The Assembly demo party is a demoscene and gaming event in Finland. The most recent Assembly was held from the 4th to 7th August 2011 at Hartwall Areena in Helsinki.

The first Assembly was held from July 24th to July 26th 1992, in Kauniainen. It was organized by the Amiga demo groups Complex and Rebels, and the PC demo group Future Crew. The staff grew into a large non-profit group of individuals known as Assembly Organizing. Through the 1990s, Assembly grew so large that even exposition halls no longer sufficed, and only the largest of sports arenas met the partygoers’ needs. In 1999 they rented the largest sports arena in the country, Hartwall Areena in Helsinki, with over 5000 visitors and 3500 computers on the ice rink and it has been held there ever since. As of 2011 the party has been held for 20 consecutive years.

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We have been on the quiet side on the blog lately, but fortunately that’s because we’ve been super busy with customer work. This means we need more dev muscle.

Sorry for spamming the blog with a recruitment plug, but if you are a guru dev looking for a change of scenery in the Vaasa region, have a look at our job posting on our main web site here. Thanks!

In a previous SharePoint project, I implemented a few event handlers that get called whenever an item in a list gets changed (or added/deleted). There were a few problems along the way that took a bit of searching before I found solutions. This post documents a few of the things that are good to know.

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A couple of days after my last post about tools for WPF debugging, I got the word that Snoop has been made open source and released on Codeplex. There are versions for both 32- and 64-bit systems, and even WPF 4.0 is supported.

This version of Snoop is based on version 2 of the original Snoop and contains a merge of the improvements done by different people, so it supports on-the-fly editing of properties, WPF interop scenarios (WPF hosting Windows Forms or vice versa), bug fixes including support for visual trees with more that 255 levels, among other improvements. Check out Cory Plotts’ blog post about the release.

Just a short note about a couple of tools I’ve been using when developing WPF applications. Please refer to the links for more information about the tools.

Snoop provides visual debugging of WPF applications at runtime.

Crack.NET is a runtime debugging and scripting tool. Also supports Windows Forms applications.

Mole is a Visual Studio visualizer allowing unlimited drilling into objects and sub-objects.

Due to the way the hooks are written, neither Snoop nor Crack.NET will work on 64-bit processes. However, there is an x64 version of Snoop available on Dan’s IK Blog (there is an updated version here). This version is based on an earlier version of Snoop where property value editing is supported, so even though you’re living in a 32-bit world, you can take advantage of this version.

Check them out!

In this posting, I’ll give an introduction to how you can use the new features provided by ASP.NET AJAX to call methods in web services from your own JavaScript code with very little fuss. (Well, at least that’s the idea…)

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As mentioned in a previous posting, Fiddler can be a great tool when debugging HTTP-based communication, particularly for webservices, WCF and similar (but really, any kind of HTTP traffic can be debugged with the tool). There is just one slight problem with it: by default, it is not usable for debugging localhost-based servers. In other words: if your server URL looks something like http://localhost:12345/MyService.asmx, you will not be able to debug it with Fiddler. That is, unless you apply “The Dot Trick”, which will be described in this blog posting.

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There is this saying that “there is no computer system with a decent level of self-respect that doesn’t include at least one Windows Service”. Generally, this rule seems to be pretty true. Even if you try to build as much as possible of the system with a platform such as Microsoft BizTalk Server  or Windows SharePoint Services (because of personal or customer-specified preferences), there are likely to occur certain parts of the system that are simply not feasible or practical to implement within the boundaries of the platform.

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Microsoft Office Groove has a nifty little hotkey. If you press shift twice, a dialog comes up to let you write a message. This is even more annoying than the accessibility sticky keys or filter keys dialog. And guess what, there is no way to disable the hotkey in the user interface! I haven’t found the place to do it at least.

I got so annoyed with this that I asked our internal IT support how to disable it. The answer was that you have to edit the registry.

Here are the instructions I got. And remember, all the normal disclaimers apply: It is dangerous to modify the registry if you don’t know what you’re doing! We are not responsible for any damage that may occur if you try to follow these instructions. With that out of the way, here’s the information you have been waiting for.

1. Make sure that Groove is shut down
2. Locate the path HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Groove
3. If this does not contain a sub key called InstaGroove, then create it
4. For the InstaGroove key, create a new DWORD Value called DisableHotkey
5. Set the value data to 1
6. Start Groove and verify that pressing shift twice does not pop up the message any more

Really simple, right?

When declaring a feature, you can add an <ActivationDependencies> section to your feature.xml file. Here you can list the features your own feature is depending on.

According to the documentation on activation dependencies (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa543162.aspx), the depending features get automatically activated if they are in the same scope: “If a Feature is dependent on another Feature at the same scope, and the second Feature is not activated when the first one is activated, Windows SharePoint Services activates the second Feature”

This is incorrect!

The second feature is activated automatically only if it is hidden!