Enterprise Library 5.0 Hands on lab

A set of Hands-on Labs for the Microsoft Enterprise Library 5.0 is released and available for download.

WPF Resources

Microsoft Site: http://windowsclient.net/

Books: http://windowsclient.net/Community/book.aspx?b=wpfbooks

FAQ : http://www.syncfusion.com/faq/wpf/default.aspx, http://wpfwiki.com/

Code Sample: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/wpfsamples

Power Toys: http://karlshifflett.wordpress.com/xaml-power-toys/

Webcast: https://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032346155&CountryCode=US

Healthcare Prototype: http://windowsclient.net/downloads/folders/wpfsamples/entry3754.aspx

Code Project: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/AdventureWorks_Part1.aspx

Applications: http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/wpf/applicationportfolio/

Fantastic demo on MVVM

Expression Blend Tutorial

XAML Best Practices: Silverlight XAML WPF-XAML

Learn more about WPF's Architecture and Design Motivations.

Installing .Net 3.0 and Tools - Tim Sneath's very useful list of tools and bits that you'll need to get started with WPF.

SDK Topic: Introduction to WPF - A primer on WPF's "building blocks".

SDK Topic: WPF Architecture - An informative and in-depth guided tour of how Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) was designed and some motivations of the architects behind those decisions. It covers most of the major subsystems of WPF and describes how they interact.

SDK Tutorial: Get Started Using WPF - This tutorial provides an introduction to the development of a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application that integrates the core elements of most WPF applications: controls, layout, data binding, and styles.

MSDN Article: Introducing Windows Presentation Foundation Get a primer from David Chappell about how the WPF unified presentation stack helps make designers active participants in creating user interfaces, and provides a common programming model for standalone and browser applications.

MSDN Article: A Guided Tour of Windows Presentation Foundation A classic overview of Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly code-named "Avalon") by Tim Sneath that provides context coupled with code samples for Microsoft's strategic presentation stack. Surveys the architecture and major components available within this release for developers.

Getting Started with WPF - from a Windows Forms developer perspective A series of articles on WPF from a Windows Forms developer perspective.  This started out as a simple document entitled “So you know Windows Forms and you wanna learn Avalon” way before there was as much content out there as there is now.  This perspective should be useful for folks who've developed using WinForms.

An Overview of Microsoft Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" White Paper This white paper provides an overview of Visual Studio code name "Orcas", including new client development features for WPF as well as WinForms.

WPF Performance White Paper This white paper is intended as a reference for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application developers who are looking for ways to improve the performance of their applications. If you are a developer who is new to the Microsoft .NET Framework version 3.0 and WPF, you should first familiarize yourself with both platforms. This topic assumes working knowledge of both, and is written for programmers who already know enough to get their applications up and running. Information in this topic is based on version 1.0 of WPF.

ContentPresenter.com for WPF ContentPresenter.com is a free WPF tutorial resource that renowed Frog Designer Lee Brimelow created to help interactive designers learn this exciting new technology. Most of the available tutorials online are too technical for most designers to follow and the majority are produced for .NET developers who are trying to learn WPF. WPF offers so many incredible visual design possibilities for creative types, so Lee created this site to help people get started. There will be a lot of programming in these tutorials so graphic designers with no prior coding experience may have difficulties. These tutorials are primarily geared for interactive designers who are used to using tools like Flash.

Online Stop Watch

Recently we conducted a team event.  While searching for a Stop Watch timer.  We found the http://www.online-stopwatch.com URL.  It is simple and solves the purpose.

Data Structure in C#

There is six part a MSDN article which discussed C# Data Structure in details.

An Extensive Examination of Data Structures Using C# 2.0

Part 1: An Introduction to Data Structures

Part 2: The Queue, Stack, and Hashtable

Part 3: Binary Trees and BSTs

Part 4: Building a Better Binary Search Tree

Part 5: From Trees to Graphs

Part 6: Efficiently Representing Sets

SSIS FAQ

The blog list the basic questions on SSIS

Control Flow:

• Process Oriented
• Doesn’t manage or pass data between components.
• It functions as a task coordinator
• In control flow tasks requires completion (Success., failure or completion)
• Synchronous in nature, this means, task requires completion before moving to next task. If the tasks are not connected with each other but still they are synchronous in nature.
• Tasks can be executed both parallel and serially
• Three types of control flow elements in SSIS 2005
• Containers - Provides structures in the packages
• Tasks - Provides functionality in the packages
• Precedence Constraints - Connects containers, executable and tasks into an ordered control flow.
• We can control the sequence execution for tasks and also specify the conditions that tasks and containers run.
• It is possible to include nested containers as SSIS Architecture supports nesting of the containers. Control flow can include multiple levels of nested containers.

Data Flow

• Streaming in nature
• Information oriented
• Passes data between other components
• Transformations work together to manage and process data. This means first set of data from the source may be in the final destination step while at the same time other set of data is still flowing. All the transformations are doing work at the same time.
• Three types of Data Flow components
• Sources - Extracts data from the various sources (Database, Text Files etc)
• Transformations - Cleans, modify, merge and summarizes the data
• Destination - Loads data into destinations like database, files or in memory datasets

How do you do

• Error handling
• Logging
• Deployment & different strategies
• Schedule SSIS packages to run on the fly?
• How do you run stored procedure and get data in SSIS?
• Debugging (Break Point, Data Viewer, SQL Profiler)
• Configuration using XML, DB
• Handle Transactions

Give a scenario: Want to insert a text file into database table, but during the upload want to change a column called as months - January, Feb, etc to a code, - 1,2,3.. .This code can be read from another database table called months. After the conversion of the data, upload the file. If there are any errors, write to error table. Then for all errors, read errors from database, create a file, and mail it to the supervisor. How would you accomplish this task in SSIS?

Do you have a minute?

Microsoft has collection of 60 second videos demonstrating its product and it is business value.  Good to watch to get a quick idea on what is the technology all about.

Sketch Flow

When you want to sketch the Application Navigation, you can use SketchFlow, a new rapid prototyping tool from Microsoft which is available as part of Expression Studio 3. For a more structured look at SketchFlow please take a look at the SketchFlow starter kit. This series of videos walks you through the major features of SketchFlow and helps you understand how to use them.