I had a great time talking about Globalization and Localization for ASP.NET applications last night at the New England ASP.NET User Group. There are definately a lot of things that you need to be aware of when you're localizing a site. Thanks to Dean Serrentino for inviting me to speak. I've uploaded the slides and demo applications below.
ASP.NetGlobalizationAndLocalization.zip (480.36 KB)I'm speaking today at the Code Camp in Waltham giving my talk on Speech Recognition using C#. I've attached the demo files I used. You can download the content here.
The 1st New Hampshire Code Camp is being help Saturday, Feb 28th at Daniel Webster College. Registration is now open at http://www.thedevcommunity.org/. We're looking for developers or DBAs to present at this event. We're also looking for component vendors or recruitment firms to sponsor the event with giveaways, or to help cover food costs. (Contact me - phil@denoncourtassociates.com or Pat Tormey)
I love going to code camps, I always learn a lot about technologies that I don't get to use in my day-to-day life. It's nice to network with other developers, learn what problems they're running into and how they're solving them. The manifesto describes it best: By and For the Developer Community, Always Free, No Fluff...
With the economy in apparent decline, a lot of you developers are looking for ways to make yourselves more marketable. According to ToastMasters International, presentation skills are "crucial to success in the workplace". Code Camps are a great way to start refining your speaking skills. Nobody expects a polished speaker. All we're looking for is someone to show us some code, help facilitate a conversation, or show us something new. If you get nervous when you speak in front of people and that's deterring you, partner up with a buddy to deliver the talk with you. Presentations should go about an hour, and budget time for dialog/Q&A.
Here's how to register to speak at the NH Code Camp:
1) Create an account at thedevcommunity.org,
or sign into your existing one.
2) Complete a Speaker Registry profile
3) On thedevcommunity.org 's home page, click
the submit a presentation link next to Code Camp New Hampshire
4) Repeat (as necessary)
Looking forward to seeing you all there...
I'll be giving a talk on implementing Speech Recognition in .NET this Saturday. There will be 24 presentations delivered at the code camp. Register to attend the code camp here.
Adding Speech Recognition to your Application
Since version 3.0, the .NET framework has built in support for speech recognition. It is easy and straightforward to use. You will learn how to use the speech recognition capabilities of .NET. We'll talk about the capabilities of the speech recognition classes. And we talk about best practices and lessons learned.
Part of the .NET 3.0 release was the System.Speech namespace. This gives you easy access to powerful speech capabilities. Text to Speech, Speech Recognition, and Dictation are all part of this library. I've tried speech recognition every 5 years or so, and it has always worked, but it never allowed me to work faster than just using my keyboard.
As a consultant, I work on a variety of different machines. Sometimes just my laptop, sometimes my laptop with an external monitor, and other times a dual monitor system. Pictured below is how I set it up on my laptop.
Most panels are auto hide so that I can maximize the amount of space to view the code. Getting to the solution explorer means I have to take my hands off the keyboard, and go to the mouse to select the tab. There are keyboard shortcuts, but I either don't remember all of them, or they don't work in all types of documents.
Since speech recognition is so easy to use with the system.speech dll, and Visual Studio addins aren't rocket science either, I built an addin that enables speech recognition within Visual Studio. Basically, the addin maps a list of words, that when recognized, execute a command in the Command Window. So, when I need to quickly look at the task list, I don't have to remember the keyboard shortcut, or mouse to it. I just speak "Task List". When I need the toolbox, I say, "Toolbox". I didn't get into dictation, because I don't think it is efficient to speak "for space open parenthesis int i space equal space zero semicolon i less than items period count semicolon i plus plus close parenthesis open curly brace..."
I uploaded the source and an installer here on CodePlex. Because (I think) Visual Studio 2005 only works with addins written in .NET 2.0, this only works for VS 2008. Try it out and let me know how it works.
Me either. See here in the C# Language Reference. This means you can overload the operators for your classes. The example on MSDN talks about classes that have a true, false, or null (neither true nor false) state. You could also create a type that can be both true and false.
Overloading operators can lead to code that is difficult to read. You should only overload operators when it makes sense to do it. If it is unclear what “if (myType)” means, don’t overload the operators.
I wrote a small rules engine for a company a while back and this would have been helpful. Supplemental rules were implemented as separate classes so that they could be dynamically strung together in different orders as the business logic changed.
Here’s a contrived sample using the true/false operators:
public
class Customer
{ publicstring CustomerName {
get; set; } publicstring EmailAddress
{ get; set; } publicdecimal OutstandingBalance
{ get; set; } } publicclass CustomerIsGoodRule
{ public CustomerIsGoodRule(Customer customer) { this.Customer
= customer; } Customer Customer { get; set; } publicstaticbooloperatortrue(CustomerIsGoodRule
theCustomer) { return (theCustomer.Customer.OutstandingBalance
<= 0); } publicstaticbooloperatorfalse(CustomerIsGoodRule
theCustomer) { return (theCustomer.Customer.OutstandingBalance
> 0); } } class Program { staticvoid Main(string[]
args) { Customer c = new Customer(); c.CustomerName = "Joanne
Doe"; c.EmailAddress = "joannedoe@mailinator.com";
c.OutstandingBalance = 25; CustomerIsGoodRule cigr = new CustomerIsGoodRule(c); if (cigr)
{ SendNewCatalog(); } else { SendNewStatement(); } } }
One thing to keep in mind is that if you provide a definition for true, you must also provide one for false. Also notice that the logical negation operator (!) was not overriden, so a statement like if (!cigr) fails to compile.
I haven’t taken the time to upload the materials yet, so thanks to Steve Coombes for hounding me about it. Here are the files:
New Hampshire Dot Net Users Group is back just in time for Microsoft’s latest releases of Visual Studio
We’ll be meeting In our new home at
6:00-8:30 May 15th
Eaton Richmond Center room 100
The Guest Speakers will be
Overview of the AJAX control toolkit:
AJAX is an way to make websites more interactive and responsive. It's powerful and easy to use. The AJAX control toolkit is a set of controls that use AJAX and wrap common UI scenarios. Cascading dropdowns, Auto completing textboxes, in-page popups, hovering menus and dynamically populated textboxes are some of the controls we'll go over. No AJAX experience is required.
And Pat Tormey will be presenting
What’s new and important in VS 2008 with a little bit of WPF and Expression Suite
Stay tuned to http://www.nhdn.com for details and register up for notices…
I'm going to be taking this next week, so I thought I'd post my study notes as I assemble them.
The ConnectionStringBuilder objects allow for an abstract way of building a connection string for ADO.NET. There is a good writeup on the data access blog showing basic usage. There is a SqlConnectionStringBuilder, OleDbConnectionStringBuilder, OdbcConnectionStringBuilder, and an OracleConnectionStringBuilder.
The ConfigurationManager has a specific section for storing connection strings and the ConnectionStrings property to manipulate them. See this article on MSDN for more information. An area that doesn't get much attention is that the Connection string configuration can be stored in a separate config file. See the section titled "Using external configuration files" to see how to use the configSource property.
MSDN has an article on securing configuration strings. An important part to pay attention to is encrypting connection string information stored in config files. Scott Forsyth has a post on using aspnet_regiis to protect web.config files. Daruish Tasdighi has an article at codeproject about protecting the contents using the ConfigurationSection.ProtectSection / UnprotectSection methods.
Managing connection state. I think that is knowing that there are methods on the connection object to open and close the connection. The connection will be closed when the connection object is disposed.
There is a great post by Sijin Joseph about connection pooling with all the different connection objects. I wasn't aware that there is no connection pooling with ODBC using the managed providers. Also interesting was that connection pooling for SQL Server was disabled while debugging in Visual Studio. Another thing to be aware of is that when using Integrated Security for SQL Server, the domain/user is added to the list of things that need to match for a connection to be reused.
To have a persistent data connection, you disable connection pooling and keep the instance of the connection object around. The connection will remain open until the connection object is disposed or the close method is used.
Eric Moreau has a post on using MARS. It is only supported in the SQL Server and Oracle managed providers.
You can encrypt/decrypt the data passed from the client back and to the database server by adding the Encrypt keyword to the connection string for SQL Server or using the Encrypt property on the SqlConnectionStringBuilder.
I guess this is a nice way of saying, "Know everything about ADO.NET". Some of the things I'm aware of are the just because you have a managed provider available, you still need the native dll libraries. Oracle, for example. The client needs the oracle client libraries in order to connect to Oracle. I mentioned some of the shortcomings of ODBC above in regards to pooling. A great source for third party data providers can be found at the mono project (Firebird, MySql, SQLLite, PostgresSQL, Mimer, Sybase..)
The common namespace is the abstract definition for all data providers. You would use this when you aren't sure which data provider your application will ultimately use. Using the DbProviderFactory you can instantiate objects for a specific data provider. Suman Chakrabarti has a post showing how to use the DbProviderFactory class.
Joydip Kanjilal has a post on handling exceptions in ADO.NET. If you catch a SqlException, you would examine the number property to determine the root cause of the problem.
Next -> Section II Selecting and Querying Data