I just thought to share this two videos i found in youtube, which is very useful for those who want to learn about SCRUM methodology, wikipedia: Scrum is an iterative incremental framework for managing complex work (such as new product development) commonly used with agile software development. for more info read here.

SCRUM Basics by Orjan Hillbom

SCRUM in Under 10 Minutes (HD) by @hamids

hope it helps.

Its about time for us to get ready for Windows 7. and most of us have to develop applications compatible to Windows 7, Vista, and Server 2008. and sometimes we need applications to run with administrative privileges. and that’s not a big deal. but in these new Operating Systems, even an administrator is sometimes locked by the UAC when running some applications.

some applications might throw exceptions in such situation, when we need administrative privileges to do some task, if they don’t request for UAC elevation by the application. only option to make these application is to right click and select “Run as Administrator” to manually trigger UAC.

In this post I’m going to show how to request for UAC Elevation for a .net Application. this explains the use of Application Manifests that request the OS for UAC elevation.

Code

I have my sample windows form C# Project with a single form that shows a message box on form load,showing whether you are an administrator or not.

  private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
         bool isAdmin = new WindowsPrincipal(WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent())

                   .IsInRole(WindowsBuiltInRole.Administrator) ? true : false;

            if(isAdmin)
            {
                MessageBox.Show("you are an administrator");
            }
            else
            {
                MessageBox.Show("You are not an administrator");
            }
        }

in the above code we use WindowsPrincipal class, which allows us to check the Windows group membership of a Windows user. to use this classes un need to use the following namespace in the code:

using System.Security.Principal;

when you compile this application and run , you would expect that it will show the message saying “you are an administrator” if you are logged in as an administrator account. well this is what you get if you have UAC enabled, not something you expected right ?

ok now we need to make our application to request for UAC elevation.  first we need to create a manifest file with the application name.

Create Manifest File

First add a new item to the project with the name with following format, <applicationname>.exe.manifest . in our case (ElevationTest.exe.manifest). and add the following XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0">
   <assemblyIdentity version="1.0.0.0"  name="ElevationTest" type="win32"/>
      <trustInfo xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3">
      <security>
         <requestedPrivileges>
            <requestedExecutionLevel level="requireAdministrator"/>
         </requestedPrivileges>
      </security>
   </trustInfo>
</assembly>

and the next step is to add the manifest in to the built executables Win32Resources by embedding it.  to do this we need to use the MT.exe in the .Net SDK.  by default it can be found in “C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bin\”.

we can use the following command to embed the manifest through visual studio command line:

mt.exe –manifest MyApp.exe.manifest -outputresource:MyApp.exe;1

or

mt.exe –manifest MyLibrary.dll.manifest -outputresource:MyLibrary.dll;2

(1 for an EXE, 2 for a DLL.)

to make things easier we can add this command to the postbuild event of the project :

below is the full  post build command:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bin\mt.exe" -manifest "$(ProjectDir)$(TargetName).exe.manifest"  –outputresource:"$(TargetDir)$(TargetFileName)";#1

once you have built the application successfully if you see the output directory you will see the icons will have a shield on them indicating that the application requires UAC elevation.

And now if you run your built application it will prompt for UAC : and when you click on allow the application will show you the following Message :

That’s it you have your application ready to request UAC Elevation in the new operating systems.

hope it helps.

Seriously, i’ve no time these days for blogging, busy with work as well as personal activities. but just wanted to share this valuable information for those who might have missed.

Well the current project which im working on is the ASSETTE Presentations. for more information on the project you can see the above link. but the project uses alot of binary data transfered back and forth to the server and the client thorugh our web services, and most of these binary files are stored in SQL Server 2005 Database. storing binary files inside the database really slows down retrieval of the files when we need them and there are several other desadvantages also. specially  rapidly growing size of the database,taking backups, and maintainance of the database. 

But now with SQL Server 2008 we have a new data type called FILESTREAM , to solve all the above issues.

What is FILESTREAM?

FILESTREAM is a new datatype in SQL SERVER 2008. To use FILESTREAM, a database needs to contain a FILESTREAM filegroup and a table which contains a varbinary(max) column with the FILESTREAM attribute set. This causes the Database Engine to store all data for that column in the file system, but not in the database file. A FILESTREAM filegroup is a special folder that contains file system directories known as data containers. These data containers are the interface between Database Engine storage and file system storage through which files in these data containers are maintained by Database Engine.

What FILESTREAM does?

By creating a FILESTREAM filegroup and setting a FILESTREAM attribute on the column of a table, a data container is created which will take care of DML statements.

FILESTREAM will use Windows API for streaming the files so that files can be accessed faster. Also instead of using SQL SERVER cache it will use Windows cache for caching the files accessed.

When you use FILESTREAM storage, consider the following:

• When a table contains a FILESTREAM column, each row must have a unique row ID.
• FILESTREAM data containers cannot be nested.
• When you are using failover clustering, the FILESTREAM filegroups must be on shared disk resources.
• FILESTREAM filegroups can be on compressed volumes.

www.windowsclient.net have released a new "Syndicated Client Starter Kit" designed to make it easy to create rich, syndicated multimedia and content experiences which engage the user, from documents and photos to videos and podcasts.you can read the story here.

And this Starter Kit Show case includes an awsum MSDN Reader. The MSDN Reader allows you to browse through MSDN Magazine articles like never before. Read through articles, view figures and code snippets in an intuitive and easy-to-use experience. The complete source code for the reader is also provided for us to download here.

Its totally free. and I would say its a must have for we developers. so what are you waiting for install it!

Download it here
Source Code
Syndication Starter Kit home

Microsoft says,the first beta of the next version of the Internet Explorer browser will be released in the first half of 2008,

to read more about this visit here

Scott Guthrie Announced in his blog entry , that Microsoft shipped Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 final version last week.