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• My Tech Ed North America Preview - Content Edition

  - by Chris Gardner

  As I promised in my last post, I feel the need to give you a rundown on all the technical content I am looking forward to checking out at Tech Ed this year. We shall start with the content I know I'll be able to see. This would be some demo stations in the Technical Learning Center. I will DEFINITELY be checking out the Windows Phone Device Bar. I will admit that I am a bit of a phone snob, and I just want to manhandle all that sexy, sexy tech. I am also planning on talking to the Windows Phone team and the Azure team. Year after year, I end up spending more time in either the TLC or taking certification tests than anywhere else. This leads me to the one "Exam Cram" session I hope to attend. There is a session to cram for 70-599: Designing and Developing Windows Phone Applications. I know this seems odd. I'm (sort of) an XNA guru. However, I'm not that up on my Silverlight. I know enough to add Silverlight to an XNA project. Now, let's talk breakout sessions. We always need to keep track of where we're going. I know, I talk about solving problems over forcing buzz words. However, it is important to know what those buzz words before you tell people not to use them. For this, we will look to the "What's New in Visual Studio 11" and "What's New in Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5." Of course, we do talk bad about buzz words around here. For this, I'm really looking forward to "Visual C#/Visual Basic: Becoming a Guru with Existing Features." I still have .NET 2 tricks that are crucial to my internal libraries. In depth knowledge will NEVER trump shortcut libraries. There is a session in ASP.NET for phones and tablets. For those of you that have not tried to use ASP.NET on a mobile device, there is one thing you really need to understand. Mobile devices don't use scroll bars. That's right; the thing with the least screen real estate doesn't use scroll bars. Thus, I am hoping this session will give some good advice in having an ASP.NET site target both mobile and desktop. The last "business only" session "The Accidental Team Foundation Server Admin." T & W Operations is a VERY small business. As such, I am the TFS admin because I'm the developer that is also the SQL Guru. I keep my server up, but it'd be nice to know some really cool tricks for the part time guy. This leads us the the fun sessions. Coding4Fun has a Kinect session. The Twitter followers will remember that I now have a Kinect for Windows sitting on my desk at work. I have gotten pretty handy with the device, but I KNOW I'm missing some good stuff. Finally, we come to Brian Prince's session on "Making Crazy Money with Games and the Cloud." Never mind the fact that we're using Azure at work. Never mind the fact that I'm actually using the cloud in a game. Never mind the fact that the session has the terms "Crazy Money" and "Games" in the title. If you've never seen Brian Prince speak, you're missing out. In the Hands-on-Labs, we are not allowed to make our own schedule. Instead, we're asked what sessions we can't miss, and they try to schedule around those times. This was the one session I said I couldn't miss. This should complete the technical content for the conference. Coming soon, I'll dig into the certifications I hope to attain. Then, we'll talk about the social activities for the week. Here's a preview of that. I am a member of The Krewe...

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• Silverlight 5 &ndash; What&rsquo;s New? (Including Screenshots &amp; Code Snippets)

  - by mbcrump

  Silverlight 5 is coming next year (2011) and this blog post will tell you what you need to know before the beta ships. First, let me address people saying that it is dead after PDC 2010. I believe that it’s best to see what the market is doing, not the vendor. Below is a list of companies that are developing Silverlight 4 applications shown during the Silverlight Firestarter. Some of the companies have shipped and some haven’t. It’s just great to see the actual company names that are working on Silverlight instead of “people are developing for Silverlight”. The next thing that I wanted to point out was that HTML5, WPF and Silverlight can co-exist. In case you missed Scott Gutherie’s keynote, they actually had a slide with all three stacked together. This shows Microsoft will be heavily investing in each technology.  Even I, a Silverlight developer, am reading Pro HTML5. Microsoft said that according to the Silverlight Feature Voting site, 21k votes were entered. Microsoft has implemented about 70% of these votes in Silverlight 5. That is an amazing number, and I am crossing my fingers that Microsoft bundles Silverlight with Windows 8. Let’s get started… what’s new in Silverlight 5? I am going to show you some great application and actual code shown during the Firestarter event. Media Hardware Video Decode – Instead of using CPU to decode, we will offload it to GPU. This will allow netbooks, etc to play videos. Trickplay – Variable Speed Playback – Pitch Correction (If you speed up someone talking they won’t sound like a chipmunk). Power Management – Less battery when playing video. Screensavers will no longer kick in if watching a video. If you pause a video then screensaver will kick in. Remote Control Support – This will allow users to control playback functions like Pause, Rewind and Fastforward. IIS Media Services 4 has shipped and now supports Azure. Data Binding Layout Transitions – Just with a few lines of XAML you can create a really rich experience that is not using Storyboards or animations. RelativeSource FindAncestor – Ancestor RelativeSource bindings make it much easier for a DataTemplate to bind to a property on a container control. Custom Markup Extensions – Markup extensions allow code to be run at XAML parse time for both properties and event handlers. This is great for MVVM support. Changing Styles during Runtime By Binding in Style Setters – Changing Styles at runtime used to be a real pain in Silverlight 4, now it’s much easier. Binding in style setters allows bindings to reference other properties. XAML Debugging – Below you can see that we set a breakpoint in XAML. This shows us exactly what is going on with our binding.  WCF & RIA Services WS-Trust Support – Taken from Wikipedia: WS-Trust is a WS-* specification and OASIS standard that provides extensions to WS-Security, specifically dealing with the issuing, renewing, and validating of security tokens, as well as with ways to establish, assess the presence of, and broker trust relationships between participants in a secure message exchange. You can reduce network latency by using a background thread for networking. Supports Azure now.  Text and Printing Improved text clarity that enables better text rendering. Multi-column text flow, Character tracking and leading support, and full OpenType font support.  Includes a new Postscript Vector Printing API that provides control over what you print . Pivot functionality baked into Silverlight 5 SDK. Graphics Immediate mode graphics support that will enable you to use the GPU and 3D graphics supports. Take a look at what was shown in the demos below. 1) 3D view of the Earth – not really a real-world application though. A doctor’s portal. This demo really stood out for me as it shows what we can do with the 3D / GPU support. Out of Browser OOB applications can now create and manage childwindows as shown in the screenshot below.  Trusted OOB applications can use P/Invoke to call Win32 APIs and unmanaged libraries.  Enterprise Group Policy Support allow enterprises to lock down or up the sandbox capabilities of Silverlight 5 applications. In this demo, he tore the “notes” off of the application and it appeared in a new window. See the black arrow below. In this demo, he connected a USB Device which fired off a local Win32 application that provided the data off the USB stick to Silverlight. Another demo of a Silverlight 5 application exporting data right into Excel running inside of browser. Testing They demoed Coded UI, which is available now in the Visual Studio Feature Pack 2. This will allow you to create automated testing without writing any code manually. Performance: Microsoft has worked to improve the Silverlight startup time. Silverlight 5 provides 64-bit browser support.  Silverlight 5 also provides IE9 Hardware acceleration.   I am looking forward to Silverlight 5 and I hope you are too. Thanks for reading and I hope you visit again soon.  Subscribe to my feed CodeProject

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• AWS: setting up auto-scale for EC2 instances

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2013/10/16/aws-setting-up-auto-scale-for-ec2-instances.aspxWith Amazon Web Services, there’s no direct equivalent to Azure Worker Roles – no Elastic Beanstalk-style application for .NET background workers. But you can get the auto-scale part by configuring an auto-scaling group for your EC2 instance. This is a step-by-step guide, that shows you how to create the auto-scaling configuration, which for EC2 you need to do with the command line, and then link your scaling policies to CloudWatch alarms in the Web console. I’m using queue size as my metric for CloudWatch,  which is a good fit if your background workers are pulling messages from a queue and processing them.  If the queue is getting too big, the “high” alarm will fire and spin up a new instance to share the workload. If the queue is draining down, the “low” alarm will fire and shut down one of the instances. To start with, you need to manually set up your app in an EC2 VM, for a background worker that would mean hosting your code in a Windows Service (I always use Topshelf). If you’re dual-running Azure and AWS, then you can isolate your logic in one library, with a generic entry point that has Start() and Stop()  functions, so your Worker Role and Windows Service are essentially using the same code. When you have your instance set up with the Windows Service running automatically, and you’ve tested it starts up and works properly from a reboot, shut the machine down and take an image of the VM, using Create Image (EBS AMI) from the Web Console: When that completes, you’ll have your own AMI which you can use to spin up new instances, and you’re ready to create your auto-scaling group. You need to dip into the command-line tools for this, so follow this guide to set up the AWS autoscale command line tool. Now we’re ready to go. 1. Create a launch configuration This launch configuration tells AWS what to do when a new instance needs to be spun up. You create it with the as-create-launch-config command, which looks like this: as-create-launch-config sc-xyz-launcher # name of the launch config --image-id ami-7b9e9f12 # id of the AMI you extracted from your VM --region eu-west-1 # which region the new instance gets created in --instance-type t1.micro # size of the instance to create --group quicklaunch-1 #security group for the new instance 2. Create an auto-scaling group The auto-scaling group links to the launch config, and defines the overall configuration of the collection of instances: as-create-auto-scaling-group sc-xyz-asg # auto-scaling group name --region eu-west-1 # region to create in --launch-configuration sc-xyz-launcher # name of the launch config to invoke for new instances --min-size 1 # minimum number of nodes in the group --max-size 5 # maximum number of nodes in the group --default-cooldown 300 # period to wait (in seconds) after each scaling event, before checking if another scaling event is required --availability-zones eu-west-1a eu-west-1b eu-west-1c # which availability zones you want your instances to be allocated in – multiple entries means EC@ will use any of them 3. Create a scale-up policy The policy dictates what will happen in response to a scaling event being triggered from a “high” alarm being breached. It links to the auto-scaling group; this sample results in one additional node being spun up: as-put-scaling-policy scale-up-policy # policy name -g sc-psod-woker-asg # auto-scaling group the policy works with --adjustment 1 # size of the adjustment --region eu-west-1 # region --type ChangeInCapacity # type of adjustment, this specifies a fixed number of nodes, but you can use PercentChangeInCapacity to make an adjustment relative to the current number of nodes, e.g. increasing by 50% 4. Create a scale-down policy The policy dictates what will happen in response to a scaling event being triggered from a “low” alarm being breached. It links to the auto-scaling group; this sample results in one node from the group being taken offline: as-put-scaling-policy scale-down-policy -g sc-psod-woker-asg "--adjustment=-1" # in Windows, use double-quotes to surround a negative adjustment value –-type ChangeInCapacity --region eu-west-1 5. Create a “high” CloudWatch alarm We’re done with the command line now. In the Web Console, open up the CloudWatch view and create a new alarm. This alarm will monitor your metrics and invoke the scale-up policy from your auto-scaling group, when the group is working too hard. Configure your metric – this example will fire the alarm if there are more than 10 messages in my queue for over a minute: Then link the alarm to the scale-up policy in your group: 6. Create a “low” CloudWatch alarm The opposite of step 4, this alarm will trigger when the instances in your group don’t have enough work to do (e.g fewer than 2 messages in the queue for 1 minute), and will invoke the scale-down policy. And that’s it. You don’t need your original VM as the auto-scale group has a minimum number of nodes connected. You can test out the scaling by flexing your CloudWatch metric – in this example, filling up a queue from a  stub publisher – and watching AWS create new nodes as required, then stopping the publisher and watch AWS kill off the spare nodes.

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• SQLAuthority News – Download Microsoft SQL Server 2012 RTM Now

  - by pinaldave

  SQL Server 2012 enables a cloud-ready information platform that will help organizations unlock breakthrough insights across the organization as well as quickly build solutions and extend data across on-premises and public cloud backed by capabilities for mission critical confidence: Deliver required uptime and data protection with AlwaysOn Gain breakthrough & predictable performance with ColumnStore Index Help enable security and compliance with new User-defined Roles and Default Schema for Groups Enable rapid data discovery for deeper insights across the organization with ColumnStore Index Ensure more credible, consistent data with SSIS improvements, a Master Data Services add-in for Excel, and new Data Quality Services Optimize IT and developer productivity across server and cloud with Data-tier Application Component (DAC) parity with SQL Azure and SQL Server Data Tools for a unified dev experience across database, BI, and cloud functions Download SQL Server 2012 RTM Download Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Feature Pack Download SQL Server Data Tools Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Documentation, SQL Download, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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• July, the 31 Days of SQL Server DMO’s – Day 23 (sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats)

  - by Tamarick Hill

  The sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats Dynamic Management View is used to return usage information about the various indexes on your SQL Server instance. Let’s have a look at this DMV against our AdventureWorks2012 database so we can examine the information returned. SELECT * FROM sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats WHERE database_id = db_id('AdventureWorks2012') The first three columns in the result set represent the database_id, object_id, and index_id of a given row. You can join these columns back to other system tables to extract the actual database, object, and index names. The next four columns are probably the most beneficial columns within this DMV. First, the user_seeks column represents the number of times that a user query caused a seek operation against a particular index. The user_scans column represents how many times a user query caused a scan operation on a particular index. The user_lookups column represents how many times an index was used to perform a lookup operation. The user_updates column refers to how many times an index had to be updated due to a write operation that effected a particular index. The last_user_seek, last_user_scan, last_user_lookup, and last_user_update columns provide you with DATETIME information about when the last user scan, seek, lookup, or update operation was performed. The remaining columns in the result set are the same as the ones we previously discussed, except instead of the various operations being generated from user requests, they are generated from system background requests. This is an extremely useful DMV and one of my favorites when it comes to Index Maintenance. As we all know, indexes are extremely beneficial with improving the performance of your read operations. But indexes do have a downside as well. Indexes slow down the performance of your write operations, and they also require additional resources for storage. For this reason, in my opinion, it is important to regularly analyze the indexes on your system to make sure the indexes you have are being used efficiently. My AdventureWorks2012 database is only used for demonstrating or testing things, so I dont have a lot of meaningful information here, but for a Production system, if you see an index that is never getting any seeks, scans, or lookups, but is constantly getting a ton of updates, it more than likely would be a good candidate for you to consider removing. You would not be getting much benefit from the index, but yet it is incurring a cost on your system due to it constantly having to be updated for your write operations, not to mention the additional storage it is consuming. You should regularly analyze your indexes to ensure you keep your database systems as efficient and lean as possible. One thing to note is that these DMV statistics are reset every time SQL Server is restarted. Therefore it would not be a wise idea to make decisions about removing indexes after a Server Reboot or a cluster roll. If you restart your SQL Server instances frequently, for example if you schedule weekly/monthly cluster rolls, then you may not capture indexes that are being used for weekly/monthly reports that run for business users. And if you remove them, you may have some upset people at your desk on Monday morning. If you would like to begin analyzing your indexes to possibly remove the ones that your system is not using, I would recommend building a process to load this DMV information into a table on scheduled basis, depending on how frequently you perform an operation that would reset these statistics, then you can analyze the data over a period of time to get a more accurate view of what indexes are really being used and which ones or not. For more information about this DMV, please see the below Books Online link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188755.aspx Follow me on Twitter @PrimeTimeDBA

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• TDC Oct 28th 2013, I&rsquo;ll be there.

  - by Sahil Malik

  SharePoint, WCF and Azure Trainings: more information I’ll be at TDC (Trondheim Developer Conference)  on the 28th of October. Check out their awesome website, and impressive speaker lineup. I will be presenting the following two sessions, UnSharePointing SharePoint SharePoint is big and clunky, hard to TDD, CI, or use all the cool stuff that ScottGu and Hanselman show. Right? Incorrect! The new apps model requires you to not be a SharePoint’er, to be a SharePoint’er. This quick session will demonstrate how regular .NET skills, best practices, and development techniques can be used in the new SharePoint app model, all this, without knowing much about SharePoint. Read full article ....

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• Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database Performance on SPARC T4-2

  - by Brian

  The Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database is optimized to run on Oracle's SPARC T4 processor platforms running Oracle Solaris 11 providing unsurpassed scalability, performance, upgradability, protection of investment and return on investment. The following demonstrate the value of combining Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database with SPARC T4 servers and Oracle Solaris 11: On a Mobile Call Processing test, the 2-socket SPARC T4-2 server outperforms: Oracle's SPARC Enterprise M4000 server (4 x 2.66 GHz SPARC64 VII+) by 34%. Oracle's SPARC T3-4 (4 x 1.65 GHz SPARC T3) by 2.7x, or 5.4x per processor. Utilizing the TimesTen Performance Throughput Benchmark (TPTBM), the SPARC T4-2 server protects investments with: 2.1x the overall performance of a 4-socket SPARC Enterprise M4000 server in read-only mode and 1.5x the performance in update-only testing. This is 4.2x more performance per processor than the SPARC64 VII+ 2.66 GHz based system. 10x more performance per processor than the SPARC T2+ 1.4 GHz server. 1.6x better performance per processor than the SPARC T3 1.65 GHz based server. In replication testing, the two socket SPARC T4-2 server is over 3x faster than the performance of a four socket SPARC Enterprise T5440 server in both asynchronous replication environment and the highly available 2-Safe replication. This testing emphasizes parallel replication between systems. Performance Landscape Mobile Call Processing Test Performance System Processor Sockets/Cores/Threads Tps SPARC T4-2 SPARC T4, 2.85 GHz 2 16 128 218,400 M4000 SPARC64 VII+, 2.66 GHz 4 16 32 162,900 SPARC T3-4 SPARC T3, 1.65 GHz 4 64 512 80,400 TimesTen Performance Throughput Benchmark (TPTBM) Read-Only System Processor Sockets/Cores/Threads Tps SPARC T3-4 SPARC T3, 1.65 GHz 4 64 512 7.9M SPARC T4-2 SPARC T4, 2.85 GHz 2 16 128 6.5M M4000 SPARC64 VII+, 2.66 GHz 4 16 32 3.1M T5440 SPARC T2+, 1.4 GHz 4 32 256 3.1M TimesTen Performance Throughput Benchmark (TPTBM) Update-Only System Processor Sockets/Cores/Threads Tps SPARC T4-2 SPARC T4, 2.85 GHz 2 16 128 547,800 M4000 SPARC64 VII+, 2.66 GHz 4 16 32 363,800 SPARC T3-4 SPARC T3, 1.65 GHz 4 64 512 240,500 TimesTen Replication Tests System Processor Sockets/Cores/Threads Asynchronous 2-Safe SPARC T4-2 SPARC T4, 2.85 GHz 2 16 128 38,024 13,701 SPARC T5440 SPARC T2+, 1.4 GHz 4 32 256 11,621 4,615 Configuration Summary Hardware Configurations: SPARC T4-2 server 2 x SPARC T4 processors, 2.85 GHz 256 GB memory 1 x 8 Gbs FC Qlogic HBA 1 x 6 Gbs SAS HBA 4 x 300 GB internal disks Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array (40 x 24 GB flash modules) 1 x Sun Fire X4275 server configured as COMSTAR head SPARC T3-4 server 4 x SPARC T3 processors, 1.6 GHz 512 GB memory 1 x 8 Gbs FC Qlogic HBA 8 x 146 GB internal disks 1 x Sun Fire X4275 server configured as COMSTAR head SPARC Enterprise M4000 server 4 x SPARC64 VII+ processors, 2.66 GHz 128 GB memory 1 x 8 Gbs FC Qlogic HBA 1 x 6 Gbs SAS HBA 2 x 146 GB internal disks Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array (40 x 24 GB flash modules) 1 x Sun Fire X4275 server configured as COMSTAR head Software Configuration: Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Oracle TimesTen 11.2.2.4 Benchmark Descriptions TimesTen Performance Throughput BenchMark (TPTBM) is shipped with TimesTen and measures the total throughput of the system. The workload can test read-only, update-only, delete and insert operations as required. Mobile Call Processing is a customer-based workload for processing calls made by mobile phone subscribers. The workload has a mixture of read-only, update, and insert-only transactions. The peak throughput performance is measured from multiple concurrent processes executing the transactions until a peak performance is reached via saturation of the available resources. Parallel Replication tests using both asynchronous and 2-Safe replication methods. For asynchronous replication, transactions are processed in batches to maximize the throughput capabilities of the replication server and network. In 2-Safe replication, also known as no data-loss or high availability, transactions are replicated between servers immediately emphasizing low latency. For both environments, performance is measured in the number of parallel replication servers and the maximum transactions-per-second for all concurrent processes. See Also SPARC T4-2 Server oracle.com OTN Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database oracle.com OTN Oracle Solaris oracle.com OTN Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition oracle.com OTN Disclosure Statement Copyright 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Results as of 1 October 2012.

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• Migrating SQL Server Compact Edition (SQL CE) database to SQL Server using Web Matrix

  - by Harish Ranganathan

  One of the things that is keeping us busy is the Web Camps we are delivering across 5 cities.  If you are a reader of this blog, and also attended one of these web camps, there is a good chance that you have seen me since I was there in all the places, so far.  The topics that we cover include Visual Studio 2010 SP1, SQL CE, ASP.NET MVC & HTML5.  Whenever I talk about SQL CE, the immediate response is that, people are wow that Microsoft has shipped a FREE compact edition database, which is an embedded database that can be x-copy deployed.  If you think, well didn’t Microsoft ship SQL Express which is FREE?  The difference is that, SQL Express runs as a service in the machine (if you open SQL Configuration Manager, you can notice that SQL Express is running as a service along with your SQL Server Engine (if you have installed ).  This makes it that, even if you are willing to use SQL Express when you deploy your application, it needs to be installed on the production machine (hosting provider) and it needs to run as a service.  Many hosters don’t allow such services to run on their space. SQL CE comes as a x-Copy deploy-able database with just a few DLLs required to run it on the machine and they don’t even need to be installed in GAC on the production machine.  In fact, if you have Visual Studio 2010 SP1 installed, you can use the “Add Deployable Dependencies” option in Project-Properties and it would detect that SQL CE is something you would probably want to add as a deploy-able dependency for your project.  With that, it bundles the required DLLs as a part of the “_bin_deployableAssemblies” folder.  So your project can be x-Copy deployed and just works fine. However, SQL CE has the limit of 4GB storage space.  Real world applications often require more than just 4GB of data storage and it often turns out that people would like to use SQL CE for development/ramp up stages but would like to migrate to full fledged SQL Server after a while.  So, its only natural that the question arises “How do I move my SQL CE database to SQL Server”  And honestly, it doesn’t come across as a straight forward support.  I was talking to Ambrish Mishra (PM in SQL CE Team, Hyderabad) since I got this question in almost all the places where we talked about SQL CE.   He was kind enough to demonstrate how this can be accomplished using Web Matrix.  Open Web Matrix (Web Matrix can be installed for free from www.microsoft.com/web) and click on “Site from Template” Click on the “Bakery” template (since by default it uses a SQL CE database and has all the required sample data) and click “Ok”. In the project, you can navigate to the Database tab and will be able to find that the Bakery site uses a SQL CE database “bakery.sdf” Select the “bakery.sdf” and you will be able to see the “Migrate” button on the top right Once you click on the “Migrate” button, you will notice that the popup wizard opens up and by default is configured for SQL Express.  You can edit the same to point to your local SQL Server instance, or a remote server. Upon filling in the Server Name, Username and Password, when you click “Ok”, couple of things happen.  1. The database is migrated to SQL Server (local or remote – subject to permissions on remote server).   You can open up SQL Server Management Studio and connect to the server to verify that the “bakery” database exists under “Databases” node. 2. You can also notice that in Web Matrix, when you navigate to the “Files” tab and open up the web.config file, connection string now points to the SQL Server instance (yes, the Migrate button was smart enough to make this change too ) And there it is, your SQL Server Compact Edition database, now migrated to SQL Server!! In a future post, I would explain the steps involved when using Visual Studio. Cheers !!!

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• Why your Netapp is so slow...

  - by Darius Zanganeh

  Have you ever wondered why your Netapp FAS box is slow and doesn't perform well at large block workloads?  In this blog entry I will give you a little bit of information that will probably help you understand why it’s so slow, why you shouldn't use it for applications that read and write in large blocks like 64k, 128k, 256k ++ etc..  Of course since I work for Oracle at this time, I will show you why the ZS3 storage boxes are excellent choices for these types of workloads. Netapp’s Fundamental Problem The fundamental problem you have running these workloads on Netapp is the backend block size of their WAFL file system.  Every application block on a Netapp FAS ends up in a 4k chunk on a disk. Reference:  Netapp TR-3001 Whitepaper Netapp has proven this lacking large block performance fact in at least two different ways. They have NEVER posted an SPC-2 Benchmark yet they have posted SPC-1 and SPECSFS, both recently. In 2011 they purchased Engenio to try and fill this GAP in their portfolio. Block Size Matters So why does block size matter anyways?  Many applications use large block chunks of data especially in the Big Data movement.  Some examples are SAS Business Analytics, Microsoft SQL, Hadoop HDFS is even 64MB! Now let me boil this down for you.  If an application such MS SQL is writing data in a 64k chunk then before Netapp actually writes it on disk it will have to split it into 16 different 4k writes and 16 different disk IOPS.  When the application later goes to read that 64k chunk the Netapp will have to again do 16 different disk IOPS.  In comparison the ZS3 Storage Appliance can write in variable block sizes ranging from 512b to 1MB.  So if you put the same MSSQL database on a ZS3 you can set the specific LUNs for this database to 64k and then when you do an application read/write it requires only a single disk IO.  That is 16x faster!  But, back to the problem with your Netapp, you will VERY quickly run out of disk IO and hit a wall.  Now all arrays will have some fancy pre fetch algorithm and some nice cache and maybe even flash based cache such as a PAM card in your Netapp but with large block workloads you will usually blow through the cache and still need significant disk IO.  Also because these datasets are usually very large and usually not dedupable they are usually not good candidates for an all flash system.  You can do some simple math in excel and very quickly you will see why it matters.  Here are a couple of READ examples using SAS and MSSQL.  Assume these are the READ IOPS the application needs even after all the fancy cache and algorithms.   Here is an example with 128k blocks.  Notice the numbers of drives on the Netapp! Here is an example with 64k blocks You can easily see that the Oracle ZS3 can do dramatically more work with dramatically less drives.  This doesn't even take into account that the ONTAP system will likely run out of CPU way before you get to these drive numbers so you be buying many more controllers.  So with all that said, lets look at the ZS3 and why you should consider it for any workload your running on Netapp today.  ZS3 World Record Price/Performance in the SPC-2 benchmark ZS3-2 is #1 in Price Performance $12.08ZS3-2 is #3 in Overall Performance 16,212 MBPS Note: The number one overall spot in the world is held by an AFA 33,477 MBPS but at a Price Performance of $29.79.  A customer could purchase 2 x ZS3-2 systems in the benchmark with relatively the same performance and walk away with $600,000 in their pocket.

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• SQLAuthority News – Amazon Gift Card Raffle for Beta Tester Feedback for NuoDB

  - by pinaldave

  As regular readers know I’ve been spending some time working with the NuoDB beta software. They contacted me last week and asked if I would give you a chance to try their new web-based console for their scalable, SQL-compliant database. They have just put out their final beta release, Beta 9.  It contains a preview of a new web-based “NuoConsole” that will replace and extend the functionality of their current desktop version.  I haven’t spent any time with the new console yet but a really quick look tells me it should make it easier to do deeper monitoring than the older one. It also looks like they have added query-level reporting through the console. I will try to play with it soon. NuoDB is doing a last, big push to get some more feedback from developers before they release their 1.0 product sometime in the next several weeks. Since the console is new, they are especially interested in some quick feedback on it before general availability. For SQLAuthority readers only, NuoDB will raffle off three $50 Amazon gift cards in exchange for your feedback on the NuoConsole preview. Here’s how to Enter Download NuoDBeta 9 here You must build a domain before you can start the console. Launch the Web Console. Windows Code: start java -jar jarnuodbwebconsole.jar Mac, Linux, Solaris, Unix Code: java -jar jar/nuodbwebconsole.jar Access the Web Console: Code: http://localhost:8080 When you have tried it out, go to a short (8 question) survey to enter the raffle Click here for the survey You must complete the survey before midnight EDT on October 17, 2012. Here’s what else they are saying about this last beta before general availability: Beta 9 now supports the Zend PHP framework so that PHP developers can directly integrate web applications with NuoDB. Multi-threaded HDFS support – NuoDB Storage Managers can now be configured to persist data to the high performance Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS). Beta 9 optimizes for multi-thread I/O streams at maximum performance. This enhancement allows users to make Hadoop their core storage with no extra effort which is a pretty cool idea. Improved Performance –On a single transaction node, Beta 9 offers performance comparable with MySQL and MariaDB. As additional nodes are added, NuoDB performance improves significantly at near linear scale. Query & Explain Plan Logging – Beta 9 introduces SQL explain plans for your queries. Qualify queries with the word “EXPLAIN” and NuoDB will respond with the details of the execution plan allowing performance optimization to SQL. Through the NuoConsole, you can now kill hung or long running queries. Java App Server Support – Beta 9 now supports leading Web JEE app servers including JBoss, Tomcat, and ColdFusion. They’ve also reported: Improved PHP/PDO drivers Support for Drupal Faster Ruby on Rails driver The Hibernate Dialect supports version 4.1 And good news for my readers: numerous SQL enhancements They will share the results of the web console feedback with me.  I’ll let you know how it goes. Also the winner of their last contest was Jaime Martínez Lafargue!  Do leave a comment here once you complete the survey.  Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: SQL Authority Tagged: NuoDB

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• Introducing Oracle System Assistant

  - by B.Koch

  by Josh Rosen One of the challenges with today's servers is getting the server up and running and understanding what all of the steps are once you plug the server in for the first time. So many different pieces come into play: installing drivers, updating firmware, configuring RAID, and provisioning the operating system. All of these steps must be done before you can even start using the server. Finding the latest firmware and drivers, making sure you have the right versions, and knowing that all the different software and firmware components work together properly can be a real challenge. If not done correctly, such as if you separately downloading disk firmware or controller firmware that doesn't match the existing OS drivers, you could experience bugs, performance problems, and incompatibilities. Gone are the days of having to locate the tools and drivers media that shipped with the server only to find out that newer versions of software and firmware are available on the web. Oracle has solved these challenges in the new X3-2 family of servers by introducing Oracle System Assistant. Oracle System Assistant is an innovative tool that is built-in to every new x86 server. It provides step-by-step assistance with configuring the server, updating firmware and drivers, and provisioning the operating system. Once you have completed all of the steps in the Oracle System Assistant tool, the server is ready to use. Oracle System Assistant was designed to be easy and straightforward. Starting it is as simple as pressing F9 when the server is booting. You'll need a keyboard, monitor, and mouse or you can use the remote console feature of Oracle ILOM (Integrated Lights Out Manager) to access a virtual KVM to the server from any machine. From there Oracle System Assistant will walk you through each of the steps necessary to set up your server. After configuring the network settings for Oracle System Assistant, the next step is to check for any new software or firmware for the server. Oracle System Assistant connects back to Oracle using your My Oracle Support account and downloads any updates that were made available to you for this specific server. This is where you really start to see the innovation that went into Oracle System Assistant. Firmware for Oracle ILOM and BIOS, operating system drivers, and other system firmware (including for option cards and disk drivers) come as a single bundle, downloading as a single unit, that has been engineered and tested to work together by Oracle. Oracle System Assistant figures out the right combination for your server, so you don't have to. Now that the server has the latest firmware, Oracle System Assistant will next walk you through configuring the hardware. From Oracle System Assistant, you can configure many Oracle ILOM settings, including the network settings and initial user accounts. This ensures that ILOM is accessible and ready to use. Oracle System Assistant is where all parts of the server come together. In addition to communicating with Oracle ILOM and interacting with BIOS, Oracle System Assistant understands and can configure the storage subsystem. Before installing the operating system, Oracle System Assistant can detect the storage configuration and configure RAID for all disks in the system. At this point, the server is ready to be provisioned with the host operating system. You can use Oracle System Assistant to provision a supported OS, including Oracle Linux, Oracle VM, RHEL, SuSe Linux, and Windows. And by using Oracle System Assistant, you can be sure that the proper OS drivers are installed for each of the installed hardware components. With Oracle System Assistant, initial setup of the server has never been easier. If we can innovate around problems and find solutions to make our servers easier to manage, this reduces IT costs and makes managing servers simpler. I think with Oracle System Assistant we have done just that. Josh Rosen is a Principal Product Manager at Oracle and previously spent more than a decade as a developer and architect of system management software. Josh has worked on system management for many of Oracle's hardware products ranging from the earliest blade systems to the latest Oracle x86 servers.

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• SQL SERVER – Query Hint – Contest Win Joes 2 Pros Combo (USD 198) – Day 1 of 5

  - by pinaldave

  August 2011 we ran a contest where every day we give away one book for an entire month. The contest had extreme success. Lots of people participated and lots of give away. I have received lots of questions if we are doing something similar this month. Absolutely, instead of running a contest a month long we are doing something more interesting. We are giving away USD 198 worth gift every day for this week. We are giving away Joes 2 Pros 5 Volumes (BOOK) SQL 2008 Development Certification Training Kit every day. One copy in India and One in USA. Total 2 of the giveaway (worth USD 198). All the gifts are sponsored from the Koenig Training Solution and Joes 2 Pros. The books are available here Amazon | Flipkart | Indiaplaza How to Win: Read the Question Read the Hints Answer the Quiz in Contact Form in following format Question Answer Name of the country (The contest is open for USA and India residents only) 2 Winners will be randomly selected announced on August 20th. Question of the Day: Which of the following queries will return dirty data? a) SELECT * FROM Table1 (READUNCOMMITED) b) SELECT * FROM Table1 (NOLOCK) c) SELECT * FROM Table1 (DIRTYREAD) d) SELECT * FROM Table1 (MYLOCK) Query Hints: BIG HINT POST Most SQL people know what a “Dirty Record” is. You might also call that an “Intermediate record”. In case this is new to you here is a very quick explanation. The simplest way to describe the steps of a transaction is to use an example of updating an existing record into a table. When the insert runs, SQL Server gets the data from storage, such as a hard drive, and loads it into memory and your CPU. The data in memory is changed and then saved to the storage device. Finally, a message is sent confirming the rows that were affected. For a very short period of time the update takes the data and puts it into memory (an intermediate state), not a permanent state. For every data change to a table there is a brief moment where the change is made in the intermediate state, but is not committed. During this time, any other DML statement needing that data waits until the lock is released. This is a safety feature so that SQL Server evaluates only official data. For every data change to a table there is a brief moment where the change is made in this intermediate state, but is not committed. During this time, any other DML statement (SELECT, INSERT, DELETE, UPDATE) needing that data must wait until the lock is released. This is a safety feature put in place so that SQL Server evaluates only official data. Additional Hints: I have previously discussed various concepts from SQL Server Joes 2 Pros Volume 1. SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Dirty Records and Table Hints SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Row Constructors SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Finding un-matching Records SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Efficient Query Writing Strategy SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Finding Apostrophes in String and Text SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Wildcard – Querying Special Characters SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Wildcard Basics Recap Next Step: Answer the Quiz in Contact Form in following format Question Answer Name of the country (The contest is open for USA and India) Bonus Winner Leave a comment with your favorite article from the “additional hints” section and you may be eligible for surprise gift. There is no country restriction for this Bonus Contest. Do mention why you liked it any particular blog post and I will announce the winner of the same along with the main contest. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Joes 2 Pros, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Brainless Backups

  - by Jesse

  I’m a software developer by trade which means to my friends and family I’m just a “computer guy”. It’s assumed that I know everything about every facet of computing from removing spyware to replacing hardware. I also can do all of this blindly over the phone or after hearing a five to ten word description of the problem over dinner ;-) In my position as CIO of my friends and families I’ve been in the unfortunate position of trying to recover music, pictures, or documents off of failed hard drives on more than one occasion. It’s not a great situation for anyone, and it’s always at these times that the importance of backups becomes so clear. Several months back a friend of mine found himself in this situation. The hard drive on his 8 year old laptop failed and took a good number of his digital photos with it. I think most folks can deal with losing some of their music and even some of their documents, but it really stings to lose pictures of past events and loved ones. After ordering a new laptop, my friend went out and bought an external hard drive so that he could start keeping a backup of his data. As fate would have it, several months later the drive in his new laptop failed and he learned the hard way that simply buying the external hard drive isn’t enough… you actually have to copy your stuff over every once in awhile! The importance of backup and recovery plans is (hopefully) well known in IT organizations. Well executed backup plans are in place, and hopefully the backup and recovery process is tested regularly. When you’re talking about users at home, however, the need for these backups is often understood far too late. Most typical users can’t be expected to remember to backup their data regularly and also don’t always have the know-how to setup automated backups. For my friends and family members in this situation I recommend tools like Dropbox, Carbonite, and Mozy. Here’s why I like them: They’re affordable: Dropbox and Mozy both have free offerings, though most people with lots of music and/or photos to backup will probably exceed the storage limitations of those free plans pretty quickly. Still, all three offer pretty affordable monthly or yearly plans. In my opinion, Carbonite’s unlimited storage plan for $50-$60 per year is the best value around. They’re easy to setup: Both Dropbox and Carbonite are very easy to get setup and start using. I’ve never used Mozy, but I imagine it’s similarly painless to get up and running. Backups are automatically “off-site”: A backup that is sitting on an external hard drive right next to your computer is great, but might not protect against flood damage, a power surge, or other disasters in that single location. These services exist “in the cloud” so to speak, helping mitigate those concerns. Granted, this kind of backup scheme requires some trust in the 3rd party to protect your data from both malicious people and disastrous events. This truly is a bit of a double edged sword, but I sleep well at night knowing that my data is being backed up and secured by a company made up of engineers that focus on the business of doing backups right. Backups are “brainless”: What I like most about services like these is that they work “automagically” in the background, watching for files to be updated and automatically backing up those changes. There’s no need to remember to plug in that external drive and copy your data over. Since starting to recommend these services to my friends and family I find myself wearing my “data recovery” hat far less often. The only way backups are effective for your standard computer user is if they’re completely automatic. Backups need to be brainless, or they just won’t work.

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• PowerShell for breakfast, lunch and dinner

  - by Enrique Lima

  Actually, for snacks too, and it is nearly everywhere I turn. If I do Microsoft Exchange work, I know I will run into it.  Active Directory, SQL Server, TFS, SharePoint, Azure and most recently Lync. All have provided a way to work with PowerShell and it has taken off (as it should). The question many will have is, How do I get started? A couple of ways are available. There are books, sites and blogs that will help you along the way. This will be the start of a series of posts that, my intention at least, will highlight and focus on the main features I have been using with the different products I interact. Here are some useful links to get started … The Master PowerShell book from Dr. Tobias Weltner PowerShell.com Script Center @ Technet

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• RUN 2012 Buenos Aires - Desarrollando para dispositivos móviles con HTML5 y ASP.NET

  - by MarianoS

  El próximo Viernes 23 de Marzo a las 8:30 hs en la Universidad Católica Argentina se realizará una nueva edición del Run en Buenos Aires, el evento Microsoft más importante del año. Particularmente, voy a estar junto con Rodolfo Finochietti e Ignacio Lopez presentando nuestra charla “Desarrollando para dispositivos móviles con HTML5 y ASP.NET” donde voy a presentar algunas novedades de ASP.NET MVC 4. Esta es la agenda completa de sesiones para Desarrolladores: Keynote: Un mundo de dispositivos conectados. Aplicaciones al alcance de tu mano: Windows Phone – Ariel Schapiro, Miguel Saez. Desarrollando para dispositivos móviles con HTML5 y ASP.NET – Ignacio Lopez, Rodolfo Finochietti, Mariano Sánchez. Servicios en la Nube con Windows Azure – Matias Woloski, Johnny Halife. Desarrollo Estilo Metro en Windows 8 – Martin Salias, Miguel Saez, Adrian Eidelman, Rubén Altman, Damian Martinez Gelabert. El evento es gratuito, con registro previo: http://bit.ly/registracionrunargdev

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• Visual Studio Async CTP

  - by Daniel Moth

  While most of the buzz at the recent PDC here at Microsoft's headquarters has been about Windows Azure and Windows Phone, there is a truly noteworthy technology that as a .NET developer (of any kind of application) you should pay attention to, even in its early technology preview stage: Visual Studio Async CTP. I could provide many more direct links, but you do not need them: just visit the home page of this technology to download whitepapers, watch videos on how this technology integrates with C# and with VB, (through the new async and await language keywords) as well as videos on how the technology works under the covers (based largely on the Task Parallel Library). More importantly, download the actual bits (they install on top of your Visual Studio 2010), which include many samples. Get ready for a revolution in Asynchronous Programming with C# and Visual Basic. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• MacGyver Moments

  - by Geoff N. Hiten

  Denny Cherry tagged me to write about my best MacGyver Moment.  Usually I ignore blogosphere fluff and just use this space to write what I think is important.  However, #MVP10 just ended and I have a stronger sense of community.  Besides, where else would I mention my second best Macgyver moment was making a BIOS jumper out of a soda can.  Aluminum is conductive and I didn't have any real jumpers lying around. My best moment is probably my entire home computer network.  Every system but one is hand-built, usually cobbled together out of spare parts and 'adapted' from its original purpose. My Primary Domain Controller is a Dell 2300.   The Service Tag indicates it was shipped to the original owner in 1999.  Box has a PERC/1 RAID controller.  I acquired this from a previous employer for $50.  It runs Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition.  Does DNS, DHCP, and RADIUS services as a bonus.  RADIUS authentication is used for VPN and Wireless access.  It is nice to sign in once and be done with it. The Secondary Domain Controller is an old desktop.  Dual P-III 933 with some extra drives. My VPN box is a P-II 250 with 384MB of RAM and a 21 GB hard drive.  I did a P-to-V to my Hyper-V box a year or so ago and retired the hardware again.  Dynamic DNS lets me connect no matter how often Comcast shuffles my IP. The Hyper-V box is a desktop system with 8GB RAM and an AMD Athlon 5000+ processor.  Cost me less than $500 to put together nearly two years ago.  I reasoned that if Vista and Windows 2008 were the same code then Vista 64-bit certified meant the drivers for Vista would load into Windows 2008.  Turns out I was right. Later I added three 1TB drives but wasn't too happy with how that turned out.  I recovered two of the drives yesterday and am building an iSCSI storage unit. (Much thanks to Starwind.  Great product).  I am using an old AMD 1.1GhZ box with 1.5 GB RAM (cobbled together from three old PCs) as my storave server.  The Hyper-V box is slated for an OS rebuild to 2008 R2 once I get the storage system worked out.  maybe in a week or two. A couple of DLink Gigabit switches ties everything together. Add in the Vonage box, the three PCs, the Wireless-N Access Point, the two notebooks and the XBox and you have gone from MacGyver to darn near Rube Goldberg. The only thing I really spend money on is power supplies and fans.  I buy top-of-the-line for both. I even pull and crimp my own cables. Oh, and if my kids hose up a PC, I have all of their data on a server elsewhere.  Every PC and laptop is pretty much interchangable for email and basic workstation tasks.  That helps a lot too. Of course I will tag SQLVariant.

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• 2010 FIFA World Cup Silverlight Smooth Streaming Player with Live Messenger

  - by FernandoCortes

  Finally after weeks of hard work the World Cup Silverlight player is ready to watch the spanish team in action. This Silverlight Player use Smooth Streaming technology, enables adaptive streaming of media to Silverlight and other clients over HTTP. Smooth Streaming provides a high-quality viewing experience that scales massively on content distribution networks, making true HD 1080p media experiences a reality. The player integrate leading social networks such as Microsoft Live Messenger, Twitter and Facebook to chat in a public chat and with your Windows Live Messenger contacts list completely private. All supported on Microsoft Azure in one of the biggest deployments in this platform (350 instances). We integrate Windows Live Messenger with Siverlight using the javascript messenger library, version 3.5. Check out this video, in spanish, where Antón and me explain how to integrate Silverlight and Live Messenger: http://www.channels.com/episodes/show/8900143/-Codecamp-es-2009-Messenger-Cortes-Molleda   Player Uri http://mundial2010.telecinco.es/ (Spanish Television)   Developer & Design Team Antón Molleda (Developer) Luis Guerrero (Developer) Raúl Varela (Designer) Ricardo Acosta (Designer) Fernando Cortés Hierro (myself)

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• My Session in TechED 2010 Beijing

  - by Shaun

  Thanks for all people who attended my session at the TechED 2010 on the 2nd of Dec in Beijing. I had uploaded my presentation (in Chinese) and the demos codes here. As I said in my session please feel free to email me ([email protected]) if you have any questions about the Windows Azure platform. And please have a look on my company’s website (www.ethos.com.cn) if you are interested.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Web Camps by Microsoft

  - by Shaun

  Just knew from Wang Tao that Microsoft will launch the Web Camp event in many cities to share their technologies and experience on web application building. The topics of this Web Camps would focus on ASP.NET, jQuery and Entity Frameworks and how to build a cool web application based on them which I’m very interesting. And another reason is that, it’s FREE.   Please have the detail information and register at http://www.webcamps.ms/, which is built on Windows Azure. And the speaker in Beijing would be Scott Hanselam and James Senior – WOW!   Hope this helps, Shaun   All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• The All New Hotmail Looks Very Impressive [Video Tour]

  - by Gopinath

  With loads of new new features being introduced into GMail every now and then, Microsoft can’t sit and relax any more. Microsoft realized this and worked hard to introduce really impressive features in upcoming version of Windows Live Hotmail that was previewed couple of days ago. Most of the new features announced in the upcoming version are focusing on the important need of email users – de-clutter the mail box and effectively manage email over load easily. Here is the list highlight of new features New Features Sweep away clutter – This is the most impressive in the set of new features. It allows you to manage email overload. If you’ve subscribed to a newsletter but decided to not to allow it into your inbox, you can activate the sweep feature to move all the messages of the newsletter in to a folder other than your inbox. This may sound similar to filters option in GMail but the workflow is very easy in Hotmail. Quickly find message – Easy to use options are provided to see mails in separate views likes mails from contacts, social networking mail, mails from e-mail subscription services, etc. Now it’s easy to prioritize email checking like how you wish to. I prefer to check mails from my contacts first, then social networking messages and then the newsletter subscriptions. Improved spam detection – The span detection rules are tightened for better spam protection and also hotmail learns from user actions to effectively catch spam No more mail box storage restrictions – With a smart decision of Microsoft, users  no longer need to worry about the storage restrictions of their mail box – large attachments of hotmail can be stored in Windows Live SkyDrive. With Hotmail, we’ve combined the simplicity of sending photos through email with the power of Windows Live SkyDrive so that you can send up to 200 photos, each up to 50 MB in size, all in a single email. You can send all your vacation photos at once without worrying about attachment limits, Excellent Integration With Office Web Apps -  View and editing of office documents attached to the emails are made very easy by integrating Office Web Apps with Hotmail. When you receive a document/presentation/spreadsheet in hotmail, you can view it, edit it, save it or even you can send the modified document to original sender – all these without leaving hotmail. Inline viewing options for Photos, Videos, Social Network Messages – You can view photos embedded in the mail as slideshows(with the help of SilverLight), YouTube  & Hulu videos can be played inline  and track shipping notifications. Threaded conversations – emails in Hotmail are grouped just like it happens in GMail Others - enhanced account protection, full-session SSL, multiple email accounts, subfolders, contact management Video Tour Of New Features Here is an impressive video tour of new Hotmail features. When are these new features coming to Hotmail? Majority of the new features announced today are rolled out in coming weeks gradually to all the users. But advanced features like Office Integration with Hotmail is expected to take couple of months for general availability. Will You Switch back to Hotmail? Will these features lure GMail/Yahoo users to switch back to Hotmail? May be not immediately but these features may hold the existing users from leaving Hotmail. I used Hotmail, in the pre GMail era and now I use  Hotmail id only to sign-in to Microsoft websites that requites Hotmail authentication. It’s been years since I composed a new email in Hotmail. Even though the new features announced by Hotmail are very impressive, I like the way how GMail rapidly brings new features at regular intervals. If Hotmail also keeps innovating with new features at regular intervals, then there are good chances for it’s old users to return home. Join us on Facebook to read all our stories right inside your Facebook news feed.

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• WebCenter Customer Spotlight: Texas Industries, Inc.

  - by me

  Author: Peter Reiser - Social Business Evangelist, Oracle WebCenter  Solution SummaryTexas Industries, Inc. (TXI) is a leading supplier of cement, aggregate, and consumer product building materials for residential, commercial, and public works projects. TXI is based in Dallas and employs around 2,000 employees. The customer had the challenge of decentralized and manual processes for entering 180,000 vendor invoices annually.  Invoice entry was a time- and resource-intensive process that entailed significant personnel requirements. TXI implemented a centralized solution leveraging Oracle WebCenter Imaging, a smart routing solution that enables users to capture invoices electronically with Oracle WebCenter Capture and Oracle WebCenter Forms Recognition to send  the invoices through to Oracle Financials for approvals and processing.  TXI significantly lowered resource needs for payable processing,  increase productivity by 80% and reduce invoice processing cycle times by 84%—from 20 to 30 days to just 3 to 5 days, on average. Company OverviewTexas Industries, Inc. (TXI) is a leading supplier of cement, aggregate, and consumer product building materials for residential, commercial, and public works projects. With operating subsidiaries in six states, TXI is the largest producer of cement in Texas and a major producer in California. TXI is a major supplier of stone, sand, gravel, and expanded shale and clay products, and one of the largest producers of bagged cement and concrete  products in the Southwest. Business ChallengesTXI had the challenge of decentralized and manual processes for entering 180,000 vendor invoices annually.  Invoice entry was a time- and resource-intensive process that entailed significant personnel requirements. Their business objectives were: Increase the efficiency of core business processes, such as invoice processing, to support the organization’s desire to maintain its role as the Southwest’s leader in delivering high-quality, low-cost products to the construction industry Meet the audit and regulatory requirements for achieving Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance Streamline entry of 180,000 invoices annually to accelerate processing, reduce errors, cut invoice storage and routing costs, and increase visibility into payables liabilities Solution DeployedTXI replaced a resource-intensive, paper-based, decentralized process for invoice entry with a centralized solution leveraging Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g. They worked with the Oracle Partner Keste LLC to develop a smart routing solution that enables users to capture invoices electronically with Oracle WebCenter Capture and then uses Oracle WebCenter Forms Recognition and the Oracle WebCenter Imaging workflow to send the invoices through to Oracle Financials for approvals and processing. Business Results Significantly lowered resource needs for payable processing through centralization and improved efficiency  Enabled the company to process invoices faster and pay bills earlier, allowing it to take advantage of additional vendor discounts Tracked to increase productivity by 80% and reduce invoice processing cycle times by 84%—from 20 to 30 days to just 3 to 5 days, on average Achieved a 25% reduction in paper invoice storage costs now that invoices are captured digitally, and enabled a 50% reduction in shipping costs, as the company no longer has to send paper invoices between headquarters and production facilities for approvals “Entering and manually processing more than 180,000 vendor invoices annually was time and labor intensive. With Oracle Imaging and Process Management, we have automated and centralized invoice entry and processing at our corporate office, improving productivity by 80% and reducing invoice processing cycle times by 84%—a very important efficiency gain.” Terry Marshall, Vice President of Information Services, Texas Industries, Inc. Additional Information TXI Customer Snapshot Oracle WebCenter Content Oracle WebCenter Capture Oracle WebCenter Forms Recognition

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• Silverlight Cream for December 18, 2010 -- #1012

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Mark Monster, Kevin Dockx, Jeremy Likness(-2-,-3-), Timmy Kokke, Den Delimarsky, Mike Snow, Samuel Jack(-2-), and Renuka Prasad(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Trigger a Storyboard on ViewModel changes" Mark Monster WP7: "Microsoft Push Notification in Windows Phone 7" Renuka Prasad Shoutouts: SilverlightGal sent me the link to The Silverlight Dossier ... I think it's a pretty good start... additions I'd like to see are ways to submit to the various areas. Michael Crump put up a contest that runs from now to January 1st... Win a set of Infragistics Silverlight Controls with Data Visualization!... pretty cool, Michael! If you visit WynApse.com, you'll see I have a subscription to LearnVisualStudio.net... and now they have posted a batch of WP7 videos... 64 of them to be exact... wow!: New video series From SilverlightCream.com: Trigger a Storyboard on ViewModel changes Mark Monster has a great post up about triggering Storyboard on ViewModel changes using the DataTrigger from Blend... cool stuff, and you can also do GoToStateAction or other actions or build yourowndang Trigger Action... fun awaits! ... sorry it took a while to post, Mark... been a tad overloaded here! Working with the Silverlight Rich Text Box control Kevin Dockx has had a post up for a while at SilverlightShow where he takes a good look at the RichText control and it's various capabilities, including source so you can give it a dance yourself. Lessons Learned in Personal Web Page Part 3: Custom Panel and Listbox Jeremy Likness's part 3 of his Personal Web Page lessons learned is covering the tres-cool 3D Panel he did... and he's got it all explained out... building from scratch via a custom panel and a Listbox control... A Silverlight MVVM Feed Reader from Scratch in 30 Minutes Jeremy Likness has a video tutorial showing building an MVVM/Silverlight feedreader in 30 minutes ... plus a couple mods that he noticed after the fact... beat that HTML5 :) Jounce Part 8: Raising Property Changed In Jeremy Likness's latest post, he has number 8 in his series on his MVVM platform, Jounce. This time he's explaining the property changed notification, has a very cool way of doing it, and some interesting comments from readers. Dependency Injection, MVVM, Ninject and Silverlight Timmy Kokke has a great tutorial up with associated demo project on Dependency Injection in MVVM and Silverlight. Some hidden features in the Windows Phone 7 emulator Den Delimarsky shows how to get some of the hidden features on your WP7 emulator like the Call History, Call Settings, and Details about the numbers. Playing sound effects on Windows Phone 7 Mike Snow's latest tip is playing sound effects on your WP7 ... a little bit of XNA here and there, and badabing, badaboom, you got sound! Day 3 of my “Build a Windows Phone 7 game in 3 days” Challenge Samuel Jack has a couple more posts up about his 'Build a WP7 game in 3 Days' challenge... first up is Day 3 from 8:50 to 22:30 ... wow... long day! ... but he's got something good going now... some good external links also Day 3.5 of my “Build a Windows Phone 7 game in 3 days” Challenge Samuel Jack's 3rd day ended with another half-day added on to put on some finishing touches... again, some good external links... and he finished with this Say hello to Simon Squared, my 3.5 day old WP7 Game Microsoft Push Notification in Windows Phone 7 Renuka Prasad has a bunch of material up that I've not been aware of (how did that happen, people??) ... here's the first of a couple of his posts on Code Project ... a very nice tutorial on the Push Notification process... great diagrams and external links. Windows Phone 7 – Toast Notification Using Windows Azure Cloud Service Renuka Prasad has another WP7 post on CodeProject... this one on Toast Notification... and he's using Azure and WCF all rolled into it as well... great diagrams, descriptions and all the code. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• PENGUIN IS GETTING READY FOR ORACLE OPENWORLD 2012

  - by Zeynep Koch

  Are you looking for reasons to attend Oracle Openworld, how about below Oracle Linux sessions and hands-on-labs.  1. General Session: Oracle Linux Strategy and Roadmap  In this session, Oracle executives will discuss Linux strategy; the roadmap; contributions to the Linux mainline kernel; and what's in store for upcoming releases of Oracle Linux and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. Don’t miss this session. 2. New Features in Oracle Linux- A Technical Deep Dive Collaborating with the Linux community, Oracle engineers contribute to advancing Linux for mission-critical deployments. In this technical session, attendees will learn about the recent developments in Oracle Linux and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 3. Why Switch to Oracle Linux?  Oracle is the only company that provides a complete Linux solution from applications to disk, fully optimized for Oracle hardware and software, with one-stop support. In this session you will hear from two customers that have successfully implemented Oracle Linux and saved 50 to 90 percent on Linux support costs as well as the reasons to switch to Oracle Linux. 4. Debugging and Configuration Best Practices for Oracle Linux This is one of our best attended sessions and most informative. In this best practices session, learn how to save time and money while preventing headaches and hassles. Discover expert secrets to get your Linux systems up and running (and keep them running), avoid common pitfalls, prevent problems, and circumvent known issues. 5. Top Technical Tips for Automatic and Secure Oracle Linux Deployments In this session, attendees will learn about how to easily deploy and install Oracle Linux systems using various technologies like Kickstart, Oracle Enterprise Manager OpsCenter, and Oracle VM Templates for applications on Linux. Additionally, the session will share useful Linux security tips and introduce utilities to help with hardening and securely operating an Oracle Linux system. We also have a great session in Oracle Develop track: 6. DTrace for Oracle Linux Initially announced at last year's Oracle Openworld, DTrace for Oracle Linux is now available for the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel R.2. In this session held by one of the engineers working on the DTrace for Linux port, you will learn how you can use this powerful and flexible framework in your development environment. If you prefer to really have practical experience, don’t miss our two Hands-on-Labs where we will cover: HOL-1 : Oracle Linux Package Management: Configuring and Enabling Services In this session you will be Installing and configuring Oracle VM VirtualBox, importing the Oracle Linux virtual appliance. You will then use the package management on Oracle Linux using RPM and yum. You will also be able to review Ksplice, zero downtime kernel updates that enable you to apply security updates, patches and critical bug fixes without rebooting. HOL-2: Oracle Linux Storage Management with LVM and Device Mapper In this session you will learn about storage management with LVM2, the Linux Logical Volume Manager, Btrfs, preparing block devices, creating physical and logical volumes, creating file systems on top of logical volumes, and resizing file systems dynamically. You will also practice setting up software RAID devices, configuring encrypted block devices. You will also see Oracle Linux and Kpslice in the three demopods we will feature at Exhibition demogrounds. One in MySQL Connect and two in Oracle Openworld. What more do you need to come to San Francisco? Oh, I forgot to mention we also have great weather in fall.. Check out the Content Catalog and register to attend Oracle Linux sessions.

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• Recap of SQLSat #65

  - by RickHeiges

  Since the MVP Summit was this past week, I decided to head out to the West Coast a little earlier and attended SQLSat#65. I did not submit to speak at the conference, but I did help out some by introducing speakers in one of the rooms and a few other places where I could. I started out in a session by Scott Klein about SQLAzure. BTW, Microsoft now has a 30-day offer for SQL Azure where you do not need to provide Credit Card info. I then sat in for a while on Alan Hirt's Session on building a Cluster...(read more)

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