just a perspective ...

It seems, either you can take College Way on your left or Husband Road on the right - depends on whether you are driving up North or down South .. (a perspective, eh!) Never thought there would be such interesting names as well.. ever heard of a Dusty Lane?

Lately, I have often spotted people carrying a really bloated wallet! P erhaps they have loads of cash and credit cards to spend during this festive time of the year .. however, one thing for sure that I'd suggest ( am not a professional chiropractor ) do NOT sit in the car with that *bloated* wallet in your back pocket .. too much of an asymmetrical bum balance (not sure if that's even a proper English!) Purge (if Delete is a little too strong for you) any receipts that is being sitting in their for a while... and stow away your plastics, as much as you can. I'd like to share a funny video clip from one of my all time favourite sitcoms Seinfeld - keep your wallet sleek unless you want to end up like George (as below)

Horrific ! Terrible ! Gruesome ! are some of the words that comes to our mind naturally, the moment our mind wanders into what happened last Friday (December 14th 2012) at Sandy Hook Elementary School in a beautiful small town in Connecticut. I'm completely appalled! I can't imagine we are really living in the 21st century and these sort of things are happening in one of the most developed countries of the world. Loads of people across the world dream of raising their kids in developed countries foreseeing their best upbringings and nurturing global citizenship in them. Alas! with tons of freedom that some of the developed countries offer, they come with little too many liberal laws - gun control to name one of them! I'd think there certainly are some vested interest and tight lobbying around keeping guns floating around in the countries - but after what happened at Newtown, even the toughest of the tough heart would cry out to STOP this now and for ever! Th...

Let me share the URL where I picked up Visual Studio 2012 theme editor .. thanks VS team to have done that work! http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/366ad100-0003-4c9a-81a8-337d4e7ace05 I settled on the one as below for now .. Rest assured you can modify the templates that you see now as bunch of options under Environment | General | Color theme .. And if you dare to go as far as *restoring* the icons similar to VS 2010 .. here is where you should navigate to.. http://vsip.codeplex.com/

Loads of people (which I gather from the .Net community) *hates* the new all-CAPS menu that is default behaviour for Studio 2012 and I am one of them, for sure ... so this morning, I thought, there got to be something to turn it off and YES - there is a way!    Default Menu for Visual Studio 2012 Steps to change the default all-CAPS menu to your usual First-letter capital word 1. Run registry editor (regedit.exe) 2. Navigate to  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\General 3. Add a new DWORD called  SuppressUppercaseConversion  and set its value as 1 There we have it ... Visual Studio 2012 with the menu (view) same as the previous version.

I'd say, it's one interesting way to reset a canvas ...

This morning I was reading the section Executive Bloggers  [Microsoft Developer Tools Blogs]  on Microsoft  Blogs and happened to read  Soma's Blog  - very inspirational, I must say and the way he has made it to leading the Developer Division. Further I accidentally happened to read  Jason Zander's blog  and noticed one thing that I don't see to read or hear or know these days ... About Jason Zander Hi there!  I'm the corporate vice president for the development team of Windows Azure in the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft.  I've worked on lots of products in twenty years at Microsoft with the unifying theme of building platforms and tools for developers to do great work.    I love writing code!  And I love working on a team where developing software and helping others build and deliver their own software is a core mission.  Jason I couldn't resist to share my perspective ( after all, my ...

Sequence feature which has been in Oracle for a number of years is now available in MS SQL 2012! A Sequence object is an object that provides functionality similar to Identity (Autonumber) column. The sequence object can be used with more than one table which is not possible in identity object. This is useful when you have parent-child tables and you want to know the value of the ID column before you insert records . A sample example is as follows: Sample 1: create sequence dbsequence start with 1 increment by 5 select next value for dbsequence --output=1 select next value for dbsequence --output=6 1.1    Should you need to clean up … drop sequence dbsequence Sample 2.1: create sequence idsequence start with 1 increment by 3 create table Products_ext ( id int, Name varchar(50) ) INSERT dbo.Products_ext (Id, Name) VALUES (NEXT VALUE FOR dbo.idsequence, 'ProductItem1') INSERT dbo.Products_ext (Id, Name) VALUES (NEXT...

This morning, a colleague of mine prompted me to find a list of changeset checked-in by a user .. I wasn't surprised to not find in either VS 2010 or VS 2012 but was little when I can't find under the TFS Power Tool plugin for Visual Studio (Team menu), however TFS Power Tool is not restricting! TFS Power Tool has this nice little nifty command tfpt searchcs Open up the Command Prompt for VS and there you go ... The tfpt searchcs brings up a popup window as below .. and you have various options to interrogate the change sets ... Happy Searching! Reference: TFS Power Tools for VS 2012 http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/b1ef7eb2-e084-4cb8-9bc7-06c3bad9148f TFS Power Tools for VS 2010 http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/d0d33361-18e2-46c0-8ff2-4adea1e34fef

Let me share with the community with what I've learnt and successfully implemented a generalised data response (data packet) exchanged between the consumer and the provider, in context to WCF services ..  The idea behind this concept is pretty simple! Instead of expecting a specific data type returned from the server call on its own, package that as part of a container that can facilitate not only the actual data expected by the consumer for a call to any service from the provider but additionally figure out if there were any validation/error that may have happened during that service call - all in one go!  The following is a simple implementation within the context of using ASP.Net MVC on the front-end and Entity Framework as a ORM tool (data layer) .. Step 1: PayLoad.cs (where the generic payload implementation lives)     [DataContract(Name = "PayLoadListUsing={0}")]     public class PayLoadList<TEntity>     where TEntity : clas...

The other day, I decided in the morning to put this issue to the rest. I analysed various scenarios and nailed down that the issue was concentrated to just my IE or local configuration/settings .. I like to stay with the latest stuff and thus I have IE 10 preview for Windows 7 I can tell you, the issue is/was not with the version of Internet Explorer  (I did try the fantastic F12 developer tool to play with various compatibility modes .. no luck, though!) Any way, it was my determination to nail down the issue to the bottom of it and figured out that the TFS (Team Foundation Server) plug-in for Office 2010 that I had enabled on my machine, for some reason screwed up (excuse my French!)  the registry settings .. I've a feeling that happened along with my upgrade of TFS from 2010 to 2012! Any way, if this happens to you, I'd suggest check out the registry (Run, regedit) .. [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Interface\{79EAC9C5-BAF9-...

I tasked myself couple of days ago to build a sample WCF Service to send a pre-configured auto response based on a specific request.  I initially defined my Data Contract as follows: namespace SampleWCFService {     [DataContract]     public class Book     {         [DataMember]         public string ISBN;         [DataMember]         public string Title;         [DataMember]         public string Author; ...     } } The data contract was streamed over the wire with the code snippet below: public List<Book> Filter(string Author, string Genre, string Title) {     XDocument db = GetData();     List<Book> lstBooks = GetAllBooks();     if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(Author))     {       lstBooks = lstBooks.Where(book => book...