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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, June 17, 2012

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, June 17, 2012Popular ReleasesXDA ROM Hub: XDA ROM Hub v0.35 Beta: Download and install stock ROM -- Not all ROMS are online. Flash CWM On locked bootloader. Root. Unroot. Flash kernels. Flash system image Erase system. Erase boot. Erase Data and Cache. Install update.zip. Install ROM addons. Install Boot animations. Unlock bootloader. Please rate and reviewCodename 'Chrometro': Developer Preview: Welcome to the Codename 'Chrometro' Developer Preview! This is the very first public preview of the app. Please note that this is a highly primitive build and the app is not even half of what it is meant to be. The Developer Preview sports the following: 1) An easy to use application setup. 2) The Assistant which simplifies your task of customization. 3) The partially complete Metro UI. 4) A variety of settings 5) A partially complete web browsing experience To get started, download the Ins...Cosmos (C# Open Source Managed Operating System): Release 92560: Prerequisites Visual Studio 2010 - Any version including Express. Express users must also install Visual Studio 2010 Integrated Shell runtime VMWare - Cosmos can run on real hardware as well as other virtualization environments but our default debug setup is configured for VMWare. VMWare Player (Free). or Workstation VMWare VIX API 1.11AutoUpdaterdotNET : Autoupdate for VB.NET and C# Developer: AutoUpdater.NET 1.1: Release Notes *New feature added that allows user to select remind later interval.Sumzlib: API document: API documentMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks 2008 OLTP Script: Install AdventureWorks2008 OLTP database from script The AdventureWorks database can be created by running the instawdb.sql DDL script contained in the AdventureWorks 2008 OLTP Script.zip file. The instawdb.sql script depends on two path environment variables: SqlSamplesDatabasePath and SqlSamplesSourceDataPath. The SqlSamplesDatabasePath environment variable is set to the default Microsoft ® SQL Server 2008 path. You will need to change the SqlSamplesSourceDataPath environment variable to th...HigLabo: HigLabo_20120613: Bug fix HigLabo.Mail Decode header encoded by CP1252Jasc (just another script compressor): 1.3.1: Updated Ajax Minifier to 4.55.WipeTouch, a jQuery touch plugin: 1.2.0: Changes since 1.1.0: New: wipeMove event, triggered while moving the mouse/finger. New: added "source" to the result object. Bug fix: sometimes vertical wipe events would not trigger correctly. Bug fix: improved tapToClick handler. General code refactoring. Windows Phone 7 is not supported, yet! Its behaviour is completely broken and would require some special tricks to make it work. Maybe in the future...Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 3.0.0.3026 (June 2012): Fixes: round( 0.0 ) local TimeZone name TimeZone search compiling multi-script-assemblies PhpString serialization DocDocument::loadHTMLFile() token_get_all() parse_url()BlackJumboDog: Ver5.6.4: 2012.06.13 Ver5.6.4 　(1) Web???????、???POST??????????????????CRM 2011 ERD Designer: CRM 2011 ERD Designer: CRM 2011 ERD Designer BETA version is now availableBumblebee: Version 0.3.1: Changed default config values to decent ones. Restricted visibility of Hive.fs to internal. Added some XML documentation. Added Array.shuffle utility. The dll is also available on NuGet My apologies, the initial source code referenced was missing one file which prevented it from building The source code contains two examples, one in C#, one in F#, illustrating the usage of the framework on the Travelling Salesman Problem: Source CodeSharePoint XSL Templates: SPXSLT 0.0.9: Added new template FixAmpersands. Fixed the contents of the MultiSelectValueCheck.xsl file, which was missing the stylesheet wrapper.ExcelFileEditor: .CS File: nothingWeapsy - ASP.NET MVC CMS: 1.0.0 RC: - Upgrade to Entity Framework 4.3.1 - Added AutoMapper custom version (by nopCommerce Team) - Added missed model properties and localization resources of Plugin Definitions - Minor changes - Fixed some bugsXenta Framework - extensible enterprise n-tier application framework: Xenta Framework 1.8.0 Beta: Catalog and Publication reviews and ratings Store language packs in data base Improve reporting system Improve Import/Export system A lot of WebAdmin app UI improvements Initial implementation of the WebForum app DB indexes Improve and simplify architecture Less abstractions Modernize architecture Improve, simplify and unify API Simplify and improve testing A lot of new unit tests Codebase refactoring and ReSharpering Utilize Castle Windsor Utilize NHibernate ORM ...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.55: Properly handle IE extension to CSS3 grammar that allows for multiple parameters to functional pseudo-class selectors. add new switch -braces:(new|same) that affects where opening braces are placed in multi-line output. The default, "new" puts them on their own new line; "same" outputs them at the end of the previous line. add new optional values to the -inline switch: -inline:(force|noforce), which can be combined with the existing boolean value via comma-separators; value "force" (which...Microsoft Media Platform: Player Framework: MMP Player Framework 2.7 (Silverlight and WP7): Additional DownloadsSMFv2.7 Full Installer (MSI) - This will install everything you need in order to develop your own SMF player application, including the IIS Smooth Streaming Client. It only includes the assemblies. If you want the source code please follow the link above. Smooth Streaming Sample Player - This is a pre-built player that includes support for IIS Smooth Streaming. You can configure the player to playback your content by simplying editing a configuration file - no need to co...Liberty: v3.2.1.0 Release 10th June 2012: Change Log -Added -Liberty is now digitally signed! If the certificate on Liberty.exe is missing, invalid, or does not state that it was developed by "Xbox Chaos, Open Source Developer," your copy of Liberty may have been altered in some (possibly malicious) way. -Reach Mass biped max health and shield changer -Fixed -H3/ODST Fixed all of the glitches that users kept reporting (also reverted the changes made in 3.2.0.2) -Reach Made some tag names clearer and more consistent between m...New ProjectsAir Sanity: its a Project for a Microsoft ContestAsp.Net Settings Checking: Simple page for review all settings for web application ASP.Net 2.0. Ex: email setting, MS SQL setting,...ATH Commander: Projekt tworzony na zaliczenie przedmiotuCold Flame Youtube Library: .net library to download youtube videos, get youtube video titles and rip audio from a youtube videoComponentModelEx: This project add functionalities to handle the INotifyPropertyChanged interface. It also includes a bit of the MVVM pattern.CRUD Services: Provides a single generic CRUD service that can handle CRUD operations for any entity. Includes wrappers for supporting backend frameworks like Entity Framework and Linq-To-Sql, as well as for communication stacks like WCF and ASP.NET Web API.DotNetNuke Persian Packages: ???? ????? ? ???? ??? ?? ???? ???? 6.1.5 ???? ????? ??? ?? ???? - ??? ?? ?? ??FactureManger: With Facture manager you can easily create products, users, business partners and add them into Factures. This application can help to any business. GetSP2010ListIDs: This application is most useful while performing a manual deployment or backup/restore of SP2010 sites/lists/libraries from one environment to anotherKTOP Homeworks: ???????? ??????? ?? ?????Minecraft Italian Utility: Applicazione originariamente pubblicata su minecraftitalia.net, qui ci saranno le release e gli aggiornamenti My_first_Codeplex_project: My first Codeplex projectOAuth .NET Client: This project implements an OAuth client library in C# .NET.Painter: Hello! This is the help file for the Painter program. With this file you will be introduced into the futures of the program and the secrets of the program. PDN C++ AMP Effects: Paint.NET Gaussian blur effect written in C++ AMPThe East Wedding: This is a website for the East WeddingXDesigner.Writer: .XDesigner.Writer is a Document Editor like MS Word , Written in 100% C# code , without any the 3th part component , without RTF Text box , MS Word component or

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  • SQL SERVER – Introduction to Extended Events – Finding Long Running Queries

    - by pinaldave
    The job of an SQL Consultant is very interesting as always. The month before, I was busy doing query optimization and performance tuning projects for our clients, and this month, I am busy delivering my performance in Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008 Query Optimization and & Performance Tuning Course. I recently read white paper about Extended Event by SQL Server MVP Jonathan Kehayias. You can read the white paper here: Using SQL Server 2008 Extended Events. I also read another appealing chapter by Jonathan in the book, SQLAuthority Book Review – Professional SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting. After reading these excellent notes by Jonathan, I decided to upgrade my course and include Extended Event as one of the modules. This week, I have delivered Extended Events session two times and attendees really liked the said course. They really think Extended Events is one of the most powerful tools available. Extended Events can do many things. I suggest that you read the white paper I mentioned to learn more about this tool. Instead of writing a long theory, I am going to write a very quick script for Extended Events. This event session captures all the longest running queries ever since the event session was started. One of the many advantages of the Extended Events is that it can be configured very easily and it is a robust method to collect necessary information in terms of troubleshooting. There are many targets where you can store the information, which include XML file target, which I really like. In the following Events, we are writing the details of the event at two locations: 1) Ringer Buffer; and 2) XML file. It is not necessary to write at both places, either of the two will do. -- Extended Event for finding *long running query* IF EXISTS(SELECT * FROM sys.server_event_sessions WHERE name='LongRunningQuery') DROP EVENT SESSION LongRunningQuery ON SERVER GO -- Create Event CREATE EVENT SESSION LongRunningQuery ON SERVER -- Add event to capture event ADD EVENT sqlserver.sql_statement_completed ( -- Add action - event property ACTION (sqlserver.sql_text, sqlserver.tsql_stack) -- Predicate - time 1000 milisecond WHERE sqlserver.sql_statement_completed.duration > 1000 ) -- Add target for capturing the data - XML File ADD TARGET package0.asynchronous_file_target( SET filename='c:\LongRunningQuery.xet', metadatafile='c:\LongRunningQuery.xem'), -- Add target for capturing the data - Ring Bugger ADD TARGET package0.ring_buffer (SET max_memory = 4096) WITH (max_dispatch_latency = 1 seconds) GO -- Enable Event ALTER EVENT SESSION LongRunningQuery ON SERVER STATE=START GO -- Run long query (longer than 1000 ms) SELECT * FROM AdventureWorks.Sales.SalesOrderDetail ORDER BY UnitPriceDiscount DESC GO -- Stop the event ALTER EVENT SESSION LongRunningQuery ON SERVER STATE=STOP GO -- Read the data from Ring Buffer SELECT CAST(dt.target_data AS XML) AS xmlLockData FROM sys.dm_xe_session_targets dt JOIN sys.dm_xe_sessions ds ON ds.Address = dt.event_session_address JOIN sys.server_event_sessions ss ON ds.Name = ss.Name WHERE dt.target_name = 'ring_buffer' AND ds.Name = 'LongRunningQuery' GO -- Read the data from XML File SELECT event_data_XML.value('(event/data[1])[1]','VARCHAR(100)') AS Database_ID, event_data_XML.value('(event/data[2])[1]','INT') AS OBJECT_ID, event_data_XML.value('(event/data[3])[1]','INT') AS object_type, event_data_XML.value('(event/data[4])[1]','INT') AS cpu, event_data_XML.value('(event/data[5])[1]','INT') AS duration, event_data_XML.value('(event/data[6])[1]','INT') AS reads, event_data_XML.value('(event/data[7])[1]','INT') AS writes, event_data_XML.value('(event/action[1])[1]','VARCHAR(512)') AS sql_text, event_data_XML.value('(event/action[2])[1]','VARCHAR(512)') AS tsql_stack, CAST(event_data_XML.value('(event/action[2])[1]','VARCHAR(512)') AS XML).value('(frame/@handle)[1]','VARCHAR(50)') AS handle FROM ( SELECT CAST(event_data AS XML) event_data_XML, * FROM sys.fn_xe_file_target_read_file ('c:\LongRunningQuery*.xet', 'c:\LongRunningQuery*.xem', NULL, NULL)) T GO -- Clean up. Drop the event DROP EVENT SESSION LongRunningQuery ON SERVER GO Just run the above query, afterwards you will find following result set. This result set contains the query that was running over 1000 ms. In our example, I used the XML file, and it does not reset when SQL services or computers restarts (if you are using DMV, it will reset when SQL services restarts). This event session can be very helpful for troubleshooting. Let me know if you want me to write more about Extended Events. I am totally fascinated with this feature, so I’m planning to acquire more knowledge about it so I can determine its other usages. Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Training, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology Tagged: SQL Extended Events

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  • Silverlight 4 Released

    - by ScottGu
    The final release of Silverlight 4 is now available. What is in the Silverlight 4 Release Silverlight 4 contains a ton of new features and capabilities.  In particular we focused on three scenarios with this release: Further enhancing media support Building great business applications Enabling out of the browser experiences On Tuesday I gave a 60 minute keynote about Silverlight 4 which showed off many of the new features and capabilities now available.  You can watch my keynote to learn more about Silverlight 4 and see a ton of great demos of it in action. Also check out these three great posts by Tim Heuer that talk about the new features and provide a guide to the new Silverlight 4 capabilities: Silverlight 4 Beta – A Guide to the New Features Silverlight 4 RC – What was updated Silverlight 4 Released Also read David Anson’s great Silverlight 4 Toolkit post to learn more about the new controls and functionality also available within the Silverlight Toolkit release we also made available today.  Also visit this page to learn more about the new Pivot functionality in Silverlight 4 – which makes it really easy to visualize and interact with collections of images using Silverlight. Lastly – make sure to visit the www.silverlight.net web-site and visit the “Get Started” section to find free tutorials that you can use. Download and Install Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 To develop Silverlight 4 applications you should first download and install Visual Studio 2010 or download and install the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express edition. Then install the Silverlight Tools RC2 for Visual Studio 2010.  This setup includes the Silverlight 4 Developer Runtime, Silverlight 4 SDK, RIA Services, and VS 2010 tools support.  Once installed you can do File->New Project and choose Silverlight Application to create your first Silverlight 4 project.  You can then use the new WYSIWYG Silverlight designer in Visual Studio 2010 to design and build rich Silverlight 4 applications. Important: If you previously installed the Silverlight 4 Beta or RC build on your machine, please make sure to go into Add/Remove programs and uninstall the “Update for Visual Studio 2010 (KB976272)” package prior to installing the Silverlight Tools RC2 for Visual Studio 2010 setup.  Note that while Silverlight 4 is released, the “Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010” is currently in “RC2” mode (meaning we are going to keep an eye out for any remaining issues before finally calling it done).  We’ll update the tools to be “final” in a few weeks once we verify that no last minute issues/bugs remain. Download and Install Expression Blend 4 Release Candidate You can also download and install the Expression Blend 4 RC to create and design great Silverlight 4 applications.  Blend contains “Sketchflow” support – which makes it really easy to rapidly prototype ideas and applications.  To learn more about Sketchflow watch this 90 second video of it in action. Summary Today’s release is the fourth release of Silverlight that we’ve shipped in the last 2.5 years.  The team has done a great job of advancing it quickly and staying focused.  We think today’s Silverlight 4 release opens up a ton of new opportunities to build great solutions for both consumers and business scenarios.  We are looking forward to seeing what you build with it! Hope this helps, Scott

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  • Tip/Trick: Fix Common SEO Problems Using the URL Rewrite Extension

    - by ScottGu
    Search engine optimization (SEO) is important for any publically facing web-site.  A large % of traffic to sites now comes directly from search engines, and improving your site’s search relevancy will lead to more users visiting your site from search engine queries.  This can directly or indirectly increase the money you make through your site. This blog post covers how you can use the free Microsoft URL Rewrite Extension to fix a bunch of common SEO problems that your site might have.  It takes less than 15 minutes (and no code changes) to apply 4 simple URL Rewrite rules to your site, and in doing so cause search engines to drive more visitors and traffic to your site.  The techniques below work equally well with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC based sites.  They also works with all versions of ASP.NET (and even work with non-ASP.NET content). [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] Measuring the SEO of your website with the Microsoft SEO Toolkit A few months ago I blogged about the free SEO Toolkit that we’ve shipped.  This useful tool enables you to automatically crawl/scan your site for SEO correctness, and it then flags any SEO issues it finds.  I highly recommend downloading and using the tool against any public site you work on.  It makes it easy to spot SEO issues you might have in your site, and pinpoint ways to optimize it further. Below is a simple example of a report I ran against one of my sites (www.scottgu.com) prior to applying the URL Rewrite rules I’ll cover later in this blog post:   Search Relevancy and URL Splitting Two of the important things that search engines evaluate when assessing your site’s “search relevancy” are: How many other sites link to your content.  Search engines assume that if a lot of people around the web are linking to your content, then it is likely useful and so weight it higher in relevancy. The uniqueness of the content it finds on your site.  If search engines find that the content is duplicated in multiple places around the Internet (or on multiple URLs on your site) then it is likely to drop the relevancy of the content. One of the things you want to be very careful to avoid when building public facing sites is to not allow different URLs to retrieve the same content within your site.  Doing so will hurt with both of the situations above.  In particular, allowing external sites to link to the same content with multiple URLs will cause your link-count and page-ranking to be split up across those different URLs (and so give you a smaller page rank than what it would otherwise be if it was just one URL).  Not allowing external sites to link to you in different ways sounds easy in theory – but you might wonder what exactly this means in practice and how you avoid it. 4 Really Common SEO Problems Your Sites Might Have Below are 4 really common scenarios that can cause your site to inadvertently expose multiple URLs for the same content.  When this happens external sites linking to yours will end up splitting their page links across multiple URLs - and as a result cause you to have a lower page ranking with search engines than you deserve. SEO Problem #1: Default Document IIS (and other web servers) supports the concept of a “default document”.  This allows you to avoid having to explicitly specify the page you want to serve at either the root of the web-site/application, or within a sub-directory.  This is convenient – but means that by default this content is available via two different publically exposed URLs (which is bad).  For example: http://scottgu.com/ http://scottgu.com/default.aspx SEO Problem #2: Different URL Casings Web developers often don’t realize URLs are case sensitive to search engines on the web.  This means that search engines will treat the following links as two completely different URLs: http://scottgu.com/Albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx SEO Problem #3: Trailing Slashes Consider the below two URLs – they might look the same at first, but they are subtly different. The trailing slash creates yet another situation that causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and so split search rankings: http://scottgu.com http://scottgu.com/ SEO Problem #4: Canonical Host Names Sometimes sites support scenarios where they support a web-site with both a leading “www” hostname prefix as well as just the hostname itself.  This causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and split search rankling: http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx/ http://www.scottgu.com/albums.aspx/ How to Easily Fix these SEO Problems in 10 minutes (or less) using IIS Rewrite If you haven’t been careful when coding your sites, chances are you are suffering from one (or more) of the above SEO problems.  Addressing these issues will improve your search engine relevancy ranking and drive more traffic to your site. The “good news” is that fixing the above 4 issues is really easy using the URL Rewrite Extension.  This is a completely free Microsoft extension available for IIS 7.x (on Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7 and Windows Vista).  The great thing about using the IIS Rewrite extension is that it allows you to fix the above problems *without* having to change any code within your applications.  You can easily install the URL Rewrite Extension in under 3 minutes using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (a free tool we ship that automates setting up web servers and development machines).  Just click the green “Install Now” button on the URL Rewrite Spotlight page to install it on your Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 or Windows Vista machine: Once installed you’ll find that a new “URL Rewrite” icon is available within the IIS 7 Admin Tool: Double-clicking the icon will open up the URL Rewrite admin panel – which will display the list of URL Rewrite rules configured for a particular application or site: Notice that our rewrite rule list above is currently empty (which is the default when you first install the extension).  We can click the “Add Rule…” link button in the top-right of the panel to add and enable new URL Rewriting logic for our site.  Scenario 1: Handling Default Document Scenarios One of the SEO problems I discussed earlier in this post was the scenario where the “default document” feature of IIS causes you to inadvertently expose two URLs for the same content on your site.  For example: http://scottgu.com/ http://scottgu.com/default.aspx We can fix this by adding a new IIS Rewrite rule that automatically redirects anyone who navigates to the second URL to instead go to the first one.  We will setup the HTTP redirect to be a “permanent redirect” – which will indicate to search engines that they should follow the redirect and use the new URL they are redirected to as the identifier of the content they retrieve.  Let’s look at how we can create such a rule.  We’ll begin by clicking the “Add Rule” link in the screenshot above.  This will cause the below dialog to display: We’ll select the “Blank Rule” template within the “Inbound rules” section to create a new custom URL Rewriting rule.  This will display an empty pane like below: Don’t worry – setting up the above rule is easy.  The following 4 steps explain how to do so: Step 1: Name the Rule Our first step will be to name the rule we are creating.  Naming it with a descriptive name will make it easier to find and understand later.  Let’s name this rule our “Default Document URL Rewrite” rule: Step 2: Setup the Regular Expression that Matches this Rule Our second step will be to specify a regular expression filter that will cause this rule to execute when an incoming URL matches the regex pattern.   Don’t worry if you aren’t good with regular expressions - I suck at them too. The trick is to know someone who is good at them or copy/paste them from a web-site.  Below we are going to specify the following regular expression as our pattern rule: (.*?)/?Default\.aspx$ This pattern will match any URL string that ends with Default.aspx. The "(.*?)" matches any preceding character zero or more times. The "/?" part says to match the slash symbol zero or one times. The "$" symbol at the end will ensure that the pattern will only match strings that end with Default.aspx.  Combining all these regex elements allows this rule to work not only for the root of your web site (e.g. http://scottgu.com/default.aspx) but also for any application or subdirectory within the site (e.g. http://scottgu.com/photos/default.aspx.  Because the “ignore case” checkbox is selected it will match both “Default.aspx” as well as “default.aspx” within the URL.   One nice feature built-into the rule editor is a “Test pattern” button that you can click to bring up a dialog that allows you to test out a few URLs with the rule you are configuring: Above I've added a “products/default.aspx” URL and clicked the “Test” button.  This will give me immediate feedback on whether the rule will execute for it.  Step 3: Setup a Permanent Redirect Action We’ll then setup an action to occur when our regular expression pattern matches the incoming URL: In the dialog above I’ve changed the “Action Type” drop down to be a “Redirect” action.  The “Redirect Type” will be a HTTP 301 Permanent redirect – which means search engines will follow it. I’ve also set the “Redirect URL” property to be: {R:1}/ This indicates that we want to redirect the web client requesting the original URL to a new URL that has the originally requested URL path - minus the "Default.aspx" in it.  For example, requests for http://scottgu.com/default.aspx will be redirected to http://scottgu.com/, and requests for http://scottgu.com/photos/default.aspx will be redirected to http://scottgu.com/photos/ The "{R:N}" regex construct, where N >= 0, is called a back-reference and N is the back-reference index. In the case of our pattern "(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$", if the input URL is "products/Default.aspx" then {R:0} will contain "products/Default.aspx" and {R:1} will contain "products".  We are going to use this {R:1}/ value to be the URL we redirect users to.  Step 4: Apply and Save the Rule Our final step is to click the “Apply” button in the top right hand of the IIS admin tool – which will cause the tool to persist the URL Rewrite rule into our application’s root web.config file (under a <system.webServer/rewrite> configuration section): <configuration>     <system.webServer>         <rewrite>             <rules>                 <rule name="Default Document" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$" />                     <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" />                 </rule>             </rules>         </rewrite>     </system.webServer> </configuration> Because IIS 7.x and ASP.NET share the same web.config files, you can actually just copy/paste the above code into your web.config files using Visual Studio and skip the need to run the admin tool entirely.  This also makes adding/deploying URL Rewrite rules with your ASP.NET applications really easy. Step 5: Try the Rule Out Now that we’ve saved the rule, let’s try it out on our site.  Try the following two URLs on my site: http://scottgu.com/ http://scottgu.com/default.aspx Notice that the second URL automatically redirects to the first one.  Because it is a permanent redirect, search engines will follow the URL and should update the page ranking of http://scottgu.com to include links to http://scottgu.com/default.aspx as well. Scenario 2: Different URL Casing Another common SEO problem I discussed earlier in this post is that URLs are case sensitive to search engines on the web.  This means that search engines will treat the following links as two completely different URLs: http://scottgu.com/Albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx We can fix this by adding a new IIS Rewrite rule that automatically redirects anyone who navigates to the first URL to instead go to the second (all lower-case) one.  Like before, we will setup the HTTP redirect to be a “permanent redirect” – which will indicate to search engines that they should follow the redirect and use the new URL they are redirected to as the identifier of the content they retrieve. To create such a rule we’ll click the “Add Rule” link in the URL Rewrite admin tool again.  This will cause the “Add Rule” dialog to appear again: Unlike the previous scenario (where we created a “Blank Rule”), with this scenario we can take advantage of a built-in “Enforce lowercase URLs” rule template.  When we click the “ok” button we’ll see the following dialog which asks us if we want to create a rule that enforces the use of lowercase letters in URLs: When we click the “Yes” button we’ll get a pre-written rule that automatically performs a permanent redirect if an incoming URL has upper-case characters in it – and automatically send users to a lower-case version of the URL: We can click the “Apply” button to use this rule “as-is” and have it apply to all incoming URLs to our site.  Because my www.scottgu.com site uses ASP.NET Web Forms, I’m going to make one small change to the rule we generated above – which is to add a condition that will ensure that URLs to ASP.NET’s built-in “WebResource.axd” handler are excluded from our case-sensitivity URL Rewrite logic.  URLs to the WebResource.axd handler will only come from server-controls emitted from my pages – and will never be linked to from external sites.  While my site will continue to function fine if we redirect these URLs to automatically be lower-case – doing so isn’t necessary and will add an extra HTTP redirect to many of my pages.  The good news is that adding a condition that prevents my URL Rewriting rule from happening with certain URLs is easy.  We simply need to expand the “Conditions” section of the form above We can then click the “Add” button to add a condition clause.  This will bring up the “Add Condition” dialog: Above I’ve entered {URL} as the Condition input – and said that this rule should only execute if the URL does not match a regex pattern which contains the string “WebResource.axd”.  This will ensure that WebResource.axd URLs to my site will be allowed to execute just fine without having the URL be re-written to be all lower-case. Note: If you have static resources (like references to .jpg, .css, and .js files) within your site that currently use upper-case characters you’ll probably want to add additional condition filter clauses so that URLs to them also don’t get redirected to be lower-case (just add rules for patterns like .jpg, .gif, .js, etc).  Your site will continue to work fine if these URLs get redirected to be lower case (meaning the site won’t break) – but it will cause an extra HTTP redirect to happen on your site for URLs that don’t need to be redirected for SEO reasons.  So setting up a condition clause makes sense to add. When I click the “ok” button above and apply our lower-case rewriting rule the admin tool will save the following additional rule to our web.config file: <configuration>     <system.webServer>         <rewrite>             <rules>                 <rule name="Default Document" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$" />                     <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" />                 </rule>                 <rule name="Lower Case URLs" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="[A-Z]" ignoreCase="false" />                     <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">                         <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" />                     </conditions>                     <action type="Redirect" url="{ToLower:{URL}}" />                 </rule>             </rules>         </rewrite>     </system.webServer> </configuration> Try the Rule Out Now that we’ve saved the rule, let’s try it out on our site.  Try the following two URLs on my site: http://scottgu.com/Albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx Notice that the first URL (which has a capital “A”) automatically does a redirect to a lower-case version of the URL.  Scenario 3: Trailing Slashes Another common SEO problem I discussed earlier in this post is the scenario of trailing slashes within URLs.  The trailing slash creates yet another situation that causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and so split search rankings: http://scottgu.com http://scottgu.com/ We can fix this by adding a new IIS Rewrite rule that automatically redirects anyone who navigates to the first URL (that does not have a trailing slash) to instead go to the second one that does.  Like before, we will setup the HTTP redirect to be a “permanent redirect” – which will indicate to search engines that they should follow the redirect and use the new URL they are redirected to as the identifier of the content they retrieve.  To create such a rule we’ll click the “Add Rule” link in the URL Rewrite admin tool again.  This will cause the “Add Rule” dialog to appear again: The URL Rewrite admin tool has a built-in “Append or remove the trailing slash symbol” rule template.  When we select it and click the “ok” button we’ll see the following dialog which asks us if we want to create a rule that automatically redirects users to a URL with a trailing slash if one isn’t present: Like within our previous lower-casing rewrite rule we’ll add one additional condition clause that will exclude WebResource.axd URLs from being processed by this rule.  This will avoid an unnecessary redirect for happening for those URLs. When we click the “OK” button we’ll get a pre-written rule that automatically performs a permanent redirect if the URL doesn’t have a trailing slash – and if the URL is not processed by either a directory or a file.  This will save the following additional rule to our web.config file: <configuration>     <system.webServer>         <rewrite>             <rules>                 <rule name="Default Document" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$" />                     <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" />                 </rule>                 <rule name="Lower Case URLs" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="[A-Z]" ignoreCase="false" />                     <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">                         <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" />                     </conditions>                     <action type="Redirect" url="{ToLower:{URL}}" />                 </rule>                 <rule name="Trailing Slash" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="(.*[^/])$" />                     <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">                         <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" />                         <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" />                         <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" />                     </conditions>                     <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" />                 </rule>             </rules>         </rewrite>     </system.webServer> </configuration> Try the Rule Out Now that we’ve saved the rule, let’s try it out on our site.  Try the following two URLs on my site: http://scottgu.com http://scottgu.com/ Notice that the first URL (which has no trailing slash) automatically does a redirect to a URL with the trailing slash.  Because it is a permanent redirect, search engines will follow the URL and update the page ranking. Scenario 4: Canonical Host Names The final SEO problem I discussed earlier are scenarios where a site works with both a leading “www” hostname prefix as well as just the hostname itself.  This causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and split search rankling: http://www.scottgu.com/albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx We can fix this by adding a new IIS Rewrite rule that automatically redirects anyone who navigates to the first URL (that has a www prefix) to instead go to the second URL.  Like before, we will setup the HTTP redirect to be a “permanent redirect” – which will indicate to search engines that they should follow the redirect and use the new URL they are redirected to as the identifier of the content they retrieve.  To create such a rule we’ll click the “Add Rule” link in the URL Rewrite admin tool again.  This will cause the “Add Rule” dialog to appear again: The URL Rewrite admin tool has a built-in “Canonical domain name” rule template.  When we select it and click the “ok” button we’ll see the following dialog which asks us if we want to create a redirect rule that automatically redirects users to a primary host name URL: Above I’m entering the primary URL address I want to expose to the web: scottgu.com.  When we click the “OK” button we’ll get a pre-written rule that automatically performs a permanent redirect if the URL has another leading domain name prefix.  This will save the following additional rule to our web.config file: <configuration>     <system.webServer>         <rewrite>             <rules>                 <rule name="Cannonical Hostname">                     <match url="(.*)" />                     <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">                         <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^scottgu\.com$" negate="true" />                     </conditions>                     <action type="Redirect" url="http://scottgu.com/{R:1}" />                 </rule>                 <rule name="Default Document" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$" />                     <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" />                 </rule>                 <rule name="Lower Case URLs" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="[A-Z]" ignoreCase="false" />                     <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">                         <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" />                     </conditions>                     <action type="Redirect" url="{ToLower:{URL}}" />                 </rule>                 <rule name="Trailing Slash" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="(.*[^/])$" />                     <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">                         <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" />                         <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" />                         <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" />                     </conditions>                     <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" />                 </rule>             </rules>         </rewrite>     </system.webServer> </configuration> Try the Rule Out Now that we’ve saved the rule, let’s try it out on our site.  Try the following two URLs on my site: http://www.scottgu.com/albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx Notice that the first URL (which has the “www” prefix) now automatically does a redirect to the second URL which does not have the www prefix.  Because it is a permanent redirect, search engines will follow the URL and update the page ranking. 4 Simple Rules for Improved SEO The above 4 rules are pretty easy to setup and should take less than 15 minutes to configure on existing sites you already have.  The beauty of using a solution like the URL Rewrite Extension is that you can take advantage of it without having to change code within your web-site – and without having to break any existing links already pointing at your site.  Users who follow existing links will be automatically redirected to the new URLs you wish to publish.  And search engines will start to give your site a higher search relevancy ranking – which will list your site higher in search results and drive more traffic to it. Customizing your URL Rewriting rules further is easy to-do either by editing the web.config file directly, or alternatively, just double click the URL Rewrite icon within the IIS 7.x admin tool and it will list all the active rules for your web-site or application: Clicking any of the rules above will open the rules editor back up and allow you to tweak/customize/save them further. Summary Measuring and improving SEO is something every developer building a public-facing web-site needs to think about and focus on.  If you haven’t already, download and use the SEO Toolkit to analyze the SEO of your sites today. New URL Routing features in ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Forms 4 make it much easier to build applications that have more control over the URLs that are published.  Tools like the URL Rewrite Extension that I’ve talked about in this blog post make it much easier to improve the URLs that are published from sites you already have built today – without requiring you to change a lot of code. The URL Rewrite Extension provides a bunch of additional great capabilities – far beyond just SEO - as well.  I’ll be covering these additional capabilities more in future blog posts. Hope this helps, Scott

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  • Silverlight Cream for December 11, 2010 -- #1007

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Mike Wolf, Colin Eberhardt, Mike Snow(-2-, -3-), David Kelley(-2-, -3-), Jesse Liberty(-2-), Erik Mork, Jeff Blankenburg, Laurent Duveau, and Jeremy Likness(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "The definitive guide to Notification Window in Silverlight 4" Laurent Duveau WP7: "Making the MS Adcontrol REALLY work on phone 7" David Kelley Silverlight 5: "Silverlight 5: In the Trenches" Mike Wolf From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight 5: In the Trenches How many people can discuss Silverlight 5 'In the Trenches' ... apparently Mike Wolf can, and that's just what he's done in the post to whet your whistle (do people say that any more?) for when we can all get our hands on the bits. Visiblox, Visifire, DynamicDataDisplay – Charting Performance Comparison Colin Eberhardt responds to reader requests, and revisits his Charting Performance after also some discussion with David Anson about the Silverlight Toolkit. This time including Dynamic Data Display which is quite impressive in the ratings... check out the post and the code. Win7 Mobile Back Arrow Key Interception The simple fact is heavy bloggers rise, like Cream, to the top of my list, and I've been missing some goodness from Mike Snow... he's blogging WP7 stuff now... first up of the 'missed' ones is this one on intercepting the Back Arrow Key. Animating the Color of an Object Switching back to Silverlight in general, Mike Snow's next post is on Animating color of an object, such as text foreground. Tombstoning on the Win7 Mobile Platform And now back to WP7, Mike Snow is discussing Tombstoning... discussing the various aspects of it, and some code to use, if you haven't gotten your head around this one yet. What I tell Designers to give me... Integrating and Digital Zen David Kelley has a post up describing what he needs from designers to get his job done... I heard him discussing this at the Firestarter, and didn't realize he had written it up... these 8 items are things learned by doing, and should be discussed with your designers. Making the MS Adcontrol REALLY work on phone 7 David Kelley also has a post up discussing how to really get the Ad control working on WP7 apps... since I've seen lots of posts about this, having a definitive explanation from someone that's doing it is a good thing. Performance Optimization on Phone 7 In a break from his norm of discussing UX, David Kelley is talking about performance on WP7 devices in this post. Windows Phone From Scratch #10 – Visual State Part 2 When I saw Jesse Liberty's latest post, I realized I had missed his Part 2 of VSM for WP7 ... don't you miss it... this completes the good stuff from number 9 :) Windows Phone From Scratch #11 – Behaviors Jesse Liberty's latest Windows Phone from Scratch is up... and he's talking about Behaviors this time out... more of an overview or introduction to behaviors, but all good Show 112: Scott Guthrie on Silverlight 5 Erik Mork's latest Sparkling Client podcast is up and he was able to get some time with Scott Guthrie at the Firestarter. What I Learned in WP7 – Issue #1 Jeff Blankenburg decided to do another series, only this one isn't promised as every day... it's "What I Learned in WP7" ... and the first is up... good interesting bits found surrounding the WP7 device. The definitive guide to Notification Window in Silverlight 4 Laurent Duveau has a great post up that will have you doing Silverlight 'toast' notifications in no time... good descriptions and source. Lessons Learned in Personal Web Page Part 1: Dynamic XAML Jeremy Likness has rebuilt his personal website in Silverlight and is sharing some of that experience on his blog. This first post discusses the dynamic content. He used Jounce, of course, and included the Silverlight Navigation Framework, and... you can download all the source Lessons Learned in Personal Web Page Part 2: Enter the Matrix Jeremy Likness's second post about building his website is all about the 'Matrix' page ... pretty cool stuff... check it out... I think it looks great 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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  • Keeping up with Technology

    - by kennedysteve
    If you're like me, you have a hard time keeping up with all the technologies out there. The reality is there's too many new technologies (languages, methodologies,  tools, etc). One of the ways I try to keep up with everything is by using good ol' RSS feeds in conjunction with Google Reader. Google Reader is both an online aggregator of RSS feeds, and it also has a good companion app on Google Android. The nicest part of Google Reader for me is the "All Listings" view which gives me a reverse chronological view of ALL articles (mixed together) regardless of the actual RSS feed.  This way, I get to see the newest articles first. I can then choose to hide the articles I've viewed, etc. Here is a list of my RSS feeds. Admittedly, some of these are all over the spectrum. But you might find one or two interesting. .NET Rocks! RSS = http://feeds.feedburner.com/netRocksFullMp3Downloads Main Web Site = http://www.dotnetrocks.com Channel 9 RSS = http://channel9.msdn.com/Feeds/RSS Main Web Site = http://channel9.msdn.com/ CodePlex  RSS = http://www.codeplex.com/site/feeds/rss Main Web Site = http://www.codeplex.com/site/feeds/rss Connected Show Developer Podcast! RSS = http://feeds.connectedshow.com/ConnectedShow Main Web Site = http://www.ConnectedShow.com/ dnrTV RSS = http://feeds.feedburner.com/DnrtvWmv?format=xml Main Web Site = http://dnrtv.com ebookshare RSS = http://www.ebookshare.net/feed/ Main Web Site = http://www.ebookshare.net Geekswithblogs.net RSS = http://feeds.feedburner.com/geekswithblogs Main Web Site = http://geekswithblogs.net/mainfeed.aspx Gmail Blog RSS = http://feeds.feedburner.com/OfficialGmailBlog?format=xml Main Web Site = http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/ Google Mobile Blog RSS = http://feeds.feedburner.com/OfficialGoogleMobileBlog Main Web Site = http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/ Herding Code RSS = http://feeds.feedburner.com/herdingcode Main Web Site = http://herdingcode.com LearnVisualStudio.NET Videos RSS = http://www.learnvisualstudio.net/videos.rss Main Web Site = http://www.learnvisualstudio.net/ Microsoft Learning Upcoming = Microsoft Learning Upcoming Titles RSS = http://learning.microsoft.com/rss/en-US/upcomingtitles?brand=Learning Main Web Site = http://learning.microsoft.com:80/rss/en-US/upcomingtitles?brand=Learning MS On-demand Webcasts RSS = http://www.microsoft.com/communities/rss.aspx?&Title=On-Demand+Webcasts&RssTitle=Microsoft+Webcasts%3A+On-Demand+Webcasts&CMTYSvcSource=MSCOMMedia&WebNewsURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.microsoft.com%2Fevents%2FEventDetails.aspx&CMTYRawShape=list&Params=+%0D%0A%09~CMTYDataSvcParams%5E%0D%0A%09~arg+Name%3D'EventType'+Value%3D'OnDemandWebcast'%2F%5E%0D%0A%09~arg+Name%3D'ProviderID'+Value%3D'A6B43178-497C-4225-BA42-DF595171F04C'%2F%5E%0D%0A%09~arg+Name%3D'StartDate'+Value%3D'06%2F30%2F2006'%2F%5E%0D%0A%09~arg+Name%3D'EndDate'+Value%3D'Now%2B0'%2F%5E%0D%0A%09~%2FCMTYDataSvcParams%5E+&NumberOfItems=100 Main Web Site = http://www.microsoft.com/events/default.mspx MS Podcasts for Devs RSS = http://www.microsoft.com/events/podcasts/default.aspx?podcast=rss&audience=Audience-e5381407-359f-4922-97d0-0237af790eee&pageId=x40 Main Web Site = http://www.microsoft.com/events/podcasts/default.aspx?audience=Audience-e5381407-359f-4922-97d0-0237af790eee&pageId=x40&WT.rss_ev=f MSDN Blogs RSS = http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mainfeed.aspx?Type=BlogsOnly Main Web Site = http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ MSDN Radio RSS = http://www.microsoft.com/events/podcasts/default.aspx?topic=&audience=&view=&pageId=x73&seriesID=Series-b9139976-8d48-4249-9b89-ccd17891de1e.xml&podcast=rss&type=wma Main Web Site = http://www.microsoft.com/events/podcasts/default.aspx?seriesID=Series-b9139976-8d48-4249-9b89-ccd17891de1e.xml&pageId=x73&WT.rss_ev=f O'Reilly Deal of the Day RSS = http://feeds.feedburner.com/oreilly/ebookdealoftheday Main Web Site = http://oreilly.com O'Reilly New RSS = http://feeds.feedburner.com/oreilly/newbooks Main Web Site = http://oreilly.com/ Safari Books Online RSS = http://my.safaribooksonline.com/rss Main Web Site = http://my.safaribooksonline.com/ ScottGu's Blog RSS = http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/rss.aspx Main Web Site = http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/default.aspx SourceForge Community Blog RSS = http://sourceforge.net/blog/feed/ Main Web Site = http://sourceforge.net/blog Stack Overflow RSS = http://blog.stackoverflow.com/feed/ Main Web Site = http://blog.stackoverflow.com Stepcase Lifehack RSS = http://www.lifehack.org/feed/ Main Web Site = http://www.lifehack.org TechNet Radio RSS = http://www.microsoft.com/events/podcasts/default.aspx?topic=&audience=&view=&pageId=x73&seriesID=Series-cc4e3db2-9212-43c5-a57b-d43fa31e6452.xml&podcast=rss&type=wma Main Web Site = http://www.microsoft.com/events/podcasts/default.aspx?seriesID=Series-cc4e3db2-9212-43c5-a57b-d43fa31e6452.xml&pageId=x73&WT.rss_ev=f Wrox All New Titles RSS = http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/feed/RSS_WROX_ALLNEW.xml Main Web Site = http://www.wrox.com

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  • Silverlight Cream for March 26, 2010 -- #821

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Max Paulousky, Christian Schormann, John Papa, Phani Raj, David Anson(-2-, -3-), Brad Abrams(-2-), and Jeff Wilcox(-2-, -3-). Shoutouts: Jeff Wilcox posted his material from mix and some preview TestFramework bits: Unit Testing Silverlight & Windows Phone Applications – talk now online At MIX10, Jeff Wilcox demo'd an app called "Peppermint"... here's the bleeding edge demo: “Peppermint” MIX demo sources Erik Mork and Co. have put out their weekly This Week In Silverlight 3.25.2010 Brad Abrams has all his materials posted for his MIX10 session Mix2010: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Microsoft Silverlight... including play-by-play of the demo and all source. Do you use Rooler? Well you should! Watch a video Pete Brown did with Pete Blois on Expression Blend, Windows Phone, Rooler Interested in Silverlight and XNA for WP7? Me too! Michael Klucher has a post outlining the two: Silverlight and XNA Framework Game Development and Compatibility From SilverlightCream.com: Modularity in Silverlight Applications - An Issue With ModuleInitializeException Max Paulousky has a truly ugly error trace listed by way of not having a reference listed, and the obvious simple solution. Next time he'll talk about the difficult situations. Using SketchFlow to Prototype for Windows Phone Christian Schormann has a tutorial up on using Expression Blend to develop for WP7 ... who better than Christian for that task?? Silverlight TV 18: WCF RIA Services Validation John Papa held forth with Nikhil Kothari on WCF RIA Services and validation just prior to MIX10, and was posted yesterday. Building SL3 applications using OData client Library with Vs 2010 RC Phani Raj walks through building an OData consumer in SL3, the first problem you're going to hit, and the easy solution to it. Tip: When creating a DependencyProperty, follow the handy convention of "wrapper+register+static+virtual" David Anson has a couple more of his 'Tips' up... this first is about Dependency Properties again... having a good foundation for all your Dependency Properties is a great way to avoid problems. Tip: Do not assign DependencyProperty values in a constructor; it prevents users from overriding them In the next post, David Anson talks about not assigning Dependency Property values in a constructor and gives one of the two ways to get around doing so. Tip: Set DependencyProperty default values in a class's default style if it's more convenient In his latest post, David Anson gives the second way to avoid setting a Dependency Property value in the constructor. Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Brad Abrams Abrams adds SEO to the tutorial series he's doing. He begins with his PDC09 session material on the subject and then takes off on a great detailed tutorial all with source. Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Localizing Business Application Brad Abrams then discusses localization and Silverlight in another detailed tutorial with all code included. Silverlight Toolkit and the Windows Phone: WrapPanel, and a few others Jeff Wilcox has a few WP7 posts I'm going to push today. This first is from earlier this week and is about using the Toolkit in WP7 and better than that, he includes the bits you need if all you want is the WrapPanel Data binding user settings in Windows Phone applications In the next one from yesterday, Jeff Wilcox demonstrates saving some user info in Isolated Storage to improve the user experience, and shares all the necessary plumbing files, and other external links as well. Displaying 2D QR barcodes in Windows Phone applications In a post from today, Jeff Wilcox ported his Silverlight 2D QR Barcode app from last year into WP7 ... just very cool... get the source and display your Microsoft Tag. 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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  • Silverlight Cream for March 25, 2010 -- #820

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: René Schulte, Jeremy Likness, Hassan, Victor Gaudioso, SilverLaw, Mike Taulty, Phani Raj, Tim Heuer, Christian Schormann, Brad Abrams, David Anson, Diptimaya Patra, and Daniel Vaughan. Shoutouts: Last week, Koen Zwikstra announced Silverlight Spy at MIX10 Anand Iyer announced this for students on the Windows Team Blog: Be a Windows Phone 7 “Rockstar” Justin Angel blogged that Silverlight Isn't Fully Cross-Platform ... let him know if you think it's a yawn or important. On behalf of SilverlightShow, Cigdem Patlak posted MIX10: Laurent Bugnion on Silverlight adoption, WP7 and the EcoContest From SilverlightCream.com: Coding4Fun - Silverlight Real Time Face Detection René Schulte has a Coding 4 Fun article posted on facial recognition. Who better to be manipulating graphics like this than René? Sequential Asynchronous Workflows Part 2: Simplified Jeremy Likness follows up his previous post with another one that is 'simplified'. Remember his previous post began with a post on the Silverlight.net forum and Rob Eisenburg's MVVM presentation from MIX10 Windows Phone 7 Video Tutorial Hassan has a new video up on his AfricanGeek site, and that's a continuation of his previous WP7 video tutorial, adding a listbox and databinding it to the selected index of another listbox. The Los Angeles Silverlight Usergorup will be Streaming its March Meeting LIVE in Silverlight – Tonight! Victor Gaudioso used his Live Streaming knowledge to stream his User Group meeting last night from LA where Michael Washington presented on MVVM followed by Victor himself. That was last night. Today he has a couple of the videos up to view. Shining 3D Font Design - Silverlight 3 SilverLaw has a "Shining 3D Font" tutorial up, and a video on it here: New Video: How to create a 3D effect on a Silverlight 3 Textblock ... this is also available in the Expression Gallery. Silverlight 4 RC – Signing trusted apps with home made certificates Mike Taulty has a post up about building a hand-rolled cert to test out the XAP signing features, and then gives a nod to John Papa with a link to the Silverlight White Paper I've posted about before, because this info is in there as well. Developing a Windows Phone 7 Application that consumes OData Phani Raj has a tutorial up on consuming the NetFlix OData catalog on the WP7 emulator ... now *that* is cool! Make your Silverlight applications Speak to you with Microsoft Translator Tim Heuer used Silverlight to demonstrate Microsoft Translator as a speech synthesis tool using the Speak API included ... pretty cool, Tim ... lots of external links and code. Blend 4: About Path Layout, Sidebar – More About ListBox Than You Ever Wanted To Know Christian Schormann has another outstanding tutorial up on the ListBox and PathLayout in Expression Blend ... just check out the screen shots and you'll wanna read it! Silverlight 4 + RIA Services: Ready for Business: Updating Data in the Client This is the continuation of Brad Abrams' series on WCF RIA Services and is a tutorial on setting up to deal with updating the data. Tip: The CLR wrapper for a DependencyProperty should do its job and nothing more David Anson is posting some "Development Tips", and this is the first ... discussing making sure your DependencyProperty CLR wrapper stays on point... Create and Apply Theme Silverlight Application Diptimaya Patra has a tutorial up on creating and using themes. He states that "Themes are nothing but some predefined styles" ... check it out and see if it's really that easy :) Building a Windows Phone 7 Puzzle Game Daniel Vaughan has a great post up starting with installing all the tools and ending with a maze game for WP7 using XNA for sound... this is the first I've seen that integrates XNA (I think). 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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  • C# Multiple Property Sort

    - by Ben Griswold
    As you can see in the snippet below, sorting is easy with Linq.  Simply provide your OrderBy criteria and you’re done.  If you want a secondary sort field, add a ThenBy expression to the chain.  Want a third level sort?  Just add ThenBy along with another sort expression. var projects = new List<Project>     {         new Project {Description = "A", ProjectStatusTypeId = 1},         new Project {Description = "B", ProjectStatusTypeId = 3},         new Project {Description = "C", ProjectStatusTypeId = 3},         new Project {Description = "C", ProjectStatusTypeId = 2},         new Project {Description = "E", ProjectStatusTypeId = 1},         new Project {Description = "A", ProjectStatusTypeId = 2},         new Project {Description = "C", ProjectStatusTypeId = 4},         new Project {Description = "A", ProjectStatusTypeId = 3}     };   projects = projects     .OrderBy(x => x.Description)     .ThenBy(x => x.ProjectStatusTypeId)     .ToList();   foreach (var project in projects) {     Console.Out.WriteLine("{0} {1}", project.Description,         project.ProjectStatusTypeId); } Linq offers a great sort solution most of the time, but what if you want or need to do it the old fashioned way? projects.Sort ((x, y) =>         Comparer<String>.Default             .Compare(x.Description, y.Description) != 0 ?         Comparer<String>.Default             .Compare(x.Description, y.Description) :         Comparer<Int32>.Default             .Compare(x.ProjectStatusTypeId, y.ProjectStatusTypeId));   foreach (var project in projects) {     Console.Out.WriteLine("{0} {1}", project.Description,         project.ProjectStatusTypeId); } It’s not that bad, right? Just for fun, let add some additional logic to our sort.  Let’s say we wanted our secondary sort to be based on the name associated with the ProjectStatusTypeId.  projects.Sort((x, y) =>        Comparer<String>.Default             .Compare(x.Description, y.Description) != 0 ?        Comparer<String>.Default             .Compare(x.Description, y.Description) :        Comparer<String>.Default             .Compare(GetProjectStatusTypeName(x.ProjectStatusTypeId),                 GetProjectStatusTypeName(y.ProjectStatusTypeId)));   foreach (var project in projects) {     Console.Out.WriteLine("{0} {1}", project.Description,         GetProjectStatusTypeName(project.ProjectStatusTypeId)); } The comparer will now consider the result of the GetProjectStatusTypeName and order the list accordingly.  Of course, you can take this same approach with Linq as well.

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  • Oracle Text query parser

    - by Roger Ford
    Oracle Text provides a rich query syntax which enables powerful text searches.However, this syntax isn't intended for use by inexperienced end-users.  If you provide a simple search box in your application, you probably want users to be able to type "Google-like" searches into the box, and have your application convert that into something that Oracle Text understands.For example if your user types "windows nt networking" then you probably want to convert this into something like"windows ACCUM nt ACCUM networking".  But beware - "NT" is a reserved word, and needs to be escaped.  So let's escape all words:"{windows} ACCUM {nt} ACCUM {networking}".  That's fine - until you start introducing wild cards. Then you must escape only non-wildcarded searches:"win% ACCUM {nt} ACCUM {networking}".  There are quite a few other "gotchas" that you might encounter along the way.Then there's the issue of scoring.  Given a query for "oracle text query syntax", it would be nice if we could score a full phrase match higher than a hit where all four words are present but not in a phrase.  And then perhaps lower than that would be a document where three of the four terms are present.  Progressive relaxation helps you with this, but you need to code the "progression" yourself in most cases.To help with this, I've developed a query parser which will take queries in Google-like syntax, and convert them into Oracle Text queries. It's designed to be as flexible as possible, and will generate either simple queries or progressive relaxation queries. The input string will typically just be a string of words, such as "oracle text query syntax" but the grammar does allow for more complex expressions:  word : score will be improved if word exists  +word : word must exist  -word : word CANNOT exist  "phrase words" : words treated as phrase (may be preceded by + or -)  field:(expression) : find expression (which allows +,- and phrase as above) within "field". So for example if I searched for   +"oracle text" query +syntax -ctxcatThen the results would have to contain the phrase "oracle text" and the word syntax. Any documents mentioning ctxcat would be excluded from the results. All the instructions are in the top of the file (see "Downloads" at the bottom of this blog entry).  Please download the file, read the instructions, then try it out by running "parser.pls" in either SQL*Plus or SQL Developer.I am also uploading a test file "test.sql". You can run this and/or modify it to run your own tests or run against your own text index. test.sql is designed to be run from SQL*Plus and may not produce useful output in SQL Developer (or it may, I haven't tried it).I'm putting the code up here for testing and comments. I don't consider it "production ready" at this point, but would welcome feedback.  I'm particularly interested in comments such as "The instructions are unclear - I couldn't figure out how to do XXX" "It didn't work in my environment" (please provide as many details as possible) "We can't use it in our application" (why not?) "It needs to support XXX feature" "It produced an invalid query output when I fed in XXXX" Downloads: parser.pls test.sql

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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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  • Silverlight Cream for June 16, 2011 -- #1108

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: René Schulte, Rajat Jaiswal(-2-), Peter Kuhn, Colin Eberhardt, Kunal Chowdhury(-2-), Beth Massi, Michael Crump, Daniel Vaughan, Chris Rouw, WindowsPhoneGeek, and Jesse Liberty. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Cubelicious - Silverlight 5 + Balder + Physics + SLARToolkit Augmented Reality = Triple Win!" René Schulte WP7: "Binding the WP7 ProgressIndicator in XAML" Daniel Vaughan LightSwitch: "Adding Static Images and Text on a LightSwitch Screen" Beth Massi Shoutouts: Laurent Bugnion is Proposing a new RelayCommand snippet for MVVM Light V4... read about it and give him some feedback From SilverlightCream.com: Cubelicious - Silverlight 5 + Balder + Physics + SLARToolkit Augmented Reality = Triple Win! René Schulte has a post up about using the SLARToolkit for Silverlight 5 Beta in conjuncion with Balder and Physics ... dang this is cool, check out the video! PSD TO XAML in few easy steps using Expression Blend I'm not a Photoshop person, but apparently Rajat Jaiswal is, and he's demonstrating using Expression Blend to get your PSD file into XAML Its really great feature Silverlight realtime augment toolkit This is a fun post from Rajat Jaiswal... fun to see someone other than René Schulteposting about René's SLARToolkit :) Getting ready for the Windows Phone 7 Exam 70-599 (Part 2) Peter Kuhn has part 2 of his series up on getting ready for the Windows Phone 7 Exam at SilverlightShow Metro In Motion Part #7 – Panorama Prettiness and Opacity Colin Eberhardt has another Metro in Motion up... this one concentrates on the opacity effect when the user slides from item-to-item in Panorama contents Windows Phone 7 (Mango) Tutorial - 13 - What is Tombstoning? Kunal Chowdhury has a couple of posts up... first up is this one on Tombstoning... and if you're just starting with WP7.1, it got easier Windows Phone 7 Tip: Showing and Hiding onscreen keyboard in Emulator Kunal Chowdhury's latest is a great hint if you haven't found it already... how to show/hide the onscreen keyboard in the emulator Adding Static Images and Text on a LightSwitch Screen Beth Massi's latest post is on showing how to display an image or static text such as a logo in a LightSwitch app Displaying PDF Files in Windows Phone 7 Mango Michael Crump responds to reader's questions about displaying a PDF file in WP7.1 with this post using ComponentOne's Studio for Windows Phone CTP Binding the WP7 ProgressIndicator in XAML Daniel Vaughan has a solution to the problem of having to bind the ProgressIndicator in WP7.1 in code-behind... he wrote a ProgressIndicatorProxy and shares it with us!<>/dd> Storing Files in SQL Server using WCF RIA Services and Silverlight – Part 2 Chris Rouw has Part 2 of his Storing Files in SQL Servier using WCF RIA Services and Silverlight up... this one is on uploading and saving files to the database from Silvelright by the user dropping them onto your app. Using SqlMetal to generate Windows Phone Mango Local Database classes OK I'm not too proud to admit I'd never heard of SQLMetal... if you haven't, or even if you have, this post by WindowsPhoneGeek is a good discussion of using it to generate your WP7.1 database classes. Obtaining Email, Address or Phone Number Jesse Liberty's latest is another in his 'Mango From Scratch' series discussing the new tasks to obtain more info from the contact list. 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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  • The busy developers guide to the Kinect SDK Beta

    - by mbcrump
    The Kinect is awesome. From day one, I’ve said this thing has got potential. After playing with several open-source Kinect projects, I am please to announce that Microsoft has released the official SDK beta on 6/16/2011. I’ve created this quick start guide to get you up to speed in no time flat. Let’s begin: What is it? The Kinect for Windows SDK beta is a starter kit for applications developers that includes APIs, sample code, and drivers. This SDK enables the academic research and enthusiast communities to create rich experiences by using Microsoft Xbox 360 Kinect sensor technology on computers running Windows 7. (defined by Microsoft) Links worth checking out: Download Kinect for Windows SDK beta – You can either download a 32 or 64 bit SDK depending on your OS. Readme for Kinect for Windows SDK Beta from Microsoft Research  Programming Guide: Getting Started with the Kinect for Windows SDK Beta Code Walkthroughs of the samples that ship with the Kinect for Windows SDK beta (Found in \Samples Folder) Coding4Fun Kinect Toolkit – Lots of extension methods and controls for WPF and WinForms. Kinect Mouse Cursor – Use your hands to control things like a mouse created by Brian Peek. Kinect Paint – Basically MS Paint but use your hands! Kinect for Windows SDK Quickstarts Installing and Using the Kinect Sensor Getting it installed: After downloading the Kinect SDK Beta, double click the installer to get the ball rolling. Hit the next button a few times and it should complete installing. Once you have everything installed then simply plug in your Kinect device into the USB Port on your computer and hopefully you will get the following screen: Once installed, you are going to want to check out the following folders: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Research KinectSDK – This contains the actual Kinect Sample Executables along with the documentation as a CHM file. Also check out the C:\Users\Public\Documents\Microsoft Research KinectSDK Samples directory: The main thing to note here is that these folders contain the source code to the applications where you can compile/build them yourself. Audio NUI DEMO Time Let’s get started with some demos. Navigate to the C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Research KinectSDK folder and double click on ShapeGame.exe. Next up is SkeletalViewer.exe (image taken from http://www.i-programmer.info/news/91-hardware/2619-microsoft-launch-kinect-sdk-beta.html as I could not get a good image using SnagIt) At this point, you will have to download Kinect Mouse Cursor – This is really cool because you can use your hands to control the mouse cursor. I actually used this to resize itself. Last up is Kinect Paint – This is very cool, just make sure you read the instructions! MS Paint on steroids! A few tips for getting started building Kinect Applications. It appears WPF is the way to go with building Kinect Applications. You must also use a version of Visual Studio 2010.  Your going to need to reference Microsoft.Research.Kinect.dll when building a Kinect Application. Right click on References and then goto Browse and navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Research KinectSDK and select Microsoft.Research.Kinect.dll. You are going to want to make sure your project has the Platform target set to x86. The Coding4Fun Kinect Toolkit really makes things easier with extension methods and controls. Just note that this is for WinForms or WPF. Conclusion It looks like we have a lot of fun in store with the Kinect SDK. I’m very excited about the release and have already been thinking about all the applications that I can begin building. It seems that development will be easier now that we have an official SDK and the great work from Coding4Fun. Please subscribe to my blog or follow me on twitter for more information about Kinect, Silverlight and other great technology.  Subscribe to my feed

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  • HSSFS Part 2.1 - Parsing @@VERSION

    - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)
    For Part 2 of the Handy SQL Server Function Series I decided to tackle parsing useful information from the @@VERSION function, because I am an idiot.  It turns out I was confused about CHARINDEX() vs. PATINDEX() and it pretty much invalidated my original solution.  All is not lost though, this mistake turned out to be informative for me, and hopefully for you. Referring back to the "Version" view in the prelude I started with the following query to extract the version number: SELECT DISTINCT SQLVersion, SUBSTRING(VersionString,PATINDEX('%-%',VersionString)+2, 12) VerNum FROM VERSION I used PATINDEX() to find the first hyphen "-" character in the string, since the version number appears 2 positions after it, and got these results: SQLVersion VerNum ----------- ------------ 2000 8.00.2055 (I 2005 9.00.3080.00 2005 9.00.4053.00 2008 10.50.1600.1 As you can see it was good enough for most of the values, but not for the SQL 2000 @@VERSION.  You'll notice it has only 3 version sections/octets where the others have 4, and the SUBSTRING() grabbed the non-numeric characters after.  To properly parse the version number will require a non-fixed value for the 3rd parameter of SUBSTRING(), which is the number of characters to extract. The best value is the position of the first space to occur after the version number (VN), the trick is to figure out how to find it.  Here's where my confusion about PATINDEX() came about.  The CHARINDEX() function has a handy optional 3rd parameter: CHARINDEX (expression1 ,expression2 [ ,start_location ] ) While PATINDEX(): PATINDEX ('%pattern%',expression ) Does not.  I had expected to use PATINDEX() to start searching for a space AFTER the position of the VN, but it doesn't work that way.  Since there are plenty of spaces before the VN, I thought I'd try PATINDEX() on another character that doesn't appear before, and tried "(": SELECT SQLVersion, SUBSTRING(VersionString,PATINDEX('%-%',VersionString)+2, PATINDEX('%(%',VersionString)) FROM VERSION Unfortunately this messes up the length calculation and yields: SQLVersion VerNum ----------- --------------------------- 2000 8.00.2055 (Intel X86) Dec 16 2008 19:4 2005 9.00.3080.00 (Intel X86) Sep 6 2009 01: 2005 9.00.4053.00 (Intel X86) May 26 2009 14: 2008 10.50.1600.1 (Intel X86) Apr 2008 10.50.1600.1 (X64) Apr 2 20 Yuck.  The problem is that PATINDEX() returns position, and SUBSTRING() needs length, so I have to subtract the VN starting position: SELECT SQLVersion, SUBSTRING(VersionString,PATINDEX('%-%',VersionString)+2, PATINDEX('%(%',VersionString)-PATINDEX('%-%',VersionString)) VerNum FROM VERSION And the results are: SQLVersion VerNum ----------- -------------------------------------------------------- 2000 8.00.2055 (I 2005 9.00.4053.00 (I Msg 537, Level 16, State 2, Line 1 Invalid length parameter passed to the LEFT or SUBSTRING function. Ummmm, whoops.  Turns out SQL Server 2008 R2 includes "(RTM)" before the VN, and that causes the length to turn negative. So now that that blew up, I started to think about matching digit and dot (.) patterns.  Sadly, a quick look at the first set of results will quickly scuttle that idea, since different versions have different digit patterns and lengths. At this point (which took far longer than I wanted) I decided to cut my losses and redo the query using CHARINDEX(), which I'll cover in Part 2.2.  So to do a little post-mortem on this technique: PATINDEX() doesn't have the flexibility to match the digit pattern of the version number; PATINDEX() doesn't have a "start" parameter like CHARINDEX(), that allows us to skip over parts of the string; The SUBSTRING() expression is getting pretty complicated for this relatively simple task! This doesn't mean that PATINDEX() isn't useful, it's just not a good fit for this particular problem.  I'll include a version in the next post that extracts the version number properly. UPDATE: Sorry if you saw the unformatted version of this earlier, I'm on a quest to find blog software that ACTUALLY WORKS.

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  • Silverlight Cream for February 07, 2011 -- #1043

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Roy Dallal, Kevin Dockx, Gill Cleeren, Oren Gal, Colin Eberhardt, Rudi Grobler, Jesse Liberty, Shawn Wildermuth, Kirupa Chinnathambi, Jeremy Likness, Martin Krüger(-2-), Beth Massi, and Michael Crump. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "A Circular ProgressBar Style using an Attached ViewModel" Colin Eberhardt WP7: "Isolated Storage" Jesse Liberty Lightswitch: "How To Create Outlook Appointments from a LightSwitch Application" Beth Massi Shoutouts: Gergely Orosz has a summary of his 4-part series on Styles in Silverlight: Everything a Developer Needs To Know From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight Memory Leak, Part 2 Roy Dallal has part 2 of his memory leak posts up... and discusses the results of runnin VMMap and some hints on how to make best use of it. Using a Channel Factory in Silverlight (instead of adding a Service Reference). With cows. Kevin Dockx has a post up for those of you that don't like the generated code that comes about when adding a service reference, and the answer is a Channel Factory... and he has an example app in the post that populates a list of cows... honest ... check it out. Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 4) Gill Cleeren has Part 4 of his deep-dive into studying for the Silverlight Certification exam. This time out he's got probably half a gazillion links for working with data... seriously! Sync unlimited instances of one Silverlight application How about a cross-browser sync of an unlimited number of instances of the same Silverlight app... Oren Gal has just that going on, and discusses his first two attempts and how he finally honed in on the solution. A Circular ProgressBar Style using an Attached ViewModel Wow... check out what Colin Eberhardt's done with the "Progress Bar" ... using an Attached View Model which he discussed in a post a while back... these are awesome! WP7 - Professional Audio Recorder Rudi Grobler discusses an audio recorder for WP7 that uses the NAudio audio library for not only the recording but visualization. Isolated Storage Jesse Liberty's got his 30th 'From Scratch' post up and this time he's talking about Isolated Storage. Learning OData? MSDN and Shawn Wildermuth has the videos for you! Shawn Wildermuth produced a couple series of videos for MSDN on OData: Getting Started and Consuming OData... get the link on Shawn's post. Creating Sample Data from a Class - Page 1 Kirupa Chinnathambi shows us how to use a schema of your own design in Blend... yet still have Blend produce sample data A Pivot-Style Data Grid without the DataGrid Jeremy Likness discusses the lack of an open-source grid with dynamic columns ... let him know if you've done one! ... and then he continues on to demonstrate his build-out of the same. Synchronize a freeform drawing and a real path creation Martin Krüger has a few new samples up in the Expression Gallery. This first is taking mouse movement in an InkPresenter and creating path statements from it in a canvas and playing them back. How to: use Storyboard completed behaviors Martin Krüger's next post is about Storyboards and firing one off the end of another, in Blend... so he ended up producing a behavior for doing that... and it's in the Expression Gallery How To Create Outlook Appointments from a LightSwitch Application Beth Massi has a new Lightswitch post up... her previous was email from Lightswitch... this is Outlook appointments... pretty darn cool. Quick run through of the WP7 Developer Tools January 2011 Michael Crump has a really good Quick look at the new WP7 Dev Tools that were released last week posted on his blog 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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  • MIXing it Up a Bit

    - by andrewbrust
    Another March, another MIX.  For the fifth year running now, Microsoft has chosen to put on a conference aimed less at software development, per se, and more at the products, experiences and designs that software development can generate.  In all four prior MIX events, the focus of the show, its keynotes and breakout sessions has been on Web products.  On day 1 of MIX 2010 that focus shifted to Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7). What little we had seen of WP7 had been shown to us in a keynote presentation, given by Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain last month.  And today, Mr. Belfiore reprised his showmanship for the MIX 2010 audience.  Joe showed us the ins and outs of WP7 and, in a breakout session, even gave us a sneak peek of Office (specifically, Excel) on WP7.  We didn’t get to see that one month ago in Barcelona, nor did get to see email messages opened for reading, which we saw today. But beyond a tour of the phone itself, impressive though that is, we got to see apps running on it.  Those apps included Associated Press news, Seesmic (a major Twitter client) and Foursquare (a social media darling).  All three ran, ran well, and looked markedly different and better from their corresponding versions on iPhone and Android.  And the games we saw looked even better. To me though, the best demos involved the creation of WP7 apps, using Silverlight in Visual Studio and Expression Blend.  These demos were so effective because they showed important apps being built in very few steps, and by Microsoft executives to boot.  Scott Guthrie showed us how to build a Twitter API app in Visual Strudio.   Jon Harris showed us how to build a photo management and viewer application in Expression Blend, using virtually no code.  Demos of apps built from scratch to F5 without the benefit of a teacher, could be challenging.  But they went off fine, without a hitch and without a ton of opaque, generated code.  Everything written, be it C# or XAML, was easily understood, and the results were impressive. That means lots of developers can do this, and I think it means a lot will.  What I’ve seen, thus far, of iPhone and Android development looks very tedious by comparison.  Development for those platforms involve a collection of tools that integrate only to a point.  Dev work for WP7 involves use of Visual Studio, Silverlight and the same debugging experience .NET developers already know.  This was very exciting for me. All the demos harkened back to days of building apps for with Visual Basic…design the front-end, put in code-behind and then hit F5.  And that makes sense, because the phone platform, and the PC of the early 90s are both, essentially, client OS machines.  The Web was minimal and the “device” was everything. Same is true of this phone.  It’s a client app contraption that fits in your pocket. And if the platforms are comparable, hopefully so too will be the draw of ease-of-development.   WP7 has the potential to make mobile developers want to switch over, and to convince enterprise developers to get into the phone scene.  Will this propel the new phone platform to new heights, and restore Microsoft’s competiveness in the mobile arena? I hope so.  I think so.  And if Microsoft uses developers to build themselves a victory, that would be beneficial and would show that Microsoft has learned from its failures, as well as its successes.  Today I saw a few beautiful apps.  Tomorrow I hope I see a slew of others; maybe not as polished, but plentiful, attractive and stable.  That would be a victory for Microsoft, and for developers.  And it would show everyone else that developers are the kingmakers.  They need cheap, efficient dev tools and lots of respect.  Microsoft has always been the company to provide that.  Hopefully, with WP7, they will return to that persona and see how very timeless it is.

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  • Inappropriate Updates?

    - by Tony Davis
    A recent Simple-talk article by Kathi Kellenberger dissected the fastest SQL solution, submitted by Peter Larsson as part of Phil Factor's SQL Speed Phreak challenge, to the classic "running total" problem. In its analysis of the code, the article re-ignited a heated debate regarding the techniques that should, and should not, be deemed acceptable in your search for fast SQL code. Peter's code for running total calculation uses a variation of a somewhat contentious technique, sometimes referred to as a "quirky update": SET @Subscribers = Subscribers = @Subscribers + PeopleJoined - PeopleLeft This form of the UPDATE statement, @variable = column = expression, is documented and it allows you to set a variable to the value returned by the expression. Microsoft does not guarantee the order in which rows are updated in this technique because, in relational theory, a table doesn’t have a natural order to its rows and the UPDATE statement has no means of specifying the order. Traditionally, in cases where a specific order is requires, such as for running aggregate calculations, programmers who used the technique have relied on the fact that the UPDATE statement, without the WHERE clause, is executed in the order imposed by the clustered index, or in heap order, if there isn’t one. Peter wasn’t satisfied with this, and so used the ingenious device of assuring the order of the UPDATE by the use of an "ordered CTE", based on an underlying temporary staging table (a heap). However, in either case, the ordering is still not guaranteed and, in addition, would be broken under conditions of parallelism, or partitioning. Many argue, with validity, that this reliance on a given order where none can ever be guaranteed is an abuse of basic relational principles, and so is a bad practice; perhaps even irresponsible. More importantly, Microsoft doesn't wish to support the technique and offers no guarantee that it will always work. If you put it into production and it breaks in a later version, you can't file a bug. As such, many believe that the technique should never be tolerated in a production system, under any circumstances. Is this attitude justified? After all, both forms of the technique, using a clustered index to guarantee the order or using an ordered CTE, have been tested rigorously and are proven to be robust; although not guaranteed by Microsoft, the ordering is reliable, provided none of the conditions that are known to break it are violated. In Peter's particular case, the technique is being applied to a temporary table, where the developer has full control of the data ordering, and indexing, and knows that the table will never be subject to parallelism or partitioning. It might be argued that, in such circumstances, the technique is not really "quirky" at all and to ban it from your systems would server no real purpose other than to deprive yourself of a reliable technique that has uses that extend well beyond the running total calculations. Of course, it is doubly important that such a technique, including its unsupported status and the assumptions that underpin its success, is fully and clearly documented, preferably even when posting it online in a competition or forum post. Ultimately, however, this technique has been available to programmers throughout the time Sybase and SQL Server has existed, and so cannot be lightly cast aside, even if one sympathises with Microsoft for the awkwardness of maintaining an archaic way of doing updates. After all, a Table hint could easily be devised that, if specified in the WITH (<Table_Hint_Limited>) clause, could be used to request the database engine to do the update in the conventional order. Then perhaps everyone would be satisfied. Cheers, Tony.

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  • Silverlight Cream for May 11, 2010 -- #859

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this All Submittal Issue: Colin Eberhardt, Ken Johnson, Alan Beasley, Pencho Popadiyn, Phil Middlemiss, Khawar(-2-), Levente Mihály, Alex van Beek, Bart Czernicki, Michael Washington, and Mark Monster. Shoutout: Not Silverlight necessarily, but definitely VS2010, read what Brett Balmer has to say In Defense of Portrait Mode From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight MultiBinding solution for Silverlight 4 Colin Eberhardt updated his Silverlight Multibinding solution to Silverlight 4. Great article with explanatory graphics, and links to the code... congrats on the use in the FaceBook Client too! Spirograph Shapes: WPF Bezier shapes from math formulae Wow... I haven't seen this much math since my Master's Thesis! ... Check out all the shapes Ken Johnson has built... don't let the math scare you... just use it :) Busy Dizzy Bee-sley Spirographic Animation in Expression Blend and Silverlight This is just fun... I saw Michael Washington playing with this yesterday at the Arizona Day of .NET but didn't have a chance to ask what it was.. Alan Beasley had a good time building this, and is sharing a very detailed tutorial with us. ModalDialogs, IEditableObject and MVVM in Silverlight 4 Pencho Popadiyn said the 'M' word over at SilverlightShow... actually the 'MVVM' word :) ... he's discussing Modal dialogs with no code in the View ... check out how he did it. A Chrome and Glass Theme - Part 6 Phil Middlemiss is up to episode 6 in his Theme-building tutorial... this time out, he's giving the TabControl and TabItem new clothes ... specifically discussing what to change and what to allow to inherit ... good stuff! Silverlight 4 Fonts gotcha Check out Khawar's ATM Machine demo -- there's a link on the page for this post... he had an issue with fonts, ratted it out, and explains it for all of us... thanks Khawar Demystifying Silverlight Obfuscation Khawar also has a good post up on Obfuscating your Silverlight... definitely showing that it's not all that difficult to do. geoGallery, a WinPhone7 sample OK this is interesting... using the geoLocation feature of WP7, Levente Mihály hits Google Picasa to find pictures... good write-up and all the code. Silverlight 4: Digitally signing a XAP with Visual Studio 2010 Alex van Beek has a nice tutorial on Signing your XAP file using Visual Studio 2010... of course you may want to visit Tim Heuer's blog (search at SC) to find the two good deals on certificates that are still in play. Creating Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in Expression Blend 4 for Business Intelligence applications In an interesting post, Bart Czernicki describes using the shape assets in Blend 4 to produce a KPI display in Silverlight or WPF. A discussion of the shape's evolution for KPI is included as well as some alternate shape uses. A DotNetNuke Silverlight 4 Drag and Drop File Manager Michael Washington has blogged about his Drag and Drop File Manager using the View Model Style pattern. This is covered in two CodeProject articles listed in the post. The design work was done by Alan Beasely and links to his work is there as well as covered in other SC posts. How to select a ListItem on Hover Mark Monster had a Use Case for Selecting a ListBox entry by hovering ... but he did it with a Behavior and for a ListBox and PathListBox and it works with DataBinding... 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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  • Unit Testing Framework for XQuery

    - by Knut Vatsendvik
    This posting provides a unit testing framework for XQuery using Oracle Service Bus. It allows you to write a test case to run your XQuery transformations in an automated fashion. When the test case is run, the framework returns any differences found in the response. The complete code sample with install instructions can be downloaded from here. Writing a Unit Test You start a new Test Case by creating a Proxy Service from Workshop that comes with Oracle Service Bus. In the General Configuration page select Service Type to be Messaging Service           In the Message Type Configuration page link both the Request & Response Message Type to the TestCase element of the UnitTest.xsd schema                 The TestCase element consists of the following child elements The ID and optional Name element is simply used for reference. The Transformation element is the XQuery resource to be executed. The Input elements represents the input to run the XQuery with. The Output element represents the expected output. These XML documents are “also” represented as an XQuery resource where the XQuery function takes no arguments and returns the XML document. Why not pass the test data with the TestCase? Passing an XML structure in another XML structure is not very easy or at least not very human readable. Therefore it was chosen to represent the test data as an loadable resource in the OSB. However you are free to go ahead with another approach on this if wanted. The XMLDiff elements represents any differences found. A sample on input is shown here. Modeling the Message Flow Then the next step is to model the message flow of the Proxy Service. In the Request Pipeline create a stage node that loads the test case input data.      For this, specify a dynamic XQuery expression that evaluates at runtime to the name of a pre-registered XQuery resource. The expression is of course set by the input data from the test case.           Add a Run stage node. Assign the result of the XQuery, that is to be run, to a context variable. Define a mapping for each of the input variables added in previous stage.     Add a Compare stage. Like with the input data, load the expected output data. Do a compare using XMLDiff XQuery provided where the first argument is the loaded output test data, and the second argument the result from the Run stage. Any differences found is replaced back into the test case XMLDiff element. In case of any unexpected failure while processing, add an Error Handler to the Pipeline to capture the fault. To pass back the result add the following Insert action In the Response Pipeline. A sample on output is shown here.

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  • Some Original Expressions

    - by Phil Factor
    Guest Editorial for Simple-Talk newsletterIn a guest editorial for the Simple-Talk Newsletter, Phil Factor wonders if we are still likely to find some more novel and unexpected ways of using the newer features of Transact SQL: or maybe in some features that have always been there! There can be a great deal of fun to be had in trying out recent features of SQL Expressions to see if  they provide new functionality.  It is surprisingly rare to find things that couldn’t be done before, but in a different   and more cumbersome way; but it is great to experiment or to read of someone else making that discovery.  One such recent feature is the ‘table value constructor’, or ‘VALUES constructor’, that managed to get into SQL Server 2008 from Standard SQL.  This allows you to create derived tables of up to 1000 rows neatly within select statements that consist of  lists of row values.  E.g. SELECT Old_Welsh, number FROM (VALUES ('Un',1),('Dou',2),('Tri',3),('Petuar',4),('Pimp',5),('Chwech',6),('Seith',7),('Wyth',8),('Nau',9),('Dec',10)) AS WelshWordsToTen (Old_Welsh, number) These values can be expressions that return single values, including, surprisingly, subqueries. You can use this device to create views, or in the USING clause of a MERGE statement. Joe Celko covered  this here and here.  It can become extraordinarily handy to use once one gets into the way of thinking in these terms, and I’ve rewritten a lot of routines to use the constructor, but the old way of using UNION can be used the same way, but is a little slower and more long-winded. The use of scalar SQL subqueries as an expression in a VALUES constructor, and then applied to a MERGE, has got me thinking. It looks very clever, but what use could one put it to? I haven’t seen anything yet that couldn’t be done almost as  simply in SQL Server 2000, but I’m hopeful that someone will come up with a way of solving a tricky problem, just in the same way that a freak of the XML syntax forever made the in-line  production of delimited lists from an expression easy, or that a weird XML pirouette could do an elegant  pivot-table rotation. It is in this sort of experimentation where the community of users can make a real contribution. The dissemination of techniques such as the Number, or Tally table, or the unconventional ways that the UPDATE statement can be used, has been rapid due to articles and blogs. However, there is plenty to be done to explore some of the less obvious features of Transact SQL. Even some of the features introduced into SQL Server 2000 are hardly well-known. Certain operations on data are still awkward to perform in Transact SQL, but we mustn’t, I think, be too ready to state that certain things can only be done in the application layer, or using a CLR routine. With the vast array of features in the product, and with the tools that surround it, I feel that there is generally a way of getting tricky things done. Or should we just stick to our lasts and push anything difficult out into procedural code? I’d love to know your views.

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  • SQL SERVER – What are Actions in SSAS and How to Make a Reporting Action

    - by Pinal Dave
    Actions are used for customized browsing and drilling of data for the end-user. It’s an event that a user can raise while accessing the cube data. They are used in cube browsers like excel and are triggered when a user in a client tool clicks on a particular member, level, dimension, cells or may be the cube itself.  For example a user might be able to see a reporting services report, open a web page or drill through to detailed information related to the cube data. Analysis server supports 3 types of actions :- Report Drill-through Standard Actions In this blog post, I will explain the Reporting  action. The objective of this action is to return a report with details of the product where the sales amount is greater than 1000 in cube browser analysis. You need to create a basic cube first with the facts and dimensions you want in the analysis. Following are the steps to create reporting action. Go to SQL server data tools and open the analysis services project. Navigate to actions and click on new reporting action. 2.) Specify the name of the action and choose target type as attribute members since we have to create the action on members for a attribute. 3.) Specify the Target object of your report action. Target object would be the dimension or attribute on which you want the report to appear. In our case it is product name. 4.) Next you have to define the condition on which you want the report link to appear. However, this is an optional feature. In this example we are specifying a condition, which will check if the sales amount is greater than 10,000. So, that the link appears only for those products where the defined condition is met. 5.) Next you have to specify the server name on which the report is present, report path  and the report format in which you want the report to appear. 6.) Additionally you can specify the parameters. As with conditional expression, the parameters should be a valid MDX expression. The parameter name should be same as the one defined in the report. 7.) Deploy your solution after you are done with specifying parameters and go to the cube browser. 8.) Click on the analyze in excel button, this will open your cube in excel 9.) Make an analysis which shows product names and their sales amount. 10.) Right click on a product where sales amount is greater than 10000 you will see the reporting action link. Click on that and you will be taken to your reporting services report. 11.) Clicking on the link will take you to the URL of the report. I created this report using report project wizard in SQL server data tools. So, this is how we can launch reports from a cube browser. Similarly you can open web pages, run applications and a number of  other tasks. Koenig Solutions offers SSAS training which contains all Analysis Services including Reporting in great detail. In my next blog post I will talk about drill-through actions. Author: Namita Sharma, Senior Corporate Trainer at Koenig Solutions. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: SSAS

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  • Silverlight Cream for February 06, 2011 -- #1042

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Mike Taulty, Timmy Kokke, Laurent Bugnion, Arik Poznanski, Deyan Ginev, Deborah Kurata(-2-), Johnny Tordgeman, Roy Dallal, Jaime Rodriguez, Samuel Jack(-2-), James Ashley. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Customizing Silverlight properties for Visual Designers" Timmy Kokke WP7: "Back button press when using webbrowser control in WP7" Jaime Rodriguez Expression Blend: "Blend Bits 21–Importing from Photoshop & Illustrator…" Mike Taulty From SilverlightCream.com: Blend Bits 21–Importing from Photoshop & Illustrator… Mike Taulty is up to 21 episodes on his Blend Bits sequence now, and this one is about using Blend's import capability, such as a .psd file with all the layers intact. Customizing Silverlight properties for Visual Designers Timmy Kokke has part 1 of 2 parts on making your Silverlight control properties in design surfaces such as Visual Studio designer or Expression Blend. An error when installing MVVM Light templates for VS10 Express Laurent Bugnion has released a new version of MVVMLight that resolves a problem with VS2010 Express version of the templates... no problem with anything else. Reading RSS items on Windows Phone 7 Arik Poznanski has a post up about reading RSS on a WP7, but better yet, he also has code for a helper class that you can grab, plus explanation of wiring it up. Integrating your Windows Phone unit tests with MSBuild #4: The WP7 Unit Test Application Deyan Ginev has a post up about Telerik's WP7 test app that outputs test results in XML from the emulator so they can be integrated with the MSBuild log. Accessing Data in a Silverlight Application: EF I apprently missed this post by Deborah Kurata last week on bringing data into your Silverlight app via Entity Frameworks... good detailed tutorial in VB and C#. Updating Data in a Silverlight Application: EF In Deborah Kurata's latest post, she is continuing with Entity Frameworks by demonstrating updating to the database... full source code will be produced in a later post. Fun with Silverlight and SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Control - Part 2 - An In Depth Look At The Ribbon Control Johnny Tordgeman has Part 2 of his Silverlight and Sharepoint 2010 Ribbon up... taking a deep-dive into the ribbon... great explanation of the attributes, code included. Geographic Coordinates Systems Roy Dallal has some Geo code up that's not necessarily Silverlight, but very cool if you're doing any GIS programming... ya gotta know the coordinate systems! Back button press when using webbrowser control in WP7 Jaime Rodriguez has a post up discussing the much-lamented back-button action in the certification requirements and how to deal with that in a web browser app. Multiplayer-enabling my Windows Phone 7 game: Day 1 Samuel Jack challenged himself to build a WP7 game in 3 days... now he's challenging himself to make it multiplayer in 3 days... this first hour-to-hour post is research of networking and an azure server-side solution. Multiplayer-enabling my Windows Phone 7 game: Day 2–Building a UI with XPF Day 2 for Samuel Jack getting the multiplayer portion of his game working in 3 days.. this day involves getting up-to-speed with XPF. How to Hotwire your WP7 Phone Battery Did you realize if you run your WP7 battery completely down that you can't charge it? James Ashley reports that circumstance, and how he resolved it. 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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  • Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations

    - by aspiringgeek
    Preamble This is the first in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in this deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc.  The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume quick-reference alternative. Why Columnstore? If we’re looking for a subset of columns from one or a few rows, given the right indexes, SQL Server can do a superlative job of providing an answer. If we’re asking a question which by design needs to hit lots of rows—DW, reporting, aggregations, grouping, scans, etc., SQL Server has never had a good mechanism—until columnstore. Columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2012. However, they're still largely unknown. Some adoption blockers existed; yet columnstore was nonetheless a game changer for many apps.  In SQL Server 2014, potential blockers have been largely removed & they're going to profoundly change the way we interact with our data.  The purpose of this series is to share the performance benefits of columnstore & documenting columnstore is a compelling reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2014. App: MSIT SONAR Aggregations At MSIT, performance & configuration data is captured by SCOM. We archive much of the data in a partitioned data warehouse table in SQL Server 2012 for reporting via an application called SONAR.  By definition, this is a primary use case for columnstore—report queries requiring aggregation over large numbers of rows.  New data is refreshed each night by an automated table partitioning mechanism—a best practices scenario for columnstore. The Win Compared to performance using classic indexing which resulted in the expected query plan selection including partition elimination vs. SQL Server 2012 nonclustered columnstore, query performance increased significantly.  Logical reads were reduced by over a factor of 50; both CPU & duration improved by factors of 20 or more.  Other than creating the columnstore index, no special modifications or tweaks to the app or databases schema were necessary to achieve the performance improvements.  Existing nonclustered indexes were rendered superfluous & were deleted, thus mitigating maintenance challenges such as defragging as well as conserving disk capacity. Details The table provides the raw data & summarizes the performance deltas. Logical Reads (8K pages) CPU (ms) Durn (ms) Columnstore 160,323 20,360 9,786 Conventional Table & Indexes 9,053,423 549,608 193,903 ? x56 x27 x20 The charts provide additional perspective of this data.  "Conventional vs. Columnstore Metrics" document the raw data.  Note on this linear display the magnitude of the conventional index performance vs. columnstore.  The “Metrics (?)” chart expresses these values as a ratio. Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing.  I have documented here, the first in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from an initial implementation at MSIT in which logical reads were reduced by over a factor of 50; both CPU & duration improved by factors of 20 or more.  Subsequent features in this series document performance enhancements that are even more significant. 

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  • Perm SSIS Developer Urgently Required

    - by blakmk
      Job Role To provide dedicated data services support to the company, by designing, creating, maintaining and enhancing database objects, ensuring data quality, consistency and integrity. Migrating data from various sources to central SQL 2008 data warehouse will be the primary function. Migration of data from bespoke legacy database’s to SQL 2008 data warehouse. Understand key business requirements, Liaising with various aspects of the company. Create advanced transformations of data, with focus on data cleansing, redundant data and duplication. Creating complex business rules regarding data services, migration, Integrity and support (Best Practices). Experience ·         Minimum 3 year SSIS experience, in a project or BI Development role and involvement in at least 3 full ETL project life cycles, using the following methodologies and tools o    Excellent knowledge of ETL concepts including data migration & integrity, focusing on SSIS. o    Extensive experience with SQL 2005 products, SQL 2008 desirable. o    Working knowledge of SSRS and its integration with other BI products. o    Extensive knowledge of T-SQL, stored procedures, triggers (Table/Database), views, functions in particular coding and querying. o    Data cleansing and harmonisation. o    Understanding and knowledge of indexes, statistics and table structure. o    SQL Agent – Scheduling jobs, optimisation, multiple jobs, DTS. o    Troubleshoot, diagnose and tune database and physical server performance. o    Knowledge and understanding of locking, blocks, table and index design and SQL configuration. ·         Demonstrable ability to understand and analyse business processes. ·         Experience in creating business rules on best practices for data services. ·         Experience in working with, supporting and troubleshooting MS SQL servers running enterprise applications ·         Proven ability to work well within a team and liaise with other technical support staff such as networking administrators, system administrators and support engineers. ·         Ability to create formal documentation, work procedures, and service level agreements. ·         Ability to communicate technical issues at all levels including to a non technical audience. ·         Good working knowledge of MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Project.   Location Based in Crawley with possibility of some remote working Contact me for more info: http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/blakmk/contact.aspx      

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  • Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations

    - by aspiringgeek
    Preamble This is the first in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in this deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc.  The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume quick-reference alternative. Why Columnstore? If we’re looking for a subset of columns from one or a few rows, given the right indexes, SQL Server can do a superlative job of providing an answer. If we’re asking a question which by design needs to hit lots of rows—DW, reporting, aggregations, grouping, scans, etc., SQL Server has never had a good mechanism—until columnstore. Columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2012. However, they're still largely unknown. Some adoption blockers existed; yet columnstore was nonetheless a game changer for many apps.  In SQL Server 2014, potential blockers have been largely removed & they're going to profoundly change the way we interact with our data.  The purpose of this series is to share the performance benefits of columnstore & documenting columnstore is a compelling reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2014. App: MSIT SONAR Aggregations At MSIT, performance & configuration data is captured by SCOM. We archive much of the data in a partitioned data warehouse table in SQL Server 2012 for reporting via an application called SONAR.  By definition, this is a primary use case for columnstore—report queries requiring aggregation over large numbers of rows.  New data is refreshed each night by an automated table partitioning mechanism—a best practices scenario for columnstore. The Win Compared to performance using classic indexing which resulted in the expected query plan selection including partition elimination vs. SQL Server 2012 nonclustered columnstore, query performance increased significantly.  Logical reads were reduced by over a factor of 50; both CPU & duration improved by factors of 20 or more.  Other than creating the columnstore index, no special modifications or tweaks to the app or databases schema were necessary to achieve the performance improvements.  Existing nonclustered indexes were rendered superfluous & were deleted, thus mitigating maintenance challenges such as defragging as well as conserving disk capacity. Details The table provides the raw data & summarizes the performance deltas. Logical Reads (8K pages) CPU (ms) Durn (ms) Columnstore 160,323 20,360 9,786 Conventional Table & Indexes 9,053,423 549,608 193,903 ? x56 x27 x20 The charts provide additional perspective of this data.  "Conventional vs. Columnstore Metrics" document the raw data.  Note on this linear display the magnitude of the conventional index performance vs. columnstore.  The “Metrics (?)” chart expresses these values as a ratio. Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing.  I have documented here, the first in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from an initial implementation at MSIT in which logical reads were reduced by over a factor of 50; both CPU & duration improved by factors of 20 or more.  Subsequent features in this series document performance enhancements that are even more significant. 

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