Shubho's Blog

In today's world, "information" is the key. With IT enabled world, we collect large amount of data from various sources but how effectively we can use such large amount of data is always a challenge. Different domains such as Financial, Sales, Security, Retail, Energy, etc. initiate and collect large amount of data from various source for their day-to-day IT operations and management. For e.g. in our day-to-day operation of using e-services, we perform various activities and transactions and one such example is e-banking. Do we ever realize when we do an online transaction how much data is collected to ensure safety of the transaction? Now, when each and every  online activity is monitored, extracting meaning out of billions of activities is a big challenge in IT enabled domains. When billions of transactions are happening per day, how do we find out which one of those is a suspicious activity. With the world becoming more and more IT enabled, IT security becomes extreme...

Wanted to share one error that I got while installing Microsoft Office Professional 2013 for which I had to spend almost 3 days to find the root cause. I also googled and found that many people have also faced the same issue but did not get if anyone had the solution. Sharing the solution that worked for me. Thanks to Dhaval Metrani, my colleague, who also helped me with this. If you get the following error in the log file (in the %temp% folder) while installing Office 2013 Failed to install product OSMMUI.msi ErrorCode: 1603  and the detail log shows ERROR: The network address is invalid then the same is because of Task Scheduler service is not enabled on the machine. 1603 is a generic error and some people have mentioned that the same could be related to deleting/renaming  %programdata% /Microsoft Help but the solution seemed to be related to Task Scheduler when the exact error was related to 'Network address invalid'. By default in Windows 7 and Windows Vista ...

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...