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• Removing stopwords,but should return as a line

  - by Sarath R Nair

  My question may appear silly. But as I am a rookie in Python , help me out. I have to pass a line to a stopword removal function. It works fine. But my problem is return of the function is appending the words. I want it as like follows: line = " I am feeling good , but I cant talk" Let "I,but,cant" are stopwords. After passing to the function , my output should be as "am feeling good , talk". What I a getting now is [['am','feeling','good','talk']]. Help me.

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• .NET Reflector 6, .NET Reflector Pro, TestDriven.NET, .NET 4.0 and Mono

  - by Bart Read

  By now you may well have noticed that .NET Reflector 6 and .NET Reflector Pro are out in the wild. The official launch happened today, although we actually put the software out last Thursday as part of a phased release plan to ensure that everything went smoothly today which, so far, it seems to have done. Clive and Alex have already talked extensively about what the new version and the Pro extension do, so I'm not going to go into any detail here, but I've linked to their blogs at the bottom. What...(read more)

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• .NET Reflector Pro Support: How do I activate .NET Reflector Pro with my serial number?

  - by Bart Read

  This is actually very straightforward, once you know where to look for it. Open up a version of Visual Studio into which you've installed the .NET Reflector add-in. Now on the main menu bar click .NET Reflector > Choose Assemblies to Debug (figure 1). Figure 1. Bring up the "Choose Assemblies to Debug" dialog from the .NET Reflector menu. The .NET Reflector Pro trial dialog will appear as shown in figure 2. Figure 2. Click Activate in the trial dialog. At this point just click Activate....(read more)

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• SQL SERVER – Quick Look at SQL Server Configuration for Performance Indications

  - by pinaldave

  Earlier I wrote SQL SERVER – Beginning SQL Server: One Step at a Time – SQL Server Magazine. That was the first article on the series of my real world experience of Performance Tuning experience. I have written second part the same series over here. Read second part over here: Quick Look at SQL Server Configuration for Performance Indications. In this second part I talk about two types of my clients. 1) Those who want instant results 2) Those who want the right results It is really fun to work with both the clients. I talk about various configuration options which I look at when I try to give very early opinion about SQL Server Performance. There are various eight configurations, I give quick look and start talking about performance. Head over to original article over here: Quick Look at SQL Server Configuration for Performance Indications. Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• The Business case for Big Data

  - by jasonw

  The Business Case for Big Data Part 1 What's the Big Deal Okay, so a new buzz word is emerging. It's gone beyond just a buzzword now, and I think it is going to change the landscape of retail, financial services, healthcare....everything. Let me spend a moment to talk about what i'm going to talk about. Massive amounts of data are being collected every second, more than ever imaginable, and the size of this data is more than can be practically managed by today’s current strategies and technologies. There is a revolution at hand centering on this groundswell of data and it will change how we execute our businesses through greater efficiencies, new revenue discovery and even enable innovation. It is the revolution of Big Data. This is more than just a new buzzword is being tossed around technology circles.This blog series for Big Data will explain this new wave of technology and provide a roadmap for businesses to take advantage of this growing trend. Cases for Big Data There is a growing list of use cases for big data. We naturally think of Marketing as the low hanging fruit. Many projects look to analyze twitter feeds to find new ways to do marketing. I think of a great example from a TED speech that I recently saw on data visualization from Facebook from my masters studies at University of Virginia. We can see when the most likely time for breaks-ups occurs by looking at status changes and updates on users Walls. This is the intersection of Big Data, Analytics and traditional structured data. Ted Video Marketers can use this to sell more stuff. I really like the following piece on looking at twitter feeds to measure mood. The following company was bought by a hedge fund. They could predict how the S&P was going to do within three days at an 85% accuracy. Link to the article Here we see a convergence of predictive analytics and Big Data. So, we'll look at a lot of these business cases and start talking about what this means for the business. It's more than just finding ways to use Hadoop + NoSql and we'll talk about that too. How do I start in Big Data? That's what is coming next post.

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• Upgrade Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 – Part II

  In Jaap's second article on upgrading straight from Exchange Server 2003 to 2010, he explains how to move the various services from Exchange Server 2003 to Exchange Server 2010 and fully decommission the Exchange Server 2003 servers.

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• SQLBeat Podcast – Episode 5 – Kevin Kline Talks With Me About SQL, Professional Development and Book Writin’

  - by SQLBeat

  I thought I would be a ball of intimated nerves when Kevin gladly agreed to speak with me on the podcast this past weekend.  After all, he is Kevin Kline of SQL in a Nutshell fame! As it turned out,  we had a comfortable and enlightening conversation on Apple MacBooks (is that what they are called?), our beginnings in the indistry, the Deep South, health care intiatives and 286′s. I almost pulled the plug when Kevin started down the Oracle path though, and for a moment he looked at me as if I was serious. As always on this podcast, it is all in good fun. The picture is of Kevin and I ( my shirt is mauve not pink by the way) at the after party for SQL Saturday 151 in Orlando, FL where he also did a Pre-Con to a sold out crowd of enthusiastic DBAs. I know they were enthusiastic even though I was not there because one of the attendees was a friend of mine who went on and on and on about the content, kind of like I am doing here.  So I will just stop that and let you proceed to listen. As always, I hope you enjoy and any feedback on this or future episodes is always welcome. Download the MP3

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• Debugging JuniperSetupClientInstaller.exe Problems

  - by Damon

  I recently moved from Windows 7 to Windows 2008 server so I can run SharePoint on my physical machine and not through a VPC, so I've been trying to get everything re-installed on my system.  As part of that process, I tried re-establishing a connection back to one of client's corporate networks and their system prompted me to run JuniperSetupClientInstaller.exe.  Normally this runs, finishes, and you can connect to the VPN no problem.  This time, however, it failed.  Unfortunately, there were no error messages to let me know why - it just didn't work. I've had success running application in "compatability mode" so I gave that a shot - same problem.  But during the installation I noticed that JuniperSetupClientInstaller.exe unpacks a number of files into a directory (you can see the exact location in the details of the installer) and then runs a DIFFERENT application - JuniperSetupClient.exe.  If you navigate to that directory, you will see a text file named JuniperSetupClient.log that contains information about the setup process. In my case, I installed a SharePoint site on Port 3333 - which the Juniper software needs to communicate with the VPN.  There was a nice message in the log file saying the VPN software could not bind to port 3333 which quickly alerted me to the issue, and moving the site off that port number fixed the issue.  However, it would have been nice to had an error message of sorts because I spent a chunk of time futilely researching compatibility issues. 

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• AngularJS on top of ASP.NET: Moving the MVC framework out to the browser

  - by Varun Chatterji

  Heavily drawing inspiration from Ruby on Rails, MVC4’s convention over configuration model of development soon became the Holy Grail of .NET web development. The MVC model brought with it the goodness of proper separation of concerns between business logic, data, and the presentation logic. However, the MVC paradigm, was still one in which server side .NET code could be mixed with presentation code. The Razor templating engine, though cleaner than its predecessors, still encouraged and allowed you to mix .NET server side code with presentation logic. Thus, for example, if the developer required a certain <div> tag to be shown if a particular variable ShowDiv was true in the View’s model, the code could look like the following: Fig 1: To show a div or not. Server side .NET code is used in the View Mixing .NET code with HTML in views can soon get very messy. Wouldn’t it be nice if the presentation layer (HTML) could be pure HTML? Also, in the ASP.NET MVC model, some of the business logic invariably resides in the controller. It is tempting to use an anti­pattern like the one shown above to control whether a div should be shown or not. However, best practice would indicate that the Controller should not be aware of the div. The ShowDiv variable in the model should not exist. A controller should ideally, only be used to do the plumbing of getting the data populated in the model and nothing else. The view (ideally pure HTML) should render the presentation layer based on the model. In this article we will see how Angular JS, a new JavaScript framework by Google can be used effectively to build web applications where: 1. Views are pure HTML 2. Controllers (in the server sense) are pure REST based API calls 3. The presentation layer is loaded as needed from partial HTML only files. What is MVVM? MVVM short for Model View View Model is a new paradigm in web development. In this paradigm, the Model and View stuff exists on the client side through javascript instead of being processed on the server through postbacks. These frameworks are JavaScript frameworks that facilitate the clear separation of the “frontend” or the data rendering logic from the “backend” which is typically just a REST based API that loads and processes data through a resource model. The frameworks are called MVVM as a change to the Model (through javascript) gets reflected in the view immediately i.e. Model > View. Also, a change on the view (through manual input) gets reflected in the model immediately i.e. View > Model. The following figure shows this conceptually (comments are shown in red): Fig 2: Demonstration of MVVM in action In Fig 2, two text boxes are bound to the same variable model.myInt. Thus, changing the view manually (changing one text box through keyboard input) also changes the other textbox in real time demonstrating V > M property of a MVVM framework. Furthermore, clicking the button adds 1 to the value of model.myInt thus changing the model through JavaScript. This immediately updates the view (the value in the two textboxes) thus demonstrating the M > V property of a MVVM framework. Thus we see that the model in a MVVM JavaScript framework can be regarded as “the single source of truth“. This is an important concept. Angular is one such MVVM framework. We shall use it to build a simple app that sends SMS messages to a particular number. Application, Routes, Views, Controllers, Scope and Models Angular can be used in many ways to construct web applications. For this article, we shall only focus on building Single Page Applications (SPAs). Many of the approaches we will follow in this article have alternatives. It is beyond the scope of this article to explain every nuance in detail but we shall try to touch upon the basic concepts and end up with a working application that can be used to send SMS messages using Sent.ly Plus (a service that is itself built using Angular). Before you read on, we would like to urge you to forget what you know about Models, Views, Controllers and Routes in the ASP.NET MVC4 framework. All these words have different meanings in the Angular world. Whenever these words are used in this article, they will refer to Angular concepts and not ASP.NET MVC4 concepts. The following figure shows the skeleton of the root page of an SPA: Fig 3: The skeleton of a SPA The skeleton of the application is based on the Bootstrap starter template which can be found at: http://getbootstrap.com/examples/starter­template/ Apart from loading the Angular, jQuery and Bootstrap JavaScript libraries, it also loads our custom scripts /app/js/controllers.js /app/js/app.js These scripts define the routes, views and controllers which we shall come to in a moment. Application Notice that the body tag (Fig. 3) has an extra attribute: ng­app=”smsApp” Providing this tag “bootstraps” our single page application. It tells Angular to load a “module” called smsApp. This “module” is defined /app/js/app.js angular.module('smsApp', ['smsApp.controllers', function () {}]) Fig 4: The definition of our application module The line shows above, declares a module called smsApp. It also declares that this module “depends” on another module called “smsApp.controllers”. The smsApp.controllers module will contain all the controllers for our SPA. Routing and Views Notice that in the Navbar (in Fig 3) we have included two hyperlinks to: “#/app” “#/help” This is how Angular handles routing. Since the URLs start with “#”, they are actually just bookmarks (and not server side resources). However, our route definition (in /app/js/app.js) gives these URLs a special meaning within the Angular framework. angular.module('smsApp', ['smsApp.controllers', function () { }]) //Configure the routes .config(['$routeProvider', function ($routeProvider) { $routeProvider.when('/binding', { templateUrl: '/app/partials/bindingexample.html', controller: 'BindingController' }); }]); Fig 5: The definition of a route with an associated partial view and controller As we can see from the previous code sample, we are using the $routeProvider object in the configuration of our smsApp module. Notice how the code “asks for” the $routeProvider object by specifying it as a dependency in the [] braces and then defining a function that accepts it as a parameter. This is known as dependency injection. Please refer to the following link if you want to delve into this topic: http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/di What the above code snippet is doing is that it is telling Angular that when the URL is “#/binding”, then it should load the HTML snippet (“partial view”) found at /app/partials/bindingexample.html. Also, for this URL, Angular should load the controller called “BindingController”. We have also marked the div with the class “container” (in Fig 3) with the ng­view attribute. This attribute tells Angular that views (partial HTML pages) defined in the routes will be loaded within this div. You can see that the Angular JavaScript framework, unlike many other frameworks, works purely by extending HTML tags and attributes. It also allows you to extend HTML with your own tags and attributes (through directives) if you so desire, you can find out more about directives at the following URL: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/607873/Extending­HTML­with­AngularJS­Directives Controllers and Models We have seen how we define what views and controllers should be loaded for a particular route. Let us now consider how controllers are defined. Our controllers are defined in the file /app/js/controllers.js. The following snippet shows the definition of the “BindingController” which is loaded when we hit the URL http://localhost:port/index.html#/binding (as we have defined in the route earlier as shown in Fig 5). Remember that we had defined that our application module “smsApp” depends on the “smsApp.controllers” module (see Fig 4). The code snippet below shows how the “BindingController” defined in the route shown in Fig 5 is defined in the module smsApp.controllers: angular.module('smsApp.controllers', [function () { }]) .controller('BindingController', ['$scope', function ($scope) { $scope.model = {}; $scope.model.myInt = 6; $scope.addOne = function () { $scope.model.myInt++; } }]); Fig 6: The definition of a controller in the “smsApp.controllers” module. The pieces are falling in place! Remember Fig.2? That was the code of a partial view that was loaded within the container div of the skeleton SPA shown in Fig 3. The route definition shown in Fig 5 also defined that the controller called “BindingController” (shown in Fig 6.) was loaded when we loaded the URL: http://localhost:22544/index.html#/binding The button in Fig 2 was marked with the attribute ng­click=”addOne()” which added 1 to the value of model.myInt. In Fig 6, we can see that this function is actually defined in the “BindingController”. Scope We can see from Fig 6, that in the definition of “BindingController”, we defined a dependency on $scope and then, as usual, defined a function which “asks for” $scope as per the dependency injection pattern. So what is $scope? Any guesses? As you might have guessed a scope is a particular “address space” where variables and functions may be defined. This has a similar meaning to scope in a programming language like C#. Model: The Scope is not the Model It is tempting to assign variables in the scope directly. For example, we could have defined myInt as $scope.myInt = 6 in Fig 6 instead of $scope.model.myInt = 6. The reason why this is a bad idea is that scope in hierarchical in Angular. Thus if we were to define a controller which was defined within the another controller (nested controllers), then the inner controller would inherit the scope of the parent controller. This inheritance would follow JavaScript prototypal inheritance. Let’s say the parent controller defined a variable through $scope.myInt = 6. The child controller would inherit the scope through java prototypical inheritance. This basically means that the child scope has a variable myInt that points to the parent scopes myInt variable. Now if we assigned the value of myInt in the parent, the child scope would be updated with the same value as the child scope’s myInt variable points to the parent scope’s myInt variable. However, if we were to assign the value of the myInt variable in the child scope, then the link of that variable to the parent scope would be broken as the variable myInt in the child scope now points to the value 6 and not to the parent scope’s myInt variable. But, if we defined a variable model in the parent scope, then the child scope will also have a variable model that points to the model variable in the parent scope. Updating the value of $scope.model.myInt in the parent scope would change the model variable in the child scope too as the variable is pointed to the model variable in the parent scope. Now changing the value of $scope.model.myInt in the child scope would ALSO change the value in the parent scope. This is because the model reference in the child scope is pointed to the scope variable in the parent. We did no new assignment to the model variable in the child scope. We only changed an attribute of the model variable. Since the model variable (in the child scope) points to the model variable in the parent scope, we have successfully changed the value of myInt in the parent scope. Thus the value of $scope.model.myInt in the parent scope becomes the “single source of truth“. This is a tricky concept, thus it is considered good practice to NOT use scope inheritance. More info on prototypal inheritance in Angular can be found in the “JavaScript Prototypal Inheritance” section at the following URL: https://github.com/angular/angular.js/wiki/Understanding­Scopes. Building It: An Angular JS application using a .NET Web API Backend Now that we have a perspective on the basic components of an MVVM application built using Angular, let’s build something useful. We will build an application that can be used to send out SMS messages to a given phone number. The following diagram describes the architecture of the application we are going to build: Fig 7: Broad application architecture We are going to add an HTML Partial to our project. This partial will contain the form fields that will accept the phone number and message that needs to be sent as an SMS. It will also display all the messages that have previously been sent. All the executable code that is run on the occurrence of events (button clicks etc.) in the view resides in the controller. The controller interacts with the ASP.NET WebAPI to get a history of SMS messages, add a message etc. through a REST based API. For the purposes of simplicity, we will use an in memory data structure for the purposes of creating this application. Thus, the tasks ahead of us are: Creating the REST WebApi with GET, PUT, POST, DELETE methods. Creating the SmsView.html partial Creating the SmsController controller with methods that are called from the SmsView.html partial Add a new route that loads the controller and the partial. 1. Creating the REST WebAPI This is a simple task that should be quite straightforward to any .NET developer. The following listing shows our ApiController: public class SmsMessage { public string to { get; set; } public string message { get; set; } } public class SmsResource : SmsMessage { public int smsId { get; set; } } public class SmsResourceController : ApiController { public static Dictionary<int, SmsResource> messages = new Dictionary<int, SmsResource>(); public static int currentId = 0; // GET api/<controller> public List<SmsResource> Get() { List<SmsResource> result = new List<SmsResource>(); foreach (int key in messages.Keys) { result.Add(messages[key]); } return result; } // GET api/<controller>/5 public SmsResource Get(int id) { if (messages.ContainsKey(id)) return messages[id]; return null; } // POST api/<controller> public List<SmsResource> Post([FromBody] SmsMessage value) { //Synchronize on messages so we don't have id collisions lock (messages) { SmsResource res = (SmsResource) value; res.smsId = currentId++; messages.Add(res.smsId, res); //SentlyPlusSmsSender.SendMessage(value.to, value.message); return Get(); } } // PUT api/<controller>/5 public List<SmsResource> Put(int id, [FromBody] SmsMessage value) { //Synchronize on messages so we don't have id collisions lock (messages) { if (messages.ContainsKey(id)) { //Update the message messages[id].message = value.message; messages[id].to = value.message; } return Get(); } } // DELETE api/<controller>/5 public List<SmsResource> Delete(int id) { if (messages.ContainsKey(id)) { messages.Remove(id); } return Get(); } } Once this class is defined, we should be able to access the WebAPI by a simple GET request using the browser: http://localhost:port/api/SmsResource Notice the commented line: //SentlyPlusSmsSender.SendMessage The SentlyPlusSmsSender class is defined in the attached solution. We have shown this line as commented as we want to explain the core Angular concepts. If you load the attached solution, this line is uncommented in the source and an actual SMS will be sent! By default, the API returns XML. For consumption of the API in Angular, we would like it to return JSON. To change the default to JSON, we make the following change to WebApiConfig.cs file located in the App_Start folder. public static class WebApiConfig { public static void Register(HttpConfiguration config) { config.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "DefaultApi", routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{id}", defaults: new { id = RouteParameter.Optional } ); var appXmlType = config.Formatters.XmlFormatter. SupportedMediaTypes. FirstOrDefault( t => t.MediaType == "application/xml"); config.Formatters.XmlFormatter.SupportedMediaTypes.Remove(appXmlType); } } We now have our backend REST Api which we can consume from Angular! 2. Creating the SmsView.html partial This simple partial will define two fields: the destination phone number (international format starting with a +) and the message. These fields will be bound to model.phoneNumber and model.message. We will also add a button that we shall hook up to sendMessage() in the controller. A list of all previously sent messages (bound to model.allMessages) will also be displayed below the form input. The following code shows the code for the partial: <!--­­ If model.errorMessage is defined, then render the error div -­­> <div class="alert alert-­danger alert-­dismissable" style="margin­-top: 30px;" ng­-show="model.errorMessage != undefined"> <button type="button" class="close" data­dismiss="alert" aria­hidden="true">&times;</button> <strong>Error!</strong> <br /> {{ model.errorMessage }} </div> <!--­­ The input fields bound to the model --­­> <div class="well" style="margin-­top: 30px;"> <table style="width: 100%;"> <tr> <td style="width: 45%; text-­align: center;"> <input type="text" placeholder="Phone number (eg; +44 7778 609466)" ng­-model="model.phoneNumber" class="form-­control" style="width: 90%" onkeypress="return checkPhoneInput();" /> </td> <td style="width: 45%; text-­align: center;"> <input type="text" placeholder="Message" ng­-model="model.message" class="form-­control" style="width: 90%" /> </td> <td style="text-­align: center;"> <button class="btn btn-­danger" ng-­click="sendMessage();" ng-­disabled="model.isAjaxInProgress" style="margin­right: 5px;">Send</button> <img src="/Content/ajax-­loader.gif" ng­-show="model.isAjaxInProgress" /> </td> </tr> </table> </div> <!--­­ The past messages ­­--> <div style="margin-­top: 30px;"> <!­­-- The following div is shown if there are no past messages --­­> <div ng­-show="model.allMessages.length == 0"> No messages have been sent yet! </div> <!--­­ The following div is shown if there are some past messages --­­> <div ng-­show="model.allMessages.length == 0"> <table style="width: 100%;" class="table table-­striped"> <tr> <td>Phone Number</td> <td>Message</td> <td></td> </tr> <!--­­ The ng-­repeat directive is line the repeater control in .NET, but as you can see this partial is pure HTML which is much cleaner --> <tr ng-­repeat="message in model.allMessages"> <td>{{ message.to }}</td> <td>{{ message.message }}</td> <td> <button class="btn btn-­danger" ng-­click="delete(message.smsId);" ng­-disabled="model.isAjaxInProgress">Delete</button> </td> </tr> </table> </div> </div> The above code is commented and should be self explanatory. Conditional rendering is achieved through using the ng-­show=”condition” attribute on various div tags. Input fields are bound to the model and the send button is bound to the sendMessage() function in the controller as through the ng­click=”sendMessage()” attribute defined on the button tag. While AJAX calls are taking place, the controller sets model.isAjaxInProgress to true. Based on this variable, buttons are disabled through the ng-­disabled directive which is added as an attribute to the buttons. The ng-­repeat directive added as an attribute to the tr tag causes the table row to be rendered multiple times much like an ASP.NET repeater. 3. Creating the SmsController controller The penultimate piece of our application is the controller which responds to events from our view and interacts with our MVC4 REST WebAPI. The following listing shows the code we need to add to /app/js/controllers.js. Note that controller definitions can be chained. Also note that this controller “asks for” the $http service. The $http service is a simple way in Angular to do AJAX. So far we have only encountered modules, controllers, views and directives in Angular. The $http is new entity in Angular called a service. More information on Angular services can be found at the following URL: http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/dev_guide.services.understanding_services. .controller('SmsController', ['$scope', '$http', function ($scope, $http) { //We define the model $scope.model = {}; //We define the allMessages array in the model //that will contain all the messages sent so far $scope.model.allMessages = []; //The error if any $scope.model.errorMessage = undefined; //We initially load data so set the isAjaxInProgress = true; $scope.model.isAjaxInProgress = true; //Load all the messages $http({ url: '/api/smsresource', method: "GET" }). success(function (data, status, headers, config) { this callback will be called asynchronously //when the response is available $scope.model.allMessages = data; //We are done with AJAX loading $scope.model.isAjaxInProgress = false; }). error(function (data, status, headers, config) { //called asynchronously if an error occurs //or server returns response with an error status. $scope.model.errorMessage = "Error occurred status:" + status; //We are done with AJAX loading $scope.model.isAjaxInProgress = false; }); $scope.delete = function (id) { //We are making an ajax call so we set this to true $scope.model.isAjaxInProgress = true; $http({ url: '/api/smsresource/' + id, method: "DELETE" }). success(function (data, status, headers, config) { // this callback will be called asynchronously // when the response is available $scope.model.allMessages = data; //We are done with AJAX loading $scope.model.isAjaxInProgress = false; }); error(function (data, status, headers, config) { // called asynchronously if an error occurs // or server returns response with an error status. $scope.model.errorMessage = "Error occurred status:" + status; //We are done with AJAX loading $scope.model.isAjaxInProgress = false; }); } $scope.sendMessage = function () { $scope.model.errorMessage = undefined; var message = ''; if($scope.model.message != undefined) message = $scope.model.message.trim(); if ($scope.model.phoneNumber == undefined || $scope.model.phoneNumber == '' || $scope.model.phoneNumber.length < 10 || $scope.model.phoneNumber[0] != '+') { $scope.model.errorMessage = "You must enter a valid phone number in international format. Eg: +44 7778 609466"; return; } if (message.length == 0) { $scope.model.errorMessage = "You must specify a message!"; return; } //We are making an ajax call so we set this to true $scope.model.isAjaxInProgress = true; $http({ url: '/api/smsresource', method: "POST", data: { to: $scope.model.phoneNumber, message: $scope.model.message } }). success(function (data, status, headers, config) { // this callback will be called asynchronously // when the response is available $scope.model.allMessages = data; //We are done with AJAX loading $scope.model.isAjaxInProgress = false; }). error(function (data, status, headers, config) { // called asynchronously if an error occurs // or server returns response with an error status. $scope.model.errorMessage = "Error occurred status:" + status // We are done with AJAX loading $scope.model.isAjaxInProgress = false; }); } }]); We can see from the previous listing how the functions that are called from the view are defined in the controller. It should also be evident how easy it is to make AJAX calls to consume our MVC4 REST WebAPI. Now we are left with the final piece. We need to define a route that associates a particular path with the view we have defined and the controller we have defined. 4. Add a new route that loads the controller and the partial This is the easiest part of the puzzle. We simply define another route in the /app/js/app.js file: $routeProvider.when('/sms', { templateUrl: '/app/partials/smsview.html', controller: 'SmsController' }); Conclusion In this article we have seen how much of the server side functionality in the MVC4 framework can be moved to the browser thus delivering a snappy and fast user interface. We have seen how we can build client side HTML only views that avoid the messy syntax offered by server side Razor views. We have built a functioning app from the ground up. The significant advantage of this approach to building web apps is that the front end can be completely platform independent. Even though we used ASP.NET to create our REST API, we could just easily have used any other language such as Node.js, Ruby etc without changing a single line of our front end code. Angular is a rich framework and we have only touched on basic functionality required to create a SPA. For readers who wish to delve further into the Angular framework, we would recommend the following URL as a starting point: http://docs.angularjs.org/misc/started. To get started with the code for this project: Sign up for an account at http://plus.sent.ly (free) Add your phone number Go to the “My Identies Page” Note Down your Sender ID, Consumer Key and Consumer Secret Download the code for this article at: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzjEWqSE31yoZjZlV0d0R2Y3eW8/edit?usp=sharing Change the values of Sender Id, Consumer Key and Consumer Secret in the web.config file Run the project through Visual Studio!

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• Upgrade Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010

  In this article, the first of two in which Jaap describes how to move from Exchange Server 2003 straight to Exchange Server 2010, he shows what is required before moving mailboxes from Exchange Server 2003 to Exchange Server 2010. He shows how to upgrade Active Directory, install both Exchange Server 2010 and certificates, and set up the Public Folder replication.

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• Chicago SQL Saturday

  - by Johnm

  This past Saturday, April 17, 2010, I journeyed North to the great city of Chicago for some SQL Server fun, learning and fellowship. The Chicago edition of this grassroots phenomenon was the 31st scheduled SQL Saturday since the program's birth in late 2007. The Chicago SQL Saturday consisted of four tracks with eight sessions each and was a very energetic and fast paced day for the 300+/- SQL Server enthusiasts in attendance. The speaker line up included national notables such as Kevin Kline, Brent Ozar, and Brad McGehee. My hometown of Indianapolis was well represented in the speaker line up with Arie Jones, Aaron King and Derek Comingore. The day began with a very humorous keynote by Kevin Kline and Brent Ozar who emphasized the importance of community events such as SQL Saturday and the monthly user group meetings. They also brilliantly included the impact that getting involved in the SQL community through social media can have on your professional career. My approach to the day was to try to experience as much of the event as I could, so there were very few sessions that I attended for their full duration. I leaped from session to session like a bumble bee, gleaning bits of nectar from each session. Amid these leaps I took the opportunity to briefly chat with some of the in-the-queue speakers as well as other attendees that wondered the hallways. I especially enjoyed a great discussion with Devin Knight about his plans regarding the upcoming Jacksonville SQL Saturday as well as an interesting SQL interpretation of the Iron Chef, which I think would catch on like wild-fire. There were two sessions that stood out as exceptional. So much so that I could not pull myself away: Kevin Kline presented on "SQL Server Internals and Architecture". This session could have been classified as one that is intended for the beginner. Kevin even personally warned me of such as I entered the room. I am a believer in revisiting the basics regardless of the level of your mastery, so I entered into this session in that spirit. It was a very clear and precise presentation. Masterfully illustrated and demonstrated. Brad McGehee presented on "How and When to Use Indexed Views". This was a topic that I was recently exploring and was considering to for use in an integration project. Brad effectively communicated the complexity of this feature and what is involved to gain their full benefit. It was clear at the conclusion of this session that it was not the right feature for my specific needs. Overall, the event was a great success. The use of volunteers, from an attendee's perspective was masterful. The only recommendation that I would have for the next Chicago SQL Saturday would be to include more time in between sessions to permit some level of networking among the attendees, one-on-one questions for speakers and visits to the sponsor booths. Congratulations to Wendy Pastrick, Ted Krueger, and Aaron Lowe for their efforts and a very successful SQL Saturday!

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• List of resources for database continuous integration

  - by David Atkinson

  Because there is so little information on database continuous integration out in the wild, I've taken it upon myself to aggregate as much as possible and post the links to this blog. Because it's my area of expertise, this will focus on SQL Server and Red Gate tooling, although I am keen to include any quality articles that discuss the topic in general terms. Please let me know if you find a resource that I haven't listed! General database Continuous Integration · What is Database Continuous Integration? (David Atkinson) · Continuous Integration for SQL Server Databases (Troy Hunt) · Installing NAnt to drive database continuous integration (David Atkinson) · Continuous Integration Tip #3 - Version your Databases as part of your automated build (Doug Rathbone) · How the "migrations" approach makes database continuous integration possible (David Atkinson) · Continuous Integration for the Database (Keith Bloom) Setting up Continuous Integration with Red Gate tools · Continuous integration for databases using Red Gate tools - A technical overview (White Paper, Roger Hart and David Atkinson) · Continuous integration for databases using Red Gate SQL tools (Product pages) · Database continuous integration step by step (David Atkinson) · Database Continuous Integration with Red Gate Tools (video, David Atkinson) · Database schema synchronisation with RedGate (Vincent Brouillet) · Database continuous integration and deployment with Red Gate tools (David Duffett) · Automated database releases with TeamCity and Red Gate (Troy Hunt) · How to build a database from source control (David Atkinson) · Continuous Integration Automated Database Update Process (Lance Lyons) Other · Evolutionary Database Design (Martin Fowler) · Recipes for Continuous Database Integration: Evolutionary Database Development (book, Pramod J Sadalage) · Recipes for Continuous Database Integration (book, Pramod Sadalage) · The Red Gate Guide to SQL Server Team-based Development (book, Phil Factor, Grant Fritchey, Alex Kuznetsov, Mladen Prajdic) · Using SQL Test Database Unit Testing with TeamCity Continuous Integration (Dave Green) · Continuous Database Integration (covers MySQL, Perason Education) Technorati Tags: SQL Server,Continous Integration

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• Resolving IIS7 HTTP Error 500.19 - Internal Server Error

  - by fatherjack

  LiveJournal Tags: RedGate Tools,SQL Server,Tips and Tricks How To The requested page cannot be accessed because the related configuration data for the page is invalid. As part of my work recently I was moving SQL Monitor from the bespoke XSP web server to be hosted on IIS instead. This didn't go smoothly. I was lucky to be helped by Red Gate's support team (http://twitter.com/kickasssupport). I had SQL Monitor installed and working fine on the XSP site but wanted to move to IIS so I reinstalled the software and chose the IIS option. This wasn't possible as IIS wasn't installed on the server. I went to Control Panel, Windows features and installed IIS and then returned to the SQL Monitor installer. Everything went as planned but when I browsed the site I got a huge error with the message "HTTP Error 500.19 - Internal Server Error The requested page cannot be accessed because the related configuration data for the page is invalid." All links that I could find suggested it was a permissions issue, based on the directory where the config file was stored. I changed this any number of times and also tried the altering its location. Nothing resolved the error. It was only when I was trying the installation again that I read through the details from Red Gate and noted that they referred to ASP settings that I didn't have. Essentially I was seeing this. I had installed IIS using the default settings and that DOESN'T include ASP. When this dawned on me I went back through the windows components installation process and ticked the ASP service within the IIS role. Completing this and going back to the IIS management console I saw something like this; so many more options! When I clicked on the Authentication icon this time I got the option to not only enable Anonymous Authentication but also ASP.NET Impersonation (which is disabled by default). Once I had enabled this the SQL Monitor website worked without error. I think the HTTP Error 500.19 is misleading in this case and at the very least should be able to recognise if the ASP service is installed or not and then to include a hint that it should be. I hope this helps some people and avoids wasting as much of your time as it did mine. Let me know if it helps you.

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• It’s time that you ought to know what you don’t know

  - by fatherjack

  There is a famous quote about unknown unknowns and known knowns and so on but I’ll let you review that if you are interested. What I am worried about is that there are things going on in your environment that you ought to know about, indeed you have asked to be told about but you are not getting the information. When you schedule a SQL Agent job you can set it to send an email to an inbox monitored by someone who needs to know and indeed can do something about it. However, what happens if the email process isnt successful? Check your servers with this: USE [msdb] GO /* This code selects the top 10 most recent SQLAgent jobs that failed to complete successfully and where the email notification failed too. Jonathan Allen Jul 2012 */ DECLARE @Date DATETIME SELECT @Date = DATEADD(d, DATEDIFF(d, '19000101', GETDATE()) - 1, '19000101') SELECT TOP 10 [s].[name] , [sjh].[step_name] , [sjh].[sql_message_id] , [sjh].[sql_severity] , [sjh].[message] , [sjh].[run_date] , [sjh].[run_time] , [sjh].[run_duration] , [sjh].[operator_id_emailed] , [sjh].[operator_id_netsent] , [sjh].[operator_id_paged] , [sjh].[retries_attempted] FROM [dbo].[sysjobhistory] AS sjh INNER JOIN [dbo].[sysjobs] AS s ON [sjh].[job_id] = [s].[job_id] WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM [dbo].[sysjobs] AS s INNER JOIN [dbo].[sysjobhistory] AS s2 ON [s].[job_id] = [s2].[job_id] WHERE [sjh].[job_id] = [s2].[job_id] AND [s2].[message] LIKE '%failed to notify%' AND CONVERT(DATETIME, CONVERT(VARCHAR(15), [s2].[run_date])) >= @date AND [s2].[run_status] = 0 ) AND sjh.[run_status] = 0 AND sjh.[step_id] != 0 AND CONVERT(DATETIME, CONVERT(VARCHAR(15), [run_date])) >= @date ORDER BY [sjh].[run_date] DESC , [sjh].[run_time] DESC go USE [msdb] go /* This code summarises details of SQLAgent jobs that failed to complete successfully and where the email notification failed too. Jonathan Allen Jul 2012 */ DECLARE @Date DATETIME SELECT @Date = DATEADD(d, DATEDIFF(d, '19000101', GETDATE()) - 1, '19000101') SELECT [s].name , [s2].[step_id] , CONVERT(DATETIME, CONVERT(VARCHAR(15), [s2].[run_date])) AS [rundate] , COUNT(*) AS [execution count] FROM [dbo].[sysjobs] AS s INNER JOIN [dbo].[sysjobhistory] AS s2 ON [s].[job_id] = [s2].[job_id] WHERE [s2].[message] LIKE '%failed to notify%' AND CONVERT(DATETIME, CONVERT(VARCHAR(15), [s2].[run_date])) >= @date AND [s2].[run_status] = 0 GROUP BY name , [s2].[step_id] , [s2].[run_date] ORDER BY [s2].[run_dateDESC] These two result sets will show if there are any SQL Agent jobs that have run on your servers that failed and failed to successfully email about the failure. I hope it’s of use to you. Disclaimer – Jonathan is a Friend of Red Gate and as such, whenever they are discussed, will have a generally positive disposition towards Red Gate tools. Other tools are often available and you should always try others before you come back and buy the Red Gate ones. All code in this blog is provided “as is” and no guarantee, warranty or accuracy is applicable or inferred, run the code on a test server and be sure to understand it before you run it on a server that means a lot to you or your manager.

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• Updating the managed debugging API for .NET v4

  - by Brian Donahue

  In any successful investigation, the right tools play a big part in collecting evidence about the state of the "crime scene" as it was before the detectives arrived. Unfortunately for the Crash Scene Investigator, we don't have the budget to fly out to the customer's site, chalk the outline, and eat their doughnuts. We have to rely on the end-user to collect the evidence for us, which means giving them the fingerprint dust and the evidence baggies and leaving them to it. With that in mind, the Red Gate support team have been writing tools that can collect vital clues with a minimum of fuss. Years ago we would have asked for a memory dump, where we used to get the customer to run CDB.exe and produce dumps that we could analyze in-house, but those dumps were pretty unwieldy (500MB files) and the debugger often didn't dump exactly where we wanted, or made five or more dumps. What we wanted was just the minimum state information from the program at the time of failure, so we produced a managed debugger that captured every first and second-chance exception and logged the stack and a minimal amount of variables from the memory of the application, which could all be exported as XML. This caused less inconvenience to the end-user because it is much easier to send a 65KB XML file in an email than a 500MB file containing all of the application's memory. We don't need to have the entire victim shipped out to us when we just want to know what was under the fingernails. The thing that made creating a managed debugging tool possible was the MDbg Engine example written by Microsoft as part of the Debugging Tools for Windows distribution. Since the ICorDebug interface is a bit difficult to understand, they had kindly created some wrappers that provided an event-driven debugging model that was perfect for our needs, but .NET 4 applications under debugging started complaining that "The debugger's protocol is incompatible with the debuggee". The introduction of .NET Framework v4 had changed the managed debugging API significantly, however, without an update for the MDbg Engine code! After a few hours of research, I had finally worked out that most of the version 4 ICorDebug interface still works much the same way in "legacy" v2 mode and there was a relatively easy fix for the problem in that you can still get a reference to legacy ICorDebug by changing the way the interface is created. In .NET v2, the interface was acquired using the CreateDebuggingInterfaceFromVersion method in mscoree.dll. In v4, you must first create IClrMetaHost, enumerate the runtimes, get an ICLRRuntimeInfo interface to the .NET 4 runtime from that, and use the GetInterface method in mscoree.dll to return a "legacy" ICorDebug interface. The rest of the MDbg Engine will continue working the old way. Here is how I had changed the MDbg Engine code to support .NET v4: private void InitFromVersion(string debuggerVersion){if( debuggerVersion.StartsWith("v1") ){throw new ArgumentException( "Can't debug a version 1 CLR process (\"" + debuggerVersion + "\"). Run application in a version 2 CLR, or use a version 1 debugger instead." );} ICorDebug rawDebuggingAPI=null;if (debuggerVersion.StartsWith("v4")){Guid CLSID_MetaHost = new Guid("9280188D-0E8E-4867-B30C-7FA83884E8DE"); Guid IID_MetaHost = new Guid("D332DB9E-B9B3-4125-8207-A14884F53216"); ICLRMetaHost metahost = (ICLRMetaHost)NativeMethods.ClrCreateInterface(CLSID_MetaHost, IID_MetaHost); IEnumUnknown runtimes = metahost.EnumerateInstalledRuntimes(); ICLRRuntimeInfo runtime = GetRuntime(runtimes, debuggerVersion); //Defined in metahost.hGuid CLSID_CLRDebuggingLegacy = new Guid(0xDF8395B5, 0xA4BA, 0x450b, 0xA7, 0x7C, 0xA9, 0xA4, 0x77, 0x62, 0xC5, 0x20);Guid IID_ICorDebug = new Guid("3D6F5F61-7538-11D3-8D5B-00104B35E7EF"); Object res;runtime.GetInterface(ref CLSID_CLRDebuggingLegacy, ref IID_ICorDebug, out res); rawDebuggingAPI = (ICorDebug)res; }elserawDebuggingAPI = NativeMethods.CreateDebuggingInterfaceFromVersion((int)CorDebuggerVersion.Whidbey,debuggerVersion);if (rawDebuggingAPI != null)InitFromICorDebug(rawDebuggingAPI);elsethrow new ArgumentException("Support for debugging version " + debuggerVersion + " is not yet implemented");} The changes above will ensure that the debugger can support .NET Framework v2 and v4 applications with the same codebase, but we do compile two different applications: one targeting v2 and the other v4. As a footnote I need to add that some missing native methods and wrappers, along with the EnumerateRuntimes method code, came from the Mindbg project on Codeplex. Another change is that when using the MDbgEngine.CreateProcess to launch a process in the debugger, do not supply a null as the final argument. This does not work any more because GetCORVersion always returns "v2.0.50727" as the function has been deprecated in .NET v4. What's worse is that on a system with only .NET 4, the user will be prompted to download and install .NET v2! Not nice! This works much better: proc = m_Debugger.CreateProcess(ProcessName, ProcessArgs, DebugModeFlag.Default,String.Format("v{0}.{1}.{2}",System.Environment.Version.Major,System.Environment.Version.Minor,System.Environment.Version.Build)); Microsoft "unofficially" plan on updating the MDbg samples soon, but if you have an MDbg-based application, you can get it working right now by changing one method a bit and adding a few new interfaces (ICLRMetaHost, IEnumUnknown, and ICLRRuntimeInfo). The new, non-legacy implementation of MDbg Engine will add new, interesting features like dump-file support and by association I assume garbage-collection/managed object stats, so it will be well worth looking into if you want to extend the functionality of a managed debugger going forward.

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• Where did I hide my TSQL mojo?

  - by fatherjack

  LiveJournal Tags: How To,SQL Server,Tips and Tricks,TSQL,Reporting Services A little while ago I wrote a piece about finding database objects that rely on other objects that no longer exist - OK, I have my database ready, now what's missing? . This is linked to that sort of process. Many SQL Server installations are associated in some way with a Reporting Services installation, it's a very logical way to distribute your database contents to system users so they can work effectively. Databases,...(read more)

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• Resolving the Access is Denied Error in VSeWSS Deployments

  - by Damon

  Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 1.3 (VSeWSS 1.3) tends to make my life easier unless I'm typing out the words that make up the VSeWSS acronym - really, what a mouthful.  But one of the problems that I routinely encounter are error messages when trying to deploy solutions.  These normally look something like the following: Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED)) I tried a variety of steps to resolve this issue: Recycling the application pool Restarting IIS Closing Visual Studio Not detaching from the debugger until a request was fully completed Logging off and logging back into Windows etc. Nothing actually worked.  Some of these resolution attempts seemed to help keep the problem from happening quite as frequently, but I still have no idea what EXACTLY causes the problem and it would rear its ugly head from time to time.  Unfortunately, the only resolution I found that seemed to work was to reboot the machine . which is a crappy resolution. Finally sick enough of the problem to spend some time on it, I went on a search and tried to figure out if anyone else was having this issue.  People seem to suggest that turning off the Indexing Service on your machine helps resolve this problem.  I tried turning it off but I kept having issues.  Which was depressing.  Fortunately, I stumbled upon the resolution when I was looking through the services list.  If you encounter the issue, all you have to do is reset the World Wide Web Publishing Service.  I've had a 100% success rate so far with this approach.  I'm not sure if having the Indexing Service is part of the solution, but I've kept it disabled for the time being because I'm really sick of having to reboot my machine to deal with that error message. If you do VSeWSS development, you may also want to check out this blog post: VSeWSS 1.3 - Getting around the "Unable to load one or more of the requested types" Error

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• Replacing “if”s with your own number system

  - by Michael Williamson

  During our second code retreat at Red Gate, the restriction for one of the sessions was disallowing the use of if statements. That includes other constructs that have the same effect, such as switch statements or loops that will only be executed zero or one times. The idea is to encourage use of polymorphism instead, and see just how far it can be used to get rid of “if”s. The main place where people struggled to get rid of numbers from their implementation of Conway’s Game of Life was the piece of code that decides whether a cell is live or dead in the next generation. For instance, for a cell that’s currently live, the code might look something like this: if (numberOfNeighbours == 2 || numberOfNeighbours == 3) { return CellState.LIVE; } else { return CellState.DEAD; } The problem is that we need to change behaviour depending on the number of neighbours each cell has, but polymorphism only allows us to switch behaviour based on the type of a value. It follows that the solution is to make different numbers have different types: public interface IConwayNumber { IConwayNumber Increment(); CellState LiveCellNextGeneration(); } public class Zero : IConwayNumber { public IConwayNumber Increment() { return new One(); } public CellState LiveCellNextGeneration() { return CellState.DEAD; } } public class One : IConwayNumber { public IConwayNumber Increment() { return new Two(); } public CellState LiveCellNextGeneration() { return CellState.LIVE; } } public class Two : IConwayNumber { public IConwayNumber Increment() { return new ThreeOrMore(); } public CellState LiveCellNextGeneration() { return CellState.LIVE; } } public class ThreeOrMore : IConwayNumber { public IConwayNumber Increment() { return this; } public CellState LiveCellNextGeneration() { return CellState.DEAD; } } In the code that counts the number of neighbours, we use our new number system by starting with Zero and incrementing when we find a neighbour. To choose the next state of the cell, rather than inspecting the number of neighbours, we ask the number of neighbours for the next state directly: return numberOfNeighbours.LiveCellNextGeneration(); And now we have no “if”s! If C# had double-dispatch, or if we used the visitor pattern, we could move the logic for choosing the next cell out of the number classes, which might feel a bit more natural. I suspect that reimplementing the natural numbers is still going to feel about the same amount of crazy though.

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• SSAS Compare: an intern’s journey

  - by Red Gate Software BI Tools Team

  About a month ago, David mentioned an intern working in the BI Tools Team. That intern happens to be me! In five weeks’ time, I’ll start my second year of Computer Science at the University of Cambridge and be a full-time student again, but for the past eight weeks, I’ve been living a completely different life. As Jon mentioned before, the teams here at Red Gate are small and everyone (including the interns!) is responsible for the product as a whole. I’ve attended planning sessions, UX tests, daily meetings, and everything else a full-time member of the team would; I had as much say in where we would go next with the product as anyone; I was able to see that what I was doing was an important part of the product from the feedback we got in the UX tests. All these things almost made me forget that this is just an internship and not my full-time job. First steps at Red Gate Being based in Cambridge, Red Gate has many Cambridge university graduates working for them. They also hire some Cambridge undergraduates for internships each summer. With its popularity with university graduates and its great working environment, Red Gate has managed to build up a great reputation. When I thought of doing an internship here in Cambridge, Red Gate just seemed to be the obvious choice for my first real work experience. On my first day at Red Gate, David, the lead developer for SSAS Compare, helped me settle in and explained what I’d be doing. My task was to improve the user experience of displaying differences between MDX scripts by syntax highlighting, script formatting, and improving the difference identification in the first place. David suggested how I should approach the problem, but left all the details and design decisions to me. That was when I realised how much independence and responsibility I’d have. What I’ve done If you launch the latest version of SSAS Compare and drill down to an MDX script difference, you can see the changes that have been made. In earlier versions, you could only see the scripts in plain text on both sides — either in black or grey, depending on whether they were the same or not. However, you couldn’t see exactly where the scripts were different, which was especially annoying when the two scripts were large – as they often are. Furthermore, if parts of the two scripts were formatted differently, they seemed to be different but were actually the same, which caused even more confusion and made it difficult to see where the differences were. All these issues have been fixed now. The two scripts are automatically formatted by the tool so that if two things are syntactically equivalent, they look the same – including case differences in keywords! The actual difference is highlighted in grey, which makes them easy to spot. The difference identification has been improved as well, so two scripts aren’t identified as different if there’s just a difference in meaningless whitespace characters, or when you have “select” on one side and “SELECT” on the other. We also have syntax highlighting, which makes it easier to read the scripts. How I did it In order to do the formatting properly, we decided to parse the MDX scripts. After some investigation into parser builders, I decided to go with the GOLD Parser builder and the bsn-goldparser .NET engine. GOLD Parser builder provides a fairly nice GUI to write, build, and test grammar in. We also liked the idea of separating the grammar building from parsing a text. The bsn-goldparser is one of many .NET engines for GOLD, and although it doesn’t support the newest features of GOLD Parser, it has “the ability to map semantic action classes to terminals or reduction rules, so that a completely functional semantic AST can be created directly without intermediate token AST representation, and without the need for glue code.” That makes it much easier for us to change the implementation in our program when we change the grammar. As bsn-goldparser is open source, and I wanted some more features in it, I contributed two new features which have now been merged to the project. Unfortunately, there wasn’t an MDX grammar written for GOLD already, so I had to write it myself. I was referencing MSDN to get the formal grammar specification, but the specification was all over the place, so it wasn’t that easy to implement and find. We’re aware that we don’t yet fully support all valid MDX, so sometimes you’ll just see the MDX script difference displayed the old way. In that case, there is some grammar construct we don’t yet recognise. If you come across something SSAS Compare doesn’t recognise, we’d love to hear about it so we can add it to our grammar. When some MDX script gets parsed, a tree is produced. That tree can then be processed into a list of inlines which deal with the correct formatting and can be outputted to the screen. Doing all this has led me to many new technologies and projects I haven’t worked with before. This was my first experience with C# and Visual Studio, although I have done things in Java before. I have learnt how to unit test with NUnit, how to do dependency injection with Ninject, how to source-control code with SVN and Mercurial, how to build with TeamCity, how to use GOLD, and many other things. What’s coming next Sadly, my internship comes to an end this week, so there will be less development on MDX difference view for a while. But the team is going to work on marking the differences better and making it consistent with difference indication in the top part of comparison window, and will keep adding support for more MDX grammar so you can see the differences easily in every comparison you make. So long! And maybe I’ll see you next summer!

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• SharePoint and COMException (0x80004005): Cannot complete this action

  - by Damon

  I ran into a small issue today working on a deployment.  We were moving a custom ASP.NET control from my development environment into a SharePoint layout page on a staging environment .  I was expecting some minor issues to arise since I had developed the control in an ASP.NET website project, but after getting everything moved over we got an obscure COMException error the that looked like this: Cannot complete this action. Please try again. Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code. Exception Details: System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException: Cannot complete this action. [COMException (0x80004005): Cannot complete this action. .Lengthy stack trace goes here. Everything in the custom control was built using managed code, so we weren't sure why a COMException would suddenly appear. The control made use of an ITemplate to define its UI, so there was a lot of markup and binding code inside the template. As such, we started taking chunks of the template out of the layout page and eventually the error went away.  It was being caused by a section of code where we were calling a custom utility method inside some binding code: <%# WebUtility.FormatDecimal(.) %> Solution: It turns out that we were missing an Assembly and Import directive at the top of the page to let the page know where to find this method.  After adding these to the page, the error went away and everything worked great.  So a COMException (0x80004005) Cannot complete this action error is just SharePoint's friendly way of letting you know you're missing an assembly or imports reference.

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• SmartAssembly Support: How to change the maps folder

  - by Bart Read

  If you've set up SmartAssembly to store error reports in a SQL Server database, you'll also have specified a folder for the map files that are used to de-obfuscate error reports (see Figure 1). Whilst you can change the database easily enough you can't change the map folder path via the UI - if you click on it, it'll just open the folder in Explorer - but never fear, you can change it manually and fortunately it's not that difficult. (If you want to get to these settings click the Tools > Options link on the left-hand side of the SmartAssembly main window.)   Figure 1. Error reports database settings in SmartAssembly. The folder path is actually stored in the database, so you just need to open up SQL Server Management Studio, connect to the SQL Server where your error reports database is stored, then open a new query on the SmartAssembly database by right-clicking on it in the Object Explorer, then clicking New Query (see figure 2).     Figure 2. Opening a new query against the SmartAssembly error reports database in SQL Server. Now execute the following SQL query in the new query window: SELECT * FROM dbo.Information You should find that you get a result set rather like that shown in figure 3. You can see that the map folder path is stored in the MapFolderNetworkPath column.   Figure 3. Contents of the dbo.Information table, showing the map folder path I set in SmartAssembly. All I need to do to change this is execute the following SQL: UPDATE dbo.Information SET MapFolderNetworkPath = '\\UNCPATHTONEWFOLDER' WHERE MapFolderNetworkPath = '\\dev-ltbart\SAMaps' This will change the map folder path to whatever I supply in the SET clause. Once you've done this, you can verify the change by executing the following again: SELECT * FROM dbo.Information You should find the result set contains the new path you've set.

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• Last week I was presented with a Microsoft MVP award in Virtual Machines – time to thank all who hel

  - by Liam Westley

  MVP in Virtual Machines Last week, on 1st April, I received an e-mail from Microsoft letting me know that I had been presented with a 2010 Microsoft® MVP Award for outstanding contributions in Virtual Machine technical communities during the past year.   It was an honour to be nominated, and is a great reflection on the vibrancy of the UK user group community which made this possible. Virtualisation for developers, not just IT Pros I consider it a special honour as my expertise in virtualisation is as a software developer utilising virtual machines to aid my software development, rather than an IT Pro who manages data centre and network infrastructure.  I’ve been on a minor mission over the past few years to enthuse developers in a topic usually seen as only for network admins, but which can make their life a whole lot easier once understood properly. Continuous learning is fun In 1676, the scientist Isaac Newton, in a letter to Robert Hooke used the phrase (http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/268025.html) ‘If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants’ I’m a nuclear physicist by education, so I am more than comfortable that any knowledge I have is based on the work of others.  Although far from a science, software development and IT is equally built upon the work of others. It’s one of the reasons I despise software patents. So in that sense this MVP award is a result of all the great minds that have provided virtualisation solutions for me to talk about.  I hope that I have always acknowledged those whose work I have used when blogging or giving presentations, and that I have executed my responsibility to share any knowledge gained as widely as possible. Thanks to all those who helped – a big thanks to the UK user group community I reckon this journey started in 2003 when I started attending a user group called the London .Net Users Group (http://www.dnug.org.uk) started by a nice chap called Ian Cooper. The great thing about Ian was that he always encouraged non professional speakers to take the stage at the user group, and my first ever presentation was on 30th September 2003; SQL Server CE 2.0 and the.NET Compact Framework. In 2005 Ian Cooper was on the committee for the first DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper! day, the free community conference held at Microsoft’s UK HQ in Thames Valley park in Reading.  He encouraged me to take part and so on 14th May 2005 I presented a talk previously given to the London .Net User Group on Simplifying access to multiple DB providers in .NET.  From that point on I definitely had the bug; presenting at DDD2, DDD3, groking at DDD4 and SQLBits I and after a break, DDD7, DDD Scotland and DDD8.  What definitely made me keen was the encouragement and infectious enthusiasm of some of the other DDD organisers; Craig Murphy, Barry Dorrans, Phil Winstanley and Colin Mackay. During the first few DDD events I met the Dave McMahon and Richard Costall from NxtGenUG who made it easy to start presenting at their user groups.  Along the way I’ve met a load of great user group organisers; Guy Smith-Ferrier of the .Net Developer Network, Jimmy Skowronski of GL.Net and the double act of Ray Booysen and Gavin Osborn behind what was Vista Squad and is now Edge UG. Final thanks to those who suggested virtualisation as a topic ... Final thanks have to go the people who inspired me to create my Virtualisation for Developers talk.  Toby Henderson (@holytshirt) ensured I took notice of Sun’s VirtualBox, Peter Ibbotson for being a fine sounding board at the Kew Railway over quite a few Adnam’s Broadside and to Guy Smith-Ferrier for allowing his user group to be the guinea pigs for the talk before it was seen at DDD7.  Thanks to all of you I now know much more about virtualisation than I would have thought possible and it continues to be great fun. Conclusion If this was an academy award acceptance speech I would have been cut off after the first few paragraphs, so well done if you made it this far.  I’ll be doing my best to do justice to the MVP award and the UK community.  I’m fortunate in having a new employer who considers presenting at user groups as a good thing, so don’t expect me to stop any time soon. If you’ve never seen me in action, then you can view the original DDD7 Virtualisation for Developers presentation (filmed by the Microsoft Channel 9 team) as part of the full DDD7 video list here, http://www.craigmurphy.com/blog/?p=1591.  Also thanks to Craig Murphy’s fine video work you can also view my latest DDD8 presentation on Commercial Software Development, here, http://vimeo.com/9216563 P.S. If I’ve missed anyone out, do feel free to lambast me in comments, it’s your duty.

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• SQL Monitor’s data repository: Alerts

  - by Chris Lambrou

  In my previous post, I introduced the SQL Monitor data repository, and described how the monitored objects are stored in a hierarchy in the data schema, in a series of tables with a _Keys suffix. In this post I had planned to describe how the actual data for the monitored objects is stored in corresponding tables with _StableSamples and _UnstableSamples suffixes. However, I’m going to postpone that until my next post, as I’ve had a request from a SQL Monitor user to explain how alerts are stored. In the SQL Monitor data repository, alerts are stored in tables belonging to the alert schema, which contains the following five tables: alert.Alert alert.Alert_Cleared alert.Alert_Comment alert.Alert_Severity alert.Alert_Type In this post, I’m only going to cover the alert.Alert and alert.Alert_Type tables. I may cover the other three tables in a later post. The most important table in this schema is alert.Alert, as each row in this table corresponds to a single alert. So let’s have a look at it. SELECT TOP 100 AlertId, AlertType, TargetObject, [Read], SubType FROM alert.Alert ORDER BY AlertId DESC;  AlertIdAlertTypeTargetObjectReadSubType 165550397:Cluster,1,4:Name,s29:srp-mr03.testnet.red-gate.com,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,10 265549387:Cluster,1,4:Name,s29:srp-mr03.testnet.red-gate.com,7:Machine,1,4:Name,s0:,10 365548187:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s15:FavouriteThings,00 465547157:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s15:FavouriteThings,00 565546147:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s15:FavouriteThings,00 665545187:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,00 765544157:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,00 865543147:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,00 965542187:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s4:msdb,00 1065541147:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s4:msdb,00 11…     So what are we seeing here, then? Well, AlertId is an auto-incrementing identity column, so ORDER BY AlertId DESC ensures that we see the most recent alerts first. AlertType indicates the type of each alert, such as Job failed (6), Backup overdue (14) or Long-running query (12). The TargetObject column indicates which monitored object the alert is associated with. The Read column acts as a flag to indicate whether or not the alert has been read. And finally the SubType column is used in the case of a Custom metric (40) alert, to indicate which custom metric the alert pertains to. Okay, now lets look at some of those columns in more detail. The AlertType column is an easy one to start with, and it brings use nicely to the next table, data.Alert_Type. Let’s have a look at what’s in this table: SELECT AlertType, Event, Monitoring, Name, Description FROM alert.Alert_Type ORDER BY AlertType;  AlertTypeEventMonitoringNameDescription 1100Processor utilizationProcessor utilization (CPU) on a host machine stays above a threshold percentage for longer than a specified duration 2210SQL Server error log entryAn error is written to the SQL Server error log with a severity level above a specified value. 3310Cluster failoverThe active cluster node fails, causing the SQL Server instance to switch nodes. 4410DeadlockSQL deadlock occurs. 5500Processor under-utilizationProcessor utilization (CPU) on a host machine remains below a threshold percentage for longer than a specified duration 6610Job failedA job does not complete successfully (the job returns an error code). 7700Machine unreachableHost machine (Windows server) cannot be contacted on the network. 8800SQL Server instance unreachableThe SQL Server instance is not running or cannot be contacted on the network. 9900Disk spaceDisk space used on a logical disk drive is above a defined threshold for longer than a specified duration. 101000Physical memoryPhysical memory (RAM) used on the host machine stays above a threshold percentage for longer than a specified duration. 111100Blocked processSQL process is blocked for longer than a specified duration. 121200Long-running queryA SQL query runs for longer than a specified duration. 131400Backup overdueNo full backup exists, or the last full backup is older than a specified time. 141500Log backup overdueNo log backup exists, or the last log backup is older than a specified time. 151600Database unavailableDatabase changes from Online to any other state. 161700Page verificationTorn Page Detection or Page Checksum is not enabled for a database. 171800Integrity check overdueNo entry for an integrity check (DBCC DBINFO returns no date for dbi_dbccLastKnownGood field), or the last check is older than a specified time. 181900Fragmented indexesFragmentation level of one or more indexes is above a threshold percentage. 192400Job duration unusualThe duration of a SQL job duration deviates from its baseline duration by more than a threshold percentage. 202501Clock skewSystem clock time on the Base Monitor computer differs from the system clock time on a monitored SQL Server host machine by a specified number of seconds. 212700SQL Server Agent Service statusThe SQL Server Agent Service status matches the status specified. 222800SQL Server Reporting Service statusThe SQL Server Reporting Service status matches the status specified. 232900SQL Server Full Text Search Service statusThe SQL Server Full Text Search Service status matches the status specified. 243000SQL Server Analysis Service statusThe SQL Server Analysis Service status matches the status specified. 253100SQL Server Integration Service statusThe SQL Server Integration Service status matches the status specified. 263300SQL Server Browser Service statusThe SQL Server Browser Service status matches the status specified. 273400SQL Server VSS Writer Service statusThe SQL Server VSS Writer status matches the status specified. 283501Deadlock trace flag disabledThe monitored SQL Server’s trace flag cannot be enabled. 293600Monitoring stopped (host machine credentials)SQL Monitor cannot contact the host machine because authentication failed. 303700Monitoring stopped (SQL Server credentials)SQL Monitor cannot contact the SQL Server instance because authentication failed. 313800Monitoring error (host machine data collection)SQL Monitor cannot collect data from the host machine. 323900Monitoring error (SQL Server data collection)SQL Monitor cannot collect data from the SQL Server instance. 334000Custom metricThe custom metric value has passed an alert threshold. 344100Custom metric collection errorSQL Monitor cannot collect custom metric data from the target object. Basically, alert.Alert_Type is just a big reference table containing information about the 34 different alert types supported by SQL Monitor (note that the largest id is 41, not 34 – some alert types have been retired since SQL Monitor was first developed). The Name and Description columns are self evident, and I’m going to skip over the Event and Monitoring columns as they’re not very interesting. The AlertId column is the primary key, and is referenced by AlertId in the alert.Alert table. As such, we can rewrite our earlier query to join these two tables, in order to provide a more readable view of the alerts: SELECT TOP 100 AlertId, Name, TargetObject, [Read], SubType FROM alert.Alert a JOIN alert.Alert_Type at ON a.AlertType = at.AlertType ORDER BY AlertId DESC;  AlertIdNameTargetObjectReadSubType 165550Monitoring error (SQL Server data collection)7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s29:srp-mr03.testnet.red-gate.com,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,00 265549Monitoring error (host machine data collection)7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s29:srp-mr03.testnet.red-gate.com,7:Machine,1,4:Name,s0:,00 365548Integrity check overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s15:FavouriteThings,00 465547Log backup overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s15:FavouriteThings,00 565546Backup overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s15:FavouriteThings,00 665545Integrity check overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,00 765544Log backup overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,00 865543Backup overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,00 965542Integrity check overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s4:msdb,00 1065541Backup overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s4:msdb,00 Okay, the next column to discuss in the alert.Alert table is TargetObject. Oh boy, this one’s a bit tricky! The TargetObject of an alert is a serialized string representation of the position in the monitored object hierarchy of the object to which the alert pertains. The serialization format is somewhat convenient for parsing in the C# source code of SQL Monitor, and has some helpful characteristics, but it’s probably very awkward to manipulate in T-SQL. I could document the serialization format here, but it would be very dry reading, so perhaps it’s best to consider an example from the table above. Have a look at the alert with an AlertID of 65543. It’s a Backup overdue alert for the SqlMonitorData database running on the default instance of granger, my laptop. Each different alert type is associated with a specific type of monitored object in the object hierarchy (I described the hierarchy in my previous post). The Backup overdue alert is associated with databases, whose position in the object hierarchy is root → Cluster → SqlServer → Database. The TargetObject value identifies the target object by specifying the key properties at each level in the hierarchy, thus: Cluster: Name = "granger" SqlServer: Name = "" (an empty string, denoting the default instance) Database: Name = "SqlMonitorData" Well, look at the actual TargetObject value for this alert: "7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,". It is indeed composed of three parts, one for each level in the hierarchy: Cluster: "7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger," SqlServer: "9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:," Database: "8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData," Each part is handled in exactly the same way, so let’s concentrate on the first part, "7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,". It comprises the following: "7:Cluster," – This identifies the level in the hierarchy. "1," – This indicates how many different key properties there are to uniquely identify a cluster (we saw in my last post that each cluster is identified by a single property, its Name). "4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData," – This represents the Name property, and its corresponding value, SqlMonitorData. It’s split up like this: "4:Name," – Indicates the name of the key property. "s" – Indicates the type of the key property, in this case, it’s a string. "14:SqlMonitorData," – Indicates the value of the property. At this point, you might be wondering about the format of some of these strings. Why is the string "Cluster" stored as "7:Cluster,"? Well an encoding scheme is used, which consists of the following: "7" – This is the length of the string "Cluster" ":" – This is a delimiter between the length of the string and the actual string’s contents. "Cluster" – This is the string itself. 7 characters. "," – This is a final terminating character that indicates the end of the encoded string. You can see that "4:Name,", "8:Database," and "14:SqlMonitorData," also conform to the same encoding scheme. In the example above, the "s" character is used to indicate that the value of the Name property is a string. If you explore the TargetObject property of alerts in your own SQL Monitor data repository, you might find other characters used for other non-string key property values. The different value types you might possibly encounter are as follows: "I" – Denotes a bigint value. For example, "I65432,". "g" – Denotes a GUID value. For example, "g32116732-63ae-4ab5-bd34-7dfdfb084c18,". "d" – Denotes a datetime value. For example, "d634815384796832438,". The value is stored as a bigint, rather than a native SQL datetime value. I’ll describe how datetime values are handled in the SQL Monitor data repostory in a future post. I suggest you have a look at the alerts in your own SQL Monitor data repository for further examples, so you can see how the TargetObject values are composed for each of the different types of alert. Let me give one further example, though, that represents a Custom metric alert, as this will help in describing the final column of interest in the alert.Alert table, SubType. Let me show you the alert I’m interested in: SELECT AlertId, a.AlertType, Name, TargetObject, [Read], SubType FROM alert.Alert a JOIN alert.Alert_Type at ON a.AlertType = at.AlertType WHERE AlertId = 65769;  AlertIdAlertTypeNameTargetObjectReadSubType 16576940Custom metric7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s6:master,12:CustomMetric,1,8:MetricId,I2,02 An AlertType value of 40 corresponds to the Custom metric alert type. The Name taken from the alert.Alert_Type table is simply Custom metric, but this doesn’t tell us anything about the specific custom metric that this alert pertains to. That’s where the SubType value comes in. For custom metric alerts, this provides us with the Id of the specific custom alert definition that can be found in the settings.CustomAlertDefinitions table. I don’t really want to delve into custom alert definitions yet (maybe in a later post), but an extra join in the previous query shows us that this alert pertains to the CPU pressure (avg runnable task count) custom metric alert. SELECT AlertId, a.AlertType, at.Name, cad.Name AS CustomAlertName, TargetObject, [Read], SubType FROM alert.Alert a JOIN alert.Alert_Type at ON a.AlertType = at.AlertType JOIN settings.CustomAlertDefinitions cad ON a.SubType = cad.Id WHERE AlertId = 65769;  AlertIdAlertTypeNameCustomAlertNameTargetObjectReadSubType 16576940Custom metricCPU pressure (avg runnable task count)7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s6:master,12:CustomMetric,1,8:MetricId,I2,02 The TargetObject value in this case breaks down like this: "7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger," – Cluster named "granger". "9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:," – SqlServer named "" (the default instance). "8:Database,1,4:Name,s6:master," – Database named "master". "12:CustomMetric,1,8:MetricId,I2," – Custom metric with an Id of 2. Note that the hierarchy for a custom metric is slightly different compared to the earlier Backup overdue alert. It’s root → Cluster → SqlServer → Database → CustomMetric. Also notice that, unlike Cluster, SqlServer and Database, the key property for CustomMetric is called MetricId (not Name), and the value is a bigint (not a string). Finally, delving into the custom metric tables is beyond the scope of this post, but for the sake of avoiding any future confusion, I’d like to point out that whilst the SubType references a custom alert definition, the MetricID value embedded in the TargetObject value references a custom metric definition. Although in this case both the custom metric definition and custom alert definition share the same Id value of 2, this is not generally the case. Okay, that’s enough for now, not least because as I’m typing this, it’s almost 2am, I have to go to work tomorrow, and my alarm is set for 6am – eek! In my next post, I’ll either cover the remaining three tables in the alert schema, or I’ll delve into the way SQL Monitor stores its monitoring data, as I’d originally planned to cover in this post.

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• Building a Windows Phone 7 Twitter Application using Silverlight

  On Monday I had the opportunity to present the MIX 2010 Day 1 Keynote in Las Vegas (you can watch a video of it here).  In the keynote I announced the release of the Silverlight 4 Release Candidate (well ship the final release of it next month) and the VS 2010 RC tools for Silverlight 4.  I also had the chance to talk for the first time about how Silverlight and XNA can now be used to build Windows Phone 7 applications. During my talk I did two quick Windows Phone 7 coding demos using...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Another Marketing Conference, part two – the afternoon

  - by Roger Hart

  In my previous post, I’ve covered the morning sessions at AMC2012. Here’s the rest of the write-up. I’ve skipped Charles Nixon’s session which was a blend of funky futurism and professional development advice, but you can see his slides here. I’ve also skipped the Google presentation, as it was a little thin on insight. 6 – Brand ambassadors: Getting universal buy in across the organisation, Vanessa Northam Slides are here This was the strongest enforcement of the idea that brand and campaign values need to be delivered throughout the organization if they’re going to work. Vanessa runs internal communications at e-on, and shared her experience of using internal comms to align an organization and thereby get the most out of a campaign. She views the purpose of internal comms as: “…to help leaders, to communicate the purpose and future of an organization, and support change.” This (and culture) primes front line staff, which creates customer experience and spreads brand. You ensure a whole organization knows what’s going on with both internal and external comms. If everybody is aligned and informed, if everybody can clearly articulate your brand and campaign goals, then you can turn everybody into an advocate. Alignment is a powerful tool for delivering a consistent experience and message. The pathological counter example is the one in which a marketing message goes out, which creates inbound customer contacts that front line contact staff haven’t been briefed to handle. The NatWest campaign was again mentioned in this context. The good example was e-on’s cheaper tariff campaign. Building a groundswell of internal excitement, and even running an internal launch meant everyone could contribute to a good customer experience. They found that meter readers were excited – not a group they’d considered as obvious in providing customer experience. But they were a group that has a lot of face-to-face contact with customers, and often were asked questions they may not have been briefed to answer. Being able to communicate a simple new message made it easier for them, and also let them become a sales and marketing asset to the organization. 7 – Goodbye Internet, Hello Outernet: the rise and rise of augmented reality, Matt Mills I wasn’t going to write this up, because it was essentially a sales demo for Aurasma. But the technology does merit some discussion. Basically, it replaces QR codes with visual recognition, and provides a simple-looking back end for attaching content. It’s quite sexy. But here’s my beef with it: QR codes had a clear visual language – when you saw one you knew what it was and what to do with it. They were clunky, but they had the “getting started” problem solved out of the box once you knew what you were looking at. However, they fail because QR code reading isn’t native to the platform. You needed an app, which meant you needed to know to download one. Consequentially, you can’t use QR codes with and ubiquity, or depend on them. This means marketers, content providers, etc, never pushed them, and they remained and awkward oddity, a minority sport. Aurasma half solves problem two, and re-introduces problem one, making it potentially half as useful as a QR code. It’s free, and you can apparently build it into your own apps. Add to that the likelihood of it becoming native to the platform if it takes off, and it may have legs. I guess we’ll see. 8 – We all need to code, Helen Mayor Great title – good point. If there was anybody in the room who didn’t at least know basic HTML, and if Helen’s presentation inspired them to learn, that’s fantastic. However, this was a half hour sales pitch for a basic coding training course. Beyond advocating coding skills it contained no useful content. Marketers may also like to consider some of these resources if they’re looking to learn code: Code Academy – free interactive tutorials Treehouse – learn web design, web dev, or app dev WebPlatform.org – tutorials and documentation for web tech  11 – Understanding our inner creativity, Margaret Boden This session was the most theoretical and probably least actionable of the day. It also held my attention utterly. Margaret spoke fluently, fascinatingly, without slides, on the subject of types of creativity and how they work. It was splendid. Yes, it raised a wry smile whenever she spoke of “the content of advertisements” and gave an example from 1970s TV ads, but even without the attempt to meet the conference’s theme this would have been thoroughly engaging. There are, Margaret suggested, three types of creativity: Combinatorial creativity The most common form, and consisting of synthesising ideas from existing and familiar concepts and tropes. Exploratory creativity Less common, this involves exploring the limits and quirks of a particular constraint or style. Transformational creativity This is uncommon, and arises from finding a way to do something that the existing rules would hold to be impossible. In essence, this involves breaking one of the constraints that exploratory creativity is composed from. Combinatorial creativity, she suggested, is particularly important for attaching favourable ideas to existing things. As such is it probably worth developing for marketing. Exploratory creativity may then come into play in something like developing and optimising an idea or campaign that now has momentum. Transformational creativity exists at the edges of this exploration. She suggested that products may often be transformational, but that marketing seemed unlikely to in her experience. This made me wonder about Listerine. Crucially, transformational creativity is characterised by there being some element of continuity with the strictures of previous thinking. Once it has happened, there may be  move from a revolutionary instance into an explored style. Again, from a marketing perspective, this seems to chime well with the thinking in Youngme Moon’s book: Different Talking about the birth of Modernism is visual art, Margaret pointed out that transformational creativity has historically risked a backlash, demanding what is essentially an education of the market. This is best accomplished by referring back to the continuities with the past in order to make the new familiar. Thoughts The afternoon is harder to sum up than the morning. It felt less concrete, and was troubled by a short run of poor presentations in the middle. Mainly, I found myself wrestling with the internal comms issue. It’s one of those things that seems astonishingly obvious in hindsight, but any campaign – particularly any large one – is doomed if the people involved can’t believe in it. We’ve run things here that haven’t gone so well, of course we have; who hasn’t? I’m not going to air any laundry, but people not being informed (much less aligned) feels like a common factor. It’s tough though. Managing and anticipating information needs across an organization of any size can’t be easy. Even the simple things like ensuring sales and support departments know what’s in a product release, and what messages go with it are easy to botch. The thing I like about framing this as a brand and campaign advocacy problem is that it makes it likely to get addressed. Better is always sexier than less-worse. Any technical communicator who’s ever felt crowded out by a content strategist or marketing copywriter  knows this – increasing revenue gets a seat at the table far more readily than reducing support costs, even if the financial impact is identical. So that’s it from AMC. The big thought-provokers were social buying behaviour and eliciting behaviour change, and the value of internal communications in ensuring successful campaigns and continuity of customer experience. I’ll be chewing over that for a while, and I’d definitely return next year.      

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