By: Alejandro Villarreal During database development, unique indexes (or constraints) are very important part of the design. There’s always data for which you do not want to have repeated values, like usernames or email addresses. Different applications might have their own uniqueness requirements, but they all usually have at least one. It’s great when we can identify those requirements from the start and create the appropriate indexes up front. But what if your application now needs to enforce uniqueness on the values of a million-row table which has tons of duplicates in the production environment? A naïve solution (and definitely not appropriate for a production environment) wou...

By: Alejandro Villarreal Debugging replication-related problems can be extremely hard if you do not have access to an environment with the exact same replication architecture where the problem occurred in the first place. As consultants working for several clients, it is not feasible to have an exact replica of each of their environments, so a feasible solution is to set up a copy of the desired environment “on demand”, on virtual machines. This is exactly what we did a couple of weeks back, and although we finally got replication to work, we had to deal with this error first: Error 18483: Could not connect to server '<Server>\<Instance>' because '<login>' is not define...

By David EspinoJquery UI controls are actually very useful on many web projects and jqGrid is an excellent example. This is a really handy control that can help us to render our list of objects using Ajax calls. How to fill the jqGrid? The jqGrid needs a json object with a particular structure. This is an example of the json object used to fill a jqGrid. {"page":1,"total":100000,"records":1000000,"rows":[{"id":"1","cell":["1","VINET","1996/07/04","32.3800","Vins et alcools Chevalier"]}, {"id":"2","cell":["2","TOMSP",...

By Rosario A. First we need to join Visual Studio 2010 and select the Windows Phone Application project Solution ExplorerThis is the appearance in the Solution Explorer for the generated project. Instead of quoting the entire content of each file, I will describe its purpose. ApplicationIcon.pngThis image should be replaced with the one that is going to represent the application. It is the one that the users will see in the phone application. Make sure it is memorable. App.xamlThe idea is to see this file as the web.config in ASP.NET. Here is where you will find comprehensive data and application settings. It is also where I prefer to keep my styles, even thought is not require...

By Denisse Zavala Microsoft recently revealed the details of the Windows Phone Application Platform. It is built upon Silverlight, XNA Framework and the .NET Compact Framework, and MS rely on this combination to claim that development of rich applications will not have a steep learning curve for developers who are familiar with these technologies. I wanted to get my hands on this platform so I used my basic Silverlight skills to create a really simple application to manage a To-Do list. Here the details: First thing to do is get the Windows Phone developer tools CTP, which includes the VS 2010 Express for Windows Phone development tool and an add-on to the VS 2010 RC to enable phone de...

A data view web part is very useful when comes to SharePoint display forms customization. You can add this web part by using the SharePoint designer tool. 1.       Insert a data view web part onto the page you want to display in the list by selecting Data View > Insert Data View from the main menu. 2.       Using the Data Source Library Task Pane in SharePoint designer select ‘Connect to another library‘ and browse to the site that contains the list you wish to display. 3.       Expand the new site in the Data Source Library Task Pane and select the list or library that contains the information you wish to display. From the drop down select ‘Show Data‘ to populate the Data Pre...

By Denisse Zavala Sharing server variables with client side scripts is nowadays a situation than can be easily overcome by choosing one of the several existing approaches. When it comes to accessing the values stored in the .resx file the story is not different, and in this post you can find a really simple way to achieve it. 1.      Add a web form to the web site, clear the markup so that only the @Page directive is present: 2.      Use the Page_Load event handler to render the resources’ values as Javascriptmembers: 3.      Use a ScriptManager control in the master page to register the script created: 4.      Now the resources are available throughout the client scripts us...

By Guillermo Cedillo Use Microsoft Ajax to extend you services If you want your service works as a REST service and return JSON is not necessary to do some complex modifications in the web.config or import special libraries. When you have a WCF or an asmx web service already implemented,  the easiest and cleaner way to extend your services is using the ScriptManager Control of Microsoft Ajax. First, enable your service to work with the Script Manager add or uncomment [ScriptService] in every web service that you want to extend. Then in your page add the Script Manager and add the reference to your services like this: <asp:ScriptManagerID="ScriptManager1"runat="s...

By Guillermo Cedillo   There are four principles of design: balance, emphasis, rhythm, and unity. These principles of design help you to combine the visual elements into a good design. Balance Visual interest is what you balance in design. Different colors, shapes sizes, etc. create different degrees of interest. It is the distribution of this interest that you need to control. Each element on a layout has visual weight that is determined by its size, darkness or lightness, and thickness of lines. There are two basic approaches to balance: symmetrical and asymmetrical. Symmetrical balance is an arrangement of elements so that they are evenly distributed to the left and to the right ...

By Edith C. This is very useful when you are talking about quickly duplicate or backup your SharePoint Sites structure and information. The site template is saved through the SharePoint web user interface, which empowers users and avoids the need for administrative intervention. Now that we have a customized site, we are ready to save it as a custom site template for others to reuse. The steps to save the custom site template (for a SharePoint Team Site) are shown below: 1.       Navigate to Site Settings in your customized site. 2.       Select Save site as template under the Look and Feel section. 3.       Fill out the Save Site as Template page and then click OK.  At this tim...