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• How does your team work together in a remote setup?

  - by Carl Rosenberger

  Hi, we are a distributed team working on the object database db4o. The way we work: We try to program in pairs only. We use Skype and VNC or SharedView to connect and work together. In our online Tuesday meeting every week (usually about 1 hour) we talk about the tasks done last week we create new pairs for the next week with a random generator so knowledge and friendship distribute evenly we set the priority for any new tasks or bugs that have come in each team picks the tasks it likes to do from the highest prioritized ones. From Tuesday to Wednesday we estimate tasks. We have a unit of work we call "Ideal Developer Session" (IDS), maybe 2 or 3 hours of working together as a pair. It's not perfectly well defined (because we know estimation always is inaccurate) but from our past shared experience we have a common sense of what an IDS is. If we can't estimate a task because it feels too long for a week we break it down into estimatable smaller tasks. During a short meeting on Wednesday we commit to a workload we feel is well doable in a week. We commit to complete. If a team runs out of committed tasks during the week, it can pick new ones from the prioritized queue we have in Jira. When we started working this way, some of us found that remote pair programming takes a lot of energy because you are so focussed. If you pair program for more than 5 or 6 hours per day, you get drained. On the other hand working like this has turned out to be very efficient. The knowledge about our codebase is evenly distributed and we have really learnt lots from eachother. I would be very interested to hear about the experiences from other teams working in a similar way. Things like: How often do you meet? Have you tried different sprint lengths (one week, two week, longer) ? Which tools do you use? Which issue tracker do you use? What do you do about time zone differences? How does it work for you to integrate new people into the team? How many hours do you usually work per week? How does your management interact with the way you are working? Do you get put on a waterfall with hard deadlines? What's your unit of work? What is your normal velocity? (units of work done per week) Programming work should be fun and for us it usually is great fun. I would be happy about any new ideas how to make it even more fun and/or more efficient.

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• Separation of domain and ui layer in a composite

  - by hansmaad

  Hi all, i'm wondering if there is a pattern how to separate the domain logic of a class from the ui responsibilities of the objects in the domain layer. Example: // Domain classes interface MachinePart { CalculateX(in, out) // Where do we put these: // Draw(Screen) ?? // ShowProperties(View) ?? // ... } class Assembly : MachinePart { CalculateX(in, out) subParts } class Pipe : MachinePart { CalculateX(in, out) length, diamater... } There is an application that calculates the value X for machines assembled from many machine parts. The assembly is loaded from a file representation and is designed as a composite. Each concrete part class stores some data to implement the CalculateX(in,out) method to simulate behaviour of the whole assembly. The application runs well but without GUI. To increase the usability a GUi should be developed on top of the existing implementation (changes to the existing code are allowed). The GUI should show a schematic graphical representation of the assembly and provide part specific dialogs to edit several parameters. To achieve these goals the application needs new functionality for each machine part to draw a schematic representation on the screen, show a property dialog and other things not related to the domain of machine simulation. I can think of some different solutions to implement a Draw(Screen) functionality for each part but i am not happy with each of them. First i could add a Draw(Screen) method to the MachinePart interface but this would mix-up domain code with ui code and i had to add a lot of functionality to each machine part class what makes my domain model hard to read and hard to understand. Another "simple" solution is to make all parts visitable and implement ui code in visitors but Visitor does not belong to my favorite patterns. I could derive UI variants from each machine part class to add the UI implementation there but i had to check if each part class is suited for inheritance and had to be careful on changes to the base classes. My currently favorite design is to create a parallel composite hierarchy where each component stores data to define a machine part, has implementation for UI methods and a factory method which creates instances of the corresponding domain classes, so that i can "convert" a UI assembly to a domain assembly. But there are problems to go back from the created domain hierarchy to the UI hierarchy for showing calculation results in the drawing for example (imagine some parts store some values during the calculation i want to show in the schematic representation after the simluation). Maybe there are some proven patterns for such problems?

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• Searching for duplicate records within a text file where the duplicate is determined by only two fie

  - by plg

  First, Python Newbie; be patient/kind. Next, once a month I receive a large text file (think 7 Million records) to test for duplicate values. This is catalog information. I get 7 fields, but the two I'm interested in are a supplier code and a full orderable part number. To determine if the record is dupliacted, I compress all special characters from the part number (except . and #) and create a compressed part number. The test for duplicates becomes the supplier code and compressed part number combination. This part is fairly straight forward. Currently, I am just copying the original file with 2 new columns (compressed part and duplicate indicator). If the part is a duplicate, I put a "YES" in the last field. Now that this is done, I want to be able to go back (or better yet, at the same time) to get the previous record where there was a supplier code/compressed part number match. So far, my code looks like this: Compress Full Part to a Compressed Part and Check for Duplicates on Supplier Code and Compressed Part combination import sys import re import time ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ start=time.time() try: file1 = open("C:\Accounting\May Accounting\May.txt", "r") except IOError: print sys.stderr, "Cannot Open Read File" sys.exit(1) try: file2 = open(file1.name[0:len(file1.name)-4] + "_" + "COMPRESSPN.txt", "a") except IOError: print sys.stderr, "Cannot Open Write File" sys.exit(1) hdrList="CIGSUPPLIER|FULL_PART|PART_STATUS|ALIAS_FLAG|ACQUISITION_FLAG|COMPRESSED_PART|DUPLICATE_INDICATOR" file2.write(hdrList+chr(10)) lines_seen=set() affirm="YES" records = file1.readlines() for record in records: fields = record.split(chr(124)) if fields[0]=="CIGSupplier": continue #If incoming file has a header line, skip it file2.write(fields[0]+"|"), #Supplier Code file2.write(fields[1]+"|"), #Full_Part file2.write(fields[2]+"|"), #Part Status file2.write(fields[3]+"|"), #Alias Flag file2.write(re.sub("[$\r\n]", "", fields[4])+"|"), #Acquisition Flag file2.write(re.sub("[^0-9a-zA-Z.#]", "", fields[1])+"|"), #Compressed_Part dupechk=fields[0]+"|"+re.sub("[^0-9a-zA-Z.#]", "", fields[1]) if dupechk not in lines_seen: file2.write(chr(10)) lines_seen.add(dupechk) else: file2.write(affirm+chr(10)) print "it took", time.time() - start, "seconds." ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ file2.close() file1.close() It runs in less than 6 minutes, so I am happy with this part, even if it is not elegant. Right now, when I get my results, I import the results into Access and do a self join to locate the duplicates. Loading/querying/exporting results in Access a file this size takes around an hour, so I would like to be able to export the matched duplicates to another text file or an Excel file. Confusing enough? Thanks.

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• Correcting a plist with dictionaries

  - by ingenspor

  Plist is copyed to documents directory if it doesn't exist. If it already exists, I want to use the "Name" key from NSDictionary in bundleArray to find the matching NSDictionary in documentsArray. When the match is found, I want to check for changes in the strings and replace them if there is a change. If a match is not found it means this dictionary must be added to documents plist. This is my code: - (BOOL)application:(UIApplication *)application didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:(NSDictionary *)launchOptions { [self managePlist]; return YES; } - (void)managePlist { NSError *error; NSArray *paths = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES); NSString *documentsDirectory = [paths objectAtIndex:0]; NSString *path = [documentsDirectory stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"Objects.plist"]; NSString *bundle = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"Objects" ofType:@"plist"]; NSFileManager *fileManager = [NSFileManager defaultManager]; if (![fileManager fileExistsAtPath: path]) { [fileManager copyItemAtPath:bundle toPath:path error:&error]; } else { NSArray *bundleArray = [[NSArray alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:bundle]; NSMutableArray *documentArray = [[NSMutableArray alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:path]; BOOL updateDictionary = NO; for(int i=0;i<bundleArray.count;i++) { NSDictionary *bundleDict=[bundleArray objectAtIndex:i]; BOOL matchInDocuments = NO; for(int ii=0;ii<documentArray.count;ii++) { NSMutableDictionary *documentDict = [documentArray objectAtIndex:ii]; NSString *bundleObjectName = [bundleDict valueForKey:@"Name"]; NSString *documentsObjectName = [documentDict valueForKey:@"Name"]; NSRange range = [documentsObjectName rangeOfString:bundleObjectName options:NSCaseInsensitiveSearch]; if (range.location != NSNotFound) { matchInDocuments = YES; } if (matchInDocuments) { if ([bundleDict objectForKey:@"District"] != [documentDict objectForKey:@"District"]) { [documentDict setObject:[bundleDict objectForKey:@"District"] forKey:@"District"]; updateDictionary=YES; } } else { [documentArray addObject:bundleDict]; updateDictionary=YES; } } } if(updateDictionary){ [documentArray writeToFile:path atomically:YES]; } } } If I run my app now I get this message: '-[__NSCFDictionary setObject:forKey:]: mutating method sent to immutable object' How can I fix this? When this is fixed, do you think my code will work? If not, I would be happy for some suggestions on how to do this. I have struggled for a while and really need to publish the update with the corrections! Thanks a lot for your help.

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• Getting the responseText from XMLHttpRequest-Object

  - by Sammy46

  I wrote a cgi-script with c++ to return the query-string back to the requesting ajax object. I also write the query-string in a file in order to see if the cgi script works correctly. But when I ask in the html document for the response Text to be shown in a messagebox i get a blank message. here is my code: js: <script type = "text/javascript"> var XMLHttp; if(navigator.appName == "Microsoft Internet Explorer") { XMLHttp = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"); } else { XMLHttp = new XMLHttpRequest(); } function getresponse () { XMLHttp.open ("GET", "http://localhost/cgi-bin/AJAXTest?" + "fname=" + document.getElementById('fname').value + "&sname=" + document.getElementById('sname').value,true); XMLHttp.send(null); } XMLHttp.onreadystatechange=function(){ if(XMLHttp.readyState == 4) { document.getElementById('response_area').innerHTML += XMLHttp.readyState; var x= XMLHttp.responseText alert(x) } } </script> First Names(s)<input onkeydown = "javascript: getresponse ()" id="fname" name="name"> <br> Surname<input onkeydown = "javascript: getresponse();" id="sname"> <div id = "response_area"> </div> C++: int main() { QFile log("log.txt"); if(!log.open(QIODevice::WriteOnly | QIODevice::Text)) { return 1; } QTextStream outLog(&log); QString QUERY_STRING= getenv("QUERY_STRING"); //if(QUERY_STRING!=NULL) //{ cout<<"Content-type: text/plain\n\n" <<"The Query String is: " << QUERY_STRING.toStdString()<< "\n"; outLog<<"Content-type: text/plain\n\n" <<"The Query String is: " <<QUERY_STRING<<endl; //} return 0; } I'm happy about every advice what to do! EDIT: the output to my logfile works just fine: Content-type: text/plain The Query String is: fname=hello&sname=world I just noticed that if i open it with IE8 i get the query-string. But only on the first "keydown" after that IE does nothing.

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• Binding on a port with netpipes/netcat

  - by mindas

  I am trying to write a simple bash script that is listening on a port and responding with a trivial HTTP response. My specific issue is that I am not sure if the port is available and in case of bind failure I fall back to next port until bind succeeds. So far to me the easiest way to achieve this was something like: for (( i=$PORT_BASE; i < $(($PORT_BASE+$PORT_RANGE)); i++ )) do if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ] ; then echo trying to bind on $i fi /usr/bin/faucet $i --out --daemon echo test 2>/dev/null if [ $? -eq 0 ] ; then #success? port=$i if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ] ; then echo "bound on port $port" fi break fi done Here I am using faucet from netpipes Ubuntu package. The problem with this is that if I simply print "test" to the output, curl complains about non-standard HTTP response (error code 18). That's fair enough as I don't print HTTP-compatible response. If I replace echo test with echo -ne "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\n\r\ntest", curl still complains: user@server:$ faucet 10020 --out --daemon echo -ne "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\n\r\ntest" ... user@client:$ curl ip.of.the.server:10020 curl: (56) Failure when receiving data from the peer I think the problem lies in how faucet is printing the response and handling the connection. For example if I do the server side in netcat, curl works fine: user@server:$ echo -ne "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\n\r\ntest\r\n" | nc -l 10020 ... user@client:$ curl ip.of.the.server:10020 test user@client:$ I would be more than happy to replace faucet with netcat in my main script, but the problem is that I want to spawn independent server process to be able to run client from the same base shell. faucet has a very handy --daemon parameter as it forks to background and I can use $? (exit status code) to check if bind succeeded. If I was to use netcat for a similar purpose, I would have to fork it using & and $? would not work. Does anybody know why faucet isn't responding correctly in this particular case and/or can suggest a solution to this problem. I am not married neither to faucet nor netcat but would like the solution to be implemented using bash or it's utilities (as opposed to write something in yet another scripting language, such as Perl or Python).

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• Object relationships

  - by Hammerstein

  This stems from a recent couple of posts I've made on events and memory management in general. I'm making a new question as I don't think the software I'm using has anything to do with the overall problem and I'm trying to understand a little more about how to properly manage things. This is ASP.NET. I've been trying to understand the needs for Dispose/Finalize over the past few days and believe that I've got to a stage where I'm pretty happy with when I should/shouldn't implement the Dispose/Finalize. 'If I have members that implement IDisposable, put explicit calls to their dispose in my dispose method' seems to be my understanding. So, now I'm thinking maybe my understanding of object lifetimes and what holds on to what is just wrong! Rather than come up with some sample code that I think will illustrate my point, I'm going to describe as best I can actual code and see if someone can talk me through it. So, I have a repository class, in it I have a DataContext that I create when the repository is created. I implement IDisposable, and when my calling object is done, I call Dispose on my repository and explicitly call DataContext.Dispose( ). Now, one of the methods of this class creates and returns a list of objects that's handed back to my front end. Front End - Controller - Repository - Controller - Front End. (Using Redgate Memory Profiler, I take a snapshot of my software when the page is first loaded). My front end creates a controller object on page load and then makes a request to the repository sending back a list of items. When the page is finished loading, I call Dispose on the controller which in turn calls dispose on the context. In my mind, that should mean that my connection is closed and that I have no instances of my controller class. If I then refresh the page, it jumps to two 'Live' instances of the controller class. If I look at the object retention graph, the objects I created in my call to the list are being held onto ultimately by what looks like Linq. The controller/repository aside, if I create a list of objects somewhere, or I create an object and return it somewhere, am I safe to just assume that .NET will eventually come and clean things up for me or is there a best practice? The 'Live' instances suggest to me that these are still in memory and active objects, the fact that RMP apparently forces GC doesn't mean anything?

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• SQL Design Question regarding schema and if Name value pair is the best solution

  - by Aur

  I am having a small problem trying to decide on database schema for a current project. I am by no means a DBA. The application parses through a file based on user input and enters that data in the database. The number of fields that can be parsed is between 1 and 42 at the current moment. The current design of the database is entirely flat with there being 42 columns; some have repeated columns such as address1, address2, address3, etc... This says that I should normalize the data. However, data integrity is not needed at this moment and the way the data is shaped I'm looking at several joins. Not a bad thing but the data is still in a 1 to 1 relationship and I still see a lot of empty fields per row. So my concerns are that this does not allow the database or the application to be very extendable. If they want to add more fields to be parsed (which they do) than I'd need to create another table and add another foreign key to the linking table. The third option is I have a table where the fields are defined and a table for each record. So what I was thinking is to make a table that stores the value and then links to those two tables. The problem is I can picture the size of that table growing large depending on the input size. If someone gives me a file with 300,000 records than 300,000 x 40 = 12 million so I have some reservations. However I think if I get to that point than I should be happy it is being used. This option also allows for more custom displaying of information albeit a bit more work but little rework even if you add more fields. So the problem boils down to: 1. Current design is a flat file which makes extending it hard and it is not normalized. 2. Normalize the tables although no real benefits for the moment but requirements change. 3. Normalize it down into the name value pair and hope size doesn't hurt. There are a large number of inserts, updates, and selects against that table. So performance is a worry but I believe the saying is design now, performance testing later? I'm probably just missing something practical so any comments would be appreciated even if it’s a quick sanity check. Thank you for your time.

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• How to reference a particular JSON in a function call.

  - by Jane Wilkie

  Hi guys! I have two javascript routines.. the first one declares some JSON and it contains a function that takes two arguments, the first argument being the json object that needs traversing and the second argument is the tab that the rendering is done in. The second routine merely passes the name of the JSON that needs traversing and tab to render in. The code is below.... <script language="JavaScript1.2" type="text/javascript"> var arr = [ {"id":"10", "class":"child-of-9", "useless":"donotneed"}, {"id":"11", "class":"child-of-10", "useless":"donotneed"}]; var arrtwo = [ {"id":"12", "class":"child-of-12", "useless":"donotneed"}, {"id":"13", "class":"child-of-13", "useless":"donotneed"}]; function render_help(json,tab){ var html=''; for(var i=0;i<json.length;i++){ var obj = json[i]; for(var key in obj){ var attrName = key; var attrValue = obj[key]; if (attrName == "id"){ html = html +'<B>'+attrValue+'</B>'+'<BR><BR>'; }else if (attrName == "class"){ html = html + attrValue + '<BR><BR>'; } } } document.getElementById(tab).innerHTML=(html); } </script> <script language="JavaScript1.2" type="text/javascript"> render_help(arr,"helptab"); </script> Various testing and strategically placed alert boxes indicate that the tab parameter is being passed and interpreted correctly. I know this because when I change .... document.getElementById(tab).innerHTML=(html); to document.getElementById(tab).innerHTML=("Howdy"); and it renders "Howdy" just fine. Putting an alert box (alert(json)) in to check the value of json yields.... [object.Object],[object.Object] The JSON object remains elusive. For the purposes of this scripting I need the JSON "arr" to be iterated over. I feel like the answer is fairly obvious so far no luck. Admittedly I am new with Javascript and I am apparently missing something. Does anyone have a clue as to what I'm overlooking here? Happy New Year to you all! Janie

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• Can you get a Func<T> (or similar) from a MethodInfo object?

  - by Dan Tao

  I realize that, generally speaking, there are performance implications of using reflection. (I myself am not a fan of reflection at all, actually; this is a purely academic question.) Suppose there exists some class that looks like this: public class MyClass { public string GetName() { return "My Name"; } } Bear with me here. I know that if I have an instance of MyClass called x, I can call x.GetName(). Furthermore, I could set a Func<string> variable to x.GetName. Now here's my question. Let's say I don't know the above class is called MyClass; I've got some object, x, but I have no idea what it is. I could check to see if that object has a GetName method by doing this: MethodInfo getName = x.GetType().GetMethod("GetName"); Suppose getName is not null. Then couldn't I furthermore check if getName.ReturnType == typeof(string) and getName.GetParameters().Length == 0, and at this point, wouldn't I be quite certain that the method represented by my getName object could definitely be cast to a Func<string>, somehow? I realize there's a MethodInfo.Invoke, and I also realize I could always create a Func<string> like: Func<string> getNameFunc = () => getName.Invoke(x, null); I guess what I'm asking is if there's any way to go from a MethodInfo object to the actual method it represents, incurring the performance cost of reflection in the process, but after that point being able to call the method directly (via, e.g., a Func<string> or something similar) without a performance penalty. What I'm envisioning might look something like this: // obviously this would throw an exception if GetActualInstanceMethod returned // something that couldn't be cast to a Func<string> Func<string> getNameFunc = (Func<string>)getName.GetActualInstanceMethod(x); (I realize that doesn't exist; I'm wondering if there's anything like it.) If what I'm asking doesn't make sense, or if I'm being unclear, I'll be happy to attempt to clarify.

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• Communicate progress from local Service

  - by kpdvx

  An application I'm building uses a local Service for downloading files from the web to the phone's SD card. In this app users can browse lists of books, and read them while online. A user can also download a pdf copy of a book for offline viewing. To handle downloads I'm using a locally bound Service. I do not want this Service to run all the time, only when downloading files. So that the Service can shut itself down when its tasks are complete, I am not binding to the service, rather I'm sending an "enqueue for download" command through the Intent passed to Context.startService. Books available for download are shown in a list. A user can choose to download a book by clicking on its row in the list. On download, I need to show download progress using a ProgressBar on the actual book list row. I need to also show, on the rows, if a book is enqueued for download, or if its download has completed or failed. The books can be shown in different activities throughout the application--in search, or in the user's list of favorite books, for example. When the books are shown in different places, these are not the same objects, but they are uniquely identified by their bookId. Because I do not want to bind to the service from every Activity, my tentative plan was to use a public static final HashMap on the Service class itself to contain a mapping of bookId to download status, an enum of enqueued, downloading, cancelled, etc. Each book view, when displayed, would check this static HashMap, and if the bookId is in the map, retrieve and display its status. I don't particularly like this idea, but at the moment it's the only way I can think of to retrieve status from the Service without having to bind to it and start it. Additionally I need to retrieve download progress percent from the Service, for a given bookId, if it is the active download. Again I'd rather not bind to the service from every activity, so I'm not sure how to go about retrieving current progress from the Service. My current plan is to use some sort of singleton mediator, that the Service will push updates to, and the views can read from. But I'm not terribly happy with this idea. The reason I'd like to avoid binding to the Service from each Activity is 1.) I'm already running another Service and 2.) binding is verbose and I'd like to avoid needing to pass around a reference to the Service (but admittedly this isn't too much of a problem). Perhaps binding to the local Service isn't expensive enough to warrant this other setup? Should I not be concerned about binding to it from each Activity? Maybe this is a non-issue?

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• jQuery .ajax doesn't load Google Adsense

  - by Sahas Katta

  Hey Everyone, Just ran into an odd issue. I have a simple WP loop and instead of regular NEXT/BACK pages, I use a jQuery powered $.ajax get to append the following page to the current page. It works perfectly. However, I choose to insert a Google Adsense unit every 5th story. Unfortunately, the Adsense unit that is brought in with a second, third, or etc page load don't render. Here's my loop: 10 stories per page, Adsense after the 4th one. <?php $count = 0; ?> <?php if ( have_posts() ) : ?> <?php while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?> <?php $count++; ?> <div class="card"> <div class="title"> <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><span><?php the_title(); ?></span></a> </div> </div> <?php if ($count == 4) : ?> <div class="card"> <!-- ADSENSE CODE HERE (Straight from Google Adsense Panel, no tweaks.) --> </div> <?php endif; ?> As for my jQuery script, here's how that looks: $.ajax({ url: nextPageLink, type: 'GET', success: function(data) { $(data).find('#reviews .card').appendTo('#reviews'); }, error: function(xhr, status, error) { $('.loadination').addClass('hidden'); } }); Keep in mind, I just simplified my code to give you guys an example. The code above was just the essentials. All the loading stuff works perfectly. Images, text, links, etc all load just fine. However, the Google Adsense unit doesn't. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks and Happy Holidays!

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• progress at work

  - by noopize

  I work in a small department in a very large company. Our department operates largely as a independent unit within the company. Each member of the team has a different role. My role within the team is a operations/admin and no one knew of my skills in programing as I never said anything before about it. I just did my work and in the free time read up on things for my own development Our developer who used to look after our websites has left a few months ago. Now when we require edits to our websites even basic HTML changes we outsource the work. We are getting shafted big time. I could of so said something sooner to highlight my skills in this area but I guess I was just happy to do my own development projects. And one reason was they are using asp.net and I have mainly done things in php. I only hinted before that I have done things but I did not want to reveal them before I had completed anything. I was working on something for myself that the company was also trying to implement something similar(e commerce site). I used open source and they decided to go for a propriety solution. Now I have finished my project and showed it to my boss, their project is still not completed and is quite expensive. He was impressed with what I showed him and suggested I should go for courses to learn asp.net. that I may be able to do the development work for them and there are some big upcoming projects in the future. He said this would be a benefit for me that I should look to be doing a better then role then admin. My employer does have a policy if relevent to the role they may support the costs of courses. Now how do I play this what should I say to my boss. I want to get advise on which MS certified courses would be good for asp.net and how to best approach my boss to see if they will pay all the amount for the course. And how much different will asp.net be from php.

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• Tips on installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1

  - by Jon Galloway

  Visual Studio SP1 went up on MSDN downloads (here) on March 8, and will be released publicly on March 10 here. Release announcements: Soma: Visual Studio 2010 enhancements Jason Zander: Announcing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 I started on this post with tips on installing VS2010 SP1 when I realized I’ve been writing these up for Visual Studio and .NET framework SP releases for a while (e.g. VS2008 / .NET 3.5 SP1 post, VS2005 SP1 post). Looking back the years of Visual Studio SP installs (and remembering when we’d get up to SP6 for a Visual Studio release), I’m happy to see that it just keeps getting easier. Service Packs are a lot less finicky about requiring beta software to be uninstalled, install more quickly, and are just generally a lot less scary. If I can’t have a jetpack, at least my future provided me faster, easier service packs. Disclaimer: These tips are just general things I've picked up over the years. I don't have any inside knowledge here. If you see anything wrong, be sure to let me know in the comments. You may want to check the readme file before installing - it's short, and it's in that new-fangled HTML format. On with the tips! Before starting, uninstall Visual Studio features you don't use Visual Studio service packs (and other Microsoft service packs as well) install patches for the specific features you’ve got installed. This is a big reason to always do a custom install when you first install Visual Studio, but it’s not difficult to update your existing installation. Here’s the quick way to do that: Tap the windows key and type “add or remove programs” and press enter (or click on the “Add or remove programs” link if you must).   Type “Visual Studio 2010” in the search box in the upper right corner, click on the Visual Studio program (the one with the VS infinity looking logo) and click on Uninstall/Change. Click on Add or Remove Features The next part’s up to you – what features do you actually use? I’ve been doing primarily ASP.NET MVC development in C# lately, so I selected Visual C# and Visual Web Developer. Remember that you can install features later if needed, and can also install the express versions if you want. Selecting everything just because it’s there - or you paid for it – means that you install updates for everything, every time. When you’ve made your changes, click on the Update button to uninstall unused features. Shut down all instances of Visual Studio It probably goes without saying that you should close a program down before installing it, partly to avoid the file-in-use-reboot-after-install horror. Additional "hunch / works on my machine" quality tip: On one computer I saw a note in the setup log about Visual Studio a prompt for user input to close Visual Studio, although I never saw the prompt. Just to  be sure, I'd personally open up Task Manager and kill any devenv.exe processes I saw running, as it couldn't hurt. Use the web installer I use the Web Installers whenever possible. There’s no point in downloading the DVD unless you’re doing multiple installs or won’t have internet access. The DVD IS is 1.5GB, since it needs to be able to service every possible supported installation option on both x86 and x64. The web installer is 776 KB (smaller than calc.exe), so you can start the installation right away. Like other web installers, the real benefit is that it only installs the updates you need (hence the reason for step 1 – uninstalling unused components). Instead of 1.5GB, my download was roughly 530MB. If you’re installing from MSDN (this link takes you right to the Visual Studio installs), select the first one on the list: The first step in the installation process is to analyze the machine configuration and tell you what needs to be installed. Since I've trimmed down my features, that's a pretty short list. The time's not far off where I may not install SQL Server on my dev machines, just using SQL Server Compact - that would shorten the list further. When I hit next, you can see that the download size has shrunk considerably. When I start the install, note that the installation begins while other components are downloading - another benefit of the web install. On my mid-range desktop machine, the install took 25 minutes. What if it takes longer? According to Heath Stewart (Visual Studio installer guru), average SP1 installs take roughly 45 minutes. An installation which takes hours to complete may be a sign of a problem: see his post Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 installing for over 2 hours could be a sign of a problem. Why so long? Yes, even 25 minutes is a while. Heath's got another blog post explaining why the update can take longer than the initial install (see: A patch may take as long or longer to install than the target product) which explains all the additional steps and complexities a patch needs to deal with, as well as some mitigation steps that deployment authors can take to mitigate the impact. Other things to know about Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Installs over Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta That's nice. Previous Visual Studio versions did a number of annoying things when you installed SP's over beta's - fail with weird errors, get part way through and tell you needed to cancel and uninstall first, etc. I've installed this on two machines that had random beta stuff installed without tears. That Readme file you didn't read I mentioned the readme file earlier (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=210711 ). Some interesting things I picked up in there: 2.1.3. Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 installation may fail when a USB drive or other removeable drive is connected 2.1.4. Visual Studio must be restarted after Visual Studio 2010 SP1 tooling for SQL Server Compact (Compact) 4.0 is installed 2.2.1. If Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 is uninstalled, Visual Studio 2010 must be reinstalled to restore certain components 2.2.2. If Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 is uninstalled, Visual Studio 2010 must be reinstalled before SP1 can be installed again 2.4.3.1. Async CTP If you installed the pre-SP1 version of Async CTP but did not uninstall it before you installed Visual Studio 2010 SP1, then your computer will be in a state in which the version of the C# compiler in the .NET Framework does not match the C# compiler in Visual Studio. To resolve this issue: After you install Visual Studio 2010 SP1, reinstall the SP1 version of the Async CTP from here. Hardware acceleration for Visual Studio is disabled on Windows XP Visual Studio 2010 SP1 disables hardware acceleration when running on Windows XP (only on XP). You can turn it back on in the Visual Studio options, under Environment / General, as shown below. See Jason Zander's post titled Performance Troubleshooting Article and VS2010 SP1 Change.

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• Try out Windows Phone 7 on your PC today

  - by Matthew Guay

  Anticipation has been building for the new Windows Phone 7 Series ever since Microsoft unveiled it at the Mobile World Congress in February.  Now, thanks to free developer tools, you can get a first-hand experience of the basic Windows Phone 7 Series devices on your PC. Windows Phone 7 Series represents a huge change in the mobile field for Microsoft, bringing the acclaimed Zune HD UI to an innovative phone platform.  Windows Mobile has often been criticized for being behind other Smartphone platforms, but Microsoft seeks to regain the lead with this new upcoming release.  A platform must have developers behind it to be useful, so they have released a full set of free development tools so anyone can make apps for it today.  Or, if you simply want to play with Windows Phone 7, you can use the included emulator to try out the new Metro UI.  Here’s how to do this today on your Vista or 7 computer. Please note: These tools are a Customer Technology Preview release, so only install them if you’re comfortable using pre-release software. Getting Started First, download the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP (link below), and run the installer.  This will install the Customer Technology Preview (CTP) versions of Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, Windows Phone Emulator, Silverlight for Windows Phone, and XNA 4.0 Game Studio on your computer, all of which are required and cannot be installed individually. Accept the license agreement when prompted. Click “Install Now” to install the tools you need.  The only setup customization option is where to save the files, so choose Customize if you need to do so. Setup will now automatically download and install the components you need, and will additionally download either 32 or 64 bit programs depending on your operating system. About halfway thorough the installation, you’ll be prompted to reboot your system.  Once your computer is rebooted, setup will automatically resume without further input.   When setup is finished, click “Run the Product Now” to get started. Running Windows Phone 7 on your PC Now that you’ve got the Windows Phone Developer tools installed, it’s time to get the Windows Phone emulator running.  If you clicked “Run the Product Now” when the setup finished, Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone should have already started.   If not, simply enter “visual studio” in your start menu search and select “Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone”. Now, to run the Windows Phone 7 emulator, we have to test an application.  So, even if you don’t know how to program, we can open a phone application template, and then test it to run the emulator.  First, click New Project on the left hand side of the front page. Any of the application templates would work for this, but here let’s select “Windows Phone Application”, and then click Ok. Here’s your new application template, which already contains the basic phone application framework.  This is where you’d start if you want to develop a Windows Phone app, but for now we just want to see Windows Phone 7 in action. So, to run the emulator, click Debug in the menu and then select Start Debugging. Your new application will launch inside the Windows Phone 7 Series emulator.  The default template doesn’t give us much, but it does show an example application running in Windows Phone 7.   Exploring Windows Phone 7 Click the Windows button on the emulator to go to the home screen.  Notice the Zune HD-like transition animation.  The emulator only includes Internet Explorer, your test application, and a few settings. Click the arrow on the right to see the available applications in a list. Settings lets you change the theme, regional settings, and the date and time in your emulator.  It also has an applications settings pane, but this currently isn’t populated. The Time settings shows a unique Windows Phone UI. You can return to the home screen by pressing the Windows button.  Here’s the Internet Explorer app running, with the virtual keyboard open to enter an address.  Please note that this emulator can also accept input from your keyboard, so you can enter addresses without clicking on the virtual keyboard. And here’s Google running in Internet Explorer on Windows Phone 7. Windows Phone 7 supports accelerometers, and you can simulate this in the emulator.  Click one of the rotate buttons to rotate the screen in that direction. Here’s our favorite website in Internet Explorer on Windows Phone 7 in landscape mode. All this, running right inside your Windows 7 desktop… Developer tools for Windows Phone 7 Although it may be fun to play with the Windows Phone 7 emulator, developers will be more excited to actually be able to create new and exciting apps for it.  The Windows Phone Developer Tools download includes Visual Studio Express and XNA Game Studio 4.0 which lets you create enticing games and apps for Windows Phones.  All development for Windows Phones will be in C#, Silverlight, and the XNA game framework.  Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone includes templates for these, and additionally has code samples to help you get started with development. Conclusion Many features are still not functional in this preview version, such as the search button and most of the included applications.  However, this still gives you a great way to experience firsthand the future of the Windows Phone platform.  And, for developers, this is your chance to set your mark on the Windows Phone 7 Series even before it is released to the public.  Happy playing and developing! Links Download Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Windows Phone Developer Site Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Keep Track of Homework Assignments with SoshikuWeekend Fun: Watch Television On Your PC With TVUPlayerEasily Manage Your Downloads with Download StatusbarCreate a Shortcut or Hotkey to Mute the System Volume in WindowsHow-To Geek on Lifehacker: How to Make Windows Vista Less Annoying TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Convert the Quick Launch Bar into a Super Application Launcher Automate Tasks in Linux with Crontab Discover New Bundled Feeds in Google Reader Play Music in Chrome by Simply Dragging a File 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam Easily Sync Files & Folders with Friends & Family

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• Basics of Join Predicate Pushdown in Oracle

  - by Maria Colgan

  Happy New Year to all of our readers! We hope you all had a great holiday season. We start the new year by continuing our series on Optimizer transformations. This time it is the turn of Predicate Pushdown. I would like to thank Rafi Ahmed for the content of this blog.Normally, a view cannot be joined with an index-based nested loop (i.e., index access) join, since a view, in contrast with a base table, does not have an index defined on it. A view can only be joined with other tables using three methods: hash, nested loop, and sort-merge joins. Introduction The join predicate pushdown (JPPD) transformation allows a view to be joined with index-based nested-loop join method, which may provide a more optimal alternative. In the join predicate pushdown transformation, the view remains a separate query block, but it contains the join predicate, which is pushed down from its containing query block into the view. The view thus becomes correlated and must be evaluated for each row of the outer query block. These pushed-down join predicates, once inside the view, open up new index access paths on the base tables inside the view; this allows the view to be joined with index-based nested-loop join method, thereby enabling the optimizer to select an efficient execution plan. The join predicate pushdown transformation is not always optimal. The join predicate pushed-down view becomes correlated and it must be evaluated for each outer row; if there is a large number of outer rows, the cost of evaluating the view multiple times may make the nested-loop join suboptimal, and therefore joining the view with hash or sort-merge join method may be more efficient. The decision whether to push down join predicates into a view is determined by evaluating the costs of the outer query with and without the join predicate pushdown transformation under Oracle's cost-based query transformation framework. The join predicate pushdown transformation applies to both non-mergeable views and mergeable views and to pre-defined and inline views as well as to views generated internally by the optimizer during various transformations. The following shows the types of views on which join predicate pushdown is currently supported. UNION ALL/UNION view Outer-joined view Anti-joined view Semi-joined view DISTINCT view GROUP-BY view Examples Consider query A, which has an outer-joined view V. The view cannot be merged, as it contains two tables, and the join between these two tables must be performed before the join between the view and the outer table T4. A: SELECT T4.unique1, V.unique3 FROM T_4K T4,            (SELECT T10.unique3, T10.hundred, T10.ten             FROM T_5K T5, T_10K T10             WHERE T5.unique3 = T10.unique3) VWHERE T4.unique3 = V.hundred(+) AND       T4.ten = V.ten(+) AND       T4.thousand = 5; The following shows the non-default plan for query A generated by disabling join predicate pushdown. When query A undergoes join predicate pushdown, it yields query B. Note that query B is expressed in a non-standard SQL and shows an internal representation of the query. B: SELECT T4.unique1, V.unique3 FROM T_4K T4,           (SELECT T10.unique3, T10.hundred, T10.ten             FROM T_5K T5, T_10K T10             WHERE T5.unique3 = T10.unique3             AND T4.unique3 = V.hundred(+)             AND T4.ten = V.ten(+)) V WHERE T4.thousand = 5; The execution plan for query B is shown below. In the execution plan BX, note the keyword 'VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE' indicates that the view has undergone the join predicate pushdown transformation. The join predicates (shown here in red) have been moved into the view V; these join predicates open up index access paths thereby enabling index-based nested-loop join of the view. With join predicate pushdown, the cost of query A has come down from 62 to 32.  As mentioned earlier, the join predicate pushdown transformation is cost-based, and a join predicate pushed-down plan is selected only when it reduces the overall cost. Consider another example of a query C, which contains a view with the UNION ALL set operator.C: SELECT R.unique1, V.unique3 FROM T_5K R,            (SELECT T1.unique3, T2.unique1+T1.unique1             FROM T_5K T1, T_10K T2             WHERE T1.unique1 = T2.unique1             UNION ALL             SELECT T1.unique3, T2.unique2             FROM G_4K T1, T_10K T2             WHERE T1.unique1 = T2.unique1) V WHERE R.unique3 = V.unique3 and R.thousand < 1; The execution plan of query C is shown below. In the above, 'VIEW UNION ALL PUSHED PREDICATE' indicates that the UNION ALL view has undergone the join predicate pushdown transformation. As can be seen, here the join predicate has been replicated and pushed inside every branch of the UNION ALL view. The join predicates (shown here in red) open up index access paths thereby enabling index-based nested loop join of the view. Consider query D as an example of join predicate pushdown into a distinct view. We have the following cardinalities of the tables involved in query D: Sales (1,016,271), Customers (50,000), and Costs (787,766).  D: SELECT C.cust_last_name, C.cust_city FROM customers C,            (SELECT DISTINCT S.cust_id             FROM sales S, costs CT             WHERE S.prod_id = CT.prod_id and CT.unit_price > 70) V WHERE C.cust_state_province = 'CA' and C.cust_id = V.cust_id; The execution plan of query D is shown below. As shown in XD, when query D undergoes join predicate pushdown transformation, the expensive DISTINCT operator is removed and the join is converted into a semi-join; this is possible, since all the SELECT list items of the view participate in an equi-join with the outer tables. Under similar conditions, when a group-by view undergoes join predicate pushdown transformation, the expensive group-by operator can also be removed. With the join predicate pushdown transformation, the elapsed time of query D came down from 63 seconds to 5 seconds. Since distinct and group-by views are mergeable views, the cost-based transformation framework also compares the cost of merging the view with that of join predicate pushdown in selecting the most optimal execution plan. Summary We have tried to illustrate the basic ideas behind join predicate pushdown on different types of views by showing example queries that are quite simple. Oracle can handle far more complex queries and other types of views not shown here in the examples. Again many thanks to Rafi Ahmed for the content of this blog post.

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• AutoMapper MappingFunction from Source Type of NameValueCollection

  - by REA_ANDREW

  I have had a situation arise today where I need to construct a complex type from a source of a NameValueCollection.  A little while back I submitted a patch for the Agatha Project to include REST (JSON and XML) support for the service contract.  I realized today that as useful as it is, it did not actually support true REST conformance, as REST should support GET so that you can use JSONP from JavaScript directly meaning you can query cross domain services.  My original implementation for POX and JSON used the POST method and this immediately rules out JSONP as from reading, JSONP only works with GET Requests. This then raised another issue.  The current operation contract of Agatha and one of its main benefits is that you can supply an array of Request objects in a single request, limiting the about of server requests you need to make.  Now, at the present time I am thinking that this will not be the case for the REST imlementation but will yield the benefits of the fact that : The same Request objects can be used for SOAP and RST (POX, JSON) The construct of the JavaScript functions will be simpler and more readable It will enable the use of JSONP for cross domain REST Services The current contract for the Agatha WcfRequestProcessor is at time of writing the following: [ServiceContract] public interface IWcfRequestProcessor { [OperationContract(Name = "ProcessRequests")] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] [TransactionFlow(TransactionFlowOption.Allowed)] Response[] Process(params Request[] requests); [OperationContract(Name = "ProcessOneWayRequests", IsOneWay = true)] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] void ProcessOneWayRequests(params OneWayRequest[] requests); }   My current proposed solution, and at the very early stages of my concept is as follows: [ServiceContract] public interface IWcfRestJsonRequestProcessor { [OperationContract(Name="process")] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] [TransactionFlow(TransactionFlowOption.Allowed)] [WebGet(UriTemplate = "process/{name}/{*parameters}", BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedResponse, ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)] Response[] Process(string name, NameValueCollection parameters); [OperationContract(Name="processoneway",IsOneWay = true)] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] [WebGet(UriTemplate = "process-one-way/{name}/{*parameters}", BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedResponse, ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)] void ProcessOneWayRequests(string name, NameValueCollection parameters); }   Now this part I have not yet implemented, it is the preliminart step which I have developed which will allow me to take the name of the Request Type and the NameValueCollection and construct the complex type which is that of the Request which I can then supply to a nested instance of the original IWcfRequestProcessor  and work as it should normally.  To give an example of some of the urls which you I envisage with this method are: http://www.url.com/service.svc/json/process/getweather/?location=london http://www.url.com/service.svc/json/process/getproductsbycategory/?categoryid=1 http://www.url.om/service.svc/json/process/sayhello/?name=andy Another reason why my direction has gone to a single request for the REST implementation is because of restrictions which are imposed by browsers on the length of the url.  From what I have read this is on average 2000 characters.  I think that this is a very acceptable usage limit in the context of using 1 request, but I do not think this is acceptable for accommodating multiple requests chained together.  I would love to be corrected on that one, I really would but unfortunately from what I have read I have come to the conclusion that this is not the case. The mapping function So, as I say this is just the first pass I have made at this, and I am not overly happy with the try catch for detecting types without default constructors.  I know there is a better way but for the minute, it escapes me.  I would also like to know the correct way for adding mapping functions and not using the anonymous way that I have used.  To achieve this I have used recursion which I am sure is what other mapping function use. As you do have to go as deep as the complex type is. public static object RecurseType(NameValueCollection collection, Type type, string prefix) { try { var returnObject = Activator.CreateInstance(type); foreach (var property in type.GetProperties()) { foreach (var key in collection.AllKeys) { if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(prefix) || key.Length > prefix.Length) { var propertyNameToMatch = String.IsNullOrEmpty(prefix) ? key : key.Substring(property.Name.IndexOf(prefix) + prefix.Length + 1); if (property.Name == propertyNameToMatch) { property.SetValue(returnObject, Convert.ChangeType(collection.Get(key), property.PropertyType), null); } else if(property.GetValue(returnObject,null) == null) { property.SetValue(returnObject, RecurseType(collection, property.PropertyType, String.Concat(prefix, property.PropertyType.Name)), null); } } } } return returnObject; } catch (MissingMethodException) { //Quite a blunt way of dealing with Types without default constructor return null; } }   Another thing is performance, I have not measured this in anyway, it is as I say the first pass, so I hope this can be the start of a more perfected implementation.  I tested this out with a complex type of three levels, there is no intended logical meaning to the properties, they are simply for the purposes of example.  You could call this a spiking session, as from here on in, now I know what I am building I would take a more TDD approach.  OK, purists, why did I not do this from the start, well I didn’t, this was a brain dump and now I know what I am building I can. The console test and how I used with AutoMapper is as follows: static void Main(string[] args) { var collection = new NameValueCollection(); collection.Add("Name", "Andrew Rea"); collection.Add("Number", "1"); collection.Add("AddressLine1", "123 Street"); collection.Add("AddressNumber", "2"); collection.Add("AddressPostCodeCountry", "United Kingdom"); collection.Add("AddressPostCodeNumber", "3"); AutoMapper.Mapper.CreateMap<NameValueCollection, Person>() .ConvertUsing(x => { return(Person) RecurseType(x, typeof(Person), null); }); var person = AutoMapper.Mapper.Map<NameValueCollection, Person>(collection); Console.WriteLine(person.Name); Console.WriteLine(person.Number); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.Line1); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.Number); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.PostCode.Country); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.PostCode.Number); Console.ReadLine(); }   Notice the convention that I am using and that this method requires you do use.  Each property is prefixed with the constructed name of its parents combined.  This is the convention used by AutoMapper and it makes sense. I can also think of other uses for this including using with ASP.NET MVC ModelBinders for creating a complex type from the QueryString which is itself is a NameValueCollection. Hope this is of some help to people and I would welcome any code reviews you could give me. References: Agatha : http://code.google.com/p/agatha-rrsl/ AutoMapper : http://automapper.codeplex.com/   Cheers for now, Andrew   P.S. I will have the proposed solution for a more complete REST implementation for AGATHA very soon. 

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• Upgrading Windows 8 boot to VHD to Windows 8.1&ndash;Step by step guide

  - by Liam Westley

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/twickers/archive/2013/10/19/upgrading-windows-8-boot-to-vhd-to-windows-8.1ndashstep-by.aspxBoot to VHD – dual booting Windows 7 and Windows 8 became easy When Windows 8 arrived, quite a few people decided that they would still dual boot their machines, and instead of mucking about with resizing disk partitions to free up space for Windows 8 they decided to use the boot from VHD feature to create a huge hard disc image into which Windows 8 could be installed.  Scott Hanselman wrote this installation guide, while I myself used the installation guide from Ed Bott of ZD net fame. Boot to VHD is a great solution, it achieves a dual boot, can be backed up easily and had virtually no effect on the original Windows 7 partition. As a developer who has dual booted Windows operating systems for years, hacking boot.ini files, the boot to VHD was a much easier solution. Upgrade to Windows 8.1 – ah, you can’t do that on a virtual disk installation (boot to VHD) Last week the final version of Windows 8.1 arrived, and I went into the Windows Store to upgrade.  Luckily I’m on a fast download service, and use an SSD, because once the upgrade was downloaded and prepared Windows informed that This PC can’t run Windows 8.1, and provided the reason, You can’t install Windows on a virtual drive.  You can see an image of the message and discussion that sparked my search for a solution in this Microsoft Technet forum post. I was determined not to have to resize partitions yet again and fiddle with VHD to disk utilities and back again, and in the end I did succeed in upgrading to a Windows 8.1 boot to VHD partition.  It takes quite a bit of effort though … tldr; Simple steps of how you upgrade Boot into Windows 7 – make a copy of your Windows 8 VHD, to become Windows 8.1 Enable Hyper-V in your Windows 8 (the original boot to VHD partition) Create a new virtual machine, attaching the copy of your Windows 8 VHD Start the virtual machine, upgrade it via the Windows Store to Windows 8.1 Shutdown the virtual machine Boot into Windows 7 – use the bcedit tool to create a new Windows 8.1 boot to VHD option (pointing at the copy) Boot into the new Windows 8.1 option Reactivate Windows 8.1 (it will have become deactivated by running under Hyper-V) Remove the original Windows 8 VHD, and in Windows 7 use bcedit to remove it from the boot menu Things you’ll need A system that can run Hyper-V under Windows 8 (Intel i5, i7 class CPU) Enough space to have your original Windows 8 boot to VHD and a copy at the same time An ISO or DVD for Windows 8 to create a bootable Windows 8 partition Step by step guide Boot to your base o/s, the real one, Windows 7. Make a copy of the Windows 8 VHD file that you use to boot Windows 8 (via boot from VHD) – I copied it from a folder on C: called VHD-Win8 to VHD-Win8.1 on my N: drive. Reboot your system into Windows 8, and enable Hyper-V if not already present (this may require reboot) Use the Hyper-V manager , create a new Hyper-V machine, using half your system memory, and use the option to attach an existing VHD on the main IDE controller – this will be the new copy you made in Step 2. Start the virtual machine, use Connect to view it, and you’ll probably discover it cannot boot as there is no boot record If this is the case, go to Hyper-V manager, edit the Settings for the virtual machine to attach an ISO of a Windows 8 DVD to the second IDE controller. Start the virtual machine, use Connect to view it, and it should now attempt a fresh installation of Windows 8.  You should select Advanced Options and choose Repair - this will make VHD bootable When the setup reboots your virtual machine, turn off the virtual machine, and remove the ISO of the Windows 8 DVD from the virtual machine settings. Start virtual machine, use Connect to view it.  You will see the devices to be re-discovered (including your quad CPU becoming single CPU).  Eventually you should see the Windows Login screen. You may notice that your desktop background (Win+D) will have turned black as your Windows installation has become deactivate due to the hardware changes between your real PC and Hyper-V. Fortunately becoming deactivated, does not stop you using the Windows Store, where you can select the update to Windows 8.1. You can now watch the progress joy of the Windows 8 update; downloading, preparing to update, checking compatibility, gathering info, preparing to restart, and finally, confirm restart - remember that you are restarting your virtual machine sitting on the copy of the VHD, not the Windows 8 boot to VHD you are currently using to run Hyper-V (confused yet?) After the reboot you get the real upgrade messages; setting up x%, xx%, (quite slow) After a while, Getting ready Applying PC Settings x%, xx% (really slow) Updating your system (fast) Setting up a few more things x%, (quite slow) Getting ready, again Accept license terms Express settings Confirmed previous password Next, I had to set up a Microsoft account – which is possibly now required, and not optional Using the Microsoft account required a 2 factor authorization, via text message, a 7 digit code for me Finalising settings Blank screen, HI .. We're setting up things for you (similar to original Windows 8 install) 'You can get new apps from the Store', below which is ’Installing your apps’ - I had Windows Media Center which is counts as an app from the Store ‘Taking care of a few things’, below which is ‘Installing your apps’ ‘Taking care of a few things’, below ‘Don't turn off your PC’ ‘Getting your apps ready’, below ‘Don't turn off your PC’ ‘Almost ready’, below ‘Don't turn off your PC’ … finally, we get the Windows 8.1 start menu, and a quick Win+D to check the desktop confirmed all the application icons I expected, pinned items on the taskbar, and one app moaning about a missing drive At this point the upgrade is complete – you can shutdown the virtual machine Reboot from the original Windows 8 and return to Windows 7 to configure booting to the Windows 8.1 copy of the VHD In an administrator command prompt do following use the bcdedit tool (from an MSDN blog about configuring VHD to boot in Windows 7) Type bcedit to list the current boot options, so you can copy the GUID (complete with brackets/braces) for the original Windows 8 boot to VHD Create a new menu option, copy of the Windows 8 option; bcdedit /copy {originalguid} /d "Windows 8.1" Point the new Windows 8.1 option to the copy of the VHD; bcdedit /set {newguid} device vhd=[D:]\Image.vhd Point the new Windows 8.1 option to the copy of the VHD; bcdedit /set {newguid} osdevice vhd=[D:]\Image.vhd Set autodetection of the HAL (may already be set); bcdedit /set {newguid} detecthal on Reboot from Windows 7 and select the new option 'Windows 8.1' on the boot menu, and you’ll have some messages to look at, as your hardware is redetected (as you are back from 1 CPU to 4 CPUs) ‘Getting devices ready, blank then %xx, with occasional blank screen, for the graphics driver, (fast-ish) Getting Ready message (fast) You will have to suffer one final reboots, choose 'Windows 8.1' and you can now login to a lovely Windows 8.1 start screen running on non virtualized hardware via boot to VHD After checking everything is running fine, you can now choose to Activate Windows, which for me was a toll free phone call to the automated system where you type in lots of numbers to be given a whole bunch of new activation codes. Once you’re happy with your new Windows 8.1 boot to VHD, and no longer need the Windows 8 boot to VHD, feel free to delete the old one.  I do believe once you upgrade, you are no longer licensed to use it anyway. There, that was simple wasn’t it? Looking at the huge list of steps it took to perform this upgrade, you may wonder whether I think this is worth it.  Well, I think it is worth booting to VHD.  It makes backups a snap (go to Windows 7, copy the VHD, you backed up the o/s) and helps with disk management – want to move the o/s, you can move the VHD and repoint the boot menu to the new location. The downside is that Microsoft has complete neglected to support boot to VHD as an upgradable option.  Quite a poor decision in my opinion, and if you read twitter and the forums quite a few people agree with that view.  It’s a shame this got missed in the work on creating the upgrade packages for Windows 8.1.

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• SQLAuthority News – Pluralsight Course Review – Practices for Software Startups – Part 1 of 2

  - by pinaldave

  This is first part of the two part series of Practices for Software Startup Pluralsight Course. The course is written by Stephen Forte (Blog | Twitter). Stephen Forte is the Chief Strategy Officer of the venture backed company, Telerik, a leading vendor of developer and team productivity tools. Stephen is also a Certified Scrum Master, Certified Scrum Professional, PMP, and also speaks regularly at industry conferences around the world. He has written several books on application and database development.  Stephen is also a board member of the Scrum Alliance. Startups – Everybodies Dream Start-up companies are an important topic right now – everyone wants to start their own business.  It is also important to remember that all companies were a start up at one point – from your corner store to the giants like Microsoft and Apple.  Research proves that not every start-up succeeds, in fact, most will fail before their first year.  There are many reasons for this, and this could be due to the fact that there are many stages to a start-up company, and stumbling at any of these stages can lead to failure.  It is important to understand what makes a start-up company succeed at all its hurdles to become successful.  It is even important to define success.  For most start-ups this would mean becoming their own independently functioning company or to be bought out for a hefty profit by a larger company.  The idea of making a hefty profit by living your dream is extremely important, and you can even think of start-ups as the new craze.  That’s why studying them is so important – they are very popular, but things have changed a lot since their inception. Starting the Startups Beginning a start-up company used to be difficult, but now facilities and information is widely available, and it is much easier.  But that means it is much easier to fail, also.  Previously to start your own company, everything was planned and organized, resources were ensured and backed up before beginning; even the idea of starting your own business was a big thing.  Now anybody can do it, and the steps are simple and outlines everywhere – you can get online software and easily outsource , cloud source, or crowdsource a lot of your material.  But without the type of planning previously required, things can often go badly. New Products – New Ideas – New World There are so many fantastic new products, but they don’t reach success all the time.  I find start-up companies very interesting, and whenever I meet someone who is interested in the subject or already starting their own company, I always ask what they are doing, their plans, goals, market, etc.  I am sorry to say that in most cases, they cannot answer my questions.  It is true that many fantastic ideas fail because of bad decisions.  These bad decisions were not made intentionally, but people were simply unaware of what they should be doing.  This will always lead to failure.  But I am happy to say that all these issues can be gone because Pluralsight is now offering a course all about start-ups by Stephen Forte.  Stephen is a start up leader.  He has successfully started many companies and most are still going strong, or have gone on to even bigger and better things. Beginning Course on Startup I have always thought start-ups are a fascinating subject, and decided to take his course, but it is three hours long.  This would be hard to fit into my busy work day all at once, so I decided to do half of his course before my daughter wakes up, and the other half after she goes to sleep.  The course is divided into six modules, so this would be easy to do.  I began the first chapter early in the morning, at 5 am.  Stephen jumped right into the middle of the subject in the very first module – designing your business plan.  The first question you will have to answer to yourself, to others, and to investors is: What is your product and when will we be able to see it?  So a very important concept is a “minimal viable product.”  This means setting goals for yourself and your product.  We all have large dreams, but your minimal viable product doesn’t have to be your final vision at the very first.  For example: Apple is a giant company, but it is still evolving.  Steve Jobs didn’t envision the iPhone 6 at the very beginning.  He had to start at the first iPhone and do his market research, and the idea evolved into the technology you see now.  So for yourself, you should decide a beginning and stop point.  Do your market research.  Determine who you want to reach, what audience you want for your product.  You can have a great idea that simply will not work in the market, do need, bottlenecks, lack of resources, or competition.  There is a lot of research that needs to be done before you even write a business plan, and Stephen covers it in the very first chapter. The Team – Unique Key to Success After jumping right into the subject in the very first module, I wondered what Stephen could have in store for me for the rest of the course.  Chapter number two is building a team.  Having a team is important regardless of what your startup is.  You can be a true visionary with endless ideas and energy, but one person can still not do everything.  It is important to decide from the very beginning if you will have cofounders, team leaders, and how many employees you’ll need.  Even more important, you’ll need to decide what kind of team you want – what personalities, skills, and type of energy you want each of your employees to bring.  Do you want to have an A+ team with a B- idea, or do you have a B- idea that needs an A+ team to sell it?  Stephen asks all the hard questions!  I was especially impressed by his insight on developing.  You have to decide if you need developers, how many, and what their skills should be. I found this insight extremely useful for everyday usage, not just for start-up companies.  I would apply this kind of information in management at any position.  An amazing team will build an amazing product – and that doesn’t matter if you’re a start-up company or a small team working for a much larger business. Customer Development – The Ultimate Obective Chapter three was about customer development. According to Stephen, there are four different steps to develop a customer base.  The first question to ask yourself is if you are envisioning a large customer base buying a few products each, or a small, dedicated base that buys a lot of your product – quantity vs. Quality.  He also discusses how to earn, retain, and get more customers.  He also says that each customer should be placed in a different role – some will be like investors, who regularly spend with you and invest their money in your business.  It is then your job to take that investment and turn it into a better product in the future.  You need to deal with their money properly – think of it is as theirs as investors, not yours as profit.  At the end of this module I felt that only Stephen could provide this kind of insight, and then he listed all the resources he took his information from.  I have never seen a group of people so passionate about their customers. It was indeed a long day for me. In tomorrow’s part 2 we will discuss rest of the three module and also will see a quick video of the Practices for Software Startup Pluralsight Course. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Agile Awakenings and the Rules of Agile

  - by Robert May

  For those that care, you can read my history of management and technology to understand why I think I’m qualified to talk about this at all.  It’s boring, so feel free to skip it. Awakenings I first started to play around with the idea of “agile” in 2004 or 2005.  I found a book on the Rational Unified Process that I thought was good, and attempted to implement parts of it.  I thought I was agile, but really, it wasn’t.   I still didn’t understand the concept of a team.  I still wanted to tell the team what to do and how to get it done.  I still thought I was smarter than the team. After that job, I started work on another project and began helping that team.  The first few months were really rough.  We were implementing Scrum, which was relatively new to everyone on the team, and, quite frankly, I was doing a poor job of it.  I was trying to micro-manage every aspect of the teams work, and we were all miserable. The moment of change came when the senior architect bailed on the project.  His comment to me was: “This isn’t Agile.  Where are the stand-ups?  Where are the stories?”  He was dead on, and I finally woke up.  I finally realized that I was the problem!  I wasn’t trusting the team.  I wasn’t helping the team.  I was being a manager. Like many (most?), I was claiming to be Agile and use Scrum, but I wasn’t in fact following the rules Scrum.  Since then, I’ve done a lot of studying, hands on practice, coaching of many different teams, and other learning around Scrum, and I have discovered that Scrum has some rules that must be followed for success, even though the process is about continuous improvement. I’ve been practicing Scrum right for about 4 years now and have helped multiple teams implement it successfully, so what you’re about to get is based on experience, rather than just theory. The Rules of Scrum In my experience, what I’ve found is that most companies that claim to be doing Scrum or Agile are actually NOT doing either.  This stems largely because they think that they can “adopt the rules of Agile that fit their organization.”  Sadly, many of them think that this means they can adopt iterations (sprints) and not much else.  Either that, or they think they can do whatever they want, or were doing before, and call it Scrum.  This is simply not true. Here are some rules that must be followed for you to really be doing Scrum.  I’ll go into detail on each one of these posts in future blog posts and update links here.  My intent is that this will help other teams implementing scrum to see more success. Agile does not allow you to do whatever you want A Product Owner is required A ScrumMaster is required The team must function as a Team, and QA must be part of the team Support from upper management is required A prioritized product backlog is required A prioritized sprint backlog is required Release planning is required Complete spring planning is required Showcases are required Velocity must be measured Retrospectives are required Daily stand-ups are required Visibility is absolutely required For now, I think that’s enough, although I reserve the right to add more.  If you’re breaking any of these rules, you’re probably not doing Scrum.  There are exceptions to these rules, but until you have practiced Scrum for a while, you don’t know what those exceptions are. Breaking the Rules Many teams break these rules because they are the ones that expose the most pain.  Scrum is not Advil.  It’s not intended to mask the pain, its intended to cure it.  Let me explain that analogy a bit more.  Recently, my 7 year old son broke his arm, quite severely (see the X-Ray to the right).  That caused him a great deal of pain.  We went first to one doctor, and after viewing the X-Ray, they determined that there was no way that they’d cast the arm at their location.  It was simply too bad of a break for them to deal with.  They did, however, give him some Advil for the pain and put a splint on his arm to stabilize the broken bones.  Within minutes, he was feeling much better.  Had we been stupid, we could have gone home and he’d have been just as happy as ever . . . until the pain medication wore off or one of his siblings touched the splint.  Then, all of that pain would come right back to the top.  Sure, he could make it go away by just taking more Advil and moving the splint out of the way, but that wasn’t going to fix the problem permanently. We ended up in an emergency room with a doctor who could fix his arm.  However, we were warned that the fix was going to be VERY painful, and it was.  Even with heavy sedation (Propofol), my son was in enough pain that he squirmed and wiggled trying to get his arm away from the doctor.  He had to endure this pain in order to have a functional arm. But the setting wasn’t the end.  He had to have several casts, had to have it re-broken once, since the first setting didn’t take and finally was given a clean bill of health. Agile implementation is much like this story.  Agile was developed as a result of people recognizing that the development methodologies that were currently in place simply were ineffective.  However, the fix to the broken development that’s been festering for many years is not painless.  Many people start Agile thinking that things will be wonderful.  They won’t!  Agile is about visibility, and often, it brings great pain to surface.  It causes all of the missed deadlines, the cowboy coders, the coasters, the micro-managers, the lazy, and all of the other problems that are really part of your development process now to become painfully visible to EVERYONE.  Many people don’t like this exposure.  Agile will make the pain better, but not if you remove the cast (the rules above) prematurely and start breaking the rules that expose the most pain.  The healing will take time and is not instant (like Advil).  Figuring out what the true source of pain and fixing it is very valuable to you, your team, and your company.  Remember as you’re doing this that Agile isn’t the source of the pain, it’s really just exposing it.  Find the source. My recommendation is that ALL of these rules are followed for a minimum of six months, and preferably for an entire year, before you decide to break any of these rules.  Get a few good releases under your belt.  Figure out what your velocity is and start firing as a team.  Chances are, after you see agile really in action, you won’t want to break the rules because you’ll see their value. More Reading Jean Tabaka recently published a list of 78 Things I Have Learned in 6 Years of Agile Coaching.  Highly recommended. Technorati Tags: Agile,Scrum,Rules

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• T4 Template error - Assembly Directive cannot locate referenced assembly in Visual Studio 2010 proje

  - by CodeSniper

  I ran into the following error recently in Visual Studio 2010 while trying to port Phil Haack’s excellent T4CSS template which was originally built for Visual Studio 2008.   The Problem Error Compiling transformation: Metadata file 'dotless.Core' could not be found In “T4 speak”, this simply means that you have an Assembly directive in your T4 template but the T4 engine was not able to locate or load the referenced assembly. In the case of the T4CSS Template, this was a showstopper for making it work in Visual Studio 2010. On a side note: The T4CSS template is a sweet little wrapper to allow you to use DotLessCss to generate static .css files from .less files rather than using their default HttpHandler or command-line tool.    If you haven't tried DotLessCSS yet, go check it out now!  In short, it is a tool that allows you to templatize and program your CSS files so that you can use variables, expressions, and mixins within your CSS which enables rapid changes and a lot of developer-flexibility as you evolve your CSS and UI. Back to our regularly scheduled program… Anyhow, this post isn't about DotLessCss, its about the T4 Templates and the errors I ran into when converting them from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2010. In VS2010, there were quite a few changes to the T4 Template Engine; most were excellent changes, but this one bit me with T4CSS: “Project assemblies are no longer used to resolve template assembly directives.” In VS2008, if you wanted to reference a custom assembly in your T4 Template (.tt file) you would simply right click on your project, choose Add Reference and select that assembly.  Afterwards you were allowed to use the following syntax in your T4 template to tell it to look at the local references: <#@ assembly name="dotless.Core.dll" #> This told the engine to look in the “usual place” for the assembly, which is your project references. However, this is exactly what they changed in VS2010.  They now basically sandbox the T4 Engine to keep your T4 assemblies separate from your project assemblies.  This can come in handy if you want to support different versions of an assembly referenced both by your T4 templates and your project. Who broke the build?  Oh, Microsoft Did! In our case, this change causes a problem since the templates are no longer compatible when upgrading to VS 2010 – thus its a breaking change.  So, how do we make this work in VS 2010? Luckily, Microsoft now offers several options for referencing assemblies from T4 Templates: GAC your assemblies and use Namespace Reference or Fully Qualified Type Name Use a hard-coded Fully Qualified UNC path Copy assembly to Visual Studio "Public Assemblies Folder" and use Namespace Reference or Fully Qualified Type Name.  Use or Define a Windows Environment Variable to build a Fully Qualified UNC path. Use a Visual Studio Macro to build a Fully Qualified UNC path. Option #1 & 2 were already supported in Visual Studio 2008, so if you want to keep your templates compatible with both Visual Studio versions, then you would have to adopt one of these approaches. Yakkety Yak, use the GAC! Option #1 requires an additional pre-build step to GAC the referenced assembly, which could be a pain.  But, if you go that route, then after you GAC, all you need is a simple type name or namespace reference such as: <#@ assembly name="dotless.Core" #> Hard Coding aint that hard! The other option of using hard-coded paths in Option #2 is pretty impractical in most situations since each developer would have to use the same local project folder paths, or modify this setting each time for their local machines as well as for production deployment.  However, if you want to go that route, simply use the following assembly directive style: <#@ assembly name="C:\Code\Lib\dotless.Core.dll" #> Lets go Public! Option #3, the Visual Studio Public Assemblies Folder, is the recommended place to put commonly used tools and libraries that are only needed for Visual Studio.  Think of it like a VS-only GAC.  This is likely the best place for something like dotLessCSS and is my preferred solution.  However, you will need to either use an installer or a pre-build action to copy the assembly to the right folder location.   Normally this is located at:  C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\PublicAssemblies Once you have copied your assembly there, you use the type name or namespace syntax again: <#@ assembly name="dotless.Core" #> Save the Environment! Option #4, using a Windows Environment Variable, is interesting for enterprise use where you may have standard locations for files, but less useful for demo-code, frameworks, and products where you don't have control over the local system.  The syntax for including a environment variable in your assembly directive looks like the following, just as you would expect: <#@ assembly name="%mypath%\dotless.Core.dll" #> “mypath” is a Windows environment variable you setup that points to some fully qualified UNC path on your system.  In the right situation this can be a great solution such as one where you use a msi installer for deployment, or where you have a pre-existing environment variable you can re-use. OMG Macros! Finally, Option #5 is a very nice option if you want to keep your T4 template’s assembly reference local and relative to the project or solution without muddying-up your dev environment or GAC with extra deployments.  An example looks like this: <#@ assembly name="$(SolutionDir)lib\dotless.Core.dll" #> In this example, I’m using the “SolutionDir” VS macro so I can reference an assembly in a “/lib” folder at the root of the solution.   This is just one of the many macros you can use.  If you are familiar with creating Pre/Post-build Event scripts, you can use its dialog to look at all of the different VS macros available. This option gives the best solution for local assemblies without the hassle of extra installers or other setup before the build.   However, its still not compatible with Visual Studio 2008, so if you have a T4 Template you want to use with both, then you may have to create multiple .tt files, one for each IDE version, or require the developer to set a value in the .tt file manually.   I’m not sure if T4 Templates support any form of compiler switches like “#if (VS2010)”  statements, but it would definitely be nice in this case to switch between this option and one of the ones more compatible with VS 2008. Conclusion As you can see, we went from 3 options with Visual Studio 2008, to 5 options (plus one problem) with Visual Studio 2010.  As a whole, I think the changes are great, but the short-term growing pains during the migration may be annoying until we get used to our new found power. Hopefully this all made sense and was helpful to you.  If nothing else, I’ll just use it as a reference the next time I need to port a T4 template to Visual Studio 2010.  Happy T4 templating, and “May the fourth be with you!”

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• The Incremental Architect&acute;s Napkin - #1 - It&acute;s about the money, stupid

  - by Ralf Westphal

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/05/24/the-incremental-architectacutes-napkin---1---itacutes-about-the.aspx Software development is an economic endeavor. A customer is only willing to pay for value. What makes a software valuable is required to become a trait of the software. We as software developers thus need to understand and then find a way to implement requirements. Whether or in how far a customer really can know beforehand what´s going to be valuable for him/her in the end is a topic of constant debate. Some aspects of the requirements might be less foggy than others. Sometimes the customer does not know what he/she wants. Sometimes he/she´s certain to want something - but then is not happy when that´s delivered. Nevertheless requirements exist. And developers will only be paid if they deliver value. So we better focus on doing that. Although is might sound trivial I think it´s important to state the corollary: We need to be able to trace anything we do as developers back to some requirement. You decide to use Go as the implementation language? Well, what´s the customer´s requirement this decision is linked to? You decide to use WPF as the GUI technology? What´s the customer´s requirement? You decide in favor of a layered architecture? What´s the customer´s requirement? You decide to put code in three classes instead of just one? What´s the customer´s requirement behind that? You decide to use MongoDB over MySql? What´s the customer´s requirement behind that? etc. I´m not saying any of these decisions are wrong. I´m just saying whatever you decide be clear about the requirement that´s driving your decision. You have to be able to answer the question: Why do you think will X deliver more value to the customer than the alternatives? Customers are not interested in romantic ideals of hard working, good willing, quality focused craftsmen. They don´t care how and why you work - as long as what you deliver fulfills their needs. They want to trust you to recognize this as your top priority - and then deliver. That´s all. Fundamental aspects of requirements If you´re like me you´re probably not used to such scrutinization. You want to be trusted as a professional developer - and decide quite a few things following your gut feeling. Or by relying on “established practices”. That´s ok in general and most of the time - but still… I think we should be more conscious about our decisions. Which would make us more responsible, even more professional. But without further guidance it´s hard to reason about many of the myriad decisions we´ve to make over the course of a software project. What I found helpful in this situation is structuring requirements into fundamental aspects. Instead of one large heap of requirements then there are smaller blobs. With them it´s easier to check if a decisions falls in their scope. Sure, every project has it´s very own requirements. But all of them belong to just three different major categories, I think. Any requirement either pertains to functionality, non-functional aspects or sustainability. For short I call those aspects: Functionality, because such requirements describe which transformations a software should offer. For example: A calculator software should be able to add and multiply real numbers. An auction website should enable you to set up an auction anytime or to find auctions to bid for. Quality, because such requirements describe how functionality is supposed to work, e.g. fast or secure. For example: A calculator should be able to calculate the sinus of a value much faster than you could in your head. An auction website should accept bids from millions of users. Security of Investment, because functionality and quality need not just be delivered in any way. It´s important to the customer to get them quickly - and not only today but over the course of several years. This aspect introduces time into the “requrements equation”. Security of Investments (SoI) sure is a non-functional requirement. But I think it´s important to not subsume it under the Quality (Q) aspect. That´s because SoI has quite special properties. For one, SoI for software means something completely different from what it means for hardware. If you buy hardware (a car, a hair blower) you find that a worthwhile investment, if the hardware does not change it´s functionality or quality over time. A car still running smoothly with hardly any rust spots after 10 years of daily usage would be a very secure investment. So for hardware (or material products, if you like) “unchangeability” (in the face of usage) is desirable. With software you want the contrary. Software that cannot be changed is a waste. SoI for software means “changeability”. You want to be sure that the software you buy/order today can be changed, adapted, improved over an unforseeable number of years so as fit changes in its usage environment. But that´s not the only reason why the SoI aspect is special. On top of changeability[1] (or evolvability) comes immeasurability. Evolvability cannot readily be measured by counting something. Whether the changeability is as high as the customer wants it, cannot be determined by looking at metrics like Lines of Code or Cyclomatic Complexity or Afferent Coupling. They may give a hint… but they are far, far from precise. That´s because of the nature of changeability. It´s different from performance or scalability. Also it´s because a customer cannot tell upfront, “how much” evolvability he/she wants. Whether requirements regarding Functionality (F) and Q have been met, a customer can tell you very quickly and very precisely. A calculation is missing, the calculation takes too long, the calculation time degrades with increased load, the calculation is accessible to the wrong users etc. That´s all very or at least comparatively easy to determine. But changeability… That´s a whole different thing. Nevertheless over time the customer will develop a feedling if changeability is good enough or degrading. He/she just has to check the development of the frequency of “WTF”s from developers ;-) F and Q are “timeless” requirement categories. Customers want us to deliver on them now. Just focusing on the now, though, is rarely beneficial in the long run. So SoI adds a counterweight to the requirements picture. Customers want SoI - whether they know it or not, whether they state if explicitly or not. In closing A customer´s requirements are not monolithic. They are not all made the same. Rather they fall into different categories. We as developers need to recognize these categories when confronted with some requirement - and take them into account. Only then can we make true professional decisions, i.e. conscious and responsible ones. I call this fundamental trait of software “changeability” and not “flexibility” to distinguish to whom it´s a concern. “Flexibility” to me means, software as is can easily be adapted to a change in its environment, e.g. by tweaking some config data or adding a library which gets picked up by a plug-in engine. “Flexibiltiy” thus is a matter of some user. “Changeability”, on the other hand, to me means, software can easily be changed in its structure to adapt it to new requirements. That´s a matter of the software developer. ?

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• South Florida Code Camp 2010 &ndash; VI &ndash; 2010-02-27

  - by Dave Noderer

  Catching up after our sixth code camp here in the Ft Lauderdale, FL area. Website at: http://www.fladotnet.com/codecamp. For the 5th time, DeVry University hosted the event which makes everything else really easy! Statistics from 2010 South Florida Code Camp: 848 registered (we use Microsoft Group Events) ~ 600 attended (516 took name badges) 64 speakers (including speaker idol) 72 sessions 12 parallel tracks Food 400 waters 600 sodas 900 cups of coffee (it was cold!) 200 pounds of ice 200 pizza's 10 large salad trays 900 mouse pads Photos on facebook Dave Noderer: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/album.php?aid=190812&id=693530361 Joe Healy: http://www.facebook.com/devfish?ref=mf#!/album.php?aid=202787&id=720054950 Will Strohl:http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/album.php?aid=2045553&id=1046966128&ref=mf Veronica Gonzalez: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/album.php?aid=150954&id=672439484 Florida Speaker Idol One of the sessions at code camp was the South Florida Regional speaker idol competition. After user group level competitions there are five competitors. I acted as MC and score keeper while Ed Hill, Bob O’Connell, John Dunagan and Shervin Shakibi were judges. This statewide competition is being run by Roy Lawsen in Lakeland and the winner, Jeff Truman from Naples will move on to the state finals to be held at the Orlando Code Camp on 3/27/2010: http://www.orlandocodecamp.com/. Each speaker has 10 minutes. The participants were: Alex Koval Jeff Truman Jared Nielsen Chris Catto Venkat Narayanasamy They all did a great job and I’m working with each to make sure they don’t stop there and start speaking at meetings. Thanks to everyone involved! Volunteers As always events like this don’t happen without a lot of help! The key people were: Ed Hill, Bob O’Connell – DeVry For the months leading up to the event, Ed collects all of the swag, books, etc and stores them. He holds meeting with various DeVry departments to coordinate the day, he works with the students in the days  before code camp to stuff bags, print signs, arrange tables and visit BJ’s for our supplies (I go and pay but have a small car!). And of course the day of the event he is there at 5:30 am!! We took two SUV’s to BJ’s, i was really worried that the 36 cases of water were going to break his rear axle! He also helps with the students and works very hard before and after the event. Rainer Haberman – Speakers and Volunteer of the Year Rainer has helped over the past couple of years but this time he took full control of arranging the tracks. I did some preliminary work solicitation speakers but he took over all communications after that. We have tried various organizations around speakers, chair per track, central team but having someone paying attention to the details is definitely the way to go! This was the first year I did not have to jump in at the last minute and re-arrange everything. There were lots of kudo’s from the speakers too saying they felt it was more organized than they have experienced in the past from any code camp. Thanks Rainer! Ray Alamonte – Book Swap We saw the idea of a book swap from the Alabama Code Camp and thought we would give it a try. Ray jumped in and took control. The idea was to get people to bring their old technical books to swap or for others to buy. You got a ticket for each book you brought that you could then turn in to buy another book. If you did not have a ticket you could buy a book for $1. Net proceeds were $153 which I rounded up and donated to the Red Cross. There is plenty going on in Haiti and Chile! I don’t think we really got a count of how many books came in. I many cases the books barely hit the table before being picked up again. At the end we were left with a dozen books which we donated to the DeVry library. A great success we will definitely do again! Jace Weiss / Ratchelen Hut – Coffee and Snacks Wow, this was an eye opener. In past years a few of us would struggle to give some attention to coffee, snacks, etc. But it was always tenuous and always ended up running out of coffee. In the past we have tried buying Dunkin Donuts coffee, renting urns, borrowing urns, etc. This year I actually purchased 2 – 100 cup Westbend commercial brewers plus a couple of small urns (30 and 60 cup we used for decaf). We got them both started early (although i forgot to push the on button on one!) and primed it with 10 boxes of Joe from Dunkin. then Jace and Rachelen took over.. once a batch was brewed they would refill the boxes, keep the area clean and at one point were filling cups. We never ran out of coffee and served a few hundred more than last  year. We did look but next year I’ll get a large insulated (like gatorade) dispensing container. It all went very smoothly and having help focused on that one area was a big win. Thanks Jace and Rachelen! Ken & Shirley Golding / Roberta Barbosa – Registration Ken & Shirley showed up and took over registration. This year we printed small name tags for everyone registered which was great because it is much easier to remember someone’s name when they are labeled! In any case it went the smoothest it has ever gone. All three were actively pulling people through the registration, answering questions, directing them to bags and information very quickly. I did not see that there was too big a line at any time. Thanks!! Scott Katarincic / Vishal Shukla – Website For the 3rd?? year in a row, Scott was in charge of the website starting in August or September when I start on code camp. He handles all the requests, makes changes to the site and admin. I think two years ago he wrote all the backend administration and tunes it and the website a bit but things are pretty stable. The only thing I do is put up the sponsors. It is a big pressure off of me!! Thanks Scott! Vishal jumped into the web end this year and created a new Silverlight agenda page to replace the old ajax page. We will continue to enhance this but it is definitely a good step forward! Thanks! Alex Funkhouser – T-shirts/Mouse pads/tables/sponsors Alex helps in many areas. He helps me bring in sponsors and handles all the logistics for t-shirts, sponsor tables and this year the mouse pads. He is also a key person to help promote the event as well not to mention the after after party which I did not attend and don’t want to know much about! Students There were a number of student volunteers but don’t have all of their names. But thanks to them, they stuffed bags, patrolled pizza and helped with moving things around. Sponsors We had a bunch of great sponsors which allowed us to feed people and give a way a lot of great swag. Our major sponsors of DeVry, Microsoft (both DPE and UGSS), Infragistics, Telerik, SQL Share (End to End, SQL Saturdays), and Interclick are very much appreciated. The other sponsors Applied Innovations (also supply code camp hosting), Ultimate Software (a great local SW company), Linxter (reliable cloud messaging we are lucky to have here!), Mediascend (a media startup), SoftwareFX (another local SW company we are happy to have back participating in CC), CozyRoc (if you do SSIS, check them out), Arrow Design (local DNN and Silverlight experts),Boxes and Arrows (a local SW consulting company) and Robert Half. One thing we did this year besides a t-shirt was a mouse pad. I like it because it will be around for a long time on many desks. After much investigation and years of using mouse pad’s I’ve determined that the 1/8” fabric top is the best and that is what we got!   So now I get a break for a few months before starting again!

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• dasBlog

  - by Daniel Moth

  Some people like blogging on a site that is completely managed by someone else (e.g. http://wordpress.com/) and others, like me, prefer hosting their own blog at their own domain. In the latter case you need to decide what blog engine to install on your web space to power your blog. There are many free blog engines to choose from (e.g. the one from http://wordpress.org/). If, like me, you want to use a blog engine that is based on the .NET platform you have many choices including BlogEngine.NET, Subtext and the one I picked: dasBlog. In this post I'll describe the steps I took to get going with the open source dasBlog (home page, source page). A. Installing First I installed dasBlog on my local Windows 7 machine where I have IIS7 installed. To install dasBlog, I started by clicking the "Install" button on its web gallery page. After that I went through configuration, theming and adding content as described below. Once I was happy that everything was working correctly on the local machine, I set this up on a hosting service. I went for a Windows IIS7 shared hosting 3 month Economy plan from GoDaddy. The dasBlog site lists a bunch of other hosts. You can read the installation instructions for dasBlog, and with GoDaddy I just had to click one button since it is available as part of their quick-install apps. With GoDaddy I had a previewdns option that allowed me to play around and preview my site before going live. B. Configuring After it was installed (on local machine and/or hosting provider), I followed the obvious steps to create an admin user and logged in. This displays an admin navigation bar with the following options: 1. Navigator Links: I decided I was not going to use this feature. I manage links on the side of my blog manually elsewhere as part of the theme. So, I deleted every entry on this page and ignored it thereafter. 2. Blogroll: Ditto - same comment as for Navigator Links. 3. Content Filters: I did not delete (or add) these, but I did ensure both checkboxes are not checked. I.e. I am not using this feature now, but I may return to it in the future. 4. Activity: This is a read-only view of various statistics. So nothing to configure here, but useful to come back to for complementary statistics to whatever other statistical package you use (e.g. free stats as part of the hosting and I also use feedburner for syndication stats). 5. Cross-posting: I did not need that, so I turned it off via the Configuration Settings discussed next. 6. Configuration Settings: This is where the bulk of the configuration for the blog takes place and they are stored in a single XML file: Site.Config file. There are truly self-explanatory options to pick for Basic Settings, Services Settings and Services to Ping, Syndication Settings (this is where you link to your feedburner name if you have one) and Mail to Weblog Settings (I keep this turned off). There are also "Xml Storage System Settings" (I keep this turned off), "OpenId Settings" (I allow OpenID commenters), "Spammer Settings" (Enable captcha, never show email addresses) and "Comment settings" (Enable comments, don't allow on older posts, don't allow html). There are also Appearance Settings (I checked the "Use Post Title for Permalink", replaced spaces with hyphen and unchecked the "Use Unique Title"). Finally, there are also Notification Settings, but they are a bit of hit and miss in my case, in that I don’t always get the emails (still investigating this). C. Adding Content You can add content via the "Add Entry" link on the admin navigation bar or by configuring the "Mail to Weblog" settings and sending email or, do what I've started doing, use Live Writer (also the team has a blog). Another way to add content is programmatically if, for example, you are migrating content from another blog (and I'll cover that in separate post sharing the code). What you should know is that all blog content (posts and comments) live in XML files in a folder called "content" under your dasBlog installation. D. Theming There is a very good guide about themes for dasBlog, there is also a similar guide with screenshots (scroll down to "So how do I create a theme") and the dasBlog macro reference. When you install dasBlog, there are many themes available; each theme is in its own folder (representing the folder name) under the themes folder. You may have noticed that you can switch between these via the "Appearance Settings" described above (look for the combobox after the Default Theme label). I created my own theme by copy-pasting an existing theme folder, renaming it and then switching to it as the default. I then opened the folder in Visual Studio and hacked around the HTML in the 3 files (itemTemplate, homeTemplate and dayTemplate). These files have a blogtemplate file extension, which I temporarily renamed to HTML as I was editing them. There is no more advice I can offer here as this is a matter of taste and the aforementioned links is all I used. Personally, I had salvaged the CSS (and structure) from my previous blog and wanted to make this one match it as closely as possible - I think I have succeeded. E. If you run into any issue with dasBlog... ...use your favorite search engine to find answers. Many bloggers have been using this engine for a while and have documented issues and workarounds over time. One such example is ScottHa's dasBlog category; another example is therightstuff where I "borrowed" the idea/macro for the outlook-style on-page navigation. If you don't find what you want through searching, try posting a question to the forums. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• Getting MySQL work with Entity Framework 4.0

  - by DigiMortal

  Does MySQL work with Entity Framework 4.0? The answer is: yes, it works! I just put up one experimental project to play with MySQL and Entity Framework 4.0 and in this posting I will show you how to get MySQL data to EF. Also I will give some suggestions how to deploy your applications to hosting and cloud environments. MySQL stuff As you may guess you need MySQL running somewhere. I have MySQL installed to my development machine so I can also develop stuff when I’m offline. The other thing you need is MySQL Connector for .NET Framework. Currently there is available development version of MySQL Connector/NET 6.3.5 that supports Visual Studio 2010. Before you start download MySQL and Connector/NET: MySQL Community Server Connector/NET 6.3.5 If you are not big fan of phpMyAdmin then you can try out free desktop client for MySQL – HeidiSQL. I am using it and I am really happy with this program. NB! If you just put up MySQL then create also database with couple of table there. To use all features of Entity Framework 4.0 I suggest you to use InnoDB or other engine that has support for foreign keys. Connecting MySQL to Entity Framework 4.0 Now create simple console project using Visual Studio 2010 and go through the following steps. 1. Add new ADO.NET Entity Data Model to your project. For model insert the name that is informative and that you are able later recognize. Now you can choose how you want to create your model. Select “Generate from database” and click OK. 2. Set up database connection Change data connection and select MySQL Database as data source. You may also need to set provider – there is only one choice. Select it if data provider combo shows empty value. Click OK and insert connection information you are asked about. Don’t forget to click test connection button to see if your connection data is okay. If everything works then click OK. 3. Insert context name Now you should see the following dialog. Insert your data model name for application configuration file and click OK. Click next button. 4. Select tables for model Now you can select tables and views your classes are based on. I have small database with events data. Uncheck the checkbox “Include foreign key columns in the model” – it is damn annoying to get them away from model later. Also insert informative and easy to remember name for your model. Click finish button. 5. Define your classes Now it’s time to define your classes. Here you can see what Entity Framework generated for you. Relations were detected automatically – that’s why we needed foreign keys. The names of classes and their members are not nice yet. After some modifications my class model looks like on the following diagram. Note that I removed attendees navigation property from person class. Now my classes look nice and they follow conventions I am using when naming classes and their members. NB! Don’t forget to see properties of classes (properties windows) and modify their set names if set names contain numbers (I changed set name for Entity from Entity1 to Entities). 6. Let’s test! Now let’s write simple testing program to see if MySQL data runs through Entity Framework 4.0 as expected. My program looks for events where I attended. using(var context = new MySqlEntities()) {     var myEvents = from e in context.Events                     from a in e.Attendees                     where a.Person.FirstName == "Gunnar" &&                             a.Person.LastName == "Peipman"                     select e;       Console.WriteLine("My events: ");       foreach(var e in myEvents)     {         Console.WriteLine(e.Title);     } }   Console.ReadKey(); And when I run it I get the result shown on screenshot on right. I checked out from database and these results are correct. At first run connector seems to work slow but this is only the effect of first run. As connector is loaded to memory by Entity Framework it works fast from this point on. Now let’s see what we have to do to get our program work in hosting and cloud environments where MySQL connector is not installed. Deploying application to hosting and cloud environments If your hosting or cloud environment has no MySQL connector installed you have to provide MySQL connector assemblies with your project. Add the following assemblies to your project’s bin folder and include them to your project (otherwise they are not packaged by WebDeploy and Azure tools): MySQL.Data MySQL.Data.Entity MySQL.Web You can also add references to these assemblies and mark references as local so these assemblies are copied to binary folder of your application. If you have references to these assemblies then you don’t have to include them to your project from bin folder. Also add the following block to your application configuration file. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <configuration> ...   <system.data>     <DbProviderFactories>         <add              name=”MySQL Data Provider”              invariant=”MySql.Data.MySqlClient”              description=”.Net Framework Data Provider for MySQL”              type=”MySql.Data.MySqlClient.MySqlClientFactory, MySql.Data,                   Version=6.2.0.0, Culture=neutral,                   PublicKeyToken=c5687fc88969c44d”          />     </DbProviderFactories>   </system.data> ... </configuration> Conclusion It was not hard to get MySQL connector installed and MySQL connected to Entity Framework 4.0. To use full power of Entity Framework we used InnoDB engine because it supports foreign keys. It was also easy to query our model. To get our project online we needed some easy modifications to our project and configuration files.

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