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  • The Jack LaLanne School of Sysadmins

    - by rickramsey
    Two of my childhood heroes were Tarzan and Jack LaLanne. Tarzan was an obvious choice: what boy wouldn't want to spend his days bungee jumping through the jungle with his own pack of gorillas? Jack Lalanne had a disturbing habit of wearing stretch pants, but he was so damn fit for an old guy that you couldn't help but be impressed. Especially back then, when nobody knew what a dumb bell was, much less Cross-Fit. Here's what he did to celebrate his 70th birthday. Sooner or later we all face a choice in our careers: surrender to the life of a has-been like Bruce Sprinsteen's baseball player or become an unstoppable sysadmin like Jack Lalanne. If you'd rather keep on fighting like Jack, give these resources a look. Brian Bream's blog provides specific suggestions for keeping your skills up to date. The video interviews describe the types of technologies that are challenging what you used to know. Blog: The Old School Sysadmin - A Dying Breed? by Brian Bream "The sysadmin role has been far too dependent on performing repetitive tasks and working in a reactionary mode ... the sysadmin must grow a much larger skill set to be successful. Don’t grow vertically in one technology, grow horizontally amongst many technologies." Just one of the suggestions Brian Bream provides in this excellent blog post. Video: Freeing the Sysadmin From Repetitive Tasks Interview with Marshall Choy Marshall Choy, Director of Optimized Solutions at Oracle was once a sysadmin. And a Solaris engineer. He explains what optimized solutions are, how they are developed and tested, how they handle patching, and how these vertically integrated systems impact the job and duties of a sysadmin. Video: The Oracle Database Appliance Interview with Bob Thome Bob Thome, Senior Director of Product Management, explains what makes the Database Appliance simple, reliable, and affordable, and how it could change the economies and processes of the data center. Video: Why Pinellas County Chose Oracle Exalytics Interview with Gautham Gautham (pronounced like Batman's Gotham) recently led an effort to refresh the Pinellas County hardware systems. He'll explain what they were looking for, why they chose Oracle Exalytics, how they became convinced it was the right decision, and how it changed the way they managed their data center. Video: DTrace for System Administrators Interview with Brendan Gregg This video interview will give you an idea of some of the value-add tasks you can perform when you are freed from the reactive mode that Brian Bream describes in his blog. Brendan Gregg describes the best ways for sysadmins to tune deployed applications to get more performance out of them in their particular computing environment photograph of Ford Mustang GT 500 taken at Gateway Museum copyright by Rick Ramsey -Rick Follow me on: Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Personal Twitter | YouTube | The Great Peruvian Novel

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  • SQL SERVER – Introduction to CUME_DIST – Analytic Functions Introduced in SQL Server 2012

    - by pinaldave
    This blog post is written in response to the T-SQL Tuesday post of Prox ‘n’ Funx. This is a very interesting subject. By the way Brad Schulz is my favorite guy when it is about blogging. I respect him as well learn a lot from him. Everybody is writing something new his subject, I decided to start SQL Server 2012 analytic functions series. SQL Server 2012 introduces new analytical function CUME_DIST(). This function provides cumulative distribution value. It will be very difficult to explain this in words so I will attempt small example to explain you this function. Instead of creating new table, I will be using AdventureWorks sample database as most of the developer uses that for experiment. Let us fun following query. USE AdventureWorks GO SELECT SalesOrderID, OrderQty, CUME_DIST() OVER(ORDER BY SalesOrderID) AS CDist FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail WHERE SalesOrderID IN (43670, 43669, 43667, 43663) ORDER BY CDist DESC GO Above query will give us following result. Now let us understand what is the formula behind CUME_DIST and why the values in SalesOrderID = 43670 are 1. Let us take more example and be clear about why the values in SalesOrderID = 43667 are 0.5. Now let us enhence the same example and use PARTITION BY into the OVER clause and see the results. Run following query in SQL Server 2012. USE AdventureWorks GO SELECT SalesOrderID, OrderQty, ProductID, CUME_DIST() OVER(PARTITION BY SalesOrderID ORDER BY ProductID ) AS CDist FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail s WHERE SalesOrderID IN (43670, 43669, 43667, 43663) ORDER BY s.SalesOrderID DESC, CDist DESC GO Now let us see the result of this query. We are have changed the ORDER BY clause as well partitioning by SalesOrderID. You can see that CUME_DIST() function provides us different results. Additionally now we see value 1 multiple times. As we are using partitioning for each group of SalesOrderID we get the CUME_DIST() value. CUME_DIST() was long awaited Analytical function and I am glad to see it in SQL Server 2012. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Function, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • IT Admin for Thrill Seekers

    - by Tony Davis
    A developer suggested to me recently that the life of the DBA was, surely, a dull one. My first reaction was indignation, but quickly followed by the thought that for many people excitement isn't necessarily the most desirable aspect of their job. It's true that some aspects of the DBA role seem guaranteed to quieten the pulse; in the days of tape backups, time must have slowed to eternity for the person whose job it was to oversee this process, placing tapes into secure containers, ensuring correct labeling, and.sorry, I drifted off there for a second. On the other hand, if you follow the adventures of the likes of Brent Ozar or Tom LaRock, you'd be forgiven for thinking that much of a database guy's time is spent, metaphorically, diving through plate glass windows in tight fitting underwear in order to extract grateful occupants from burning database applications. Alas it isn't true of the majority, but it isn't as dull as some people imagine, and is a helter-skelter ride compared with some other IT roles. Every IT department has people who toil away in shadowy corners doing quiet but mysterious tasks. When you ask them to explain what they do, you almost immediately want them to stop, but you hear enough to appreciate that these tasks are often absolutely vital to the smooth functioning of an IT organization. Compared with them, the DBAs are prima donnas. Here are a few nominations: Installation engineer - install all of the company's laptops and workstations, and software, deal with licensing, shipping and data entry.many organizations, especially those subject to tight regulation, would simply grind to a halt without their efforts. Localization engineer - Not quite software engineering, not quite translation, the job is to rebuild a product in a different language and make sure everything still works. QA Tester - firstly, I should say that the testers at Red Gate seem to me some of the most-fulfilled in the company. I refer here to the QA Tester whose job is more-or-less entirely to read a script, click some buttons and make sure the actual and expected values match. Configuration manager - for example, someone whose main job is to configure build environments so that devs can access their source code; assuredly necessary for the smooth functioning and productivity of the team, and hopefully well-paid. So what other sort of job in IT should one choose if the work of a DBA proves to be too exciting? Or are these roles secretly more exciting than many imagine? I invite you all to put forward your own suggestions. Cheers, Tony.

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  • TFS Rant *WARNING* negative opinions are being expressed.

    - by ryanabr
    It has happened several times now where I end up installing TFS "over the shoulder" of the system admin guy whose job it will be to "own" the server when I am gone. TFS is challenging enough to stand up when doing it myself on a completely open platform, but at these locations, networks are locked down, machines are locked down, and the unexpected always seems to pop up. I personally have the tolerance for these things as a software developer, but as we are installing I have to listen to all of 'colorful' remarks being made about: "why is it like this" or "this is a piece of crap". Generally the issues center around SharePoint integration. TFS on it's own is straightforward, but the last flavor in everyone's mouth is the SharePoint piece. As a product I like SharePoint, but installation is a nightmare. In this particular case, we are going to use WSS since the customer would like this separate from their corp SharePoint 2010 installations since there dev team is really small (1 developer) and it is being used as a VSS replacement, more than a full blown ALM tool. The server where it is being installed as a Cisco Security Agent on it that seems to block 'suspicious' activity, and as far as I can tell is preventing WSS from installing properly. The most confounding thing we can find no meaningful log entries to help diagnose the issue. it didn't help matters that when we tried to contact Microsoft for support, because we mentioned TFS in the list of things that we were trying to install, that after waiting 2 hours that we got a TFS support person NOT the SharePoint person that we really needed, so after another 2 hours the SharePoint support that we did get managed to corrupt the registry sufficiently with his 'tools' that we ended up starting over from scratch the next day anyway after going home at midnight. My point to this is: The System Administrator who is going to own this, now thinks it is a piece of crap because SharePoint wouldn't install properly. Perception is everything.  Everyone today is conditioned that software installs and works in a very simple matter. When looking at the different options to install TFS with the different "modes" there is inconsistency in the information being presented which leads to choices that causes headaches and this bad perception before the product is even installed. I am highlighting this because I love TFS as a product, but I HATE installing it, and would like it to install as simply and elegantly as the product operates once it is installed.

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  • Best development architecture for a small team of programmers ( WAMP Stack )

    - by Tio
    Hi all.. I'm in the first month of work in a new company.. and after I met the two programmer's and asked how things are organized in terms of projects inside the company, they simply shrug their shoulders, and said that nothing is organized.. I think my jaw hit the ground that same time.. ( I know some, of you think I should quit, but I'm on a privileged position, I'm the most experienced there, so there's room for me to grow inside the company, and I'm taking the high road ).. So I talked to the IT guy, and one of the programmers, and maybe this week I'm going to get a server all to myself to start organizing things. I've used various architectures in my previous work experiences, on one I was developing in a server on the network ( no source control of course ).. another experience I had was developing in my local computer, with no server on the network, just source control. And at home, I have a mix of the two, everything I code is on a server on the network, and I have those folders under source control, and I also have a no-ip account configured on that server so I can access it everywhere and I can show the clients anything. For me I think this last solution ( the one I have at home ) is the best: Network server with WAMP stack. The server as a public IP so we can access it by domain name. And use subdomains for each project. Everybody works directly on the network server. I think the problem arises, when two or more people want to work on the same project, in this case the only way to do this is by using source control and local repositories, this is great, but I think this turns development a lot more complicated. In the example I gave, to make a change to the code, I would simply need to open the file in my favorite editor, make the change, alter the database, check in the changes into source control and presto all done. Using local repositories, I would have to get the latest version, run the scripts on the local database to update it, alter the file, alter the database, check in the changes to the network server, update the database on the network server, see if everything is running well on the network server, and presto all done, to me this seems overcomplicated for a change on a simple php page. I could share the database for the local development and for the network server, that sure would help. Maybe the best way to do this is just simply: Network server with WAMP stack ( test server so to speak ), public server accessible trough the web. LAMP stack on every developer computer ( minus the database ) We develop locally, test, then check in the changes into the server test and presto. What do you think? Maybe I should start doing this at home.. Thanks and best regards... Edit: I'm sorry I made a mistake and switched WAMP with LAMP, sorry about that..

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  • Frustrated where I am, but not sure where to go with my career [closed]

    - by Tom Pickles
    I work (3 years now) as a lead developer for a team developing internal tools and websites for a customer account within large outsourcing company. I'm a self taught programmer and my previous incarnation was a 3rd line support guy, so I have a solid infrastructure knowledge. We use VB.Net/MSSQL/SSIS/SSRS ASP.NET (nTier) in house and I have about 8 years coding experience. Without going into too much detail, my boss is very ambitious and uses our team as his footing to get up the ladder. I've been in the team from the start and the only new dev's we have brought in have been people with a bit of VBA/VBScript experience, much to my chagrin, to bolster his empire. It's been a lot of hard work to bring them up to a standard, but there's still a lot for them to learn. This makes my life stressful as I always get the high profile/complex project work to do as other's simply cannot do it, or it'd take them twice/three times longer to do it. My boss is always seeking stuff for us to build for people who haven't asked for it, which usually get's thrown to me as I have the most experience and can pick new API's (etc) up quicker. He doesn't give us proper requirements, we don't get time to design properly before we code, he wants us to throw something (quick and dirty as he calls it) together so we can get it out ASAP. I take pride in my work so I like to do it properly, make my code clean, maintainable etc, and I train the other guys in the team to do the same. But, we always fall on our faces. The customer we drop the apps on say it doesn't do what they need (due to few requirements), or my boss doesn't like it/changes the spec, so we have to rework it, it get's drawn out, and it makes us and me look and feel like fools. We then get accused by boss of not being reactive enough to change. I've had enough. In order to get my skills and knowledge gap's filled, I've been reading Code Complete 2nd Ed (McConnell) and the Head First Design Patterns books. I'm forcing myself to move into C# from VB at home to broaden my horizons. I'm not sure where to go from here. I don't want to code all my life as I'd like to move into a higher level design/architects role at some point in time (I'm 35). Where do I/can I go from here?

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  • Java Spotlight Episode 85: Migrating from Spring to JavaEE 6

    - by Roger Brinkley
    Interview with Bert Ertman and Paul Bakker on migrating from Spring to JavaEE 6. Joining us this week on the Java All Star Developer Panel is Arun Gupta, Java EE Guy. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link:  Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News Transactional Interceptors in Java EE 7 Larry Ellison and Mark Hurd on Oracle Cloud Duke’s Choice Award submissions open until June 15 Registration for the 2012 JVM Lanugage Summit now open Events June 11-14, Cloud Computing Expo, New York City June 12, Boulder JUG June 13, Denver JUG June 13, Eclipse Juno DemoCamp, Redwoood Shore June 13, JUG Münster June 14, Java Klassentreffen, Vienna, Austria June 18-20, QCon, New York City June 20, 1871, Chicago June 26-28, Jazoon, Zurich, Switzerland July 5, Java Forum, Stuttgart, Germany July 30-August 1, JVM Language Summit, Santa Clara Feature InterviewBert Ertman is a Fellow at Luminis in the Netherlands. Next to his customer assignments he is responsible for stimulating innovation, knowledge sharing, coaching, technology choices and presales activities. Besides his day job he is a Java User Group leader for NLJUG, the Dutch Java User Group. A frequent speaker on Enterprise Java and Software Architecture related topics at international conferences (e.g. Devoxx, JavaOne, etc) as well as an author and member of the editorial advisory board for Dutch software development magazine: Java Magazine. In 2008, Bert was honored by being awarded the coveted title of Java Champion by an international panel of Java leaders and luminaries. Paul Bakker is senior software engineer at Luminis Technologies where he works on the Amdatu platform, an open source, service-oriented application platform for web applications. He has a background as trainer where he teached various Java related subjects. Paul is also a regular speaker on conferences and author for the Dutch Java Magazine.TutorialsPart 1: http://howtojboss.com/2012/04/17/article-series-migrating-spring-applications-to-java-ee-6-part-1/Part 2: http://howtojboss.com/2012/04/17/article-series-migrating-spring-applications-to-java-ee-6-part-2/Part 3: http://howtojboss.com/2012/05/10/article-series-migrating-from-spring-to-java-ee-6-part-3/   Mail Bag What’s Cool Sang Shin in EE team @larryellison JavaOne content selection is almost complete-Notifications coming soon

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  • How one decision can turn web services to hell

    - by DigiMortal
    In this posting I will show you how one stupid decision may turn developers life to hell. There is a project where bunch of complex applications exchange data frequently and it is very hard to change something without additional expenses. Well, one analyst thought that string is silver bullet of web services. Read what happened. Bad bad mistake In the early stages of integration project there was analyst who also established architecture and technical design for web services. There was one very bad mistake this analyst made: All data must be converted to strings before exchange! Yes, that’s correct, this was the requirement. All integers, decimals and dates are coming in and going out as strings. There was also explanation for this requirement: This way we can avoid data type conversion errors! Well, this guy works somewhere else already and I hope he works in some burger restaurant – far away from computers. Consequences If you first look at this requirement it may seem like little annoying piece of crap you can easily survive. But let’s see the real consequences one stupid decision can cause: hell load of data conversions are done by receiving applications and SSIS packages, SSIS packages are not error prone and they depend heavily on strings they get from different services, there are more than one format per type that is used in different services, for larger amounts of data all these conversion tasks slow down the work of integration packages, practically all developers have been in hurry with some SSIS import tasks and some fields that are not used in different calculations in SSAS cube are imported without data conversions (by example, some prices are strings in format “1.021 $”). The most painful problem for developers is the part of data conversions because they don’t expect that there is such a stupid requirement stated and therefore they are not able to estimate the time their tasks take on these web services. Also developers must be prepared for cases when suddenly some service sends data that is not in acceptable format and they must solve the problems ASAP. This puts unexpected load on developers and they are not very happy with it because they can’t understand why they have to live with this horror if it is possible to fix. What to do if you see something like this? Well, explain the problem to customer and demand special tasks to project schedule to get this mess solved before going on with new developments. It is cheaper to solve the problems now that later.

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  • Oracle ODP.NET und Windows PowerShell

    - by cjandaus
    In der Microsoft Welt wohlbekannt, in der Oracle Welt nur ein Schulterzucken hervorrufend - die sogenannten Scripting Guys. Wie der Name bereits vermuten lässt, geht es in deren Hey, Scripting Guy! Blog um Scripting. Und damit natürlich um die Windows PowerShell. Ja, die Zeiten des DOS-Kommandofensters und Batch-Dateien ist vorbei. Die PowerShell ist eine mächtige Scripting-Umgebung unter Windows, die selbst unter Unix/Linux-Administratoren Gefallen finden sollte. Dass man damit wunderbar auch auf Oracle Datenbanken zugreifen kann, haben wir bereits vor Jahren in einer Oracle Workshop Reihe bewiesen. Damals begleitete mich Klaus Rohe von Microsoft, der mit mir dann auch gemeinsam einen Vortrag auf DOAG Konferenz hielt. Unser gemeinsames Ziel war es damals wie heute, die Oracle Anwender von der hervorragenden Integration zwischen Oracle, Windows und .NET zu überzeugen. Was lag näher, als sich dies von beiden Herstellern gemeinsam bestätigen zu lassen? Vor allem die ewigen Zweifler begrüßten dies. Seither war die PowerShell bei mir nicht mehr auf dem Radar und auch Oracle Anwender haben das Thema nicht mehr aufgeworfen. Möglicherweise auch deshalb, weil es zu neu oder zu unbekannt ist? Eher unwahrscheinlich ... Vielleicht liegt es vielmehr daran, dass man einfach mal davon ausgeht, dass PowerShell nur für Microsoft Produkte richtig nutzbar ist? Oder man bekommt erzählt, dass nur die Integration mit der Microsoft-eigenen Datenbank SQL Server möglich ist? Und das ist natürlich nicht richtig - so wie immer (ich denke dabei unter anderem an das Microsoft Active Directory - aber dazu ein andermal mehr). Umso mehr freut es mich, einen brandneuen Blog-Beitrag zu genau diesem Thema zu lesen, auf den mich Alex Keh, (Produkt Manager für Windows und .NET im Oracle Headquarter in San Francisco) aufmerksam gemacht hat. Was die Sache noch besser macht, dieser Beitrag stammt aus der Microsoft Welt und belegt damit zwischen den Zeilen, dass die Oracle Datenbank und unsere .NET Integration via dem Oracle Data Provider for .NET (ODP.NET) auch hier eine bedeutende Rolle spielt. In diesem Sinne: Beide Daumen hoch für die Scripting Guys! Der Beitrag nennt sich Use Oracle ODP.NET and PowerShell to Simplify Data Access und trotz ein paar weniger Ausreißer, ist der Artikel sehr zu empfehlen, um in das Thema einzusteigen. Lassen Sie es mich wissen, wie Sie zu dieser Integration stehen, ob die PowerShell für Sie in der Praxis wichtig ist oder werden könnte, und falls Sie Features vermissen, die Oracle künftig umsetzen sollte. Danke!

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  • SortedDictionary and SortedList

    - by Simon Cooper
    Apart from Dictionary<TKey, TValue>, there's two other dictionaries in the BCL - SortedDictionary<TKey, TValue> and SortedList<TKey, TValue>. On the face of it, these two classes do the same thing - provide an IDictionary<TKey, TValue> interface where the iterator returns the items sorted by the key. So what's the difference between them, and when should you use one rather than the other? (as in my previous post, I'll assume you have some basic algorithm & datastructure knowledge) SortedDictionary We'll first cover SortedDictionary. This is implemented as a special sort of binary tree called a red-black tree. Essentially, it's a binary tree that uses various constraints on how the nodes of the tree can be arranged to ensure the tree is always roughly balanced (for more gory algorithmical details, see the wikipedia link above). What I'm concerned about in this post is how the .NET SortedDictionary is actually implemented. In .NET 4, behind the scenes, the actual implementation of the tree is delegated to a SortedSet<KeyValuePair<TKey, TValue>>. One example tree might look like this: Each node in the above tree is stored as a separate SortedSet<T>.Node object (remember, in a SortedDictionary, T is instantiated to KeyValuePair<TKey, TValue>): class Node { public bool IsRed; public T Item; public SortedSet<T>.Node Left; public SortedSet<T>.Node Right; } The SortedSet only stores a reference to the root node; all the data in the tree is accessed by traversing the Left and Right node references until you reach the node you're looking for. Each individual node can be physically stored anywhere in memory; what's important is the relationship between the nodes. This is also why there is no constructor to SortedDictionary or SortedSet that takes an integer representing the capacity; there are no internal arrays that need to be created and resized. This may seen trivial, but it's an important distinction between SortedDictionary and SortedList that I'll cover later on. And that's pretty much it; it's a standard red-black tree. Plenty of webpages and datastructure books cover the algorithms behind the tree itself far better than I could. What's interesting is the comparions between SortedDictionary and SortedList, which I'll cover at the end. As a side point, SortedDictionary has existed in the BCL ever since .NET 2. That means that, all through .NET 2, 3, and 3.5, there has been a bona-fide sorted set class in the BCL (called TreeSet). However, it was internal, so it couldn't be used outside System.dll. Only in .NET 4 was this class exposed as SortedSet. SortedList Whereas SortedDictionary didn't use any backing arrays, SortedList does. It is implemented just as the name suggests; two arrays, one containing the keys, and one the values (I've just used random letters for the values): The items in the keys array are always guarenteed to be stored in sorted order, and the value corresponding to each key is stored in the same index as the key in the values array. In this example, the value for key item 5 is 'z', and for key item 8 is 'm'. Whenever an item is inserted or removed from the SortedList, a binary search is run on the keys array to find the correct index, then all the items in the arrays are shifted to accomodate the new or removed item. For example, if the key 3 was removed, a binary search would be run to find the array index the item was at, then everything above that index would be moved down by one: and then if the key/value pair {7, 'f'} was added, a binary search would be run on the keys to find the index to insert the new item, and everything above that index would be moved up to accomodate the new item: If another item was then added, both arrays would be resized (to a length of 10) before the new item was added to the arrays. As you can see, any insertions or removals in the middle of the list require a proportion of the array contents to be moved; an O(n) operation. However, if the insertion or removal is at the end of the array (ie the largest key), then it's only O(log n); the cost of the binary search to determine it does actually need to be added to the end (excluding the occasional O(n) cost of resizing the arrays to fit more items). As a side effect of using backing arrays, SortedList offers IList Keys and Values views that simply use the backing keys or values arrays, as well as various methods utilising the array index of stored items, which SortedDictionary does not (and cannot) offer. The Comparison So, when should you use one and not the other? Well, here's the important differences: Memory usage SortedDictionary and SortedList have got very different memory profiles. SortedDictionary... has a memory overhead of one object instance, a bool, and two references per item. On 64-bit systems, this adds up to ~40 bytes, not including the stored item and the reference to it from the Node object. stores the items in separate objects that can be spread all over the heap. This helps to keep memory fragmentation low, as the individual node objects can be allocated wherever there's a spare 60 bytes. In contrast, SortedList... has no additional overhead per item (only the reference to it in the array entries), however the backing arrays can be significantly larger than you need; every time the arrays are resized they double in size. That means that if you add 513 items to a SortedList, the backing arrays will each have a length of 1024. To conteract this, the TrimExcess method resizes the arrays back down to the actual size needed, or you can simply assign list.Capacity = list.Count. stores its items in a continuous block in memory. If the list stores thousands of items, this can cause significant problems with Large Object Heap memory fragmentation as the array resizes, which SortedDictionary doesn't have. Performance Operations on a SortedDictionary always have O(log n) performance, regardless of where in the collection you're adding or removing items. In contrast, SortedList has O(n) performance when you're altering the middle of the collection. If you're adding or removing from the end (ie the largest item), then performance is O(log n), same as SortedDictionary (in practice, it will likely be slightly faster, due to the array items all being in the same area in memory, also called locality of reference). So, when should you use one and not the other? As always with these sort of things, there are no hard-and-fast rules. But generally, if you: need to access items using their index within the collection are populating the dictionary all at once from sorted data aren't adding or removing keys once it's populated then use a SortedList. But if you: don't know how many items are going to be in the dictionary are populating the dictionary from random, unsorted data are adding & removing items randomly then use a SortedDictionary. The default (again, there's no definite rules on these sort of things!) should be to use SortedDictionary, unless there's a good reason to use SortedList, due to the bad performance of SortedList when altering the middle of the collection.

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  • Most Unprofessional Workplace

    - by TehGrumpyCoder
    I've worked lots of places in lots of roles: Delivery truck driver, Boilermaker, antenna rigger, Professional Musician, Electronic Technician, Electrical Engineer, and for most of my career: Software Turkey. I want to say this large company is the most unprofessional place I've ever worked, but then I think about other jobs such as TTI that stiffed us all for 10 months salary -- or had us work 2-1/2 years at 66% however you want to look at it, or maybe NeoPlanet with a cast from a bad sitcom running the show, I could go on, but I digress (as usual). So maybe this place isn't the *most* unprofessional, but the personnel rank up there. I'm in a small room off a factory. There are 3 managerial offices, and 36 common-folk of various skill-sets in a variety of single to quad cubicles. No matter where you sit though, because of the layout and location, you've got a hard wall as one wall of your cubicle. Because of that hard wall, everything echoes. I get off the phone, and the guy in the next cubicle makes a comment in response to my phone conversation... I hate that it can be heard and I hate that they do that! These people have no problem yelling from cube to cube to carry on running conversations some of which are actually work-related. There's a lady two cubes away that talks so loud I can clearly hear every phone conversation she has... all work-related but still... Then the one in the next cubicle must have been raised on a farm because there's only one volume setting: LOUD... "HEY MARGE, CAN I GET IN FOR A QUICK APPOINTMENT AFTER WORK TONIGHT?" ... sigh Also that cube is the 'party cube' so that's where all the candy, cake, donuts, and leftovers sits. Anything MzLoud brings in has to have a verbal recipe associated with it at least 10 times during the day, and of course at volume. I've had running conversations over the top of my cube from people in the next one on each side. The weird thing is... the boss sits with an open door closer to this whole fiasco than me. So I wear a pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and crank up Kenny Burrell, Herb Ellis, Wes Montgomery, or Jimmy Smith to the point I can't hear the racket... what the heck, I already have a hearing loss from playing guitar.

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  • Exciting product releases (and one disappointing thing) with Mix10

    - by Jeff
    Sadly, I'm not at Mix this year, for the first time in a few years. It's a little harder to go if you work for Microsoft, oddly enough. And then there's this little guy next to me, who at ten days old really needs his daddy to be around! But oh, the excitement of what Microsoft has in store! It's great to finally see all of these major releases coming together for Microsoft developer products. There is a great deal of excitement among people internally no matter where you work, because there is so much cool stuff in the pipe. In case you live under a rock...Visual Studio 2010 - Great to see all of the positive feedback on the Twitter and what not. I've been using it on one of my home products for awhile, and I really like it. The newer nightly builds of ReSharper also seem to be gaining speed in quality as well. I like the new debugging features, and the text readability is not imagined. Love it.Silverlight 4 - I've been running a couple of minor SL3 apps on my personal sites for awhile now, and I'm thrilled with the platform. With a couple of key concepts down, .NET folk like you and me can do some stellar things with this, and if you're a Mac nerd (like me), it's all kinds of awesome to be able to build stuff for it without the agony of Objective-C and X Code.Windows Phone 7 Series - A few weeks ago you got to see the shiny new UI that went beyond the icon grid, and now you've got the developer story as well. That I can adapt my existing Silverlight apps with minimal effort to work on the phone is pretty powerful. Millions of .NET devs just because phone developers, using the tools they already know. How great is that?ASP.NET MVC2 - The final bits shipped last week, and there was much rejoicing. I love this framework because of the testability and the real ability to get to the true mechanics of HTTP. The other cool thing is the speed at which the framework has evolved. v2 in less than a year is pretty "un-Microsoft" in a lot of eyes.The video of keynotes and sessions is starting to appear on the Mix site, but for reasons I can't understand, they're WMV downloads. For real? Not that helpful for Mac folk. Why wouldn't they be using a Silverlight player?In any case, the thing that continues to motivate me is that getting what you imagine on to the Internet gets easier every year. This is not a new revelation for me. I've only been at Microsoft for four months, but I've felt this way for years. I'm thrilled to be a part of it.

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  • Java Spotlight Episode 78: Jasper Potts on the JavaFX Scene Builder

    - by Roger Brinkley
    Tweet An interview with Jasper Potts about the new JavaFX Scene Builder. Joining us this week on the Java All Star Developer Panel are Dalibor Topic, Java Free and Open Source Software Ambassador and Arun Gupta, Java EE Guy. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link:  Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News JavaFX Scene Builder Developer Preview available for testing. Java EE Unlock the Java EE 6 Platform using NetBeans 7.1 Tuning GlassFish for Production JSF 2.2 Update from Ed Burns John Rose at Microsoft's Lang.NEXT summit Recording of John's Java 8 presentation Jeroen Frijters' presentation on IKVM.NET Martin Odersky's keynote JVM Language Summit 2012 July 30 – August 1; Oracle Santa Clara (same as last year) CFP coming in a few days JVM Language Summit 2011 Presentations & Recordings Proposed development schedule for JDK 8 Say hello to Mathias Axelsson Events April 11, Cleveland JUG, Cleveland, OH April 12, GreenJUG, Greenville, SC April 17-18, JavaOne Russia, Moscow Russia April 18–20, Devoxx France, Paris, France April 17-20, GIDS, Bangalore April 21, Java Summit, Chennai April 26, Mix-IT, Lyon, France, May 3-4, JavaOne India, Hyderabad, India May 5, Bangalore, Pune, ?? - JUG outreach May 7, OTN Developer Day, Mumbai May 8, OTN Developer Day, Delhi Feature InterviewJasper Potts is the Developer Experience Architect for the Java Client Group at Oracle. Responsible for technical design for everything thats sis on the core platform including Controls, Tools, Samples and Blueprints. Formally a lead engineer on the JavaFX & Swing teams working on the new JavaFX UI Controls and Graphics frameworks. Also responsible for designing, developing and presenting demos during the keynotes at JavaOne and Devoxx. A JavaOne Rockstar presenter having presented many sessions on JavaFX and Swing at many conferences. Prior to Sun he founded Xerto a desktop applications company developing Imagery a Java professional photo management application. In this interview Jasper talks about the recently release JavaFX Scene Builder. Mail Bag What’s Cool Contribute to GlassFish in Five Different Ways Stephen Chin and James Weaver join Oracle Adam Bien - Building Java FX 2 Libraries From Source With Maven 3 Paul Sandoz - Java Boomerang Building Jigsaw on Mac OS X using VirtualBox Mandy Chung: Jigsaw for Mac OS X

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  • From Zero To Deployed Contest&ndash;Prizes Announced

    - by Robz / Fervent Coder
    Do you have what it takes to meet the challenge? We’ll make it worth it. You may have noticed at the end of my last post I threw down the community challenge to get from zero to deployed faster than me. The Challenge My time was 13:48 to be from zero to deployed. Beat my time and show it in a video response. The person with the best time by March 15th @ 11:59PM CST will receive a prize. Here are the links to the videos: #1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZIUVfHWsbc #2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7WluaXIya0 #3 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqPh7wbWsLc The Rules Let’s revisit those ground rules before I tell you what the prizes will be: Ground rules: .NET Application with a valid database connection Start from Zero Deployed with AppHarbor or an alternative A timer displayed in the video that runs during the entire process Video response published on YouTube or acceptable alternative Video(s) must be published by March 15th at 11:59PM CST. Either post the link here as a comment or on YouTube as a response (also by 11:59PM CST March 15th) The Prizes The prize package for the best time is:                      $50 Gift Card or equivalent – Provided by yours truly. AppHarbor $100 service credit – AppHarbor will provide a $100 credit for their services once they launch payments. Thank you to the folks at AppHarbor! ReSharper - Jetbrains will provide a FULL license of ReSharper Personal. This license is a $199 value. Thank you to the folks at Jetbrains! Telerik Ultimate Collection for .NET – Telerik will provide a license to pretty much every .NET tool they offer. This license is a $1999 value. A big thank you to the folks at Telerik!! This is a total value of $2348!!! The prize package for the person that has the most creative video(s) with a time better than mine (if there are at least 5 responses):           $20 Gift card or equivalent – Provided by this guy. AppHarbor $50 service credit – same deal as above. Thank you AppHarbor! Twilio T-Shirt - Twilio has donated a shirt and will ship your size to you (this may be subject to US residents only). This is a $25 value. Thank you to the folks at Twilio!

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  • PostSharp, Obfuscation, and IL

    - by Simon Cooper
    Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a relatively new programming paradigm. Originating at Xerox PARC in 1994, the paradigm was first made available for general-purpose development as an extension to Java in 2001. From there, it has quickly been adapted for use in all the common languages used today. In the .NET world, one of the primary AOP toolkits is PostSharp. Attributes and AOP Normally, attributes in .NET are entirely a metadata construct. Apart from a few special attributes in the .NET framework, they have no effect whatsoever on how a class or method executes within the CLR. Only by using reflection at runtime can you access any attributes declared on a type or type member. PostSharp changes this. By declaring a custom attribute that derives from PostSharp.Aspects.Aspect, applying it to types and type members, and running the resulting assembly through the PostSharp postprocessor, you can essentially declare 'clever' attributes that change the behaviour of whatever the aspect has been applied to at runtime. A simple example of this is logging. By declaring a TraceAttribute that derives from OnMethodBoundaryAspect, you can automatically log when a method has been executed: public class TraceAttribute : PostSharp.Aspects.OnMethodBoundaryAspect { public override void OnEntry(MethodExecutionArgs args) { MethodBase method = args.Method; System.Diagnostics.Trace.WriteLine( String.Format( "Entering {0}.{1}.", method.DeclaringType.FullName, method.Name)); } public override void OnExit(MethodExecutionArgs args) { MethodBase method = args.Method; System.Diagnostics.Trace.WriteLine( String.Format( "Leaving {0}.{1}.", method.DeclaringType.FullName, method.Name)); } } [Trace] public void MethodToLog() { ... } Now, whenever MethodToLog is executed, the aspect will automatically log entry and exit, without having to add the logging code to MethodToLog itself. PostSharp Performance Now this does introduce a performance overhead - as you can see, the aspect allows access to the MethodBase of the method the aspect has been applied to. If you were limited to C#, you would be forced to retrieve each MethodBase instance using Type.GetMethod(), matching on the method name and signature. This is slow. Fortunately, PostSharp is not limited to C#. It can use any instruction available in IL. And in IL, you can do some very neat things. Ldtoken C# allows you to get the Type object corresponding to a specific type name using the typeof operator: Type t = typeof(Random); The C# compiler compiles this operator to the following IL: ldtoken [mscorlib]System.Random call class [mscorlib]System.Type [mscorlib]System.Type::GetTypeFromHandle( valuetype [mscorlib]System.RuntimeTypeHandle) The ldtoken instruction obtains a special handle to a type called a RuntimeTypeHandle, and from that, the Type object can be obtained using GetTypeFromHandle. These are both relatively fast operations - no string lookup is required, only direct assembly and CLR constructs are used. However, a little-known feature is that ldtoken is not just limited to types; it can also get information on methods and fields, encapsulated in a RuntimeMethodHandle or RuntimeFieldHandle: // get a MethodBase for String.EndsWith(string) ldtoken method instance bool [mscorlib]System.String::EndsWith(string) call class [mscorlib]System.Reflection.MethodBase [mscorlib]System.Reflection.MethodBase::GetMethodFromHandle( valuetype [mscorlib]System.RuntimeMethodHandle) // get a FieldInfo for the String.Empty field ldtoken field string [mscorlib]System.String::Empty call class [mscorlib]System.Reflection.FieldInfo [mscorlib]System.Reflection.FieldInfo::GetFieldFromHandle( valuetype [mscorlib]System.RuntimeFieldHandle) These usages of ldtoken aren't usable from C# or VB, and aren't likely to be added anytime soon (Eric Lippert's done a blog post on the possibility of adding infoof, methodof or fieldof operators to C#). However, PostSharp deals directly with IL, and so can use ldtoken to get MethodBase objects quickly and cheaply, without having to resort to string lookups. The kicker However, there are problems. Because ldtoken for methods or fields isn't accessible from C# or VB, it hasn't been as well-tested as ldtoken for types. This has resulted in various obscure bugs in most versions of the CLR when dealing with ldtoken and methods, and specifically, generic methods and methods of generic types. This means that PostSharp was behaving incorrectly, or just plain crashing, when aspects were applied to methods that were generic in some way. So, PostSharp has to work around this. Without using the metadata tokens directly, the only way to get the MethodBase of generic methods is to use reflection: Type.GetMethod(), passing in the method name as a string along with information on the signature. Now, this works fine. It's slower than using ldtoken directly, but it works, and this only has to be done for generic methods. Unfortunately, this poses problems when the assembly is obfuscated. PostSharp and Obfuscation When using ldtoken, obfuscators don't affect how PostSharp operates. Because the ldtoken instruction directly references the type, method or field within the assembly, it is unaffected if the name of the object is changed by an obfuscator. However, the indirect loading used for generic methods was breaking, because that uses the name of the method when the assembly is put through the PostSharp postprocessor to lookup the MethodBase at runtime. If the name then changes, PostSharp can't find it anymore, and the assembly breaks. So, PostSharp needs to know about any changes an obfuscator does to an assembly. The way PostSharp does this is by adding another layer of indirection. When PostSharp obfuscation support is enabled, it includes an extra 'name table' resource in the assembly, consisting of a series of method & type names. When PostSharp needs to lookup a method using reflection, instead of encoding the method name directly, it looks up the method name at a fixed offset inside that name table: MethodBase genericMethod = typeof(ContainingClass).GetMethod(GetNameAtIndex(22)); PostSharp.NameTable resource: ... 20: get_Prop1 21: set_Prop1 22: DoFoo 23: GetWibble When the assembly is later processed by an obfuscator, the obfuscator can replace all the method and type names within the name table with their new name. That way, the reflection lookups performed by PostSharp will now use the new names, and everything will work as expected: MethodBase genericMethod = typeof(#kGy).GetMethod(GetNameAtIndex(22)); PostSharp.NameTable resource: ... 20: #kkA 21: #zAb 22: #EF5a 23: #2tg As you can see, this requires direct support by an obfuscator in order to perform these rewrites. Dotfuscator supports it, and now, starting with SmartAssembly 6.6.4, SmartAssembly does too. So, a relatively simple solution to a tricky problem, with some CLR bugs thrown in for good measure. You don't see those every day!

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  • ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-06-22

    - by Bob Rhubart
    Guide to integration architecture | Stephanie Mann "The landscape of integration architecture is shifting as service-oriented and cloud-based architecture take the fore," says Stephanie Mann. "To ensure success, enterprise architects and developers are turning to lighter-weight infrastructure to support more complex integration projects." FY13 Oracle PartnerNetwork Kickoff - Tues June 26, 2012 Join us for a one-hour live online event hosted by the Oracle PartnerNetwork team as we kickoff FY13. Other dates/times for EMEA/LAD/JAPAN/APAC. Click the link for details. Why should you choose Oracle WebLogic 12c instead of JBoss EAP 6? | Ricardo Ferreira Okay, you would expect an Oracle guy to make this argument. But Ferreira takes a very deep, very detailed technical dive into the issue. So hear the man out, will ya? Hibernate4 and Coherence | Rene van Wijk According to Oracle ACE Rene van Wijk, "there are two ways to integrate Hibernate and Coherence." In this post he illustrates one of them. Simple Made Easy | Rich Hickey Rich Hickey discusses simplicity, why it is important, how to achieve it in design and how to recognize its absence in the tools, language constructs and libraries in this presentation from QCon London 2012. Starting a cluster | Mark Nelson Fusion Middleware A-Team blogger Mark Nelson looks at Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle BPM, and Oracle Coherence, three products that are " commonly clustered, and which have somewhat different requirements." Why building SaaS well means giving up your servers | GigaOM The biggest benefit to PaaS, reports GigaOM's Derrick Harris, "might be a better product because the company is able to focus on building the app rather than managing servers." Personas - what, why & how | Mascha van Oosterhout "To be able to create a successful, user-friendly website or application," says Mascha van Oosterhout, "every decision you take, whether you are part of the marketing team, the design team or the development team, should be based on what you know about the user." Thought for the Day "Machines take me by surprise with great frequency." — Alan Turing(June 23, 1912 - June 7, 1954) Source: Brainy Quote

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  • TechEd 2010 Day Three: The Database Designer (Isn't)

    - by BuckWoody
    Yesterday at TechEd 2010 here in New Orleans I worked the front-booth, answering general SQL Server questions for the masses. I was actually a little surprised to find most of the questions I got were from folks that wanted to know more about Stream Insight and Master Data Services. In past conferences I've been asked a lot of "free consulting" questions, about problems folks have had from older products. I don't mind that a bit - in fact, I'm always happy to help in any way I can. But this time people are really interested in the new features in the product, and I like that they are thinking ahead, not just having to solve problems in production. My presentation was on "Database Design in an Hour". We had the usual fun, and SideShow Bob made an appearance - I kid you not. The guy in the back of the room looked just like Sideshow Bob, so I quickly held a "bes thair" contest, and he won. Duing the presentation, I explain the tools you can use to design databases. I also explain that the "Database Designer" tool in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) isn't truly a desinger - it uses non-standard notation, doesn't have a meta-data dictionary, and worst of all, it works at the physical level. In other words, whatever you do in SSMS will automatically change the field/table/relationship structures in the database. We fixed this in SSMS 2008 and higher by adding an option to block that, but the tool is not a good design function nonetheless. To be fair, no one I know of at Microsoft recommends that it is - but I was shocked to hear so many developers in the room defending it as a good tool. I think the main issue for someone who doesn't have to work with Relational Systems a great deal is that it can be difficult to figure out Foreign Keys. The syntax makes them look "backwards", so it's just easier to grab a field and place it on the table you want to point to. There are options. You can download a couple of free tools (CA has a community edition of ER-WIN, Quest has one, and Embarcadero also has one) and if you design more than one or two databases a year, it may be worth buying a true design tool. For years I used Visio, but we changed it so that it doesn't forward-engineer (create the DDL) any more, so it isn't a true design tool either. So investigate those free and not-so-free tools. You'll find they help you in your job - but stay away from the Database Designer in SSMS. Or I'll send Sideshow Bob over there to straighten you out. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • Play Your Position Until the Play Breaks Down&hellip;then Do Whatever it Takes.

    - by AjarnMark
    If I didn’t know better, I would think that K. Brian Kelley (blog | twitter) has been listening in on conversations with my boss. In his recent blog post Successful Teams: Knowing When to Step Out of Your Role, Brian describes quite clearly a philosophy that my boss has been trying to get across to everyone in the department.  We have been using sports analogies, like how important it is to play your position, until the play breaks down (such as a fumble) and then do whatever it takes it to cover each other / recover the ball / win.  While we like having very skilled people who could do a lot of different tasks, it is important that you first do your assigned tasks, and only once those are complete, or failure of the larger mission is probable, do you consider walking away from them to help someone else with their responsibilities. The thing that you cannot afford, especially on a lean team, is the really nice guy who is always trying to help out other people, but in doing so, is never quite getting his own responsibilities taken care of.  Yes, if the Running Back drops the football, you want any member of the team in the vicinity to jump on it, whether that is the leading blocker or the Quarterback.  But until the fumble happens, you want the leading blocker to focus on doing his job, and block for the Running Back.  If the blocker is doing any other job than his primary responsibility, you’re probably going to lose. This sounds logical enough, but it is really easy to go astray with the best of intentions.  This is especially true on a small, tight-knit team, where it is really easy to get sucked into someone else’s task or problem, doubly so if you think you can do it better or faster than them.  Now you are really setting yourself up for failure.  The right thing is to let the other person do the job, even if it seems less efficient in the short-run, so that you can focus on the tasks which require your expertise.  Don’t break formation…don’t abandon your assignment, until it is clear that mission failure is imminent, and even then, as Brian writes, it should be with the agreement of the mission leader. Thanks, Brian, for putting it so well.  This has been distributed throughout our department.

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  • Justification for learning/implementing newer Microsoft technologies

    - by Darren
    I work at a large healthcare organization as a mid-level software developer. I have over 10 years experience in the IT industry using Microsoft technologies (ASP.NET & SQL Server). When I go to conferences, code camps, .net user group meetings, I hear of all kinds of new tools and technologies: MVC, LINQ, Entity Framework, WCF Web Services, etc. I guess you could say I'm in my comfort zone using the same old stuff from asp.net 2.0. I use typed datasets for my data access layer. I use web forms and feature rich server controls with master pages. I know how to use plain old SQL and create queries in my typed datasets to get at data my applications need. Throughout my career, I'm always sensitive to not become obsolete with my skill set. What I currently use works fine and my development time is fast. But I'm concerned that if I were to be laid off, I would be asked in interviews how many MVC apps I've written. Or how I am with LINQ or WCF web services. I know that it doesn't matter how many conferences, books, or videos I watch on some new technology...I have to implement/use it or it simply won't sink in. Also, managers who interview don't care how much someone reads up on something, only real use and experience with a technology. I have a new project to write. I've gone to my manager and have asked for additional time for the project for learning/implementing technology I may not be familiar with. Our organization encourages its employees to "learn and grow" and to continue are education. But I always get resistance when I ask for more time to ramp up on something new to implement. My manager is asking for concrete business reasons for implementing these new technologies. I don't have business reasons. My reasons are because I don't want to become obsolete. I could say it would make the project more maintainable in the future by other developers since at some point people could stop using these older technologies, but that' about all I can think of. Does Linq/Entity Framework/MCV apps perform better? So much so that the customers (users in departments I'm creating this app for) need? I doubt it. I'm interested in you guy's thoughts on this. Do many of you have similar plights with trying to use newer upcoming technologies? I doubt I'm on the bleeding edge of technology, either. Are there "business reasons" that you would bring to light for using these technologies? Thanks in advance! Sorry for the long wall of text.

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  • Travelling MVP #2: Community event at Bucharest, Romania

    - by DigiMortal
    My second trip was to DevReach with two stops. My first stop was at Bucharest where I met with my friend Dimitar Georgiev who is one of authors of Gym Realm service. Romanian MVP Andrei Ignat was our host there and organized meeting with local community guys. With me – it was first time in my life – was one more guy from Estonia visiting DevReach and he made the whole trip with me. Bucharest We arrived to Bucharest 29.09 at night. We stayed at Hotel Michelangelo. It’s small hotel with nice rooms, free WiFi and very good service. Although my room was on the first floor there was no street noise. We visited one restaurant that offers national cuisine and it was really great. Next day we went out with local guys and had some beers in “old town”. Bucharest “old town” is nice and cozy. There are many bars open and I am sure everybody will find there some very okay place. After supper we visited one warm karaoke bar where we had beers with local guys. Andrei Ignat – karaoke star Agu Suur and Andrei Ion Rinea enjoying karaoke and tequila Community event Next day we had community event. I made my session about ASP.NET Web API and Dimitar told about how to port ASP.NET web applications to cloud environment. Sessions were held at study class of one local company. Dimitar Georgiev speaking about porting web apps to Windows Azure. As it was usual community evening and not some bigger event there were about 12 guys attending from Bucharest. There were both IT-PROs and developers and one nice thing about Bucharest community is that they are listening to you very well and they ask questions if something is unclear or if you slide over from topic they are interested in. Okay, we tried to keep up good tempo so people stay awake and I think we succeeded. After sessions we went all together to local Piranha pub that was near event venue. We had some beers with local guys and talked with them on different technology topics. It was another good and interesting evening at Bucharest. I want to go back there for sure. As it was my first trip to Bucharest and mostly I gathered experiences I think my next community trip there will be way stronger. I take it as a challenge. Plus – I have there some new friends and I want to meet them too – be it community event or not. :)

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  • 302: this blog will be closed

    - by preishuber
    After nearly 7 years I will discontinue blogging on this site. My resources are limited. You can reach my German blog which is used to support my customers. Looking back to a long an interesting journey ASP.NET by ScottGu That was the reason to attend this site and support Microsoft as much as I can. For that I was honored as ASP.NET MVP- thanks again. Meet Scoot several times. Great guy! Forums I have left NNTP forums a few years ago and now Microsoft closed it- It was my idea ;-) AJAX Was the wrong way- JQuery won the game IIS7 That is really a great plattform and the IIS team rules. I am sad that is so silent around that topic. ASP.NET after 2.0 Is no longer my world. I love ASP.NET and ASP.NET Server controls. I hate the discussion about how to follow the holy rules of MVC. Microsoft have dropped the goal to bring ASP.NET to #1 and accepted PHP is it. Facebook & Twittering Microblogging takes over a part of the blogging business. Shorter faster cheaper- or as SteveB mentioned - do more with less. Google Google is taking over the web. I am using Bing every time as I can but Google have more options. Sorry Microsoft you will loose that game. Apple That is not the biggest problem of Microsoft. the Ixxx takes over a small part but big money of the market, but the customers are not strongly linked. New wave new hype- Game over Apple. Silverlight My new home. I can reuse a lot of my skills and love the possibilitys. Silverligth will passing WPF-and strike Flash Windows phone 7 Also my skills fit. I just will use it for fun. I am not really satisfied about what I have heard from MIX. Guys from Redmond, I am sad to say you have been the best Smartphone OS and lost everything. The ADO vNext Story That will be the next mystic point. WCF, REST, JSON, ATOM and now OData. Nothing about SQL commands. LINQ, ORM is also not the final solution for multilayered disconnected async scenarios. Personally I prefere the OData idea and dislike the Swiss Army Knife (German Eierlegende Wollmilchsau) WCF. I am still in INETA Speakers board and I am glad to come to your user group. In all other cases you can hire me over ppedv AG. Good by and have good live.

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  • How to shoot yourself in the foot (DO NOT Read in the office)

    - by TATWORTH
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TATWORTH/archive/2013/06/21/how-to-shoot-yourself-in-the-foot-do-not-read.aspxLet me make it absolutely clear - the following is:merely collated by your Geek from http://www.codeproject.com/Lounge.aspx?msg=3917012#xx3917012xxvery, very very funny so you read it in the presence of others at your own riskso here is the list - you have been warned!C You shoot yourself in the foot.   C++ You accidently create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical assistance is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying "That's me, over there."   FORTRAN You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception-handling facility.   Modula-2 After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in this language, you shoot yourself in the head.   COBOL USEing a COLT 45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER and SQUEEZE. THEN return HANDGUN to HOLSTER. CHECK whether shoelace needs to be retied.   Lisp You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds...   BASIC Shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.   Forth Foot yourself in the shoot.   APL You shoot yourself in the foot; then spend all day figuring out how to do it in fewer characters.   Pascal The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot.   Snobol If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot. If you fail, shoot yourself in the right foot.   HyperTalk Put the first bullet of the gun into foot left of leg of you. Answer the result.   Prolog You tell your program you want to be shot in the foot. The program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't allow it to explain.   370 JCL You send your foot down to MIS with a 4000-page document explaining how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot comes back deep-fried.   FORTRAN-77 You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you still can't do exception-processing.   Modula-2 (alternative) You perform a shooting on what might be currently a foot with what might be currently a bullet shot by what might currently be a gun.   BASIC (compiled) You shoot yourself in the foot with a BB using a SCUD missile launcher.   Visual Basic You'll really only appear to have shot yourself in the foot, but you'll have so much fun doing it that you won't care.   Forth (alternative) BULLET DUP3 * GUN LOAD FOOT AIM TRIGGER PULL BANG! EMIT DEAD IF DROP ROT THEN (This takes about five bytes of memory, executes in two to ten clock cycles on any processor and can be used to replace any existing function of the language as well as in any future words). (Welcome to bottom up programming - where you, too, can perform compiler pre-processing instead of writing code)   APL (alternative) You hear a gunshot and there's a hole in your foot, but you don't remember enough linear algebra to understand what happened. or @#&^$%&%^ foot   Pascal (alternative) Same as Modula-2 except that the bullet is not the right type for the gun and your hand is blown off.   Snobol (alternative) You grab your foot with your hand, then rewrite your hand to be a bullet. The act of shooting the original foot then changes your hand/bullet into yet another foot (a left foot).   Prolog (alternative) You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot, but the bullet, failing to find its mark, backtracks to the gun, which then explodes in your face.   COMAL You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol, but the bore is clogged, and the pressure build-up blows apart both the pistol and your hand. or draw_pistol aim_at_foot(left) pull_trigger hop(swearing)   Scheme As Lisp, but none of the other appendages are aware of this happening.   Algol You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket. The musket is aesthetically fascinating and the wound baffles the adolescent medic in the emergency room.   Ada If you are dumb enough to actually use this language, the United States Department of Defense will kidnap you, stand you up in front of a firing squad and tell the soldiers, "Shoot at the feet." or The Department of Defense shoots you in the foot after offering you a blindfold and a last cigarette. or After correctly packaging your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream and shoot yourself in the foot. When you try, however, you discover that your foot is of the wrong type. or After correctly packing your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream, and confidently aim at your foot knowing it is safe. However the cordite in the round does an Unchecked Conversion, fires and shoots you in the foot anyway.   Eiffel   You create a GUN object, two FOOT objects and a BULLET object. The GUN passes both the FOOT objects a reference to the BULLET. The FOOT objects increment their hole counts and forget about the BULLET. A little demon then drives a garbage truck over your feet and grabs the bullet (both of it) on the way. Smalltalk You spend so much time playing with the graphics and windowing system that your boss shoots you in the foot, takes away your workstation and makes you develop in COBOL on a character terminal. or You send the message shoot to gun, with selectors bullet and myFoot. A window pops up saying Gunpowder doesNotUnderstand: spark. After several fruitless hours spent browsing the methods for Trigger, FiringPin and IdealGas, you take the easy way out and create ShotFoot, a subclass of Foot with an additional instance variable bulletHole. Object Oriented Pascal You perform a shooting on what might currently be a foot with what might currently be a bullet fired from what might currently be a gun.   PL/I You consume all available system resources, including all the offline bullets. The Data Processing & Payroll Department doubles its size, triples its budget, acquires four new mainframes and drops the original one on your foot. Postscript foot bullets 6 locate loadgun aim gun shoot showpage or It takes the bullet ten minutes to travel from the gun to your foot, by which time you're long since gone out to lunch. The text comes out great, though.   PERL You stab yourself in the foot repeatedly with an incredibly large and very heavy Swiss Army knife. or You pick up the gun and begin to load it. The gun and your foot begin to grow to huge proportions and the world around you slows down, until the gun fires. It makes a tiny hole, which you don't feel. Assembly Language You crash the OS and overwrite the root disk. The system administrator arrives and shoots you in the foot. After a moment of contemplation, the administrator shoots himself in the foot and then hops around the room rabidly shooting at everyone in sight. or You try to shoot yourself in the foot only to discover you must first reinvent the gun, the bullet, and your foot.or The bullet travels to your foot instantly, but it took you three weeks to load the round and aim the gun.   BCPL You shoot yourself somewhere in the leg -- you can't get any finer resolution than that. Concurrent Euclid You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot.   Motif You spend days writing a UIL description of your foot, the trajectory, the bullet and the intricate scrollwork on the ivory handles of the gun. When you finally get around to pulling the trigger, the gun jams.   Powerbuilder While attempting to load the gun you discover that the LoadGun system function is buggy; as a work around you tape the bullet to the outside of the gun and unsuccessfully attempt to fire it with a nail. In frustration you club your foot with the butt of the gun and explain to your client that this approximates the functionality of shooting yourself in the foot and that the next version of Powerbuilder will fix it.   Standard ML By the time you get your code to typecheck, you're using a shoot to foot yourself in the gun.   MUMPS You shoot 583149 AK-47 teflon-tipped, hollow-point, armour-piercing bullets into even-numbered toes on odd-numbered feet of everyone in the building -- with one line of code. Three weeks later you shoot yourself in the head rather than try to modify that line.   Java You locate the Gun class, but discover that the Bullet class is abstract, so you extend it and write the missing part of the implementation. Then you implement the ShootAble interface for your foot, and recompile the Foot class. The interface lets the bullet call the doDamage method on the Foot, so the Foot can damage itself in the most effective way. Now you run the program, and call the doShoot method on the instance of the Gun class. First the Gun creates an instance of Bullet, which calls the doFire method on the Gun. The Gun calls the hit(Bullet) method on the Foot, and the instance of Bullet is passed to the Foot. But this causes an IllegalHitByBullet exception to be thrown, and you die.   Unix You shoot yourself in the foot or % ls foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o % rm * .o rm: .o: No such file or directory % ls %   370 JCL (alternative) You shoot yourself in the head just thinking about it.   DOS JCL You first find the building you're in in the phone book, then find your office number in the corporate phone book. Then you have to write this down, then describe, in cubits, your exact location, in relation to the door (right hand side thereof). Then you need to write down the location of the gun (loading it is a proprietary utility), then you load it, and the COBOL program, and run them, and, with luck, it may be run tonight.   VMS   $ MOUNT/DENSITY=.45/LABEL=BULLET/MESSAGE="BYE" BULLET::BULLET$GUN SYS$BULLET $ SET GUN/LOAD/SAFETY=OFF/SIGHT=NONE/HAND=LEFT/CHAMBER=1/ACTION=AUTOMATIC/ LOG/ALL/FULL SYS$GUN_3$DUA3:[000000]GUN.GNU $ SHOOT/LOG/AUTO SYS$GUN SYS$SYSTEM:[FOOT]FOOT.FOOT   %DCL-W-ACTIMAGE, error activating image GUN -CLI-E-IMGNAME, image file $3$DUA240:[GUN]GUN.EXE;1 -IMGACT-F-NOTNATIVE, image is not an OpenVMS Alpha AXP image or %SYS-F-FTSHT, foot shot (fifty lines of traceback omitted) sh,csh, etc You can't remember the syntax for anything, so you spend five hours reading manual pages, then your foot falls asleep. You shoot the computer and switch to C.   Apple System 7 Double click the gun icon and a window giving a selection for guns, target areas, plus balloon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects. Click "shoot" button and a small bomb appears with note "Error of Type 1 has occurred."   Windows 3.1 Double click the gun icon and wait. Eventually a window opens giving a selection for guns, target areas, plus balloon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects. Click "shoot" button and a small box appears with note "Unable to open Shoot.dll, check that path is correct."   Windows 95 Your gun is not compatible with this OS and you must buy an upgrade and install it before you can continue. Then you will be informed that you don't have enough memory.   CP/M I remember when shooting yourself in the foot with a BB gun was a big deal.   DOS You finally found the gun, but can't locate the file with the foot for the life of you.   MSDOS You shoot yourself in the foot, but can unshoot yourself with add-on software.   Access You try to point the gun at your foot, but it shoots holes in all your Borland distribution diskettes instead.   Paradox Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can too.   dBase You squeeze the trigger, but the bullet moves so slowly that by the time your foot feels the pain, you've forgotten why you shot yourself anyway. or You buy a gun. Bullets are only available from another company and are promised to work so you buy them. Then you find out that the next version of the gun is the one scheduled to actually shoot bullets.   DBase IV, V1.0 You pull the trigger, but it turns out that the gun was a poorly designed hand grenade and the whole building blows up.   SQL You cut your foot off, send it out to a service bureau and when it returns, it has a hole in it but will no longer fit the attachment at the end of your leg. or Insert into Foot Select Bullet >From Gun.Hand Where Chamber = 'LOADED' And Trigger = 'PULLED'   Clipper You grab a bullet, get ready to insert it in the gun so that you can shoot yourself in the foot and discover that the gun that the bullets fits has not yet been built, but should be arriving in the mail _REAL_SOON_NOW_. Oracle The menus for coding foot_shooting have not been implemented yet and you can't do foot shooting in SQL.   English You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off. (For those who don't know, English is a McDonnell Douglas/PICK query language which allegedly requires 110% of system resources to run happily.) Revelation [an implementation of the PICK Operating System] You'll be able to shoot yourself in the foot just as soon as you figure out what all these bullets are for.   FlagShip Starting at the top of your head, you aim the gun at yourself repeatedly until, half an hour later, the gun is finally pointing at your foot and you pull the trigger. A new foot with a hole in it appears but you can't work out how to get rid of the old one and your gun doesn't work anymore.   FidoNet You put your foot in your mouth, then echo it internationally.   PicoSpan [a UNIX-based computer conferencing system] You can't shoot yourself in the foot because you're not a host. or (host variation) Whenever you shoot yourself in the foot, someone opens a topic in policy about it.   Internet You put your foot in your mouth, shoot it, then spam the bullet so that everybody gets shot in the foot.   troff rmtroff -ms -Hdrwp | lpr -Pwp2 & .*place bullet in footer .B .NR FT +3i .in 4 .bu Shoot! .br .sp .in -4 .br .bp NR HD -2i .*   Genetic Algorithms You create 10,000 strings describing the best way to shoot yourself in the foot. By the time the program produces the optimal solution, humans have evolved wings and the problem is moot.   CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes) You only fail to shoot everything that isn't your foot.   MS-SQL Server MS-SQL Server’s gun comes pre-loaded with an unlimited supply of Teflon coated bullets, and it only has two discernible features: the muzzle and the trigger. If that wasn't enough, MS-SQL Server also puts the gun in your hand, applies local anesthetic to the skin of your forefinger and stitches it to the gun's trigger. Meanwhile, another process has set up a spinal block to numb your lower body. It will then proceeded to surgically remove your foot, cryogenically freeze it for preservation, and attach it to the muzzle of the gun so that no matter where you aim, you will shoot your foot. In order to avoid shooting yourself in the foot, you need to unstitch your trigger finger, remove your foot from the muzzle of the gun, and have it surgically reattached. Then you probably want to get some crutches and go out to buy a book on SQL Server Performance Tuning.   Sybase Sybase's gun requires assembly, and you need to go out and purchase your own clip and bullets to load the gun. Assembly is complicated by the fact that Sybase has hidden the gun behind a big stack of reference manuals, but it hasn't told you where that stack is. While you were off finding the gun, assembling it, buying bullets, etc., Sybase was also busy surgically removing your foot and cryogenically freezing it for preservation. Instead of attaching it to the muzzle of the gun, though, it packed your foot on dry ice and sent it UPS-Ground to an unnamed hookah bar somewhere in the middle east. In order to shoot your foot, you must modify your gun with a GPS system for targeting and hire some guy named "Indy" to find the hookah bar and wire the coordinates back to you. By this time, you've probably become so daunted at the tasks stand between you and shooting your foot that you hire a guy who's read all the books on Sybase to help you shoot your foot. If you're lucky, he'll be smart enough both to find your foot and to stop you from shooting it.   Magic software You spend 1 week looking up the correct syntax for GUN. When you find it, you realise that GUN will not let you shoot in your own foot. It will allow you to shoot almost anything but your foot. You then decide to build your own gun. You can't use the standard barrel since this will only allow for standard bullets, which will not fire if the barrel is pointed at your foot. After four weeks, you have created your own custom gun. It blows up in your hand without warning, because you failed to initialise the safety catch and it doesn't know whether the initial state is "0", 0, NULL, "ZERO", 0.0, 0,0, "0.0", or "0,00". You fix the problem with your remaining hand by nesting 12 safety catches, and then decide to build the gun without safety catch. You then shoot the management and retire to a happy life where you code in languages that will allow you to shoot your foot in under 10 days.FirefoxLets you shoot yourself in as many feet as you'd like, while using multiple great addons! IEA moving target in terms of standard ammunition size and doesn't always work properly with non-Microsoft ammunition, so sometimes you shoot something other than your foot. However, it's the corporate world's standard foot-shooting apparatus. Hackers seem to enjoy rigging websites up to trigger cascading foot-shooting failures. Windows 98 About the same as Windows 95 in terms of overall bullet capacity and triggering mechanisms. Includes updated DirectShot API. A new version was released later on to support USB guns, Windows 98 SE.WPF:You get your baseball glove and a ball and you head out to your backyard, where you throw balls to your pitchback. Then your unkempt-haired-cargo-shorts-and-sandals-with-white-socks-wearing neighbor uses XAML to sculpt your arm into a gun, the ball into a bullet and the pitchback into your foot. By now, however, only the neighbor can get it to work and he's only around from 6:30 PM - 3:30 AM. LOGO: You very carefully lay out the trajectory of the bullet. Then you start the gun, which fires very slowly. You walk precisely to the point where the bullet will travel and wait, but just before it gets to you, your class time is up and one of the other kids has already used the system to hack into Sony's PS3 network. Flash: Someone has designed a beautiful-looking gun that anyone can shoot their feet with for free. It weighs six hundred pounds. All kinds of people are shooting themselves in the feet, and sending the link to everyone else so that they can too. That is, except for the criminals, who are all stealing iOS devices that the gun won't work with.APL: Its (mostly) all greek to me. Lisp: Place ((gun in ((hand sight (foot then shoot))))) (Lots of Insipid Stupid Parentheses)Apple OS/X and iOS Once a year, Steve Jobs returns from sick leave to tell millions of unwavering fans how they will be able to shoot themselves in the foot differently this year. They retweet and blog about it ad nauseam, and wait in line to be the first to experience "shoot different".Windows ME Usually fails, even at shooting you in the foot. Yo dawg, I heard you like shooting yourself in the foot. So I put a gun in your gun, so you can shoot yourself in the foot while you shoot yourself in the foot. (Okay, I'm not especially proud of this joke.) Windows 2000 Now you really do have to log in, before you are allowed to shoot yourself in the foot.Windows XPYou thought you learned your lesson: Don't use Windows ME. Then, along came this new creature, built on top of Windows NT! So you spend the next couple days installing antivirus software, patches and service packs, just so you can get that driver to install, and then proceed to shoot yourself in the foot. Windows Vista Newer! Glossier! Shootier! Windows 7 The bullets come out a lot smoother. Active Directory Each bullet now has an attached Bullet Identifier, and can be uniquely identified. Policies can be applied to dictate fragmentation, and the gun will occasionally have a confusing delay after the trigger has been pulled. PythonYou try to use import foot; foot.shoot() only to realize that's only available in 3.0, to which you can't yet upgrade from 2.7 because of all those extension libs lacking support. Solaris Shoots best when used on SPARC hardware, but still runs the trigger GUI under Java. After weeks of learning the appropriate STOP command to prevent the trigger from automatically being pressed on boot, you think you've got it under control. Then the one time you ever use dtrace, it hits a bug that fires the gun. MySQL The feature that allows you to shoot yourself in the foot has been in development for about 6 years, and they are adding it into the next version, which is coming out REAL SOON NOW, promise! But you can always check it out of source control and try it yourself (just not in any environment where data integrity is important because it will probably explode.) PostgreSQLAllows you to have a smug look on your face while you shoot yourself in the foot, because those MySQL guys STILL don't have that feature. NoSQL Barrel? Who needs a barrel? Just put the bullet on your foot, and strike it with a hammer. See? It's so much simpler and more efficient that way. You can even strike multiple bullets in one swing if you swing with a good enough arc, because hammers are easy to use. Getting them to synchronize is a little difficult, though.Eclipse There are about a dozen different packages for shooting yourself in the foot, with weird interdependencies on outdated components. Once you finally navigate the morass and get one installed, you then have something to look at while you shoot yourself in the foot with that package: You can watch the screen redraw.Outlook Makes it really easy to let everyone know you shot yourself in the foot!Shooting yourself in the foot using delegates.You really need to shoot yourself in the foot but you hate firearms (you don't want any dependency on the specifics of shooting) so you delegate it to somebody else. You don't care how it is done as long is shooting your foot. You can do it asynchronously in case you know you may faint so you are called back/slapped in the face by your shooter/friend (or background worker) when everything is done.C#You prepare the gun and the bullet, carefully modeling all of the physics of a bullet traveling through a foot. Just before you're about to pull the trigger, you stumble on System.Windows.BodyParts.Foot.ShootAt(System.Windows.Firearms.IGun gun) in the extended framework, realize you just wasted the entire afternoon, and shoot yourself in the head.PHP<?phprequire("foot_safety_check.php");?><!DOCTYPE HTML><html><head> <!--Lower!--><title>Shooting me in the foot</title></head> <body> <!--LOWER!!!--><leg> <!--OK, I made this one up...--><footer><?php echo (dungSift($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], "ie"))?("Your foot is safe, but you might want to wear a hard hat!"):("<div class=\"shot\">BANG!</div>"); ?></footer></leg> </body> </html>

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  • Build Dependencies and Silverlight 4

    - by Kyle Burns
    At my current position, I’ve been doing quite a bit of Silverlight development and have also been working with TFS2010 build services to enable continuous integration.  One of the critical pieces of a successful continuous build setup (and also one of the benefits of having one) is that the build system should be able to “get latest” against the source repository and immediately build with no errors.  This can break down both in an automated build scenario and a “new guy” scenario when the solution has external dependencies that may not be present in the build environment. The method that I use to address the dependency issue is to store all of the binaries upon which my solution depends in a folder under the solution root called “Reference Items”.  I keep this folder as part of the solution and check all of the binaries into source control so when I get the latest version of the solution from source control all of the binaries are downloaded to my machine as well and gets me closer to the ideal where a new developer installs the development IDE, get latest and can immediately build and run unit tests before jumping into coding the feature of the day. This all sounds pretty good (and it is), but a little while back I ran into one of those little hiccups that requires a little manual intervention.  The issue that I ran into is that with Silverlight (at least version 4), the behavior of the “Add Reference” command when adding reference to a DLL that is present in the GAC is to omit the HintPath element that it includes with regular .Net projects, so even if the DLL is setting in the Reference Items folder and downloaded to the build machine it cannot be found at compile time and the build will fail. To work around this behavior, you need to be comfortable editing the XML project files generated by Visual Studio (in my case this is typically a .csproj file).  Simply open the project file in your favorite text editor, find the Reference element that refers to the component, and modify the XML to include the HintPath.  Here’s a before and after example of the component that ultimately led me to the investigation behind this post: Before: <Reference Include="Telerik.Windows.Controls, Version=2011.2.920.1040, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=5803cfa389c90ce7, processorArchitecture=MSIL" /> After: <Reference Include="Telerik.Windows.Controls, Version=2011.2.920.1040, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=5803cfa389c90ce7, processorArchitecture=MSIL">       <HintPath>..\Reference Items\Telerik.Windows.Controls.dll</HintPath>     </Reference>

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  • External File Upload Optimizations for Windows Azure

    - by rgillen
    [Cross posted from here: http://rob.gillenfamily.net/post/External-File-Upload-Optimizations-for-Windows-Azure.aspx] I’m wrapping up a bit of the work we’ve been doing on data movement optimizations for cloud computing and the latest set of data yielded some interesting points I thought I’d share. The work done here is not really rocket science but may, in some ways, be slightly counter-intuitive and therefore seemed worthy of posting. Summary: for those who don’t like to read detailed posts or don’t have time, the synopsis is that if you are uploading data to Azure, block your data (even down to 1MB) and upload in parallel. Set your block size based on your source file size, but if you must choose a fixed value, use 1MB. Following the above will result in significant performance gains… upwards of 10x-24x and a reduction in overall file transfer time of upwards of 90% (eg, uploading a 1GB file averaged 46.37 minutes prior to optimizations and averaged 1.86 minutes afterwards). Detail: For those of you who want more detail, or think that the claims at the end of the preceding paragraph are over-reaching, what follows is information and code supporting these claims. As the title would indicate, these tests were run from our research facility pointing to the Azure cloud (specifically US North Central as it is physically closest to us) and do not represent intra-cloud results… we have performed intra-cloud tests and the overall results are similar in notion but the data rates are significantly different as well as the tipping points for the various block sizes… this will be detailed separately). We started by building a very simple console application that would loop through a directory and upload each file to Azure storage. This application used the shipping storage client library from the 1.1 version of the azure tools. The only real variation from the client library is that we added code to collect and record the duration (in ms) and size (in bytes) for each file transferred. The code is available here. We then created a directory that had a collection of files for the following sizes: 2KB, 32KB, 64KB, 128KB, 512KB, 1MB, 5MB, 10MB, 25MB, 50MB, 100MB, 250MB, 500MB, 750MB, and 1GB (50 files for each size listed). These files contained randomly-generated binary data and do not benefit from compression (a separate discussion topic). Our file generation tool is available here. The baseline was established by running the application described above against the directory containing all of the data files. This application uploads the files in a random order so as to avoid transferring all of the files of a given size sequentially and thereby spreading the affects of periodic Internet delays across the collection of results.  We then ran some scripts to split the resulting data and generate some reports. The raw data collected for our non-optimized tests is available via the links in the Related Resources section at the bottom of this post. For each file size, we calculated the average upload time (and standard deviation) and the average transfer rate (and standard deviation). As you likely are aware, transferring data across the Internet is susceptible to many transient delays which can cause anomalies in the resulting data. It is for this reason that we randomized the order of source file processing as well as executed the tests 50x for each file size. We expect that these steps will yield a sufficiently balanced set of results. Once the baseline was collected and analyzed, we updated the test harness application with some methods to split the source file into user-defined block sizes and then to upload those blocks in parallel (using the PutBlock() method of Azure storage). The parallelization was handled by simply relying on the Parallel Extensions to .NET to provide a Parallel.For loop (see linked source for specific implementation details in Program.cs, line 173 and following… less than 100 lines total). Once all of the blocks were uploaded, we called PutBlockList() to assemble/commit the file in Azure storage. For each block transferred, the MD5 was calculated and sent ensuring that the bits that arrived matched was was intended. The timer for the blocked/parallelized transfer method wraps the entire process (source file splitting, block transfer, MD5 validation, file committal). A diagram of the process is as follows: We then tested the affects of blocking & parallelizing the transfers by running the updated application against the same source set and did a parameter sweep on the block size including 256KB, 512KB, 1MB, 2MB, and 4MB (our assumption was that anything lower than 256KB wasn’t worth the trouble and 4MB is the maximum size of a block supported by Azure). The raw data for the parallel tests is available via the links in the Related Resources section at the bottom of this post. This data was processed and then compared against the single-threaded / non-optimized transfer numbers and the results were encouraging. The Excel version of the results is available here. Two semi-obvious points need to be made prior to reviewing the data. The first is that if the block size is larger than the source file size you will end up with a “negative optimization” due to the overhead of attempting to block and parallelize. The second is that as the files get smaller, the clock-time cost of blocking and parallelizing (overhead) is more apparent and can tend towards negative optimizations. For this reason (and is supported in the raw data provided in the linked worksheet) the charts and dialog below ignore source file sizes less than 1MB. (click chart for full size image) The chart above illustrates some interesting points about the results: When the block size is smaller than the source file, performance increases but as the block size approaches and then passes the source file size, you see decreasing benefit to the point of negative gains (see the values for the 1MB file size) For some of the moderately-sized source files, small blocks (256KB) are best As the size of the source file gets larger (see values for 50MB and up), the smallest block size is not the most efficient (presumably due, at least in part, to the increased number of blocks, increased number of individual transfer requests, and reassembly/committal costs). Once you pass the 250MB source file size, the difference in rate for 1MB to 4MB blocks is more-or-less constant The 1MB block size gives the best average improvement (~16x) but the optimal approach would be to vary the block size based on the size of the source file.    (click chart for full size image) The above is another view of the same data as the prior chart just with the axis changed (x-axis represents file size and plotted data shows improvement by block size). It again highlights the fact that the 1MB block size is probably the best overall size but highlights the benefits of some of the other block sizes at different source file sizes. This last chart shows the change in total duration of the file uploads based on different block sizes for the source file sizes. Nothing really new here other than this view of the data highlights the negative affects of poorly choosing a block size for smaller files.   Summary What we have found so far is that blocking your file uploads and uploading them in parallel results in significant performance improvements. Further, utilizing extension methods and the Task Parallel Library (.NET 4.0) make short work of altering the shipping client library to provide this functionality while minimizing the amount of change to existing applications that might be using the client library for other interactions.   Related Resources Source code for upload test application Source code for random file generator ODatas feed of raw data from non-optimized transfer tests Experiment Metadata Experiment Datasets 2KB Uploads 32KB Uploads 64KB Uploads 128KB Uploads 256KB Uploads 512KB Uploads 1MB Uploads 5MB Uploads 10MB Uploads 25MB Uploads 50MB Uploads 100MB Uploads 250MB Uploads 500MB Uploads 750MB Uploads 1GB Uploads Raw Data OData feeds of raw data from blocked/parallelized transfer tests Experiment Metadata Experiment Datasets Raw Data 256KB Blocks 512KB Blocks 1MB Blocks 2MB Blocks 4MB Blocks Excel worksheet showing summarizations and comparisons

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  • TypeScript first impressions

    - by Bertrand Le Roy
    Anders published a video of his new project today, which aims at creating a superset of JavaScript, that compiles down to regular current JavaScript. Anders is a tremendously clever guy, and it always shows in his work. There is much to like in the enterprise (good code completion, refactoring and adoption of the module pattern instead of namespaces to name three), but a few things made me rise an eyebrow. First, there is no mention of CoffeeScript or Dart, but he does talk briefly about Script# and GWT. This is probably because the target audience seems to be the same as the audience for the latter two, i.e. developers who are more comfortable with statically-typed languages such as C# and Java than dynamic languages such as JavaScript. I don’t think he’s aiming at JavaScript developers. Classes and interfaces, although well executed, are not especially appealing. Second, as any code generation tool (and this is true of CoffeeScript as well), you’d better like the generated code. I didn’t, unfortunately. The code that I saw is not the code I would have written. What’s more, I didn’t always find the TypeScript code especially more expressive than what it gets compiled to. I also have a few questions. Is it possible to duck-type interfaces? For example, if I have an IPoint2D interface with x and y coordinates, can I pass any object that has x and y into a function that expects IPoint2D or do I need to necessarily create a class that implements that interface, and new up an instance that explicitly declares its contract? The appeal of dynamic languages is the ability to make objects as you go. This needs to be kept intact. More technical: why are generated variables and functions prefixed with _ rather than the $ that the EcmaScript spec recommends for machine-generated variables? In conclusion, while this is a good contribution to the set of ideas around JavaScript evolution, I don’t expect a lot of adoption outside of the devoted Microsoft developers, but maybe some influence on the language itself. But I’m often wrong. I would certainly not use it because I disagree with the central motivation for doing this: Anders explicitly says he built this because “writing application-scale JavaScript is hard”. I would restate that “writing application-scale JavaScript is hard for people who are used to statically-typed languages”. The community has built a set of good practices over the last few years that do scale quite well, and many people are successfully developing and maintaining impressive applications directly in JavaScript. You can play with TypeScript here: http://www.typescriptlang.org

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