good boy - Page 187 - Developer IT

Visual Studio & TFS – List of addins, extensions, patches and hotfixes – Latest and Greatest

- by terje

This post is a list of the addins and extensions we (I ) recommend for use in Inmeta. It’s coming up all the time – what to install, where are the download sites, etc etc, and thus I thought it better to post it here and keep it updated. The basics are Visual Studio 2010 connected to a Team Foundation Server 2010. The edition of Visual Studio I use is the Ultimate Edition, but as many stay with the Premium Edition I’ve marked the extensions which only works with the Ultimate with a . I’ve also split the group into Recommended (which means Required) and Optional (which means Recommended) and Nice to Have (which means Optional) . The focus is to get a setup which can be used for a complete coding experience for the whole ALM process. The Code Gallery is found either through the Tools/Extension Manager menu in Visual Studio or through this link. The ones to really download is the Recommended category. Then consider the Optional based on your needs. The list of course reflects what I use for my work , so it is by no means complete, and for some of the tools there are equally useful alternatives. The components directly associated with Visual Studio from Microsoft should be common, see the Microsoft column. Product Available on Code Gallery Latest Version License Rec/Opt/N2H Applicable to Microsoft TFS Power Tools Sept 2010 Complete setup msi on link, split into parts on CG Sept 2010 Free Recommended TFS integration Yes Productivity Power Tools Yes 10.0.11019.3 Free Recommended Coding Yes Code Contracts No 1.4.30903 Free Recommended Coding & Quality Yes Code Contracts Editor Extensions Yes 1.4.30903 Free Recommended Coding & Quality Yes VSCommands Yes 3.6.4.1 Lite version Free (Good enough) Nice to have Coding No Power Commands Yes 1.0.2.3 Free Recommended Coding Yes FeaturePack 2 No. MSDN Subscriber download under Visual Studio 2010 FP2 Part of MSDN Subscription Recommended Modeling & Testing Yes ReSharper No (Trial only) 5.1.1 Licensed Recommended Coding & Quality No dotTrace No 4.0.1 Licensed Optional Quality No NDepends No (Trial only) Licensed Optional Quality No tangible T4 editor Yes 1.950 Lite version Free (Good enough) Optional Coding (T4 templates) No Reflector No (Trial of Pro version only) 6.5 Lite version Free (Good enough) Recommended Coding/Investigation No LinqPad No 4.26.2 Licensed Nice to have Coding No Beyond Compare No 3.1.11 Licensed Recommended Coding/Investigation No Pex and Moles No (Moles available alone on CG) . Complete on MSDN Subscriber download under Visual Studio 2010 0.94.51023 Part of MSDN Subscription Optional Coding & Unit Testing Yes ApexSQL No Licensed Nice to have SQL No Some important Patches, upgrades and fixes Product Date Information Rec/Opt Applicable to Scrolling context menu KB2345133 and KB2413613 October 2010 Here Recommended Visual Studio MTM Patch October 2010 Here and here KB2387011 Recommended (if you use MTM) MTM Data warehouse fix June 2010 Iteration dates fails with SQL 2008 R2. KB2222312. Affects Burndown chart in Agile workbook Only for SQL 2008 R2 Server Upgrade 2008 to 2010 issue and hotfix August 2010 Fixes problems with labels and branches which are lost during upgrade. Apply before upgrade. Note: This has been fixed in the latest re-release of the TFS Server dated Aug 5th 2010. See here. Recommends downloading the latest bits. Only if upgrade from 2008 from earlier bits Server

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SQL SERVER – Transcript of Learning SQL Server Performance: Indexing Basics – Interview of Vinod Kumar by Pinal Dave

- by pinaldave

Recently I just wrote a blog post on about Learning SQL Server Performance: Indexing Basics and I received lots of request that if we can share some insight into the course. Here is 200 seconds interview of Vinod Kumar I took right after completing the course. We have few free codes to watch the course, please your comment at http://facebook.com/SQLAuth and we will few of first ones, we will send the code. There are many people who said they would like to read the transcript of the video. Here I have generated the same. Pinal: Vinod, we recently released this course, SQL Server Indexing. It is about performance tuning. So tell me – how do indexes help performance? Vinod: I think what happens in the industry when it comes to performance is that developers and DBAs look at indexes first. So that’s the first step for any performance tuning exercise, indexing is one of the most critical aspects and it is important to learn it the right way. Pinal: Correct. So what you mean to say is that if you know indexing you can pretty much tune any server and query. Vinod: So I might contradict my false statement now. Indexing is usually a stepping stone but it does not lead you to the end. But it’s good to start with indexing and there are lots of nuances to indexing that you need to understand, like how SQL uses indexing and how performance can improve because of the strategies that you have made. Pinal: But now I’m confused. First you said indexes are good, and then you said that indexes can degrade your performance. So what is this course about? I mean how does this course really make an impact? Vinod: Ok -so from the course perspective, what we are trying to do is give you a capsule which gives you a good start. Every journey needs a beginning, you need that first step. This course is that first step in understanding. This is the most basic, fundamental course that we have tried to attack. This is the fundamentals of indexing, some of the key things that you must know about indexing. Some of the basics of indexing are lesser known and so I think this course is geared towards each and every one of you out there who wants to understand little bit more about indexing. Pinal: So what I understand is that if I enrolled in this course I will have a minimum understanding about indexing when dealing with performance tuning. Right? Vinod: Exactly. In this course is we have tried to give you a nice summary. We are talking about clustered indexing, non clustered indexing, too many indexes, too few indexes, over indexing, under indexing, duplicate indexing, columns tune indexing, with SQL Server 2012. There’s lot’s to learn. Pinal: You can see the URL [http://bit.ly/sql-index] of the course on the screen. Go ahead, attend, and let us know what you think about it. Thank you. Vinod: Thank you. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Index, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology, Video

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Best WordPress Shopping Cart & Ecommerce Plugins

- by Edward

A versatile WordPress Shopping Cart plugin can help you create a feature-rich online store on your WordPress-powered website or blog. Some are so advanced that you can get your store up and running in minutes. Some plugins allow you to take ecommerce to a next level with their high end customization tools. Here is a list of best WP shopping cart plugins available: Cart66 One of the best WordPress plugin with lots of features, great quality and ease of use. It accepts few more payment getways such as PayPal Website Payments Standard, PayPal Website Payments Professional, PayPal Express Checkout, eProcessing Network etc. It has flexible design options, recurring payments for subscriptions, memberships, and payment plans, Easy PCI Compliance – Safe and Secure. It is fast and efficient, one can sell digital and physical products and support is good. Price: Standard $49 & Professional $99 Details Download StorePress StorePress is a WordPress theme, which is fully coded. It comes with scripts that can change a WordPress blog into a veritable e-commerce virtual store. With this great premium WordPress theme, one can start affiliate stores, or promote affiliate products. Price: Single $59.99 & Developer License $119.99 Details Download WordPress eStore Plugin This shopping cart plugin comes with easy checkout, ease of design and use, automatic instant digital product delivery, Next Gen gallery integration, autoresponder integration etc. It is a lightweight shopping cart and allows multi site license. This plugin offers an amazingly comprehensive toolkit that will ensure your online shop is almost just plug-and-play. Price: $49.99 Details Download Shoppers Press Shoppers press is a premium cart for Word Press that comes with 20+ to choose from and 20+ built in payment gateways. It features one-click setups, personalized user accounts, easy management tools, detailed sales tracking, promotional options, a variety of product import tools, and many more features Price:$79 Details Download WordPress Shopping Cart plugin The WordPress Shopping Cart plugin by Tribulant quickly and seamlessly integrates an online shop with a fully functional shopping cart interface into any WordPress website. It has easy to use interface, which enables set up of multiple products and categorize and organizing them into multiple product categories. It also has many more attractive features. Price: $49.99 Details Download WP e-commerce WP e-commerce is a free full-featured shopping cart plugin for WordPress. It is a full featured shopping cart and boasts of easy checkout. It offers a wide range of features including SSL compatibility, customization and merchandising, integrated payment processing solutions including manual payment, Google Checkout and PayPal Payments, and email marketing. It is wordpress and social networking integrated. It is customizable by use of PHP template tag, wordpress shortcode and widgets. Details Download YAK for WordPress YAK is an open source shopping cart plugin for WordPress. It associates products with weblog entries (in other words, posts), so the post ID also becomes the product code. It supports both pages and posts as products, handles different types of product through categories. YAK supports downloadable products, so any e-books, plugins, or zip files you’re marketing can be easily purchased and dowloaded. Details Download Market Press It is another shopping cart full of many features. It offers following features such as assign categories and tags to products to make them easy to find, stock tracking with alerts, order management/alerts, fully customizable email messages, full support for most major currencies, fully customizable store urls/slugs, customers can checkout without being a site user etc. Expensive, but good option for those who can afford it. Price: $17.42/month Details Download Shopp It is an excellent shopping cart plugin for Word Press. This plugin is extremely easy to install and use. It has a cleaner interface. The customer support is good. Use can easily customize the look of the cart by using its amazing features. Price: $55 Details Download Related posts:8 PHP Shopping Cart Software for Reliable Ecommerce Solution Shopping Cart SEO 8 Free Open Source Shopping Carts

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Is Agile the new micromanagement?

- by Smith James

Hi, This question has been cooking in my head for a while so I wanted to ask those who are following agile/scrum practices in their development environments. My company has finally ventured into incorporating agile practices and has started out with a team of 4 developers in an agile group on a trial basis. It has been 4 months with 3 iterations and they continue to do it without going fully agile for the rest of us. This is due to the fact that management's trust to meet business requirements with a quite a bit of ad hoc type request from high above. Recently, I talked to the developers who are part of this initiative; they tell me that it's not fun. They are not allowed to talk to other developers by their Scrum master and are not allowed to take any phone calls in the work area (which maybe fine to an extent). For example, if I want to talk to my friend for kicks who is in the agile team, I am not allowed without the approval of the Scrum master; who is sitting right next to the agile team. The idea of all this or the agile is to provide a complete vacuum for agile developers from any interruptions and to have them put in good 6+ productive hours. Well, guys, I am no agile guru but what I have read Yahoo agile rollout document and similar for other organizations, it gives me a feeling that agile is not cheap. It require resources and budget to instill agile into the teams and correct issue as they arrive to put them back on track. For starters, it requires training for developers and coaching for managers and etc, etc... The current Scrum master was a manager who took a couple days agile training class paid by the management is now leading this agile team. I have also heard in the meeting that agile manifesto doesn't dictate that agile is not set in stones and is customized differently for each company. Well, it all sounds good and reason. In conclusion, I always thought the agile was supposed to bring harmony in the development teams which results in happy developers. However, I am getting a very opposite feeling when talking to the developers in the agile team. They are unhappy that they cannot talk anything but work, sitting quietly all day just working, and they feel it's just another way for management to make them work more. Tell me please, if this is one of the examples of good practices used for the purpose of selfish advantage for more dollars? Or maybe, it's just us the developers like me and this agile team feels that they don't like to work in an environment where they only breathe work because they are at work. Thanks. Edit: It's a company in healthcare domain that has offices across US, but we're in Texas. It definitely feels like a cowboy style agile which makes me really not wanting to go for agile at all, esp at my current company. All of it has to do with the management being completely cheap. Cutting out expensive coffee for cheaper version, emphasis on savings and being productive while staying as lean as possible. My feeling is that someone in the management behind the door threw out this idea, that agile makes you produce more so we can show our bosses we're producing more with the same headcount. Or, maybe, it will allow us to reduce headcount if that's the case. EDITED: They are having their 5 min daily meeting. But not allowed to chat or talk with someone outside of their team. All focus is on work.

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Today's Links (6/29/2011)

- by Bob Rhubart

Event-Driven SOA: Events meet Services | Guido Schmutz Oracle ACE Director Guido Schmutz shows you how to achieve extreme loose coupling within a Service-Oriented Architecture by using event-driven interactions. Misconceptions About Software Architecture | Sanjeev Kumar A concise, to-the-point, and informative article by Sanjeev Kumar. Good Leaders Acknowledge What Can't Be Done - Jeffrey Pfeffer - Harvard Business Review "None of us likes to admit to bad decisions," says Jeffrey Pfeffer. "But imagine how much harder that is for someone who has been chosen to lead a large organization precisely because he or she is thought to have the power to see the future more clearly and chart a wise course." Suboptimal Thinking within Enterprise Architecture | James McGovern McGovern says: "We need to remember that enterprises live and thrive beyond just the current person at the helm." Boundaryless Information Flow | Richard Veryard "If all the boundaries are removed or porous, then the (extended) enterprise or ecosystem becomes like a giant sponge, in which all information permeates the whole," Veryard says. "Some people may think that's a good idea, but it's not what I'd call loose coupling." Coming to a City Near You: Oracle Business Analytics Summits | Rob Reynolds This series of events includes a Technology and Architecture track. New Date for Implementation of Sun Hands-On Course Requirement (Oracle Certification) As announced on the Oracle Certification website, Java Architect, Java Developer, Solaris System Administrator and Solaris Security Administrator certification tracks will include a new mandatory course attendance requirement. VirtualBox 4.0.10 is now available for download | Bob Netherton Netherton shares information on the new release. Updated Technical Best Practices whitepaper | Anthony Shorten The Technical Best Practices whitepaper has been updated with the latest advice. "New advice includes new installation advice, advanced settings, new security settings and advice for both Oracle WebLogic and IBM WebSphere installations," says Shorten. Kscope 11 ADF, AIA and Business Rules | Peter Paul van de Beek Whitehorses Solution Architect Peter Paul van de Beek shares his impressions of KScope11 presentations by Markus Eisele, Sten Vesterli, and Edwin Biemond. Amazon AWS for the learning experience | Andrej Koelewijn "Using AWS changes your expectations how your internal data center should operate," says Koelewijn. BPMN is dead, long live BPEL! (SOA Partner Community Blog) Jürgen Kress shares information -- including a long list of speakers -- for the SOA & BPM Integration Days 2011 conference, October 12th & 13th 2011 in Düsseldorf. InfoQ: HTML5 and the Dawn of Rich Mobile Web Applications James Pearce introduces cross-platform web apps development using HTML5 and web frameworks, such as jQTouch, jQuery Mobile, Sencha Touch, PhoneGap, outlining what makes a good framework. InfoQ: Interview and Book Excerpt: CMMI for Development "Frameworks like TOGAF are used to define an architecture that aligns IT assets and resources to support key business needs and processes of key stakeholders," says SEI's Mike Konrad. "But the individual application systems, capabilities, services, networks, and other IT assets and infrastructure still need to be acquired, developed, or sustained." InfoQ: Architecting a Cloud-Scale Identity Fabric | Eric Olden "The most cited reason for not moving to the cloud is concern about security," says Olden. "In particular, managing user identity and access in the cloud is a tough problem to solve and a big security concern for organizations."

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The dislikes of TDD

- by andrewstopford

I enjoy debates about TDD and Brian Harrys blog post is no exception. Brian sounds out what he likes and dislikes about TDD and it's the dislikes I'll focus on. The idea of having unit tests that cover virtually every line of code that I’ve written that I have to refactor every time I refactor my code makes me shudder. Doing this way makes me take nearly twice as long as it would otherwise take and I don’t feel like I get sufficient benefits from it. Refactoring your tests to match your refactored code sounds like the tests are suffering. Too many hard dependencies with no SOLID concerns are a sure fire reason you would do this. Maybe at the start of a TDD cycle you would need to do this as your design evolves and you remove these dependencies but this should quickly be resolved as you refactor. If you find your self still doing it then stop and look back at your design. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of unit tests. I just prefer to write them after the code has stopped shaking a bit. In fact most of my early testing is “manual”. Either I write a small UI on top of my service that allows me to plug in values and try it or write some quick API tests that I throw away as soon as I have validated them. The problem with this is that a UI can make assumptions on your code that then just unit test around and very quickly the design becomes bad and you technical debt sweeps in. If you want to blackbox test your code with a UI then do so after your TDD cycles not before. This is probably by biggest issue with a literal TDD interpretation. TDD says you never write a line of code without a failing test to show you need it. I find it leads developers down a dangerous path. Without any help from a methodology, I have met way too many developers in my life that “back into a solution”. By this, I mean they write something, it mostly works and they discover a new requirement so they tack it on, and another and another and when they are done, they’ve got a monstrosity of special cases each designed to handle one specific scenario. There’s way more code than there should be and it’s way too complicated to understand. I believe in finding general solutions to problems from which all the special cases naturally derive rather than building a solution of special cases. In my mind, to do this, you have to start by conceptualizing and coding the framework of the general algorithm. For me, that’s a relatively monolithic exercise. TDD is an development pratice not a methodology, the danger is that the solution becomes a mass of different things that violate DRY. TDD won't solve these problems, only good communication and practices like pairing will help. Above all else an assumption that TDD replaces a methodology is a mistake, combine it with what ever works for your team\business but only good communication will help. A good naming scheme\structure for folders, files and tests can help you and your team isolate what tests are for what.

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Is Agile the new micromanagement?

- by Smith James

This question has been cooking in my head for a while so I wanted to ask those who are following agile/scrum practices in their development environments. My company has finally ventured into incorporating agile practices and has started out with a team of 4 developers in an agile group on a trial basis. It has been 4 months with 3 iterations and they continue to do it without going fully agile for the rest of us. This is due to the fact that management's trust to meet business requirements with a quite a bit of ad hoc type request from high above. Recently, I talked to the developers who are part of this initiative; they tell me that it's not fun. They are not allowed to talk to other developers by their Scrum master and are not allowed to take any phone calls in the work area (which maybe fine to an extent). For example, if I want to talk to my friend for kicks who is in the agile team, I am not allowed without the approval of the Scrum master; who is sitting right next to the agile team. The idea of all this or the agile is to provide a complete vacuum for agile developers from any interruptions and to have them put in good 6+ productive hours. Well, guys, I am no agile guru but what I have read Yahoo agile rollout document and similar for other organizations, it gives me a feeling that agile is not cheap. It require resources and budget to instill agile into the teams and correct issue as they arrive to put them back on track. For starters, it requires training for developers and coaching for managers and etc, etc... The current Scrum master was a manager who took a couple days agile training class paid by the management is now leading this agile team. I have also heard in the meeting that agile manifesto doesn't dictate that agile is not set in stones and is customized differently for each company. Well, it all sounds good and reason. In conclusion, I always thought the agile was supposed to bring harmony in the development teams which results in happy developers. However, I am getting a very opposite feeling when talking to the developers in the agile team. They are unhappy that they cannot talk anything but work, sitting quietly all day just working, and they feel it's just another way for management to make them work more. Tell me please, if this is one of the examples of good practices used for the purpose of selfish advantage for more dollars? Or maybe, it's just us the developers like me and this agile team feels that they don't like to work in an environment where they only breathe work because they are at work. Thanks. Edit: It's a company in healthcare domain that has offices across US. It definitely feels like a cowboy style agile which makes me really not wanting to go for agile at all, esp at my current company. All of it has to do with the management being completely cheap. Cutting out expensive coffee for cheaper version, emphasis on savings and being productive while staying as lean as possible. My feeling is that someone in the management behind the door threw out this idea, that agile makes you produce more so we can show our bosses we're producing more with the same headcount. Or, maybe, it will allow us to reduce headcount if that's the case. EDITED: They are having their 5 min daily meeting. But not allowed to chat or talk with someone outside of their team. All focus is on work.

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Silverlight Cream for January 30, 2011 - 2 -- #1038

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Max Paulousky, Renuka Prasad, Ollie Riches, Jesse Liberty(-2-, -3-, -4-, -5-), Medusa M, John Papa, Beth Massi, and Joost van Schaik. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Stop What You Are Doing And Learn About Reactive Programming" Jesse Liberty WP7: "Windows Phone Looping Selector for Digits " Max Paulousky Lightswitch: "How To Send HTML Email from a LightSwitch Application" Beth Massi Shoutouts: Shawn Wildermuch has niether GooNews for users of his cool WP7 app or or for the WP7 Marketplace in general: R.I.P. GooNews From SilverlightCream.com: Windows Phone Looping Selector for Digits Max Paulousky expanded on the Looping selector for some customization allowing him to display width/height metric measurement selectors... great job, Max! WP7 – How to Create a Simple Checked Listbox In Windows Phone 7 Renuka Prasad has the code for a nicely-working checked Listbox for WP7 on his blog... the post is the code... WP7Contrib: Network Connectivity Push Model Ollie Riches had a post last week that I'm just catching up to... about the 'push model' for network connectivity they produced in WP7 Contrib. Using the Camera in Windows Phone 7 Jesse Liberty has a bunch of posts up... I'm just going to bite the bullet and catch up! ... this 'From Scratch post 24 is all about the camera in your WP7 dev travails... and he makes it look so darned easy :) Linq and Fluent Programming Jesse Liberty's next post is 'From Scratch 25 and is all about Linq and Fluent Programming which started with a discussion at Codemash with Bill Wagner... wanna get a handle on fluent programming? ... check this out. Stop What You Are Doing And Learn About Reactive Programming Another item you might want to get your head around is Reactive Programming, or Rx... Jesse Liberty has a great post up discussing this, as his 'From Scratch post 26... good external links, and lots of commentary as well. Rx–Reactive Programming for Windows Phone Jesse Liberty's 'From Scratch 27 follows the previous on about Rx by taking the Rx show to the WP7 development arena. Want a solid Rx example... here ya go! Reactive Extensions–Observable Sequences are First Class Objects Finally catching up with Jesse Liberty (for now), I find this 'From Scratch number 28 which is again on Rx and WP7 dev, expanding on the example from the previous post by harnessing the power of Rx Localizing Silverlight applications Medusa M has a nice post up at dotnetslackers on localization in Silverlight. If you haven't had to do localization before, it can get to be a pain... understanding an article like this will get you part of the way to being pain-free. Silverlight TV 59: What Goes Into Baking Silverlight? Very cool presentation for those of you interested in the bits ... John Papa's Silverlight TV number 59 is up and he's chatting with Andy Rivas about the process followed getting the bits to us. How To Send HTML Email from a LightSwitch Application Beth Massi's latest Lightswitch post is on sending HTML Email via SMTP from Lightswitch, and then follows that up with sending Email via Outlook automation. ViewModel driven animations using the Visual State Manager, DataStateBehavior and Expression Blend After some good user feedback, Joost van Schaik decided to make some modifications to his WP7 app, and got involved in a Page Title collapse animation driven from the ViewModel. Check out the nice write-up, video, external links, and source... all good! Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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You Are Hiring But Do Candidate’s Want to Work For You

- by david.talamelli

So here you are – it has happened, you are now interviewing for that position that you have either applied for or maybe were called about. Whether you are an “active” candidate looking for a job or a “passive” candidate who was contacted about the opportunity, it doesn’t matter now. Regardless of the circumstances of how you got to the interview stage, how you and your new potential manager connect with each other at interview will play a part in whether you are successful in landing that job. The best manager/employee relationships I think tend to be the ones where both the manager and employee have a common goal that they are both working towards and they work together in unison to achieve these goals. Candidates – when you are interviewing for a role, remember that an interview is a two way process. An interview shouldn’t be just a case of a company interviewing you to see if you are a good fit for a certain role. Don’t forget in an interview process it is equally important that you take the opportunity to similarly interview the company to see if that role/company are the right place for you to move to as the next step in your career. I think an interview should not only be a chance for a Hiring Manager to get to better know a candidate and asses his capability and cultural fit for a team/company but it should also be a chance for the candidate to similarly assess a company or manager about whether they are someone that they want to work with. Managers – I know Recruiters have been talking about the “war for talent” since before many of you were managers, but there is no denying it – it exists. You are not only competing with other companies for talented individuals but you are also competing with the existing companies that those talented individuals are working at. Companies are not going to let the people they have identified as superstars resign without a fight (this is the classic Counter Offer scenario which may be another blog post in itself). So how do we get these great people – their current employer will do all they can to keep them, everyone else wants them – does this mean all hope is lost? No, absolutely not. The same reasons that have always existed on why candidates are interested in other opportunities is still there: it could be that someone is looking for career advancement, or they want the chance to work with new technology or maybe you have an opportunity that is exactly what that person is looking to do. As a Hiring Manager don’t just conduct your interviews in question/answer mode. You should talk to that individual to work out what it is they are looking for and you can then relate how your role addresses that. It is potentially going to be the two of you working together so you two are the ones who have to be most comfortable with each other. Don’t oversell the role – set realistic expectations of what that candidate can expect working in your team – give them the good, the bad and the ugly so they can make an informed decision. Manager’s think back to when you last were looking for a job and put yourself in the candidate’s shoes. When you were looking for a job, what was it that you wanted to know about Oracle, or what was it that you wanted more information about. There are some great Business Leaders that work here at Oracle – if you are one of them it is likely that you already are doing all these things anyway. The good news for you is that you are also likely raising yourself head and shoulders above what many interviewers do – that in itself gives you a competitive advantage in this ‘war for talent’ but as a great Business Leader you already know that

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2010 April Fools Joke

- by Dane Morgridge

I started at my current job at the end of March last year and there were some pretty funny April fools jokes. Nothing super crazy, but pretty funny. One guy came in and there was a tree in his cube. We (me and the rest of my team) were planning for a couple of weeks on what we could do that would be just awesome. We had a lot of really good ideas but nothing was spectacular. Then Steve Andrews had a brilliant idea (yes it's true). Since we have internal DNS servers we could redirect DNS to our internal servers for a site such as cnn.com. Then we would lift the code from the site and create our own home page that would contain news about people in the company. Steve was actually laughing so hard when he thought of the idea that it took him almost 30 minutes to spit it out. I thought, "this is perfect". I had enlisted a couple of people to help come up with the stories and at the same time we were trying to figure out how to get everybody to the site the morning of the 1st. Then it hit me. We could have the main article be one of my getting picked up by the FBI on hacking charges. Then Chris (my boss) could send an email out telling everyone that I would not be there today and direct them to the site. That would for sure get everyone to go to cnn.com first thing and see our prank. I begun the process of looking for photos I could crop myself into and found the perfect one. Then my wife took a good pic with our Canon 40D and I went to work. The night before I didn't have any other stories due to everyone being really busy at work, but I decided to go ahead with just the FBI bust on it's own. I got everything working and tested and coordinated with Chris for me to come in late so no one would see me at the office until after everyone had seen the joke. And so the morning of April fools came and I was waiting at home and the email was perfect. Chris told everyone that I wouldn't be in and that not to answer any questions if you got any calls from anybody. The Photoshop job I did was not perfect, but good enough and I even wrote an article with it that went into more detail about how I had been classified as a terrorist and all kinds of stuff. People at work started getting the emails and a few people didn't realize it was a joke (as I had hoped), including some from senior management (one person in particular who shall remain nameless in this post). Emails started flying around about how to contain the situation and how to handle bad PR. He basically bought it hook, line and sinker and then went in to crisis mode. It was awesome! He did finally realize it was a joke and I will likely print and frame the email he sent out. In short, April fools this year was a huge success.

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Silverlight Cream for May 15, 2010 -- #862

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Victor Gaudioso, Antoni Dol(-2-), Brian Genisio, Shawn Wildermuth, Mike Snow, Phil Middlemiss, Pete Brown, Kirupa, Dan Wahlin, Glenn Block, Jeff Prosise, Anoop Madhusudanan, and Adam Kinney. Shoutouts: Victor Gaudioso would like you to Checkout my Interview with Microsoft’s Murray Gordon at MIX 10 Pete Brown announced: Connected Show Podcast #29 With … Me! From SilverlightCream.com: New Silverlight Video Tutorial: How to Create Fast Forward for the MediaElement Victor Gaudioso's latest video tutorial is on creating the ability to fast-forward a MediaElement... check it out in the tutorial player itself! Overlapping TabItems with the Silverlight Toolkit TabControl Antoni Dol has a very cool tutorial up on the Toolkit TabItems control... not only is he overlapping them quite nicely but this is a very cool tutorial... QuoteFloat: Animating TextBlock PlaneProjections for a spiraling effect in Silverlight Antoni Dol also has a Blend tutorial up on animating TextBlock items... run the demo and you'll want to read the rest :) Adventures in MVVM – My ViewModel Base – Silverlight Support! Brian Genisio continues his MVVM tutorials with this update on his ViewModel base using some new C# 4.0 features, and fully supports Silverlight and WPF My Thoughts on the Windows Phone 7 Shawn Wildermuth gives his take on WP7. He included a port of his XBoxGames app to WP7 ... thanks Shawn! Silverlight Tip of the Day #20 – Using Tooltips in Silverlight I figured Mike Snow was going to overrun me with tips since I have missed a couple days, but there's only one! ... and it's on Tooltips. Animating the Silverlight opacity mask Phil Middlemiss has an article at SilverZine describing a Behavior he wrote (and is sharing) that turns a FrameworkElement into an opacity mask for it's parent container... cool demo on the page too. Breaking Apart the Margin Property in Xaml for better Binding Pete Brown dug in on a Twitter message and put some thoughts down about breaking a Margin apart to see about binding to the individual elements. Building a Simple Windows Phone App Kirupa has a 6-part tutorial up on building not-your-typical first WP7 application... all good stuff! Integrating HTML into Silverlight Applications Dan Wahlin has a post up discussing three ways to display HTML inside a Silverlight app. Hello MEF in Silverlight 4 and VB! (with an MVVM Light cameo) Glenn Block has a post up discussing MEF, MVVM, and it's in VB this time... and it's actually a great tutorial top to bottom... all source included of course :) Understanding Input Scope in Silverlight for Windows Phone Jeff Prosise has a good post up on the WP7 SIP and how to set the proper InputScope to get the SIP you want. Thinking about Silverlight ‘desktop’ apps – Creating a Standalone Installer for offline installation (no browser) Anoop Madhusudanan is discussing something that's been floating around for a while... installing Silverlight from, say, a CD or DVD when someone installs your app. He's got some good code, but be sure to read Tim Heuer and Scott Guthrie's comments, and consider digging deeper into that part. Using FluidMoveBehavior to animate grid coordinates in Silverlight Adam Kinney has a cool post up on animating an object using the FluidMotionBehavior of Blend 4... looks great moving across a checkerboard... check out the demo, then grab the code. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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Building a Mafia…TechFest Style

- by David Hoerster

It’s been a few months since I last blogged (not that I blog much to begin with), but things have been busy. We all have a lot going on in our lives, but I’ve had one item that has taken up a surprising amount of time – Pittsburgh TechFest 2012. After the event, I went through some minutes of the first meetings for TechFest, and I started to think about how it all came together. I think what inspired me the most about TechFest was how people from various technical communities were able to come together and build and promote a common event. As a result, I wanted to blog about this to show that people from different communities can work together to build something that benefits all communities. (Hopefully I've got all my facts straight.) TechFest started as an idea Eric Kepes and myself had when we were planning our next Pittsburgh Code Camp, probably in the summer of 2011. Our Spring 2011 Code Camp was a little different because we had a great infusion of some folks from the Pittsburgh Agile group (especially with a few speakers from LeanDog). The line-up was great, but we felt our audience wasn’t as broad as it should have been. We thought it would be great to somehow attract other user groups around town and have a big, polyglot conference. We started contacting leaders from Pittsburgh’s various user groups. Eric and I split up the ones that we knew about, and we just started making contacts. Most of the people we started contacting never heard of us, nor we them. But we all had one thing in common – we ran user groups who’s primary goal is educating our members to make them better at what they do. Amazingly, and I say this because I wasn’t sure what to expect, we started getting some interest from the various leaders. One leader, Greg Akins, is, in my opinion, Pittsburgh’s poster boy for the polyglot programmer. He’s helped us in the past with .NET Code Camps, is a Java developer (and leader in Pittsburgh’s Java User Group), works with Ruby and I’m sure a handful of other languages. He helped make some e-introductions to other user group leaders, and the whole thing just started to snowball. Once we realized we had enough interest with the user group leaders, we decided to not have a Fall Code Camp and instead focus on this new entity. Flash-forward to October of 2011. I set up a meeting, with the help of Jeremy Jarrell (Pittsburgh Agile leader) to hold a meeting with the leaders of many of Pittsburgh technical user groups. We had representatives from 12 technical user groups (Python, JavaScript, Clojure, Ruby, PittAgile, jQuery, PHP, Perl, SQL, .NET, Java and PowerShell) – 14 people. We likened it to a scene from a Godfather movie where the heads of all the families come together to make some deal. As a result, the name “TechFest Mafia” was born and kind of stuck. Over the next 7 months or so, we had our starts and stops. There were moments where I thought this event would not happen either because we wouldn’t have the right mix of topics (was I off there!), or enough people register (OK, I was wrong there, too!) or find an appropriate venue (hmm…wrong there, too) or find enough sponsors to help support the event (wow…not doing so well). Overall, everything fell into place with a lot of hard work from Eric, Jen, Greg, Jeremy, Sean, Nicholas, Gina and probably a few others that I’m forgetting. We also had a bit of luck, too. But in the end, the passion that we had to put together an event that was really about making ourselves better at what we do really paid off. I’ve never been more excited about a project coming together than I have been with Pittsburgh TechFest 2012. From the moment the first person arrived at the event to the final minutes of my closing remarks (where I almost lost my voice – I ended up being diagnosed with bronchitis the next day!), it was an awesome event. I’m glad to have been part of bringing something like this to Pittsburgh…and I’m looking forward to Pittsburgh TechFest 2013. See you there!

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I spy a Live Framework portal

- by jamiet

Those that have followed my blogs for a while may know that I have a slightly banal interest in Windows Live and, more specifically, the Live Services developer platform'; if that doesn’t sound interesting to you then stop reading now. My interest mainly stems from the Live Mesh technology that was announced a couple of years ago and the data synchronisation platform API that underpins it; that platform is called the Live Framework or LiveFX for short. At the Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC) 2008 Microsoft made LiveFX available to the public as a Tech Preview and I spent some time learning to use it and also built a few test apps on it too. In August 2009 an announcement came that that tech preview was getting shut down: "At the Professional Developer Conference 2008, we gave the developer community access to the technical preview of the Live Framework. The Live Framework is core to our vision of providing you with a consistent programming interface. Now we are working to integrate existing services, controls and the Live Framework into the next release of Windows Live. Your feedback continues to help us build the best possible offerings for Windows Live users, for you and for your customers. " Since then news on LiveFX has disappeared save for a throwaway session at PDC09 and I was hoping that news was going to appear at this week’s MIX conference but nothing was forthcoming. Instead though today I stumbled upon an unannounced portal for future LiveFX applications on Microsoft’s Azure portal at http://live.azure.com. Check it out: I consider this to be very good news. This Azure portal was built after the LiveFX tech preview was decommissioned so seeing Live Services existing so prominently alongside Microsoft’s other cloud efforts like Windows Azure and SQL Azure vindicates my early investment in the platform and gives me hope that we’re going to see something get released very very soon. I believe that the potential uses for this platform are extremely compelling and I’m looking forward to trying some out in the near future. I am also expecting LiveFX to have a heavy dependency on the OData protocol that I talked about yesterday in my post OData.org updated - gives clues about future sql azure enhancements so you can tell where my interest in that stems from. In case you’re wondering the projects that you see listed above (Basic List Sample, JT-proj etc…) are projects that I built on the old Tech Preview platform so clearly that stuff has not gone for good which is also good news; not just because it means I’ll have access to the code I wrote before but I also assume it means that LiveFX won’t have changed much since its tech preview incarnation. I know there are other LiveFX buffs out there and hopefully this news reaches some of them. If you are one of them the please put a comment below and let me know your thoughts! @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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WEB203 – Jump into Silverlight!… and Become Effective Immediately with Tim Huckaby, Fou

- by Robert Burger

Getting ready for the good stuff. Definitely wish there were more Silverlight and WCF RIA sessions, but this is a start. Was lucky to get a coveted power-enabled seat. Luckily, due to my trustily slow Verizon data card, I can get these notes out amidst a total Internet outage here. This is the second breakout session of the day, and is by far standing-room only. I stepped out before the session started to get a cool Diet COKE and wouldn’t have gotten back in if I didn’t already have a seat. Tim says this is an intro session and that he’s been begging for intro sessions at TechEd for years and that by looking at this audience, he thinks the demand is there. Admittedly, I didn’t know this was an intro session, or I might have gone elsewhere. But, it was the very first Silverlight session, so I had to be here. Tim says he will be providing a very good comprehensive reference application at the end of the presentation. He has just demoed it, and it is a full CRUD-based Sales Manager application based on… AdventureWorks! Session Agenda What it is / How to get started Declarative Programming Layout and Controls, Events and Commands Working with Data Adding Style to Your Application Silverlight… “WPF Light” Why is the download 4.2MB? Because the direct competitor is a 4.2MB download. There is no technical reason it is not the entire framework. It is purely to “be competitive”. Getting Started Get all of the following downloads from www.silverlight.net/getstarted Install VS2010 or Visual Web Developer Express 2010 Install Silverlight 4 Tools for VS2010 Install Expression Blend 4 Install the Silverlight 4 Toolkit Reference Application Features Uses MVVM pattern – a way to move data access code that would normally be inline within the UI and placing it in nice data access libraries Images loaded dynamically from the database, converting GIF to PNG because Silverlight does not support GIF. LINQ to SQL is the data access model WCF is the data provider and is using binary message encoding Declarative Programming XAML replaces code for UI representation Attributes control Layout and Style Event handlers wired-up in XAML Declarative Data Binding Layout Overview Content rendering flows inside of parent Fixed positioning (Canvas) is seldom used Panels are used to house content Margins and Padding over fixed size Panels StackPanel – Arranges child elements into a single line oriented horizontally or vertically Grid – A flexible grid are that consists of rows and columns Canvas – An are where positions are specifically fixed WrapPanel (in Toolkit) – Positions child elements in sequential position left to right and top to bottom. DockPanel (in Toolkit) – Positions child controls within a dockable area Positioning Horizontal and Vertical Alignment Margin – Separates an element from neighboring elements Padding – Enlarges the effective size of an element by a thickness Controls Overview Not all controls created equal Silverlight, as a subset of WPF, so many WPF controls do not exist in the core Siverlight release Silverlight Toolkit continues to add controls, but are released in different quality bands Plenty of good 3rd party controls to fill the gaps Windows Phone 7 is to have 95% of controls available in Silverlight Core and Toolkit. Events and Commands Standard .NET Events Routed Events Commands – based on the ICommand interface – logical action that can be invoked in several ways Adding Style to Your Application Resource Dictionaries – Contains a hash table of key/value pairs. Silverlight can only use Static Resources whereas WPF can also use Dynamic Resources Visual State Manager Silverlight 4 supports Implicit styles ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries combines many different file-based resources Downloads

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Silverlight Cream for May 13, 2010 -- #861

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Sigurd Snørteland, Jeff Prosise, DaveDev, Joe Zhou, Chris Eargle, John Papa(-2-, -3-), and David Anson(-2-). Shoutouts: In with the links I've listed below, Sigurd Snørteland also sent a link to this app he's working on which is actually pretty cool to see: ZuneLight. The code is not yet available. He also has a no-code demo of a Silverlight Media Center Pieter Voloshyn, Luiz Thadeu, and Jhun Iti have a very nice Silverlight image editor up: Thumba From SilverlightCream.com: WP7 - Silverlight on mobile Sigurd Snørteland submitted some links for me that have been translated to English from his blog. I hope the pages come out good because he's got a lot of good stuff on there. This one has a link to a presentation he did, and 4 projects you can load up in the emulator that he's converted to the phone: weather, worldclock, coverflow, and solitaire ... pretty cool... thanks for the links Sigurd! Understanding Page Orientation in Silverlight for Windows Phone Jeff Prosise has a really nice post up on page orientation in WP7 ... what it means to your app, how to detect it, and example code for what to do then... also love a quote by Jeff: "Silverlight for Windows Phone is the hottest thing since color TV" Why you should check out Expression Blend Behaviors when using Silverlight DaveDev has a post up describing Behaviors and why we should use them, plus tons of external links to resources, blogs, videos... all good stuff... Fiddler inspector for WCF Silverlight Polling Duplex and WCF RIA Joe Zhou announces and provides a link to a new Fiddler inspector that understands the framing in Polling Duplex and also raw binary xml and binary SOAP. Windows Phone Controls v0.7 Chris Eargle reports the release of Version 0.7 of the Windows Phone Controls project on CodePlex ... this includes a Pivot Control and a Panorama Control... both very nicely done. Binding to Silverlight ComboBox and Using SelectedValue, SelectedValuePath and DisplayMemberPath John Papa responds to a user question and put up a nice post about binding to a ComboBox and then go from the selected item to some other property ... code included No More Boxes! Exploring the PathListBox (Silverlight TV #25) Silverlight TV 25 went up on Tuesday ... thought it was going to be Thursday?? anyway ... John Papa and Adam Kinney are discussing the PathListBox and looking at some cool demos thereof. Exposing SOAP, OData, and JSON Endpoints for RIA Services (Silverlight TV 26) Since today IS Thursday, we have a new Silverlight TV, number 26, and John Papa is chatting with Deepesh Mohnani of the WCF RIA Services team about exposing all sorts of endpoints... should be something in there for everybody :) Workaround for a Silverlight data binding bug affecting various scenarios - including DataGrid+ContextMenu David Anson details the rabbit-trail he and others on the team followed in response to a problem reported via Twitter where the binding on a DataGrid seemed off by a row(!) ... weird but true, validated, and SL3/4 are bug-for-bug compatible with this too! ... But David wouldn't leave us there.. he also has a workaround. Sharing the code for a simple Silverlight 4 REST-based cloud-oriented file management app for Azure and S3 David Anson had an opportunity to build an app he's wanted to build for a while and shares it with us: Blobstore -- a small, lightweight Silverlight 4 application that acts as a basic front-end for the Windows Azure Simple Data Storage and the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) -- and remember I said he shared the source :) Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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Cross platform application revolution

- by anirudha

Every developer know that if they make a windows application that they work only on windows. that’s a small pity thing we all know. this is a lose point for windows application who make developer thing small means only for windows and other only for mac. this is a big point behind success of web because who purchase a operating system if they want to use a application on other platform. why they purchase when they can’t try them. that’s a thing better in Web means IE 6 no problem IE 6 to IE 8 chrome to chrome 8 Firefox to Firefox 3.6.13 even that’s beta no problem the good website is shown as same as other browser. some minor difference may be can see. the cross platform application development thinking is much big then making a application who is only for some audience. the difference between audience make by OS what they use Windows or mac. if they use mac they can’t use this they use windows they can’t use this. Web for Everyone starting from a children to grandfather. male and female Everyone can use internet.no worrying what you have even you have Windows or mac , any browser even as silly IE 6. the cross platform have a good thing that “People”. everyone can use them without a problem that. just like some time problem come in windows that “some component is missing click here to get them” , you can’t use this [apps] software because you have windows sp1 , sp2 sp3. you need to install this first before this. this stupidity mainly comes in Microsoft software. in last year i found a issue on WPI that they force user to install another software when they get them from WPI. ex:- you need to install Visual studio 2008 before installing Visual studio 2010 express. are anyone tell me why user get old version 2008 when they get latest and express version. i never try again their to check the issue is solved or not. a another thing is you can’t get IE 9 on windows XP version. in that’case don’t thing and worrying about them because Firefox and Chrome is much better. the stupidity from Microsoft is too much. they never told you about Firebug even sometime they discuss about damage tool in IE they called them developer tool because they are Microsoft and they only thing how they can market their products. you need to install many thing without any reason such as many SQL server component even you use other RDBMS. you can’t say no to them because you need a tool and tool require a useless component called SQL server. i never found any software force me to install this for this and this for this before install me. that’s another good thing in WEB that no thing require i means you not need to install dotnet framework 4 before enjoy facebook or twitter. may be you found out that Microsoft's fail project Window planet force you to get silverlight before going their. i never hear about them. some month ago my friend talked to me about them i found nothing better their. Wha’t user do when facebook force user to install silverlight or adobe flash or may be Microsoft dotnet framework 4. if you not install them facebook tell you bye bye tata ! never come here before installing Microsoft dotnet framework 4. the door is open for you after installing them not before. the story is same as “ tell me sorry before coming in home” as mother says to their child when they do something wrong. the web never force you to do something for them. sometime they allow you to use other website account their that’s very fast login for you. because they know the importance of your time.

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SQLAuthority News – Ahmedabad Tech Ed On Road June 11, 2011 – An Event to Remember – A Grand Success of Community Tech Days

- by pinaldave

I am very excited to announce the huge success of the Microsoft Community TechDays at Ahmedabad, on 11 June 2011. The turn-out for this seminar was huge, and there was a great response from the audience. In fact, the AMA where the conference was held can seat 275 people – but there were over 50 people standing, the event coordinators had to find 150 more chairs, and we even had to turn away 30 people at the door because there was just no more room. This means that there were over 500 attendees! The event started right on time, at 10 am, with my introduction and welcome to the audience. My presentation on my favorite subject of “SQL Server Performance Troubleshooting Using Waits and Queues.” Because of the number of speakers, I had to cut my presentation short by 10 minutes, so I only had 50 minutes to explain how to use swaits and queues to fine tune performance. There was a good response to my talk from audience. I feel the best presentation, though, was “HTML5 – Future of the Web” by Harish Vaidyanathan. He explained how HTML5 is going to change the internet, and taught everyone a lot about how to best use Internet Explorer 9, and discussed CSS3, SVG and DOM specifications. Many people in the audience came specifically for this session – many had to take a half day leave off work just to travel there. At this point we all took a break for lunch, but there was no one taking a nap with a full stomach because we had a presentation of the new Windows Mango phone from Dhananjay Kumar. New technology like this always wakes everyone up! After this came “TSQL Worst Practices” by Jacob Sebastian. He too had to cut his talk short by 10 minutes in order to accommodate everyone, but his discussion of what SQL queries to avoid was still excellent. He is magnificent presenter and Ahmedabad loves him. The final presentation was “ASP.NET Tips and Tricks” by Tejas Shah. This was a good overview of asp.net fundamentals, and how to use them to improve application performance. However, the day was not over here! We kept the audience entertained with prizes and give-aways. Names were drawn for prizes and there was a quiz session with great gifts for the winners. Overall, the day was a huge success. There was a good mix of SQL and non-SQL subjects, and many audiences members commented on how much they learned. We had a much bigger turn-out than expected – all the chairs were filled 45 minutes before we even started! For our next conference we need to find a space that will hold everyone, especially since we are hoping to have 600-800 people attending. We definitely feel we can reach this goal. We are already looking forward to the next Ahmedabad Microsoft Community TechDays. Download presentations: HTML5 Beauty of Web -By Harish Vaidyanathan TSQL Worst Practices- By Jacob Sebastian SQL SERVER Performance troubleshooting using Waits and Queues -By Pinal Dave ASP.NET Tips and Tracks -By Tejas Shah Other reports: Tech-Ed on Road 2011- Ahmedabad–A great event- By Jalpesh Tech-Ed 2011 on the Road in Ahmedabad – by Ritesh Shah Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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Reflections on Life

- by MOSSLover

I haven’t written a blog post in a while. I understand there is blog neglect going on, but there is a lot going on in my life. I am trying really hard to embrace the change and roll with everything thrown my way. I had a really hard year it was not my best and it was not my worst. I cannot say it was entirely hard, because January 1st I received the MVP Award. If you know me you know the three things that happened starting in August, but if you really know me it was miserable for a substantial period of time prior to August. There was some personal life issues I neglected to deal with that came into a headway. Anyway I’d like to think that as of today I am doing much better. I finally went to Paris and London. I found out I love Paris and Nottingham. I think that London is something I need to visit a few more times. I would love to go back to the UK and France. I think I’d love to live overseas someday, but not anytime soon. The past few weeks were like a whirlwind experience. I felt like I had been sitting around for months just waiting for this trip and the big move. Maybe it was something I was waiting to do for several years. I needed a big change. I needed to get unstuck. I feel like August, however horrible it was, helped me get to the point where I am somewhere happy. For at least two years I have been miserable outside of my work (community and otherwise). I was just downright unhappy. One of my coworkers said that my tweets were just horrible this past year. Depressing might I add. I agree they were incredibly depressing for the past several years. But things are on an upturn. I decided a month or so ago that I was going to do all the things I have wanted to do without looking back. So I dove into this trip and into this move to NYC head first. I was scared for a bit and I didn’t think it would come through. Everyone friend-wise and coworker-wise has helped me accomplish this great feat. I am now a New Yorker and as of January 1st 100% living in the city. Thank you for those who have checked up on me. Thank you for those who listened to all my problems and continue to do so. Thank you to everyone who has helped me through this really terrible time. You guys mean the world to me. You are my friends. Some of you I have not met and some of you I barely know. I have been to a lot of events where people just walked up to me and asked me if I was doing ok. I will continue to keep moving forward one foot in front of the other. If I ever get so down again please remind me about this year. I hope to see you all in the upcoming year as I attend more events. Have a good night or a good morning or a good afternoon. I will catch you all later. Technorati Tags: Life,2011,Disaster Year,Happinness

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Silverlight Cream for December 16, 2010 -- #1011

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: John Papa, Tim Heuer, Jeff Blankenburg(-2-, -3-), Jesse Liberty, Jay Kimble, Wei-Meng Lee, Paul Sheriff, Mike Snow(-2-, -3-), Samuel Jack, James Ashley, and Peter Kuhn. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Animation Texture Creator" Peter Kuhn WP7: "dows Phone from Scratch #13 — Custom Behaviors Part II: ActionTrigger" Jesse Liberty Shoutouts: Awesome blog post by Jesse Liberty about writing in general: Ten Requirements For Tutorials, Videos, Demos and White Papers That Don’t Suck From SilverlightCream.com: 1000 Silverlight Cream Posts and Counting! John Papa has Silverlight TV number 55 up and it's an inverview he did with me the day before the Firestarter in December... thanks John... great job in making me not look stooopid :) Silverlight service release today - 4.0.51204 Tim Heuer announced a service release of Silverlight ... check out his blog for the updates and near the bottom is a link to the developer runtime. What I Learned In WP7 – Issue #3 Jeff Blankenburg has been pushing out tips ... number 3 consisted of 3 good pieces of info for WP7 devs including more info about fonts and a good site for free audio files What I Learned In WP7 – Issue #4 In number 4, Jeff Blankenburg talks about where to get some nice free WP7 icons, and a link to a cool article on getting all sorts of device info What I Learned In WP7 – Issue #5 Number 5 finds Jeff Blankenburg giving up the XAP for a CodeMash sessiondata app... or wait for it to appear in the Marketplace next week. Windows Phone from Scratch #13 — Custom Behaviors Part II: ActionTrigger Wow... Jesse Liberty is up to number 13 in his Windows Phone from scratch series... this time it's part 2 of his Custom Behaviors post, and ActionTriggers specifically. Solving the Storage Problem in WP7 (for CF Developers) Jay Kimble has released his WP7 dropbox client to the wild ... this is cool for loading files at run-time... opens up some ideas for me at least. Building Location Service Apps in Windows Phone 7 Wei-Meng Lee has a big informative post on location services in WP7... getting a Bing Maps API key, getting the data, navigating and manipulating the map, adding pushpins... good stuff Using Xml Files on Windows Phone Paul Sheriff is discussing XML files as a database for your WP7 apps via LINQ to XML. Sample code included. ABC–Win7 App Mike Snow has been busy with Tips of the Day ... he published a children's app for tracing their ABC's and discusses some of the code bits involved. Win7 Mobile Application Bar – AG_E_PARSER_BAD_PROPERTY_VALUE Mike Snow's next post is about the infamous AG_E_PARSER_BAD_PROPERTY_VALUE error or worse in WP7 ... how he got it, and how he fixed it... could save you some hair... Forward Navigation on the Windows Phone Mike Snow's latest post is about forward navigation on the WP7 ... oh wait... there isn't any... check out the post. Day 2 of my “3 days to Build a Windows Phone 7 Game” challenge Samuel Jack details about 9 hours in day 2 of his quest to build an XNA app for WP7 from a cold start. Windows Phone 7 Side Loading James Ashley has a really complete write-up on side-loading apps onto your WP7 device. Don't get excited... this isn't a hack... this is instructions for side-loading using the Microsoft-approved methos, which means a registered device. Animation Texture Creator Remember Peter Kuhn's post the other day about an Animation Texture Creator? ... well today he has some added tweaks and the source code! ... thanks Peter! Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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PHP Web Services - Nice try

Thanks to the membership in the O'Reilly User Group Programme the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (short: MSCC) recently received a welcome package with several book titles. Among them is the latest publication of Lorna Jane Mitchell - 'PHP Web Services: APIs for the Modern Web'. Following is the book review I put on Amazon: Nice try! Initially, I was astonished that a small book like 'PHP Web Services' would be able to cover all the interesting topics about APIs and Web Services, independently whether they are written in PHP or not. And unfortunately, the title isn't able to stand up to the readers (or at least my) expectations. Maybe as a light defense, there is no usual paragraph about the intended audience of that book, but still I have to admit that the first half (chapters 1 to 8) are well written and Lorna has her points on the various technologies. Also, the code samples in PHP are clean and easy to understand. With chapter 'Debugging Web Services' the book started to change my mind about the clarity of advice and the instructions on designing and developing good APIs. Eventually, this might be related to the fact that I'm used to other tools since years, like Telerik Fiddler as HTTP proxy in order to trace and inspect any kind of request/response handling. Including localhost monitoring, SSL certification acceptance, and the ability to debug mobile devices, especially iOS-based ones. Compared to Charles, Fiddler is available for free. What really got me off the hook is the following statement in chapter 10 about Service Type Decisions: "For users who have larger systems using technology stacks such as Java, C++, or .NET, it may be easier for them to integrate with a SOAP service." WHAT? A couple of pages earlier the author recommends to stay away from 'old-fashioned' API styles like SOAP (if possible). And on top of that I wonder why there are tons of documentation towards development of RESTful Web Services based on WebAPI. The ASP.NET stack clearly moves away from SOAP to JSON and REST since years! Honestly, as a software developer on the .NET stack this leaves a mixed feeling after all. As for the remaining chapters I simply consider them as 'blah blah' without any real value and lots of theoretical advice. Related to the chapter 13 about 'Documentation', I just had the 'pleasure' to write a C#-based client against a Java-based SOAP Web Service. Personally, I take the WSDL as the master reference in the first place and Visual Studio generates all the stub types involved in the communication. During the implementation and testing I came across a 'java.lang.NullPointerException' in various methods and for various method parameters. The WSDL and the generated types were declared as Nullable, so nothing to worry about, or? Well, I logged in a support ticket, and guess what was the response to that scenario? "The service definition in the WSDL is wrong, please refer to the documentation in order to use the methods and parameters correctly" - No comment! Lorna's title is a quick read and in some areas she has good advice on designing and implementing Web Services and APIs. But roughly 100 pages aren't enough to cover a vast topic like that. After all, nice try and I'm looking forward to an improved second edition. Honestly, I never thought that I would come across a poor review. In general, it's a good book but it clearly has a lack of depth, the PHP code samples are incomplete (closing tags missing), and there are too many assumptions and theoretical statements.

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Book review (Book 6) - Wikinomics

- by BuckWoody

This is a continuation of the books I challenged myself to read to help my career - one a month, for year. You can read my first book review here. The book I chose for November 2011 was: Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott Why I chose this Book: I’ve heard a lot about this book - was one of the “must read” kind of business books (many of which are very “fluffy”) and supposedly deals with collaborating using technology - so I want to see what it says about collaborative efforts and how I can leverage them. What I learned: I really disliked this book. I’ve never been a fan of the latest “business book”, and sadly that’s what this felt like to me. A “business book” is what I call a work that has a fairly simple concept to get across, and then proceeds to use various made-up terms, analogies and other mechanisms to fill hundreds of pages doing it. This perception is at my own – the book is pretty old, and these things go stale quickly. The author’s general point (at least what I took away from it) was: Open Source is good, proprietary is bad. Collaboration is the hallmark of successful companies. In my mind, you can save yourself the trouble of reading this work if you get these two concepts down. Don’t get me wrong – open source is awesome, and collaboration is a good thing, especially in places where it fits. But it’s not a panacea as the author seems to indicate. For instance, he continuously uses the example of MySpace to show a “2.0” company, which I think means that you can enter text as well as read it on a web page. All well and good. But we all know what happened to MySpace, and of course he missed the point entirely about this new web environment: low barriers to entry often mean low barriers to exit. And the open, collaborative company being the best model – well, I think we all know a certain computer company famous for phones and music that is arguably quite successful, and is probably one of the most closed, non-collaborative (at least with its customers) on the planet. So that sort of takes away that argument. The reality of business is far more complicated. Collaboration is an amazing tool, and should be leveraged heavily. However, at the end of the day, after you do your research you need to pick a strategy and stick with it. Asking thousands of people to assist you in building your product probably will not work well. Open Source is great – but some proprietary products are quite functional as well, have a long track record, are well supported, and will probably be upgraded. Everything has its place, so use what works where it is needed. There is no single answer, sadly. So did I waste my time reading the book? Did I make a bad choice? Not at all! Reading the opinions and thoughts of others is almost always useful, and it’s important to consider opinions other than your own. If nothing else, thinking through the process either convinces you that you are wrong, or helps you understand better why you are right.

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HP and Microsoft: That’s What Friends Are For ?

- by andrewbrust

Today, HP pre-announced the second coming out for its recently acquired Palm webOS mobile operating system. I happen to think webOS is quite good, and when the Palm Pre first came out, I thought it a worthwhile phone. I was worried though that the platform would never attract the developer mindshare it needed to be competitive, and that turned out to be the case. But then HP acquired Palm and announced it would be revamping the webOS offering, not only on phones, but also on tablets. It later announced that it would also use webOS as an embedded solution on HP printers. The timing of this came shortly after HP had announced it would be producing a “Slate” product running Windows 7. After the Palm deal, HP became vague about whether the Windows-powered slate would actually come out. They did, in fact, bring the Slate 500 to market, but by some accounts, they only built 5000 units. Another recent awkward moment between HP and Microsoft: HP withdrew itself from the Windows Home Server ecosystem. That one hurt, as they were the dominant OEM there. But Microsoft’s decision to kill Drive Extender had driven away many parties, not just HP. On Wednesday, HP came out with their TouchPad, and new phone models. Not a nice thing for Windows Phone 7, but other OEMs are taking a wait and see attitude there too, I suppose. There was one more zinger though, and it was bigger: HP announced they’d be porting webOS to PCs. No Windows Phone 7? OK. No Windows Home Server? Whatcha gonna do? But no Windows 7 either? From HP? What comes after that, no ink and toner? Some people think Microsoft’s been around too long to be relevant. But HP started out making oscilloscopes! The notion that HP is too cool for Windows school is a it far-fetched. This is the company that bought EDS. This is the company that bought Compaq. And Compaq was the company that bought Digital Equipment Corporation. Somehow, I don’t think the VT 220 outclasses Windows PCs. What could possibly be going on? My sense is that HP wants to put webOS on PCs that also have Windows, and that people will buy because they have Windows. And for every one of those sold, HP gets to count, technically speaking, another webOS unit in the install base. webOS is really nice, as I said. But being good isn’t good enough when you are trying to get market share. Number of units shipped matters. The question is whether counting PCs with webOS installed, but dormant, is helpful to HP’s cause. Seems like a funny way to account for market share, and a strange way to treat a big partner in Redmond.

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Silverlight Cream for February 09, 2011 -- #1044

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Vikas, Tony Champion, Peter Kuhn, Ollie Riches, Rich Griffin, Rob Eisenberg, Andrea Boschin, Rudi Grobler(-2-), Jesse Liberty, Dan Wahlin, Roberto Sonnino, Deborah Kurata. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight double click event" Vikas WP7: "Logging in Silverlight and WP7 with MVVM Light" Tony Champion XNA: "XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 3 - Animation (transforms)" Peter Kuhn Shoutouts: Vikas deserves congratulations for passing the beta Silverlight 4 exam, but in the process he has a great list of resources to help you do the same: Exam 70-506 ( TS: Silverlight 4, Development ) From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight double click event Vikas demonstrates 3 ways to come up with a double-click in Silverlight: Timer, Rx Framework, and Behavior with code for each. Logging in Silverlight and WP7 with MVVM Light Tony Champion is discussing logging... and since he finds himself doing it in every project, he's setting up an extensible solution he can reuse and is doing so with MVVMLight XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 3 - Animation (transforms) Peter Kuhn has part 3 of his XNA for WP7 series up at SilverlightShow. In this 3rd tutorial, Peter is discussing animation with Transformations.... remember... this is XNA! WP7Contrib: Location Push Model Ollie Riches posts from the WP7C and discusses how they provide an interface for location service by abstracting away the GeoCoordinateWatcher class and provide a clean push model using the IObservable as the return types for all variants. WP7 Contrib – When messaging becomes messy and services shine Rich Griffin pulls another post up from WP7C where he discusses swapping out using Service Styles rather than Messenger Styles... in his words "when we start getting friction trying to bend the framework api to do something that it was not really meant for its time to use something [that] solves the problem better" Herding Code 104: Rob Eisenberg on Caliburn Micro Rob Eisenberg is interviewed on the latest Herding Code, talking about his baby, Caliburn Micro, and tons of other stuff as well... just check out the list of links generated for this show. Windows Phone 7 - Part #4: The application lifecycle Andrea Boschin has part 4 of his WP7 tutorial series up at SilverlightShow... In this tutorial he does a complete run-down the the WP7 Application Life-Cycle Simple Error Reporting on WP7 Rudi Grobler has a code snippet up that, with the end-user's permission of course, emails problem reports back to you... very cool idea. Simple Error Reporting on WP7 REDUX Rudi Grobler demonstrates using the Coding4Fun toolkit to display an exception prompt to the user... and then possibly email the report to you..see Rudi's other post on that. Creating An Application Bar–Don’t Panic In his latest (number 31) WP7 From Scratch episode, Jesse Liberty takes on the ApplicationBar, and uses Blend to get the job done easier. Syncing Data with a Server using Silverlight and HTTP Polling Duplex Dan Wahlin revisits some older posts of his about Push technologies in Silverlight, and provides some great insight (and code) into Http Polling Duplex Quick WPF/Silverlight tips to make great videos of your apps Roberto Sonnino has some great tips on making awesome videos of your WPF or Silverlight app. Simple Silverlight MVVM Base Class Deborah Kurata has her take at a good MVVM base class as the subject of her latest post... good points and good code. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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Measuring ASP.NET and SharePoint output cache

- by DigiMortal

During ASP.NET output caching week in my local blog I wrote about how to measure ASP.NET output cache. As my posting was based on real work and real-life results then I thought that this posting is maybe interesting to you too. So here you can read what I did, how I did and what was the result. Introduction Caching is not effective without measuring it. As MVP Henn Sarv said in one of his sessions then you will get what you measure. And right he is. Lately I measured caching on local Microsoft community portal to make sure that our caching strategy is good enough in environment where this system lives. In this posting I will show you how to start measuring the cache of your web applications. Although the application measured is built on SharePoint Server publishing infrastructure, all those counters have same meaning as similar counters under pure ASP.NET applications. Measured counters I used Performance Monitor and the following performance counters (their names are similar on ASP.NET and SharePoint WCMS): Total number of objects added – how much objects were added to output cache. Total object discards – how much objects were deleted from output cache. Cache hit count – how many times requests were served by cache. Cache hit ratio – percent of requests served from cache. The first three counters are cumulative while last one is coefficient. You can use also other counters to measure the full effect of caching (memory, processor, disk I/O, network load etc before and after caching). Measuring process The measuring I describe here started from freshly restarted web server. I measured application during 12 hours that covered also time ranges when users are most active. The time range does not include late evening hours and night because there is nothing to measure during these hours. During measuring we performed no maintenance or administrative tasks on server. All tasks performed were related to usual daily content management and content monitoring. Also we had no advertisement campaigns or other promotions running at same time. The results You can see the results on following graphic. Total number of objects added Total object discards Cache hit count Cache hit ratio You can see that adds and discards are growing in same tempo. It is good because cache expires and not so popular items are not kept in memory. If there are more popular content then the these lines may have bigger distance between them. Cache hit count grows faster and this shows that more and more content is served from cache. In current case it shows that cache is filled optimally and we can do even better if we tune caches more. The site contains also pages that are discarded when some subsite changes (page was added/modified/deleted) and one modification may affect about four or five pages. This may also decrease cache hit count because during day the site gets about 5-10 new pages. Cache hit ratio is currently extremely good. The suggested minimum is about 85% but after some tuning and measuring I achieved 98.7% as a result. This is due to the fact that new pages are most often requested and after new pages are added the older ones are requested only sometimes. So they get discarded from cache and only some of these will return sometimes back to cache. Although this may also indicate the need for additional SEO work the result is very well in technical means. Conclusion Measuring ASP.NET output cache is not complex thing to do and you can start by measuring performance of cache as a start. Later you can move on and measure caching effect to other counters such as disk I/O, network, processors etc. What you have to achieve is optimal cache that is not full of items asked only couple of times per day (you can avoid this by not using too long cache durations). After some tuning you should be able to boost cache hit ratio up to at least 85%.

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Silverlight Cream for February 13, 2011 -- #1046

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Loek van den Ouweland, Colin Eberhardt, Rudi Grobler, Joost van Schaik, Mike Taulty(-2-, -3-), Deborah Kurata, David Kelley, Peter Foot, Samuel Jack(-2-), and WindowsPhoneGeek(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight Simple MVVM Commanding" Deborah Kurata WP7: "WP7 CustomInputPrompt control with Cancel button" WindowsPhoneGeek Expression Blend: "Silverlight Templated Image Button with two images" Loek van den Ouweland Shoutouts: Dave Campbell posted a write-up about the project he's on and the use of Sterling: Sterling Object-Oriented Database for ISO 1.0 Released!... Also see Jeremy Likness' post on the 1.0 release: Sterling Object-Oriented Database 1.0 RTM Not necessarily Silverlight, but darn cool, a great control by Sasha Barber: WPF : A Weird 3d based control snoutholder announced new content: Windows Phone 7 QuickStarts Live! From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight Templated Image Button with two images Loek van den Ouweland has a video tutorial up for creating an ImageButton with a hover state... Expression Blend coolness, and check out the external links he has to their training site. Windows Phone 7 Performance Measurements – Emulator vs. Hardware Colin Eberhardt's latest is a popular post comparing performance metrics between the WP7 emulator and a real device. Mileage may vary, but I'm pretty sure the overall results are conculsive, and should help the way you view your app as you're building in the emulator. WP7: WebClient vs HttpWebRequest Rudi Grobler's latest is a discussion of WebClient and HttpWebRequest, gives coding examples of each plus discussion of why you may choose one over the other... and pay attention to his comment about mobile providers. A Blendable Windows Phone 7 / Silverlight clipping behavior Joost van Schaik posted this WP7/Silverlight clipping behavior he developed because all the other solutions were not blendable. Another really useful piece of code from Joost! Blend Bits 22–Being Stylish Mike Taulty has 3 more episodes in his Blend Bits series... first up is on one Styles... explicit, implicit, inheriting... you name it, he's covering it! Blend Bits 23–Templating Part 1 MIke Taulty then has the beginning of a series within his Blend Bits series on Templating. This is something you just have to either bite the bullet and go with Blend to do, or consume someone else's work. Mike shows us how to do it ourself by tweaking the visual aspects of a checkbox Blend Bits 24–Templating Part 2 In part 2 of the Templating series, Mike Taulty digs deeper into Blend and cracks open the Listbox control to take a bunch of the inner elements out for a spin... fun stuff and great tutorial, Mike! Silverlight Simple MVVM Commanding Deborah Kurata has another great MVVM post up... if you don't have your head wrapped around commanding yet, this is a good place to start that process... VB and C# as always. App Development for Windows Phone 7 101 David Kelley goes through the basics of producing a WP7 app both from the Silverlight and XNA side... good info and good external links to get you going. Copyable TextBlock for Windows Phone Peter Foot takes a look at the Copy/Paste functionality in WP7 and how to apply it to a TextBlock... which is NOT an out-of-the-box solution. How to deploy to, and debug, multiple instances of the Windows Phone 7 emulator Samuel Jack has a couple posts up this week... first is this clever one on running multiple copies of the emulator at once... too cool for debugging a multi-player game! Multi-player enabling my Windows Phone 7 game: Day 3 – The Server Side Samuel Jack's latest is a detailed look at his day 3 adventure of taking his multi-player game to WP7... lots of information and external links... what do you say, give him another day? :) WP7 CustomInputPrompt control with Cancel button WindowsPhoneGeek has a couple more posts up... first is this "CustomInputPrompt" control based off the InputPrompt from Coding4Fun. Implementing Windows Phone 7 DataTemplateSelector and CustomDataTemplateSelector In his latest post, WindowsPhoneGeek writes a DataTemplateSelector to allow different data templates for different list elements based on the type of the element. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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