Anith Gopal

  Are you all about Apps and do gadgets interest interest you ? Do not wait to register then for one of the new Imagine Cup competitions : Windows Metro Style App  Challenge and Kinect Fun Lab Challenge

Practice This , my personal blog, is now available on Amazon Kindle through monthly subscription.     If you are happy owner of Amazon Kindle reader you can now read www.PracticeThis.com blog on it.     It’s a digital information age and it’s a thrill to experiment with what’s possible especially when the entry bar is so low

  In SharePoint 2010 service applications, the managed metadata service connection properties can be set using the cmdlet Get-SPMetadataServiceApplicationProxy   $metadataserviceapplicationproxy = Get-SPMetadataServiceApplicationProxy "Managed Metadata Service" # This service application is the default storage location for Keywords.

Don’t you hate it when you are going to do a simple thing like copy a UserControl and then it doesn’t work?  Seriously, how can you steal other peoples work if you have to redo all of their code.

We all know that guy who is always gaming the system, it’s so irritating, you don’t quite know how he does it, and his career kind of sucks, but somehow he figures it out. Of course in software there are a lot of people who game the system, here is a clue: Software is about gaming the system.

One of the major advances in politics in recent years has been the evolution of “The Third Way”. You know the kind of thing: Given a choice between two approaches to a problem, neither of which are politically palatable, politicians invent a “third way” that relieves them of the requirement to choose either of the two undesirable outcomes.

Yesterday, I blogged about how you can implement a custom SynchronizationContext in order to pump the continuations used by async methods so that they may be processed on a single, dedicated thread.  I also highlighted that this is basically what UI frameworks like Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation do with their message pumps. Now that we understand the mechanics of how these things work, it’s worth pointing out that we can achieve the same basic semantics without writing our own custom SynchronizationContext.  Instead, we can use one that already exists in the .NET Framework: DispatcherSynchronizationContext.  Through its Dispatcher class and its PushFrame method, WPF provides the ability to (as described in MSDN) “enter an execute loop” that “processes pending work items.”  This is exactly what our custom SynchronizationContext was doing with its usage of BlockingCollection<T>, so we can just use WPF’s support instead of developing our own. (You might ask then why I started by describing how to do it manually and writing my own to exemplify it.  I do so because I think it’s important to really understand how things work; I typically find that developers write better higher-level code if they have the right mental model for what’s happening under the covers, allowing them to better reason about bugs, about performance, about reliability, and the like.) Below you can see how few lines of code it takes to achieve this support.  (To compile this code, you’ll need to reference WindowsBase.dll to bring in the relevant WPF types.) using System; using System.Threading; using System.Threading.Tasks; using System.Windows.Threading; public static class AsyncPump {     public static void Run(Func<Task> func)     {         if (func == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("func");         var prevCtx = SynchronizationContext.Current;         try         {             var syncCtx = new DispatcherSynchronizationContext();             SynchronizationContext.SetSynchronizationContext(syncCtx);             var t = func();             if (t == null) throw new InvalidOperationException();             var frame = new DispatcherFrame();             t.ContinueWith(_ => { frame.Continue = true; },                 TaskScheduler.Default);             Dispatcher.PushFrame(frame);             t.GetAwaiter().GetResult();         }         finally         {              SynchronizationContext.SetSynchronizationContext(prevCtx);         }     } } In short, we instantiate a DispatcherSynchronizationContext and publish it to be Current on the current thread; this is what enables the awaits inside of the async method being processed to queue their continuations back to this thread and this thread’s Dispatcher.  Then we instantiate a DispatcherFrame, which represents an execute loop for WPF’s message pump.  We use a continuation to signal to that DispatcherFrame when it should exit its loop (i.e

The Nokia Lumia 800 Windows Phone is now available as a reward with the Windows Phone UK Developer Reward Programme . By simply joining the UK Developer rewards programme Educators and Students can get rewarded with loads of other fantastic prizes for building Windows Phone App and publishing it on the Windows Phone Marketplace. The programme concludes (Sunday 5 Feb 2012).

So, to round out the Hadoop Streaming samples I thought I would put together an XML Streaming sample. As always the code can be found here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Hadoop-Streaming-and-F-f2e76850 XML Streaming Reader So how does one stream in XML

Following are some common exception scenarios encountered while configuring MS Dynamics CRM 2011 Outlook Client…  Error while configuring a new organization using the MSCRM 2011 Outlook Configuration Wizard Symptom : You already have all organizations of an instance configured on your Outlook client, and you try to add the same server URL again. You are prompted with the error: Cannot find any organzation on the server

Every so often we invite ALM Rangers to collaborate with us on a strategic project. They are typically roped into meetings during their vacation time, which means that they are giving up their vacation time for the community We had tree previous ALM Rangers sabbaticals: No Sabbatical Focus ALM Ranger More Information 1 Team Foundation Server Integration Tools – SharePoint Adapter Robert MacLean Does anyone recognize the Team System MVP, enjoying his sabbatical under the liquid sun

Windows Server 8 is introducing seriously big and awesome enhancements for the enterprise. As a cloud-optimized operating system, Storage Management has a host of new features and requirements