For the release of Visual Studio 2010 RC (Release Candidate), Microsoft provided us with a fully installed VPC (Virtual Machine) image. For some reason they did not do the same for the release of Beta 1. I guess they wanted people to go through the installation so they can receive feedback and bugs for it. Anyway, if you want to install VS 2010 Beta in a Virtual Machine, I recommend watching this Channel 9 Videoby Brian Keller on how to download and install all the requirements. Keep in mind that Brian also installs VS Team Foundation Server which is not needed if you only want to play with VS 2010. Therefore you can skip the steps to install SQL Server 2008 and VS TFS 2010.

Happy Installing!

Thanks to everyone who showed up for the Miramar.NET user group at Devry University. You can now download the presentation and demos from here.

Happy Programming!

Tomorrow I will be speaking about the SQL Server 2008 Spatial Data and Virtual Earth at Devry for the Miramar.NET user group. It will be a very informal meeting where we will discuss about the new Spatial Data Types in SQL Server 2008, Virtual Earth, and some sample codes and ideas on how to integrate both.

The meeting will be held at Devry University Miramar Campus tomorrow (5/12/2009) at 6:30 PM on Room 254. If you are also a student of Devry I recommend you go to room 132 at around 6 PM where I will be speaking to the first year student about being a developer in the real world.

We finally have the video from last year’s Buenos Aires Code Camp.

If you are interested in sponsoring the 2009 Code Camp, you can contact me through the contact form on this blog.

The iPhone revolutionized how Mobile Web Browser Clients render content and, let’s face it, there are millions of users out there who use the iPhone or the iPod Touch to navigate the web. The number of people is so huge that many websites have specific versions of their websites just for iPhone users, but what about if you are a web developer and are in need of developing an iPhone friendly website and do not have an iPhone to test?  You have a few choices and one of them is User Agent Spoofing. What is User Agent Spoofing? Well let’s start by explaining what is the User Agent. Basically, the User Agent is a string that defines the Web Browser and is passed to the server of the page the user is visiting. Hence User Agent Spoofing is the act of changing the User Agent to fake to the server the identity of the browser (kind of like Identity Theft :)). User Agent Spoofing is nothing new in the Web Development community, but the cool thing about Safari is that it comes with a built in way to spoof the user agent. Why is this cool if it is not new? Because the iPhone and iPod touch browser are both Safari browsers and by changing the User Agent to the iPod or iPod Touch Safari browser we can test how our web sites will render on the iPhone. You might ask what is the difference between the Safari User Agent Spoofing and the other spoofing techniques/tools? From the point of view of spoofing there are no difference, but by using the Safari rendering engine we know we are using almost the same rendering engine as the iPhone. With this technique you won’t be able to zoom in and out, simply check how the page renders hence the tile of this post (Kind Of). Enough of talk, show me how to do it!

With Safari 4.0 Beta you will have to first enable the Develop menu and you can do so by clicking on the star on the right hand side by the toolbar and going to Preferences:

Go to the advances tab check the “Show Develop menu in menu bar”:

Close out of the preferences and go to the Develop menu on the menu bar (if it is not showing press F10 to show it), User Agent, and then select Mobile Safari (there are 4 versions: 2 for the iPod and 2 for iPhone)

Happy Testing!

Yesterday I announced my project on CodePlex: uscdsql. Between yesterday and today I finished importing and uploading the Cities and ZipCodes of the 2000 Census. Go ahead and download the data and play with it. I hope you can make your contribution to the project.

Happy GeoProgramming!

I have been playing around with the new SQL Server 2008 spatial data types and Virtual Earth and I must admit that I am loving every single minute of it. Anyway, I’m going to make it short and sweet. I would say that 99% of business applications are data centric and I dare to say that almost every single one of those applications have spatial data one way or another (sales, customers, etc).

Having this type of data is great, but to make an application really great and be able to take full advantage of the spatial functionality of SQL Server 2008 we need some reference spatial data. Thankfully that data is available to us (here in the United States) in electronic format by the Census department. I spent quite a few hours importing the data to SQL Server 2008 and decided to make my work available to others.

So without further a do I present to you my CodePlex project: US Census Data for SQL Server 2008. Go nuts and start downloading and querying away. With this data you will be able to query for things like give me all customers that live in xxx county.

Please note that as of this writing the only information available are States and Counties. More to come in the near future: Cities and Zip Codes

We use the Page.LoadControl() method when we have the need to dynamically load User Controls into a page. If you look at the signature of the method the return type is of type System.Web.UI.Control, which is one of the base classes for all controls (directly or indirectly). This is fine when all we want to do is load the User Control, but sometimes we need to reference some properties, methods, events, etc of that control and to do so we have cast the instance of the control to the correct type. The first thing one tries is:

   1: MyUserControl uc = Page.LoadControl("MyUserControl.ascx") as MyUserControl;

   2: //or

   3: MyUserControl uc = (MyUserControl)Page.LoadControl("MyUserControl.ascx");

but this results in the compile time error of type System.Web.HttpCompileException: “The type or namespace name ‘MyUserControl’ could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?).”

To fix this all we have to do is register the UserControl with the page by adding the following Register declarative in the aspx page:

<%@ Register src="MyUserControl.ascx" tagname="MyUserControl" tagprefix="uc1" %>

Happy programming!

I was trying to record a Web Test using Visual Studio Team System 2008 with Internet Explorer 8 on a Windows Vista 64 bit machine. After creating the Web Test IE was launching without the Web Test Recorder Explorer Bar. Going to View – Explorer Bars – Web Test Recorder 9.0 would show up, but after clicking Stop I would get the following exception: “Unable to load DLL ‘Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.RecorderBarBHO90.dll.’ The specified module could not be found. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007007E).”

After a few recommendations on the web the problem was solved by moving the dll found on the \Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies to the \Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer folder.

I hope this solves your problem.

Happy Testing!

Internet Explorer 8 has been released! If you want some of the new features:

• Accelarators
• Enhanced Navigation
• Increased Performance
• Better Favorites and History Management
• Instant Search
• Web Slices
• Safety and Security

Go ahead and install it!