Marvin Trilles

Taken from the internet T he year 2017 ended in the usual festive way. It is, therefore, just standard for us to be retrospective of the year that was and look forward to new plans for 2018. Personally, last year was life-changing. Bleak at it may seem, I managed to look at the lighter side of things. I literally stayed at home the whole year recuperating from a health issue. Instead of stumbling into depression, I resorted to code-therapy! From mid-2017, I shifted from full-time desktop developer to a wannabe web developer. It was fun, like being handed with a new toy to play around. Here is my alphabet listing of what got me interested and always looking positive last year. Angular I once have the desire to learn Angular late 2015, when it was still referred to as AngularJS. Because of work schedules and other priorities, it was buried from my bucket list. Last year was different, I had time. I started with Angular 2.0 and due to the fast releases from Google, my last ...

Automated unit testing has been around for more than a decade now. I remember back in 2008, a colleague introduced to our team the concept of MVP pattern and in the process the advantage of using the pattern in unit testing. The concept of automated testing using NUnit and mocking using NMock was also discussed. That is where I began to see the advantage of implementing Test Driven Development  methodology to developers. Unfortunately, the company where I moved don't see it as such. Thus, I was only able to practice it on my learning time. With the recent events in my life , I now have more time exploring this concept a little further. A series of post will concentrate on this concept using Python and C#. Lets begin with Python .

Not everyday that you get to attend a great informative talk from subject matter experts. Last saturday, I attended the Amazon Web Services Developer Day organized by the Developers Connect Philippines (DevConPH) and hosted by iAcademy in Makati, PH. A free event that far exceeded my expectation. Information overload, so to speak. With the ever changing phase of technology and innovations, talks like these are very much welcome and much needed. Collaborations between solution providers and developers can pave way to innovations. Read on to find what made this event a fulfilling one.

If you are still trapped in the era of batch files and command lines in Windows environment, here is something you can add to your DOS cheat codes.  Lucky for us here, we are still using DOS batch file to implement installation of some updates to our system. Here is a simple batch file script that is designed for slow systems that requires a significant amount of time to kill a particular process. The requirement is simple,  do not start any copying or moving of files until  the process ( i.e. MyProcess.exe) is totally killed by DOS. The simplest solution would be to use TASKKILL to kill the process, wait for a few seconds  then start copying/ moving of files there after. Unfortunately, while we were testing this simple step on a slow machine, DOS would take an awful lot of minutes to kill the process in question. Thus, when our delay is reached, we would encounter error on copying/moving files that is currently used by the unkilled process causing a failure on ...

Good news to all Microsoft Visual Studio users,  MSDN has sent email notifications to all subscribers about the availability of update 2 today. Here is the rest of the information from the email.

Microsoft error messages are sometimes cryptic and in some cases, misleading. This morning I was working on a client server setup at work when I encountered one. So I have two fresh image drive, one for the client and the other for the server. For redundancy, each have their own MS SQL Server installed. The client uses its local database in case of disconnect. After a little configuration, all is almost ready to go. However, final test would reveal its not ready at all.

Microsoft has been making moves to fit in to the computing ecosystem . Several of the notable development in this area includes the Windows Live Platform , Live Mesh and recently Moonlight . Moonlight is an open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight web application platform. It's built on top of Mono, the open source .Net project.Moonlight is not a Microsoft project, but Microsoft has been working together with Mono , an open source project sponsored by Novell, to develop and run .Net client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix, to make a Linux version of Silverlight happen. Moonlight is now available in both Silverlight v1.o and 2.0 builds. Silverlight, while it still has a long way to go to become as widely adapted as Adobe’s Flash, is leading the charge for Microsoft to become a more open eco-system for development.

The first of the series of service packs for VS2008 has just been released . With Service Pack 1, Visual Studio 2008 introduces a large assortment of new features for targeting Windows, Office, and the Web. Developers building .NET-basedapplications will enjoy improved performance in the WPF designer, new components for Visual Basic and Visual C++, as well as an MFC-based Office 2007 Ribbon. Web developers will see continued improvement in the client-side script tooling including JavaScript IntelliSense. Additionally, full support for SQL Server 2008, the ADO.NET Entity Framework and performance improvements for the IDE make Service Pack 1 a great release across the board. The .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 delivers more controls, a streamlined setup, improved start-up performance, and powerful new graphics features for client development and rich data scaffolding, improved AJAX support, and other improvements for Web development. Additionally it introduces the ADO.NET Entity Fram...

With the release of .Net 3.5 alongside with Visual Studio 2008 , new enhancements was again introduced . Some maybe well pronounced such as the inclusion of WCF, WPF , LINQ in .Net 3.0 and some just came unnoticed. If you have been accustomed of using a particular method or technique in implementing a certain code in .Net 2.0 , because of backward compatibility , you may not even notice that there are new ways of implementing it in .Net 3.5. Here are two new concepts in .Net 3.5 that a developer may not notice ( at least in my opinion ) : Automatic Properties and O bject Initializers . To illustrate these two , I am going to present the pre-.Net 3.5 way (.Net 2.0) and the .Net 3.5 way in creating a simple class with simple properties. Automatic Properties Creating a class can be tedious , especially when working with a list of properties , . One way to get around having to type the code for a private field and its public property getter and setter is to use a refactoring tool. ...

Hey guys ! Im not raging a war to whatever language you prefer , Im just interested on your choice . Join the survey below and be counted . Ill be doing a post on the differences between these 2 languages as well as pros and cons on using them . So please leave a comment why you are choosing C# or VB.Net . Thanks a lot .

For those who had been accustomed to the use of XML DOM perhaps you may have experienced the tedious job of extracting to converting node values . This sample will simply show us how extracting is easily done on LINQ . Example 1 : Extracting string values. XElement stringElement=    new XElement ( "Name" , "Marvin" );           Console .WriteLine(stringElement); Console .WriteLine(( string )stringElement); Result 1: <Name>Marvin</Name> Marvin Example 2 : Working with double values XElement doubleElement=    new XElement ( "Value" ,1.2345678); Console .WriteLine(doubleElement); Console .WriteLine(( double )doubleElement); Result 2: <Value>1.2345678</Value> 1.2345678 Example 3: Converting from one type to another XElement castElement=    new XElement ( "Condition" , "TRUE" ); Console .WriteLine(castElement); Console .WriteLine(( bool )c...

Here is my first post (from a series of i-dont-know-how-many) regarding LINQ . Im not a guru , Im just starting out with the technology . So comments are well appreciated . Creating XMLDocument the preLINQ and LINQ way This post will give the viewers the idea on what LINQ to XML has to offer . To be able to see the difference I am goig to implement the solution using the preLINQ way then move forward using LINQ . This is a simple console application made using VS2008 that simply create the XML document below : <Persons>   <Person Type="Faculty">    <FirstName>Dugong</FirstName>    <LastName>Valenciano</LastName>   </Person>   <Person Type="Student">    <FirstName>Kokey</FirstName>    <LastName>Donatelo</LastName>   </Person> </Persons> The application calls two separate methods to build the document . The Creat...

Heres another VS2008 tool worth reviewing . A handy tool which contains some useful task that would help any developers like Copy Path, Email CodeSnippet, Insert Guid Attribute , Copy As Project Reference , Remove and Sort Usings among others . Take a peek on the tool at this website.

For a tech blogger who wants to show off a lot of codes , the gruesome process of Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V may not be of big help . Why? Because your blog may not be WYSIWYG and the pasted code just mess up your post . Then came CopySourceAsHTML for Visual Studio developers . Sleek and handy , just copy the code from your editor and paste it to your blog as HTML with all the CSS embedded in it to copy even the color schemes of the editor . Cool right? Well, the installer works only for Visual Studio 2005 !!!! And if your a developer working now on Visual Studio 2008 ( obviously I am ) , you dont have the capability to do that easily . Just an hour ago I stumble on a site that allows you to download a CopySourceAsHTML compatible for Visual Studio 2008 . The bad news is that its not an installer but a zipped file containing 3 files that should be manually added to VS2008 . Here are the steps to make it run together with some test scenarios I did. 1. Download the Zip File on this SITE 2. Un...

On three different projects , I was exposed to a new product being marketed by Microsft , Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) . More particularly , I was into the Business Data Catalog functionality where I was tasked to retrieve data from third party software and display it on a MOSS Portal . Here are some issues that I stumbled upon and found a really interesting website that affirmed my issues together with "answers" from Microsoft Technology Center . 1. Filter Pattern Re-arrangement - Search parameters are fixed to “is equal to”, “starts with”, “ends with” and “contains”. Is it possible to change the order in which these appear in the menu ?. In our interface “is equal to” would hardly be used; however, it is the first option available, is it possible to retain only the “contains” filter and remove the rest ? . Sadly , according to MTC , it is not possible . 2. Lack of handling co-related sub queries . The BDC does not handle joining of tables to...

i was working a few weeks back on an Outlook 2007 OBA application which involved creating a custom menu to enable user interaction ( a candidate for a post maybe later ) . one of the UI issue i have to deal with is to assign face id prperty to the menu items to make it sexy . unlike my previous VSTO projects which involved Office 2007 ribbon interface where i have a material for looking for the appropriate isoimage to be used by a ribbon control , i did not have any . so google came in as a great help and directed me to a site named kebabShopblues which list down possible face ids from 0000-2999 together with a thumbnail . View the article .

Here is a link to an article about the model view presenter design pattern . The article was created by one of the gurus in the field , Rod Cerrada . The article is very informative and easy to understand . It contains practical scenarios where MVP can be applied in the design process. The article contains a downloadable solution file which can be opened by the users to actually see how the code works. A very good and helpful article for those trying to study MVP . Read the article at this link. Goodluck Rod , it was a great honor working with you.

So here is the scenario , you are starting a VSTO project and decided that your default namespace is ExcelAddInTesterApp . You created the project and started coding the project. After several days , your boss called and said "hey marvin , make use of this namespace OurCompany.ExcelAddInTesterApp , we have to add our company name to it got it?" . You get back to your machine thinking its just a simple property just like any project you've been working on. So you right clicked the VSTO project and hit properties . Boom! What the F@#$? The default namespace textbox is disabled!!!! I've been through this and I googled for ways to do it and ended up with a blog from a Microsoft MVP telling me it can't be done because it is disabled. Then I thought of Refactoring, the beauty and grandeur of the renaming process. I selected the namespace and hit the refactor menu hoping that this would solve the problem . Unfortunately , it did not rather it displayed the message b...

just last week our company already had the licensed copy of visual studio 2008, thats what you get being a MS gold partner. we have to use it right away to migrate some projects that we developed using the beta 2 release . the look and feel did npt change a bit but i bet there are a lot of changes that are waiting to be discovered. one of the most notable changes was on VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office). VSTO has been around since VS2005 and we had no problem migrating it to beta 2 of VS2008. well things have changed and there are new features in 2008 plus changes in assembly names. so here are the things that we got and the workarounds that we made : The following assemblies are no longer supported in VS 2008 Release. Remove it from the reference list. Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.AddInBase.dll Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.Common.dll Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Office.dll Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Office.Common.dll Replace above with the ...