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• Having to insert a record, then update the same record warrants 1:1 relationship design?

  - by dianovich

  Let's say an Order has many Line items and we're storing the total cost of an order (based on the sum of prices on order lines) in the orders table. -------------- orders -------------- id ref total_cost -------------- -------------- lines -------------- id order_id price -------------- In a simple application, the order and line are created during the same step of the checkout process. So this means INSERT INTO orders .... -- Get ID of inserted order record INSERT into lines VALUES(null, order_id, ...), ... where we get the order ID after creating the order record. The problem I'm having is trying to figure out the best way to store the total cost of an order. I don't want to have to create an order create lines on an order calculate cost on order based on lines then update record created in 1. in orders table This would mean a nullable total_cost field on orders for starters... My solution thus far is to have an order_totals table with a 1:1 relationship to the orders table. But I think it's redundant. Ideally, since everything required to calculate total costs (lines on an order) is in the database, I would work out the value every time I need it, but this is very expensive. What are your thoughts?

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• Best Practices For Secure APIs?

  - by Ferrett Steinmetz

  Let's say I have a website that has a lot of information on our products. I'd like some of our customers (including us!) to be able to look up our products for various methods, including: 1) Pulling data from AJAX calls that return data in cool, JavaScripty-ways 2) Creating iPhone applications that use that data; 3) Having other web applications use that data for their own end. Normally, I'd just create an API and be done with it. However, this data is in fact mildly confidential - which is to say that we don't want our competitors to be able to look up all our products every morning and then automatically set their prices to undercut us. And we also want to be able to look at who might be abusing the system, so if someone's making ten million complex calls to our API a day and bogging down our server, we can cut them off. My next logical step would be then to create a developers' key to restrict access - which would work fine for web apps, but not so much for any AJAX calls. (As I see it, they'd need to provide the key in the JavaScript, which is in plaintext and easily seen, and hence there's actually no security at all. Particularly if we'd be using our own developers' keys on our site to make these AJAX calls.) So my question: after looking around at Oauth and OpenID for some time, I'm not sure there is a solution that would handle all three of the above. Is there some sort of canonical "best practices" for developers' keys, or can Oauth and OpenID handle AJAX calls easily in some fashion I have yet to grok, or am I missing something entirely?

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• Good Hosting Providers With Zend Framework Support

  - by manyxcxi

  I currently use ixwebhosting for my hosting services. They're cheap and work (most of the time). The databases are horribly slow, the servers are horribly slow, and their support (though usually prompt) is tough to deal with. That being said, they're cheap, I've got like 20 domains hosted in my account, none of them are high volume, and they work JUST good enough- until today. This isn't meant to be a condemnation of ixwh though. Their prices are very low for what they do offer and most things work just fine, most of the time. I need to be able to host web apps written with Zend Framework in a fairly easy fashion. The server performance can't be worse than what I've already had (a pretty low hurdle to clear), and I don't want to spend $30/mo. These are not money making websites- they're projects. My requirements are PHP 5.3, ZF support, MySQL databases, multiple domains- not much. Who should I look at, and who should I look out for? Also- I put this on SO instead of SF because of the Zend Framework specific requirement. If I'm wrong, do as you wish.

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• c++ and visual studio 08, how to develop the following web extracting application. folloow up of las

  - by user287745

  the purpose is to use c++ in a useful way. i have just started programming and have made a few small applications in c and c#. my understanding is that programming for web and thing related to web is now a days a very easy task. please note this is for personnel learning not for rent a coder or any money making. an application which can run on any windows platform even win98. the application should start automatically at a scheduled time and do the following. connect to a site which displays stock prices summary (high low current open ). captures the data (excluding the other things in the site) and saves it to disk ( a sql database) please note:- internet connection is assumed to be there always. do not want to know how to make database schema or database. the stock exchange has no law prohibiting the use of the data provided on its site, but i do not want to mention the name in case i am wrong, but its for personnel private use only. the data of summary of pricing is arranged in a table such that when copied pasted to ms excel it automatically forms a table. guidance needed thank u.

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• How to "upgrade" the database in real world?

  - by Tattat

  My company have develop a web application using php + mysql. The system can display a product's original price and discount price to the user. If you haven't logined, you get the original price, if you loginned , you get the discount price. It is pretty easy to understand. But my company want more features in the system, it want to display different prices base on different user. For example, user A is a golden parnter, he can get 50% off. User B is a silver parnter, only have 30 % off. But this logic is not prepare in the original system, so I need to add some attribute in the database, at least a user type in this example. Is there any recommendation on how to merge current database to my new version of database. Also, all the data should preserver, and the server should works 24/7. (within stop the database) Is it possible to do so? Also , any recommend for future maintaince advice? Thz u.

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• Will these security functions be enough? (PHP)

  - by ggfan

  I am trying to secure my site so I don't have sql injections and xss scripting. Here's my code. //here's the from, for brevity, i just show a field for users to put firstname <form> <label for="first_name" class="styled">First Name:</label> <input type="text" id="first_name" name="first_name" value="<?php if (!empty($first_name)) echo $first_name; ?>" /><br /> //submit button etc </form> if (isset($_POST['submit'])) { //gets rid of extra whitesapce and escapes $first_name = mysqli_real_escape_string($dbc, trim($_POST['first_name'])); //check if $first_name is a string if(!is_string($first_name) { echo "not string"; } //then insert into the database. ....... } mysqli_real_espace_string: I know that this func escapes certain letters like \n \r, so when the data gets inputted into the dbc, it would have '\' next to all the escaped letters? --Will this script be enough to prevent most sql injections? just escaping and checking if the data is a string. For integers values(like users putting in prices), i just: is_numeric(). --How should I use htmlspecialchars? Should I use it only when echoing and displaying user data? Or should I also use this too when inputting data to a dbc? --When should I use strip_tags() or htmlspecialchars? SOO with all these function... if (isset($_POST['submit'])) { //gets rid of extra whitesapce and escapes $first_name = mysqli_real_escape_string($dbc, trim($_POST['first_name'])); //check if $first_name is a string if(!is_string($first_name) { echo "not string"; } //gets rid of any <,>,& htmlspecialchars($first_name); //strips any tags with the first name strip_tags($first_name) //then insert into the database. ....... } Which funcs should I use for sql injections and which ones should I use for xss?

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• synchronizing reads to a java collection

  - by jeff

  so i want to have an arraylist that stores a series of stock quotes. but i keep track of bid price, ask price and last price for each. of course at any time, the bid ask or last of a given stock can change. i have one thread that updates the prices and one that reads them. i want to make sure that when reading no other thread is updating a price. so i looked at synchronized collection. but that seems to only prevent reading while another thread is adding or deleting an entry to the arraylist. so now i'm onto the wrapper approach: public class Qte_List { private final ArrayList<Qte> the_list; public void UpdateBid(String p_sym, double p_bid){ synchronized (the_list){ Qte q = Qte.FindBySym(the_list, p_sym); q.bid=p_bid;} } public double ReadBid(String p_sym){ synchronized (the_list){ Qte q = Qte.FindBySym(the_list, p_sym); return q.bid;} } so what i want to accomplish with this is only one thread can be doing anything - reading or updating an the_list's contents - at one time. am i approach this right? thanks.

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• What kind of online hosting do I need for a WCF-based service?

  - by mafutrct

  First of all, I'm not sure if SO is the right place to ask. Please migrate me if needed. I would like to host a WCF-based service so it is available for everyone. While hosting it on my personal, local servers succeeded, I would prefer to move it to an external service provider for various reasons. I'll be blunt: I have no clue about hosting providers. I know there are webhosters, virtual and root servers and several other services. What I would like to know is what kind of hosting I need in my case. I understand that a root server would easily fulfill my requirements, but that is not exactly cheap. The program I'd like to run on the server requires .NET 4, preferably on a windows machine. Access to a folder in the file system is much appreciated (1 GB storage is enough by far). Communication with clients (in form of an applications written in .NET) via opening a port on the server. Traffic is low (<<1 GB/month?) There is no website. Having the provider perform updates would be nice. My understanding is that a virtual server would be a possible solution. Prices seem start at around 5€/month, which is ok for me. However, I read that for these cheap solutions RAM is severely limited (~400 MB), and I'm not confident that is enough to run windows and a .NET application.

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• Modifying html of dom element that was created after page loaded

  - by Ben321

  I have two separate AJAX calls. One that gets a list of items from a txt file and creates an HTML table out of them and one that talks to a database to find how much each item costs and then lists this in the corresponding table cell for each item (I know this may sound like a strange approach, but it's a good option in our case...). The issue is that the price is not getting written to the table since the table is created (or to be precise, the rows of the table are created) after the page loads. I'm not sure how to fix this. $(document).ready(function() { makeItemTable(); listPrices(); ... }); function makeItemTable() { $.ajax({ url: 'products.php', type: 'GET' }) .done(function(response) { $('.price-table > tbody').html(response); }) } function listPrices() { .ajax({ url: 'prices.php', type: 'GET' }) .done(function(response) { priceData = $.parseJSON(response); $('.price-table tr').each(function() { var item = $(this).find('td:nth-child(1)').text(); if (priceData[item]) { var price = priceData[item]; $(this).find('td:nth-child(2)').text(price); } }) }

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• SQL Trigger Need to set x from a value

  - by Eric

  Im stuck on a the type of trigger needed to for this constraint. I will have a price and a commission. The price determines the commission amount, < 100 - 4%, < 200 - 5% etc. My idea. the database contains a separate table that will hold 4 price values , 101, 201, 401, 601, with their own matching comission %, this will be called PC. When i create a property listing i want to calculate the commission they earn depending on the price entered. on insert, i need to check the new.price and compare it to the prices in PC. Once new.price is less than the price tuple, i set the price to that commission value create or replace TRIGGER findCommission BEFORE INSERT OR UPDATE ON HASLISTING FOR each ROW BEGIN IF (:NEW.ASKING_PRICE < 100001) THEN :NEW.COMMISSION = 6.0; END IF; IF (:NEW.ASKING_PRICE < 250001) THEN :NEW.COMMISSION = 5.5; END IF; IF (:NEW.ASKING_PRICE < 1000001) THEN :NEW.COMMISSION = 5.0; END IF; IF (:NEW.ASKING_PRICE > 1000000) THEN :NEW.COMMISSION = 4.0; END IF; END;

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• What's New in ASP.NET 4

  - by Navaneeth

  The .NET Framework version 4 includes enhancements for ASP.NET 4 in targeted areas. Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express also include enhancements and new features for improved Web development. This document provides an overview of many of the new features that are included in the upcoming release. This topic contains the following sections: ASP.NET Core Services ASP.NET Web Forms ASP.NET MVC Dynamic Data ASP.NET Chart Control Visual Web Developer Enhancements Web Application Deployment with Visual Studio 2010 Enhancements to ASP.NET Multi-Targeting ASP.NET Core Services ASP.NET 4 introduces many features that improve core ASP.NET services such as output caching and session state storage. Extensible Output Caching Since the time that ASP.NET 1.0 was released, output caching has enabled developers to store the generated output of pages, controls, and HTTP responses in memory. On subsequent Web requests, ASP.NET can serve content more quickly by retrieving the generated output from memory instead of regenerating the output from scratch. However, this approach has a limitation — generated content always has to be stored in memory. On servers that experience heavy traffic, the memory requirements for output caching can compete with memory requirements for other parts of a Web application. ASP.NET 4 adds extensibility to output caching that enables you to configure one or more custom output-cache providers. Output-cache providers can use any storage mechanism to persist HTML content. These storage options can include local or remote disks, cloud storage, and distributed cache engines. Output-cache provider extensibility in ASP.NET 4 lets you design more aggressive and more intelligent output-caching strategies for Web sites. For example, you can create an output-cache provider that caches the "Top 10" pages of a site in memory, while caching pages that get lower traffic on disk. Alternatively, you can cache every vary-by combination for a rendered page, but use a distributed cache so that the memory consumption is offloaded from front-end Web servers. You create a custom output-cache provider as a class that derives from the OutputCacheProvider type. You can then configure the provider in the Web.config file by using the new providers subsection of the outputCache element For more information and for examples that show how to configure the output cache, see outputCache Element for caching (ASP.NET Settings Schema). For more information about the classes that support caching, see the documentation for the OutputCache and OutputCacheProvider classes. By default, in ASP.NET 4, all HTTP responses, rendered pages, and controls use the in-memory output cache. The defaultProvider attribute for ASP.NET is AspNetInternalProvider. You can change the default output-cache provider used for a Web application by specifying a different provider name for defaultProvider attribute. In addition, you can select different output-cache providers for individual control and for individual requests and programmatically specify which provider to use. For more information, see the HttpApplication.GetOutputCacheProviderName(HttpContext) method. The easiest way to choose a different output-cache provider for different Web user controls is to do so declaratively by using the new providerName attribute in a page or control directive, as shown in the following example: <%@ OutputCache Duration="60" VaryByParam="None" providerName="DiskCache" %> Preloading Web Applications Some Web applications must load large amounts of data or must perform expensive initialization processing before serving the first request. In earlier versions of ASP.NET, for these situations you had to devise custom approaches to "wake up" an ASP.NET application and then run initialization code during the Application_Load method in the Global.asax file. To address this scenario, a new application preload manager (autostart feature) is available when ASP.NET 4 runs on IIS 7.5 on Windows Server 2008 R2. The preload feature provides a controlled approach for starting up an application pool, initializing an ASP.NET application, and then accepting HTTP requests. It lets you perform expensive application initialization prior to processing the first HTTP request. For example, you can use the application preload manager to initialize an application and then signal a load-balancer that the application was initialized and ready to accept HTTP traffic. To use the application preload manager, an IIS administrator sets an application pool in IIS 7.5 to be automatically started by using the following configuration in the applicationHost.config file: <applicationPools> <add name="MyApplicationPool" startMode="AlwaysRunning" /> </applicationPools> Because a single application pool can contain multiple applications, you specify individual applications to be automatically started by using the following configuration in the applicationHost.config file: <sites> <site name="MySite" id="1"> <application path="/" serviceAutoStartEnabled="true" serviceAutoStartProvider="PrewarmMyCache" > <!-- Additional content --> </application> </site> </sites> <!-- Additional content --> <serviceAutoStartProviders> <add name="PrewarmMyCache" type="MyNamespace.CustomInitialization, MyLibrary" /> </serviceAutoStartProviders> When an IIS 7.5 server is cold-started or when an individual application pool is recycled, IIS 7.5 uses the information in the applicationHost.config file to determine which Web applications have to be automatically started. For each application that is marked for preload, IIS7.5 sends a request to ASP.NET 4 to start the application in a state during which the application temporarily does not accept HTTP requests. When it is in this state, ASP.NET instantiates the type defined by the serviceAutoStartProvider attribute (as shown in the previous example) and calls into its public entry point. You create a managed preload type that has the required entry point by implementing the IProcessHostPreloadClient interface, as shown in the following example: public class CustomInitialization : System.Web.Hosting.IProcessHostPreloadClient { public void Preload(string[] parameters) { // Perform initialization. } } After your initialization code runs in the Preload method and after the method returns, the ASP.NET application is ready to process requests. Permanently Redirecting a Page Content in Web applications is often moved over the lifetime of the application. This can lead to links to be out of date, such as the links that are returned by search engines. In ASP.NET, developers have traditionally handled requests to old URLs by using the Redirect method to forward a request to the new URL. However, the Redirect method issues an HTTP 302 (Found) response (which is used for a temporary redirect). This results in an extra HTTP round trip. ASP.NET 4 adds a RedirectPermanent helper method that makes it easy to issue HTTP 301 (Moved Permanently) responses, as in the following example: RedirectPermanent("/newpath/foroldcontent.aspx"); Search engines and other user agents that recognize permanent redirects will store the new URL that is associated with the content, which eliminates the unnecessary round trip made by the browser for temporary redirects. Session State Compression By default, ASP.NET provides two options for storing session state across a Web farm. The first option is a session state provider that invokes an out-of-process session state server. The second option is a session state provider that stores data in a Microsoft SQL Server database. Because both options store state information outside a Web application's worker process, session state has to be serialized before it is sent to remote storage. If a large amount of data is saved in session state, the size of the serialized data can become very large. ASP.NET 4 introduces a new compression option for both kinds of out-of-process session state providers. By using this option, applications that have spare CPU cycles on Web servers can achieve substantial reductions in the size of serialized session state data. You can set this option using the new compressionEnabled attribute of the sessionState element in the configuration file. When the compressionEnabled configuration option is set to true, ASP.NET compresses (and decompresses) serialized session state by using the .NET Framework GZipStreamclass. The following example shows how to set this attribute. <sessionState mode="SqlServer" sqlConnectionString="data source=dbserver;Initial Catalog=aspnetstate" allowCustomSqlDatabase="true" compressionEnabled="true" /> ASP.NET Web Forms Web Forms has been a core feature in ASP.NET since the release of ASP.NET 1.0. Many enhancements have been in this area for ASP.NET 4, such as the following: The ability to set meta tags. More control over view state. Support for recently introduced browsers and devices. Easier ways to work with browser capabilities. Support for using ASP.NET routing with Web Forms. More control over generated IDs. The ability to persist selected rows in data controls. More control over rendered HTML in the FormView and ListView controls. Filtering support for data source controls. Enhanced support for Web standards and accessibility Setting Meta Tags with the Page.MetaKeywords and Page.MetaDescription Properties Two properties have been added to the Page class: MetaKeywords and MetaDescription. These two properties represent corresponding meta tags in the HTML rendered for a page, as shown in the following example: <head id="Head1" runat="server"> <title>Untitled Page</title> <meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2' /> <meta name="description" content="Description of my page" /> </head> These two properties work like the Title property does, and they can be set in the @ Page directive. For more information, see Page.MetaKeywords and Page.MetaDescription. Enabling View State for Individual Controls A new property has been added to the Control class: ViewStateMode. You can use this property to disable view state for all controls on a page except those for which you explicitly enable view state. View state data is included in a page's HTML and increases the amount of time it takes to send a page to the client and post it back. Storing more view state than is necessary can cause significant decrease in performance. In earlier versions of ASP.NET, you could reduce the impact of view state on a page's performance by disabling view state for specific controls. But sometimes it is easier to enable view state for a few controls that need it instead of disabling it for many that do not need it. For more information, see Control.ViewStateMode. Support for Recently Introduced Browsers and Devices ASP.NET includes a feature that is named browser capabilities that lets you determine the capabilities of the browser that a user is using. Browser capabilities are represented by the HttpBrowserCapabilities object which is stored in the HttpRequest.Browser property. Information about a particular browser's capabilities is defined by a browser definition file. In ASP.NET 4, these browser definition files have been updated to contain information about recently introduced browsers and devices such as Google Chrome, Research in Motion BlackBerry smart phones, and Apple iPhone. Existing browser definition files have also been updated. For more information, see How to: Upgrade an ASP.NET Web Application to ASP.NET 4 and ASP.NET Web Server Controls and Browser Capabilities. The browser definition files that are included with ASP.NET 4 are shown in the following list: •blackberry.browser •chrome.browser •Default.browser •firefox.browser •gateway.browser •generic.browser •ie.browser •iemobile.browser •iphone.browser •opera.browser •safari.browser A New Way to Define Browser Capabilities ASP.NET 4 includes a new feature referred to as browser capabilities providers. As the name suggests, this lets you build a provider that in turn lets you write custom code to determine browser capabilities. In ASP.NET version 3.5 Service Pack 1, you define browser capabilities in an XML file. This file resides in a machine-level folder or an application-level folder. Most developers do not need to customize these files, but for those who do, the provider approach can be easier than dealing with complex XML syntax. The provider approach makes it possible to simplify the process by implementing a common browser definition syntax, or a database that contains up-to-date browser definitions, or even a Web service for such a database. For more information about the new browser capabilities provider, see the What's New for ASP.NET 4 White Paper. Routing in ASP.NET 4 ASP.NET 4 adds built-in support for routing with Web Forms. Routing is a feature that was introduced with ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 and lets you configure an application to use URLs that are meaningful to users and to search engines because they do not have to specify physical file names. This can make your site more user-friendly and your site content more discoverable by search engines. For example, the URL for a page that displays product categories in your application might look like the following example: http://website/products.aspx?categoryid=12 By using routing, you can use the following URL to render the same information: http://website/products/software The second URL lets the user know what to expect and can result in significantly improved rankings in search engine results. the new features include the following: The PageRouteHandler class is a simple HTTP handler that you use when you define routes. You no longer have to write a custom route handler. The HttpRequest.RequestContext and Page.RouteData properties make it easier to access information that is passed in URL parameters. The RouteUrl expression provides a simple way to create a routed URL in markup. The RouteValue expression provides a simple way to extract URL parameter values in markup. The RouteParameter class makes it easier to pass URL parameter values to a query for a data source control (similar to FormParameter). You no longer have to change the Web.config file to enable routing. For more information about routing, see the following topics: ASP.NET Routing Walkthrough: Using ASP.NET Routing in a Web Forms Application How to: Define Routes for Web Forms Applications How to: Construct URLs from Routes How to: Access URL Parameters in a Routed Page Setting Client IDs The new ClientIDMode property makes it easier to write client script that references HTML elements rendered for server controls. Increasing use of Microsoft Ajax makes the need to do this more common. For example, you may have a data control that renders a long list of products with prices and you want to use client script to make a Web service call and update individual prices in the list as they change without refreshing the entire page. Typically you get a reference to an HTML element in client script by using the document.GetElementById method. You pass to this method the value of the id attribute of the HTML element you want to reference. In the case of elements that are rendered for ASP.NET server controls earlier versions of ASP.NET could make this difficult or impossible. You were not always able to predict what id values ASP.NET would generate, or ASP.NET could generate very long id values. The problem was especially difficult for data controls that would generate multiple rows for a single instance of the control in your markup. ASP.NET 4 adds two new algorithms for generating id attributes. These algorithms can generate id attributes that are easier to work with in client script because they are more predictable and that are easier to work with because they are simpler. For more information about how to use the new algorithms, see the following topics: ASP.NET Web Server Control Identification Walkthrough: Making Data-Bound Controls Easier to Access from JavaScript Walkthrough: Making Controls Located in Web User Controls Easier to Access from JavaScript How to: Access Controls from JavaScript by ID Persisting Row Selection in Data Controls The GridView and ListView controls enable users to select a row. In previous versions of ASP.NET, row selection was based on the row index on the page. For example, if you select the third item on page 1 and then move to page 2, the third item on page 2 is selected. In most cases, is more desirable not to select any rows on page 2. ASP.NET 4 supports Persisted Selection, a new feature that was initially supported only in Dynamic Data projects in the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. When this feature is enabled, the selected item is based on the row data key. This means that if you select the third row on page 1 and move to page 2, nothing is selected on page 2. When you move back to page 1, the third row is still selected. This is a much more natural behavior than the behavior in earlier versions of ASP.NET. Persisted selection is now supported for the GridView and ListView controls in all projects. You can enable this feature in the GridView control, for example, by setting the EnablePersistedSelection property, as shown in the following example: <asp:GridView id="GridView2" runat="server" PersistedSelection="true"> </asp:GridView> FormView Control Enhancements The FormView control is enhanced to make it easier to style the content of the control with CSS. In previous versions of ASP.NET, the FormView control rendered it contents using an item template. This made styling more difficult in the markup because unexpected table row and table cell tags were rendered by the control. The FormView control supports RenderOuterTable, a property in ASP.NET 4. When this property is set to false, as show in the following example, the table tags are not rendered. This makes it easier to apply CSS style to the contents of the control. <asp:FormView ID="FormView1" runat="server" RenderTable="false"> For more information, see FormView Web Server Control Overview. ListView Control Enhancements The ListView control, which was introduced in ASP.NET 3.5, has all the functionality of the GridView control while giving you complete control over the output. This control has been made easier to use in ASP.NET 4. The earlier version of the control required that you specify a layout template that contained a server control with a known ID. The following markup shows a typical example of how to use the ListView control in ASP.NET 3.5. <asp:ListView ID="ListView1" runat="server"> <LayoutTemplate> <asp:PlaceHolder ID="ItemPlaceHolder" runat="server"></asp:PlaceHolder> </LayoutTemplate> <ItemTemplate> <% Eval("LastName")%> </ItemTemplate> </asp:ListView> In ASP.NET 4, the ListView control does not require a layout template. The markup shown in the previous example can be replaced with the following markup: <asp:ListView ID="ListView1" runat="server"> <ItemTemplate> <% Eval("LastName")%> </ItemTemplate> </asp:ListView> For more information, see ListView Web Server Control Overview. Filtering Data with the QueryExtender Control A very common task for developers who create data-driven Web pages is to filter data. This traditionally has been performed by building Where clauses in data source controls. This approach can be complicated, and in some cases the Where syntax does not let you take advantage of the full functionality of the underlying database. To make filtering easier, a new QueryExtender control has been added in ASP.NET 4. This control can be added to EntityDataSource or LinqDataSource controls in order to filter the data returned by these controls. Because the QueryExtender control relies on LINQ, but you do not to need to know how to write LINQ queries to use the query extender. The QueryExtender control supports a variety of filter options. The following lists QueryExtender filter options. Term Definition SearchExpression Searches a field or fields for string values and compares them to a specified string value. RangeExpression Searches a field or fields for values in a range specified by a pair of values. PropertyExpression Compares a specified value to a property value in a field. If the expression evaluates to true, the data that is being examined is returned. OrderByExpression Sorts data by a specified column and sort direction. CustomExpression Calls a function that defines custom filter in the page. For more information, see QueryExtenderQueryExtender Web Server Control Overview. Enhanced Support for Web Standards and Accessibility Earlier versions of ASP.NET controls sometimes render markup that does not conform to HTML, XHTML, or accessibility standards. ASP.NET 4 eliminates most of these exceptions. For details about how the HTML that is rendered by each control meets accessibility standards, see ASP.NET Controls and Accessibility. CSS for Controls that Can be Disabled In ASP.NET 3.5, when a control is disabled (see WebControl.Enabled), a disabled attribute is added to the rendered HTML element. For example, the following markup creates a Label control that is disabled: <asp:Label id="Label1" runat="server"   Text="Test" Enabled="false" /> In ASP.NET 3.5, the previous control settings generate the following HTML: <span id="Label1" disabled="disabled">Test</span> In HTML 4.01, the disabled attribute is not considered valid on span elements. It is valid only on input elements because it specifies that they cannot be accessed. On display-only elements such as span elements, browsers typically support rendering for a disabled appearance, but a Web page that relies on this non-standard behavior is not robust according to accessibility standards. For display-only elements, you should use CSS to indicate a disabled visual appearance. Therefore, by default ASP.NET 4 generates the following HTML for the control settings shown previously: <span id="Label1" class="aspNetDisabled">Test</span> You can change the value of the class attribute that is rendered by default when a control is disabled by setting the DisabledCssClass property. CSS for Validation Controls In ASP.NET 3.5, validation controls render a default color of red as an inline style. For example, the following markup creates a RequiredFieldValidator control: <asp:RequiredFieldValidator ID="RequiredFieldValidator1" runat="server"   ErrorMessage="Required Field" ControlToValidate="RadioButtonList1" /> ASP.NET 3.5 renders the following HTML for the validator control: <span id="RequiredFieldValidator1"   style="color:Red;visibility:hidden;">RequiredFieldValidator</span> By default, ASP.NET 4 does not render an inline style to set the color to red. An inline style is used only to hide or show the validator, as shown in the following example: <span id="RequiredFieldValidator1"   style"visibility:hidden;">RequiredFieldValidator</span> Therefore, ASP.NET 4 does not automatically show error messages in red. For information about how to use CSS to specify a visual style for a validation control, see Validating User Input in ASP.NET Web Pages. CSS for the Hidden Fields Div Element ASP.NET uses hidden fields to store state information such as view state and control state. These hidden fields are contained by a div element. In ASP.NET 3.5, this div element does not have a class attribute or an id attribute. Therefore, CSS rules that affect all div elements could unintentionally cause this div to be visible. To avoid this problem, ASP.NET 4 renders the div element for hidden fields with a CSS class that you can use to differentiate the hidden fields div from others. The new classvalue is shown in the following example: <div class="aspNetHidden"> CSS for the Table, Image, and ImageButton Controls By default, in ASP.NET 3.5, some controls set the border attribute of rendered HTML to zero (0). The following example shows HTML that is generated by the Table control in ASP.NET 3.5: <table id="Table2" border="0"> The Image control and the ImageButton control also do this. Because this is not necessary and provides visual formatting information that should be provided by using CSS, the attribute is not generated in ASP.NET 4. CSS for the UpdatePanel and UpdateProgress Controls In ASP.NET 3.5, the UpdatePanel and UpdateProgress controls do not support expando attributes. This makes it impossible to set a CSS class on the HTMLelements that they render. In ASP.NET 4 these controls have been changed to accept expando attributes, as shown in the following example: <asp:UpdatePanel runat="server" class="myStyle"> </asp:UpdatePanel> The following HTML is rendered for this markup: <div id="ctl00_MainContent_UpdatePanel1" class="expandoclass"> </div> Eliminating Unnecessary Outer Tables In ASP.NET 3.5, the HTML that is rendered for the following controls is wrapped in a table element whose purpose is to apply inline styles to the entire control: FormView Login PasswordRecovery ChangePassword If you use templates to customize the appearance of these controls, you can specify CSS styles in the markup that you provide in the templates. In that case, no extra outer table is required. In ASP.NET 4, you can prevent the table from being rendered by setting the new RenderOuterTable property to false. Layout Templates for Wizard Controls In ASP.NET 3.5, the Wizard and CreateUserWizard controls generate an HTML table element that is used for visual formatting. In ASP.NET 4 you can use a LayoutTemplate element to specify the layout. If you do this, the HTML table element is not generated. In the template, you create placeholder controls to indicate where items should be dynamically inserted into the control. (This is similar to how the template model for the ListView control works.) For more information, see the Wizard.LayoutTemplate property. New HTML Formatting Options for the CheckBoxList and RadioButtonList Controls ASP.NET 3.5 uses HTML table elements to format the output for the CheckBoxList and RadioButtonList controls. To provide an alternative that does not use tables for visual formatting, ASP.NET 4 adds two new options to the RepeatLayout enumeration: UnorderedList. This option causes the HTML output to be formatted by using ul and li elements instead of a table. OrderedList. This option causes the HTML output to be formatted by using ol and li elements instead of a table. For examples of HTML that is rendered for the new options, see the RepeatLayout enumeration. Header and Footer Elements for the Table Control In ASP.NET 3.5, the Table control can be configured to render thead and tfoot elements by setting the TableSection property of the TableHeaderRow class and the TableFooterRow class. In ASP.NET 4 these properties are set to the appropriate values by default. CSS and ARIA Support for the Menu Control In ASP.NET 3.5, the Menu control uses HTML table elements for visual formatting, and in some configurations it is not keyboard-accessible. ASP.NET 4 addresses these problems and improves accessibility in the following ways: The generated HTML is structured as an unordered list (ul and li elements). CSS is used for visual formatting. The menu behaves in accordance with ARIA standards for keyboard access. You can use arrow keys to navigate menu items. (For information about ARIA, see Accessibility in Visual Studio and ASP.NET.) ARIA role and property attributes are added to the generated HTML. (Attributes are added by using JavaScript instead of included in the HTML, to avoid generating HTML that would cause markup validation errors.) Styles for the Menu control are rendered in a style block at the top of the page, instead of inline with the rendered HTML elements. If you want to use a separate CSS file so that you can modify the menu styles, you can set the Menu control's new IncludeStyleBlock property to false, in which case the style block is not generated. Valid XHTML for the HtmlForm Control In ASP.NET 3.5, the HtmlForm control (which is created implicitly by the <form runat="server"> tag) renders an HTML form element that has both name and id attributes. The name attribute is deprecated in XHTML 1.1. Therefore, this control does not render the name attribute in ASP.NET 4. Maintaining Backward Compatibility in Control Rendering An existing ASP.NET Web site might have code in it that assumes that controls are rendering HTML the way they do in ASP.NET 3.5. To avoid causing backward compatibility problems when you upgrade the site to ASP.NET 4, you can have ASP.NET continue to generate HTML the way it does in ASP.NET 3.5 after you upgrade the site. To do so, you can set the controlRenderingCompatibilityVersion attribute of the pages element to "3.5" in the Web.config file of an ASP.NET 4 Web site, as shown in the following example: <system.web>   <pages controlRenderingCompatibilityVersion="3.5"/> </system.web> If this setting is omitted, the default value is the same as the version of ASP.NET that the Web site targets. (For information about multi-targeting in ASP.NET, see .NET Framework Multi-Targeting for ASP.NET Web Projects.) ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET MVC helps Web developers build compelling standards-based Web sites that are easy to maintain because it decreases the dependency among application layers by using the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. MVC provides complete control over the page markup. It also improves testability by inherently supporting Test Driven Development (TDD). Web sites created using ASP.NET MVC have a modular architecture. This allows members of a team to work independently on the various modules and can be used to improve collaboration. For example, developers can work on the model and controller layers (data and logic), while the designer work on the view (presentation). For tutorials, walkthroughs, conceptual content, code samples, and a complete API reference, see ASP.NET MVC 2. Dynamic Data Dynamic Data was introduced in the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 release in mid-2008. This feature provides many enhancements for creating data-driven applications, such as the following: A RAD experience for quickly building a data-driven Web site. Automatic validation that is based on constraints defined in the data model. The ability to easily change the markup that is generated for fields in the GridView and DetailsView controls by using field templates that are part of your Dynamic Data project. For ASP.NET 4, Dynamic Data has been enhanced to give developers even more power for quickly building data-driven Web sites. For more information, see ASP.NET Dynamic Data Content Map. Enabling Dynamic Data for Individual Data-Bound Controls in Existing Web Applications You can use Dynamic Data features in existing ASP.NET Web applications that do not use scaffolding by enabling Dynamic Data for individual data-bound controls. Dynamic Data provides the presentation and data layer support for rendering these controls. When you enable Dynamic Data for data-bound controls, you get the following benefits: Setting default values for data fields. Dynamic Data enables you to provide default values at run time for fields in a data control. Interacting with the database without creating and registering a data model. Automatically validating the data that is entered by the user without writing any code. For more information, see Walkthrough: Enabling Dynamic Data in ASP.NET Data-Bound Controls. New Field Templates for URLs and E-mail Addresses ASP.NET 4 introduces two new built-in field templates, EmailAddress.ascx and Url.ascx. These templates are used for fields that are marked as EmailAddress or Url using the DataTypeAttribute attribute. For EmailAddress objects, the field is displayed as a hyperlink that is created by using the mailto: protocol. When users click the link, it opens the user's e-mail client and creates a skeleton message. Objects typed as Url are displayed as ordinary hyperlinks. The following example shows how to mark fields. [DataType(DataType.EmailAddress)] public object HomeEmail { get; set; } [DataType(DataType.Url)] public object Website { get; set; } Creating Links with the DynamicHyperLink Control Dynamic Data uses the new routing feature that was added in the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 to control the URLs that users see when they access the Web site. The new DynamicHyperLink control makes it easy to build links to pages in a Dynamic Data site. For information, see How to: Create Table Action Links in Dynamic Data Support for Inheritance in the Data Model Both the ADO.NET Entity Framework and LINQ to SQL support inheritance in their data models. An example of this might be a database that has an InsurancePolicy table. It might also contain CarPolicy and HousePolicy tables that have the same fields as InsurancePolicy and then add more fields. Dynamic Data has been modified to understand inherited objects in the data model and to support scaffolding for the inherited tables. For more information, see Walkthrough: Mapping Table-per-Hierarchy Inheritance in Dynamic Data. Support for Many-to-Many Relationships (Entity Framework Only) The Entity Framework has rich support for many-to-many relationships between tables, which is implemented by exposing the relationship as a collection on an Entity object. New field templates (ManyToMany.ascx and ManyToMany_Edit.ascx) have been added to provide support for displaying and editing data that is involved in many-to-many relationships. For more information, see Working with Many-to-Many Data Relationships in Dynamic Data. New Attributes to Control Display and Support Enumerations The DisplayAttribute has been added to give you additional control over how fields are displayed. The DisplayNameAttribute attribute in earlier versions of Dynamic Data enabled you to change the name that is used as a caption for a field. The new DisplayAttribute class lets you specify more options for displaying a field, such as the order in which a field is displayed and whether a field will be used as a filter. The attribute also provides independent control of the name that is used for the labels in a GridView control, the name that is used in a DetailsView control, the help text for the field, and the watermark used for the field (if the field accepts text input). The EnumDataTypeAttribute class has been added to let you map fields to enumerations. When you apply this attribute to a field, you specify an enumeration type. Dynamic Data uses the new Enumeration.ascx field template to create UI for displaying and editing enumeration values. The template maps the values from the database to the names in the enumeration. Enhanced Support for Filters Dynamic Data 1.0 had built-in filters for Boolean columns and foreign-key columns. The filters did not let you specify the order in which they were displayed. The new DisplayAttribute attribute addresses this by giving you control over whether a column appears as a filter and in what order it will be displayed. An additional enhancement is that filtering support has been rewritten to use the new QueryExtender feature of Web Forms. This lets you create filters without requiring knowledge of the data source control that the filters will be used with. Along with these extensions, filters have also been turned into template controls, which lets you add new ones. Finally, the DisplayAttribute class mentioned earlier allows the default filter to be overridden, in the same way that UIHint allows the default field template for a column to be overridden. For more information, see Walkthrough: Filtering Rows in Tables That Have a Parent-Child Relationship and QueryableFilterRepeater. ASP.NET Chart Control The ASP.NET chart server control enables you to create ASP.NET pages applications that have simple, intuitive charts for complex statistical or financial analysis. The chart control supports the following features: Data series, chart areas, axes, legends, labels, titles, and more. Data binding. Data manipulation, such as copying, splitting, merging, alignment, grouping, sorting, searching, and filtering. Statistical formulas and financial formulas. Advanced chart appearance, such as 3-D, anti-aliasing, lighting, and perspective. Events and customizations. Interactivity and Microsoft Ajax. Support for the Ajax Content Delivery Network (CDN), which provides an optimized way for you to add Microsoft Ajax Library and jQuery scripts to your Web applications. For more information, see Chart Web Server Control Overview. Visual Web Developer Enhancements The following sections provide information about enhancements and new features in Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Web Developer Express. The Web page designer in Visual Studio 2010 has been enhanced for better CSS compatibility, includes additional support for HTML and ASP.NET markup snippets, and features a redesigned version of IntelliSense for JScript. Improved CSS Compatibility The Visual Web Developer designer in Visual Studio 2010 has been updated to improve CSS 2.1 standards compliance. The designer better preserves HTML source code and is more robust than in previous versions of Visual Studio. HTML and JScript Snippets In the HTML editor, IntelliSense auto-completes tag names. The IntelliSense Snippets feature auto-completes whole tags and more. In Visual Studio 2010, IntelliSense snippets are supported for JScript, alongside C# and Visual Basic, which were supported in earlier versions of Visual Studio. Visual Studio 2010 includes over 200 snippets that help you auto-complete common ASP.NET and HTML tags, including required attributes (such as runat="server") and common attributes specific to a tag (such as ID, DataSourceID, ControlToValidate, and Text). You can download additional snippets, or you can write your own snippets that encapsulate the blocks of markup that you or your team use for common tasks. For more information on HTML snippets, see Walkthrough: Using HTML Snippets. JScript IntelliSense Enhancements In Visual 2010, JScript IntelliSense has been redesigned to provide an even richer editing experience. IntelliSense now recognizes objects that have been dynamically generated by methods such as registerNamespace and by similar techniques used by other JavaScript frameworks. Performance has been improved to analyze large libraries of script and to display IntelliSense with little or no processing delay. Compatibility has been significantly increased to support almost all third-party libraries and to support diverse coding styles. Documentation comments are now parsed as you type and are immediately leveraged by IntelliSense. Web Application Deployment with Visual Studio 2010 For Web application projects, Visual Studio now provides tools that work with the IIS Web Deployment Tool (Web Deploy) to automate many processes that had to be done manually in earlier versions of ASP.NET. For example, the following tasks can now be automated: Creating an IIS application on the destination computer and configuring IIS settings. Copying files to the destination computer. Changing Web.config settings that must be different in the destination environment. Propagating changes to data or data structures in SQL Server databases that are used by the Web application. For more information about Web application deployment, see ASP.NET Deployment Content Map. Enhancements to ASP.NET Multi-Targeting ASP.NET 4 adds new features to the multi-targeting feature to make it easier to work with projects that target earlier versions of the .NET Framework. Multi-targeting was introduced in ASP.NET 3.5 to enable you to use the latest version of Visual Studio without having to upgrade existing Web sites or Web services to the latest version of the .NET Framework. In Visual Studio 2008, when you work with a project targeted for an earlier version of the .NET Framework, most features of the development environment adapt to the targeted version. However, IntelliSense displays language features that are available in the current version, and property windows display properties available in the current version. In Visual Studio 2010, only language features and properties available in the targeted version of the .NET Framework are shown. For more information about multi-targeting, see the following topics: .NET Framework Multi-Targeting for ASP.NET Web Projects ASP.NET Side-by-Side Execution Overview How to: Host Web Applications That Use Different Versions of the .NET Framework on the Same Server How to: Deploy Web Site Projects Targeted for Earlier Versions of the .NET Framework

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• Month in Geek: December 2010 Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  As 2010 draws to a close, we have gathered together another great batch of article goodness for your reading enjoyment. Here are our ten hottest articles for December. Note: Articles are listed as #10 through #1. The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 Even though we cover plenty of other topics, Windows has always been a primary focus around here, and we’ve got one of the largest collections of Windows-related how-to articles anywhere. Here’s the fifty best Windows articles that we wrote in 2010. Read the article Desktop Fun: Happy New Year Wallpaper Collection [Bonus Edition] As this year draws to a close, it is a time to reflect back on what we have done this year and to look forward to the new one. To help commemorate the event we have put together a bonus size edition of Happy New Year wallpapers for your desktops. Read the article LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology With image technology progressing faster than ever, High-Def has become the standard, giving TV buyers more options at cheaper prices. But what’s different in all these confusing TVs, and what should you know before buying one? Read the article HTG Explains: Which Linux File System Should You Choose? File systems are one of the layers beneath your operating system that you don’t think about—unless you’re faced with the plethora of options in Linux. Here’s how to make an educated decision on which file system to use. Read the article Desktop Fun: Merry Christmas Fonts Christmas will soon be here and there are lots of cards, invitations, gift tags, photos, and more to prepare beforehand. To help you get ready we have gathered together a great collection of fun holiday fonts to help turn those ordinary looking holiday items into extraordinary looking ones. Read the article Microsoft Security Essentials 2.0 Kills Viruses Dead. Download It Now. Microsoft’s Security Essentials has been our favorite anti-malware application for a while—it’s free, unobtrusive, and it doesn’t slow your PC down, but now it’s even better with the new 2.0 release, which adds network filtering, heuristic protection, and more. Read the article 20 OS X Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Not Know Mastering the keyboard will not only increase your navigation speed but it can also help with wrist fatigue. Here are some lesser known OS X shortcuts to help you become a keyboard ninja. Read the article 20 Windows Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Not Know Mastering the keyboard will not only increase your navigation speed but it can also help with wrist fatigue. Here are some lesser known Windows shortcuts to help you become a keyboard ninja. Read the article The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better We’re big fans of hacking the Windows Registry around here, and we’ve got one of the biggest collections of registry hacks you’ll find. Don’t believe us? Here’s a list of the top 50 registry hacks that we’ve covered. Read the article The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials The Apple iPad is an amazing tablet, and to help you get the most out of it, we’ve put together a comprehensive list of every tip, trick, and tutorial for you. Read on for more. Read the article Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 How to Disable Caps Lock Key in Windows 7 or Vista How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials Tune Pop Enhances Android Music Notifications Another Busy Night in Gotham City Wallpaper Classic Super Mario Brothers Theme for Chrome and Iron Experimental Firefox Builds Put Tabs on the Title Bar (Available for Download) Android Trojan Found in the Wild Chaos, Panic, and Disorder Wallpaper

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• Airtel 3G in Chennai – User experience, Price & What’s the catch?

  - by Boonei

  Finally ! Here we are with Airtel 3G in India. Now Airtel customers can have a go at real 3G speed. Sources suggest that the delay in rolling out 3G was due to hardware problems. It was provided by Ericsson. Now first things first. Let me get to the point. I had subscribed to Airtel’s 3G pack Rs.100 for 100 MB. This is to check out how good it is, did not want to pay a hefty sum at the first instance. It was pretty smooth upgrading.. After the upgrade I did see the much awaited 3G signal bar on my phone. Ok! now its testing time. User experience First I did a bit of browsing, boy ! it was pretty quick, web pages loaded in a jiffy. I really did not time it because it loaded really quick. I loaded a YouTube Video, no buffering, watched the 4 min Video with no problems, it took around 6 MB of data usage Made a Skype call for about 6 min, voice clarity was really good and data usage was around 4-5 MB Tried Google Maps everything was so fast could not see the difference between computer and my phone, used it for about couple of minutes. Did listen to an Online Radio for about 5 min took about 8 MB of data usage Guess there is no need to say about Facebook or Twitter. It was good obviously. Video Call – Not yet tested Price – Do you get what you pay for ? 3G speed is fantastic, you have to really feel it to enjoy it. But currently in Airtel, 3G is available only in 3 places wiz. Bengaluru, Chennai, Coimbatore. ok ! Its not even there in all the metros? hmmm. 3G signal was not available in all parts of Chennai, often in many places it changed to 2G. Let alone all the places, even in my house when walking from one room to another sometimes its shows 2G. When it chaged from 3G to 2G there was lag in the application when it was loading data which often made me wonder if the application hanged. Currently prices not low. 2G plans in Airtel is Rs.98 for 2GB and for Rs.100 its only 100MB in 3G. Now you decide please, it’s quite a debate. The Catch – There is always a catch right ? If you have bought 3G connection and in places where 3G is not available (2G) and use any application that requires data connections (youtube, browse, chat etc) its changed with 3G!. Meaning if you have bought 100MB of 3G by paying Rs.100 like I did, suppose you used the connection for about 10MB using 2G, then it would reduce from the 100MB to 90 MB….That’s bad ! You cannot have 2G and 3G plans activated at the same point of time in your phone. You will pay 3G price for using 2G. This article titled,Airtel 3G in Chennai – User experience, Price & What’s the catch?, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• Pet Store Loyalty Programs: I'm Not Loyal Yet!

  - by ruth.donohue

  After two years of constantly being asked (aka "pestered) by my now eight-year-old daughter for a dog (or any pet that is more interactive than a goldfish), I've finally compromised with a hamster purely by chance. Friends of ours had recently brought home a female hamster, and (surprise, surprise) two weeks later, they were looking for homes for 11 baby hamster pups. Since the pups were not yet ready to be weaned from their mother, my daughter and I had several weeks to get ready -- and we spent that extra time visiting a number of local pet stores and purchasing an assortment of hamster books, toys, exercise equipment, food, bedding, and cage -- not cheap! Now, I'm usually an online shopper (i.e. I love reading user reviews and comparing prices), but for kids, there is absolutely no online substitute for actually walking into a store and physically picking out something you want. We have two competing pet shops within close proximity to where we live, and I signed up for their rewards programs to get discounts on select items. I'm sure it takes a while to get my data into the system (after all, I did fill out a form the old-fashioned way), but as it has been more than two weeks for one store and over a week for the other, the window of opportunity is getting smaller as we by now pretty much have most of what we think we need. Everything I've purchased has been purely hamster or small animal related, so in an ideal world, the stores would have me easily figured out as a hamster owner. Here is what I would be expecting of a loyalty rewards program: Point me to some useful links, either information provied by the company or external websites where I can learn more. Any value-add a business can provide to make my life easier makes me a much more loyal customer. What things can I expect as a new pet owner? Any hamster communities? Any hamster-related events? Any vets that specialize in small animals in the vicinity? Send me an email with other related products I may be interested in. Upsell and cross-sell to me. We've go the basics and a couple of luxuries, but at this point, I'm pretty excited (surprisingly) about the hamster, and my daughter is footing the bill with her birthday and Christmas money. She and I would be more than happy to spend her money! Get this information to me faster. As I mentioned, my window of opportunity is getting smaller, as eithe rmy daughter's money will run out on other things or we'll start losing the thrill of buying new hamster toys and treats. I realize this is easier said than done, and undoubtedly, the stores are getting value knowing my basic customer information and purchase history. Buth, they could really benefit by delivering a loyalty program that really earned my loyalty. "Goldeen" needs a new water bottle, yogurt chips, and chew toys as he doesn't seem to like the ones we bought. So for now, I'll just go to whichever store is the most convenient. Oh, and just for fun (not related to this post), here are a couple of videos my daughter really got a kick out of watching: Hamster on a Piano Tic in a Spin-Dryer

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• Travelling MVP #4: DevReach 2012

  - by DigiMortal

  Our next stop after Varna was Sofia where DevReach happens. DevReach is one of my favorite conferences in Europe because of sensible prices and strong speakers line-up. Also they have VIP-party after conference and this is good event to meet people you don’t see every day, have some discussion with speakers and find new friends. Our trip from Varna to Sofia took about 6.5 hours on bus. As I was tired from last evening it wasn’t problem for me as I slept half the trip. After smoking pause in Velike Tarnovo I watched movies from bus TV. We had supper later in city center Happy’s – place with good meat dishes and nice service. And next day it begun…. :) DevReach 2012 DevReach is held usually in Arena Mladost. It’s near airport and Telerik office. The event is organized by local MVP Martin Kulov together with Telerik. Two days of sessions with strong speakers is good reason enough for me to go to visit some event. Some topics covered by sessions: Windows 8 development web development SharePoint Windows Azure Windows Phone architecture Visual Studio Practically everybody can find some interesting session in every time slot. As the Arena is not huge it is very easy to go from one sessions to another if selected session for time slot is not what you expected. On the second floor of Arena there are many places where you can eat. There are simple chunk-food places like Burger King and also some restaurants. If you are hungry you will find something for your taste for sure. Also you can buy beer if it is too hot outside :) Weather was very good for October – practically Estonian summer – 25C and over. Sessions I visited Here is the list of sessions I visited at DevReach 2012: DevReach 2012 Opening & Welcome Messsage with Martin Kulov and Stephen Forte Principled N-Tier Solution Design with Steve Smith Data Patterns for the Cloud with Brian Randell .NET Garbage Collection Performance Tips with Sasha Goldshtein Building Secured, Scalable, Low-latency Web Applications with the Windows Azure Platform with Ido Flatow It’s a Knockout! MVVM Style Web Applications with Charles Nurse Web Application Architecture – Lessons Learned from Adobe Brackets with Brian Rinaldi Demystifying Visual Studio 2012 Performance Tools with Martin Kulov SPvNext – A Look At All the Exciting And New Features In SharePoint with Sahil Malik Portable Libraries – Why You Should Care with Lino Tadros I missed some sessions because of some death march projects that are going and that I have to coordinate but it was not big loss as I had time to walk around in session venue neighborhood and see Sofia Business Park. Next year again! I will be there again next year and hopefully more guys from Estonia will join me. I think it’s good idea to take short vacation for DevReach time and do things like we did this time – Bucharest, Varna, Sofia. It’s only good idea to plan some more free time so we are not very much in hurry and also we have no work stuff to do on the trip. This far this trip has been one of best trips I have organized and I will go and meet all those guys in this region again! :)

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• Technology vs. Antiquated Methods

  - by AreYouSerious

  So Here I am talking with my Program lead, about technology, and how while my father is the VP of a major company, he still doesn't have a blackberry, or a smart phone. and I think it's funny. Most people would say it's a generational thing. That because he's older, he dosen't accept technology, and that's why. I have trouble swallowing that because this is the same man, who bought a satellite radio for his car, and made sure that the printer for the house was networked so that his and my mom's laptop could print wirelessly from the living room through their wireless network. I think it has to do with more with necessity, and partially with finical responsibility. My father is very financially conciencious. Think about it yourself. you pay for internet at your home. You have internet access at your office. But if you get a smart phone you're going to pay almost the same amount just for that access. A lot of people take it as just another fixed cost... I'm one of those. I don't even think about it, as I check my facebook from the bus, train, or even while sitting in traffic... The convience of having connection everywhere outweigh the financial responsible person screaming at in the back of my mind. However This conversation lead us to another venue of discussion.... what happens when the power dies. if you left your charger at home, or you phone or navi just stops working... are you going to be able to continue on as you did when it was working... let take the navi as an example... if your navi stops working, how many of you know how to use a map, and navigate? can you even find where you are on a map using the cross streets that your stopped at? This is a skill that unfortunatelly is overlooked these days in the child rearing process. Most people don't see the value, while some others can't do it themselves, so how can they teach their offspring? Take another example.... what if your phone gets lost... or stolen, or you drive over it? do you have the numbers in their memorized? are they recorded somewhere? I know that if it weren't for google sync I wouldn't have them backed up... not sufficiently. And what good does that do if you're in timbuckto and your phone dies, think you can get on the internet to look up those numbers? Don't get me wrong. I'm the first to see the value in technology, and am willing to pay the price to not have to wait for prices to come down. I will pay extra to have that newest thing right now. but let me tell you what.... I know that should I ever procreate it will be a requirement for my offspring (children) to learn how to do something manually before I'll let them use technology. Food for thought?? Let everyone else know what you think.... just sayin'

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• Buy iPads In India From eZone, Reliance iStores [Chennai, Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai]

  - by Gopinath

  Close to an year wait for Apple iPad in India is over. Now everyone can buy a genuine iPad with manufacturers’ warranty from dozens of retail outlets set up by Future Bazar’s eZone and Reliance iStore. This puts an end to the grey market that was importing iPads through illegal channels, selling them at staggering high prices and with no warranty. iPad Retail Price at eZone & Outlet Address The iPad page on eZone’s website has price details of various models and they range from Rs.27,900/- to Rs.44,000/-. iPad 16 GB WiFi  – Rs. 27900.00 iPad 32 GB WiFi  – Rs. 32900.00 iPad 64 GB WiFi  – Rs. 37900.00 iPad 16 GB WiFi  + 3G – Rs. 34900.00 iPad 32 GB WiFi  + 3G – Rs. 39900.00 iPad 64 GB WiFi  + 3G – Rs. 44900.00 Here is the list of eZone stores selling iPads Chennai Stores eZone :: CHENNAI-GANDHI SQUARE Gandhi Square, ( G2),No. 46, Old Mahabalipuram Road, Kandanchavadi, Chennai ( Before Lifeline Hospital) – 600096. Phone : 24967771/7 eZone :: CHENNAI-MYLAPORE Grand Terrace, Old no. 94, new door no. 162, Luz Church Road, Mylapore, Chennai – . Tamil Nadu. Phone : 24987867/68. Mumbai Stores eZone :: MUMBAI-GOREGAON Shop No-S-23, 2nd Floor, Oberoi Mall Off Western Express Highway , Goregaon(E) , Mumbai – 400063, Phone: 28410011/40214771. eZone :: MUMBAI-POWAI-HAIKO MALL Hailko Mall, Level 2, Central Avenue, Hiranandani Garden, Powai, Mumbai, 400076. Phone: 25717355/56. eZone :: EZ-Sobo Central C wing,SOBO Central, Next to Tardoe AC Market, Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya Road, Mumbai – 400034. Phone : 022-30089344. Bangalore Stores eZone :: Koramangala (Bnglr) Regent Insignia, Ground Floor,# 414, 100 Ft Road, Koramangala, Bangalore – 560034 Phone : 080-25520241/242/243. eZone :: BANGALORE-INDIRA NAGAR No.62, Asha Pearl,100 Feet Road, Opp.AXIS Bank.Indiranagar, Bangalore – 560038 Phone : 25216857/6855/6856. eZone :: BANGALORE-PASADENA pasadena’ (Ground floor),18/1.(old number 125/a),10th main,Ashoka pillar road,Jaynagar 1st block,Bangalore – 560 011. Phone : 26577527. Delhi Stores eZone :: NEW DELHI-PUSA ROAD Ground/Lower Ground Floor, Plot # 26, Pusa Road, Adjacent to Karol Bagh Metro Station, Karol Bagh, New Delhi – 110005. Phone :28757040/41. For more details check eZone iPad Product Page iPads at Reliance iStore Reliance iStores are exclusive outlets for selling Apple products in India. All the models of iPad are available at Reliance iStore and the price details are not available on their websites. You may walk into any of the iStore close by your locality or call them to get the details. To locate the stores close by your locality please check store locator page on iStore Website. Do you know any other retail stores selling iPads in India? This article titled,Buy iPads In India From eZone, Reliance iStores [Chennai, Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai], was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• SQLAuthority News – Random Thoughts and Random Ideas

  - by pinaldave

  There are days when I keep on wondering about SQL, and even my life overall. Today is Saturday so I decided to write about SQL Server. Just like any other mornings, I woke up at 5 and opened my blog editor. I usually do not open Twitter or Facebook when I am planning to focus on my work, as they are little distractions for me. But today I opened my Twitter account and came across a very interesting quote from a friend: ‘Can I expect you to be different today?’ Well, I think it was very powerful quote for me to read first thing on a new day. This quote froze me for a while and made me think, “Do I really want to write about an SQL Server tip, or something different?”  After a little thinking, I’ve realized that for today I would go on and write something different. I am going to write about a few of the ideas and thoughts I had yesterday. After writing all these, I realized that if I am thinking so much in a day, and if I write a blog post of my random musing of the week or month, it can be so long (and boring). Here are some of my random thoughts I’d like to share with you: When the airplane lands, why does everybody get up and try to rush out when their luggage would be coming probably 20-30 minutes later? I really do not like this question when it was asked to me: “SQL Server is not using optimal index which I just created – how can I force it?” I am not going elaborate on this statement but you are allowed to in the comment section. Why do some people wish Good Morning even when they meet us after 4 PM? Can I optimize a query so much that it gives me a result before I execute it? Is it corruption when someone does their personal household work at office? The lane where I drive is always the slowest lane. Why waste time on correcting others when there are a lot of pending improvements for ourselves? If I have to get Tattoo, which SQL Server Execution Plan symbol should I get? Why do I reach office so early that the coffee machine is yet running its daily cleaning job? Why does every laptop have a ‘Page Up’ key at different locations on the keyboard? While I like color movies, I really appreciate black and white photographs. I do not appreciate statements like, “If I receive your books in PDF, I will spread it to many people to give you much greater exposure. So would you please send them to me ASAP?” Do not tell me, “Why does the database grow back after shrinking it every day?” I suggest you use “Search this blog” for the explanation. Petrol prices are currently at INR 74. I hope the rate remains there. Let me ask you the same question which started my day today:  “Can I expect you to be different today?” Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• My Tech Ed North America Preview - Certification Edition

  - by Chris Gardner

  In my previous TechEd North America Preview, I addressed all the content I wanted to see at the show. This time, we shall turn our attention to the certifications I might try to pick up. If you have never been to TechEd North America before, one of the greatest things about the event is an on-site certification center. If you have a couple hours to spare, you can walk up to a test. The first test on my agenda is 70-5231. I took this update test once, but did not do well on the MVC portion2. A few practice tests later, and I think I'm ready to fake that section. After that, I need to complete my road to being a master. The good folks here at work have been having a real love / hate relationship with the idea of me become an MCM in SQL Server3. Of course, before I do that, I need to finally take the SQL Administration tests. Thus, we shall add 70-4324 and 70-4505 to the list. Speaking of MCM, TechEd North America will have a special on test 88-9706. This test is normally $500, and you have to find a place to take it7. However, there is a special 50% off rate for people who take it on location. With those kind of prices, I may just take it as a form of study guide. As a final push, I may take some Windows Phone exams. I mentioned in my previous post that I may attend the 70-5998 Exam Cram session. Unfortunately, I will be staffing the Hands-On-Lab at that time. As we know, this has never stopped me from taking a test. This may lead to fits of 70-5069, but after we've come this far... That should complete my list. Do I really think I'll find time to take 6 tests at TechEd North America? Probably not. I have done it at TechEd North America before, but that was before I was TechEd North America staff. I also had a co-worker pass 9 in one year, but he basically did nothing but travel to Orlando in 2007 to take tests. And what's the point of attending a HUGE conference if you don't network? Of course, networking will have to wait for Friday's post... 1 Upgrade: Transition Your MCPD .NET Framework 3.5 Web Developer Skills to MCPD .NET Framework 4 Web Developer 2Because I never have used, nor do I really think I ever will use, MVC... 3By that, I mean they love the idea, and they hate the price 4Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Implementation and Maintenance 5PRO: Designing, Optimizing and Maintaining a Database Administrative Solution Using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 6SQL Server 2008 Microsoft Certified Master: Knowledge Exam 7Which isn't nearly as expensive as the Lab Exam, nor as difficult to find a location. However, it is not offered at every testing facility. 8PRO: Designing and Developing Windows Phone Applications 9TS: Silverlight 4, Development

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• Hey Retailers, Are You Ready For The Holiday Season?

  - by Jeri Kelley

  With online holiday spending reaching $35.3 billion in 2011 and American shoppers spending just under $750 on average on their holiday purchases this year, how ready is your business for the 2012 holiday season?   ?? Today’s shoppers do not take their purchases lightly.  They are more connected, interact with more resources to make decisions, diligently compare products and services, seek out the best deals, and ask for input from friends and family.   This holiday season, as consumers browse for apparel, tablets, toys, and much more, they will be bombarded with retailer communication - from emails and commercials to countless search engine results and social recommendations.  With a flurry of activity coming at consumers from every channel and competitor, your success this year will rely on communicating a consistent, personalized message no matter where your customers are shopping.  Here are a few ideas to help with your commerce strategy this holiday season: CONSISTENCY COUNTS FOR MULTICHANNEL SHOPPERS??According to a November 2011 study commissioned by Oracle, “Channel Commerce 2011: The Consumer View,” 54% of consumers in the U.S. and Canada regularly employ two or more channels before they make a purchase.  While each channel has its own unique benefit, user profile, and purpose, it’s critical that your shoppers have a consistent core experience wherever they’re looking for information or making a purchase.  Be sure consumers can consistently search and browse the same product information and receive the same promotions online, on their mobile devices, and in-store.? USE YOUR CUSTOMER’S CONTEXT TO SURFACE RELEVANT CONTENTYour Web site is likely the hub of your holiday activity.  According to a Monetate infographic, 39% of shoppers will visit your Web site directly to find out about the best holiday deals.   Use everything you know about your customers from past purchase data to browsing history to provide a relevant experience at every click, and assemble content in a context that entices shoppers to buy online, or influences an offline purchase.? TAKE ADVANTAGE OF MOBILE BEHAVIOR?Having a mobile program is no longer a choice.   Armed with smartphones and tablets, consumers now have access to more and more product information and can compare products and prices from anywhere.  In fact, approximately 52% of smartphone users will use their device to research products, redeem coupons and use apps to assist in their holiday gift purchase.  At a minimum, be sure your mobile environment has store information, consistent pricing and promotions, and simple checkout capabilities. ARM IN-STORE ASSOCIATES WITH TABLETS?According to RISNews.com, 31% of retailers plan to begin testing tablets in stores in 2012, 22% have already begun such testing and 6% had fully deployed tablets within stores.   Take advantage of this compelling sales tool to get shoppers interacting with videos, user reviews, how-to guides, side-by-side product comparisons, and specs.  Automatically trigger upsell and cross sell suggestions for store associates to recommend for each product or category, build in alerts for promotions, and allow associates to place orders and check inventory from their tablet.  ? WISDOM OF THE CROWDS IS GOOD, BUT WISDOM FROM FRIENDS IS BETTER?Shoppers who grapple with options are looking for recommendations; they’d rather get advice from friends, and they’re more likely to spend more while doing so.    In fact, according to an infographic by Mr. Youth, 66% of social media users made a purchase on Black Friday or Cyber Monday as a direct result of social media interactions with brands or family.   This holiday season, be sure you are leveraging your social channels from Facebook to Pinterest to drive consistent promotions and help your brand to become part of the conversation. So, are you ready for the holidays this year?  

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• Indexed view deadlocking

  - by Dave Ballantyne

  Deadlocks can be a really tricky thing to track down the root cause of.  There are lots of articles on the subject of tracking down deadlocks, but seldom do I find that in a production system that the cause is as straightforward.  That being said,  deadlocks are always caused by process A needs a resource that process B has locked and process B has a resource that process A needs.  There may be a longer chain of processes involved, but that is the basic premise. Here is one such (much simplified) scenario that was at first non-obvious to its cause: The system has two tables,  Products and Stock.  The Products table holds the description and prices of a product whilst Stock records the current stock level. USE tempdb GO CREATE TABLE Product ( ProductID INTEGER IDENTITY PRIMARY KEY, ProductName VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL, Price MONEY NOT NULL ) GO CREATE TABLE Stock ( ProductId INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, StockLevel INTEGER NOT NULL ) GO INSERT INTO Product SELECT TOP(1000) CAST(NEWID() AS VARCHAR(255)), ABS(CAST(CAST(NEWID() AS VARBINARY(255)) AS INTEGER))%100 FROM sys.columns a CROSS JOIN sys.columns b GO INSERT INTO Stock SELECT ProductID,ABS(CAST(CAST(NEWID() AS VARBINARY(255)) AS INTEGER))%100 FROM Product There is a single stored procedure of GetStock: Create Procedure GetStock as SELECT Product.ProductID,Product.ProductName FROM dbo.Product join dbo.Stock on Stock.ProductId = Product.ProductID where Stock.StockLevel <> 0 Analysis of the system showed that this procedure was causing a performance overhead and as reads of this data was many times more than writes,  an indexed view was created to lower the overhead. CREATE VIEW vwActiveStock With schemabinding AS SELECT Product.ProductID,Product.ProductName FROM dbo.Product join dbo.Stock on Stock.ProductId = Product.ProductID where Stock.StockLevel <> 0 go CREATE UNIQUE CLUSTERED INDEX PKvwActiveStock on vwActiveStock(ProductID) This worked perfectly, performance was improved, the team name was cheered to the rafters and beers all round.  Then, after a while, something else happened… The system updating the data changed,  The update pattern of both the Stock update and the Product update used to be: BEGIN TRAN UPDATE... COMMIT BEGIN TRAN UPDATE... COMMIT BEGIN TRAN UPDATE... COMMIT It changed to: BEGIN TRAN UPDATE... UPDATE... UPDATE... COMMIT Nothing that would raise an eyebrow in even the closest of code reviews.  But after this change we saw deadlocks occuring. You can reproduce this by opening two sessions. In session 1 begin transaction Update Product set ProductName ='Test' where ProductID = 998 Then in session 2 begin transaction Update Stock set Stocklevel = 5 where ProductID = 999 Update Stock set Stocklevel = 5 where ProductID = 998 Hop back to session 1 and.. Update Product set ProductName ='Test' where ProductID = 999 Looking at the deadlock graphs we could see the contention was between two processes, one updating stock and the other updating product, but we knew that all the processes do to the tables is update them.  Period.  There are separate processes that handle the update of stock and product and never the twain shall meet, no reason why one should be requiring data from the other.  Then it struck us,  AH the indexed view. Naturally, when you make an update to any table involved in a indexed view, the view has to be updated.  When this happens, the data in all the tables have to be read, so that explains our deadlocks.  The data from stock is read when you update product and vice-versa. The fix, once you understand the problem fully, is pretty simple, the apps did not guarantee the order in which data was updated.  Luckily it was a relatively simple fix to order the updates and deadlocks went away.  Note, that there is still a *slight* risk of a deadlock occurring, if both a stock update and product update occur at *exactly* the same time.

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• iOS 5 New Features vs Android

  - by kerry

  Browsing through the iOS 5 features list, I can’t help but notice a lot of it is catch up. Having owned both an iPhone and an Android for a considerable amount of time, I figured I would jot down my opinions. Notification Center – Completely ripped off from Android but looks good and is a much needed addition iMessage – This is very interesting as most people who would think it’s cool, probably really wouldn’t understand the significance.  Basically, Apple is adding an IM application to iOS.  Now iPhone / iPad users can sit around messaging each other how cool it is like Crackberry users circa 2003.  I guess the only real improvement over MMS is that you can easily setup groups, see when each other are typing, and don’t incur text messaging charges; at the expense of leaving your non-iOS buddies out (who wants to talk to those losers anyways?). Newstand – An app update and not an OS one (Apple typically doesn’t make distinctions).  It all seems like stuff my current Nook stuff will do.  Note: I did look to compare prices but it seems that information is not available without downloading iTunes.  lame. Reminders – TODO lists are ho hum, but the ability to have reminders when you arrive or leave a position is pretty cool. Twitter integration – The fact that the best Apple can come up with is ‘one at a timing’ online service integration is laughable at best. Camera – Can control it from the lock screen.  Now you’ll have tons of pocket lint photos in your iCloud to go along with the wicked shot of that cheetah that just unexpectedly ran by your apartment. Photos – Speaking of iCloud, all of your devices photos will be synced through it.  That’s cool I guess, not sure if Android will do the same. Safari – What?  You haven’t been reading rss feeds on your device this whole time?  Something tells me you aren’t about to start. PC Free – Finely Apple untethers the iPhone.  What took them so long? Game Center – This should be an interesting service.  Attention Apple fanboys immediately forget how they are blatantly copying Microsoft achievements (at least rename them). Wifi Sync – Just couldn’t cut the cord completely could they?  For what it’s worth, the Zune has been doing this for 5 years now. All in all a pretty big update.  Mostly iCloud.  Mostly keeping up the mobile status quo.  As an Android user, I can’t say there is anything I am envious of.

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• I.T. Chargeback : Core to Cloud Computing

  - by Anand Akela

  Contributed by Mark McGill Consolidation and Virtualization have been widely adopted over the years to help deliver benefits such as increased server utilization, greater agility and lower cost to the I.T. organization. These are key enablers of cloud, but in themselves they do not provide a complete cloud solution. Building a true enterprise private cloud involves moving from an admin driven world, where the I.T. department is ultimately responsible for the provisioning of servers, databases, middleware and applications, to a world where the consumers of I.T. resources can provision their infrastructure, platforms and even complete application stacks on demand. Switching from an admin-driven provisioning model to a user-driven model creates some challenges. How do you ensure that users provisioning resources will not provision more than they need? How do you encourage users to return resources when they have finished with them so that others can use them? While chargeback has existed as a concept for many years (especially in mainframe environments), it is the move to this self-service model that has created a need for a new breed of chargeback applications for cloud. Enabling self-service without some form of chargeback is like opening a shop where all of the goods are free. A successful chargeback solution will be able to allocate the costs of shared I.T. infrastructure based on the relative consumption by the users. Doing this creates transparency between the I.T. department and the consumers of I.T. When users are able to understand how their consumption translates to cost they are much more likely to be prudent when it comes to their use of I.T. resources. This also gives them control of their I.T. costs, as moderate usage will translate to a lower charge at the end of the month. Implementing Chargeback successfully create a win-win situation for I.T. and the consumers. Chargeback can help to ensure that I.T. resources are used for activities that deliver business value. It also improves the overall utilization of I.T. infrastructure as I.T. resources that are not needed are not left running idle. Enterprise Manager 12c provides an integrated metering and chargeback solution for Enterprise Manager Targets. This solution is built on top of the rich configuration and utilization information already available in Enterprise Manager. It provides metering not just for virtual machines, but also for physical hosts, databases and middleware. Enterprise Manager 12c provides metering based on the utilization and configuration of the following types of Enterprise Manager Target: Oracle VM Host Oracle Database Oracle WebLogic Server Using Enterprise Manager Chargeback, administrators are able to create a set of Charge Plans that are used to attach prices to the various metered resources. These plans can contain fixed costs (eg. $10/month/database), configuration based costs (eg. $10/month if OS is Windows) and utilization based costs (eg. $0.05/GB of Memory/hour) The self-service user provisioning these resources is then able to view a report that details their usage and helps them understand how this usage translates into cost. Armed with this information, the user is able to determine if the resources are delivering adequate business value based on what is being charged. Figure 1: Chargeback in Self-Service Portal Enterprise Manager 12c provides a variety of additional interfaces into this data. The administrator can access summary and trending reports. Summary reports allow the administrator to drill-down through the cost center hierarchy to identify, for example, the top resource consumers across the organization. Figure 2: Charge Summary Report Trending reports can be used for I.T. planning and budgeting as they show utilization and charge trends over a period of time. Figure 3: CPU Trend Report We also provide chargeback reports through BI Publisher. This provides a way for users who do not have an Enterprise Manager login (such as Line of Business managers) to view charge and usage information. For situations where a bill needs to be produced, chargeback can be integrated with billing applications such as Oracle Billing and Revenue Management (BRM). Further information on Enterprise Manager 12c’s integrated metering and chargeback: White Paper Screenwatch Cloud Management on OTN

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• Can someone explain the true landscape of Rails vs PHP deployment, particularly within the context of Reseller-based web hosting (e.g., Hostgator)?

  - by rcd

  Currently, I have a reseller account with the company HostGator. I design websites, which up until now have occasionally been wrapped in Wordpress CMSs and the like (PHP applications). I then sell hosting (of the site I've designed) to the client, which is pretty simple, in that I can simply click a button and add a new shared hosting account/site with whatever settings I want. Furthermore, I then utilize WHMCS to automate billing and account management. It's a nice package and pretty simple. I pay something like $25 a month, and can sell a hundred accounts under this (because my clients bandwidth requirements are low). Now I am finding the need to develop more customized applications, including a minimalist CMS and several proprietary things. I soon anticipate developing these apps for clients as well. Thus, I've spent the past few months learning Rails, and it's coming along well now. The thing that has nagged at me all along, though, is the deployment issue. I can't wrap my brain around it. It seems like all of the popular options (Heroku, etc) have nice automation with git and are set up in the "Rails Way". I get that (sort of). But it's terribly expensive... a single dyno, a helper, and the cheapest database (which they say is mainly suitable for testing) that isn't limited to 5MB runs $51. This is for ONE app!!! Throw in a "production" DB and you're over $200. This is like... the same prices as getting a server somewhere, right? Meanwhile, going back to what I guess is a "traditional" hosting environment with Hostgator, their server only has Ruby 1.8.7 and Rails 2.3.5... No Rails 3. AND, no Passenger (not that I really understand the difference in CGI or mod_rails or whatever, but they say Passenger is the simplest). So I'm to understand that if I build an app in Rails 3, it won't run at all on this host? But damn, I already have these accounts under my reseller account there, all running static html and/or PHP stuff, right? So what now? How do I get all of this under one simple (and affordable) roof? Forgive my ignorance, but I just don't get it. Managing a VPS is cool and all, but entails learning server admin stuff and security... And it's expensive. I get that a shared and/or reseller "server-based" (forgive the terminology) may be inadequate for large-scale apps that use a lot of bandwidth... But what about for those of us who are building real (but small and low bandwidth) apps (with Rails) and who want to deploy them simply, cheaply, using the same conceptual approach as PHP? Even after learning all of this Ruby and Rails stuff for months, I'm questioning whether it's worth it when it comes to deployment. I want to build a small app, upload it to my home directory on a shared server account, and just make it run. Why should that be so hard? Am I just choosing the wrong language/framework? Forgive my ignorance in the subject; these questions are not rhetorical; just trying to learn here. So: 1) I'd appreciate if someone could give me a good rundown of how to understand deployment in Rails vs. PHP. 2) I'd appreciate if someone could address my issue with running a hosting/web business around reseller hosting (Hostgator) while also being able to host Rails apps. Can it be done? And how can a company like Hostgator completely ignore what's current in Rails/Ruby? Thanks.

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• SQL Server Licensing in a VMware vSphere Cluster

  - by Helvick

  If I have SQL Server 2008 instances running in virtual machines on a VMware vSphere cluster with vMotion\DRS enabled so that the VM's can (potentially) run on any one of the physical servers in the cluster what precisely are the license requirements? For example assume that I have 4 physical ESX Hosts with dual physical CPU's and 3 separate single vCPU Virtual Machines running SQL Server 2008 running in that cluster. How many SQL Standard Processor licenses would I need? Is it 3 (one per VM) or 12 (one per VM on each physical host) or something else? How many SQL Enterprise Processor licenses would I need? Is it 3 (one per VM) or 8 (one for each physical CPU in the cluster) or, again, something else? The range in the list prices for these options goes from $17k to $200k so getting it right is quite important. Bonus question: If I choose the Server+CAL licensing model do I need to buy multiple Server instance licenses for each of the ESX hosts (so 12 copies of the SQL Server Standard server license so that there are enough licenses on each host to run all VM's) or again can I just license the VM and what difference would using Enterprise per server licensing make? Edited to Add Having spent some time reading the SQL 2008 Licensing Guide (63 Pages! Includes Maps!*) I've come across this: • Under the Server/CAL model, you may run unlimited instances of SQL Server 2008 Enterprise within the server farm, and move those instances freely, as long as those instances are not running on more servers than the number of licenses assigned to the server farm. • Under the Per Processor model, you effectively count the greatest number of physical processors that may support running instances of SQL Server 2008 Enterprise at any one time across the server farm and assign that number of Processor licenses And earlier: ..For SQL Server, these rule changes apply to SQL Server 2008 Enterprise only. By my reading this means that for my 3 VM's I only need 3 SQL 2008 Enterprise Processor Licenses or one copy of Server Enterprise + CALs for the cluster. By implication it means that I have to license all processors if I choose SQL 2008 Standard Processor licensing or that I have to buy a copy of SQL Server 2008 Standard for each ESX host if I choose to use CALs. *There is a map to demonstrate that a Server Farm cannot extend across an area broader than 3 timezones unless it's in the European Free Trade Area, I wasn't expecting that when I started reading it.

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