Whilst expanding one’s knowledge on Windows Azure one will eventually end up with the authentication and authorization dealings using Windows Identity Foundation. Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) is a Microsoft technology that offers APIs for ASP.NET and WCF developers that can be used to build claims-aware and federation capable applications.
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In this new series of posts, I’m going to share my personal experiences while working with user stories for gathering, tracking and planning requirements.
So let me start with a definition. The ideal user story represents an independent, estimable and prioritizable functional or non-functional requirement, is written in the language of the business and adds value to the project or system. That’s it? Well no, it’s not that easy unfortunately, but I promise you will get a whole lot closer after reading this article (or run away screaming with more questions than you started with).
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I was getting a CommunicationObjectFaultedException every time I started my service and I didn’t have any clue as to why. Because during my earlier runs it just “worked”.
I thought last week while presenting on Windows Azure to my colleague's I had every thing well prepared and tried and tested every thing.
This was one of those kind of moments you want you computer program to be alive so you could hit it in the face.
Today I figured out what I did “wrong”. What happened was that I did a check-in of the code, which is no problem in itself, but it is a problem because it makes the web.config READ-only. And for some obscure reason the devfabric controllers wants this to be readable.
In short I checked out the web.config and could start my service again :-)
Let’s start by stating clearly that Windows Phone 7 Development is not supported by Microsoft in a Virtual Machine environment. Still, maybe like you too, I like to keep my laptop clean and have all different development environments in different Virtual Machines. It helps preventing conflicts across all different tools that you end up installing when you target a specific server or client environment. Be it third party tools, Silverlight or different databases… aargh…
Personally I enjoy using VMWare Player a lot and that is where I tried to make the Windows Phone 7 development work. This is a one click install from the MSDN App Hub if you have a Windows 7 workstation running. If you already have Visual Studio 2010 there or Expression Blend 4.0, all tools will become part of your existing development environment. Otherwise Express versions of these tools will be installed. Getting started is the easy part.
The moment I tried to use the Windows Phone 7 emulator however, my troubles started. It turned out that the default of 1GB ram memory allocated should be increased to at least 2GB. Also my hardware did not correctly support the WDDM video requirements. That is something that will quietly present itself in the Device Manager. Next fix needed:
virtualHW.version = "7"
guestOS = "windows7"
or at least
guestOS = "winvista"
Now the emulator will be able to get past the cold boot sequence and run Windows Phone 7.
All seems to be well until you want to deploy to a hardware Windows Phone 7 device. You need the Zune software install to be able to sync with a Windows Phone 7 (yes I understand, no its not something I enjoy). The trouble is that the guest OS does not support USB 2.0 by default and this is a requirement to make sync work. The last fixes are:
ehci.present = "TRUE"
and if needed:
ehci.pciSlotNumber = "16"
There are no changes needed on the host. Zune complains in my Virtual Machine that its not happy with the video support, but I am not planning to sync all my content from this developer environment, so I ignored it.
Now it works for me! Happy coding!
As of now you can download the latest version of Fluent Assertions directly from within Visual Studio 2010. Just install the NuGet package manager, select Add Library Package Reference from the project context menu and search for FluentAssertions.
Yesterday, I blogged about the newest release of Fluent Assertions for .NET and Silverlight and promised to demonstrate the new event monitoring syntax. Since I’m a Silverlight addict, I decided to show you an example of a MVVM unit test when using the traditional Assert class and the same example using Fluent Assertions.
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Christmas usually means a week off and a whole lot of free time between the social obligations and spending some quality time with my wife and daughter. That’s why I decided to get rid of some of the backlog items for the next version of Fluent Assertions. And I’m done, version 1.3.0 is a fact.
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