Many cool stuff I won't detail since you can read them from the site www.genexusX.com.
For a couple of months or so I contributed with my grain of sand to the GeneXus dev team, so I guess that allows me to feel the pride and happiness I feel right now about the release :)
Congratulations to all the team!
I've been playing around with Popfly for a while now, so I thought I'll post something about it.
Popfly is one of Microsoft 'newest' online toys that allows you to create mashups and blocks. Mashups are pieces of code which using Silverlight will display something nice to show in your web site, Facebook profile, Live Space, etc.
But, to show what?!... well pretty much everything that's available on the internet. To create a mashup you don't need any programming skills cause it's pretty much dragging, dropping and linking blocks. To build blocks you must have at least some programming knowledge cause you'll need to write some javascript and a config file with xml.
You can build your block from the online editor (not too nice) or you can download the VS2008 Popfly Explorer and build your blocks from VS2008, where you can debug your code.
I created a few mashups and two blocks. One of them is called Picasa Web Block and takes two parameters, username and albumname. After filling those up you'll get a collection with all the pictures from that album and you can display those pics with any of the display blocks available.
The other block was a little trickier, it takes a US zip code or a location code and the temperature unit (c or f) and it'll return the "current" weather conditions from the given location. The weather forecast is provided by Yahoo! Weather which takes the data from Weather.com.
In my spanish blog (scroll down all the way) I have a mashup I created with my Yahoo Weather block and the Live Earth block from Microsoft. Here's a picture of what it looks like.
Mahalo to my visitor from Hawaii :)
As every year aspnetPro is conducting the Reader's Choice Awards where DeKlarit is running for best Add-In and of course, Product of the Year.
It is a good opportunity to vote for your favorite tools, the ones that make your life easier every day (of course DeKlarit is one of them). Me, I voted for IDM's UltraEdit which it's is a great tool, some of the Infragistics's controls and Microsoft's Visual Studio, among others.
As a great plus, you get the chance to take a look at a great compiled list of the best developing related tools in the web.
I was getting tired of VSS, don't ask me why, I just wasn't happy about the different VSS databases. Also, at DeKlarit we're using SVN with TortoiseSVN which has a great integration with Windows Explorer. So I started to look for some free SVN server... I didn't try too hard, cause I just loved the first one I found.
It's called Assembla and it has many cool features. Here's just a list of what you get with a free account:
You get all that with a free 500 MB account, which is pretty decent for just source code and some wiki pages. Right now I'm hosting three projects there and I'm really happy about it.
One feature I particularly "enjoy" is being able of open tickes (like, issues, bugs, improvements) and then close them from tortoise while committing the changes. All you have to do is writing 'fix #2' as as comment to the commit you're doing if that action closes your ticket #2.
Beautiful day outside to go to the beach, but I'm recovering from the flu, so I stayed in and thought give some of the "new" VB9 (aka VB 2008) features a try. I must say I got into the .net world thru VB.Net but for one of my projects I decided to switch to C# (also to learn it) and never looked back.
But today I found some amazing new features in VB9 and I wanted to share them. Actually one of them is plain LinQ and we covered that before but I want to comment on VB9's integrated support for XML, and probably the best way to explain it is by showing an example... take a look at the following sub
Dim orders As New OrdersCollection
orders.Fill()
Dim elems = From order As Orders In orders Where order.ShipCountry = "Brazil" _
Select <order><id><%= order.OrderID %></id><customer><%= order.CustomersCompanyName %></customer></order>
Dim doc = <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><orders></orders>
doc.Root.Add(elems)
Console.WriteLine(doc.ToString())
Keep in mind that OrdersCollection is the collection generated by DeKlarit's BusinessObject Addin. Do you have any idea what this writes to the console? well... take a look at it...
First of all, have you ever seen xml displayed like that in the console? not me. And in case you missed it, let me go thru the code. First, I created the collection and filled it. Then I used LinQ to query the orders shipped to Brazil and selected <order> XElements with an id tag and a customer tag, both of them filled with data. Then I created an XDocument just writing the tags, and then just added my previous collection of XElements (elems) to the document and voilá!, to ToString method of the XDocument prints out what you see in the console pic. Ain't that cool or what?!
Others things you can do with your XDocument (doc)
Console.WriteLine(doc...<order>.Count())
Console.WriteLine(doc...<order>(0)...<customer>(0).Value)
The first line writes how many orders are in the xml document, while the second line writes the value of the (first) customer of the the first order.
