My Simpson Avatar

I read about this page in Karen's blog (she's one of the ladies behind Acropolis, more coming on that soon), and I found it pretty cool.

If you know me personally you will know I don't look anything like it. But in my defense the other guys were either too fat or too skinny. The thing is I don't know what my eyes, nose or mouth look like. I should have asked my wife Vivi to create my avatar. I will do so, and if it looks more like myself I'll change the pic. Until then, this is what I got.

So, go to the Simpson's movie site, create your own avatar and drop a line so I can see what you would look like in Springfield.

P.S: I'm using Windows Live writer now to write my posts.

P.S2: Last nite I went to the movies with my wife, my sister and her boyfriend to watch The Simpson Movie. It was excelent!!!

Edit: I Simpsonized myself and this is what I got, I think it looks more like me

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DeKlarit 4.3 will be released with WCF support!

That's what's been keeping me busy for the last couple of months, Windows Communication Foundation.
Originally started by Andres, the WCF addin is a great tool for quickly implement your own WCF architecture, or if your new to it, is a pretty good way get things working right away and see how it all works.

Basically you will have, as you did in the Remoting or the WSE addin, your own client where you change the data provider from SimpleDataAdapterFactory to WCFDataAdapterFactory and change the DataAdpaters reference in your module project for a reference to the WCFGenerator client dll where all the proxies are hosted. By doing that your app will no longer reach the DataAdapters in order to get to the data, instead it will try to reach some services. But where are these services? At the moment you have only one option, Internet Information Services, but you will have more options in the future. Also, right now only BasicHttpBinding and WSHttpBinding is supported.

So when you run the addin you'll get:
Service Client: the project you have to reference in your client application
Server web application: where the services are hosted
Service Implementation: that's the actual place were the services are implemented, so if you want to host your services in a console application or as a Windows Service the implementation is already done and it will be the same for all three kinds of project.
Service Contracts: that's where all the interfaces used as contracts are.

There's a pre-release version of DeKlarit 4.3 in the forum.

P.S: Windows Presentation Foundation will also be available in future DeKlarit versions, sorry, no 4.3

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Why I uninstalled Windows Vista

First of all let me tell you I got me a new computer. It's a Toshiba A205-S4617 with 2GB RAM, Core 2 Duo, 250GB HD, and so on.
It came with Vista preloaded which I like (by then).
I bought it on vacations so I started using it to download my pictures from my digital camera and uploaded them to my picassa web albums. So far so good.
When I got back home I started to install the programs I need.
First of all, I noticed an extremely annoying pop up a little too often asking me if I was sure about running the setups.
Including setups digitally signed by Microsoft, "what, don't you trust each other?" :)

The first piece of software I installed was Visual Studio 2003, I still have some clients with applications in .net 2.0, and when I tried to run it I got a message telling me that VS2003 is not supported by Vista, and recommending me to go online to find a solution. Well, I went, but got no solution. Instead, I found the confirmation that VS2003 does not run in Vista. At first I got pissed, why would Microsoft do such a thing!. Then I thought, well it's a good time to migrate my old clients to C# 2.0, but then I found that SQL 2005 needs SP2 to run in Vista and SQL 2000 won't run, no matter what, just like VS2003. Now, I'm really pissed... I really can't think of one good thing of not allowing SQL 2000 in Vista.
I tried to create a Virtual PC with the software I need but the I found out that I can't have SQL 2000 in a virtual PC which databases’ file are in the actual PC's drive... so that's it... I formatted my hard drive and installed a fresh copy of WindowsXP Pro wich is great, runs faster, allows me to do everything I need, and I'm used to it.
I believe this is the first time Microsoft creates an OS that does not allows software that ran in previous versions run in the new one.

I know I'll have to move to Vista some day, but it won't be anytime soon.

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Microsoft Surface

As Don Box said,"Wow, I want one"
Microsoft unveiled a new technology called Microsoft Surface. If you haven't seen it let me give you a hint... Imagine Star Trek, Minority Report and every scifi movie you've seen.
Well, that's Microsoft Surface... watch the videos from the Microsoft Surface site but also take a look at some videos of what it's doing right now... (check this one out)
Keep in mind they are actual videos, that's what Surface is doing today.
AWESOME!

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Windows Presentation Foundation

It's been a while since my last post. I guess I figured out I won't make a living out of this... he he, just kidding. Anyways, you know the holiday season and all, it's hard to sit down and write, so now, as I wait for the "Doble San Antonio" to come. I thought I'd write something.

Since .net Framework 3.0 (formerly winfx) was released I've been reading about it and now I'll post a little Hello World WPF application. There are tons of papers about WPF and XAML (Zamel) so I won't dig into it.

After I installed the .net 3.0 extensions for VS2005 I wanted to create my first Hello World application consisting in a simple form with a button that once clicked a MessageBox would appear with the catchy phrase, "Hello World". Simple right? Not as simple as it sounds, or at least, not as simple as it used to be.

When you start a WPF application you get the main form in the designer. There are a few improvements there like a rule for aligning controls and stuff. Then I went to my toolbox (many new controls) and drag a button into the form.

While doing this you can see what the designer is writing in XAML in a little window below the designer view. You can work either with the designer and the property page or writing the XAML code yourself.

So, once I had my button on the form I did the obvious thing to do, double clicked on it to write the handler for the OnClick event, right? WRONG!!! you can double click, triple click, and do as many clicks as you want and nothing will happen. After a few tries I discovered the Click attribute on the button tag (XAML) so I went and wrote the name of the function I wanted the button to fire up. After doing that I went to the code behind file and implemented that function (you can also write it in the XAML document). Keep in mind that this method uses the ClickEventHandler, sou you'll have to write it with a matching signature (object sender, CleickEventArgs e).
Finally, write the code to execute the MessageBox (like in 2.0) and voila!, your first WPF XAML app is working.

I added some other controls and stuff in my example, so feel free to download it and take a look at it. Any comments about it are welcome.

It's been a few days since I started to write the post, I did well in the "Doble San Antonio", thank you, and I also added some interesting functionality to the example like binding.

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