New Feed/Blog Site Location Reminder

Just a reminder to everyone that my new blog RSS feed is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/LyalinMeshBlog

and my new Blog location is:

http://www.lyalin.com/blog

Please disregard this location and all previous RSS feeds. Thank you!

Shutting down Blogger Version of the blog, moving on to new location

I am finally ready to announce my new blog site at:

http://www.lyalin.com/blog/

With this transition I am moving away from Blogger and into a self-hosted solution running BlogEngine.NET. For the full details, check out my first post.

My new blog is not 100% operational as there are still links I want to add and some features to put back, but it will be completed soon.

I highly recommend everyone following this blog to upgrade their feed to my new location at:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/LyalinMeshBlog

To Summarize: NO MORE POSTS WILL HAPPEN ON THIS BLOG ADDRESS, PLEASE VISIT MY NEW BLOG SITE INSTEAD!

Visual Studio: Unable to create the virtual directory

Problem

The other day I was in Visual Studio on my Windows Vista machine and attempted to create a Virtual Directory by going into the web project properties tab and selecting “Use IIS Web Server”.

Unfortunately Visual Studio gave me this error:

“Unable to create the virtual directory. The access local IIS Web sites, you must run Visual Studio in the context of an administrator account….”

The solution is right there in the message but I sometimes find that putting up a blog post can help someone, so here is the step-by-step:

Solution

First its worth saying that this issue should only be a problem for people running Windows Vista, as Vista has a tighter security model that does not automatically run applications as Administrator even when your local account is an admin.

So to resolve this problem first find your Visual Studio Icon and right-click on it:

Once you do so one of the menu options will be “Run as administrator” which once clicked will take you through a few more prompts to confirm this action. Once Visual Studio starts though you should have no more problems so try your action again.

Do note you will need to run Visual Studio using this special right-click feature each time you want to create a Virtual Directory in the future.

DasBlog Conversion, Goodbye Blogger

As all of you know I have been hard to work to migrate off Blogger to my own hosted Blog engine. I have settled (for now) on DasBlog and am in the process of configuring it in a Virtual Machine to test everything ahead of going live.

Due to this my blog posts will much but slower then usual while I am in this process, so wish me luck and I look forward on getting your help to test the new blog setup.

Released: Composite Application Guidance for WPF

The Patterns and Practices group has been hard at work on a project codenamed “Prism” designed to “help you more easily build enterprise-level Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) client applications”.

As of Yesterday July 3rd this project has been officially released under the name: Composite Application Guidance for WPF. To find out the full details and download it visit the following resource sites:

• MSDN site: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc707819.aspx
• Community site: http://www.codeplex.com/compositewpf

For anyone interested in a quick summary of what's in this release, here are the official release notes:

In This Release

The following technical challenges are addressed:

Modularity: The Composite Application Library promotes modularity by allowing you to implement business logic, visual components, infrastructure components, presenter or controller components, and any other objects the application requires, in separate modules. Developers can easily create the UI and implement business logic independently of each other.

User Interface Composition: The Composite Application Library promotes user interface composition by allowing you to implement visual components from various loosely coupled visual components, known as views, which may reside in separate modules. The visual components may display content from multiple back-end systems. To the user, it appears as one seamless application.

The guidance includes the following assets:

• Stock Trader Reference Implementation
• Composite Application Library for WPF
• Quickstarts (4)
• Hands on Lab (1)
• Documentation (300 pages)
• Composite Baseline Architecture
• UI Designer Guidance
• Design Concepts (3)
• Technical Concepts (8)
• Patterns (6) + Patterns Overview
• How-to’s (20)

Excellent Silverlight Blogs

I’ve been meaning to do a more complete post on this subject but time is simply not allowing, so here is just a quick few links to some excellent Silverlight Blogs and recently published training videos:

Blogs

• http://joel.neubeck.net/
• http://timheuer.com/blog/
• http://blogs.msdn.com/timrule/

50 Training Videos

http://www.mtaulty.com/SLVideos.html

Podcasting Kit for SharePoint: Technical Preview

As Podcasting becomes a more and more normal way of communicating with an audience some corporations are moving into using this technology for internal broadcasts.

For those companies using SharePoint the process of publishing content is about to get much easier with the release of the Podcasting Kit for Sharepoint. For anyone interested in this technology checkout the Technical Preview found at this URL on CodePlex:

http://www.codeplex.com/pks

adCenter Analytics (Beta) – My Experiences

As anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I recently said Goodbye Google Analytics, and hello AdCenter.

AdCenter Analytics is Microsoft's web analytics projects formerly codenamed Gatineau. The basic concept is the service allows you to embed a small amount of JavaScript into your webpages and it will track all traffic to the site. This technique has been used for many years now by various providers of website traffic analytics and im very excited to see us get into the same product offering.

Now lets talk about some of the details on my experience getting started with AdCenter Analytics.

Getting Started

After getting my account activated I entered the website and registered by blog by creating a profile:

Once my blog was registered a small customized javascript snippet was provided and I installed it into my master blog HTML template that would ensure it appears on every page.

By the next day my profile Status showed GREEN as traffic was being recorded and I was ready to look at the reports, which is really the heart of this system.

Reports

The interface is very clean, for a complete demo checkout the official website but here are some snippets:

The above image shows the various statistics AdCenter Analytics is able to track, very useful information such as:

• Number of Unique visitors
• Referrals (where traffic is coming from, search engines or direct links)
• Visitor Information such as the browser, operating system, screen resolution and even the language of my visitors
• And many more as you can see above

Within the first full day of tracking my site had already hit 165 unique visitors:

and I was able to see such things like most people had at least 1024x768 as their screen resolution: 

I am also able to analyze where people are coming from and if they are new or returning visitors. This is great to gauge the kind of traffic and audience that comes to my blog.

Interface

I really cannot say enough nice things about the interface, its clean and intuitive as this example can show:

Clicking on the various duration bars above such as the week in the first screenshot (marked goldish/yellow) or month in the second resets all the statistics below it to show the data for this period.

Also almost all the graphical representations in reports can be highlighted with the mouse for the full detail, again a very helpful feature:

Still Beta

As i continued to explore the system I did find that features such as Print, Email and Exporting of reports was not still implemented:

This is understandable as this is a relatively new (and complex) product that will take time to development and bring into its first release, this is a BETA after all.

My Impression

Now that I got to fully play with the product I must say I am very impressed. Two advantages already stand out for me over Google’s product:

• Cleaner sleek looking interface
• Relatively “real time” statistics (see the word “Live data” below)

I’ve confirmed with the product group that this data is in fact being made available to reporting within hours of it being gathered. For me is a clear winning feature and my hope is it will continue to be this way. (As anyone who’s designed such systems knows, this is not an easy feature to pull off)

Closing

For more information and to signup for the service visit their office website at:

http://advertising.microsoft.com/advertising/adcenter-analytics

or check out their team blog which has a very good collection of informational posts and resources:

http://www.adcentercommunity.com/blogs/analytics/

Best NYC Photo

One of my friends is an aspiring photographer and now fellow blogger. He has resisted doing the "Blog" thing for a while but I have finally talked him into it. If anyone is interested in photography I recommend checking out his website and new blog.

Goodbye Google Analytics, and hello AdCenter

As of today I am finally done with Google Analytics and am instead starting to use Microsoft AdCenter Analytics Beta to track my blog traffic.

Even though I just started using adCenter Analytics I am already liking it. AdCenter seems like a complete package and the design of the sign-up process is very clean and simple.

As always I want to say thank you to Google Analytics team for providing me a great service that worked without issue. I really have nothing against the product but simply eat my own dogfood. For my purposes both products are way more advanced then I need them to be anyway, but I am glad that we as consumers have choices and the competition will be healthy for both sides.

I will probably post more details about AdCenter later as I start using it more often and experience the full breath of reports available.

Want AdCenter for your site?

Currently the Beta is invite for non-Microsoft employees and additional people are allowed in as capacity becomes available. I highly recommend everyone interested though sign-up on the site to get into the queue: http://advertising.microsoft.com/advertising/adcenter-analytics