.NET From India

PDC Downloader - No More !!

A few months back I wrote and application called the PDC downloader and Viewer and released it at CodePlex.

Over the last couple of weekends, I kind of updated the application, so that it can also be used to get the Mix 2009 videos. So now it is a more of a generic Event video downloader and viewer. If MS continues to use similar naming conventions, this application can be updated quite easily to download and view videos from other future events too.

The new version 1.0.0.3 of the updated Event Video downloader and viewer is now available for download from Codeplex.

Technorati Tags: PDC 2008,Mix 2009,Video Downloader,Project,Codeplex

TSQL variables and null

It has been quite sometime since I actually coded TSQL. So I had to kind of brush up the hidden knowledge over the weekend when I wrote a small stored proc for a personal project I am working on.
(expect to see something in Codeplex, if I can get it finished before the new year)

I declared a variable and wrote out some code as follow:

    declare @tempstring as nvarchar(max)

    <More code here>

    select @tempstring=@tempstring + ' ' + @word

I was kind of left scratching my head as @tempstring always seem to end up being empty, even when @word did have some data.

Then I remembered something from my start up SQL classes... anything+null is always null. So I initialized @tempstring to an empty string and viola, there the data was, correct and ready to use.

Having been working so much in VB that it actually took me quite a while to figure out those small klinks that are specific to TSQL.

This is the kind of situation that may really affect someone moving from C# to VB or vice versa too. :)

PDC 2008 Vide Viewer and Downloader - Version 1.0.0.2 Available

Over the weekend I fixed up a couple of bugs in the PDC 2008 Video Viewer and Downloader( My WPF based Viewer and Downloader for PDC 2008 Videos). This version is not available for download in CodePlex. All releases in Codeplex also contain the Source code. Do not download the source from the Source tab. The Source tab is a older version of the source and not the latest.

PDC 2008 Video Downloader and Viewer - v 1.0.0.1

I have already fixed a couple of bugs in the application. To make it easier to download and manage versions I have created a CodePlex project to manager this applications.

I am not using the source code part of Codeplex. Instead, I will use the releases system to upload zips with both the source and the executables.

PDC 2008 Viewer and Downloaded on Codeplex

Version 1.0.0.1 is already uploaded.

PDC 2008 Video Downloader and Viewer

I couple of years back I wrote a .NET tool the just download the whole set of PDC videos for offline viewing. So when the PDC 2008 videos became available I thought I would update the tool. But then I thought that this gives me a chance to kind of mess around with some newer technologies and so wrote a PDC video downloader and viewer using WPF, VS 2008 and SQL CE 3.5.

The whole source and executable are available for download below. I also added the session and speaker information that is available online at the PDC site, so it is a true Offline PDC viewing experience. I have also added a few extras like try and find out the blog of the speakers (this is based on an automated live search and so I expect that there are quite a bit of wrong links. If you can update the database and send it back to me, I would update the application).

Note that the application currently only downloads WMV-HD, so make sure you have enough free space on your HDD and bandwidth to download (from what I found searching online the videos will be 50+ GBs).

I don't have too much of error handling code, so expect crashes when things go wrong. If you find a bug, let me know, I will fix it when I get time.

Download pdc_2008_video_downloader_and_viewer_v1.0.0.zip

New Project from Exisiting Code

It does happen sometimes that you start off a project write up a few classes and then suddenly realize that you need to break this up into multiple projects or re-organize your solution structure.

So when I saw this post on an option in Visual Studio 2008 that was supposedly called "Project From Existing Code" I was quite surprised how I never noticed it.

When I launched my VS 2008 instance I could not find this option. Then I went and reset my toolbar settings and set it up for the default development environment setting and this option appeared.

I always set my dev settings to the VB Developer Settings and this option seems to be not available in the menu for that setting. If you want to use a different setting and want to use this option, you will need to customize your Menu Options to do so.

Moving a project from VS 2005 to VS 2008

When you open a VS 2005 project in VS 2008, Visual Studio offers to migrate the project to the new format. Usually there should be no problem with this and all your project files, solution files, Test cases etc should move seamlessly to the 2008 format.

But if you do build your project you will notice that your output assemblies actually target .NET Framework 2.0 and not 3.5. This is basically because the migration retains the targeted framework to make sure you application does not fail. The method to change this setting after migration is not easy to find.

For VB projects, this setting is actually hidden inside, My Project -> Compile -> Advanced Compiler Options dialog. Obviously, this is not very easy to find. (See Image)

In C# projects this setting is a lot easier to find in Project Properties -> Application Tab itself. I am not sure why the VB team actually made this setting so difficult to find.

Late Binding - VB vs C#

Scott Hanselman has a nice post on trying to use C# and VB with Office Interop and how he found that VB made it a lot easier.

I have always argued that the two thing that acutally bring power to Office Interop when using VB is Optional arguments and late binding. Though I have made this argument many times to my peers (almost always without code in hand as they are mostly arguments over cups of coffee) this post actually has an example using the two languages and nobody can dispute the differnce in complexity that the C# sample has.

This also illustrates a point I always try to make.. It rarely makes sense arguing VB vs C# except in certain scenarios. This is one of them... In most cases choose the language you are comfortable with and start coding. It just happens that VB is that language of choice for me..

India Stock Quote Component version 1.2.0 Released

Ok, finally finished the basic things I wanted in place for the 1.2.0 release. Checked in the code today morning and have also created a release for this version.

New Features

1. Create a Interface that will allow you to just switch websites from where you want to get the quote. Out of the box, this release supports, Yahoo India and NSE India sites.
2. Added the NSE India provider. This only supports quotes as of now as the NSE charts are based on java applets.
3. So reorganization of code to make it more maintainable and some additional comments to help you, if you are looking at the code.

India Stock Quotes Component

I had written a small component as a part of my Vista Gadget attempt sometime back to get the stock quote for Indian Shares from the Yahoo Finance Site. I kind of left that out in my blog for a long time and then this week I wanted a similar component for something else.

So I just took the old component and then cleaned it up and created a CodePlex project for it. I will be updating this component based on what I need and then updates will depend on feature request.

India Stock Quotes (from Yahoo Finance)

Update: I updated the component over the weekend to also send the Chart images. This feature is not available in version 1.1