Posts

Showing posts from June, 2011

How to create a ChildWindow Login Popup for Windows Phone 7

Image
Introduction After struggling with a navigation issue in my app of when to show/go to/return from the Settings page that captured the user name and password, I decided to pop up a window on any page where and when credentials were necessary but not currently known. Since I knew I was going to add more credential-requiring pages in my app, using a popup allowed me to reduce my dependency on navigation silliness between the pages, and have a more encapsulated design.   This post will show you how to pop up a ChildWindow on the app page to grab the user’s login credentials. The control allows the old username and password to be passed into the control so that previous values can appear. The tab order/enter key switches from textbox to textbox to button.     The sample application included in this post just displays the results on the calling page.   Acknowledgements Several other posts helped me along the way:   Jesse Liberty’s video “Creating a custom popup i

How to Get and Install an SSL Certificate for a Windows Azure Deployment (Web Service) used by Windows Phone 7

Image
Introduction In all development processes, you need to perform a security review in order to responsibly handle your user’s data . With my Windows Phone 7 application, the process turned into a huge decision and many incremental steps to handle. This blog post will enumerate how I took my unsecured WP7 app and corresponding Windows Azure website and secured them. This blog includes a detailed step-by-step of deploying a SSL certificate on Windows Azure. Process Summary DNS Name Change : Mapped my subdomain (wazup.berryintl.com) to my Windows Azure subdomain (*.cloudapp.net) via a CName change to my DNS on Network Solutions. Cert Provider : Found an SSL Cert provider. Dev Box/IIS : Created the certificate request in the IIS Manager. Cert Provider : Since I was requesting a wildcard certificate to handle all subdomains as well, I received two files: one for the domain and one to handle the wildcard subdomains. Dev Box/Certificate Manager : The next part of the pr

How a technical conference should be / representing data

This last week I attended “Information Making Sense of the Deluge” hosted by The Economist (on my own dime and time). http://ideas.economist.com/event/information Available on line at http://fora.tv/conference/ideas_economy_information   First , this was the best conference that I have attended in at least 20 years… They had a strict “No Death by PowerPoint” policy. Less than 300 participants and 60 speakers. Talks and panel discussions were typically just 10 – 20 minutes each. A massive number of awesome speakers. Since we often present data, I should point folks to the works of Edward Tufte a Yale Emeritus Professor who is renowned for his data visualization and information design (see http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/ -- he is giving one-day courses in Seattle on the 20 th and 21 st of June). He has written publications on some of the problems with PowerPoints. These URLs will show some of his data visualizations: Bing Images Google I

Create a User Work Area Database on SQL Server

Long ago, in a past millennium (literally), I was working for Microsoft Licensing and we needed to create a User Work Area where power users can create their own tables, stored procedures, etc. A colleague from those days asked me for a modern equivalency. I like this idea because it amounts to crowd-sourcing of data . People own their data and can share it with whoever they wish easily from a massive repository. Of course, IT Micro-Managers may not be too happy because it may threaten some of their position-justification. I like the concept because it can make a firm more agile with better sharing of data, power users leveraging power user.   No more politics, let us get to the proposed pattern and then the code. The idea is to create a SCHEMA for each person and then grant him all of the permissions for his SCHEMA. He thus has his sandbox… The person (super user in terms of skills) can thus grant permission to other users to access his SCHEMA – sharing.