Enlarge your VPC

I have now used Microsoft VPC for some time now, and went into disk space problems.


I didn't realy know howto fix this problem, but after som googling i found a way to fix it in 2 steps.

1.wmtoolkit - vhd resizer to enlarge my vhd image.
2. Downloaded and run partition manager home http://vistaguide.dk/?EaseusPartitionMaster3.0HomeEdition/Diverse/Programmer/784#

CMS utopia with umbraco

I have worked with different cms's the last 4 years, and must say that umbraco is really showing off these days with version 4.0. and is in the top 12 download ranking on codeplex - really cool.

Some new features in umbraco is Canvas, Web PI and performance, to name a few.

Canvas : Is live editng of content really cool, read more

Web Pi : install umbraco in a single click

Performance : The umbraco UI has made a great performance boost from v.3 to v.4, and umbraco says "Umbraco 4 is blisterngly fast and performs with reponsivness of a desktop application" and it actually feels like that some time!..

Read the whitepaper

There is still som features that I would like in the future, primarily the use og attributes, instead of using xml files, examples of this will come in another post later :o)

May the Umbraco force be with you!..

MS Virtual PC 2007 and screen resolution problem

I just got my new awsome "Dell from Hell" laptop!..

My laptop is running vista ultimate and works as a Virtual PC server.

This is all great, but I ran into a little problem with the screen resolution.
The problem was that im using 1920x1080 on my laptop and the VPC can't give me that resolution, so the VPC was surrounded with a black frame every time I went to fullscreen, and that was quite anoying.

I found a fix - well it's not a real fix, but it works until Microsoft update their s3 trio driver to handle my resolution.

The fix is to start VPC, and then connect to it via Remote Desktop.

If anyone knows a better fix, please let me know :)

Juhuu got certified

Just got "Umbraco Certified Professional" Level 2 developer, juhuu!... :)

så now I can put this nice little logo on my website


The test went good. 100 points out of 100 so no complains at all.
see result
Howto become a "Umbraco Certified Professional" Level 2 developer

Itunes StreamReader

Preperation to take certifications can be quite boring, and Im about to take the ".NET Framework 2.0 Application Developement Foundation".

So I have made an ItunesStreamReader that I use to count the size of all my media files in a nice litle pie chart.

I have try to performance test it by take two itunes Files (3.9mb + 1+9mb = 5.8mb) merge and exstraced all the tracks and putted them into a DropdownList it took 845.1 milli seconds


A simple example of using the ItunesStreamReader could looks like this.

using(ItunesStreamReader its = new ItunesStreamReader ( new ItunesItem.items[] { ItunesItem.items.name, ItunesItem.items.trackNumber } ))
{
while(!its.EndOfStream()) { string name = its.ReadLine(); string number = its.ReadLine(); Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Name {0} Number {1} ", name, number));
}
}


If you want to play with it you can download it here.

Feedback and suggenstions would be great :o)

The WebNavigator

What is the Web Navigator?!
Well the Web Navigator is a techhnique, or pattern that I was introduced to from a podcast by Craig Shoemaker at http://polymorphicpodcast.com "Download example code"This pattern is a great way of creating Contracts for Your Web Pages, so its much easier to manage navigation throughout your websites.Some of the strength that i like about it, is that it "Encapsulate page locations" , "Makes the code easy to read and maintain" and make contract of a page requirements.

The Code
Lets say that you need to se a profile page, and that page show userinfo by a querystring, the code could look like this.string userName;
// set userName to something... perhaps from the database
WebNavigator.GoTo(WebNavigator.URLFor.Profile(userName));

class WebNavigator
{
public void GoTo(string url)
{
HttpContext.Current.Response.Redirect(url,true);
}
public string Profile(string userName)
{
return string.Format("~/login/default.aspx?userName={0}",userName);
}
}

You could make it more dynamically so you dont have to recompile if the url changes, by store the urls in xml or whatever you like.
In umbraco the method could look like this.

public string Profile(string userName) { return umbraco.library.GetDictionaryItem("ProfileUrl") + "?" + userName);
}

VS 2008 certifications

There have ben announced new certifications for vs 2008 - Great!.. Now I know what to do after my MCPD webdeveloper exams.

Exam 70-502: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 - Windows Presentation Foundation - 11/09/2007Exam 70-503: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 - Windows Communication Foundation - 11/08/2007Exam 70-504: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 - Workflow - 11/15/2007Exam 70-561: TS: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 - ADO.NET - 1/17/2008Exam 70-562: TS: TS: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 - ASP.NET - 1/31/2008

Where did I fount the informations here