Shubho's Blog

If you get an error something like "Object Expected - Webresource.axd" while trying to run an ASP.NET application then please do the followings - 1. Many blogs suggest trying un-checking "check if File exists" in the handlers mappings section in IIS (IIS 5 or 6) and similar settings in IIS 7 but still sometimes it doesn't work. I did not found any websites suggesting the simple solution I found as I continued to face the same problem with the above solution. 2. The solution specific to my problem that worked was - check ASPNET has read/write access to the WebApplication folder. This is typically a problem in Windows Vista/7 where even an Administrator has some execution issues in the C drive too. So, it's better to move the WebApplication to drives other than C: like D:. Please check if this works. In my case it worked, hopefully it would work in your case too :-)

This is for the developers who must have been struggling with, why a Silverlight ComboBox is not working in a Windows Phone 7 application. Although the code does allow to put a ComboBox control to the page but actually it doesn't work when you try to run the page with ComboBox controls. This control has been removed in Windows Phone 7 development and you won't find this in ToolBox either in Visual Studio or Expression Blend. I think the ComboBox is not designed to work with touch screen input. Please check the msdn article on the same.

After a few months of break, I am back now and hope to post a few useful posts on Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 development in coming days. In between, the entire World, particularly the developer community, has now started talking about Windows Phone 7 (expected to get launched this Fall - Sep/Oct in India) after Microsoft's recent announcement on WP7 and release of development kit for the developers to start building Apps on WP7 before every common man :-) starts using it. Here, I will talk about how to start building your own application that can run on Windows Phone 7. People who are already familiar with Silverlight, would be very happy to see the same technology getting used for application development except few changes. I will talk about those changes in my future posts. The installations/applications that are required for WP7 app development are - 1. Visual Studio as IDE 2. Windows Phone 7 Development Kit (aka WP7 Developer Tools) Download Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 E...

Recently, I had a requirement to display combined data from multiple tables in a Silverlight page. For this I had to use WCF RIA services to get the data from the database and send it back to the client for use. To be very specific on the requirement, I had 2 tables - Employee and Address and I had to display Employee information and its various types of Address information. Since RIA Services work well with Entity model and generates methods for single table operation, using the same we can create domain service methods to deal with data from multiple tables. A data class needs to be created with combined fields from multiple tables. In my case, I created a data class EmployeeAndAddressDetails with attributes/columns from Employee and Address tables and created an entity model of these 2 tables from the database. Then we need to create a IQueryable domain method to fetch data from these 2 tables. The return type should be IQueryable template class pointing to the data class created ...

Have you ever seen how boardrooom connections page of WotNews, Australia ( http://wotnews.com.au/boardroom_connections/ ) works? Few days back, I was working on a similar requirement where we had Silverlight 3/4 to implement the same feature. While searching for Silverlight feature to implement this, we discovered Graphite (a product from Orbifold ) which could give similar features as required. If you are new to Graphite then for you, Graphite is a diagramming control with a (auto-layout) spring-embedder algorithm for Silverlight. The control is designed to display a small set of data without having to define a particular layout or without much customization. The Silverlight version of it can be used for website navigation, inside SharePoint, to visualize CRM/Dynamics relationships etc. Conceptually, Graphite control works managing components at 2 levels - one at Visual level and another at Non-Visual level. Visual level ensures creation and maintenance of visual parts (node, conne...

I would like to share a problem that I faced while installing Visual Studio 2010 Express editions using Web Platform Installer 2.0 version. Web Platform Installer 2.0 from Microsoft is a very good tool for keeping track of what is installed and what is not and to install softwares in the background without expecting any user action but I did not like one thing in the Installer i.e. no status of Installation Progress is shown on the installation window. We won't even know if it is actually installing or has died. As the download and the installation take a long time, sometimes I feel that it is not working and try to kill the Platform Installer application. Later on, I realize that to find whether it is really doing anything or not, the best way to check the progress would be to check the installation log files. The installation log files are created in the system Temp folder. To browse the Temp folder, please browse the C:\Users\ \AppData\Local\Temp folder directly (in Windows Vi...

Have you ever faced any problem with your UI based application when you are making a long database operation or calling a long running service or making any network connections like connecting your CD drive etc.? I think, your answer to this would be “Yes” whereas you would have wanted your UI application to continue to respond to your actions while the above like operations going in the background, and to display the results on the UI as soon the background operations are completed. I would like to have this, wouldn’t you? The simple answer to this is to create a multi-threaded application and have different threads to manage different operations. People like to use the word “multithreading” when they talk in the context of software programming but it is not a simple task to write multithreaded programs. It can make the entire application down and can take weeks to find and fix the problem. Any application (to avoid any argument for now, I would say Win UI application) by default runs...