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  • Free HTML5 & CSS3 Fundamentals course

    - by TATWORTH
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TATWORTH/archive/2013/10/13/free-html5--css3-fundamentals-course.aspxAt http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/html5-css3-fundamentals-development-for-absolute-beginners there is a free course on HTML5 & CSS3 FundamentalsThis is not a course for pretty web design but for writing good standards compliant HTML. Please note that to get the work files for the course you need to go to http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/HTML5-CSS3-Fundamentals-Development-for-Absolute-Beginners/Series-Introduction-01 as the Microsoft Academy downloads do not seem to work!The course is done by Bob Tabor who runs http://www.learnvisualstudio.net

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  • More Stuff less Fluff

    - by brendonpage
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/brendonpage/archive/2013/11/08/more-stuff-less-fluff.aspxYAGNI – "You Aren't Going To Need It". This is an acronym commonly used in software development to remind developers to only write what they need. This acronym exists because software developers have gotten into the habit of writing everything they need to solve a problem and then everything they think they're going to possibly need in the future. Since we can't predict the future this results in a large portion of the code that we write never being used. That extra code causes unnecessary complexity, which makes it harder to understand and harder to modify when we inevitably have to write something that we didn't think of. I've known about YAGNI for some time now but I never really got it. The words made sense and the idea was clear but the concept never sank in. I was one of those devs who'd happily write a ton of code in the anticipation of future needs. In my mind this was an essential part of writing high quality code. I didn't realise that in doing so I was actually writing low quality code. If you are anything like me you are probably thinking "Lies and propaganda! High quality code needs to be future proof." I agree! But what makes code future proof? If we could see into the future the answer would be simple, code that allows for or meets all future requirements. Since we can't see the future the best we can do is write code that can easily adapt to future requirements, this means writing flexible code. Flexible code is: Fast to understand. Fast to add to. Fast to modify. To be flexible code has to be simple, this means only making it as complex as it needs to be to meet those 3 criteria. That is high quality code. YAGNI! The art is in deciding where to place the seams (abstractions) that will give you flexibility without making decisions about future functionality. Robert C Martin explains it very nicely, he says a good architecture allows you to defer decisions because if you can defer a decision then you have the flexibility to change it. I've recently had a YAGNI experience which brought this all into perspective. I was working on a new project which had multiple clients that connect to a server hosted in the cloud. I was tasked with adding a feature to the desktop client that would allow users to capture items that would then be saved to the cloud. My immediate thought was "Hey we have multiple clients so I should build a web service for these items, that way we can access them from other clients", so I went to work and this is what I created.  I stood back and gazed upon what I'd created with a warm fuzzy feeling. It was beautiful! Then the time came for the team to use the design I'd created for another feature with a new entity. Let's just say that they didn't get the same warm fuzzy feeling that I did when they looked at the design. After much discussion they eventually got it through to me that I'd bloated the design based on an assumption of future functionality. After much more discussion we cut the design down to the following. This design gives us future flexibility with no extra work, it is as complex as it needs to be. It has been a couple of months since this incident and we still haven't needed to access either of the entities from other clients. Using the simpler design allowed us to do more stuff with less stuff!

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  • Collabnet Subversion and Self Signed Certificates

    - by Robert May
    We installed Collabnet as our subversion server recently.  This is the first time that we’ve used it.  In general, it seems pretty good, but we ran into a problem with it.  People were getting the following error in Tortoise: OPTIONS of ’https://xxxx.xxxxxxxx.xxxx/svn/xxxxx’: SSL handshake failed: SSL error code – 1/1/336032856 (https://xxxx.xxxxxxxx.xxxx) The odd thing is that for some people, it worked, for others, it didn’t!  I also couldn’t find anything useful out on the internet. We had checked the Subversion Server should serve via https option in the settings, and all of the ports were open, etc. This option causes a self signed certificate to be used. What we discovered: Tortoise must use the same url as is in the Hostname field on the General settings for collabnet or you’ll get this error.  Basically, some people were using https://svn.xxxxxxx.xxxxx and others were using https://computername.xxxxxxxx.xxxx.  Because the host name said used the computer name version, the whole thing broke.  By changing the host name to the svn version, which is what they should be using, the problem went away.  The users do get the “Accept Certificate” prompt, but we can live with that! Technorati Tags: Subversion,Collabnet

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  • C# 4.0 Optional/Named Parameters Beginner&rsquo;s Tutorial

    - by mbcrump
    One of the interesting features of C# 4.0 is for both named and optional arguments.  They are often very useful together, but are quite actually two different things.  Optional arguments gives us the ability to omit arguments to method invocations. Named arguments allows us to specify the arguments by name instead of by position.  Code using the named parameters are often more readable than code relying on argument position.  These features were long overdue, especially in regards to COM interop. Below, I have included some examples to help you understand them more in depth. Please remember to target the .NET 4 Framework when trying these samples. Code Snippet using System;   namespace ConsoleApplication3 {     class Program     {         static void Main(string[] args)         {               //C# 4.0 Optional/Named Parameters Tutorial               Foo();                              //Prints to the console | Return Nothing 0             Foo("Print Something");             //Prints to the console | Print Something 0             Foo("Print Something", 1);          //Prints to the console | Print Something 1             Foo(x: "Print Something", i: 5);    //Prints to the console | Print Something 5             Foo(i: 5, x: "Print Something");    //Prints to the console | Print Something 5             Foo("Print Something", i: 5);       //Prints to the console | Print Something 5             Foo2(i3: 77);                       //Prints to the console | 77         //  Foo(x:"Print Something", 5);        //Positional parameters must come before named arguments. This will error out.             Console.Read();         }           static void Foo(string x = "Return Nothing", int i = 0)         {             Console.WriteLine(x + " " + i + Environment.NewLine);         }           static void Foo2(int i = 1, int i2 = 2, int i3 = 3, int i4 = 4)         {             Console.WriteLine(i3);         }     } }

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  • I'm back

    - by Rob Addis
    I haven’t posted much for a while but after 3 years as a Solution Architect I’m back to my old role designing and developing SOA Frameworks and Management Platforms. So you may be hearing a bit more from me in the future.

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  • Silverlight 4 Twitter Client &ndash; Source Files

    - by Max
    Here you can download the source files this includes all the parts we have discussed and one more list feature which I am currently working on, its not fully finished. Will see you soon in my next post with the next part ready. I received a few emails, saying that my tutorial is good – Thanks for all your support. A few asked for source files, here it is. All your support gives me more reasons to keep blogging! Cheers!

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  • This is something new

    - by shmoolca
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} I have created GUI with lots of my own controls. This control has style as a resource inside control resources. My performance profiler shows that InitializeComponent of this control is 7.5 times longer than control that has defined style in resources of application. It occurs because constructor is loading whole BAML each time constructor is called. Sounds logical for me :)

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  • Weekly Cloud Roundup 2012-15

    - by Alan Smith
    Filtering the informative, insightful and quirky from the fire hose of cloud-based hype. Irving Wladawsky-Berger provides some great insight into The Complex Transition to the Cloud, sharing his views on the slow adoption of cloud computing in organizations. “…a prediction by the research firm Gartner that while cloud computing will continue to grow at almost 20 percent a year, it will account for less than 5 percent of totally IT spending in 2015.” With a more positive mindset, Balaji Viswanathan highlights 7 Salient Trends and Directions in Cloud Computing that could be shaping the industry over the next few years. Cloud computing also looks to save energy “A small business with 100 users that moved the Microsoft applications to the cloud could cut energy use and carbon emissions by 90%. Large organizations with 10,000 users saw a 30% reduction.” More on that story here. The expansion of Windows Azure has been in the news with the announcement of “East US” and “West US” datacenters; this was covered by Visual Studio Magazine and Mary-Jo, and according to thenextweb.com Microsoft are also building $112 million data center in Wyoming. The cloud price war is still in full swing with Joe Panettieri discussing the pricing of Windows Azure and Office 365 and asking How Low Can It Go?

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  • DDDSouthWest 4.0 26th May 2012 - Async 20/20 presentation

    - by Liam Westley
    As I wasn’t voted in with my nominated sessions I presented a 20/20 talk on the new async functionality coming with the .Net Framework.  This was based on the PechaKucha presentation format, where you have only 20 slides with only 20 seconds per slide, and it progresses automatically. It was the first I’d attempted, so thanks to the organisers for allowing me to have a go. Although creating the slide deck was definitely easier than a one hour presentation, it was much more stressful giving the talk by the end of the 6m 40s. I’m not going to upload the slide deck (it won’t make much sense) but I did record the audio and used the excellent Camtasia to create a video of the slide deck with that audio which you can watch over here, https://vimeo.com/42957952

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  • IsNullOrEmpty generic method for Array to avoid Re-Sharper warning

    - by Michael Freidgeim
    I’ve used the following extension method in many places. public static bool IsNullOrEmpty(this Object[] myArr) { return (myArr == null || myArr.Length == 0); }Recently I’ve noticed that Resharper shows warning covariant array conversion to object[] may cause an exception for the following codeObjectsOfMyClass.IsNullOrEmpty()I’ve resolved the issue by creating generic extension method public static bool IsNullOrEmpty<T>(this T[] myArr) { return (myArr == null || myArr.Length == 0); }Related linkshttp://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/94089/add-isnullorempty-to-array-class    public static bool IsNullOrEmpty(this System.Collections.IEnumerable source)        {            if (source == null)                return true;            else            {                return !source.GetEnumerator().MoveNext();            }        }http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8560106/isnullorempty-equivalent-for-array-c-sharp

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  • Application Integration Future &ndash; BizTalk Server &amp; Windows Azure (TechEd 2012)

    - by SURESH GIRIRAJAN
    I am really excited to see lot of new news around BizTalk in TechEd 2012. I was recently watching the session presented by Sriram and Rajesh on “Application Integration Futures: The Road Map and What's Next on Windows Azure”. It was great session and lot of interesting stuff about the feature updates for BizTalk and Azure integration. I have highlighted them below, definitely customers who haven’t started using Microsoft BizTalk ESB Toolkit should start using them which is going to be part of the core BizTalk product in future release, which is cool… BizTalk Server feature enhancements Manageability: ESB Tool Kit is going to be part of the core BizTalk product and Setup. Visualize BizTalk artifact dependencies in BizTalk administration console. HIS administration using configuration files. Performance: Improvements in ordered send port scenarios Improved performance in dynamic send ports and ESB, also to configure BizTalk host handler for dynamic send ports. Right now it runs under default host, which does not enable to scale. MLLP adapter enhancements and DB2 client transaction load balancing / client bulk insert. Platform Support: Visual Studio 2012, Windows 8 Server, SQL Server 2012, Office 15 and System Center 2012. B2B enhancements to support latest industry standards natively. Connectivity Improvements: Consume REST service directly in BizTalk SharePoint integration made easier. Improvements to SMTP adapter, to add macros for sending same email with different content to different parties. Connectivity to Azure Service Bus relay, queues and topics. DB2 client connectivity to SQL Server and SQL Server connectivity to Informix. CICS Http client connectivity to Windows. Azure: Use Azure as IaaS/PaaS for BizTalk environment. Use Azure to provision BizTalk environment for test environment / development. Later move to On-premises or build a Hybrid cloud approach. Eliminate HW procurement for BizTalk environment for testing / demos / development etc. Enable to create BizTalk farm easily and remove/add more servers as needed. EAI Service: EAI Bridge Protocol transformation Message Transformation Running custom code Message Enrichment Hybrid Connectivity LOB Applications On-premises Application On-premises Connectivity to Applications in the cloud Queues/ Topics Ftp Devices Web Services Bridge can be customized based on the service needs to provide different capabilities needed as part of the bridge. Look at the sample for EDI bridge for EDI service sample. Also with Tracking enabled through the portal. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh674490 Adapters: Service Bus Messaging adapter - New adapter added. WebHttp adapter - For REST services. NetTcpRelay adapter - New adapter added. I will start posting more and once I start playing with this…

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  • Why is Double.Parse so slow?

    - by alexhildyard
    I was recently investigating a bottleneck in one of my applications, which read a CSV file from disk using a TextReader a line at a time, split the tokens, called Double.Parse on each one, then shunted the results into an object list. I was surprised to find it was actually the Double.Parse which seemed to be taking up most of the time.Googling turned up this, which is a little unfocused in places but throws out some excellent ideas:It makes more sense to work with binary format directly, rather than coerce strings into doublesThere is a significant performance improvement in composing doubles directly from the byte stream via long intermediariesString.Split is inefficient on fixed length recordsIn fact it turned out that my problem was more insidious and also more mundane -- a simple case of bad data in, bad data out. Since I had been serialising my Doubles as strings, when I inadvertently divided by zero and produced a "NaN", this of course was serialised as well without error. And because I was reading in using Double.Parse, these "NaN" fields were also (correctly) populating real Double objects without error. The issue is that Double.Parse("NaN") is incredibly slow. In fact, it is of the order of 2000x slower than parsing a valid double. For example, the code below gave me results of 357ms to parse 1000 NaNs, versus 15ms to parse 100,000 valid doubles.            const int invalid_iterations = 1000;            const int valid_iterations = invalid_iterations * 100;            const string invalid_string = "NaN";            const string valid_string = "3.14159265";            DateTime start = DateTime.Now;                        for (int i = 0; i < invalid_iterations; i++)            {                double invalid_double = Double.Parse(invalid_string);            }            Console.WriteLine(String.Format("{0} iterations of invalid double, time taken (ms): {1}",                invalid_iterations,                ((TimeSpan)DateTime.Now.Subtract(start)).Milliseconds            ));            start = DateTime.Now;            for (int i = 0; i < valid_iterations; i++)            {                double valid_double = Double.Parse(valid_string);            }            Console.WriteLine(String.Format("{0} iterations of valid double, time taken (ms): {1}",                valid_iterations,                ((TimeSpan)DateTime.Now.Subtract(start)).Milliseconds            )); I think the moral is to look at the context -- specifically the data -- as well as the code itself. Once I had corrected my data, the performance of Double.Parse was perfectly acceptable, and while clearly it could have been improved, it was now sufficient to my needs.

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  • Building Enterprise Smartphone App &ndash; Part 4: Application Development Considerations

    - by Tim Murphy
    This is the final part in a series of posts based on a talk I gave recently at the Chicago Information Technology Architects Group.  Feel free to leave feedback. Application Development Considerations Now we get to the actual building of your solutions.  What are the skills and resources that will be needed in order to develop a smartphone application in the enterprise? Language Knowledge One of the first things you need to consider when you are deciding which platform language do you either have the most in house skill base or can you easily acquire.  If you already have developers who know Java or C# you may want to use either Android or Windows Phone.  You should also take into consideration the market availability of developers.  If your key developer leaves how easy is it to find a knowledgeable replacement? A second consideration when it comes to programming languages is the qualities exposed by the languages of a particular platform.  How well does that development language and its associated frameworks support things like security and access to the features of the smartphone hardware?  This will play into your overall cost of ownership if you have to create this infrastructure on your own. Manage Limited Resources Everything is limited on a smartphone: battery, memory, processing power, network bandwidth.  When developing your applications you will have to keep your footprint as small as possible in every way.  This means not running unnecessary processes in the background that will drain the battery or pulling more data over the airwaves than you have to.  You also want to keep your on device in as compact a format as possible. Mobile Design Patterns There are a number of design patterns that have either come to life because of smartphone development or have been adapted for this use.  The main pattern in the Windows Phone environment is the MVVM (Model-View-View-Model).  This is great for overall application structure and separation of concerns.  The fun part is trying to keep that separation as pure as possible.  Many of the other patterns may or may not have strict definitions, but some that you need to be concerned with are push notification, asynchronous communication and offline data storage. Real estate is limited on smartphones and even tablets. You are also limited in the type of controls that can be represented in the UI. This means rethinking how you modularize your application. Typing is also much harder to do so you want to reduce this as much as possible.  This leads to UI patterns.  While not what we would traditionally think of as design patterns the guidance each platform has for UI design is critical to the success of your application.  If user find the application difficult navigate they will not use it. Development Process Because of the differences in development tools required, test devices and certification and deployment processes your teams will need to learn new way of working together.  This will include the need to integrate service contracts of back-end systems with mobile applications.  You will also want to make sure that you present consistency across different access points to corporate data.  Your web site may have more functionality than your smartphone application, but it should have a consistent core set of functionality.  This all requires greater communication between sub-teams of your developers. Testing Process Testing of smartphone apps has a lot more to do with what happens when you lose connectivity or if the user navigates away from your application. There are a lot more opportunities for the user or the device to perform disruptive acts.  This should be your main testing concentration aside from the main business requirements.  You will need to do things like setting the phone to airplane mode and seeing what the application does in order to weed out any gaps in your handling communication interruptions. Need For Outside Experts Since this is a development area that is new to most companies the need for experts is a lot greater. Whether these are consultants, vendor representatives or just development community forums you will need to establish expert contacts. Nothing is more dangerous for your project timelines than a lack of knowledge.  Make sure you know who to call to avoid lengthy delays in your project because of knowledge gaps. Security Security has to be a major concern for enterprise applications. You aren't dealing with just someone's game standings. You are dealing with a companies intellectual property and competitive advantage. As such you need to start by limiting access to the application itself.  Once the user is in the app you need to ensure that the data is secure at all times.  This includes both local storage and across the wire.  This means if a platform doesn’t natively support encryption for these functions you will need to find alternatives to secure your data.  You also need to keep secret (encryption) keys obfuscated or locked away outside of the application. People can disassemble the code otherwise and break your encryption. Offline Capabilities As we discussed earlier one your biggest concerns is not having connectivity.  Because of this a good portion of your code may be dedicated to handling loss of connection and reconnection situations.  What do you do if you lose the network?  Back up all your transactions and store of any supporting data so that operations can continue off line. In order to support this you will need to determine the available flat file or local data base capabilities of the platform.  Any failed transactions will need to support a retry mechanism whether it is automatic or user initiated.  This also includes your services since they will need to be able to roll back partially completed transactions.  What ever you do, don’t ignore this area when you are designing your system. Deployment Each platform has different deployment capabilities. Some are more suited to enterprise situations than others. Apple's approach is probably the most mature at the moment. Prior to the current generation of smartphone platforms it would have been Windows CE. Windows Phone 7 has the limitation that the app has to be distributed through the same network as public facing applications. You mark them as private which means that they are only accessible by a direct URL. Unfortunately this does not make them undiscoverable (although it is very difficult). This will change with Windows Phone 8 where companies will be able to certify their own applications and distribute them.  Given this Windows Phone applications need to be more diligent with application access in order to keep them restricted to the company's employees. My understanding of the Android deployment schemes is that it is much less standardized then either iOS or Windows Phone. Someone would have to confirm or deny that for me though since I have not yet put the time into researching this platform further. Given my limited exposure to the iOS and Android platforms I have not been able to confirm this, but there are varying degrees of user involvement to install and keep applications updated. At one extreme the user just goes to a website to do the install and in other case they may need to download files and perform steps to install them. Future Bluetooth Today we use Bluetooth for keyboards, mice and headsets.  In the future it could be used to interrogate car computers or manufacturing systems or possibly retail machines by service techs.  This would open smartphones to greater use as a almost a Star Trek Tricorder.  You would get you all your data as well as being able to use it as a universal remote for just about any device or machine. Better corporation controlled deployment At least in the Windows Phone world the upcoming release of Windows Phone 8 will include a private certification and deployment option that is currently not available with Windows Phone 7 (Mango). We currently have to run the apps through the Marketplace certification process and use a targeted distribution method. Platform independent approaches HTML5 and JavaScript with Web Service has become a popular topic lately for not only creating flexible web site, but also creating cross platform mobile applications.  I’m not yet convinced that this lowest common denominator approach is viable in most cases, but it does have it’s place and seems to be growing.  Be sure to keep an eye on it. Summary From my perspective enterprise smartphone applications can offer a great competitive advantage to many companies.  They are not cheap to build and should be approached cautiously.  Understand the factors I have outlined in this series, do you due diligence and see if there is a portion of your business that can benefit from the mobile experience. del.icio.us Tags: Architecture,Smartphones,Windows Phone,iOS,Android

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  • Working with QuickBooks using LINQPad

    - by dataintegration
    The RSSBus ADO.NET Providers can be used from many applications and development environments. In this article, we show how to use LINQPad to connect to QuickBooks using the RSSBus ADO.NET Provider for QuickBooks. Although this example uses the QuickBooks Data Provider, the same process applies to any of our ADO.NET Providers. Create the Data Model Step 1: Download and install both the Data Provider from RSSBus and LINQPad (available at www.linqpad.net Step 2: Create a new project in Visual Studio and create a data model for it using the ADO.NET Entity Data Model wizard. Step 3: Create a new connection by clicking "New Connection", specify the connection string options, and click Next. Step 4: Select the desired tables and views and click Finish to create the data model. Step 5: Right click on the entity diagram and select 'Add Code Generation Item'. Choose the 'ADO.NET DbContext Generator'. Step 6: Now build the project. The generated files can be used to create a QuickBooks connection in LINQPad. Create the connection to QuickBooks in LINQPad Step 7:Open LINQPad and click 'Add New Connection'. Step 8: Choose 'Entity Framework DbContext POCO'. Step 9: Choose the data model assembly ('.dll') created by Visual Studio as the 'Path to Custom Assembly'. Choose the name of the custom DbContext, the path to the config file, and assign a name to the connection that will allow you to recognize its purpose. Step 10: Congratulations! Now you have a connection to QuickBooks, and you can query data through LINQPad.

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  • O'Reilly 50% off selected Training Kit Ebooks to July 5, 2012 at 23:59 PT

    - by TATWORTH
    At http://shop.oreilly.com/category/deals/msp-training-kit-owo.do?code=WKMSPTK, there is 50% off a selection of Microsoft Press Training Kit ebooks" Make the most of your study time with Microsoft Press Training Kit ebooks. Work at your own pace through a series of lessons and reviews that fully cover exam objectives. Then, reinforce and apply your knowledge to real-world case scenarios and practice exercises to maximize your performance on the exams. For one week only, you can save 50% on these ebooks"

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  • Using IIS Logs for Performance Testing with Visual Studio

    - by Tarun Arora
    In this blog post I’ll show you how you can play back the IIS Logs in Visual Studio to automatically generate the web performance tests. You can also download the sample solution I am demo-ing in the blog post. Introduction Performance testing is as important for new websites as it is for evolving websites. If you already have your website running in production you could mine the information available in IIS logs to analyse the dense zones (most used pages) and performance test those pages rather than wasting time testing & tuning the least used pages in your application. What are IIS Logs To help with server use and analysis, IIS is integrated with several types of log files. These log file formats provide information on a range of websites and specific statistics, including Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, user information and site visits as well as dates, times and queries. If you are using IIS 7 and above you will find the log files in the following directory C:\Interpub\Logs\ Walkthrough 1. Download and Install Log Parser from the Microsoft download Centre. You should see the LogParser.dll in the install folder, the default install location is C:\Program Files (x86)\Log Parser 2.2. LogParser.dll gives us a library to query the iis log files programmatically. By the way if you haven’t used Log Parser in the past, it is a is a powerful, versatile tool that provides universal query access to text-based data such as log files, XML files and CSV files, as well as key data sources on the Windows operating system such as the Event Log, the Registry, the file system, and Active Directory. More details… 2. Create a new test project in Visual Studio. Let’s call it IISLogsToWebPerfTestDemo.   3.  Delete the UnitTest1.cs class that gets created by default. Right click the solution and add a project of type class library, name it, IISLogsToWebPerfTestEngine. Delete the default class Program.cs that gets created with the project. 4. Under the IISLogsToWebPerfTestEngine project add a reference to Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.WebTestFramework – c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\PublicAssemblies\Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.WebTestFramework.dll LogParser also called MSUtil - c:\users\tarora\documents\visual studio 2010\Projects\IisLogsToWebPerfTest\IisLogsToWebPerfTestEngine\obj\Debug\Interop.MSUtil.dll 5. Right click IISLogsToWebPerfTestEngine project and add a new classes – IISLogReader.cs The IISLogReader class queries the iis logs using the log parser. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; using MSUtil; using LogQuery = MSUtil.LogQueryClassClass; using IISLogInputFormat = MSUtil.COMIISW3CInputContextClassClass; using LogRecordSet = MSUtil.ILogRecordset; using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.WebTesting; using System.Diagnostics; namespace IisLogsToWebPerfTestEngine { // By making use of log parser it is possible to query the iis log using select queries public class IISLogReader { private string _iisLogPath; public IISLogReader(string iisLogPath) { _iisLogPath = iisLogPath; } public IEnumerable<WebTestRequest> GetRequests() { LogQuery logQuery = new LogQuery(); IISLogInputFormat iisInputFormat = new IISLogInputFormat(); // currently these columns give us suffient information to construct the web test requests string query = @"SELECT s-ip, s-port, cs-method, cs-uri-stem, cs-uri-query FROM " + _iisLogPath; LogRecordSet recordSet = logQuery.Execute(query, iisInputFormat); // Apply a bit of transformation while (!recordSet.atEnd()) { ILogRecord record = recordSet.getRecord(); if (record.getValueEx("cs-method").ToString() == "GET") { string server = record.getValueEx("s-ip").ToString(); string path = record.getValueEx("cs-uri-stem").ToString(); string querystring = record.getValueEx("cs-uri-query").ToString(); StringBuilder urlBuilder = new StringBuilder(); urlBuilder.Append("http://"); urlBuilder.Append(server); urlBuilder.Append(path); if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(querystring)) { urlBuilder.Append("?"); urlBuilder.Append(querystring); } // You could make substitutions by introducing parameterized web tests. WebTestRequest request = new WebTestRequest(urlBuilder.ToString()); Debug.WriteLine(request.UrlWithQueryString); yield return request; } recordSet.moveNext(); } Console.WriteLine(" That's it! Closing the reader"); recordSet.close(); } } }   6. Connect the dots by adding the project reference ‘IisLogsToWebPerfTestEngine’ to ‘IisLogsToWebPerfTest’. Right click the ‘IisLogsToWebPerfTest’ project and add a new class ‘WebTest1Coded.cs’ The WebTest1Coded.cs inherits from the WebTest class. By overriding the GetRequestMethod we can inject the log files to the IISLogReader class which uses Log parser to query the log file and extract the web requests to generate the web test request which is yielded back for play back when the test is run. namespace IisLogsToWebPerfTest { using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.WebTesting; using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.WebTesting.Rules; using IisLogsToWebPerfTestEngine; // This class is a coded web performance test implementation, that simply passes // the path of the iis logs to the IisLogReader class which does the heavy // lifting of reading the contents of the log file and converting them to tests. // You could have multiple such classes that inherit from WebTest and implement // GetRequestEnumerator Method and pass differnt log files for different tests. public class WebTest1Coded : WebTest { public WebTest1Coded() { this.PreAuthenticate = true; } public override IEnumerator<WebTestRequest> GetRequestEnumerator() { // substitute the highlighted path with the path of the iis log file IISLogReader reader = new IISLogReader(@"C:\Demo\iisLog1.log"); foreach (WebTestRequest request in reader.GetRequests()) { yield return request; } } } }   7. Its time to fire the test off and see the iis log playback as a web performance test. From the Test menu choose Test View Window you should be able to see the WebTest1Coded test show up. Highlight the test and press Run selection (you can also debug the test in case you face any failures during test execution). 8. Optionally you can create a Load Test by keeping ‘WebTest1Coded’ as the base test. Conclusion You have just helped your testing team, you now have become the coolest developer in your organization! Jokes apart, log parser and web performance test together allow you to save a lot of time by not having to worry about what to test or even worrying about how to record the test. If you haven’t already, download the solution from here. You can take this to the next level by using LogParser to extract the log files as part of an end of day batch to a database. See the usage trends by user this solution over a longer term and have your tests consume the web requests now stored in the database to generate the web performance tests. If you like the post, don’t forget to share … Keep RocKiNg!

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  • Nokia Lumia 920 Windows Phone 8 Announcement

    - by Tim Murphy
    Today Nokia and Microsoft had an event to officially introduce the Lumia 920.  Below is a rundown of some of the things I found interesting. As a person who likes photography there was a lot to drool over.  The main feature that caught my attention was PureView with its optical stabilization.  This alone should improve the majority of you pictures.  Add to that the SmartShoot Object remover that uses multiple images to remove unwanted people or objects that move through your picture and you never have to accept reality again. For the most part the lenses concept introduced in Windows Phone 8 just makes the usability of leveraging camera better.  Of course that is Microsoft’s selling point.  One lens that caught my attention was the Bing lens.  I have to say it is about time that we can take pictures and use them to search for answers using Bing. There were a couple of features shown that involved augmented reality.  One was similar to the yapf application that is already in the market which overlays restaurants and other destination over live camera views.  The other was using the navigation directions with a live view. Then you get down to some of the physical features of the Lumia 920.  The one that got the most stage time is that it has a great 2000mah battery which can be charged wirelessly.  They also pointed out the improved glare reduction of the 4.5 in. curved glass screen.  This hardware improvement is improved further with software that detects glare conditions and adjusts the display attributes to enhance viewing ease. Adding to the wireless cool factor of the Lumia 920 is the general NFC capabilities.  This was demonstrated with NFC docking stations as well as JBL speakers and headphones. There was one more hardware feature that I applauded.  The super sensitive touch screen did away with one of my pet peeves with capacitive touch screens.  You will never have to remove you gloves to operate your phone again.  The mittens that they did the demo with looked more like boxing gloves. I was disappointed with Joe Belfiore said that they were only going to show a couple of new features of the Windows Phone 8 and would hear more at future events.  One of the things he did show is the ability to customize which buttons you preferred as defaults in IE10.  For example you could have the folders button where the refresh button normally is.  He also showed that at long last you can natively take screenshots on your phone.  Hopefully he will be back quickly to give us the rest of the features. The most disappointing part of the event was that we never found out when they would be released or how much they would cost.  Let’s hope this comes soon.  Even with these couple of items still left on my wish list I can’t wait to get my hands on a Lumia 920.  del.icio.us Tags: Windows Phone,Windows Phone 8,Nokia,Lumia,Lumia 920,Microsoft

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  • TechEd 2012: Recap

    - by Tim Murphy
    TechEd this week was a great experience and I wanted to wrap it up with a summary post. First let me say a thank you to John and Jeff from GWB for supplying power, connectivity and a place to work in between sessions.  The blogging hub was a great experience in itself.  Getting to talk with other bloggers and other conference goers turned into a series of interesting conversations.  And where else can you almost end up in the day 1 highlights video? The sessions at TechEd were a mixed bag of value.  The Keynotes rocked, both figuratively and literally and most of the sessions that I want to were a good experience and had gems of information to take away.  There were a few exceptions though.  A couple of the sessions turned out to be sales jobs.  Nothing turns me off more than that (there will be some really honest comments on those surveys). TechEd re-enforced for me that much of the value is not in the sessions, but in the networking opportunities. I got to talk with several Microsoft team members and MVPs as well as some of the vendor representative for companies like Inrule and ComponentOne. Also got to expand both my local and extended community with discussions at meal times and waiting for sessions to start. I think this is one of the benefits that a lot of people don’t take advantage of in these conferences that should be a bigger part of the advertising. Exposure to a wide variety of topics, many of which I had not been able to make time for up to this point was envigorating.  The list of topic includes: Office 365, Windows Server 2012, Windows 8, Metro, Azure.  I can’t wait to get back to work and dig into these subjects in more depth. The one complaint that I had and heard from other attendees was that there weren’t enough sessions that were actually about development.  I realize that TechEd started as an event for IT Pros, but there needs to be more value for the Devs.  It all went by too fast and it will take a couple more days to digest the material, but the batteries are and I’m ready to leverage what I’ve learned.  Hopefully we will do it again next year. del.icio.us Tags: TechEd,TechEd 2012

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  • AJI Software is now a Microsoft Gold Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Partner

    - by Jeff Julian
    Our team at AJI Software has been hard at work over the past year on certifications and projects that has allowed us to reach Gold Partner status in the Microsoft Partner Program.  We have focused on providing services that not only assist in custom software development, but process analysis and mentoring.  I definitely want to thank each one of our team members for all their work.  We are currently the only Microsoft Gold ALM Partner for a 500 mile radius around Kansas City. If you or your team is in need of assistance with Team Foundation Server, Agile Processes, Scrum Mentoring, or just a process/team assessment, please feel free to give us a call.  We also have practices focused on SharePoint, Mobile development (iOS, Android, Windows Mobile), and custom software development with .NET.  Technorati Tags: Gold Partner,ALM,Scrum,TFS,AJI Software

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  • Controlling access to site folders if you cannot user Roles

    - by DavidMadden
    I find myself on an assignment where I could not use System.Web.Security.Roles.  That meant that I could not use Visual Studio's Website | ASP.NET Configuration.  I had to go about things another way.  The clues were in these two websites:http://www.csharpaspnetarticles.com/2009/02/formsauthentication-ticket-roles-aspnet.htmlhttp://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/b6x6shw7(v=VS.71).aspxhttp://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/b6x6shw7(v=VS.71).aspxYou can set in your web.config the restrictions on folders without having to set the restrictions in multiple folders through their own web.config file.  In my main default.aspx file in my protected subfolder off my main site, I did the following code due to MultiFormAuthentication (MFA) providing the security to this point:        string role = string.Empty;         if (((Login)Session["Login"]).UserLevelID > 3)         {             role = "PowerUser";         }         else         {             role = "Newbie";         }         FormsAuthenticationTicket ticket =  new FormsAuthenticationTicket( 1,                 ((Login)Session["Login"]).UserID,                 DateTime.Now,                 DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(20),                 false,                 role,                 FormsAuthentication.FormsCookiePath);         string hashCookies = FormsAuthentication.Encrypt(ticket);         HttpCookie cookie =  new HttpCookie(FormsAuthentication.FormsCookieName, hashCookies);         Response.Cookies.Add(cookie); This all gave me the ability to change restrictions on folders without having to restart the website or having to do any hard coding.

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  • NDepend Evaluation: Part 3

    - by Anthony Trudeau
    NDepend is a Visual Studio add-in designed for intense code analysis with the goal of high code quality. NDepend uses a number of metrics and aggregates the data in pleasing static and active visual reports. My evaluation of NDepend will be broken up into several different parts. In the first part of the evaluation I looked at installing the add-in.  And in the last part I went over my first impressions including an overview of the features.  In this installment I provide a little more detail on a few of the features that I really like. Dependency Matrix The dependency matrix is one of the rich visual components provided with NDepend.  At a glance it lets you know where you have coupling problems including cycles.  It does this with number indicating the weight of the dependency and a color-coding that indicates the nature of the dependency. Green and blue cells are direct dependencies (with the difference being whether the relationship is from row-to-column or column-to-row).  Black cells are the ones that you really want to know about.  These indicate that you have a cycle.  That is, type A refers to type B and type B also refers to Type A. But, that’s not the end of the story.  A handy pop-up appears when you hover over the cell in question.  It explains the color, the dependency, and provides several interesting links that will teach you more than you want to know about the dependency. You can double-click the problem cells to explode the dependency.  That will show the dependencies on a method-by-method basis allowing you to more easily target and fix the problem.  When you’re done you can click the back button on the toolbar. Dependency Graph The dependency graph is another component provided.  It’s complementary to the dependency matrix, but it isn’t as easy to identify dependency issues using the window. On a positive note, it does provide more information than the matrix. My biggest issue with the dependency graph is determining what is shown.  This was not readily obvious.  I ended up using the navigation buttons to get an acceptable view.  I would have liked to choose what I see. Once you see the types you want you can get a decent idea of coupling strength based on the width of the dependency lines.  Double-arrowed lines are problematic and are shown in red.  The size of the boxes will be related to the metric being displayed.  This is controlled using the Box Size drop-down in the toolbar.  Personally, I don’t find the size of the box to be helpful, so I change it to Constant Font. One nice thing about the display is that you can see the entire path of dependencies when you hover over a type.  This is done by color-coding the dependencies and dependants.  It would be nice if selecting the box for the type would lock the highlighting in place. I did find a perhaps unintended work-around to the color-coding.  You can lock the color-coding in by hovering over the type, right-clicking, and then clicking on the canvas area to clear the pop-up menu.  You can then do whatever with it including saving it to an image file with the color-coding. CQL NDepend uses a code query language (CQL) to work with your code just like it was a database.  CQL cannot be confused with the robustness of T-SQL or even LINQ, but it represents an impressive attempt at providing an expressive way to enumerate and interrogate your code. There are two main windows you’ll use when working with CQL.  The CQL Query Explorer allows you to define what queries (rules) are run as part of a report – I immediately unselected rules that I don’t want in my results.  The CQL Query Edit window is where you can view or author your own rules.  The explorer window is pretty self-explanatory, so I won’t mention it further other than to say that any queries you author will appear in the custom group. Authoring your own queries is really hard to screw-up.  The Intellisense-like pop-ups tell you what you can do while making composition easy.  I was able to create a query within two minutes of playing with the editor.  My query warns if any types that are interfaces don’t start with an “I”. WARN IF Count > 0 IN SELECT TYPES WHERE IsInterface AND !NameLike “I” The results from the CQL Query Edit window are immediate. That fact makes it useful for ad hoc querying.  It’s worth mentioning two things that could make the experience smoother.  First, out of habit from using Visual Studio I expect to be able to scroll and press Tab to select an item in the list (like Intellisense).  You have to press Enter when you scroll to the item you want.  Second, the commands are case-sensitive.  I don’t see a really good reason to enforce that. CQL has a lot of potential not just in enforcing code quality, but also enforcing architectural constraints that your enterprise has defined. Up Next My next update will be the final part of the evaluation.  I will summarize my experience and provide my conclusions on the NDepend add-in. ** View Part 1 of the Evaluation ** ** View Part 2 of the Evaluation ** Disclaimer: Patrick Smacchia contacted me about reviewing NDepend. I received a free license in return for sharing my experiences and talking about the capabilities of the add-in on this site. There is no expectation of a positive review elicited from the author of NDepend.

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  • BizTalk&ndash;Mapping repeating EDI segments using a Table Looping functoid

    - by Bill Osuch
    BizTalk’s HIPAA X12 schemas have several repeating date/time segments in them, where the XML winds up looking something like this: <DTM_StatementDate> <DTM01_DateTimeQualifier>232</DTM01_DateTimeQualifier> <DTM02_ClaimDate>20120301</DTM02_ClaimDate> </DTM_StatementDate> <DTM_StatementDate> <DTM01_DateTimeQualifier>233</DTM01_DateTimeQualifier> <DTM02_ClaimDate>20120302</DTM02_ClaimDate> </DTM_StatementDate> The corresponding EDI segments would look like this: DTM*232*20120301~ DTM*233*20120302~ The DateTimeQualifier element indicates whether it’s the start date or end date – 232 for start, 233 for end. So in this example (an X12 835) we’re saying the statement starts on 3/1/2012 and ends on 3/2/2012. When you’re mapping from some other data format, many times your start and end dates will be within the same node, like this: <StatementDates> <Begin>20120301</Begin> <End>20120302</End> </StatementDates> So how do you map from that and create two repeating segments in your destination map? You could connect both the <Begin> and <End> nodes to a looping functoid, and connect its output to <DTM_StatementDate>, then connect both <Begin> and <End> to <DTM_StatementDate> … this would give you two repeating segments, each with the correct date, but how to add the correct qualifier? The answer is the Table Looping Functoid! To test this, let’s create a simplified schema that just contains the date fields we’re mapping. First, create your input schema: And your output schema: Now create a map that uses these two schemas, and drag a Table Looping functoid onto it. The first input parameter configures the scope (or how many times the records will loop), so drag a link from the StatementDates node over to the functoid. Yes, StatementDates only appears once, so this would make it seem like it would only loop once, but you’ll see in just a minute. The second parameter in the functoid is the number of columns in the output table. We want to fill two fields, so just set this to 2. Now drag the Begin and End nodes over to the functoid. Finally, we want to add the constant values for DateTimeQualifier, so add a value of 232 and another of 233. When all your inputs are configured, it should look like this: Now we’ll configure the output table. Click on the Table Looping Grid, and configure it to look like this: Microsoft’s description of this functoid says “The Table Looping functoid repeats with the looping record it is connected to. Within each iteration, it loops once per row in the table looping grid, producing multiple output loops.” So here we will loop (# of <StatementDates> nodes) * (Rows in the table), or 2 times. Drag two Table Extractor functoids onto the map; these are what are going to pull the data we want out of the table. The first input to each of these will be the output of the TableLooping functoid, and the second input will be the row number to pull from. So the functoid connected to <DTM01_DateTimeQualifier> will look like this: Connect these two functoids to the two nodes we want to populate, and connect another output from the Table Looping functoid to the <DTM_StatementDate> record. You should have a map that looks something like this: Create some sample xml, use it as the TestMap Input Instance, and you should get a result like the XML at the top of this post. Technorati Tags: BizTalk, EDI, Mapping

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  • Microsoft Office 2010 Service Pack 1 has been released

    - by Enrique Lima
    On June 27th Microsoft released Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Office. The download can be found at: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26622 As always, with any installation of a hotfix or service pack, become informed on what the changes/improvements are so you are prepared in the event of mitigation steps being needed.  The information for the Service Pack can be found as KB2460049 here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2460049

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  • How to leverage the internal HTTP endpoint available on Azure web roles?

    - by Alfredo Delsors
    Imagine you have a Web application using an in-memory collection that changes occasionally but is used very often. The collection gets loaded from storage on the Application_Start global.asax event and is updated whenever its content changes. If you want to deploy this application on Azure you need to keep in mind that more than one instance of the application can be running at any time and therefore you need to provide some mechanism to keep all instances informed with the latest changes. Because the communication through internal endpoints between Azure role instances is at no cost, a good solution can be maintaining the information on Azure Storage Tables, reading its contents on the Application_Start event and populating its changes to all other instances using the internal HTTP port available on Azure Web Roles. You need to follow these steps to leverage the internal HTTP endpoint available on Azure web roles to maintain all instances up to date. 1.   Define an internal HTTP endpoint in the Web Role properties, for example InternalHttpEndpoint   2.   Add a new WCF service to the Web Role, for example NotificationService.svc 3.   Disable multiple site bindings in web.config: <serviceHostingEnvironment multipleSiteBindingsEnabled="false"> 4.   Add a method on the new service to receive notifications from other role instances. namespace Service { [ServiceContract] public interface INotificationService { [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true)] void Notify(Information info); } } 5.   Declare a class that inherits from System.ServiceModel.Activation.ServiceHostFactory and override the method CreateServiceHost to host the internal endpoint. public class InternalServiceFactory : ServiceHostFactory { protected override ServiceHost CreateServiceHost(Type serviceType, Uri[] baseAddresses) { var internalEndpointAddress = string.Format( "http://{0}/NotificationService.svc", RoleEnvironment.CurrentRoleInstance.InstanceEndpoints["InternalHttpEndpoint"].IPEndpoint); ServiceHost host = new ServiceHost( typeof(NotificationService), new Uri(internalEndpointAddress)); BasicHttpBinding binding = new BasicHttpBinding(SecurityMode.None); host.AddServiceEndpoint( typeof(INotificationService), binding, internalEndpointAddress); return host; } } Note that you can use SecurityMode.None because the internal endpoint is private to the instances of the service. 6.   Edit the markup of the service right clicking the svc file and selecting "View markup" to add the new factory as the factory to be used to create the service <%@ ServiceHost Language="C#" Debug="true" Factory="Service.InternalServiceFactory" Service="Service.NotificationService" CodeBehind="NotificationService.svc.cs" %> 7.   Now you can notify changes to other instances using this code: var current = RoleEnvironment.CurrentRoleInstance; var endPoints = current.Role.Instances .Where(instance => instance != current) .Select(instance => instance.InstanceEndpoints["InternalHttpEndpoint"]); foreach (var ep in endPoints) { EndpointAddress address = new EndpointAddress( String.Format("http://{0}/NotificationService.svc", ep.IPEndpoint)); BasicHttpBinding binding = new BasicHttpBinding(SecurityMode.None); var factory = new ChannelFactory<INotificationService>(binding); INotificationService instance = factory.CreateChannel(address); instance.Notify(changedinfo); }

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