We have created a website for saxophonist Paul Burger, who wanted a design to match his printed brand material.  The design has a vintage look which suits his service well. We provided the photographs on the site of Paul’s Saxophone in our studio, which really adds to the site visually. Paul often plays at events from weddings, cocktail parties to corporate events and wanted a simple brochure website to showcase his services.  We have created an online presence for the business, which will improve the number of enquiries the business gains as 80% of couples now search for wedding suppliers online.

Jazz Musician's website

The site includes an audio player so potential clients can listen to samples of Paul’s music easily and get an idea of the different genres Paul offers.  Along with rolling testimonials, which can be easily updated by the client and a contact form which will provide the client with all the information they need from enquiries. The site also has a Blog, which is easily updated by the client and a great way to target search engines, driving new visitors to the site.

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When someone asked my former manager David Treadwell what he did on a daily basis his answer was “Go to meetings and delete email”.  Unfortunately that often describes my life as well.  It is always challenging to manage your time.  I want to ensure I’m spending enough on technology, people, customers, etc.  To make this easier, I’m using the Categories feature of Exchange to code each meeting I have (these are my custom categories):

At a glance I can then tell what kind of meeting I’m headed to next.  But I still need a way to understand how I’m spending my time every month.  What would be great is to collect all the category data from all my meetings and then get the ratios.  This blog covers a sample that does that.

There are several ways you can get your calendar data.  In this case the task is very simple:  collect all calendar items in a given month including the category setting.  The easiest way to do this is to use Exchange Web Services support to ask the server for the data directly.  The sample has a library which can be used to connect to EWS and collect all the calendar items and a console application which provides an easy way to drive the program logic.  The following shows the overall structure of the sample code (click for larger image):

The diagram was generated using new Generate Dependency Graph feature of Visual Studio Ultimate.  The graph is created by shredding the binaries themselves so we find everything.

There are a few key areas to look through for EWS code.  The first is the GetExchangeProxy helper which sets up the connection to Exchange using ExchangeServiceBinding.  In this case we are using integrated Windows security so that a userid/password is not required (you could supply them as an alternative):

The next interesting helper method is BuildQueryFilter which is responsible for creating a FindItemType filter class.  This class allows you to construct a query for the server to find the data we care about.  The code builds up a series of arguments to scope calendar items between the start and end dates.  For example, this snippet of code sets a criteria of all dates greater than or equal to the start date:

A similar block of code sets the filter for less than or equal to the end date.  Finally these two conditions are combined with an And clause to essentially mean “>= start AND <= end”:

Once the filter is set, we can retrieve all of the calendar items we asked for.  In this case I’m returning the array in our own CalendarItemList which will allow us to enumerate the data from the client code.  The GetNextItem method will then strip the full Exchange calendar item (with over 100 fields) down to just a handful we care about and return the data in a CalendarItemData instance.  There are a huge number of fields available for return.  You can use the DebugTraceCalItem helper method to dump the entire type if you are interested in pulling back more data.

The console application then becomes pretty easy:  parse and validate all the arguments, connect to the exchange server, then write each calendar item out in a comma separated view (CSV) format.  The output can either be written directly to a file or to the console for redirection to other locations.  At that point it is very easy to simply open the file directly in Excel where you can edit it, create charts, analyze it, etc. 

I’ve included a sequence diagram in the project which demonstrates the core logic of the Run method (click for larger image):

(Note that generating a sequence diagram with VS Ultimate is very easy: just place your cursor in the method and right click to run “Generate Sequence Diagram”)

Running the application is now very simple:

timespent /start:9/1/2009 /end:9/30/2009 /out:c:\temp\sept09.csv /mailpath:https://mydomain/ews/exchange.asmx

“mydomain” in this case is the domain address for your Exchange server.  You can get this from your exchange administrator (it will likely match the path you are using on your phone to sync your mail over the air). 

You can download the Exchange SDK from MSDN here.  You can download a full copy of the source code here.

Enjoy!

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Retro Web Design

Dorset Country Inn, The Langton Arms has been featured on creative Web Design Gallery Designfridge along with other stunning Retro inspired designs.  The Langton Arms site was designed to get across the welcoming and relaxed atmosphere at the Inn in Blandford Forum.  With its textured dark background in contrast with bright photography which we also provided, the site evokes a sense of English Tradition.

If you are looking for a creative website and want to find out what we can offer then do Get In Touch!

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The ASP.NET Website Administration Tool (WSAT) provides a web-based user interface for configuring Membership and Roles settings and for creating, editing, and deleting users and roles. Unfortunately, the WSAT only works when visited from localhost, meaning that you cannot reach the production website’s Administration Tool through your browser. The good news is that there are workarounds that make it possible to manage users and roles on production. This tutorial looks at these workarounds and others.
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Visual Studio offers ASP.NET developers two types of projects: Web Application Projects (WAPs) and Web Site Projects (WSPs). One of the key differences between the two project types is that WAPs must have the code explicitly compiled prior to deployment whereas the code in a WSP can be automatically compiled on the web server. However, it is possible to precompile a WSP prior to deployment. This tutorial explores the benefits of precompilation and shows how to precompile a website from within Visual Studio and from the command line.
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Microsoft’s health monitoring system provides an easy and customizable way to log various web events, including unhandled exceptions. This tutorial walks through setting up the health monitoring system to log unhandled exceptions to a database and to notify developers via an e-mail message.
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Error Logging Modules And Handlers (ELMAH) offers another approach to logging runtime errors in a production environment. ELMAH is a free, open source error logging library that includes features like error filtering and the ability to view the error log from a web page, as an RSS feed, or to download it as a comma-delimited file. This tutorial walks through downloading and configuring ELMAH.
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What does the user see when a runtime error occurs in an ASP.NET web application? The answer depends on how the website’s <customErrors> configuration. By default, users are shown an unsightly yellow screen proclaiming that a runtime error has occurred. This tutorial shows how to customize these settings to display an aesthetically-pleasing custom error page that matches your site’s look and feel.
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When a runtime error occurs on a web application in production it is important to notify a developer and to log the error so that it may be diagnosed at a later point in time. This tutorial provides an overview of how ASP.NET processes runtime errors and looks at one way to have custom code execute whenever an unhandled exception bubbles up to the ASP.NET runtime.
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Take advantage of the Data Annotation Model Binder to perform validation within an ASP.NET MVC application. Learn how to use the different types of validator attributes and work with them in the Microsoft Entity Framework.
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