How does Visifire Rendering Works?

Since the release of Visifire 2.0 I am using the toolkit for chart visualization. Mostly within SharePoint (see here and here), but lately also within Windows Azure. I like the simplicity, the looks and the customizability of Visifire. It is challenging to provide this functionality in an easy to use toolkit, but Visifire does an excellent job at it.

The secret of Visifire is of course the underlying set of algorithms that determine the best visualization for a given set of parameters. So even when you provide bare minimum data required for rendering, Visifire renders a nice looking chart which has tooltips, default interactivity like explode in Pie Chart, auto font-color for labels depending on the Chart Background color, auto indexing of DataPoints when XValue is not provided, etc. Though Visifire makes effort to find the best visualization for any given case, its not perfect. Sometimes you just want to make it a little different.

Sunil Urs wrote a great post at the Visifire blog that explains the default rendering behavior of Visifire and how you can adapt it to your needs. A must read when you use, or plan to use, Visifire.

Related Posts:

• How To Create Drilldown Silverlight Graphs in SharePoint with Visifire
• How To Add Awesome Graphs To SharePoint with Silverlight

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How to use ASP.NET MVC in combination with ADO.NET Entity Framework

As mentioned in a previous post I am currently working on a web application that we are building on top of the ASP.NET MVC Framework. The framework allows for a very clean implementation of the MVC pattern.

Because there is a database behind the application we decided to use the ADO.NET Entity Framework to access this database with help from model classes. The Entity Framework is a modeling framework that enables developers to define a conceptual model of a database schema that closely aligns to a real world view of the information. Benefits include easier to understand and easier to maintain application code that is shielded from underlying database schema changes.

In theory this all makes perfectly sense, but you have to implement it as well. There are two resources that I want to pass on because they were an incredible help to us.

The first is the tutorial Creating Model Classes with the Entity Framework on www.asp.net. The goal of this tutorial is to explain how you can create data access classes using the Entity Framework when building an ASP.NET MVC application. This tutorial assumes no previous knowledge of the Entity Framework. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll understand how to use the Entity Framework to select, insert, update, and delete database records. And in my opinion this tutorial meets its goal.

The second is a sample application written by Brad Abrams and Lance Olson. You will find a link to the sample and a description in his article ASP.NET MVC Example Application over Northwind with the Entity Framework. The sample application is a little outdated, but still an excellent reference point.

Related Posts:

• How to use ASP.NET MVC in SharePoint

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The Intersection of People and Process

Saturday I wrote a guest post on the blog "The Intersection of People and Process" which is owned by my buddy Jeff Shuey. It is Jeff's place to talk about Cloud Computing, Workflow, BPM, ECM, CRM, UC and other work related stuff, but also about other things that interest him - mountain biking, wake surfing, and anything else that strikes a chord.

Jeff spent the better part of the last 16 years working in various aspects of the ECM space. He spent time at Kofax, Microsoft, FileNet, K2, and most recently Captaris (which was acquired by Open Text in Nov 2008). Prior to that he was a Unix VAR running his own company. Follow him on Twitter and/or check his blog. It is definitely worth it!

My guest post is titled "Where is my data?", and is about the the apparently simple question where your data is located within a cloud service. Go check it out, and let me know what you think about the data issue in the cloud computing space.

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How to use ASP.NET MVC in SharePoint

Currently I am working on a web application that we are building on top of the ASP.NET MVC Framework. The framework is pretty impressive and allows for a very clean implementation of the MVC pattern.

As some of you know I do some SharePoint development as well, and I decided to try to run an application developed with ASP.NET MVC within SharePoint.

Why I want to do this? Because we could leverage all strong points of ASP.NET MVC like separation of concerns, testability, clean HTML together with the huge foundation that SharePoint offers. I am definitely not the first who wanted to do this, so help was allready on it's way.

SharePointMVC from Simon Cropp which is available for download on CodePlex is a great start for getting your ASP.NET MVC application to run in SharePoint.

Here is how it works:

1. A SharePoint Master Page contains all SharePoint styles and theme
2. A custom ASP.net page (MVCHostingPage) is based upon the SharePoint Master Page
3. MVCHostingPage contains a web control called RenderControl
4. RenderControl (and other internal classes) interrogates the current request and forwards it onto the ASP.NET MVC rendering engine.
5. A HttpHandler takes all requests to *.mvc and redirects them to the MvcHostingPage.aspx page.

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You voted, the judges decided, and the winners are ...

As some of you know I participated in the World's Best Presentation Contest 2009 at SlideShare with my presentation "24 Reasons Why Twitter Sucks!".

Yesterday the results were announced at SlideShare, and I won in the category Technology! The complete results you can find here. Dan Roam's Napkins on Healtcare absolutely rocks! No matter if you agree with it's content or not.

Thanks to all the people who voted for me, the people that spread my presentation through social media, and of course the judges Padmasree Warrior, David Armano and Guy Kawasaki. I really appreciate it!

View more documents from Henrico Dolfing.

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Yugma: A web conferencing software that does not work

Yesterday I had my first real life experience with Yugma, a web conferencing software. I work a lot with WebEx and really like it, but i thought let's try something different.

So last weekend I surfed to the home page of Yugma and signed up for a free account. The free account includes a 15 day trial of the pro version and setting it up was a no brainer. After signing up I downloaded the installer and ran it at one of my PCs at home (OS is Windows Vista Home Edition). It worked like a charm and a few minutes later I was able to start my first meeting with Yugma.

I had planned a web conference for yesterday, and decided in all my naivity to run the conference with Yugma. That was a big mistake...

It started with the installation of Yugma on one of my other PCs (OS is Windows Vista Ultimate Edition). The installation worked like a charm, but when I wanted to start Yugma the following message popped up:

Application cannot run without client.properties file

After some searching on the web I found multiple blog posts describing the error. The most promising was this post about the yugma client.properties file. But it did not solve my issue. I never moved my user directory. I made a fresh install and I still get the error.

Wat was wondering me about the post is that it describes the exact same error as I had, and it was written in June 2008. This makes you think that Yugma had enough time to solve this issue. Even greater was my astonishment when I saw a comment from nobody else then the CEO of Yugma.

Thanks for tracking this down. I recently joined Yugma as CEO and I want to sincerely thank you for your helpful research.

Best,
Vas Bhandarkar

So next stop was the website of Yugma itself, and after some searching I found an entry on their forum. Be aware that when you follow this link you have to wait very VERY long before the page is loaded. Here Yugma states the following:

The "client.properties" error comes from a rare bug in Vista where an important Registry setting is set incorrectly by default. This entry must be fixed manually before Yugma can work.

Please note that making changes to the Windows Registry can cause major damage to your Windows installation if done incorrectly - it is highly recommended to have a professional perform this change or have someone from our technical support staff walk you through it.

The entry was made in November 2008, and that is where I got really dissapointed. When you know you have this issue you will make a solution for it. A manual entry in the register is NOT a solution. Especially not for less experienced computer users.

A quote from one of the comments on the forum entry:

This configuration is not rare, and I am quite sure it never works. I have seen on other blogs other user having this problem for months, without correction made from yugma. It cannot be so rare, as when you start googling yugma and a space, google suggest "yugma client.properties file" automatically.

But because I was still interested in how Yugma works I followed the described steps and got the darn thing working. So last night the mentioned web conference took place based on Yugma. The other participants had no problem installing and running the client, so that was good news, and we actually got going with our conference.

We used the telephone conference provider from Yugma that allowed us to dial in a number, give in the meeting ID and that way talk to each other. This worked for about half an hour and then we got kicked out of the telephone conference. We were not able to dial in anymore since we only got the busy tone when we dialed the provided number. So we had to move to an alternative.

That made it final. Yugma sucks. Their software sucks, their support sucks, and their telephone conferencing sucks. So bye bye Yugma, you will never ever be installed on one of my machines again. And I would have been a paying user, cause the pro version contains stuff I need for my conferencing ...

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How to Create a Good API

As a consultant that actually programms as well I interact with APIs on a regular basis. Some are good, some are bad, some are just hopeless. Most programmers know what they like about an API and what not, but actually creating a good API is a whole different story...

This video of the Google Techtalk "How to Design a Good API & Why it Matters" by Joshua Bloch is a great start. Joshua is a Principal Engineer at Google. He led the design and implementation of numerous Java platform features, including the Java Collections Framework.

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