The Best Vector Tutorials of 2009

During the past few weeks we’ve been publishing our “Best of 2009″ series in which we’re picking the best of the best in design resources created this year. This week our focus is on vector tutorials. Vector applications such as Adobe Illustrator that are used to create scalable graphics are ideal for creating such things as logos, characters, and icons. There were many great vector tutorials put out this year, which made it difficult to choose the best, but here are our picks.

You can check out the rest of the “Best of 2009″ series at the bottom of this article.

Create a Happy Sun Character

Logo Design Process and Walkthrough for Vivid Ways

How to Create a Vector Illustration and Prepare it for Micro-Stock Sale

Create a Cute Panda Bear Face Icon

Create incredible 3D type-based infographic art

How to Create Smoky Brushes and Type In Illustrator CS4

Create An Awesome Space Rocket Avatar in Illustrator

Create a Character Mascot with Adobe Illustrator CS4

Craft a Delicious Chinese Food Icon

How to Create an Alarm Clock Icon

Create a Stylized GPS Icon

Make 3D Yet Flat Looking Shopping Basket Icons

How to Create a Vector Light Bulb Icon with Inkscape

Create a Vintage TV Set Icon in Illustrator

Zee Logo in Illustrator

How to Create a Photorealistic iMac and Magic Mouse

How to Create Funky 3D Springs in Illustrator

Design a Cute Hamster Avatar

Create a Rolling Stones Inspired Tongue Illustration

Tags: - Virtualization, 2009, Application Packaging

StatLight – Goes Open Source

Although I made a very minor attempt at making StatLight a “for-sale” product, I knew when I started that open-source was most likely going to be my long term path for StatLight.

What is it? (Silverlight Testing Automation Tool)

StatLight is a tool developed for automating the setup, running, and gathering results of Silverlight unit tests. StatLight helps to speed up the feedback cycles while practicing TDD/BDD/(insert your test style here) during Silverlight development.

Where can I get StatLight?

http://StatLight.CodePlex.com

Happy Coding !!!

Tags: - Virtualization, Application Packaging, Esoterica

Ericom Blaze – RDP Acceleration Demonstration Video

Tags: - Virtualization, Application Packaging, Video

VMware Set to Update Mac Virtualization to VMware Fusion 3.0.1 any day now

Tags: - Virtualization, Application Packaging, Desktop Virtualization

CloudShare Comes Out of Stealth with Marquee Customers and Cloud-Based Platform

Tags: - Virtualization, Application Packaging, cloud

Call for Proposals: 2nd Annual Cloud Computing Conference – Cloud Slam 2010

Tags: - Virtualization, Application Packaging, cloud, events

Silverlight 4 – More on Capturing Video from WebCams

Tags: - Virtualization, .NET, Application Packaging, Silverlight, Visual Studio

Dataline LLC and AWS Successfully Demonstrate Secure Cloud Computing

read more

Tags: - Virtualization, Application Packaging

Running ASP.NET applications from a remote share

This is as much a reminder to myself for the future as anything. But I am going to start with a boast – I have a swanky new PC! I am trying to do everything in VMs (I know that a lot of people have tried this and failed but I am nothing if not altruistic). I want to keep all of my source in one place and share it between the VMs. However even though I could open the Solution in Visual Studio when I went to run it I would encounter the following error:

[SecurityException: Request for the permission of type 'System.Web.AspNetHostingPermission, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' failed.]
   System.Reflection.Assembly._GetType(String name, Boolean throwOnError, Boolean ignoreCase) +0
   System.Reflection.Assembly.GetType(String name, Boolean throwOnError, Boolean ignoreCase) +42
   System.Web.UI.Util.GetTypeFromAssemblies(ICollection assemblies, String typeName, Boolean ignoreCase) +145
   System.Web.UI.TemplateParser.GetType(String typeName, Boolean ignoreCase, Boolean throwOnError) +73
   System.Web.UI.TemplateParser.ProcessInheritsAttribute(String baseTypeName, String codeFileBaseTypeName, String src, Assembly assembly) +111
   System.Web.UI.TemplateParser.PostProcessMainDirectiveAttributes(IDictionary parseData) +279

I knew that some sort of trust issue was the problem and after some Googling I came across this article that explained this problem and more importantly provided a solution. The pertinent command to execute was:

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\caspol.exe -m -ag 1 -url "file:////\\computername\sharename\*" FullTrust -exclusive on

Tags: - Virtualization, Application Packaging, Esoterica

WCF NET.TCP Protocol in Silverlight 4

Introduction

As you may already know, Silverlight 4 beta has been released and it has many new features. One of the most important features is net.tcp binding support. Now in Silverlight 4 we can communicate with WCF web service using net.tcp protocol. You may have noticed the many blog posts or articles that came out with a title similar to this : Silverlight 4 – WPF killer. If I can choose the one most important feature in Silverlight 4 beta that can kill WPF apps I will choose the net.tcp support.

If you have already worked with Silverlight 3 you probably have some WCF web service. In Silverlight 3 you have been limited to use basic http binding for communication with WCF service. One of the major performance improvements in Silverlight 3 was the possibility to add binary encoding to basic http binding that serializes and deserializes your messages in binary format. Net.tcp binding uses binary message encoding by default.

Why to use net.tcp binding ?

A key benefit of net.tcp binding is the performance. If you want fast Silverlight applications that communicate with your WCF service in your secure intranet environment you will probably use this binding. 

This net.tcp binding for now is intended to be used in intranet environments. Because this protocol is build on top of Silverlight sockets implementation it has same network security restrictions. Silverlight restricts the ports of TCP socket connections to the range 4502 – 4534 . Because of that it requires environment where we can control the firewall configuration. In this way we can easily monitor Silverlight applications traffic and maintain the security of our corporate network.

Net.tcp protocol in Silverlight also does not support transport level security. For example, we can’t have SSL communication.

Net.tcp duplex support

Another key benefit of net.tcp binding is the support for duplex communication. Now we can use same HTTP polling duplex proxy from the previous version of Silverlight and just specify that the proxy will use net.tcp binding and everything will work. We can even make WCF service that uses HTTP polling duplex protocol for Internet clients and uses net.tcp protocol for Intranet clients. The programming model is the same like before and is simple to use.

Problems with installation

When I tried to debug an example of a WCF application using net.tcp binding  I ran into the following problem. I constantly received the error : The protocol 'net.tcp' is not supported .

It seems that Visual Studio Integrated Cassino server supports only HTTP activation. So after that I tried to deploy my application into IIS.

Only IIS7 has support for net.tcp binding so you must have IIS7 installed on your machine.

WCF services with net.tcp binding inside IIS7 are hosted on Windows Process Activation Services (WAS). To enable WAS hosting on IIS7 for net.tcp you must do a few things:

1) You must enable Windows Communication Foundation Non-HTTP Activation. One important feature of IIS is the ability to activate a web application when an HTTP request for that application is received. A similar feature exists in IIS7 for net.tcp , but it may not be enabled by default.

2) You must set the application poll to use Framework 4 enabled poll and must enable the net.tcp protocol.

3) You must also enable port or ports in range 4502 – 4534 for net.tcp binding.

Or you can skip step two and three and do it faster and quicker using command prompt. IIS provides a new command-line utility to configure Web sites : Appcmd.exe. The command bellow will update the configuration file for WAS, applicationHost.config, with new binding for the default web site :

%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe set site     

"Default Web Site" -+bindings.[protocol=    

'net.tcp',bindingInformation='*']  

After that you need to check if net.tcp listner adapter service is running. You can do it by executing the following command sc query NetTcpActivator or look in services :

If you get the following error : Could not find a base address that matches scheme net.tcp for the endpoint with binding NetTcpBinding. Registered base address schemes are [http].

the problem might be because you haven’t specify a base address for net.tcp binding in service web.config file. You need to specify a base address similar to this :

endpoint address="net.tcp://localhost:4502/wcservice/Service.svc"  

If we want to generate proxy on client side and we have only specified net.tcp binding in our service, we must set up the Metadata Exchange (mex) endpoint to use the net.tcp binding :

<endpoint address="mex"   

 binding="mexTcpBinding"   

 contract="IMetadataExchange" />  

Also if we want to allow  to share the same port on different services, we must enable the port sharing service for net.tcp. We can do it by executing the following command in command prompt : C:\sc.exe config NetTcpPortSharing start= demand

After that you must allow Silverlight applications to communicate over TCP. In order to do that the server must explicitly allow such a connection. This is done by exposing a TCP socket policy over TCP port 943.

This is how an example policy file for sockets looks like :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding ="utf-8"?>

<access-policy>

  <cross-domain-access>

    <policy>

      <allow-from>

        <domain uri="*"/>

      </allow-from>

      <grant-to>

        <socket-resource port="4502-4506" protocol="tcp" />

      </grant-to>

    </policy>

  </cross-domain-access>

</access-policy>

To make our life easier, Tomasz Janczuk from Microsoft has created a free template for console applications that serves like TCP socket policy server.

You can later make windows service that will do the same thing on hosting server. This console application receives requests from Silverlight clients and returns socket policy file to the client. You must run this console app on server to enable Silverlight applications to communicate over TCP.

After that we are up and running….

Summary

Net.tcp binding support in Silverlight 4 beta is one of the most important new features. It brings us excellent performance but with some security constraints such us port limitations. Because of that it is recommended to use it for Intranet applications in secure environments where you can control firewall settings. It can be great alternative in such environments for HTTP polling duplex or for Basic HTTP binding. This protocol supports a simple to use WCF duplex programming model. I hope that in the near future we will see a much better support for net.tcp binding in Silverlight without security constraints.

Tags: - Virtualization, Application Packaging