In a few days, my time as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) will come to a close. Sad, yes I know… OK, not really so much sad as the natural evolution of things. I first received the MVP award a mere four days before my daughter was born. Even back then, I knew that I would have to eventually bow out of the program. Of course, there are people in the program who successfully juggle their job, home life, and somehow still manage to be excellent MVPs, but I don’t feel I’m one of them, so I’ve asked not to be renewed this year.
The MVP program is excellent and I’ve enjoyed being a part of it. Most of all, I’ll miss going to the MVP Summit and hanging out with the other MVPs. There are other benefits of course—access to early information, free software—but those don’t match the amount of effort it takes to get the award. As I describe in the post mentioned below, you really have to doing community work because you love doing community work—otherwise the time investment just doesn’t make sense.
I already sent the obligatory “so long and thanks for all the fish” message to my fellow MVPs. I wish you all well and keep up the excellent work!
BTW -- If you don’t know what the Microsoft MVP award is, here’s some content from a post I wrote called How do I Become a Microsoft MVP?
First of all, if there is only one thing to remember about the MVP award, it’s this: the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award isn’t a certification. There are no set criteria or steps that someone can take to become an MVP. As the name implies, it’s an award.
“This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in SharePoint Services technical communities during the past year.”
- Microsoft
In practical terms, this means helping with community-focused resources such as contributing to newsgroups, speaking at conferences, writing/blogging about your subject (e.g., SharePoint) and contributing code to CodePlex (an open source site).
Here is my ALS Ice Bucket Challenge video. I was challenged by my good friend and advocate for ALS fundraising efforts, Rasool Rayani.
You can contribute online to the Walk for ALS (ALS society of BC).
"Also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. There is no cure and only one medicine to slow its progress has been approved."
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ice-bucket-challenge-brings-millions-of-dollars-to-battle-als-1.2739663
I’ve been mentioned on the Microsoft MVP Award Program blog. The post is about MVPs and the evolution of Windows.
From the article:
For more than two decades, MVPs have been on the forefront of helping people around the world make the most of their Microsoft technologies, including its centerpiece, the Windows operating system, from Windows 3.1 to Windows 8.1 and all the releases in between. Today, with Microsoft’s new rapid release cadence, their expertise is more important than ever…
In Canada, five MVPs produced guidance for the Windows XP End of Life campaign. Here are some highlights:
Brian Bourne | Windows XP End Of Support – Mitigating the Security Concerns
Yannick Plavonil | Chères entreprises, réveillez-vous Windows XP c’est fini dans un mois!
Sean Wallbridge | I Love My Surface Pro 2 and Windows 8.1
Colin Smith | XP End of Support – Do You Need New Hardware?
Stephen Cawood | Windows XP End of Life Is Coming
If you haven’t tried Snagit, you should check it out. It’s much better than relying on the old school screen capture mechanisms. When I was taking screenshots for my books, Snagit saved me a great deal of time. As just one example, try capturing an open dropdown menu using just Windows screen capture shortcuts—it’s like trying to catch a greased pig.
I just upgraded to Snagit 12 and found that every time I take an image capture, I’m prompted to select either a video or image capture (see the big blue buttons in the screenshot below). I rarely use the video capture, so this is a waste of time. Here’s how to turn it off.
First, check if you’ve got an old version of Snagit installed. I had 11 and 12 installed and was not getting the behaviour I wanted. I had to uninstall Snagit 11 to get rid of the old editor.
Next, go to the preferences window and check the hotkey associated with the default capture profile. I like to use print screen, so I’m going to change the “Global capture” shortcut key to something else. To get to the preferences window, you can right-click the icon in the task menu (bottom right corner of your screen with the hidden icons), then choose Preferences and the Hotkeys tab.
After I’ve freed up the right shortcut key, I’m going to associate that key (PrtScn) with a profile that doesn’t ask if I want to take video.
To do this, choose the “Send to Clipboard” profile from the Manage Profiles dialog, and then click the Hotkey button at the bottom to associate this with the keyboard shortcut you’d like to use. Note that I wanted to go directly to the Snagit editor, so I have that enabled.
Now I’m back to the lightning fast capture that I’ve come to love. When I use the hotkey, I go straight to the Snagit editor. If I wanted, I could add styles (such as borders) as part of the profile and they would be automatically applied.
p.s., If you’re wondering how I captured the Snagit windows. I cheated. I used Alt+PrtScn to do it old school.
Check out my first blog post on the Aquatic Informatics blog: AQUARIUS: Where Smart Water Data Meets the SMART Tunnel
In this post, I discuss the engineering feat that is the SMART (Stormwater Management and Road Tunnel) Tunnel. It stretches 9.7 km beneath Malaysia’s capital and function both as a roadway as a storm drainage system.
- Image Courtesy: ENTURA, Hydro Tasmania
From the post:
The “Stormwater Management And Road Tunnel” (SMART Tunnel), has been featured in many news stories and television shows such as Extreme Engineering on the Discovery Channel, Build It Bigger on the Science Channel, Megastructures on the National Geographic Channel, and Man Made Marvels on the Science Channel. The reason the Kuala Lumpur tunnel is so amazing starts with its length: it is the second longest storm drainage tunnel in Asia at 9.7 km (6.0 mi). The truly amazing aspect of the SMART tunnel is that it’s the first dual-use storm drainage and road structure in the world. The tunnel is mainly used to ease traffic congestion in Kuala Lumpur, but there is a storm drainage system under the two decks of cars. Essentially, the tunnel acts as a reservoir to decrease the peak of water flows of the Klang river and therefore mitigate the severity of floods. However, that’s not all. In the event of a bad flood, the road decks can also be used to drain the storm water away from the city. That’s right. The car levels can be completely filled with water as well!
Update: It was recently announced that a similar tunnel project is planned for Jakarta:
Jakarta Announces Plan for Integrated Tunnels to Manage Traffic and Floods
Office 2013 and SharePoint apps are great, but I have to admit that I haven’t done much with them yet. Today, I found myself wondering what I’d have to do to get Wikipedia to open when I right-clicked on a word or phrase in Word 2013.
To add Wikipedia, all I had to do was choose Insert from the Ribbon menu at the top of the screen and then click the Wikipedia icon. If you click “My Apps,” you can navigate to the Office 2013 app store and check out what other interesting apps are available.
Once you click the icon, you’ll need to confirm that you trust this new app.
After you’ve trusted the app, you can now quickly look up words or phrases from your Word documents in Wikipedia. Very cool!
Switching the app that opens by default when you choose the “Define” option is not obvious. To choose a different app, you first need to hide the Wikipedia app my clicking “My Apps” in the Ribbon and then clicking “Manage My Apps.”
For example, let’s say you wanted to use the Bing dictionary for the Define option. You can add the Bing app, then choose Manage My Apps—which opens a web page—and hide Wikipedia from that page. Once you hide an app, you should be able to click the “Refresh” button in the My Apps view and see that the app is no longer there.
After you’re done, you can unhide Wikipedia. Note that some people have reported that they had to restart Word after hiding Wikipedia.
I should mention that it’s also possible to have multiple apps running. In the screenshot below, I have both the Bing dictionary and the Wikipedia app open.
Today is U.N. World Water day!
My smartass Twitter comment was that I’ll spend the day reflecting on things, but seriously… water is our most precious resource and we really need to start taking care of it. Since joining Aquatic Informatics software, I’ve had much more exposure to stories of water-related issues around the world. We’re working to provide the software the world needs to make smart water policies based on actual data rather than speculation or lobbying. We need to let science decide how we can provide better access to clean drinking water and more widespread use of renewable resources for power generation.
From the U.N. Water Day Facebook page:
“Did YOU know that… by 2035, the global energy demand is projected to grow by more than one-third and demand for electricity is expected to grow by 70%.
22nd of March is World Water Day. The theme for this year is Water & Energy.
Share this picture and help us raise awareness about UN-Water World Water Day”
In previous posts, I covered installing Ubuntu on Windows Azure, remotely accessing Linux from Windows Azure, installing LAMP and installing Git on Linux and a few other topics. The next subject I’ll be writing about is the Ruby on Rails web development platform.
There are some great resources out there for learning Ruby and Rails, and when the install goes smoothly, it’s very easy. I’m not an expert on Ruby, but the install didn’t go swimmingly for me, so I’m writing this post.
\curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --ruby
Ruby Version Manager (RVM) is a great tool for working with Ruby. You can even run multiple versions of Ruby and easily switch back and forth.
Finally, you can use RubyGems to install rails:
gem install rails (may need sudo, I had to run it with both, see note below)
Note: if you see the error, “ERROR: Error installing rails: activesupport requires Ruby version >= 1.9.3.”, (or some other version) install Ruby 1.9.3 (Yes, even if you have a newer version installed) then use RVM to set the old version as the default using: rvm use ruby-1.9.3. This caused me much angst today. You can use ruby –v to see which version you’re running and rvm list to see the installed versions.
I also ran into this ugly error:
cawood@cawood:~$ rails --version
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/dependency.rb:247:in `to_specs': Could not find railties (>= 0) amongst [activesupport-4.0.2, atomic-1.1.14, bigdecimal-1.1.0, bundler-1.3.5, bundler-unload-1.0.2, executable-hooks-1.2.6, gem-wrappers-0.9.2, i18n-0.6.9, io-console-0.3, json-1.5.5, minitest-4.7.5, minitest-2.5.1, multi_json-1.8.2, rake-0.9.2.2, rdoc-3.9.5, rubygems-bundler-1.4.2, rvm-1.11.3.8, thread_safe-0.1.3, tzinfo-0.3.38] (Gem::LoadError)
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/dependency.rb:256:in `to_spec'
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rubygems.rb:1210:in `gem'
from /usr/local/bin/rails:18:in `<main>'
I had to run gem install rails (with no sudo) to get all the gems to install properly. After I did that, I could see that Rails was installed properly: cawood@cawood:~$ rails --version
Rails 4.0.2
Of course, my list of installed gems was much longer because the missing gems had been installed. It should look like this:
cawood@cawood:~$ gem list
*** LOCAL GEMS ***
actionmailer (4.0.2)
actionpack (4.0.2)
activemodel (4.0.2)
activerecord (4.0.2)
activerecord-deprecated_finders (1.0.3)
activesupport (4.0.2)
arel (4.0.1)
atomic (1.1.14)
bigdecimal (1.1.0)
builder (3.1.4)
bundler (1.3.5)
bundler-unload (1.0.2)
erubis (2.7.0)
executable-hooks (1.2.6)
gem-wrappers (0.9.2)
hike (1.2.3)
i18n (0.6.9)
io-console (0.3)
json (1.5.5)
mail (2.5.4)
mime-types (1.25.1)
minitest (4.7.5, 2.5.1)
multi_json (1.8.2)
polyglot (0.3.3)
rack (1.5.2)
rack-test (0.6.2)
rails (4.0.2)
railties (4.0.2)
rake (0.9.2.2)
rdoc (3.9.5)
rubygems-bundler (1.4.2)
rvm (1.11.3.8)
sprockets (2.10.1)
sprockets-rails (2.0.1)
thor (0.18.1)
thread_safe (0.1.3)
tilt (1.4.1)
treetop (1.4.15)
tzinfo (0.3.38)
Step 1 – Install Ruby
You can either install the standard version: sudo apt-get install ruby-full build-essential
or the minimal requirements with: sudo aptitude install ruby build-essential libopenssl-ruby ruby1.8-dev (note the version number – you’ll have to update that).
I’m going with the first option to install ruby-full.
Step 2 – Install the Ruby Version Manager
CAUTION: Normally you would just run: sudo apt-get install ruby-rvm
However, there is an issue with the Ubuntu RVM package, so you should run this instead: \curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --ruby --autolibs=enable --auto-dotfiles
If you do run into issues with RVM. For example, using rvm use doesn’t change to the version you want, you can run these commands to clean your system (see this thread).
sudo apt-get --purge remove ruby-rvm
sudo rm -rf /usr/share/ruby-rvm /etc/rvmrc /etc/profile.d/rvm.shThen, open new terminal and validate environment is clean from old RVM settings (should be no output):
env | grep rvmStep 3 – Check that You’re Using the Latest Version of Ruby
ruby –v will show you which version you’re using.
If you’re not using the one you want, you can use RVM to upgrade. This will download the source that is then used by RVM in the next step to compile and install Ruby; it is not a quick command.
sudo rvm install ruby-1.9.3-p125
or
sudo rvm install ruby-1.9.3 (Note version number)
However, if you do the second option, you may need to workaround an issue before updating. If you try to install ruby-1.9.3, you might get the error: “ERROR: The requested url does not exist: 'ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.3-.tar.bz2' from RVM. You can workaround this by downloading the package yourself.”
sudo curl -o /usr/share/ruby-rvm/archives/ruby-1.9.3-.tar.bz2 \http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.3-p0.tar.bz2
Check that you’re using the latest Ruby: ruby -v
If not, switch to the latest using RVM: rvm use 1.9.3
Step 4 – Install Rails
Finally, you can use RubyGems to install rails:
sudo gem install rails
Step 5 – Install a Web Server
I use Apache and MySQL, so the LAMP install works for me, but there are other options such as WEBrick or Lighttpd.
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="~/Home/wyzz.js"></script>
<textarea name="textEditor" id="textEditor" rows="10" cols="40">No file loaded...</textarea><br />
<script language="javascript1.2"> make_wyzz('textEditor');
</script>
<div ng-controller="EditorCtrl">
<form novalidate class="simple-form">
<button ng-click="saveFileContent()">save</button>
</form>
</div>
$scope.saveFileContent = function () {
$http.post('/Home/SaveFileContent', { filePath: document.getElementById("multilingualfile").innerHTML, content: document.getElementById("wysiwyg" + "textEditor").contentWindow.document.body.innerHTML, title: document.getElementById("titleHtml").value })
.then(
function (response) {
alert("File Save Result: " + response.data.Result);
},
function (data) {
alert("Error saving file content");
}
);
}
[HttpPost] public ActionResult SaveFileContent(string filePath, string content, string title) { try { ... return Json ( new { Result = "Success", } ); } catch (Exception ex) { ... return Json ( new { Result = "Error saving content: " + ex.ToString(), } ); } }
When I wanted to use a pure JavaScript treeview control for a recent ASP.NET MVC5 project, I looked around and found jsTree; it’s a popular and rich solution, so I decided to try it. I ran into a few customization hurdles, so here are my lessons learned.
Note that this is for jsTree 1.0; at the time of writing, 3.0 has not been released.
Step 1: The HTML in the view. Pretty simple…
<div id="FileTree"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
// Begin JSTree: courtesy Ivan Bozhanov: http://www.jstree.com:
$('#FileTree').jstree({
"json_data": {
"ajax": {
"url": "/Home/GetTreeData",
"type": "POST",
"dataType": "json",
"contentType": "application/json charset=utf-8"
}
},
"themes": {
"theme": "default",
"dots": false,
"icons": true,
"url": "/jstree/themes/default/style.css"
},
"contextmenu": {
"items": {
"create": false,
"rename": false,
"remove": false,
"ccp": false,
}
},
"plugins": ["themes", "json_data", "dnd", "contextmenu", "ui", "crrm"]
})
</script>
// Begin JSTree (Controller code courtesy desalbres: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/176166/Simple-FileManager-width-MVC-3-and-jsTree)
[HttpPost]
public ActionResult GetTreeData()
{
if (AlreadyPopulated == false)
{
JsTreeModel rootNode = new JsTreeModel();
rootNode.attr = new JsTreeAttribute();
rootNode.data = "Root";
string rootPath = Request.MapPath(dataPath);
rootNode.attr.id = rootPath;
PopulateTree(rootPath, rootNode);
AlreadyPopulated = true;
return Json(rootNode);
}
else
{
return null;
}
}
/// <summary>
/// Populate a TreeView with directories, subdirectories, and files
/// </summary>
/// <param name="dir">The path of the directory</param>
/// <param name="node">The "master" node, to populate</param>
public void PopulateTree(string dir, JsTreeModel node)
{
if (node.children == null)
{
node.children = new List<JsTreeModel>();
}
// get the information of the directory
DirectoryInfo directory = new DirectoryInfo(dir);
// loop through each subdirectory
foreach (DirectoryInfo d in directory.GetDirectories())
{
// create a new node
JsTreeModel t = new JsTreeModel();
t.attr = new JsTreeAttribute();
t.attr.id = d.FullName;
t.data = d.Name.ToString();
// populate the new node recursively
PopulateTree(d.FullName, t);
node.children.Add(t); // add the node to the "master" node
}
// loop through each file in the directory, and add these as nodes
foreach (FileInfo f in directory.GetFiles("*.htm"))
{
// create a new node
JsTreeModel t = new JsTreeModel();
t.attr = new JsTreeAttribute();
t.attr.id = f.FullName;
t.data = f.Name.ToString();
// add it to the "master"
node.children.Add(t);
}
}
// Don't load the jsTree treeview again if it has already been populated.
// Note: this causes a bug where the tree won't repaint on browser refresh
public bool AlreadyPopulated
{
get
{
return (Session["AlreadyPopulated"] == null ? false : (bool)Session["AlreadyPopulated"]);
}
set
{
Session["AlreadyPopulated"] = (bool)value;
}
}
// End JSTree
public ActionResult Test(string returnUrl)
{
ViewBag.ReturnUrl = returnUrl;
Session["AlreadyPopulated"] = false;
return View();
}
$('#FileTree').bind("loaded.jstree", function (event, data) {
$(this).jstree("close_all");
})
Next, I wanted the leaf nodes to use a different background image than the folder nodes. This required changing the server-side code to actually write the leaves (files) as leaf nodes and then add the right CSS to style the jstree-leaf class.
namespace FileEditor.Models
{
public class JsTreeModel
{
public string data;
public JsTreeAttribute attr;
// this was "open" but changing it to “leaf” adds “jstree-leaf” to the class
public string state = "leaf";
public List<JsTreeModel> children;
}
public class JsTreeAttribute
{
public string id;
}
}
And then styling the leaf nodes with a different background image than the folders.
<style type="text/css">
#FileTree .jstree-leaf > a > ins {
background: url("/jstree/themes/default/d.gif");
background-position: -2px -19px !important;
}
</style>
"contextmenu": {
"items": {
"create": false,
"rename": false,
"remove": false,
"ccp": false,
}
},
In principle, I appreciate the value of test-driven development (TDD) and continuous integration (CI) builds; I just didn’t think they would be entirely practical for my solo, side projects. Well, I don’t have any excuses anymore, I’ve been working on a quick project and in just a few hours, I had an AngularJS single page application (SPA) remotely building and deploying to an Azure web site. All for free. Every time I check-in a change, the source is copied to the cloud, my test runs and it triggers a CI build remotely and then is deployed automatically to the host server. Pretty slick.
One change was that testing web applications has come along from the dark days of having to wrangle with the HTTP context. Maybe the situation isn’t totally resolved, but it’s easier these days to write tests because the HTTP context isn’t so much of a stumbling block in newer frameworks.
I only ran into two issues setting everything up, and one was pretty much my fault. First, I created an ASP.NET MVC project using Visual Studio 2013 and added it to Visual Studio Online (which supports both Git and Team Foundation Services [TFS] online). As I wrote in a previous post, you can get free private Git repositories via Visual Studio Online. I also created an Azure website and linked it to the project. I created a CI build profile and the build triggered correctly on check-in. No problems, no errors. However, the project was not being deployed. The issue was simple, I chose the wrong deployment template. I should have been using the AzureContinuousDeployment.11.xaml template.
The other issue was that the Visual Studio Online build machine wasn’t in sync with the NuGet updates, I had installed on my local box. To resolve these issues with package management, I Enabled NuGet Package Restore feature and then check-in the entire “packages” directory to resolve missing DLL errors.
To get this working for your project, you can start by reading the MSDN article about a continuous deployment setup.
BTW - If you don’t check in the package files, you’ll get error such as these (and more) because the remote build machine won’t be able to find the DLLs. To help with search, I'll paste in a bunch of the errors here.
Models\AccountModels.cs (11): The type or namespace name 'DbContext' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)App_Start\WebApiConfig.cs (5): The type or namespace name 'Newtonsoft' could not be found Controllers\AccountController.cs (7): The type or namespace name 'DotNetOpenAuth' could not be found Controllers\TodoController.cs (3): The type or namespace name 'Infrastructure' does not exist in the namespace 'System.Data.Entity' Controllers\TodoListController.cs (4): The type or namespace nam 'Infrastructure' does not exist in the namespace 'System.Data.Entity' Filters\InitializeSimpleMembershipAttribute.cs (3): The type or namespace name 'Infrastructure' does not exist in the namespace 'System.Data.Entity' Areas\HelpPage\SampleGeneration\HelpPageSampleGenerator.cs (14): The type or namespace name 'Newtonsoft' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?) Models\TodoListDto.cs (6): The type or namespace name 'Newtonsof' could not be found Models\TodoList.cs (6): The type or namespace name 'Newtonsoft' could not be found Models\TodoItemContext.cs (16): The type or namespace name 'DbContext' could not be found Models\AccountModels.cs (18): The type or namespace name 'DbSet' could not be found Models\TodoItemContext.cs (23): The type or namespace name 'DbSet' could not be found C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Common.targets (1605): Could not resolve this reference. Could not locate the assembly "EntityFramework". Check to make sure the assembly exists on disk. If this reference is required by your code, you may get compilation errors.C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Common.targets (1605): Could not resolve this reference. Could not locate the assembly "DotNetOpenAuth.OAuth". Check to make sure the assembly exists on disk. If this reference is required by your code, you may get compilation errors.
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Common.targets (1605): Could not resolve this reference. Could not locate the assembly "DotNetOpenAuth.OAuth.Consumer".C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Common.targets (1605): Could not resolve this reference. Could not locate the assembly "DotNetOpenAuth.OpenId". C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Common.targets (1605): Could not resolve this reference. Could not locate the assembly "DotNetOpenAuth.OpenId.RelyingParty". Check to make sure the assembly exists on disk. If this reference is required by your code, you may get compilation errors. C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Common.targets (1605): Could not resolve this reference. Could not locate the assembly "DotNetOpenAuth.Core".
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Common.targets (1605): Could not resolve this reference. Could not locate the assembly "EntityFramework.SqlServer". C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Common.targets (1605): Could not resolve this reference. Could not locate the assembly "Newtonsoft.Json". C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Common.targets (1605): Could not resolve this reference. Could not locate the assembly "System.Web.Http.OData". C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Common.targets (1605): Found conflicts between different versions of the same dependent assembly.
