Development by Davis: “Preparing for my first open source conference” plus 4 more

Preparing for my first open source conference
LightSwitch: reading threads from StackOverflow with OData
How do we recycle hackathon code?
New AMD E-Series APUs Set the High Bar for Essential Notebook Battery Life
wbadmin start backup... difference between Powsershell and cmd

Preparing for my first open source conference

Posted: 06 Jun 2012 05:00 AM PDT

How many open source conferences have you attended?

0-5

6-10

More than 10

It's time for a confession: I have never been to an open source conference.

I've been an open source and free culture advocate for more than half a decade. I've used open source operating systems and applications on my computers and mobile devices for nearly as long. I've contributed to open source documentation efforts. I've organized a university event to promote the principles of open source in college. And I've been writing for opensource.com.

But I've never been to an honest-to-goodness, full-blown conference.

Read more...

LightSwitch: reading threads from StackOverflow with OData

Posted: 26 Mar 2012 01:22 PM PDT

As you might know, one of the most important new features in the next version of Visual Studio LightSwitch, currently in beta, is the support for OData.

You can read some post from Beth Massi about this topic, today I'm just showing a different usage.

OData is an open protocol based on WCF Data Services and allows managing data sets through services. If you visit the Ecosystem page of the OData portal, you can find a list of public services from 3rd party producers, including the well-known StackOverflow web site, which offers a very popular forum platform.

Imagine you want to read your favorite threads from StackOverflow inside a LightSwitch application. After creating the project, the first thing you want to do is connecting to an external data source such as OData:

In the next screen of the Wizard we specify the service URL and credentials if required. In this case no credentials are required and Anonymous auth is enough:

In order to be sure that the connection works, click Test Connection and select the entity that will be used for the test:

By clicking Test you will be able to check that everything works. The next step allows selecting entities you want to import into the application. We are talking about entities, this means that LightSwitch is able of representing OData information as the classic entity. So, working with OData is exactly like with any other data source, including business logic, validation, queries, and so on. Let's select posts, tags, and comments:

When you click su Finish, LightSwitch will tell you that it needs to import the User entity as well, since this has a relationship with the Comment one. This demonstrates that LightSwitch perfectly knows how to handle this kinds of situations. Once imported entities and relationships, these will appear in the Table Designer the usual way:

You can replace Date Time with Date to optimize visualization and you can change the summary property from Body to Title. Now imagine you only want to show posts talking about LightSwitch. You can simply create a Query the usual way; Right-click the Posts table in Solution Explorer, then Add Query. The new query is called LightSwitchPosts and we are going to set a couple of filters like in the following figure (tags are lower case):

Now you can simply add a Search Screen pointing to the query:

If you have changed the Summary Property to be Title, in the Properties window you can set this to be Show as Link. I am using here the Cosmopolitan shell which has been released recently. This is how the application will appear when running:

As you can see we have retrieved the list of posts talking about LightSwitch in StackOverflow's forums. You can simply click the hyperlink to show the post details:

OData in LightSwitch opens to infinite new development scenarios, making your applications even more powerful.

Alessandro

How do we recycle hackathon code?

Posted: 06 Jun 2012 03:00 AM PDT

With the sheer number of civic hackathons starting to reach a critical mass, some are asking whether the energy and drive embodied by these events can be directed to reusing existing applications or projects started at earlier events.

This is an important issue, as some projects worked on at civic hacking events aren't actively pursued after the event is over. Is there an opportunity to better focus the energy and talents of civic hackers to reuse existing applications, or to take the work from previous hackathons further?

Read more...

New AMD E-Series APUs Set the High Bar for Essential Notebook Battery Life

Posted: 05 Jun 2012 12:00 AM PDT

AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced the launch of its latest AMD E-Series Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) platform. Designed for essential notebook and desktop personal computers which meet basic performance needs at accessible price points, the 2012 AMD E-Series APU enables long battery life and a best-in-class e...

wbadmin start backup... difference between Powsershell and cmd

Posted: 05 Jun 2012 09:57 PM PDT

I am running "wbadmin start backup -include:C:E: -backupTarget:G:" in
both Powershell ISE 2 and from the command line in SBS 2008.

From the command line it runs fine, from powershell I get the error:
"wbadmin 1.0 - Backup command-line tool (C) Copyright 2004 Microsoft
Corp. Retrieving volume information... ERROR - One of the source