pr0g33k's Blog

Sorting Queries in SSMS Solution Explorer

I dig SSMS 2010 (SQL Server Management Studio) and I use it religiously. But one thing that has always bugged me about the Solution Explorer is that it sorts items in the Queries folder by the order in which they are added (i.e. the most recently added item is always first in the list).

So to remedy this shortcoming, I present to you SsmsSort.

It's a simple Console application that you can run as an external tool in SSMS. Configure the tool as follows:

The Command field should point to the executable, SsmsSort.exe. In the screen capture above, I set the directory to the bin/Release folder of the SsmsSort .NET project.

After you add the External Tool, you'll have a new entry in the Tools menu called SsmsSort. Select that menu item to run the application against your project file.

SsmsSort outputs messages to the SSMS Output window (note that "Use Output window" is selected in the External tools dialog). Refer to the Output window for any errors.

I included the entire project so you can modify it however you wish.

ServiceDefinition.csdef

If you're using Azure to host your project and using Team Foundation Server to control the Azure deployment project's source, you might run into an issue where you get a build error saying that ServiceDefinition.csdef and ServiceDefinition.build.csdef cannot be written to because of a lack of permissions to access those files.

The problem is that once it's checked in to TFS, a read-only attribute gets placed on those files. The build process wants to write to those files during the build and cannot because of the -R attribute.

If you run into this, place a pre- and post-build event to handle the attribute:

These events will remove the read-only attribute, build the project, then add the read-only attribute. Problem solved!

Fotoshop by Adobé

Fotoshop by Adobé from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

B-n-W Hotness

L337 Passwords Sidebar Gadget

I use L337 from time-to-time for my passwords. Whereas it makes for a strong password, it's sometimes a real pain in the butt to type in L337. So to make things a little easier, I created a Windows Sidebar Gadget to convert plain text to L337 for use in passwords.

You can download the project here.

To make a Gadget package, simply zip the project files (minus the Properties, bin, & obj folders and the *.csproj* files) and rename the extension to ".gadget". I included a Gadget installation package in the solution folder.

Enjoy!

Good Game

Summertime Hotness

The temperature has definitely dropped around here this week. So I guess summer is gone and we won't get to see scenes like this for another 8 or 9 months. Dammit!!!

Elbow Rocked!

I'm finally getting around to posting these. The show was the best I've ever seen from anyone!

Operation Smile

This just makes ya feel good.

I reported this to AttackWatch

QOTD

"Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age." ~ Dr. Richard Lindzen

Hotness du jour: Kelly Brook

I saw her in a really awful yet kind of cute movie a few weeks ago where she played a mermaid. It was a movie my daughter wanted to watch. The sacrifices I make for my kid...

Freckled Hotness

Reactive Extensions Rock!

I've been using Reactive-Extensions quite a lot on the applications I've been building recently. We're supposed to see some pretty cool stuff for async programming in the next version of the .NET framework, too. It definitely cleans up the code and makes things easier to maintain.

Buh-Bye, GoDaddy

GoDaddy pissed me off for the last time so I took my business elsewhere. The bad service... The constant barrage of pushy sales efforts... The crappy, slow administrative UI... The elephant...

I'm done! Buh-Bye, GoDaddy.

Nina Minami

The Cloud Mystery

Long time no Hotness

Was it the chair or the Tea Party?

You be the judge. Personally, I think this is the Tea Party's fault. Senator Frank has the manners of an angel and would never do anything like blow a humongous fart on national television. Those Tea Partiers have gone too far this time.

This should be a competitive sport

Freaking Amazing!

Pair this with the next round of processors due to be released at the beginning of next year (higher speed, lower power consumption) and things are going to get a LOT more interesting.

Good to know!

Don't Mess With Hover Cat

How cool is this?

A Mountain View start-up is promising that its camera, due later this year, will bring the biggest change to photography since the transition from film to digital.

Ordinarily, I’m turned off by such hyperbole, but after having seen a demo from Lytro, that statement seems downright reasonable.

The breakthrough is a different type of sensor that captures what are known as light fields — basically, all the light that is moving in all directions in the view of the camera. That offers several advantages over traditional photography, the most revolutionary of which is that photos no longer need to be focused before they are taken.

This means capturing that perfect shot of your fast-moving pet or squirming child could soon get a whole lot easier. Instead of having to manually focus or wait for autofocus to kick in and hopefully center on the right thing, pictures can be taken immediately and in rapid succession. Once the picture is on a computer or phone, the focus can be adjusted to center on any object in the image, also allowing for cool artsy shots where one shifts between a blurry foreground and sharp background and vice versa.

Article published here.

Click away!

Go The F**k To Sleep

Ya gotta love Samuel L. Jackson.

Summer's Here!

Language is Hard

This one's for you, Dad:

Kate Upton: Silly Video Hotness

At first I wasn't much of a fan. Now I'm sold. Cute, sexy, and fun? Count me in!

The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

SocialPush is getting some attention

SocialPush (formerly WebPush) is drawing the attention of some pretty serious people. I'll keep you posted but it looks like the past 2 months may pay off after all. Hydra is coming along nicely, too, and has some of the same people chomping at the bit.

I know I've been quiet lately and I hope to be back to a normal schedule soon.

How to trick people into thinking you're good looking

Pole Dancing for Jesus

You just can't make up stuff like this.

Mesmerizing, isn't it?

P.S. Don't forget to mute the sound. Unless you speak Chinese in which case I'm sure it adds to the humor.

Kate Upton: Hotness

foo posted this a few days ago. I'm definitely a fan, to say the least.

Battlefield 3: Freakin' SWEET!

New Kidneythieves!

I went out looking for new music yesterday and discovered that Kidneythieves has a new release, Trypt0fanatic. Wow!!! I'm about a third of the way through it but so far I like it just as much, if not more, than their last release, Zerøspace.

Fearnet.com has this to say about it:

Now working as the duo of vocalist Free Dominguez and instrumentalist Bruce Somers, Kidneythieves managed to pick up pretty much where they left off after their second album Zer0space, capturing the same dark & sultry atmosphere, aggressive attitude and hard electro-rock vibe that got everyone's attention in the first place. You really need to have your creative shit together to keep a consistent signature style while forging new musical turf – especially after an eight-year break – and this record proves the duo never lost the qualities that made them so cool in the first place.

I'm wondering what happened to the rest of the band... Anyway, as a duo they're even stronger with the latest release and I'm really digging it so far. Here's a video of them talking about the album and playing an acoutsic version of their first single:

And here's a video from several years ago when they were touring with Zerøspace:

Man, what a groove! I definitely recommend them if you're into industrial/metal. There are few out there with this sound and even fewer that are this good at it, IMHO.

Long time no see, Hotness

Catalina Otalvaro. I had a few minutes while my system backed up this morning and ran across her over at forgetfoo's. I have to agree... Pretty tasty!

DomainService EntitySet cannot be edited error

Code generation has spoiled me. I'm having a helluva time getting a hand-crafted DomainService written. While editing my custom User (see my previous post), I got the following:

This EntitySet of type 'User' does not support the 'Edit' operation.

Wow. Really? Awesome.

In order for an EntitySet to support the 'Edit' operation, it must have the appropriate CUD (Create/Update/Delete) methods implemented. Adding the following solved the problem:

[Update]
public void UpdateUser(User user)
{
}
 
[Delete]
public void DeleteUser(User user)
{
}

This allows the DomainContextEntityContainer to create the EntitySet with EntitySetOperations.All which will open up the Entity for editing.

I hope that keeps someone else from wasting as much time as I just did!

Hey! Where's my DomainService custom class?

It's little quirks like this that are bringing me to the edge of insanity. I just spent the past 2 hours trying to figure out why my custom Entity object wasn't showing up in my Silverlight client from its RIA DomainService. Here's what the DomainService looks like:

[EnableClientAccess()]
public class SecurityService : DomainService
{
    public String GetUserName()
    {
        return HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name;
    }
 
    public Boolean IsInRole(String roleName)
    {
        return HttpContext.Current.User.IsInRole(roleName);
    }
}

I added a User class to aggregate some simple data that was scattered out across several of my data abstraction objects which RIA Services couldn't access (mainly because of some self-referencing objects that require recursion - something that generated services don't like very much). Here's what the custom EntityFramework class looks like:

public class User
{
    public User() { }
 
    [Key]
    [Required(ErrorMessage = "Email is required")]
    public String Email { get; set; }
 
    [Required(ErrorMessage = "Password is required")]
    public String Password { get; set; }
 
    [Required(ErrorMessage = "Security Question is required")]
    public String SecurityQuestion { get; set; }
 
    [Required(ErrorMessage = "Security Answer is required")]
    public String SecurityAnswer { get; set; }
 
    [Required(ErrorMessage = "Role is required")]
    public String Role { get; set; }
 
    [Required(ErrorMessage = "Company Id is required")]
    public Int32 CompanyId { get; set; }
 
    public String Status { get; set; }
}

Next I added a method that takes the User object as a parameter like so:

[Insert]
public void CreateUser(User user)
{
    MembershipCreateStatus status;
    Membership.CreateUser(user.Email, user.Password, user.Email, user.SecurityQuestion, user.SecurityAnswer, true, out status);
 
    switch (status)
    {
        case MembershipCreateStatus.Success:
            user.Status = "The user account was successfully created!";
            break;
        case MembershipCreateStatus.DuplicateUserName:
            user.Status = "There already exists a user with this username.";
            break;
        case MembershipCreateStatus.DuplicateEmail:
            user.Status = "There already exists a user with this email address.";
            break;
        case MembershipCreateStatus.InvalidEmail:
            user.Status = "There email address you provided in invalid.";
            break;
        case MembershipCreateStatus.InvalidAnswer:
            user.Status = "There security answer was invalid.";
            break;
        case MembershipCreateStatus.InvalidPassword:
            user.Status = "The password you provided is invalid.";
            break;
        default:
            user.Status = "There was an unknown error; the user account was not created.";
            break;
    }
}

After compiling, I got the dreaded "Parameter types must be an entity type or one of the predefined serializable types" error.

I tried adding data annotation attributes to the User class. Nothing. Then I prayed to the code gods. Nothing again.

Come to find out, RIA Services won't generate an entity type on the client until it's returned in a service call. After I added the following, everything showed up as expected:

[Query(IsComposable = false)]
public User GetUser()
{
    return new User();
}

Hopefully this will help someone else...

Hotness with a Smile

I have no idea who this is. She's a cutie, though!

SQL Server under TFS Source Control

One of the things that has always bugged me about SQL Server was a lack of integration with a source control provider (especially Team Foundation Server - TFS). When developing on my local machine, I like to use source control more as version tracking than anything else. But when it has come to SQL, I have had to resort to saving the files to my hard drive and manually put them into source control; I've never found anything that would allow me to keep a change history from the SQL Management Studio IDE. Until now...

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/bce06506-be38-47a1-9f29-d3937d3d88d6/

This was evidently available for TFS 2005, too, but I somehow missed it. The above link will get you the 2010 version.

To get it to work, you need to create a Project in SQL Management Studio and, upon creation (although you can also add it to source control later), specify that you want the project under source control. After the project is created and added to the TFS database, you'll want to add a connection by right-clicking on the Connection folder and specify the connection. Then either double-click on the new connection or right-click on the Queries folder and add a new query. From there you can create your SQL statement and then check it in just like from the Visual Studio IDE. The project will also show up in Visual Studio and you can edit the files from there, too. Slick!

Loss of History in Silverlight 4

Silverlight 4 is just too slick. I mean, really. Wow! I ran into an issue today that had me scratching my head, though.

I created a "playground" Silverlight Navigation Project so that I could hack around with a few things before I committed to building it in my official product's solution. My Silverlight application is delivered from a page in a subdirectory that is protected by Forms Authentication.

Now, I know what you're saying, "Why didn't you just create a Silverlight Business Application that has all of the authentication stuff already baked in? DUH!"

First, I don't like the way Microsoft set up the Membership database because it used to screw up my code generation and they way they name things looks horrible with my other Entity Abstraction objects so I have my own schema and my own Membership providers that are pretty and shiny and, generally, kick ass.

Second, I didn't want to. Mind your own damn business!

Anyway, back to my problem. I got the application up and running but noticed that the navigation wasn't writing to the broswer's history. WTF? Where are the #PageName markers in the URL?

At first I thought is was a problem with the UriMapper and the UriMappings due to the fact that I was in a subdirectory. I went through every regular expression I could hack together and couldn't get anything to recognize that I was in a subdirectory. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Not even the Googlebox could help me.

So I went back to my "playground" application (which worked just fine, BTW - damn you, "playground," you mocker of my idiocy!) Then I started flipping back and forth between the "playground" applications files and my production product's files. And there it was, staring at me, making me feel infinitesimally small. VISUAL STUDIO RENAMED THE @$%#&*!^ IFRAME'S ID TO "Iframe1" WHEN I COPIED AND PASTED THE MARKUP!!!

Evidently the iframe that controls the Silverlight Navigation Application's history with the browser has to be named: _sl_historyFrame