in a distributed environment, DCOM was proposed.

The technology proposed by Microsoft to support distributed commerce application is called as Microsoft Destributed Component Architecture (MDCA). MDCA lays out the rules governing software components and their usage in complex commerce system. MDCA uses distributed COM (DCOM) technology. Microsoft provides COM interfaces for many Windows application programming interfaces such as Direct Show, Media Foundation, Packaging API, Windows Animation Manager, Windows Portable Devices, and Microsoft Active Directory (AD). COM is used in applications such as the Microsoft Office Family of products. For example COM OLE technology allows Word documents to dynamically link to data in Excel spreadsheets and COM Automation allows users to build scripts in their applications to perform repetitive tasks or control one application from another.

Evolution of DCOM

Initially, clipboard was used as a fundamental method of sharing data between applications on Windows. By using clipboards, the user can copy data from the data provider application onto the data consumer application. Dynamic data exchange (DDE)(1990) was primarily used for dynamically exchanging data between two applications. The main purpose of this protocol was to think two piece of data dynamically, so that when an item of data in the source document was changed, the changes could updated in the destination document also. It was used by Microsoft office application and Internet browser. DDE evolved into OLE 1.0. while DDE was limited to transfering limited ammount of data between two running applications, OLE was capable of maintaining active links between two documents or even embedding one type of document within another. Whenever data was copied onto the clipboard the following information about the source of data was copied onto clipboard.

Presentation data, a meta-file of the data
Class information about the source application
Raw data or a reference of the file providing raw data.

OLE 1.0 evolved into 16-bit OLE 2.0 (1990) in Visual Basic 2.0 and Microsoft Office 4 and then into COM. OLE 2.0 was extended as OLE controls (OCXs) in Visual Basic 4 in 1994. An OCX is implemented as a dynamic link library (DLL). In 1996 on the “Internet Day”, Microsoft renamed the OLE 2.0 technology to ActiveX, primarily a lightweight COM object. It deals with the active content management of web pages. COM, introduced by Microsoft in 1993, is a platform for software componentry. The foundations for COM ware provided by Antony Williams in 1988. Along the bumpy roadmap from OLE through COM to ActiveX(according to fig), microsoft industry competitors began working on a distributed object system model called CORBA. As Microsoft’s object system was not distributed, DCOM (1996) was created from COM. It was then included in all version of Windows staring with Windows 98. The COM platform has largely been superesded by the Microsoft .NET initiative as it provides rapid development tools for both Windows Platform and Web forms.

Getting started with Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 v1.2

Rahul — Tue, 17 May 2011 06:47:38 +0000

Microsoft’s Drew Robbins has just announced the availability of Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 v.1.2 during today’s keynote at TechEd North America. They have demonstrated how to build a cloud application for windows phone 7 through couple of exapmles. Some of the latest feature of V.1.2 is as follows.

Support and tooling for the Access Control Service 2.0 (i.e. use identity federation like Live ID, Facebook, Google, Yahoo! and ADFS)
Support for Apple Push Notification Services (with the Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS)
Support for Windows Azure storage queues (simple enqueue and dequeue operations)
Updated UI/UX for the management web application
Code refactoring, simplification, and bug fixes

These channel 9 videos could help you to getting started with the development process. Getting Started with the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 (v1.2) Getting Started with ACS and the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7

Developer Giveaway – Visual Studio 2010 Resource Kit

Rahul — Fri, 06 May 2011 19:50:36 +0000

After getting peesed of with my College schedules and university exams, finally i got some time to spend on my blog. Since a month i am trying to learn Windows Phone 7 Programming and indeed so far im going quite well for which i did my hands dirty on virtual machines and hands on Labs. I got a Visual Studio 2010 resource kit DVD and a DVD of VS 2010 Virtual Machine Environment and hands on labs as a giveaway for WinSpark.net readers. You can grab these bits for free by simply answering the question “Why you need this and how you gonna use this resource“. Whats inside :

The Hands-on Labs (HOLs) environment is provided as a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD). This VHD contains a 64-bit operating system that you need to run in Hyper-V environment, such as the ones provided by Microsoft Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008 R2. Note that since this image contains a 64-bit operating system, it will not work under Microsoft Virtual PC. All the instruction and lab manuals are provided inside the disk. Answer the question below on comment box (Facebook/Twitter share will be appreciated). One of the best ans will win the prize and the giveaway will be remain active till 14th May 2011. Have fun guys.

Another Visual Studio member for Cloud Computing – LightSwitch

Rahul — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 20:25:01 +0000

Visual Studio LightSwitch, a new addition to the Visual Studio family, helps you to create business class application for Cloud as well as Desktop. With LightSwitch you can create custom applications for the way you do business.

LightSwitch provides a variety of pre-built templates and tools to build business applications that target Windows Client or Windows Azure using as much or as little code as you want to write.

You can build forms from existing templates and populate them with data from data sources including SQL Server, SQL Azure, SharePoint, and others. There is integrated support for working with Microsoft Office for tasks such as exporting data to Excel without having to write code.

Microsoft says that LightSwitch dramatically decreases the time it takes to build a custom application by automatically handling routine code; it’s a rapid application development tool that offers application shells and screen templates to allow the developer to concentrate on the core business logic.

Links :

LightSwitch Homepage
LightSwitch Demo (MSDN blog)

The Unit testing development tool for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0

Rahul — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 08:09:58 +0000

Every software development has its stepwise procedure of Analysis, Design, Coding, Testing, and its maintenance. And testing may be kind of many types like Black-box, White-box, Alpha, Beta, Unit, Milestone etc. Many of the development through Visual Studio 2010 needs to be tested before the actual product launch or distribution. Programmer has to make sure to have a command over their code what they have written through Unit Testing.

The Typemock Isolator 2010 is unit testing tool, for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0, which takes control over hectic methods and Code snippet. It occupies less testing code and simplifies unit testing by simpler and cleaner code. It provides support for variety of .NET Framework Technology including including WCF, WPF, SharePoint, Asp.Net and Silverlight.

This add in for VS 2010 auto-completes and generates the cods and gives the developer to isolate or mock any method of class in a programe , such as Public, Private and Protected methods or Abstract or static class. It verifies the call arguments by delivering different fake objects and control behavior.

The Typemock Isolator Unit testing tool is simple to implement, easy to handle and contains simple API. It also supports the older .NET technologies rather then .NET 4.0.

Download Silverlight 4 Training Course

Rahul — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 02:59:07 +0000

Microsoft made an announcement of Silverlight 4 RC availability at MIX10 now they have launched special training course kit for the download. The Silverlight 4 Training Course includes a whitepaper explaining all of the new Silverlight 4 RC features, several hands-on-labs that explain the features, and a 8 unit course for building business applications with Silverlight 4. This Training Course is the result of effort from a great developers like John Papa and Adam Kinney. Download Silverlight 4 Training Course

Download Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone

Rahul — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 18:34:56 +0000

Through MIX Microsoft has made the availability of Developer tools for Windows Mobile 7 application development. So what are you waiting for, Get started with the Windows Phone Developer Tools, Start creating today, and See your application in the Windows Phone Emulator.

Windows Phone Developer Tools includes:

Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone
Windows Phone Emulator
Silverlight for Windows Phone
XNA Game Studio 4.0 CTP

Download Links:

Developer Guide:

MSDN Code Samples. Windows Phone 7 Series MIX sessions and Keynotes.