The process began with engaging real citizens first. Last October, FCC Managing Director Steven VanRoekel let users look under the hood and directly provide feedback for the design. Soliciting feedback right from the start was part of the key for success. Usability issues and other sticking points that had persisted on the old FCC.gov site for years were finally brought to task.

In addition to improving the usability and functionality, many of the latest Web 2.0 principles and technologies have been integrated into the new site, assuring this new FCC site can “keep up with the pace of the Internet.”

Reading some of the blogoshpere’s first reactions to the overhaul, you’ll see nothing but smiles on our faces:

• “FCC.gov reboots as an open government platform” by Alex Howard (aka @digiphile)
• “Miraculous makeover: using the new FCC.gov” by Matthew Lasar
• “Having Sat Out the Aughts, FCC.gov Steps into the Modern Age” by Nancy Scola

Unlocking the power of the FCC through smart design and engagement is just the beginning. We’re excited to see how the public takes advantage of the simpler design, open data, and powerful FCC toolkit.

And of course, if you haven’t checked it out yet, please do so and feel free to leave us a comment with your thoughts: http://beta.fcc.gov/

You can also contribute your feedback directly to the FCC.  Your thoughts and ideas about additional features, improving the user experience, and/or improving the functionality of the website will be considered in future releases and updates: http://fccdotgov.uservoice.com/forums/105541-a-new-fcc-gov-feedback

Lo and behold the culprits where SharePoint’s log files which over time had grown to over 30 GB!  Since it was my development VM  I simply deleted the logs and freed up half the drive.  Problem solved!

I’ve only been working with Silverlight for a few months now and I’ve came to the conclusion that either my Google-fu is lacking or there isn’t a great deal of lower level information out there on how to get started. Personally I’m going with the latter because in my experience if you follow some of these posts online you’ll find yourself creating a sample Silverlight project, which is hosted within its own development application. But how do you actually add the control to your existing site?

Hopefully this will shed some light on the subject.

It turns out that this task is very simple and can be completed in a few steps. These steps include: creating the control (assuming this has been done already), adding the Silverlight application package (.xap) to your website, and adding the Silverlight Object element to a page.

Given that you have already created your Silverlight control (you did didn’t you?), we will move on to step 2: Adding the application package to some location on your site.

1. Within your website add a directory and call it ClientBin (you actually can name this anything you like, but this is the standard).
2. Navigate to your Silverlight project folder on your computer, open the Bin directory, open the Debug directory, and copy the .xap file.
3. Now navigate to your website and paste this file into the ClientBin directory. You’re solution explorer in Visual Studio should look something like this:

And last but not least, we will place your new Silverlight control on your site. To do this, we need only a little HTML, so copy the code below:

<div id="silverlightControlHost" style="height:100%">
<object width="100%" height="100%" type="application/x-silverlight-2" data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," >
<param name="source" value="ClientBin/Silverlight.xap"/>
<param name="background" value="white" />
<param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="3.0.40624.0" />
<param name="autoUpgrade" value="true" />
<a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=149156&v=3.0.40624.0" style="text-decoration: none;">
<img src="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=161376" alt="Get Microsoft Silverlight" style="border-style: none"/>
</a>
</object>
<iframe id="_sl_historyFrame" style='visibility:hidden;height:0px;width:0px;border:0px'></iframe>
</div>

Now open your website, find the location in the site where you want to place it, and paste the code in. Also, unless you named your Silverlight project Silverlight, rename the source parameter to match your filename.

And that’s it!

Before closing, I thought it might help to explain the different parts of the code, so here goes.

• The div is what contains your control. You don’t need the div, but it has become somewhat of a standard for me.
• The Object tag is what is used within the HTML to host the application. Alternatively you can use JavaScript to replace the object tag, but given that most browsers now recognize these tags, it generally is not necessary. Also, it is generally a good idea to set the Height and Width as specified in the above code to ensure that your control is completely displayed.
• • source – the location of your application package (usually within a ClientBin directory)
  • background – the color of the object background.
  • minRuntimeVersion – the minimum version of Silverlight required to be on the persons computer who is accessing the site. For most applications the version above should be more than enough. You may also want to use a lower version if you know that people accessing your site mostly have a lower version. And a higher version may be required if your application requires it.
  • autoUpgrade – if the user does not have the minimum required version, this parameter is used to specify if you want it to prompt the user to install the upgrade necessary.
• The HTML link and image tags are used to provide the user with information about installing Silverlight if necessary.
• The iframe is used for cross-browser compatibility. According to Microsoft, the iframe is used to ensure that the Safari browser does not cache the page. Safari caching prevents the Silverlight plug-in from reloading when the user navigates back to a previously-visited Silverlight page.

So again, that’s essentially it! And again, I am new to this, so if I misrepresented something, please feel free to point it out. I hope this has been helpful.

On September 25th, David Keener, a Solutions Architect for MetroStar System’s New Media Group, spoke at SunnyConf in Phoenix, Arizona. SunnyConf is Arizona’s first Ruby conference.

According to David Keener, “I’m pleased to be one of the inaugural speakers for what is shaping up to be a great annual technical conference for Arizona. It may be the first year of the conference, but they’ve assembled a great group of speakers. I’m excited to have been invited to be one of them.”

Taking advantage of his extensive social media experience at MetroStar, Dave presented “Leveraging Rails to Build Facebook Applications.” His talk builds on his experience with real-life clients, both commercial and government, who are increasingly clamoring for social features to be “baked into” business applications in order to communicate more effectively with customers.

Speakers at SunnyConf: Back Row: Blake Mizerany, creator of the Sinatra web framework; Jeremy Ashkenas, creator of the CoffeeScript language and lead developer for DocumentCloud; Les Hill, Hashrocket consultant, open source contributor and occasional host of the Ruby5 podcast; Charles Nutter, co-lead for the JRuby initiative; David Keener, Senior Solutions Architect for MetroStar Systems and co-found of the RubyNation conference; and Front Row: Brian Sam-Bodden, creator of the Trellis component framework; Jim Remsik, Haskrocket consultant and well-known open source contributor; Luigi Montanez. developer for Sunlight Labs.

Find out more about the conference at:
http://www.sunnyconf.com/

This year’s RubyNation conference will take place on Friday April 9th and Saturday April 10th at the Sheraton Reston Hotel in Reston, Virginia.  In its 3rd year, RubyNation is a two-day conference presented by the Washington, DC area Ruby community that “features debate and discussions of the latest trends, techniques, and tools in Ruby development, design, deployment, business and marketing.”  This year’s speakers include Dave Thomas (Co-Author of Agile Manifesto and Author of The Pragmatic Programmer, Agile Web Development with Rails and Programming Ruby), Jeff Barr (Amazon Web Services), and MetroStar Systems‘ very own Dave McVicar and David Keener (shameless plug). Click on the list of speakers and agenda for complete details and info.

MetroStar Sytems is proud to be a diamond sponsor for this event and happy to support the Washington DC area Ruby Community.  Members of our team will be attending, volunteering, filming, and presenting at RubyNation, so please leave us a comment below if you plan to come.  We will also be hosting the “Ruby-B-Q” at our headquarters on Friday evening (after RubyNation Day 1) featuring food and drinks.  Registration for the conference is still open, but get your tickets soon before the event sells out: http://rubynation.org/registration

I recently upgraded my computer from Windows Vista to Windows 7.  And while setting up my computer, I discovered that the Microsoft Surface SDK only works on Windows Vista.

I am not going to lie, but I was very disappointed and could not see why the SDK could not work on Windows 7. Hence, I went ahead and searched the web for individuals with the same issue. Hence, I discovered this post which helps you with adjusting the Surface SDK msi file, along with samples to work on Windows 7.

Great Post !!!

http://www.grumpydev.com/2009/05/17/surface-sdk-sp1-on-vista-and-win7-x64/

.MSI files can act strangely at times. Causing us to explode in anger as to why it decided that it must check your disk for space requirements.

Is this a sign that I must take a break and get a cup of coffee?

Hence, I clicked on “Return” on the above message and took a break.

To my surprise, nothing had happened. Moreover, when I clicked on “Next”, I received the haunting message again

“Please wait while Setup finishes determining your disk space requirements”

Haven’t I waited enough?
Isn’t this suposed to be easier?
Is this a sign that I should go home earlier?
Am I on Celebrity Ghost Stories?

And then Command Line came to mind.

A black screen (Night) with white letter (Ghost) .

Try this command (Spell)

“msiexec /package [sample.msi] /qr”

and it should install the .MSI without any unwanted messages.

On August 27th, the Northern Virginia Ruby User’s Group (NovaRUG) will be hosting “Rails 101: Persistence Night.” This event consists of a number of talks geared towards new Rails developers, with all talks focused on persistence topics such as storing data in a database.

David Keener will be rounding out the evening event with his presentation on “Rails Tips and Best Practices.” This talk is a compendium of Rails beginner tips, covering query optimizations, some migration tactics, a few typical gotchas to watch out for, etc.

NovaRUG meetings are held at the FGM headquarters building at 12021 Sunset Hills Rd (Suite 400) in Reston, VA. Networking begins at 6:30 PM and presentations typically last from 7:00 – 9:00 PM. Pizza and drinks are provided by the event sponsors.

Register for the Event on Eventbrite

In athletic arenas, winning multiple games, titles, and championships can result in several acknowledgments and perks. Each field of sport tends to acknowledge one shining star as its team’s Most Valuable Player (MVP) for exhibiting dynamic leadership, sportsmanship, and professional conduct throughout the season. So, who says that only athletes get to have all of the fun?

MetroStar Systems proudly announces and congratulates our new team member, Mostafa Elzoghbi, Senior Software Engineer, for his fourth consecutive win of the 2009 Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVP) Award – Visual C#.  Microsoft’s MVP Award distinguishes its awardees because in order to receive the Award, candidates undergo a rigorous nomination and review process.  Annually, the technical community’s best and brightest are bestowed this exclusive honor. Worldwide, there are over 100 million participants across the global technical community vying for the elite acknowledgment and opportunities warranted as a Microsoft MVP; of these participants, there are fewer than 4,000 active Microsoft MVPs.

Mr. Mostafa Elzoghbi, 2009 Microsoft MVP - Visual C#

Microsoft MVPs are exceptional technical community leaders from around the world who are awarded for voluntarily sharing their high quality, real-world expertise in offline and online technical communities. Upon graduating with a B.S. of Computer Science from Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt, Mostafa began his professional career in 2003. In 2005, Mostafa had an idea to create a software development community in Kuwait.  Not only was it the first of its kind, but it has evolved to become the largest and most well known development and .NET community in the Persian Gulf region.

For his contributions to the software development community, he received his first Microsoft MVP Award in 2006.  This year’s award was especially challenging for him because he additionally relocated from Kuwait to Iowa in order to complete his Masters degree.

Ecstatic and diligent of another consecutive win; Mostafa has definite plans to continue his hard work to qualify for the MVP award each year offered.  “Receiving the Microsoft MVP Award just once would be enough and a great milestone in my development career.  However, being an MVP motivates me to increase my knowledge and expertise while staying active in the Microsoft community.  It comes with many advantages, benefits, and access to be very engaged with new Microsoft technologies.  This reward helps increase awareness and the reputation of MetroStar Systems as a certified Microsoft Gold Partner,” says Elzoghbi.

Find out more about Mostafa and his background in reading his blog here: Mostafa’s Blog

If you’ve landed on this post, then you are probably struggling to submit InfoPath browser-enabled forms to a SharePoint library anonymously. And you’ve already learned that SharePoint doesn’t allow anonymous users to add to document and form libraries. There are some good solutions out there, but I found most to be more complex than I needed.

I had one anonymous access site collection. I needed anonymous users to submit a browser enabled InfoPath form, and I needed the submission to trigger a SharePoint Designer workflow. You may or may not already know this, but SharePoint Designer workflows will not trigger on items added or updated by anonymous users. [Note: Prior to SP1, declarative workflows could run under System Account. If you have upgraded to SP1 then this is no longer possible. See comments below for possible solutions.]

My solution assumes you are already familiar with setting up anonymous access within MOSS 2007. If you are not, you can find information on this at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263363.aspx and http://blogs.devhorizon.com/reza/?p=498. You will also need to deploy your InfoPath form as an administrator-approved form template. If you are not sure how to do this, check out http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262921.aspx and http://www.infopathdev.com/blogs/janice/archive/2009/03/03/administrator-approved-form-templates.aspx. You should be able to accomplish both of the above before you proceed with this solution.

Below I’ll show you how to setup a SharePoint library to allow anonymous users to open your form template, and how to create a custom button to submit the form under elevated privileges.

Enable Anonymous Access on Form Library (MOSS 2007)

Go to Form Library Settings. Under Permissions and Management, click Permissions for this form library.

Under Actions, choose Edit Permissions. When the Settings button appears, choose Anonymous Access.

You will notice that on the Change Anonymous Access Settings page only View Items is selectable. Add, Edit, and Delete Items check boxes are grayed out. As mentioned earlier, by default SharePoint only allows anonymous users to view items in document and form libraries. Without checking Add Items, anonymous users will not be able to open your browser-enabled form. To workaround this issue, look at the end of the URL for this page.

Change DOCLIB to LIST and hit Enter. The page will now allow you to select Add Items for anonymous users.

Select Add Items and hit OK. While anonymous users can now open your form, when they attempt to submit the form they will receive an error. This workaround to allow anonymous access to the form template will not override SharePoint’s default policies regarding anonymous users and libraries.

Preparing Your Administrator-Approved Form Template to Use Custom Code (InfoPath 2007)

Open your form template in InfoPath Design mode. Under Tools, choose Form Options. In the Form Options window, choose Category: Security and Trust. You will need to set the Security Level of your form template to Full Trust.

Next choose Category: Programming. Under Programming Language, select C# and hit OK. My solution uses C#. If you prefer to use VB or another language, there are some good conversion sites on the web. You can try the converter at http://www.developerfusion.com/tools/convert/csharp-to-vb/. If you are already using custom VB code in your form template, then converting the C# to VB will be a must.

Adding Custom Code to Your Administrator-Approved Form Template (InfoPath 2007, Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Applications)

You should have already setup your form template to submit to a document library under Tools: Submit Options. If you have not, you can find more info on this at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/infopath/HA101070571033.aspx.

Under Insert: More Controls, add a Button control to your form template. Double click your new button control, enter a unique Label and ID, and click Edit Form Code.

This will open your custom code in a Visual Studio environment. If you are not familiar working within Visual Studio, there are numerous primers on the web. However, this solution is straight forward and simple so you should be fine.

If you are developing your form template on a client operating system and not on a SharePoint development server, you will need to add a reference to Microsoft.SharePoint.dll. You can copy this dll from your SharePoint server at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\ISAPI\. Copy the dll into your InfoPath template projects folders which will probably be located under \Documents\InfoPath Projects\.

After adding the dll reference, you will add the following code within your button’s click event.

The final code should look something like this.

Save All and Build your project. Back in InfoPath, save your template and Publish the administrator-approved form template.

Once the new template is published and activated to your SharePoint site collection, you should be able to open and submit the form anonymously. The form will actually submit under the System account credentials, and as a bonus will successfully trigger SharePoint Designer workflows. [Note: As of SP1, Microsoft deprecated the ability for declarative workflows to run under System Account. See comments below for possible solutions.] You will probably want to adjust some Form Options on your template to ensure that the default Submit button does not show anywhere in the user’s browser. You only want them submitting with your custom button.