Nintex Analytics 2010 on Vahid Taslimi

We are hiring and here are some reasons for you to come and work with me at Nintex

Mon, 10 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

We are hiring and here are some reasons for you to come and work with me at Nintex

So first things first. You are asking if this is a marketing email? answer is yes. I am expanding my team and I am writing this post to convince smart developers like yourself to come and work with us at Nintex. It’s me writing this and these are my own view points. No one from the company has asked me to write this (in fact no one knows that I am writing this. not even HR).

How to delete a team project from tfs online tfs.visualstudio.com

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

How to delete a team project from tfs online tfs.visualstudio.com

unfortunately we cannot delete a team project from visual studio or online control panel. to delete a team project you need to use the command line utility.

run visual studio tools command prompt tools. make sure you open the x86 version as x64 version wouldnt work.

and then run this command:

tfsdeleteproject /collection:https://YOUR-ACCOUNT-URL.visualstudio.com/DefaultCollection “Your project name”

if required this will prompt you to login with a Microsoft Account.

TFS.VisualStudio.com TF30063: You are not authorized to access Collection

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

TFS.VisualStudio.com TF30063: You are not authorized to access Collection

if you are trying to connect to team foundation server online through visual studio and you get unauthorized excetion.

first make sure you have got access to that account and if you do then it most probably must be because of a cached microsoft account which does not have access to the collection. to fix this:

Open visual studio
using a visual studio built in browser, navigate to http://tfs.visualstudio.com
Sign out of the exisiting logged in account
Log in using the microsoft account which has got access to the collection
and you are good to go.

Written by vahid

How to host website in the Windows Azure Virtual Machine

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

How to host website in the Windows Azure Virtual Machine

Well as you know Microsoft is now offering IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) services through the new Virtual Machine role.

It’s quite good and easy to get up and running with it but. In matter of minutes you can have your windows or linux virtual machine ready to be used. You can shut them off or backup their VHDs.

Challenges in switching to Agile/Scrum

Sat, 08 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Challenges in switching to Agile/Scrum

there is no doubt that agile practices specially scrum is pretty popular these days. This is not because scrum is something funky to have but rather because it really works and works very well. i know what you are saying now… you would be saying but hold on i have seen some companies/projects which started to switch to scrum but they all ended up in tears and had to leave it half way.

Cool Extension for Visual Studio 2010

Tue, 29 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Cool Extension for Visual Studio 2010

i have been using Power Commands for Visual Studio for a long time. but i had never noticed that it’s a got very good feature for automatically formatting the document on save. not only it can format the document, but also it can remove and sort using statements in the files when you save them.

it this really good for me because we use stylecop to enforce coding standard within our dev team.

How to configure drill down report in Nintex Analytics 2010

Thu, 03 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

How to configure drill down report in Nintex Analytics 2010

Time to time we need to be able to connect couple of report to make an end to end usage story of reports.

Fortunately Nintex Analytics 2010 fully support drill down functionality and most of the out of the box report are configured to drill down to a related report.

but if you need to configure your own custom report to drill down to a report, don’t worry it’s quite easy in NA2010.

How to flag system/image file types in Nintex Analytics 2010

Thu, 03 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

How to flag system/image file types in Nintex Analytics 2010

When you are after some statistics in SharePoint, say number of user activities, you want to exclude activities on certain file types. For example we normally are not interested on activities on the webpart or xml file but we are rather interested in activities on docx or xlsx files.

Nintex Analytics 2010 enables to mark the files that you normally want to exclude from your reports as either System file or Image file. it then gives you parameters in some reports to exclude activities on the file types which are flagged as system or image files from the result.

How to create a new report in Nintex Analytics 2010

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

How to create a new report in Nintex Analytics 2010

in this video I show you how to create a new report in Nintex Analytics 2010. I’ll show you:

how to select a dataset for your report* how to configure report parameters* How set the report name, description, icon and other properties* How to customize chart visualization* How to customize table visualization

Written by vahid

Thursday, April 26, 2012 at 6:35 AM

Nintex Analytics 2010 Out of the box reports-Sites&Pages

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

How To Install Nintex Analytics 2010

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

How To Install Nintex Analytics 2010

one of the best thing about Nintex Analytics 2010 is the installation experience. like other Nintex products, the installation experience is fast and easy. you just need to let Nintex Analytics know a few settings and it will take care of the rest.

in the following video I’ll show how to install Nintex Analytics 2010 on your environment.

Written by vahid

Wednesday, April 18, 2012 at 7:54 AM

How to trigger a Nintex Workflow from a Nintex Analytics report schedule

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

How to trigger a Nintex Workflow from a Nintex Analytics report schedule

well we all know that Nintex Analytics provides a great insight to our SharePoint environments through the vast number of reports it provides out of the box.

But how can we turn these information into some actions? the good news is that Nintex Analytics 2010 integrates well with Nintex Workflow which would enable us to make some decision and execute a set up process based on the outcome of a report.

Using Unity with ASP.NET WEB API Controller

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Using Unity with ASP.NET WEB API Controller

Support for Ioc containers is backed into ASP.NET WEB API and uses the service locator pattern dependency resolver by default.

the default service locator implements the IDependencyResolver interface. This interface has two methods.

GetService: Creates one instance of a specified type.* GetServices: Create a collection of objects of a specified type.

in order to use Microsoft Unity framework with ASP.NET WEB API we need to map these to methods to Resolve and ResolveAll methods of Utity. to do so first add the following method to your global.asax.cs or your bootstrapper class

Hosting ASP.NET WEB API

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Hosting ASP.NET WEB API

You may want to host you HTTP Service i.e. ASP.NET WEB API in a console app. well it can be easily done.

to show this lets create a console app and add reference to the following assemblies:

System.Web

System.Web.Http

System.Web.Http.Common

System.Web.Http.SelfHost

System.Web.Http.WebHost

System.Net;

System.Net.Http.Formatting;

System.Net.Http.Headers;

this step is optional but for just touching on Json.net I am going to install Json.net using Nuget.

![image](http://www.taslimi.me/Media/Default/Windows-Live-Writer/Hosting-ASP.NET-WEB-API_13135/image_thumb.png "image")

Now lets add a CarInfo class to return it in our controller

SQL syntax formatter

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

SQL syntax formatter

Well it’s really pity that neither VS2010 nor SQL development studio provide SQL syntax formatter. but anyway there good news is that there are sites like http://www.tsqltidy.com out there which would this for you for free.

but that was not enough for me. i wanted to have tool with me to do this even when i am not connected to the internet–although does not happen that often -

Invisible character when parsing DateTime

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Invisible character when parsing DateTime

Today we faced a crazy situation. we have a piece of code in one of our applications which parses date and time value entered into a text box. Being lazy/smart developers we normally copy paste the sample value from the help file in order to test it. but crazy part was that when we copy paste it, .net could not parse the value throwing exception saying that the string was not in correct format. but if we typed exactly the same value it would work! aha let me copy paste both values into notepad and compare them char by char. ok they are exactly the same.

ASP.Net WEB API VS WCF Service

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

ASP.Net WEB API VS WCF Service

Well as soon as i heard and read about asp.net web api, i was very excited about it but in between i had that mmmmm moment. i was like, this is great but what about WCF? I am not going to create any WCF services anymore?

so I had think again about it but could not find any concrete answer as these two are overlapping in many areas. so I had to do a bit more R&D about the differences and I came across this blog post from Matt Milner.

Make a call to a JSON/XML ASP.Net WEB API from server code

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Make a call to a JSON/XML ASP.Net WEB API from server code

There is plenty of articles out there on how to make a ajax call to a asp.net web api service. but what if you want to make a call to the same service from a server code? this can happen because of various reasons like when you want to offer a service and use IP validation.

anyway this is quite simple to call a service exposed by ASP.net WEB API either using JSON or XML. and it is like calling a WCF or XML web service from a server side code without adding a reference to the service.

The Visual Studio 2011 Fakes Framework

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The Visual Studio 2011 Fakes Framework

I was just reading this blog post about Unit Testing Improvement in Visual Studio 2011 and noticed that there is something new called Fakes Framework.

I didn’t get it first time so I had to read it again and also had to read this MSDN article to get my head around it. I mean I was getting so excited about it that I had to read it twice to make sure I have understood it properly. then I went like wow that’s great. now I can test old SharePoint code without TypeMock.

ASP.NET Web API

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

ASP.NET Web API

I am a huge fan of Ajax. If you want to create a great experience for the users of your website – regardless of whether you are building an ASP.NET MVC or an ASP.NET Web Forms site — then you need to use Ajax. Otherwise, you are just being cruel to your customers.

Most of the new websites expose data from the server as JSON and use jQuery to retrieve and update that data from the browser.

ASP.Net Page Lifecycle Events

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

ASP.Net Page Lifecycle Events

We all know a asp.net page events, but do we exactly know the orders? and what each event is good for?

well I am putting this list together to talk about the events.

PreInit * use this event to:
- Set a master page dynamically.+ Set the Theme property dynamically.+ Read or set profile property values.* Init* Use this event to read or initialize control properties* InitComplete* Use this event to make changes to view state that you want to make sure are persisted after the next postback.* LoadState* * ProcessPostData* * PreLoad* * Load * * LoadComplete * * PreRender * if you have got custom controls on your page and you want to manupulate the final page output based on some values in a custom control, you need to put your logic in this event.* SaveState * Any changes to the page or controls at this point affect rendering, but the changes will not be retrieved on the next postback.* Render

Written by vahid

Why I believe in lean software development

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Why I believe in lean software development

Few weeks ago I got myself an Amazon Kindle to facilitate book reading and hopefully get back my reading habits. I am so amazed by the device that today I twitted “it’s my best gadget”. now there are very genuine reasons behind the twit.

it’s meant to be used to read books and it does it perfectly.

it has a great screen which is optimized for the reading.
does not hurt your eyes.
you can read books even in the direct sunlight.
it’s handy and light so very easy to carry with you
it’s got a long lasting battery life
bot built in dictionary which is extremely easy to use
has got a great search functionality
has got wireless connection so that Amazon can push the books immediately to the device
it’s very very easy to use

I have just mentioned couple of it’s great features. don’t get me wrong, I don’t work for Amazon and I am not doing any promotion for the Kindle. the moral of what I have mentioned above it that IT DOES WHAT IT IS SUPPOSED TO DO AT IT’S BEST.