Martin Kulov's Blog

The first LINQ tutorial in Bulgarian is fact!

It just came to my mind that I forget to tell you the good news earlier.
Author of the tutorial is Galin Iliev aka Galcho. He wrote about 50 pages tutorial written in Bulgarian. He covers everything you need to get started with LINQ by yourself. The tutorial is available in HTML and PDF format. It is on introductory level, so one can easily find his way into the whole story.

Here are the contents of the tutorial:

Въведение
Въведение в LINQ и основни възможности
Инициализиране на обекти и колекции
Подразбиране на типа на променливите
Анонимни типове
Автоматично изграждане на свойства
Разширяващи методи (Extension Methods)
Ламбда изрази
Дървета от изрази (expression trees)
LINQ в детайли
Основни оператори
LINQ to Objects
LINQ to SQL
LINQ to Entities
LINQ to DataSets
LINQ to XML
LINQ to XSD
Заключение
Използвани източници

Download the PDF file

Labels: LINQ

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 5:41 AM |

The November meeting of SofiaDev .NET User Group will be held on 29^th November, 18:30h, at local Microsoft office.

Presenter is going to be Galin Iliev aka Galcho, very smart guy and a very good friend also.

Galcho is going to talk about building custom modules in II7, web farm administration, problem diagnostics and others.
Here is a brief schedule:

1. New tools in IIS7 as well as new administration options


2. New tracing and diagnostics options


3. New integration pipeline


4. Deep example that:
   
   
   
   1. use custom IIS module written in C#
   
   
   2. extend IIS configuration schema
   
   
   3. extend IIS Manager by adding UI component
   
   
   
   

If you want to attend, send an email to branimir a-t sofiadev.net to reserve your seat.

Labels: INETA

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 5:08 AM |

Just one week after Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 are released, there is tons of information about it and you can easily lose the track of where it all started. I have tried to summarize some important links I found that target VS/TFS 2008 and .NET 3.5 release.

So here they are... Enjoy!

VS/VSTS/TFS 2008 are Shipping! – by Brian Harry

Brian explains what is like to ship a product of such a magnitude and tells briefly about the features he likes the most.

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 shipped! – by Somasegar

The obligatory Soma’s post links to a cool Channel 9 video about TFS 2008.

Visual Studio Team System 2008 ships! – by Jeff Beehler

Jeff puts an extremely helpful list of all the important features that are coming in Team System 2008. Every list item links to the original blog post from the development team. Great work, Jeff!

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Released – by ScottGu

Of course Scott is also in this list. He blogs about the features that are coming in Visual Studio as a standalone product more oriented to the new web development features. Very useful indeed!

Upgrade: VS 2005 to Orcas – by Sudhir Hasbe

If you want to upgrade your old TFS 2005 installation, make sure you do it right in the first place and take the advices in Sudhir Hasbe’s blog.

Team Foundation Server (TFS) - Ports ... where is what?– by Willy-Peter Schaub

The list puts all the ports that you need to get TFS running, on one simple page.

2008 Installation Questions – by Brian Harry

General licensing questions from Brian.

TFS Licensing Change for TFS 2008

This blog post outlines one of the most significant changes in licensing for VS2008. The change is that there is no longer need of CAL when you access work items that you created by yourself. Now your customers can use the WebAccess tool to enter bug reports directly in TFS 2008 without violating the MS Eula.

Labels: Visual Studio 2008

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 3:31 AM |

Come chat with the Visual Studio Team System group – December 5th
 
Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Team Foundation Server, Team Suite, Architecture Edition, Development Edition, Database Edition, and Test Edition. In addition, discuss what's new for these editions for Visual Studio 2008.

We will be holding two sessions:

Join the chat on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 from 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific Time. Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones

-and-
Join the chat on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 from 4:00pm - 5:00pm Pacific Time. Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones
 

Labels: Visual Studio 2008

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 3:16 AM |

Many people think that besides programming I do not have any real live. Well – it may be true from time to time, but I do have other interests also.

This Friday, Hard Music and Sounds United (H.M.S.U.) are organizing great event called Drum’N’Jazz. Special guests are Ltj Bukem (UK) and Teodosi Spasov (BG) and more.
Leading guests will be streamed online and live with the following schedule at this address:

http://btctv.dir.bg/tv_play_2.php?cat=84

22.00 – 23.30
Cooh /H.M.S.U., Kuker,BG/ лайв изпълнение от зала Jazz

23.30 – 01.00
VЯRA /Tеодосий Спасов и приятели/ лайв изпълнение от зала Jazz

01.00 – 02.00
Deadbeat /~scape, Canada/ лайв изпълнение от зала Drum

02.00 – 04.30
LTJ Bukem и MC Conrad /GLO, UK/ диджей/емси сет на живо от зала Drum

04.30 – 06.30
Stamina MC /Movement, UK/ feat. Konspirator & Mocks /H.M.S.U., BG/ диджей/емси сет на живо от зала Drum

The party will start on 22:00 at Party Center 4km.
Do not miss it. Meet you there!

Labels: Events

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 2:20 AM |

Never install third party drivers from Windows Update. I lost about one day trying to get one virtual machine working again. It turned out that during the last updates I installed a new driver for my video card. This unfortunately resulted in conflict with the network adapter driver and leaving the machine without any connectivity. As Shenan Stanley, another Microsoft MVP, states in TechArena Community post:
“It has been explained before - many times - on these newsgroups by many different people that relying on the Windows Updates for hardware drivers should *not* be done. The hardware drivers that appear there have to be submitted to Microsoft by the hardware vendors anyway. They have to pay for the priviledge to have them placed there. There is also a process through which the drivers to be placed there have to go through to get the 'logo'/'certified'. That all takes time. By the time it is done - usually several releases from the manufacturer have passed by - sometimes solving issues with that original driver, sometimes just new features, sometimes nothing major.”

In my case I had to completely uninstall ATI PCI Express (3GIO) Filter Driver to get the machine running fine. If you have similar problems, open Device Manager and look for devices with yellow exclamation mark. When you open properties of the failed device and click Resources you will see this error:
Code 12: This device cannot find enough free resources that it can use.
On my machine I got the error for two devices: VM Additions S3 Trio32/64 and Intel 21140-Based PCI Fast Ethernet Adapter (Emulated).

Steps to uninstall the driver:

Vindows Vista
1. Go to Device Manager (To access device manager, Go to START/CONTROL PANEL/SYSTEM & MAINTENANCE/SYSTEM/DEVICE MANAGER
2. Expand "SYSTEM DEVICES"
3. Find "ATI PCI EXPRESS (3GIO) FILTER DRIVER" and delete it.
4. Reboot
5. Check and make sure "ATI PCI EXPRESS (3GIO) FILTER" has been deleted. If it has not, restart at step 3
6. If it has been deleted, Reboot 1 or 2 more times and then your computer should be OK.

Make sure that you check Delete the driver software for this device when you uninstall it, otherwise Vista will install it again when you restart.

Good luck!

PS: This is my 200^th blog post <edited>and third year of blogging</edited>. Of course, I never imagined that I could write for such a long time. Please let me know what would you like to see more, what you do not like and any other feedback you may have. Thanks for reading!

Labels: Tools and Tips

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 3:35 AM |

Blogging from TechEd Developers Barcelona:

Somasegar just announced that Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 will be out this November. After just few weeks we will be all able to use the latest version of Visual Studio.

Also Microsoft will release source code of Visual Studio IDE to the Premier Visual Studio Industry Partners (VSIP).

Cool news!!!

Labels: Visual Studio Orcas

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 3:36 PM |

Steven Guggenheimer blogs about the new annoucement from Microsoft of the “Oslo” product line.

Biztalk is going to be the next version in Microsft servers that will allow us to host not only Biztalk adapters and Orchestration, but also Windows Workflow Foundation and and Windows Communication Foundation hosts.

Codename “Oslo” is the new product line from Microsoft that will enable many products to integrate with Biztalk and create SOA solutions in a completely new way.

From eWeek.com:

"Microsoft BizTalk Server 6 will continue to provide a core foundation for distributed and highly scalable SOA and BPM solutions, and deliver the capability to develop, manage and deploy composite applications.

Microsoft System Center 5, Visual Studio 10 and BizTalk Server 6 will utilize a repository technology for managing, versioning and deploying models.

Microsoft is not providing exact time frames for when technologies such as .Net Framework 4 and Visual Studio 10 will ship. But the .Net Framework 3.5 has yet to ship. "

Labels: Oslo

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 6:26 AM |

I will be proctoring Hands On Labs and doing Ask the Experts sessions at TechEd Barcelona next week. If you are going to be there, give me a call or send me email. I would love to meet you there.

Somasegar will do the keynote this year and I guess the accent will be definitely on Oslo (see my next post).

Labels: TechEd

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 4:44 AM |