Steve Eichert

VB9 Prepares for World Domination

With people like Erik Meijer and Brian Beckman leading the charge, Visual Basic is on a course for World Dominiation .  Checkout the channel 9 video with Brian to learn more about how they're aiming to make VB the language of choice among the developers of the world.  As I stated before there are a lot of very nice features making their way into VB that could begin to grab my attention away from C#.  Then again maybe not

Tracking tasks in a browser?

This past week we started experimenting with a "long distance collaboration tool" called CardMeeting.  Our team has a big ocean in between them which sometimes makes it difficult for everyone to stay on the same page.  As I mentioned in How to prevent an agile face plant post, we use index cards for all of our planning.  We have a big visible whiteboard that "holds" all of our cards.  As we start a task we "brown it", and when we finish it we "green it".  At times the card can go red as well which means its blocked due to something development can't control (such as needing clarification from business).

Our whiteboard has a lot of valuable information.  At any given time anyone can walk over to the whiteboard and see where we're at.  Unless of course they're across the ocean.  To help keep our colleagues across the pond in the loop this past week we used CardMeeting to hold a duplicate "copy" of all of our cards.  This allowed everyone on the project to have the latest and greatest information about where we were.  For the development team it was a bit of a pain maintaining two copies of all the cards, but, being the great team that we are we managed. 

In addition to using it to track the current iteration we've also started a couple of other card meetings which are being used to plan out future iterations.  I'm not exactly sure how we'll use it going forward, and if it will be useful or not, but at the very least it's an interesting experiment.

tags: agile, agileplanning, taskbreakdown

Generating an RSS Feed from the Event Log using Linq to XML

Jim Wooley put together a nice "cool code" sample for the Jacksonville Code Camp.  Obviously anything that uses Linq gets my vote.  He took third place for his Linq to XML code that generates an RSS feed from the Event Log using VB9's XML Literals.

Download

tags: linq, linqtoxml, xlinq

Called on the carpet for not solving ALL Scoble's problems

M. David Peterson calls me on the carpet for not really solving ALL of Scoble’s problems and for not using a fancy algorithm to boot.  I was waiting for someone to expose me and it appears it’s happened.    Anywho, he has a nice post on how he solved Scoble’s problem using XSLT.  He ends up with 29 lines of XML (data + transform) compared to my 48 lines of Linq code.  Of course I like my version much more since it uses Linq but his post does point out an important point, while Linq and Linq to XML do an amazing job of providing a consistent programming API for accessing all sorts of data there may be times when XSLT (or some other technology) are more – maybe not more but just as – appropriate.  I for one really like what Linq provides.  The fact that I can write what is essentially transform code in my preferred programming language (C#) using my preferred data query api (Linq) and do so rather quickly rocks.

tags: linq, linqtoxml, xlinq, xslt

Solving all Scoble's problems with Linq to XML

Although Scoble already received a lot of answers on how he can get get what he wants out of his Excel file containing all the URL's from the http://weblogs.com/changes.xml file I couldn't help but fire up VS and solve his problem using Linq to XML.  I'm sure Scoble will send me a big fat check for solving his problem with one of the cooler technologies that will coming out of his former employer.  Of course I didn't give him just the URL's that he asked for either so maybe I shouldn't hold my breath.  On the other hand maybe he'll give me a bonus for giving him a nice list that has the number of sites for each site he's interested in grouped with a count? 

Output:

• Blogspot has 8928 sites in the changes.xml file
  • list of sites
• Spaces has 900 sites in the changes.xml file
  • list of sites
• Wordpress has 384 sites in the changes.xml file
  • list of sites
• TypePad has 118 sites in the changes.xml file
  • list of sites

Code:

    1 using System;

    2 using System.Collections.Generic;

    3 using System.Text;

    4 using System.Query;

    5 using System.Xml.XLinq;

    6 using System.Data.DLinq;

    7 

    8 namespace ScobleWeblogsDotComCleaner {

    9   class Program {

   10     static void Main(string[] args) {

   11       XElement weblogs = XElement.Load("http://rpc.weblogs.com/changes.xml");

   12 

   13       var matches =

   14         from weblog in weblogs.Elements("weblog")

   15         where IsMatch((string) weblog.Attribute("url"))

   16         group weblog by GetSite((string) weblog.Attribute("url")) into sites

   17         orderby sites.Count() descending

   18         select new {

   19             HostingSite=sites.Key,

   20             Count=sites.Count(),

   21             Sites=sites

   22           };

   23 

   24       foreach(var match in matches) {

   25         Console.WriteLine(match.HostingSite + " has " + match.Count + " sites in the changes.xml file");

   26         foreach(var x in match.Sites) {

   27           Console.WriteLine("  - " + (string) x.Attribute("url"));

   28         }

   29       }

   30     }

   31 

   32     private static string GetSite(string  url) {

   33       if(url.Contains("spaces.live.com")) return "Spaces";

   34       else if(url.Contains("typepad.com")) return "TypePad";

   35       else if(url.Contains("blogspot.com")) return "Blogspot";

   36       else if(url.Contains("wordpress.com")) return "Wordpress";

   37       return String.Empty;

   38     }

   39 

   40     private static bool IsMatch(string url) {

   41         return

   42           url.Contains("spaces.live.com") ||

   43           url.Contains("typepad.com") ||

   44           url.Contains("blogspot.com") ||

   45           url.Contains("wordpress.com");

   46     }

   47   }

   48 }

tags: linqtoxml, xlinq, linq, scoble

LINQ to Entities vs. LINQ to SQL

Kevin Hoffman has a nice post outlining the differences between LINQ to Entities and LINQ to SQL.  As I've stated before I think LINQ to SQL should go by the wayside for LINQ to Entities.  If you're going to create a conceptual model that directly maps to your relational model you can still use LINQ to Entities.  Why lock yourself into a direct mapping when you can instead have the flexibility of a conceptual model which can change independently of your relational model?  LINQ to Entities is where it's at.  Let's all accept that and start using it.  Whenever you have the question of whether LINQ to SQL or LINQ to Entities is your best approach go with LINQ to Entities. 

tags: linq, dlinq, entities, linqtoentities, entityframework, adoef

Creating an RSS Feed using LINQ to XML (XLinq)

To help get more familiar with the new XML Programming API that is hidden away inside of LINQ to XML I recently set on a journey to update the code that creates my RSS feed to use LINQ to XML.  In order to complete my journey I needed to get familiar with how to use functional construction to build XML from a set of in memory objects.  Before diving into the LINQ to XML code let's first take a peak at the old code which was building the XML using an XmlWriter.

I've re-organized the code for this post but most of the basics have stayed intact.  As you can see we use an XmlWriter (XmlTextWriter to be more specific) to write our root rss element, our main channel, as well as the 25 most recent postings.  The LINQ to XML code looks somewhat similar. 

    1   XNamespace dc = "http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";

    2   XNamespace slash = "http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/";

    3   XNamespace wfw = "http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/";

    4 

    5   XDocument rss = new XDocument(