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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, June 01, 2014

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, June 01, 2014Popular ReleasesSandcastle Help File Builder: Help File Builder and Tools v2014.5.31.0: General InformationIMPORTANT: On some systems, the content of the ZIP file is blocked and the installer may fail to run. Before extracting it, right click on the ZIP file, select Properties, and click on the Unblock button if it is present in the lower right corner of the General tab in the properties dialog. This release completes removal of the branding transformations and implements the new VS2013 presentation style that utilizes the new lightweight website format. Several breaking cha...Tooltip Web Preview: ToolTip Web Preview: Version 1.0Database Helper: Release 1.0.0.0: First Release of Database HelperCoMaSy: CoMaSy1.0.2: !Contact Management SystemImage View Slider: Image View Slider: This is a .NET component. We create this using VB.NET. Here you can use an Image Viewer with several properties to your application form. We wish somebody to improve freely. Try this out! Author : Steven Renaldo Antony Yustinus Arjuna Purnama Putra Andre Wijaya P Martin Lidau PBK GENAP 2014 - TI UKDWAspose for Apache POI: Missing Features of Apache POI WP - v 1.1: Release contain the Missing Features in Apache POI WP SDK in Comparison with Aspose.Words for dealing with Microsoft Word. What's New ?Following Examples: Insert Picture in Word Document Insert Comments Set Page Borders Mail Merge from XML Data Source Moving the Cursor Feedback and Suggestions Many more examples are yet to come here. Keep visiting us. Raise your queries and suggest more examples via Aspose Forums or via this social coding site.babelua: V1.5.6.0: V1.5.6.0 - 2014.5.30New feature: support quick-cocos2d-x project now; support text search in scripts folder now, you can use this function in Search Result Window;SEToolbox: 01.032.014 Release 1: Added fix when loading game Textures for icons causing 'Unable to read beyond the end of the stream'. Added new Resource Report, that displays all in game resources in a concise report. Added in temp directory cleaner, to keep excess files from building up. Fixed use of colors on the windows, to work better with desktop schemes. Adding base support for multilingual resources. This will allow loading of the Space Engineers resources to show localized names, and display localized date a...ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.71.2: More memory and performance improvements. Fixed an issue with pivot table field order.Fancontroller: Fancontroller: Initial releaseVi-AIO SearchBar: Vi – AIO Search Bar: Version 1.0Top Verses ( Ayat Emas ): Binary Top Verses: This one is the bin folder of the component. the .dll component is inside.Traditional Calendar Component: Traditional Calender Converter: Duta Wacana Christian University This file containing Traditional Calendar Component and Demo Aplication that using Traditional Calendar Component. This component made with .NET Framework 4 and the programming language is C# .SQLSetupHelper: 1.0.0.0: First Stable Version of SQL SetupComposite Iconote: Composite Iconote: This is a composite has been made by Microsoft Visual Studio 2013. Requirement: To develop this composite or use this component in your application, your computer must have .NET framework 4.5 or newer.Magick.NET: Magick.NET 6.8.9.101: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 6.8.9.1. Breaking changes: - Int/short Set methods of WritablePixelCollection are now unsigned. - The Q16 build no longer uses HDRI, switch to the new Q16-HDRI build if you need HDRI.fnr.exe - Find And Replace Tool: 1.7: Bug fixes Refactored logic for encoding text values to command line to handle common edge cases where find/replace operation works in GUI but not in command line Fix for bug where selection in Encoding drop down was different when generating command line in some cases. It was reported in: https://findandreplace.codeplex.com/workitem/34 Fix for "Backslash inserted before dot in replacement text" reported here: https://findandreplace.codeplex.com/discussions/541024 Fix for finding replacing...VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.59: changes NEW: Added Support for 'GokoImage.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'ViperII.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'PixxxView.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgRex.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'PixLiv.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'imgsee.me' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgS.it' linksToolbox for Dynamics CRM 2011/2013: XrmToolBox (v1.2014.5.28): XrmToolbox improvement XrmToolBox updates (v1.2014.5.28)Fix connecting to a connection with custom authentication without saved password Tools improvement New tool!Solution Components Mover (v1.2014.5.22) Transfer solution components from one solution to another one Import/Export NN relationships (v1.2014.3.7) Allows you to import and export many to many relationships Tools updatesAttribute Bulk Updater (v1.2014.5.28) Audit Center (v1.2014.5.28) View Layout Replicator (v1.2014.5.28) Scrip...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 5.10: Fix for Issue #20875 - echo switch doesn't work for CSS CSS should honor the SASS source-file comments JS should allow multi-line comment directivesNew ProjectsCet MicroWPF: WPF-like library for simple graphic-UI application using Netduino (Plus) 2 and the FTDI FT800 Eve board.Fakemons: Some Fakmons, powered by XML, XSLT, CSS and JavascriptFling OS: Fling OS is a C# operating system project aiming to create a new, managed operating system from the ground up.MudRoom: Experimental tool sets in mud parsing and area definitionOOP-2112110158: My name's NgocDungRoslynResearch: Roslyn ResearchTHD - Control de Usuarios: control de usuarios y permisosWPF Kinect User Controls: WPF Kinect User Control project provide simple Tilt and Skeleton Tracking Parameter Controls.

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  • Avoid the “Social Silo” - Learn Why and How

    - by Brian Dayton
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} I’m not going to spend any more real estate than needed on this—social media is big. Facebook hit the Billion user mark in October, that’s 1 out of every 7 humans on the planet. This past Summer (in the Northern hemisphere) Twitter passed the 400 Million Tweet/day mark. The list of social properties and data points goes on and on. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} With social your customer, prospect, or constituent has pervasive access—through mobile—to a global audience, the ability to influence friends, friends of friends, and even people they will never meet. They also have the unique opportunity to forge a deeper relationship with your business—telling you what they like, what they don’t like, how you can help, and what they’d like to see more of. Are you listening? Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} What’s the Bottom Line for Business? Businesses need to be where their customers are—on social properties. They need to be available and responsive in those channels—24x7x365. They need to engage and communicate in new ways—sometimes in less than 140 characters and with empathy, not a 1-way megaphone. Finally, businesses need to look at social as an extension of their existing business practices. Not as a silo’d communication channel limited to marketing. Social Can’t Be a Silo – Learn Why @ Oracle CloudWorld When a business is on social networks they represent the whole business. That’s how a customer, constituent, partner or potential candidate sees it. Those organizations that have moved on the opportunity to build closer relationships through social marketing have already made the first step. Social Selling, Service, eCommerce, and Recruiting are external-facing opportunities that leading organizations are moving on right now. This strategy, one of weaving social into and across your business processes—and leveraging social concepts and technologies for internal collaboration—is something you can learn about during an Oracle CloudWorld event in a city near you. You’ll hear and see social relationship management concepts, best-practices, and recommendations woven into topics, discussions, and demonstrations throughout the event—from Marketing and Sales to Service and Human Resources. Stay Tuned and Avoid Potholes By all indications social is here to stay but it’s moving fast and social business strategies are evolving rapidly. At Oracle CloudWorld you’ll also get the opportunity to learn how to avoid some of the potholes on the road to #socialbusiness. Stay tuned to this blog. In future posts I’ll cover some of those potholes including the challenges of Social@Scale and Parallel Processes. Jump-start your social business strategy or learn how to refine and expand what you’re doing already at Oracle CloudWorld. Want to learn more about what Oracle is doing in social? Check out www.oracle.com/social or, if you're looking for a quick read my co-worker, Pat Ma, has a great post on this blog summarizing some popular Social Relationship Management use cases.

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 15, 2011

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 15, 2011Popular ReleasesTerraria World Viewer: Version 1.2: Update June 15thNew User Interface Map drawing will not cause the program to freeze anymore Fixed the "Draw Symbols" (now called "Markers") checkbox not having any effectMVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 1.1.5 RC: Added Extended Dropdown allows a prompt item to be inserted as first element. RequiredAttribute, if present, trggers if no element is chosen Client side javascript function to set/get the values of DateTimeInput, TypedTextBox, TypedEditDisplay, and to bind/unbind a "change" handler The selected page in the pager is applied the attribute selected-page="selected" that can be used in the definition of CSS rules to style the selected page items controls now interpret a null value as an empr...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco CMS 5.0 CTP 1: Umbraco 5 Community Technology Preview Umbraco 5 will be the next version of everyone's favourite, friendly ASP.NET CMS that already powers over 100,000 websites worldwide. Try out our first CTP of version 5 today! If you're new to Umbraco and would like to get a quick low-down on our popular and easy-to-learn approach to content management, check out our intro video here. What's in the v5 CTP box? This is a preview version of version 5 and includes support for the following familiar Umbr...Ribbon Browser for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Ribbon Browser (1.0.514.30): Initial releaseTerrariViewer: TerrariViewer v3.0 [Terraria Inventory Editor]: In this version, I did an overhaul of the GUI of the program. The only pop-up window you will receive now is a warning box for for when you click on the "Delete" button. Everything has been integrated into the tabs on the form. I added every item included with v1.0.4 of Terraria and added the option to set inventory/bank slots to "No Item". This WILL work with characters that have not been opened in v1.0.4patterns & practices: Project Silk: Project Silk Community Drop 11 - June 14, 2011: Changes from previous drop: Many code changes: please see the readme.mht for details. New "Client Data Management and Caching" chapter. Updated "Application Notifications" chapter. Updated "Architecture" chapter. Updated "jQuery UI Widget" chapter. Updated "Widget QuickStart" appendix and code. Guidance Chapters Ready for Review The Word documents for the chapters are included with the source code in addition to the CHM to help you provide feedback. The PDF is provided as a separat...Orchard Project: Orchard 1.2: Build: 1.2.41 Published: 6/14/2010 How to Install Orchard To install Orchard using Web PI, follow these instructions: http://www.orchardproject.net/docs/Installing-Orchard.ashx. Web PI will detect your hardware environment and install the application. Alternatively, to install the release manually, download the Orchard.Web.1.2.41.zip file. http://orchardproject.net/docs/Manually-installing-Orchard-zip-file.ashx The zip contents are pre-built and ready-to-run. Simply extract the contents o...PowerGUI Visual Studio Extension: PowerGUI VSX 1.3.4: Changes - Got rid of suppressed exceptions on assemblies loading at project startup - Fixed Issue #28535 "No Print Support" - Enabled IntelliSence commands wich are supported by ActiPro Syntax Editor control: ToggleBookmark, NextBookmark, PreviousBookmark, ShowMemberList - Added missing Import directives in PS Script project template - Fixed exception occurring on debug start - Fixed an issue: after creating a new PS project, a debugging session hung being run for the second timeSnippet Designer: Snippet Designer 1.4.0: Snippet Designer 1.4.0 for Visual Studio 2010 Change logSnippet Explorer ChangesReworked language filter UI to work better in the side bar. Added result count drop down which lets you choose how many results to see. Language filter and result count choices are persisted after Visual Studio is closed. Added file name to search criteria. Search is now case insensitive. Snippet Editor Changes Snippet Editor ChangesAdded menu option for the $end$ symbol which indicates where the c...SizeOnDisk: 1.0.9.0: Can handle Right-To-Left languages (issue 316) About box (issue 310) New language: Deutsch (thanks to kyoka) Fix: file and folder context menuDropBox Linker: DropBox Linker 1.1: Added different popup descriptions for actions (copy/append/update/remove) Added popup timeout control (with live preview) Added option to overwrite clipboard with the last link only Notification popup closes on user click Notification popup default timeout increased to 3 sec. Added codeplex link to about .NET Framework 4.0 Client Profile requiredWCF Community Site: WCF Express Interop Bindings 1.0: Welcome to the first release of the WCF Express Interop BindingsThis project provides a starter kit for WCF service developers wishing to connect with Java clients in WebSphere, WebLogic, Metro and Apache. It supports security, MTOM and RM features. For more information see the Landing page We welcome your feedback (Topic: Interop Bindings). Please submit any feature requests / bug fixes via the issue tracker. FeaturesVSIX Installer WCF Bindings for Oracle WebLogic, Oracle Metro, IBM WebS...Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 1.0.4.1: Stable Release 51 Degrees.mobi Foundation is the best way to detect and redirect mobile devices and their capabilities on ASP.NET and is being used on thousands of websites worldwide. We’re highly confident in our software and we recommend all users update to this version. Changes to Version 1.0.4.1Changed the BlackberryHandler and BlackberryVersion6Handler to have equal CONFIDENCE values to ensure they both get a chance at detecting BlackBerry version 4&5 and version 6 devices. Prior to thi...Kouak - HTTP File Share Server: Kouak Beta 3 - Clean: Some critical bug solved and dependecy problems There's 3 package : - The first, contains the cli server and the graphical server. - The second, only the cli server - The third, only the graphical client. It's a beta release, so don't hesitate to emmit issue ;pRawr: Rawr 4.1.06: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr AddonWe now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including bag and bank items) like Char...AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.0 Beta6: ??AcDown?????????????,?????????????,????、????。?????Acfun????? ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??:????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64),?????"?????????"??? ??v3.0 Beta6 ?????(imanhua.com)????? ???? ?? ??"????","?????","?????","????"?????? "????"?????"????????"?? ??????????? ?????????????? ?????????????/???? ?? ????Windows 7???????????? ????????? ?? ????????????? ???????/??????????? ???????????? ?? ?? ?????(imanh...Pulse: Pulse Beta 2: - Added new wallpapers provider http://wallbase.cc. Supports english search, multiple keywords* - Improved font rendering in Options window - Added "Set wallpaper as logon background" option* - Fixed crashes if there is no internet connection - Fixed: Rewalls downloads empty images sometimes - Added filters* Note 1: wallbase provider supports only english search. Rewalls provider supports only russian search but Pulse automatically translates your english keyword into russian using Google Tr...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.0.0.7: Version: 2.0.0.7 (Milestone 7): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Remark The sample applications are using Microsoft’s IoC container MEF. However, the WPF Application Framework (WAF) doesn’t force you to use the same IoC container in your application. You can use ...SimplePlanner: v2.0b: For 2011-2012 Sem 1 ???2011-2012 ????Visual Studio 2010 Help Downloader: 1.0.0.3: Domain name support for proxy Cleanup old packages bug Writing to EventLog with UAC enabled bug Small fixes & RefactoringNew Projects360U: 360UAd Configuration + Rotator for Windows Phone: Ad Configuration and Rotator for Windows Phone is a set of classes and controls which allow you to remotely manage advertising providers used inside your Windows Phone application. Advertising providers can be plugged in on an 'as needed' so application only ship with the providers being used.CommerceShopSystem: CommerceShopSystemContour strikes again: Collection of extensions for the Umbraco Contour form builderFarseer Physics & GLEED2D Link: This project includes c# files usable to implement the Farseer Physics engine in a level created using GLEED2D.FolderComparer: This DLL holds an extension of the DirectoryInfo class. It contains a logic that helps compare the contents of two folders. HierList Hierarchial Outline ASP.NET Server Control ( using UL or OL and LI ): The HierList ASP WebControl generates a hierarchial list using the UL, OL, and LI html tags. Images Organizator: A C# .Net program that organizes all pictures in a folder by date.KiggDemo: i study kiggLavieOrnamentos: LavieOrnamentos is a MVC project written in C# for a standard business website. I plan to use it as a base for a bigger project, a standard business site framework targeting small companies that just want to display their products and latest news.Multiple Choice Training Application: This is an ASP.Net (VB.Net) Web based training application. This application can be configured to ask multiple choice questions for multiple groups, score based on percentage, create completion certificates and be completely managed via a web interface,Orchard Windows Authentication: This module allows Windows domain users to be authenticated in Orchard.Party Estimator: Party Estimator is a training project based on requirements from O'Reilly's _Head First C#_, and is not intended for widespread use. SharePoint Enforcer - Ensuring large sites comply with standards: SharePoint Enforcer is a utility that aids in governance of large SharePoint sites to ensure that the sites comply with various business rules that have been created to keep the site from growing out of control.SharePoint WarmUp Tool (Claims+FBA): This tools is for warming up (waking) SharPoint sites. It addresses the issue of a 403 forbidden error when the SharePoint web app is in claims mode and FBA. It uses Windows authentication to warm up the sites and bypasses the FBA login redirection causing the 403 forbidden error.Super Mario Limitless: Super Mario Limitless is an in-production Super Mario level engine. It allows you to play your own levels and worlds, play others' levels and worlds, and even play online. With limitless features, you'll spend hours playing and creating.VB.NET ASP.NET MVC 2 - Music Store: This project is a port using the VB language with ASP.NET MVC 2 of the MusicStore application that can be found at : http://mvcmusicstore.codeplex.com/ Veni, Vedi, Velcro...: A personal phone 7 social media app that shows basic elements of design, ad model, panorama etc.XMLServiceMonitor: A Windows service (VB.Net) that allows the monitoring of failure of Servers, Services, Applications, Scheduled Tasks and SQL Jobs. The service is configurable with simple XML files and sends out email notifications of failures.

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  • Reg Gets a Job at Red Gate (and what happens behind the scenes)

    - by red(at)work
    Mr Reg Gater works at one of Cambridge’s many high-tech companies. He doesn’t love his job, but he puts up with it because... well, it could be worse. Every day he drives to work around the Red Gate roundabout, wondering what his boss is going to blame him for today, and wondering if there could be a better job out there for him. By late morning he already feels like handing his notice in. He got the hacky look from his boss for being 5 minutes late, and then they ran out of tea. Again. He goes to the local sandwich shop for lunch, and picks up a Red Gate job menu and a Book of Red Gate while he’s waiting for his order. That night, he goes along to Cambridge Geek Nights and sees some very enthusiastic Red Gaters talking about the work they do; it sounds interesting and, of all things, fun. He takes a quick look at the job vacancies on the Red Gate website, and an hour later realises he’s still there – looking at videos, photos and people profiles. He especially likes the Red Gate’s Got Talent page, and is very impressed with Simon Johnson’s marathon time. He thinks that he’d quite like to work with such awesome people. It just so happens that Red Gate recently decided that they wanted to hire another hot shot team member. Behind the scenes, the wheels were set in motion: the recruitment team met with the hiring manager to understand exactly what they’re looking for, and to decide what interview tests to do, who will do the interviews, and to kick-start any interview training those people might need. Next up, a job description and job advert were written, and the job was put on the market. Reg applies, and his CV lands in the Recruitment team’s inbox and they open it up with eager anticipation that Reg could be the next awesome new starter. He looks good, and in a jiffy they’ve arranged an interview. Reg arrives for his interview, and is greeted by a smiley receptionist. She offers him a selection of drinks and he feels instantly relaxed. A couple of interviews and an assessment later, he gets a job offer. We make his day and he makes ours by accepting, and becoming one of the 60 new starters so far this year. Behind the scenes, things start moving all over again. The HR team arranges for a “Welcome” goodie box to be whisked out to him, prepares his contract, sends an email to Information Services (Or IS for short - we’ll come back to them), keeps in touch with Reg to make sure he knows what to expect on his first day, and of course asks him to fill in the all-important wiki questionnaire so his new colleagues can start to get to know him before he even joins. Meanwhile, the IS team see an email in SupportWorks from HR. They see that Reg will be starting in the sales team in a few days’ time, and they know exactly what to do. They pull out a new machine, and within minutes have used their automated deployment software to install every piece of software that a new recruit could ever need. They also check with Reg’s new manager to see if he has any special requirements that they could help with. Reg starts and is amazed to find a fully configured machine sitting on his desk, complete with stationery and all the other tools he’ll need to do his job. He feels even more cared for after he gets a workstation assessment, and realises he’d be comfier with an ergonomic keyboard and a footstool. They arrive minutes later, just like that. His manager starts him off on his induction and sales training. Along with job-specific training, he’ll also have a buddy to help him find his feet, and loads of pre-arranged demos and introductions. Reg settles in nicely, and is great at his job. He enjoys the canteen, and regularly eats one of the 40,000 meals provided each year. He gets used to the selection of teas that are available, develops a taste for champagne launch parties, and has his fair share of the 25,000 cups of coffee downed at Red Gate towers each year. He goes along to some Feel Good Fund events, and donates a little something to charity in exchange for a turn on the chocolate fountain. He’s looking a little scruffy, so he decides to get his hair cut in between meetings, just in time for the Red Gate birthday company photo. Reg starts a new project: identifying existing customers to up-sell to new bundles. He talks with the web team to generate lists of qualifying customers who haven’t recently been sent marketing emails, and sends emails out, using a new in-house developed tool to schedule follow-up calls in CRM for the same group. The customer responds, saying they’d like to upgrade but are having a licensing problem – Reg sends the issue to Support, and it gets routed to the web team. The team identifies a workaround, and the bug gets scheduled into the next maintenance release in a fortnight’s time (hey; they got lucky). With all the new stuff Reg is working on, he realises that he’d be way more efficient if he had a third monitor. He speaks to IS and they get him one - no argument. He also needs a test machine and then some extra memory. Done. He then thinks he needs an iPad, and goes to ask for one. He gets told to stop pushing his luck. Some time later, Reg’s wife has a baby, so Reg gets 2 weeks of paid paternity leave and a bunch of flowers sent to his house. He signs up to the childcare scheme so that he doesn’t have to pay National Insurance on the first £243 of his childcare. The accounts team makes it all happen seamlessly, as they did with his Give As You Earn payments, which come out of his wages and go straight to his favorite charity. Reg’s sales career is going well. He’s grateful for the help that he gets from the product support team. How do they answer all those 900-ish support calls so effortlessly each month? He’s impressed with the patches that are sent out to customers who find “interesting behavior” in their tools, and to the customers who just must have that new feature. A little later in his career at Red Gate, Reg decides that he’d like to learn about management. He goes on some management training specially customised for Red Gate, joins the Management Book Club, and gets together with other new managers to brainstorm how to get the most out of one to one meetings with his team. Reg decides to go for a game of Foosball to celebrate his good fortune with his team, and has to wait for Finance to finish. While he’s waiting, he reflects on the wonderful time he’s had at Red Gate. He can’t put his finger on what it is exactly, but he knows he’s on to a good thing. All of the stuff that happened to Reg didn’t just happen magically. We’ve got teams of people working relentlessly behind the scenes to make sure that everyone here is comfortable, safe, well fed and caffeinated to the max.

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  • SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #032

    - by Pinal Dave
    Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 Complete Series of Database Coding Standards and Guidelines SQL SERVER Database Coding Standards and Guidelines – Introduction SQL SERVER – Database Coding Standards and Guidelines – Part 1 SQL SERVER – Database Coding Standards and Guidelines – Part 2 SQL SERVER Database Coding Standards and Guidelines Complete List Download Explanation and Example – SELF JOIN When all of the data you require is contained within a single table, but data needed to extract is related to each other in the table itself. Examples of this type of data relate to Employee information, where the table may have both an Employee’s ID number for each record and also a field that displays the ID number of an Employee’s supervisor or manager. To retrieve the data tables are required to relate/join to itself. Insert Multiple Records Using One Insert Statement – Use of UNION ALL This is very interesting question I have received from new developer. How can I insert multiple values in table using only one insert? Now this is interesting question. When there are multiple records are to be inserted in the table following is the common way using T-SQL. Function to Display Current Week Date and Day – Weekly Calendar Straight blog post with script to find current week date and day based on the parameters passed in the function.  2008 In my beginning years, I have almost same confusion as many of the developer had in their earlier years. Here are two of the interesting question which I have attempted to answer in my early year. Even if you are experienced developer may be you will still like to read following two questions: Order Of Column In Index Order of Conditions in WHERE Clauses Example of DISTINCT in Aggregate Functions Have you ever used DISTINCT with the Aggregation Function? Here is a simple example about how users can do it. Create a Comma Delimited List Using SELECT Clause From Table Column Straight to script example where I explained how to do something easy and quickly. Compound Assignment Operators SQL SERVER 2008 has introduced new concept of Compound Assignment Operators. Compound Assignment Operators are available in many other programming languages for quite some time. Compound Assignment Operators is operator where variables are operated upon and assigned on the same line. PIVOT and UNPIVOT Table Examples Here is a very interesting question – the answer to the question can be YES or NO both. “If we PIVOT any table and UNPIVOT that table do we get our original table?” Read the blog post to get the explanation of the question above. 2009 What is Interim Table – Simple Definition of Interim Table The interim table is a table that is generated by joining two tables and not the final result table. In other words, when two tables are joined they create an interim table as resultset but the resultset is not final yet. It may be possible that more tables are about to join on the interim table, and more operations are still to be applied on that table (e.g. Order By, Having etc). Besides, it may be possible that there is no interim table; sometimes final table is what is generated when the query is run. 2010 Stored Procedure and Transactions If Stored Procedure is transactional then, it should roll back complete transactions when it encounters any errors. Well, that does not happen in this case, which proves that Stored Procedure does not only provide just the transactional feature to a batch of T-SQL. Generate Database Script for SQL Azure When talking about SQL Azure the most common complaint I hear is that the script generated from stand-along SQL Server database is not compatible with SQL Azure. This was true for some time for sure but not any more. If you have SQL Server 2008 R2 installed you can follow the guideline below to generate a script which is compatible with SQL Azure. Convert IN to EXISTS – Performance Talk It is NOT necessary that every time when IN is replaced by EXISTS it gives better performance. However, in our case listed above it does for sure give better performance. You can read about this subject in the associated blog post. Subquery or Join – Various Options – SQL Server Engine Knows the Best Every single time whenever there is a performance tuning exercise, I hear the conversation from developer where some prefer subquery and some prefer join. In this two part blog post, I explain the same in the detail with examples. Part 1 | Part 2 Merge Operations – Insert, Update, Delete in Single Execution MERGE is a new feature that provides an efficient way to do multiple DML operations. In earlier versions of SQL Server, we had to write separate statements to INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE data based on certain conditions; however, at present, by using the MERGE statement, we can include the logic of such data changes in one statement that even checks when the data is matched and then just update it, and similarly, when the data is unmatched, it is inserted. 2011 Puzzle – Statistics are not updated but are Created Once Here is the quick scenario about my setup. Create Table Insert 1000 Records Check the Statistics Now insert 10 times more 10,000 indexes Check the Statistics – it will be NOT updated – WHY? Question to You – When to use Function and When to use Stored Procedure Personally, I believe that they are both different things - they cannot be compared. I can say, it will be like comparing apples and oranges. Each has its own unique use. However, they can be used interchangeably at many times and in real life (i.e., production environment). I have personally seen both of these being used interchangeably many times. This is the precise reason for asking this question. 2012 In year 2012 I had two interesting series ran on the blog. If there is no fun in learning, the learning becomes a burden. For the same reason, I had decided to build a three part quiz around SEQUENCE. The quiz was to identify the next value of the sequence. I encourage all of you to take part in this fun quiz. Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 1 Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 2 Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 3 Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 4 Simple Example to Configure Resource Governor – Introduction to Resource Governor Resource Governor is a feature which can manage SQL Server Workload and System Resource Consumption. We can limit the amount of CPU and memory consumption by limiting /governing /throttling on the SQL Server. If there are different workloads running on SQL Server and each of the workload needs different resources or when workloads are competing for resources with each other and affecting the performance of the whole server resource governor is a very important task. Tricks to Replace SELECT * with Column Names – SQL in Sixty Seconds #017 – Video  Retrieves unnecessary columns and increases network traffic When a new columns are added views needs to be refreshed manually Leads to usage of sub-optimal execution plan Uses clustered index in most of the cases instead of using optimal index It is difficult to debug SQL SERVER – Load Generator – Free Tool From CodePlex The best part of this SQL Server Load Generator is that users can run multiple simultaneous queries again SQL Server using different login account and different application name. The interface of the tool is extremely easy to use and very intuitive as well. A Puzzle – Swap Value of Column Without Case Statement Let us assume there is a single column in the table called Gender. The challenge is to write a single update statement which will flip or swap the value in the column. For example if the value in the gender column is ‘male’ swap it with ‘female’ and if the value is ‘female’ swap it with ‘male’. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • Integrate Google Wave With Your Windows Workflow

    - by Matthew Guay
    Have you given Google Wave a try, only to find it difficult to keep up with?  Here’s how you can integrate Google Wave with your desktop and workflow with some free and simple apps. Google Wave is an online web app, and unlike many Google services, it’s not easily integrated with standard desktop applications.  Instead, you’ll have to keep it open in a browser tab, and since it is one of the most intensive HTML5 webapps available today, you may notice slowdowns in many popular browsers.  Plus, it can be hard to stay on top of your Wave conversations and collaborations by just switching back and forth between the website and whatever else you’re working on.  Here we’ll look at some tools that can help you integrate Google Wave with your workflow, and make it feel more native in Windows. Use Google Wave Directly in Windows What’s one of the best ways to make a web app feel like a native application?  By making it into a native application, of course!  Waver is a free Air powered app that can make the mobile version of Google Wave feel at home on your Windows, Mac, or Linux desktop.  We found it to be a quick and easy way to keep on top of our waves and collaborate with our friends. To get started with Waver, open their homepage on the Adobe Air Marketplace (link below) and click Download From Publisher. Waver is powered by Adobe Air, so if you don’t have Adobe Air installed, you’ll need to first download and install it. After clicking the link above, Adobe Air will open a prompt asking what you wish to do with the file.  Click Open, and then install as normal. Once the installation is finished, enter your Google Account info in the window.   After a few moments, you’ll see your Wave account in miniature, running directly in Waver.  Click a Wave to view it, or click New wave to start a new Wave message.  Unfortunately, in our tests the search box didn’t seem to work, but everything else worked fine. Google Wave works great in Waver, though all of the Wave features are not available since it is running the mobile version of Wave. You can still view content from plugins, including YouTube videos, directly in Waver.   Get Wave Notifications From Your Windows Taskbar Most popular email and Twitter clients give you notifications from your system tray when new messages come in.  And with Google Wave Notifier, you can now get the same alerts when you receive a new Wave message. Head over to the Google Wave Notifier site (link below), and click the download link to get started.  Make sure to download the latest Binary zip, as this one will contain the Windows program rather than the source code. Unzip the folder, and then run GoogleWaveNotifier.exe. On first run, you can enter your Google Account information.  Notice that this is not a standard account login window; you’ll need to enter your email address in the Username field, and then your password below it. You can also change other settings from this dialog, including update frequency and whether or not to run at startup.  Click the value, and then select the setting you want from the dropdown menu. Now, you’ll have a new Wave icon in your system tray.  When it detects new Waves or unread updates, it will display a popup notification with details about the unread Waves.  Additionally, the icon will change to show the number of unread Waves.  Click the popup to open Wave in your browser.  Or, if you have Waver installed, simply open the Waver window to view your latest Waves. If you ever need to change settings again in the future, right-click the icon and select Settings, and then edit as above. Get Wave Notifications in Your Email  Most of us have Outlook or Gmail open all day, and seldom leave the house without a Smartphone with push email.  And thanks to a new Wave feature, you can still keep up with your Waves without having to change your workflow. To activate email notifications from Google Wave, login to your Wave account, click the arrow beside your Inbox, and select Notifications. Select how quickly you want to receive notifications, and choose which email address you wish to receive the notifications.  Click Save when you’re finished. Now you’ll receive an email with information about new and updated Waves in your account.  If there were only small changes, you may get enough info directly in the email; otherwise, you can click the link and open that Wave in your browser. Conclusion Google Wave has great potential as a collaboration and communications platform, but by default it can be hard to keep up with what’s going on in your Waves.  These apps for Windows help you integrate Wave with your workflow, and can keep you from constantly logging in and checking for new Waves.  And since Google Wave registration is now open for everyone, it’s a great time to give it a try and see how it works for yourself. Links Signup for Google Wave (Google Account required) Download Waver from the Adobe Air Marketplace Download Google Wave Notifier Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips We Have 20 Google Wave Invites. Want One?Tired of Waiting for Google Wave? Try ShareFlow NowIntegrate Google Docs with Outlook the Easy WayAwesome Desktop Wallpapers: The Windows 7 EditionWeek in Geek: The Stupid Geek Tricks to Hide Extra Windows Edition TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Default Programs Editor – One great tool for Setting Defaults Convert BMP, TIFF, PCX to Vector files with RasterVect Free Identify Fonts using WhatFontis.com Windows 7’s WordPad is Actually Good Greate Image Viewing and Management with Zoner Photo Studio Free Windows Media Player Plus! – Cool WMP Enhancer

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  • Prevent your Silverlight XAP file from caching in your browser.

    - by mbcrump
    If you work with Silverlight daily then you have run into this problem. Your XAP file has been cached in your browser and you have to empty your browser cache to resolve it. If your using Google Chrome then you typically do the following: Go to Options –> Clear Browsing History –> Empty the Cache and finally click Clear Browsing data. As you can see, this is a lot of unnecessary steps. It is even worse when you have a customer that says, “I can’t see the new features you just implemented!” and you realize it’s a cached xap problem.  I have been struggling with a way to prevent my XAP file from caching inside of a browser for a while now and decided to implement the following solution. If the Visual Studio Debugger is attached then add a unique query string to the source param to force the XAP file to be refreshed. If the Visual Studio Debugger is not attached then add the source param as Visual Studio generates it. This is also in case I forget to remove the above code in my production environment. I want the ASP.NET code to be inline with my .ASPX page. (I do not want a separate code behind .cs page or .vb page attached to the .aspx page.) Below is an example of the hosting code generated when you create a new Silverlight project. As a quick refresher, the hard coded param name = “source” specifies the location of your XAP file.  <form id="form1" runat="server" style="height:100%"> <div id="silverlightControlHost"> <object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2" width="100%" height="100%"> <param name="source" value="ClientBin/SilverlightApplication2.xap"/> <param name="onError" value="onSilverlightError" /> <param name="background" value="white" /> <param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="4.0.50826.0" /> <param name="autoUpgrade" value="true" /> <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=149156&v=4.0.50826.0" style="text-decoration:none"> <img src="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=161376" alt="Get Microsoft Silverlight" style="border-style:none"/> </a> </object><iframe id="_sl_historyFrame" style="visibility:hidden;height:0px;width:0px;border:0px"></iframe></div> </form> We are going to use a little bit of inline ASP.NET to generate the param name = source dynamically to prevent the XAP file from caching. Lets look at the completed solution: <form id="form1" runat="server" style="height:100%"> <div id="silverlightControlHost"> <object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2" width="100%" height="100%"> <% string strSourceFile = @"ClientBin/SilverlightApplication2.xap"; string param; if (System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached) //Debugger Attached - Refresh the XAP file. param = "<param name=\"source\" value=\"" + strSourceFile + "?" + DateTime.Now.Ticks + "\" />"; else { //Production Mode param = "<param name=\"source\" value=\"" + strSourceFile + "\" />"; } Response.Write(param); %> <param name="onError" value="onSilverlightError" /> <param name="background" value="white" /> <param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="4.0.50826.0" /> <param name="autoUpgrade" value="true" /> <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=149156&v=4.0.50826.0" style="text-decoration:none"> <img src="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=161376" alt="Get Microsoft Silverlight" style="border-style:none"/> </a> </object><iframe id="_sl_historyFrame" style="visibility:hidden;height:0px;width:0px;border:0px"></iframe></div> </form> We add the location to our XAP file to strSourceFile and if the debugger is attached then it will append DateTime.Now.Ticks to the XAP file source and force the browser to download the .XAP. If you view the page source of your Silverlight Application then you can verify it worked properly by looking at the param name = “source” tag as shown below. <param name="source" value="ClientBin/SilverlightApplication2.xap?634299001187160148" /> If the debugger is not attached then it will use the standard source tag as shown below. <param name="source" value="ClientBin/SilverlightApplication2.xap"/> At this point you may be asking, How do I prevent my XAP file from being cached on my production app? Well, you have two easy options: 1) I really don’t recommend this approach but you can force the XAP to be refreshed everytime with the following code snippet.  <param name="source" value="ClientBin/SilverlightApplication2.xap?<%=Guid.NewGuid().ToString() %>"/> NOTE: You could also substitute the “Guid.NewGuid().ToString() for anything that create a random field. (I used DateTime.Now.Ticks earlier). 2) Another solution that I like even better involves checking the XAP Creation Date and appending it to the param name = source. This method was described by Lars Holm Jenson. <% string strSourceFile = @"ClientBin/SilverlightApplication2.xap"; string param; if (System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached) param = "<param name=\"source\" value=\"" + strSourceFile + "\" />"; else { string xappath = HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(@"") + @"\" + strSourceFile; DateTime xapCreationDate = System.IO.File.GetLastWriteTime(xappath); param = "<param name=\"source\" value=\"" + strSourceFile + "?ignore=" + xapCreationDate.ToString() + "\" />"; } Response.Write(param); %> As you can see, this problem has been solved. It will work with all web browsers and stubborn proxy servers that are caching your .XAP. If you enjoyed this article then check out my blog for others like this. You may also want to subscribe to my blog or follow me on Twitter.   Subscribe to my feed

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  • Can Microsoft Build Appliances?

    - by andrewbrust
    Billy Hollis, my Visual Studio Live! colleague and fellow Microsoft Regional Director said recently, and I am paraphrasing, that the computing world, especially on the consumer side, has shifted from one of building hardware and software that makes things possible to do, to building products and technologies that make things easy to do.  Billy crystalized things perfectly, as he often does. In this new world of “easy to do,” Apple has done very well and Microsoft has struggled.  In the old world, customers wanted a Swiss Army Knife, with the most gimmicks and gadgets possible.  In the new world, people want elegantly cutlery.  They may want cake cutters and utility knives too, but they don’t want one device that works for all three tasks.  People don’t want tools, they want utensils.  People don’t want machines.  They want appliances. Microsoft Appliances: They Do Exist Microsoft has built a few appliance-like devices.  I would say XBox 360 is an appliance,  It’s versatile, mind you, but it’s the kind of thing you plug in, turn on and use, as opposed to set-up, tune, and open up to upgrade the internals.  Windows Phone 7 is an appliance too.  It’s a true smartphone, unlike Windows Mobile which was a handheld computer with a radio stack.  Zune is an appliance too, and a nice one.  It hasn’t attained much traction in the market, but that’s probably because the seminal consumer computing appliance -- the iPod – got there so much more quickly. In the embedded world, Mediaroom, Microsoft’s set-top product for the cable industry (used by AT&T U-Verse and others) is an appliance.  So is Microsoft’s Sync technology, used in Ford automobiles.  Even on the enterprise side, Microsoft has an appliance: SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse Edition (PDW) combines Microsoft software with select OEMs’ server, networking and storage hardware.  You buy the appliance units from the OEMs, plug them in, connect them and go. I would even say that Bing is an appliance.  Not in the hardware sense, mind you.  But from the software perspective, it’s a single-purpose product that you visit or run, use and then move on.  You don’t have to install it (except the iOS and Android native apps where it’s pretty straightforward), you don’t have to customize it, you don’t have to program it.  Basically, you just use it. Microsoft Appliances that Should Exist But Microsoft builds a bunch of things that are not appliances.  Media Center is not an appliance, and it most certainly should be.  Instead, it’s an app that runs on Windows 7.  It runs full-screen and you can use this configuration to conceal the fact that Windows is under it, but eventually something will cause you to abandon that masquerade (like Patch Tuesday). The next version of Windows Home Server won’t, in my opinion, be an appliance either.  Now that the Drive Extender technology is gone, and users can’t just add and remove drives into and from a single storage pool, the product is much more like a IT server and less like an appliance-premised one.  Much has been written about this decision by Microsoft.  I’ll just sum it up in one word: pity. Microsoft doesn’t have anything remotely appliance-like in the tablet category, either.  Until it does, it likely won’t have much market share in that space either.  And of course, the bulk of Microsoft’s product catalog on the business side is geared to enterprise machines and not personal appliances. Appliance DNA: They Gotta Have It. The consumerization of IT is real, because businesspeople are consumers too.  They appreciate the fit and finish of appliances at home, and they increasingly feel entitled to have it at work too.  Secure and reliable push email in a smartphone is necessary, but it isn’t enough.  People want great apps and a pleasurable user experience too.  The full Microsoft Office product is needed at work, but a PC with a keyboard and mouse, or maybe a touch screen that uses a stylus (or requires really small fingers), to run Office isn’t enough either.  People want a flawless touch experience available for the times they want to read and take quick notes.  Until Microsoft realizes this fully and internalizes it, it will suffer defeats in the consumer market and even setbacks in the business market.  Think about how slow the Office upgrade cycle is…now imagine if the next version of Office had a first-class alternate touch UI and consider the possible acceleration in adoption rates. Can Microsoft make the appliance switch?  Can the appliance mentality become pervasive at the company?  Can Microsoft hasten its release cycles dramatically and shed the “some assembly required” paradigm upon which many of its products are based?  Let’s face it, the chances that Microsoft won’t make this transition are significant. But there are also encouraging signs, and they should not be ignored.  The appliances we have already discussed, especially Xbox, Zune and Windows Phone 7, are the most obvious in this regard.  The fact that SQL Server has an appliance SKU now is a more subtle but perhaps also more significant outcome, because that product sits so smack in the middle of Microsoft’s enterprise stack.  Bing is encouraging too, especially given its integrated travel, maps and augmented reality capabilities.  As Bing gains market share, Microsoft has tangible proof that it can transform and win, even when everyone outside the company, and many within it, would bet otherwise. That Great Big Appliance in the Sky Perhaps the most promising (and evolving) proof points toward the appliance mentality, though, are Microsoft’s cloud offerings -- Azure and BPOS/Office 365.  While the cloud does not represent a physical appliance (quite the opposite in fact) its ability to make acquisition, deployment and use of technology simple for the user is absolutely an embodiment of the appliance mentality and spirit.  Azure is primarily a platform as a service offering; it doesn’t just provide infrastructure.  SQL Azure does likewise for databases.  And Office 365 does likewise for SharePoint, Exchange and Lync. You don’t administer, tune and manage servers; instead, you create databases or site collections or mailboxes and start using them. Upgrades come automatically, and it seems like releases will come more frequently.  Fault tolerance and content distribution is just there.  No muss.  No fuss.  You use these services; you don’t have to set them up and think about them.  That’s how appliances work.  To me, these signs point out that Microsoft has the full capability of transforming itself.  But there’s a lot of work ahead.  Microsoft may say they’re “all in” on the cloud, but the majority of the company is still oriented around its old products and models.  There needs to be a wholesale cultural transformation in Redmond.  It can happen, but product management, program management, the field and executive ranks must unify in the effort. So must partners, and even customers.  New leaders must rise up and Microsoft must be able to see itself as a winner.  If Microsoft does this, it could lock-in decades of new success, and be a standard business school case study for doing so.  If not, the company will have missed an opportunity, and may see its undoing.

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  • Massive Silverlight Giveaway! DevExpress , Syncfusion, Crypto Obfuscator and SL Spy!

    - by mbcrump
    Oh my, have we grown! Maybe I should change the name to Multiple Silverlight Giveaways. So far, my Silverlight giveaways have been such a success that I’m going to be able to give away more than one Silverlight product every month. Last month, we gave away 3 great products. 1) ComponentOne Silverlight Controls 2)  ComponentOne XAP Optimizer (with obfuscation) and 3) Silverlight Spy. This month, we will give away 4 great Silverlight products and have 4 different winners. This way the Silverlight community can grow with more than just one person winning all the prizes. This month we will be giving away: DevExpress Silverlight Controls – Over 50+ Silverlight Controls Syncfusion User Interface Edition - Create stunning line of business silverlight applications with a wide range of components including a high performance grid, docking manager, chart, gauge, scheduler and much more. Crypto Obfuscator – Works for all .NET including Silverlight/Windows Phone 7. Silverlight Spy – provides a license EVERY month for this giveaway. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Win a FREE developer’s license of one of the products listed above! 4 winners will be announced on April 1st, 2011! To be entered into the contest do the following things: Subscribe to my feed. – Use Google Reader, email or whatever is best for you.  Leave a comment below with a valid email account (I WILL NOT share this info with anyone.) Retweet the following : I just entered to win free #Silverlight controls from @mbcrump . Register here: http://mcrump.me/fTSmB8 ! Don’t change the URL because this will allow me to track the users that Tweet this page. Don’t forget to visit each of the vendors sites because they made this possible. MichaelCrump.Net provides Silverlight Giveaways every month. You can also see the latest giveaway by bookmarking http://giveaways.michaelcrump.net . ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DevExpress Silverlight Controls Let’s take a quick look at some of the software that is provided in this giveaway. Before we get started with the Silverlight Controls, here is a couple of links to bookmark for the DevExpress Silverlight Controls: The Live Demos of the Silverlight Controls is located here. Great Video Tutorials of the Silverlight Controls are here. One thing that I liked about the DevExpress is how easy it was to find demos of each control. After you install the controls the following Program Group appears complete with “demos” that include full-source.   So, the first question that you may ask is, “What is included?” Here is the official list below. I wanted to show several of the controls that I think developers will use the most. The Book – Very rich animation between switching pages. Very easy to add your own images and custom text. The Menu – This is another control that just looked great. You can easily add images to the menu items with a few lines of XAML. The Window / Dialog Box – You can use this control to make a very beautiful “Wizard” to help your users navigate between pages. This is useful in setup or installation. Calculator – This would be useful for any type of Banking app. Also a first that I’ve seen from a 3rd party Control company. DatePicker – This controls feels a lot smoother than the one provided by Microsoft. It also provides the ability to “Clear” the selection. Overall the DevExpress Silverlight Controls feature a lot of quality controls that you should check out. You can go ahead and download a trial version of it right now by clicking here. If you win the contest you can simply enter your registration key and continue using the product without reinstalling. Syncfusion User Interface Edition Before we get started with the Syncfusion User Interface Edition, here is a couple of links to bookmark. The Live Demos can be found here. You can download a demo of it now at http://www.syncfusion.com/downloads/evalstart. After you install the Syncfusion, you can view the dashboard to run locally installed samples. You may also download the documentation to your local machine if needed. Since the name of the package is “User Interface Edition”, I decided to share several samples that struck me as “awesome”. Dashboard Gauges – I was very impressed with the various gauges they have included. The digital clock also looks very impressive. Diagram – The diagrams are also very easy to build. In the sample project below you can drag/drop the shapes onto the content pane. More complex lines like the Bezier lines are also easy to create using Syncfusion. Scheduling – Another strong component was the Scheduling with built-in support for Themes. Tools – If all of that wasn’t enough, it also comes with a nice pack of essential tools. Syncfusion has a nice variety of Silverlight Controls that you should check out. You can go ahead and download a trial version of it right now by clicking here. Crypto Obfuscator The following feature set is what is important to me in an Obfuscator since I am a Silverlight/WP7 Developer: And thankfully this is what you get in Crypto Obfuscator. You can download a trial version right now if you want to go ahead and play with it. Let’s spend a few moments taking a look at the application. After you have installed Crypto Obfuscator you will see the following screen: After you click on Assemblies you have the option to add your .XAP file in: I went ahead and loaded my .xap file from a Silverlight Application. At this point, you can simply save your project and hit “Obfuscate” and your done. You don’t have to mess with any of the other settings if you don’t want too. Of course, you can change the settings and add obfuscation rules, watermarks and signing if you wish.  After Obfuscation, it looks like this in .NET Reflector: I was trying to browse through methods and it actually crashed Reflector. This confirms the level of protection the obfuscator is providing. If this were a commercial application that my team built, I would have a huge smile on my face right now. Crypto Obfuscator is a great product and I hope you will spend the time learning more about it. Silverlight Spy Silverlight Spy is a runtime inspector tool that will tell you pretty much everything that is going on with the application. Basically, you give it a URL that contains a Silverlight application and you can explore the element tree, events, xaml and so much more. This has already been reviewed on MichaelCrump.net. _________________________________________________________________________________________ Thanks for reading and don’t forget to leave a comment below in order to win one of the four prizes available! Subscribe to my feed

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  • Advanced Continuous Delivery to Azure from TFS, Part 1: Good Enough Is Not Great

    - by jasont
    The folks over on the TFS / Visual Studio team have been working hard at releasing a steady stream of new features for their new hosted Team Foundation Service in the cloud. One of the most significant features released was simple continuous delivery of your solution into your Azure deployments. The original announcement from Brian Harry can be found here. Team Foundation Service is a great platform for .Net developers who are used to working with TFS on-premises. I’ve been using it since it became available at the //BUILD conference in 2011, and when I recently came to work at Stackify, it was one of the first changes I made. Managing work items is much easier than the tool we were using previously, although there are some limitations (more on that in another blog post). However, when continuous deployment was made available, it blew my mind. It was the killer feature I didn’t know I needed. Not to say that I wasn’t previously an advocate for continuous delivery; just that it was always a pain to set up and configure. Having it hosted - and a one-click setup – well, that’s just the best thing since sliced bread. It made perfect sense: my source code is in the cloud, and my deployment is in the cloud. Great! I can queue up a build from my iPad or phone and just let it go! I quickly tore through the quick setup and saw it all work… sort of. This will be the first in a three part series on how to take the building block of Team Foundation Service continuous delivery and build a CD model that will actually work for any team deploying something more advanced than a “Hello World” example. Part 1: Good Enough Is Not Great Part 2: A Model That Works: Branching and Multiple Deployment Environments Part 3: Other Considerations: SQL, Custom Tasks, Etc Good Enough Is Not Great There. I’ve said it. I certainly hope no one on the TFS team is offended, but it’s the truth. Let’s take a look under the hood and understand how it works, and then why it’s not enough to handle real world CD as-is. How it works. (note that I’ve skipped a couple of steps; I already have my accounts set up and something deployed to Azure) The first step is to establish some oAuth magic between your Azure management portal and your TFS Instance. You do this via the management portal. Once it’s done, you have a new build process template in your TFS instance. (Image lifted from the documentation) From here, you’ll get the usual prompts for security, allowing access, etc. But you’ll also get to pick which Solution in your source control to build. Here’s what the bulk of the build definition looks like. All I’ve had to do is add in the solution to build (notice that mine is from a specific branch – Release – more on that later) and I’ve changed the configuration. I trigger the build, and voila! I have an Azure deployment a few minutes later. The beauty of this is that it’s all in the cloud and I’m not waiting for my machine to compile and upload the package. (I also had to enable the build definition first – by default it is created in disabled state, probably a good thing since it will trigger on every.single.checkin by default.) I get to see a history of deployments from the Azure portal, and can link into TFS to see the associated changesets and work items. You’ll notice also that this build definition also automatically put my code in the Staging slot of my Azure deployment – more on this soon. For now, I can VIP swap and be in production. (P.S. I hate VIP swap and “production” and “staging” in Azure. More on that later too.) That’s it. That’s the default out-of-box experience. Easy, right? But it’s full of room for improvement, so let’s get into that….   The Problems Nothing is perfect (except my code – it’s always perfect), and neither is Continuous Deployment without a bit of work to help it fit your dev team’s process. So what are the issues? Issue 1: Staging vs QA vs Prod vs whatever other environments your team may have. This, for me, is the big hairy one. Remember how this automatically deployed to staging rather than prod for us? There are a couple of issues with this model: If I want to deliver to prod, it requires intervention on my part after deployment (via a VIP swap). If I truly want to promote between environments (i.e. Nightly Build –> Stable QA –> Production) I likely have configuration changes between each environment such as database connection strings and this process (and the VIP swap) doesn’t account for this. Yet. Issue 2: Branching and delivering on every check-in. As I mentioned above, I have set this up to target a specific branch – Release – of my code. For the purposes of this example, I have adopted the “basic” branching strategy as defined by the ALM Rangers. This basically establishes a “Main” trunk where you branch off Dev and Release branches. Granted, the Release branch is usually the only thing you will deploy to production, but you certainly don’t want to roll to production automatically when you merge to the Release branch and check-in (unless you like the thrill of it, and in that case, I like your style, cowboy….). Rather, you have nightly build and QA environments, or if you’ve adopted the feature-branch model you have environments for those. Those are the environments you want to continuously deploy to. But that takes us back to Issue 1: we currently have a 1:1 solution to Azure deployment target. Issue 3: SQL and other custom tasks. Let’s be honest and address the elephant in the room: I need to get some sleep because I see an elephant in the room. But seriously, I can’t think of an application I have touched in the last 10 years that doesn’t need to consider SQL changes when deploying code and upgrading an environment. Microsoft seems perfectly content to ignore this elephant for now: yes, they’ve added Data Tier Applications. But let’s be honest with ourselves again: no one really uses it, and it’s not suitable for anything more complex than a Hello World sample project database. Why? Because it doesn’t fit well into a great source control story. Developers make stored procedure and table changes all day long while coding complex applications, and if someone forgets to go update the DACPAC before the automated deployment, you have a broken build until it’s completed. Developers – not just DBAs – also like to work with SQL in SQL tools, not in Visual Studio. I’m really picking on SQL because that’s generally the biggest concern that I hear. But we need to account for any custom tasks as well in the build process.   The Solutions… ? We’ve taken a look at how this all works, and addressed the shortcomings. In my next post (which I promise will be very, very soon), I will detail how I’ve overcome these shortcomings and used this foundation to create a mature, flexible model for deploying my app – any version, any time, to any environment.

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  • Big Data Matters with ODI12c

    - by Madhu Nair
    contributed by Mike Eisterer On October 17th, 2013, Oracle announced the release of Oracle Data Integrator 12c (ODI12c).  This release signifies improvements to Oracle’s Data Integration portfolio of solutions, particularly Big Data integration. Why Big Data = Big Business Organizations are gaining greater insights and actionability through increased storage, processing and analytical benefits offered by Big Data solutions.  New technologies and frameworks like HDFS, NoSQL, Hive and MapReduce support these benefits now. As further data is collected, analytical requirements increase and the complexity of managing transformations and aggregations of data compounds and organizations are in need for scalable Data Integration solutions. ODI12c provides enterprise solutions for the movement, translation and transformation of information and data heterogeneously and in Big Data Environments through: The ability for existing ODI and SQL developers to leverage new Big Data technologies. A metadata focused approach for cataloging, defining and reusing Big Data technologies, mappings and process executions. Integration between many heterogeneous environments and technologies such as HDFS and Hive. Generation of Hive Query Language. Working with Big Data using Knowledge Modules  ODI12c provides developers with the ability to define sources and targets and visually develop mappings to effect the movement and transformation of data.  As the mappings are created, ODI12c leverages a rich library of prebuilt integrations, known as Knowledge Modules (KMs).  These KMs are contextual to the technologies and platforms to be integrated.  Steps and actions needed to manage the data integration are pre-built and configured within the KMs.  The Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop provides a series of KMs, specifically designed to integrate with Big Data Technologies.  The Big Data KMs include: Check Knowledge Module Reverse Engineer Knowledge Module Hive Transform Knowledge Module Hive Control Append Knowledge Module File to Hive (LOAD DATA) Knowledge Module File-Hive to Oracle (OLH-OSCH) Knowledge Module  Nothing to beat an Example: To demonstrate the use of the KMs which are part of the ODI Application Adapter for Hadoop, a mapping may be defined to move data between files and Hive targets.  The mapping is defined by dragging the source and target into the mapping, performing the attribute (column) mapping (see Figure 1) and then selecting the KM which will govern the process.  In this mapping example, movie data is being moved from an HDFS source into a Hive table.  Some of the attributes, such as “CUSTID to custid”, have been mapped over. Figure 1  Defining the Mapping Before the proper KM can be assigned to define the technology for the mapping, it needs to be added to the ODI project.  The Big Data KMs have been made available to the project through the KM import process.   Generally, this is done prior to defining the mapping. Figure 2  Importing the Big Data Knowledge Modules Following the import, the KMs are available in the Designer Navigator. v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false EN-US ZH-TW X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Figure 3  The Project View in Designer, Showing Installed IKMs Once the KM is imported, it may be assigned to the mapping target.  This is done by selecting the Physical View of the mapping and examining the Properties of the Target.  In this case MOVIAPP_LOG_STAGE is the target of our mapping. Figure 4  Physical View of the Mapping and Assigning the Big Data Knowledge Module to the Target Alternative KMs may have been selected as well, providing flexibility and abstracting the logical mapping from the physical implementation.  Our mapping may be applied to other technologies as well. The mapping is now complete and is ready to run.  We will see more in a future blog about running a mapping to load Hive. To complete the quick ODI for Big Data Overview, let us take a closer look at what the IKM File to Hive is doing for us.  ODI provides differentiated capabilities by defining the process and steps which normally would have to be manually developed, tested and implemented into the KM.  As shown in figure 5, the KM is preparing the Hive session, managing the Hive tables, performing the initial load from HDFS and then performing the insert into Hive.  HDFS and Hive options are selected graphically, as shown in the properties in Figure 4. Figure 5  Process and Steps Managed by the KM What’s Next Big Data being the shape shifting business challenge it is is fast evolving into the deciding factor between market leaders and others. Now that an introduction to ODI and Big Data has been provided, look for additional blogs coming soon using the Knowledge Modules which make up the Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop: Importing Big Data Metadata into ODI, Testing Data Stores and Loading Hive Targets Generating Transformations using Hive Query language Loading Oracle from Hadoop Sources For more information now, please visit the Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop web site, http://www.oracle.com/us/products/middleware/data-integration/hadoop/overview/index.html Do not forget to tune in to the ODI12c Executive Launch webcast on the 12th to hear more about ODI12c and GG12c. Normal 0 false false false EN-US ZH-TW X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";}

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  • Improving Manageability of Virtual Environments

    - by Jeff Victor
    Boot Environments for Solaris 10 Branded Zones Until recently, Solaris 10 Branded Zones on Solaris 11 suffered one notable regression: Live Upgrade did not work. The individual packaging and patching tools work correctly, but the ability to upgrade Solaris while the production workload continued running did not exist. A recent Solaris 11 SRU (Solaris 11.1 SRU 6.4) restored most of that functionality, although with a slightly different concept, different commands, and without all of the feature details. This new method gives you the ability to create and manage multiple boot environments (BEs) for a Solaris 10 Branded Zone, and modify the active or any inactive BE, and to do so while the production workload continues to run. Background In case you are new to Solaris: Solaris includes a set of features that enables you to create a bootable Solaris image, called a Boot Environment (BE). This newly created image can be modified while the original BE is still running your workload(s). There are many benefits, including improved uptime and the ability to reboot into (or downgrade to) an older BE if a newer one has a problem. In Solaris 10 this set of features was named Live Upgrade. Solaris 11 applies the same basic concepts to the new packaging system (IPS) but there isn't a specific name for the feature set. The features are simply part of IPS. Solaris 11 Boot Environments are not discussed in this blog entry. Although a Solaris 10 system can have multiple BEs, until recently a Solaris 10 Branded Zone (BZ) in a Solaris 11 system did not have this ability. This limitation was addressed recently, and that enhancement is the subject of this blog entry. This new implementation uses two concepts. The first is the use of a ZFS clone for each BE. This makes it very easy to create a BE, or many BEs. This is a distinct advantage over the Live Upgrade feature set in Solaris 10, which had a practical limitation of two BEs on a system, when using UFS. The second new concept is a very simple mechanism to indicate the BE that should be booted: a ZFS property. The new ZFS property is named com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe (isn't that creative? ). It's important to note that the property is inherited from the original BE's file system to any BEs you create. In other words, all BEs in one zone have the same value for that property. When the (Solaris 11) global zone boots the Solaris 10 BZ, it boots the BE that has the name that is stored in the activebe property. Here is a quick summary of the actions you can use to manage these BEs: To create a BE: Create a ZFS clone of the zone's root dataset To activate a BE: Set the ZFS property of the root dataset to indicate the BE To add a package or patch to an inactive BE: Mount the inactive BE Add packages or patches to it Unmount the inactive BE To list the available BEs: Use the "zfs list" command. To destroy a BE: Use the "zfs destroy" command. Preparation Before you can use the new features, you will need a Solaris 10 BZ on a Solaris 11 system. You can use these three steps - on a real Solaris 11.1 server or in a VirtualBox guest running Solaris 11.1 - to create a Solaris 10 BZ. The Solaris 11.1 environment must be at SRU 6.4 or newer. Create a flash archive on the Solaris 10 system s10# flarcreate -n s10-system /net/zones/archives/s10-system.flar Configure the Solaris 10 BZ on the Solaris 11 system s11# zonecfg -z s10z Use 'create' to begin configuring a new zone. zonecfg:s10z create -t SYSsolaris10 zonecfg:s10z set zonepath=/zones/s10z zonecfg:s10z exit s11# zoneadm list -cv ID NAME STATUS PATH BRAND IP 0 global running / solaris shared - s10z configured /zones/s10z solaris10 excl Install the zone from the flash archive s11# zoneadm -z s10z install -a /net/zones/archives/s10-system.flar -p You can find more information about the migration of Solaris 10 environments to Solaris 10 Branded Zones in the documentation. The rest of this blog entry demonstrates the commands you can use to accomplish the aforementioned actions related to BEs. New features in action Note that the demonstration of the commands occurs in the Solaris 10 BZ, as indicated by the shell prompt "s10z# ". Many of these commands can be performed in the global zone instead, if you prefer. If you perform them in the global zone, you must change the ZFS file system names. Create The only complicated action is the creation of a BE. In the Solaris 10 BZ, create a new "boot environment" - a ZFS clone. You can assign any name to the final portion of the clone's name, as long as it meets the requirements for a ZFS file system name. s10z# zfs snapshot rpool/ROOT/zbe-0@snap s10z# zfs clone -o mountpoint=/ -o canmount=noauto rpool/ROOT/zbe-0@snap rpool/ROOT/newBE cannot mount 'rpool/ROOT/newBE' on '/': directory is not empty filesystem successfully created, but not mounted You can safely ignore that message: we already know that / is not empty! We have merely told ZFS that the default mountpoint for the clone is the root directory. List the available BEs and active BE Because each BE is represented by a clone of the rpool/ROOT dataset, listing the BEs is as simple as listing the clones. s10z# zfs list -r rpool/ROOT NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT rpool/ROOT 3.55G 42.9G 31K legacy rpool/ROOT/zbe-0 1K 42.9G 3.55G / rpool/ROOT/newBE 3.55G 42.9G 3.55G / The output shows that two BEs exist. Their names are "zbe-0" and "newBE". You can tell Solaris that one particular BE should be used when the zone next boots by using a ZFS property. Its name is com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe. The value of that property is the name of the clone that contains the BE that should be booted. s10z# zfs get com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe rpool/ROOT NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE rpool/ROOT com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe zbe-0 local Change the active BE When you want to change the BE that will be booted next time, you can just change the activebe property on the rpool/ROOT dataset. s10z# zfs get com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe rpool/ROOT NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE rpool/ROOT com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe zbe-0 local s10z# zfs set com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe=newBE rpool/ROOT s10z# zfs get com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe rpool/ROOT NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE rpool/ROOT com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe newBE local s10z# shutdown -y -g0 -i6 After the zone has rebooted: s10z# zfs get com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe rpool/ROOT rpool/ROOT com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe newBE local s10z# zfs mount rpool/ROOT/newBE / rpool/export /export rpool/export/home /export/home rpool /rpool Mount the original BE to see that it's still there. s10z# zfs mount -o mountpoint=/mnt rpool/ROOT/zbe-0 s10z# ls /mnt Desktop export platform Documents export.backup.20130607T214951Z proc S10Flar home rpool TT_DB kernel sbin bin lib system boot lost+found tmp cdrom mnt usr dev net var etc opt Patch an inactive BE At this point, you can modify the original BE. If you would prefer to modify the new BE, you can restore the original value to the activebe property and reboot, and then mount the new BE to /mnt (or another empty directory) and modify it. Let's mount the original BE so we can modify it. (The first command is only needed if you haven't already mounted that BE.) s10z# zfs mount -o mountpoint=/mnt rpool/ROOT/zbe-0 s10z# patchadd -R /mnt -M /var/sadm/spool 104945-02 Note that the typical usage will be: Create a BE Mount the new (inactive) BE Use the package and patch tools to update the new BE Unmount the new BE Reboot Delete an inactive BE ZFS clones are children of their parent file systems. In order to destroy the parent, you must first "promote" the child. This reverses the parent-child relationship. (For more information on this, see the documentation.) The original rpool/ROOT file system is the parent of the clones that you create as BEs. In order to destroy an earlier BE that is that parent of other BEs, you must first promote one of the child BEs to be the ZFS parent. Only then can you destroy the original BE. Fortunately, this is easier to do than to explain: s10z# zfs promote rpool/ROOT/newBE s10z# zfs destroy rpool/ROOT/zbe-0 s10z# zfs list -r rpool/ROOT NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT rpool/ROOT 3.56G 269G 31K legacy rpool/ROOT/newBE 3.56G 269G 3.55G / Documentation This feature is so new, it is not yet described in the Solaris 11 documentation. However, MOS note 1558773.1 offers some details. Conclusion With this new feature, you can add and patch packages to boot environments of a Solaris 10 Branded Zone. This ability improves the manageability of these zones, and makes their use more practical. It also means that you can use the existing P2V tools with earlier Solaris 10 updates, and modify the environments after they become Solaris 10 Branded Zones.

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  • ASP.NET MVC 3 Hosting :: MVC 2 Strongly Typed HTML Helper and Enhanced Validation Sample

    - by mbridge
    In lue of the off the official release of ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM, I decided I would put together a quick sample of the enhanced HTML.Helpers and validation controls. I am going to use my sample event site where I will have a form so a user can search for information about a certain events. So when the Search page loads the Search action is fired return my strongly typed model. to the view.    1: [HttpGet]    2: public ViewResult Search(): public ViewResult Search()    3: {    4:     IList<EventsModel> result = _eventsService.GetEventList();    5:     var viewModel = new EventSearchModel    6:                         {    7:                             EventList = new SelectList(result, "EventCode","EventName","Select Event")    8:                         };    9:     return View(viewModel);  10: } Nothing special here, although I did want to show how to load up a strongly typed drop down list because that hung me up for a little bit. So to that, I am going to pass back a SelectList to the view and my HTML helper should no how to load this. So lets take a look at the mark up for the view.    1: <%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master"    2: Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<EventsSample.Models.EventSearchModel>" %>    3:     4: <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent" runat="server">    5:     Search    6: </asp:Content>    7:     8: <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server">    9:   10:     <h2>Search for Events</h2>  11:   12:     <% using (Html.BeginForm("Search","Events")) {%>  13:         <%= Html.ValidationSummary(true) %>  14:          15:         <fieldset>  16:             <legend>Fields</legend>  17:              18:             <div class="editor-label">  19:                 <%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.EventNumber) %>  20:             </div>  21:             <div class="editor-field">  22:                 <%= Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.EventNumber) %>  23:                 <%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.EventNumber) %>  24:             </div>  25:              26:             <div class="editor-label">  27:                 <%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.GuestLastName) %>  28:             </div>  29:             <div class="editor-field">  30:                 <%= Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.GuestLastName) %>  31:                 <%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.GuestLastName) %>  32:             </div>  33:              34:             <div class="editor-label">  35:                 <%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.EventName) %>  36:             </div>  37:             <div class="editor-field">  38:                 <%= Html.DropDownListFor(model => model.EventName, Model.EventList,"Select Event") %>  39:                 <%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.EventName) %>  40:             </div>  41:              42:             <p>  43:                 <input type="submit" value="Save" />  44:             </p>  45:         </fieldset>  46:   47:     <% } %>  48:   49:     <div>  50:         <%= Html.ActionLink("Back to List", "Index") %>  51:     </div>  52:   53: </asp:Content> A nice feature is the scaffolding that MVC has to generate code. I simply right clicked inside my Search() action, inside the EventsController and selected “Add View” and then I selected my strongly typed object that I wanted to pass to the view and also selected that I wanted the content type be “Edit”. With that the aspx page was completely generated, although I did have to go back in and change the textbox for the Event Names to a drop down list of the names to select from. The new feature with MVC 2 are the strongly typed HTML helpers. So now, my textboxes, drop down list, and validation helpers are all strongly typed to my model.  This features gives you the benefits of intellisense and also makes it easier to debug. “The Gu” has a great post about the feature in case you want more details. The DropDownListFor function to generate the drop down list was a little tricky for me. You first need to use a Lanbda expression to pass in the property you want the selected value assigned to in your model, and then you need to pass in the list directly from the model. Validations To validate the form, you can use the strongly type validation HTML helpers which will inspect your model and return errors if the validation fails. The definitions of these rules are set directly on the Model itself so lets take a look.    1: using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations;    2: using System.Web.Mvc;    3:     4: namespace EventsSample.Models    5: {    6:     public class EventSearchModel    7:     {    8:         [Required(ErrorMessage = "Please enter the event number.")]    9:         [RegularExpression(@"\w{6}",  10:             ErrorMessage = "The Event Number must be 6 letters and/or numbers.")]  11:         public string EventNumber { get; set; }  12:   13:         [Required(ErrorMessage = "Please enter the guest's last name.")]  14:         [RegularExpression(@"^[A-Za-zÀ-ÖØ-öø-ÿ1-9 '\-\.]{1,22}$",  15:             ErrorMessage = "The gueest's last name must 1 to 20 characters.")]  16:         public string GuestLastName { get; set; }  17:   18:         public string EventName { get; set; }  19:         public SelectList EventList { get; set; }  20:     }  21: } Pretty cool! Okay, the only thing left to do is perform the validation in the POST action.    1: [HttpPost]    2: public ViewResult Search(EventSearchModel eventSearchModel)    3: {    4:     if (ModelState.IsValid) return View("SearchResults");    5:     else    6:     {    7:          IList<EventsModel> result = _eventsService.GetEventList();    8:         eventSearchModel.EventList = new SelectList(result, "EVentCode","EventName");   9:   10:         return View(eventSearchModel);  11:     }  12: }  13:     } If the form entries are valid, here I am simply displaying the SearchResult, but in a real world sample I would also go out get the results first. You get the idea though. In my case, when the form is not valid, I also had to reload my SelectList with the event names before I loaded the page again. Remember this is MVC, no _VieState here :) So that’s it. Now my form is validating the data and when it fails it looks like this.

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  • J2EE Applications, SPARC T4, Solaris Containers, and Resource Pools

    - by user12620111
    I've obtained a substantial performance improvement on a SPARC T4-2 Server running a J2EE Application Server Cluster by deploying the cluster members into Oracle Solaris Containers and binding those containers to cores of the SPARC T4 Processor. This is not a surprising result, in fact, it is consistent with other results that are available on the Internet. See the "references", below, for some examples. Nonetheless, here is a summary of my configuration and results. (1.0) Before deploying a J2EE Application Server Cluster into a virtualized environment, many decisions need to be made. I'm not claiming that all of the decisions that I have a made will work well for every environment. In fact, I'm not even claiming that all of the decisions are the best possible for my environment. I'm only claiming that of the small sample of configurations that I've tested, this is the one that is working best for me. Here are some of the decisions that needed to be made: (1.1) Which virtualization option? There are several virtualization options and isolation levels that are available. Options include: Hard partitions:  Dynamic Domains on Sun SPARC Enterprise M-Series Servers Hypervisor based virtualization such as Oracle VM Server for SPARC (LDOMs) on SPARC T-Series Servers OS Virtualization using Oracle Solaris Containers Resource management tools in the Oracle Solaris OS to control the amount of resources an application receives, such as CPU cycles, physical memory, and network bandwidth. Oracle Solaris Containers provide the right level of isolation and flexibility for my environment. To borrow some words from my friends in marketing, "The SPARC T4 processor leverages the unique, no-cost virtualization capabilities of Oracle Solaris Zones"  (1.2) How to associate Oracle Solaris Containers with resources? There are several options available to associate containers with resources, including (a) resource pool association (b) dedicated-cpu resources and (c) capped-cpu resources. I chose to create resource pools and associate them with the containers because I wanted explicit control over the cores and virtual processors.  (1.3) Cluster Topology? Is it best to deploy (a) multiple application servers on one node, (b) one application server on multiple nodes, or (c) multiple application servers on multiple nodes? After a few quick tests, it appears that one application server per Oracle Solaris Container is a good solution. (1.4) Number of cluster members to deploy? I chose to deploy four big 64-bit application servers. I would like go back a test many 32-bit application servers, but that is left for another day. (2.0) Configuration tested. (2.1) I was using a SPARC T4-2 Server which has 2 CPU and 128 virtual processors. To understand the physical layout of the hardware on Solaris 10, I used the OpenSolaris psrinfo perl script available at http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/download/Community+Group+performance/files/psrinfo.pl: test# ./psrinfo.pl -pv The physical processor has 8 cores and 64 virtual processors (0-63) The core has 8 virtual processors (0-7)   The core has 8 virtual processors (8-15)   The core has 8 virtual processors (16-23)   The core has 8 virtual processors (24-31)   The core has 8 virtual processors (32-39)   The core has 8 virtual processors (40-47)   The core has 8 virtual processors (48-55)   The core has 8 virtual processors (56-63)     SPARC-T4 (chipid 0, clock 2848 MHz) The physical processor has 8 cores and 64 virtual processors (64-127)   The core has 8 virtual processors (64-71)   The core has 8 virtual processors (72-79)   The core has 8 virtual processors (80-87)   The core has 8 virtual processors (88-95)   The core has 8 virtual processors (96-103)   The core has 8 virtual processors (104-111)   The core has 8 virtual processors (112-119)   The core has 8 virtual processors (120-127)     SPARC-T4 (chipid 1, clock 2848 MHz) (2.2) The "before" test: without processor binding. I started with a 4-member cluster deployed into 4 Oracle Solaris Containers. Each container used a unique gigabit Ethernet port for HTTP traffic. The containers shared a 10 gigabit Ethernet port for JDBC traffic. (2.3) The "after" test: with processor binding. I ran one application server in the Global Zone and another application server in each of the three non-global zones (NGZ):  (3.0) Configuration steps. The following steps need to be repeated for all three Oracle Solaris Containers. (3.1) Stop AppServers from the BUI. (3.2) Stop the NGZ. test# ssh test-z2 init 5 (3.3) Enable resource pools: test# svcadm enable pools (3.4) Create the resource pool: test# poolcfg -dc 'create pool pool-test-z2' (3.5) Create the processor set: test# poolcfg -dc 'create pset pset-test-z2' (3.6) Specify the maximum number of CPU's that may be addd to the processor set: test# poolcfg -dc 'modify pset pset-test-z2 (uint pset.max=32)' (3.7) bash syntax to add Virtual CPUs to the processor set: test# (( i = 64 )); while (( i < 96 )); do poolcfg -dc "transfer to pset pset-test-z2 (cpu $i)"; (( i = i + 1 )) ; done (3.8) Associate the resource pool with the processor set: test# poolcfg -dc 'associate pool pool-test-z2 (pset pset-test-z2)' (3.9) Tell the zone to use the resource pool that has been created: test# zonecfg -z test-z1 set pool=pool-test-z2 (3.10) Boot the Oracle Solaris Container test# zoneadm -z test-z2 boot (3.11) Save the configuration to /etc/pooladm.conf test# pooladm -s (4.0) Results. Using the resource pools improves both throughput and response time: (5.0) References: System Administration Guide: Oracle Solaris Containers-Resource Management and Oracle Solaris Zones Capitalizing on large numbers of processors with WebSphere Portal on Solaris WebSphere Application Server and T5440 (Dileep Kumar's Weblog)  http://www.brendangregg.com/zones.html Reuters Market Data System, RMDS 6 Multiple Instances (Consolidated), Performance Test Results in Solaris, Containers/Zones Environment on Sun Blade X6270 by Amjad Khan, 2009.

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  • Using Sitecore RenderingContext Parameters as MVC controller action arguments

    - by Kyle Burns
    I have been working with the Technical Preview of Sitecore 6.6 on a project and have been for the most part happy with the way that Sitecore (which truly is an MVC implementation unto itself) has been expanded to support ASP.NET MVC. That said, getting up to speed with the combined platform has not been entirely without stumbles and today I want to share one area where Sitecore could have really made things shine from the "it just works" perspective. A couple days ago I was asked by a colleague about the usage of the "Parameters" field that is defined on Sitecore's Controller Rendering data template. Based on the standard way that Sitecore handles a field named Parameters, I was able to deduce that the field expected key/value pairs separated by the "&" character, but beyond that I wasn't sure and didn't see anything from a documentation perspective to guide me, so it was time to dig and find out where the data in the field was made available. My first thought was that it would be really nice if Sitecore handled the parameters in this field consistently with the way that ASP.NET MVC handles the various parameter collections on the HttpRequest object and automatically maps them to parameters of the action method executing. Being the hopeful sort, I configured a name/value pair on one of my renderings, added a parameter with matching name to the controller action and fired up the bugger to see... that the parameter was not populated. Having established that the field's value was not going to be presented to me the way that I had hoped it would, the next assumption that I would work on was that Sitecore would handle this field similar to how they handle other similar data and would plug it into some ambient object that I could reference from within the controller method. After a considerable amount of guessing, testing, and cracking code open with Redgate's Reflector (a must-have companion to Sitecore documentation), I found that the most direct way to access the parameter was through the ambient RenderingContext object using code similar to: string myArgument = string.Empty; var rc = Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.RenderingContext.CurrentOrNull; if (rc != null) {     var parms = rc.Rendering.Parameters;     myArgument = parms["myArgument"]; } At this point, we know how this field is used out of the box from Sitecore and can provide information from Sitecore's Content Editor that will be available when the controller action is executing, but it feels a little dirty. In order to properly test the action method I would have to do a lot of setup work and possible use an isolation framework such as Pex and Moles to get at a value that my action method is dependent upon. Notice I said that my method is dependent upon the value but in order to meet that dependency I've accepted another dependency upon Sitecore's RenderingContext.  I'm a big believer in, when possible, ensuring that any piece of code explicitly advertises dependencies using the method signature, so I found myself still wanting this to work the same as if the parameters were in the request route, querystring, or form by being able to add a myArgument parameter to the action method and have this parameter populated by the framework. Lucky for us, the ASP.NET MVC framework is extremely flexible and provides some easy to grok and use extensibility points. ASP.NET MVC is able to provide information from the request as input parameters to controller actions because it uses objects which implement an interface called IValueProvider and have been registered to service the application. The most basic statement of responsibility for an IValueProvider implementation is "I know about some data which is indexed by key. If you hand me the key for a piece of data that I know about I give you that data". When preparing to invoke a controller action, the framework queries registered IValueProvider implementations with the name of each method argument to see if the ValueProvider can supply a value for the parameter. (the rest of this post will assume you're working along and make a lot more sense if you do) Let's pull Sitecore out of the equation for a second to simplify things and create an extremely simple IValueProvider implementation. For this example, I first create a new ASP.NET MVC3 project in Visual Studio, selecting "Internet Application" and otherwise taking defaults (I'm assuming that anyone reading this far in the post either already knows how to do this or will need to take a quick run through one of the many available basic MVC tutorials such as the MVC Music Store). Once the new project is created, go to the Index action of HomeController.  This action sets a Message property on the ViewBag to "Welcome to ASP.NET MVC!" and invokes the View, which has been coded to display the Message. For our example, we will remove the hard coded message from this controller (although we'll leave it just as hard coded somewhere else - this is sample code). For the first step in our exercise, add a string parameter to the Index action method called welcomeMessage and use the value of this argument to set the ViewBag.Message property. The updated Index action should look like: public ActionResult Index(string welcomeMessage) {     ViewBag.Message = welcomeMessage;     return View(); } This represents the entirety of the change that you will make to either the controller or view.  If you run the application now, the home page will display and no message will be presented to the user because no value was supplied to the Action method. Let's now write a ValueProvider to ensure this parameter gets populated. We'll start by creating a new class called StaticValueProvider. When the class is created, we'll update the using statements to ensure that they include the following: using System.Collections.Specialized; using System.Globalization; using System.Web.Mvc; With the appropriate using statements in place, we'll update the StaticValueProvider class to implement the IValueProvider interface. The System.Web.Mvc library already contains a pretty flexible dictionary-like implementation called NameValueCollectionValueProvider, so we'll just wrap that and let it do most of the real work for us. The completed class looks like: public class StaticValueProvider : IValueProvider {     private NameValueCollectionValueProvider _wrappedProvider;     public StaticValueProvider(ControllerContext controllerContext)     {         var parameters = new NameValueCollection();         parameters.Add("welcomeMessage", "Hello from the value provider!");         _wrappedProvider = new NameValueCollectionValueProvider(parameters, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);     }     public bool ContainsPrefix(string prefix)     {         return _wrappedProvider.ContainsPrefix(prefix);     }     public ValueProviderResult GetValue(string key)     {         return _wrappedProvider.GetValue(key);     } } Notice that the only entry in the collection matches the name of the argument to our HomeController's Index action.  This is the important "secret sauce" that will make things work. We've got our new value provider now, but that's not quite enough to be finished. Mvc obtains IValueProvider instances using factories that are registered when the application starts up. These factories extend the abstract ValueProviderFactory class by initializing and returning the appropriate implementation of IValueProvider from the GetValueProvider method. While I wouldn't do so in production code, for the sake of this example, I'm going to add the following class definition within the StaticValueProvider.cs source file: public class StaticValueProviderFactory : ValueProviderFactory {     public override IValueProvider GetValueProvider(ControllerContext controllerContext)     {         return new StaticValueProvider(controllerContext);     } } Now that we have a factory, we can register it by adding the following line to the end of the Application_Start method in Global.asax.cs: ValueProviderFactories.Factories.Add(new StaticValueProviderFactory()); If you've done everything right to this point, you should be able to run the application and be presented with the home page reading "Hello from the value provider!". Now that you have the basics of the IValueProvider down, you have everything you need to enhance your Sitecore MVC implementation by adding an IValueProvider that exposes values from the ambient RenderingContext's Parameters property. I'll provide the code for the IValueProvider implementation (which should look VERY familiar) and you can use the work we've already done as a reference to create and register the factory: public class RenderingContextValueProvider : IValueProvider {     private NameValueCollectionValueProvider _wrappedProvider = null;     public RenderingContextValueProvider(ControllerContext controllerContext)     {         var collection = new NameValueCollection();         var rc = RenderingContext.CurrentOrNull;         if (rc != null && rc.Rendering != null)         {             foreach(var parameter in rc.Rendering.Parameters)             {                 collection.Add(parameter.Key, parameter.Value);             }         }         _wrappedProvider = new NameValueCollectionValueProvider(collection, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);         }     public bool ContainsPrefix(string prefix)     {         return _wrappedProvider.ContainsPrefix(prefix);     }     public ValueProviderResult GetValue(string key)     {         return _wrappedProvider.GetValue(key);     } } In this post I've discussed the MVC IValueProvider used to map data to controller action method arguments and how this can be integrated into your Sitecore 6.6 MVC solution.

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  • ANTS Memory Profiler 7.0

    - by James Michael Hare
    I had always been a fan of ANTS products (Reflector is absolutely invaluable, and their performance profiler is great as well – very easy to use!), so I was curious to see what the ANTS Memory Profiler could show me. Background While a performance profiler will track how much time is typically spent in each unit of code, a memory profiler gives you much more detail on how and where your memory is being consumed and released in a program. As an example, I’d been working on a data access layer at work to call a market data web service.  This web service would take a list of symbols to quote and would return back the quote data.  To help consolidate the thousands of web requests per second we get and reduce load on the web services, we implemented a 5-second cache of quote data.  Not quite long enough to where customers will typically notice a quote go “stale”, but just long enough to be able to collapse multiple quote requests for the same symbol in a short period of time. A 5-second cache may not sound like much, but it actually pays off by saving us roughly 42% of our web service calls, while still providing relatively up-to-date information.  The question is whether or not the extra memory involved in maintaining the cache was worth it, so I decided to fire up the ANTS Memory Profiler and take a look at memory usage. First Impressions The main thing I’ve always loved about the ANTS tools is their ease of use.  Pretty much everything is right there in front of you in a way that makes it easy for you to find what you need with little digging required.  I’ve worked with other, older profilers before (that shall remain nameless other than to hint it was created by a very large chip maker) where it was a mind boggling experience to figure out how to do simple tasks. Not so with AMP.  The opening dialog is very straightforward.  You can choose from here whether to debug an executable, a web application (either in IIS or from VS’s web development server), windows services, etc. So I chose a .NET Executable and navigated to the build location of my test harness.  Then began profiling. At this point while the application is running, you can see a chart of the memory as it ebbs and wanes with allocations and collections.  At any given point in time, you can take snapshots (to compare states) zoom in, or choose to stop at any time.  Snapshots Taking a snapshot also gives you a breakdown of the managed memory heaps for each generation so you get an idea how many objects are staying around for extended periods of time (as an object lives and survives collections, it gets promoted into higher generations where collection becomes less frequent). Generating a snapshot brings up an analysis view with very handy graphs that show your generation sizes.  Almost all my memory is in Generation 1 in the managed memory component of the first graph, which is good news to me, because Gen 2 collections are much rarer.  I once3 made the mistake once of caching data for 30 minutes and found it didn’t get collected very quick after I released my reference because it had been promoted to Gen 2 – doh! Analysis It looks like (from the second pie chart) that the majority of the allocations were in the string class.  This also is expected for me because the majority of the memory allocated is in the web service responses, so it doesn’t seem the entities I’m adapting to (to prevent being too tightly coupled to the web service proxy classes, which can change easily out from under me) aren’t taking a significant portion of memory. I also appreciate that they have clear summary text in key places such as “No issues with large object heap fragmentation were detected”.  For novice users, this type of summary information can be critical to getting them to use a tool and develop a good working knowledge of it. There is also a handy link at the bottom for “What to look for on the summary” which loads a web page of help on key points to look for. Clicking over to the session overview, it’s easy to compare the samples at each snapshot to see how your memory is growing, shrinking, or staying relatively the same.  Looking at my snapshots, I’m pretty happy with the fact that memory allocation and heap size seems to be fairly stable and in control: Once again, you can check on the large object heap, generation one heap, and generation two heap across each snapshot to spot trends. Back on the analysis tab, we can go to the [Class List] button to get an idea what classes are making up the majority of our memory usage.  As was little surprise to me, System.String was the clear majority of my allocations, though I found it surprising that the System.Reflection.RuntimeMehtodInfo came in second.  I was curious about this, so I selected it and went into the [Instance Categorizer].  This view let me see where these instances to RuntimeMehtodInfo were coming from. So I scrolled back through the graph, and discovered that these were being held by the System.ServiceModel.ChannelFactoryRefCache and I was satisfied this was just an artifact of my WCF proxy. I also like that down at the bottom of the Instance Categorizer it gives you a series of filters and offers to guide you on which filter to use based on the problem you are trying to find.  For example, if I suspected a memory leak, I might try to filter for survivors in growing classes.  This means that for instances of a class that are growing in memory (more are being created than cleaned up), which ones are survivors (not collected) from garbage collection.  This might allow me to drill down and find places where I’m holding onto references by mistake and not freeing them! Finally, if you want to really see all your instances and who is holding onto them (preventing collection), you can go to the “Instance Retention Graph” which creates a graph showing what references are being held in memory and who is holding onto them. Visual Studio Integration Of course, VS has its own profiler built in – and for a free bundled profiler it is quite capable – but AMP gives a much cleaner and easier-to-use experience, and when you install it you also get the option of letting it integrate directly into VS. So once you go back into VS after installation, you’ll notice an ANTS menu which lets you launch the ANTS profiler directly from Visual Studio.   Clicking on one of these options fires up the project in the profiler immediately, allowing you to get right in.  It doesn’t integrate with the Visual Studio windows themselves (like the VS profiler does), but still the plethora of information it provides and the clear and concise manner in which it presents it makes it well worth it. Summary If you like the ANTS series of tools, you shouldn’t be disappointed with the ANTS Memory Profiler.  It was so easy to use that I was able to jump in with very little product knowledge and get the information I was looking it for. I’ve used other profilers before that came with 3-inch thick tomes that you had to read in order to get anywhere with the tool, and this one is not like that at all.  It’s built for your everyday developer to get in and find their problems quickly, and I like that! Tweet Technorati Tags: Influencers,ANTS,Memory,Profiler

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  • Announcing: Improvements to the Windows Azure Portal

    - by ScottGu
    Earlier today we released a number of enhancements to the new Windows Azure Management Portal.  These new capabilities include: Service Bus Management and Monitoring Support for Managing Co-administrators Import/Export support for SQL Databases Virtual Machine Experience Enhancements Improved Cloud Service Status Notifications Media Services Monitoring Support Storage Container Creation and Access Control Support All of these improvements are now live in production and available to start using immediately.  Below are more details on them: Service Bus Management and Monitoring The new Windows Azure Management Portal now supports Service Bus management and monitoring. Service Bus provides rich messaging infrastructure that can sit between applications (or between cloud and on-premise environments) and allow them to communicate in a loosely coupled way for improved scale and resiliency. With the new Service Bus experience, you can now create and manage Service Bus Namespaces, Queues, Topics, Relays and Subscriptions. You can also get rich monitoring for Service Bus Queues, Topics and Subscriptions. To create a Service Bus namespace, you can now select the “Service Bus” tab in the Windows Azure portal and then simply select the CREATE command: Doing so will bring up a new “Create a Namespace” dialog that allows you to name and create a new Service Bus Namespace: Once created, you can obtain security credentials associated with the Namespace via the ACCESS KEY command. This gives you the ability to obtain the connection string associated with the service namespace. You can copy and paste these values into any application that requires these credentials: It is also now easy to create Service Bus Queues and Topics via the NEW experience in the portal drawer.  Simply click the NEW command and navigate to the “App Services” category to create a new Service Bus entity: Once you provision a new Queue or Topic it can be managed in the portal.  Clicking on a namespace will display all queues and topics within it: Clicking on an item in the list will allow you to drill down into a dashboard view that allows you to monitor the activity and traffic within it, as well as perform operations on it. For example, below is a view of an “orders” queue – note how we now surface both the incoming and outgoing message flow rate, as well as the total queue length and queue size: To monitor pub/sub subscriptions you can use the ADD METRICS command within a topic and select a specific subscription to monitor. Support for Managing Co-Administrators You can now add co-administrators for your Windows Azure subscription using the new Windows Azure Portal. This allows you to share management of your Windows Azure services with other users. Subscription co-administrators share the same administrative rights and permissions that service administrator have - except a co-administrator cannot change or view billing details about the account, nor remove the service administrator from a subscription. In the SETTINGS section, click on the ADMINISTRATORS tab, and select the ADD button to add a co-administrator to your subscription: To add a co-administrator, you specify the email address for a Microsoft account (formerly Windows Live ID) or an organizational account, and choose the subscription you want to add them to: You can later update the subscriptions that the co-administrator has access to by clicking on the EDIT button, and then select or deselect the subscriptions to which they belong. Import/Export Support for SQL Databases The Windows Azure administration portal now supports importing and exporting SQL Databases to/from Blob Storage.  Databases can be imported/exported to blob storage using the same BACPAC file format that is supported with SQL Server 2012.  Among other benefits, this makes it easy to copy and migrate databases between on-premise and cloud environments. SQL Databases now have an EXPORT command in the bottom drawer that when pressed will prompt you to save your database to a Windows Azure storage container: The UI allows you to choose an existing storage account or create a new one, as well as the name of the BACPAC file to persist in blob storage: You can also now import and create a new SQL Database by using the NEW command.  This will prompt you to select the storage container and file to import the database from: The Windows Azure Portal enables you to monitor the progress of import and export operations. If you choose to log out of the portal, you can come back later and check on the status of all of the operations in the new history tab of the SQL Database server – this shows your entire import and export history and the status (success/fail) of each: Enhancements to the Virtual Machine Experience One of the common pain-points we have heard from customers using the preview of our new Virtual Machine support has been the inability to delete the associated VHDs when a VM instance (or VM drive) gets deleted. Prior to today’s release the VHDs would continue to be in your storage account and accumulate storage charges. You can now navigate to the Disks tab within the Virtual Machine extension, select a VM disk to delete, and click the DELETE DISK command: When you click the DELETE DISK button you have the option to delete the disk + associated .VHD file (completely clearing it from storage).  Alternatively you can delete the disk but still retain a .VHD copy of it in storage. Improved Cloud Service Status Notifications The Windows Azure portal now exposes more information of the health status of role instances.  If any of the instances are in a non-running state, the status at the top of the dashboard will summarize the status (and update automatically as the role health changes): Clicking the instance hyperlink within this status summary view will navigate you to a detailed role instance view, and allow you to get more detailed health status of each of the instances.  The portal has been updated to provide more specific status information within this detailed view – giving you better visibility into the health of your app: Monitoring Support for Media Services Windows Azure Media Services allows you to create media processing jobs (for example: encoding media files) in your Windows Azure Media Services account. In the Windows Azure Portal, you can now monitor the number of encoding jobs that are queued up for processing as well as active, failed and queued tasks for encoding jobs. On your media services account dashboard, you can visualize the monitoring data for last 6 hours, 24 hours or 7 days. Storage Container Creation and Access Control Support You can now create Windows Azure Storage storage containers from within the Windows Azure Portal.  After selecting a storage account, you can navigate to the CONTAINERS tab and click the ADD CONTAINER command: This will display a dialog that lets you name the new container and control access to it: You can also update the access setting as well as container metadata of existing containers by selecting one and then using the new EDIT CONTAINER command: This will then bring up the edit container dialog that allows you to change and save its settings: In addition to creating and editing containers, you can click on them within the portal to drill-in and view blobs within them.  Summary The above features are all now live in production and available to use immediately.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using them today.  Visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. We’ll have even more new features and enhancements coming later this month – including support for the recent Windows Server 2012 and .NET 4.5 releases (we will enable new web and worker role images with Windows Server 2012 and .NET 4.5, and support .NET 4.5 with Websites).  Keep an eye out on my blog for details as these new features become available. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, July 02, 2013

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, July 02, 2013Popular ReleasesMastersign.Expressions: Mastersign.Expressions v0.4.2: added support for if(<cond>, <true-part>, <false-part>) fixed multithreading issue with rand() improved demo applicationNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module: NB_Store v2.3.6 Rel0: v2.3.6 Is now DNN6 and DNN7 compatible Important : During update this install with overwrite the menu.xml setting, if you have changed this then make a backup before you upgrade and reapply your changes after the upgrade. Please view the following documentation if you are installing and configuring this module for the first time System Requirements Skill requirements Downloads and documents Step by step guide to a working store Please ask all questions in the Discussions tab. Document.Editor: 2013.26: What's new for Document.Editor 2013.26: New Insert Chart Improved User Interface Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsWsus Package Publisher: Release V1.2.1307.01: Fix an issue in the UI, approvals are not shown correctly in the 'Report' tabDirectX Tool Kit: July 2013: July 1, 2013 VS 2013 Preview projects added and updates for DirectXMath 3.05 vectorcall Added use of sRGB WIC metadata for JPEG, PNG, and TIFF SaveToWIC functions updated with new optional setCustomProps parameter and error check with optional targetFormatCore Server 2012 Powershell Script Hyper-v Manager: new_root.zip: Verison 1.0JSON Toolkit: JSON Toolkit 4.1.736: Improved strinfigy performance New serializing feature New anonymous type support in constructorsDotNetNuke® IFrame: IFrame 04.05.00: New DNN6/7 Manifest file and Azure Compatibility.VidCoder: 1.5.2 Beta: Fixed crash on presets with an invalid bitrate.Gardens Point LEX: Gardens Point LEX version 1.2.1: The main distribution is a zip file. This contains the binary executable, documentation, source code and the examples. ChangesVersion 1.2.1 has new facilities for defining and manipulating character classes. These changes make the construction of large Unicode character classes more convenient. The runtime code for performing automaton backup has been re-implemented, and is now faster for scanners that need backup. Source CodeThe distribution contains a complete VS2010 project for the appli...ZXMAK2: Version 2.7.5.7: - fix TZX emulation (Bruce Lee, Zynaps) - fix ATM 16 colors for border - add memory module PROFI 512K; add PROFI V03 rom image; fix PROFI 3.XX configTwitter image Downloader: Twitter Image Downloader 2 with Installer: Application file with Install shield and Dot Net 4.0 redistributableUltimate Music Tagger: Ultimate Music Tagger 1.0.0.0: First release of Ultimate Music TaggerBlackJumboDog: Ver5.9.2: 2013.06.28 Ver5.9.2 (1) ??????????(????SMTP?????)?????????? (2) HTTPS???????????Outlook 2013 Add-In: Configuration Form: This new version includes the following changes: - Refactored code a bit. - Removing configuration from main form to gain more space to display items. - Moved configuration to separate form. You can click the little "gear" icon to access the configuration form (still very simple). - Added option to show past day appointments from the selected day (previous in time, that is). - Added some tooltips. You will have to uninstall the previous version (add/remove programs) if you had installed it ...Terminals: Version 3.0 - Release: Changes since version 2.0:Choose 100% portable or installed version Removed connection warning when running RDP 8 (Windows 8) client Fixed Active directory search Extended Active directory search by LDAP filters Fixed single instance mode when running on Windows Terminal server Merged usage of Tags and Groups Added columns sorting option in tables No UAC prompts on Windows 7 Completely new file persistence data layer New MS SQL persistence layer (Store data in SQL database)...NuGet: NuGet 2.6: Released June 26, 2013. Release notes: http://docs.nuget.org/docs/release-notes/nuget-2.6Python Tools for Visual Studio: 2.0 Beta: We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 2.0 Beta. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including CPython/IronPython, Edit/Intellisense/Debug/Profile, Cloud, HPC, IPython, and cross platform debugging support. For a quick overview of the general IDE experience, please watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuewiStN...Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 and WP8 (v1.3 beta): Preview: New MPEG DASH adaptive streaming plugin for Windows Azure Media Services Preview: New Ultraviolet CFF plugin. Preview: New WP7 version with WP8 compatibility. (source code only) Source code is now available via CodePlex Git Misc bug fixes and improvements: WP8 only: Added optional fullscreen and mute buttons to default xaml JS only: protecting currentTime from returning infinity. Some videos would cause currentTime to be infinity which could cause errors in plugins expectin...AssaultCube Reloaded: 2.5.8: SERVER OWNERS: note that the default maprot has changed once again. Linux has Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit precompiled binaries and Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, please wait while we continue to try to package for those OSes. Or better yet, try to compile it. If it fails, download a virtual machine. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compi...New ProjectsALM Rangers DevOps Tooling and Guidance: Practical tooling and guidance that will enable teams to realize a faster deployment based on continuous feedback.Core Server 2012 Powershell Script Hyper-v Manager: Free core Server 2012 powershell scripts and batch files that replace the non-existent hyper-v manager, vmconnect and mstsc.Enhanced Deployment Service (EDS): EDS is a web service based utility designed to extend the deployment capabilities of administrators with the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit.ExtendedDialogBox: Libreria DialogBoxJazdy: This project is here only because we wanted to take advantage of a public git server.Mon Examen: This web interface is meant to make examinationsneet: summaryOrchard Multi-Choice Voting: A multiple choice voting Orchard module.Particle Swarm Optimization Solving Quadratic Assignment Problem: This project is submitted for the solving of QAP using PSO algorithms with addition of some modification Porjects: 23123123PPL Power Pack: PPL Power PackProperty Builder: Visual Studio tool for speeding up process of coding class properties getters and setters.RedRuler for Redline: I tried some on-screen rulers, none of them help me measure the UI element quickly based on the Redline. So I decided to created this handy RedRuler tool. Royale Living: Mahindra Royale Community PortalSearch and booking Hotel or Tours: Ð? án nghiên c?u c?a sinh viên tdt theo mô hình mvc 4SystemBuilder.Show: This tool is a helper after you create your project in visual studio to create the respective objects and interface. TalentDesk: new ptojectTcmplex: The Training Center teaches many different kind of course such as English, French, Computer hardware and computer softwareTFS Reporting Guide: Provides guidance and samples to enable TFS users to generate reports based on WIT data.Umbraco AdaptiveImages: Adaptive Images Package for UmbracoVirtualNet - A ILcode interpreter/emulator written in C++/Assembly: VirtualNet is a interpreter/emulator for running .net code in native without having to install the .Net FrameWorkVisual Blocks: Visual Blocks ????IDE ????? ??????? ????? ????/?? Visual Studio and Cloud Based Mobile Device Testing: Practical guidance enabling field to remove blockers to adoption and to use and extend the Perfecto Mobile Cloud Device testing within the context of VS.Windows 8 Time Picker for Windows Phone: A Windows Phone implementation of the Time Picker control found in the Windows 8.1 Alarms app.???? - SmallBasic?: ?????????

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  • The challenge of communicating externally with IRM secured content

    - by Simon Thorpe
    I am often asked by customers about how they handle sending IRM secured documents to external parties. Their concern is that using IRM to secure sensitive information they need to share outside their business, is troubled with the inability for third parties to install the software which enables them to gain access to the information. It is a very legitimate question and one i've had to answer many times in the past 10 years whilst helping customers plan successful IRM deployments. The operating system does not provide the required level of content security The problem arises from what IRM delivers, persistent security to your sensitive information where ever it resides and whenever it is in use. Oracle IRM gives customers an array of features that help ensure sensitive information in an IRM document or email is always protected and only accessed by authorized users using legitimate applications. Examples of such functionality are; Control of the clipboard, either by disabling completely in the opened document or by allowing the cut and pasting of information between secured IRM documents but not into insecure applications. Protection against programmatic access to the document. Office documents and PDF documents have the ability to be accessed by other applications and scripts. With Oracle IRM we have to protect against this to ensure content cannot be leaked by someone writing a simple program. Securing of decrypted content in memory. At some point during the process of opening and presenting a sealed document to an end user, we must decrypt it and give it to the application (Adobe Reader, Microsoft Word, Excel etc). This process must be secure so that someone cannot simply get access to the decrypted information. The operating system alone just doesn't have the functionality to deliver these types of features. This is why for every IRM technology there must be some extra software installed and typically this software requires administrative rights to do so. The fact is that if you want to have very strong security and access control over a document you are going to send to someone who is beyond your network infrastructure, there must be some software to provide that functionality. Simple installation with Oracle IRM The software used to control access to Oracle IRM sealed content is called the Oracle IRM Desktop. It is a small, free piece of software roughly about 12mb in size. This software delivers functionality for everything a user needs to work with an Oracle IRM solution. It provides the functionality for all formats we support, the storage and transparent synchronization of user rights and unique to Oracle, the ability to search inside sealed files stored on the local computer. In Oracle we've made every technical effort to ensure that installing this software is a simple as possible. In situations where the user's computer is part of the enterprise, this software is typically deployed using existing technologies such as Systems Management Server from Microsoft or by using Active Directory Group Policies. However when sending sealed content externally, you cannot automatically install software on the end users machine. You need to rely on them to download and install themselves. Again we've made every effort for this manual install process to be as simple as we can. Starting with the small download size of the software itself to the simple installation process, most end users are able to install and access sealed content very quickly. You can see for yourself how easily this is done by walking through our free and easy self service demonstration of using sealed content. How to handle objections and ensure there is value However the fact still remains that end users may object to installing, or may simply be unable to install the software themselves due to lack of permissions. This is often a problem with any technology that requires specialized software to access a new type of document. In Oracle, over the past 10 years, we've learned many ways to get over this barrier of getting software deployed by external users. First and I would say of most importance, is the content MUST have some value to the person you are asking to install software. Without some type of value proposition you are going to find it very difficult to get past objections to installing the IRM Desktop. Imagine if you were going to secure the weekly campus restaurant menu and send this to contractors. Their initial response will be, "why on earth are you asking me to download some software just to access your menu!?". A valid objection... there is no value to the user in doing this. Now consider the scenario where you are sending one of your contractors their employment contract which contains their address, social security number and bank account details. Are they likely to take 5 minutes to install the IRM Desktop? You bet they are, because there is real value in doing so and they understand why you are doing it. They want their personal information to be securely handled and a quick download and install of some software is a small task in comparison to dealing with the loss of this information. Be clear in communicating this value So when sending sealed content to people externally, you must be clear in communicating why you are using an IRM technology and why they need to install some software to access the content. Do not try and avoid the issue, you must be clear and upfront about it. In doing so you will significantly reduce the "I didn't know I needed to do this..." responses and also gain respect for being straight forward. One customer I worked with, 6 months after the initial deployment of Oracle IRM, called me panicking that the partner they had started to share their engineering documents with refused to install any software to access this highly confidential intellectual property. I explained they had to communicate to the partner why they were doing this. I told them to go back with the statement that "the company takes protecting its intellectual property seriously and had decided to use IRM to control access to engineering documents." and if the partner didn't respect this decision, they would find another company that would. The result? A few days later the partner had made the Oracle IRM Desktop part of their approved list of software in the company. Companies are successful when sending sealed content to third parties We have many, many customers who send sensitive content to third parties. Some customers actually sell access to Oracle IRM protected content and therefore 99% of their users are external to their business, one in particular has sold content to hundreds of thousands of external users. Oracle themselves use the technology to secure M&A documents, payroll data and security assessments which go beyond the traditional enterprise security perimeter. Pretty much every company who deploys Oracle IRM will at some point be sending those documents to people outside of the company, these customers must be successful otherwise Oracle IRM wouldn't be successful. Because our software is used by a wide variety of companies, some who use it to sell content, i've often run into people i'm sharing a sealed document with and they already have the IRM Desktop installed due to accessing content from another company. The future In summary I would say that yes, this is a hurdle that many customers are concerned about but we see much evidence that in practice, people leap that hurdle with relative ease as long as they are good at communicating the value of using IRM and also take measures to ensure end users can easily go through the process of installation. We are constantly developing new ideas to reducing this hurdle and maybe one day the operating systems will give us enough rich security functionality to have no software installation. Until then, Oracle IRM is by far the easiest solution to balance security and usability for your business. If you would like to evaluate it for yourselves, please contact us.

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  • Columnstore Case Study #2: Columnstore faster than SSAS Cube at DevCon Security

    - by aspiringgeek
    Preamble This is the second in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in my big 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. See also Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations Why Columnstore? As stated previously, 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. The Customer DevCon Security provides home & business security services & has been in business for 135 years. I met DevCon personnel while speaking to the Utah County SQL User Group on 20 February 2012. (Thanks to TJ Belt (b|@tjaybelt) & Ben Miller (b|@DBADuck) for the invitation which serendipitously coincided with the height of ski season.) The App: DevCon Security Reporting: Optimized & Ad Hoc Queries DevCon users interrogate a SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services cube via SSRS. In addition, the SQL Server 2012 relational back end is the target of ad hoc queries; this DW back end is refreshed nightly during a brief maintenance window via conventional table partition switching. SSRS, SSAS, & MDX Conventional relational structures were unable to provide adequate performance for user interaction for the SSRS reports. An SSAS solution was implemented requiring personnel to ramp up technically, including learning enough MDX to satisfy requirements. Ad Hoc Queries Even though the fact table is relatively small—only 22 million rows & 33GB—the table was a typical DW table in terms of its width: 137 columns, any of which could be the target of ad hoc interrogation. As is common in DW reporting scenarios such as this, it is often nearly to optimize for such queries using conventional indexing. DevCon DBAs & developers attended PASS 2012 & were introduced to the marvels of columnstore in a session presented by Klaus Aschenbrenner (b|@Aschenbrenner) The Details Classic vs. columnstore before-&-after metrics are impressive. Scenario   Conventional Structures   Columnstore   Δ SSRS via SSAS 10 - 12 seconds 1 second >10x Ad Hoc 5-7 minutes (300 - 420 seconds) 1 - 2 seconds >100x Here are two charts characterizing this data graphically.  The first is a linear representation of Report Duration (in seconds) for Conventional Structures vs. Columnstore Indexes.  As is so often the case when we chart such significant deltas, the linear scale doesn’t expose some the dramatically improved values corresponding to the columnstore metrics.  Just to make it fair here’s the same data represented logarithmically; yet even here the values corresponding to 1 –2 seconds aren’t visible.  The Wins Performance: Even prior to columnstore implementation, at 10 - 12 seconds canned report performance against the SSAS cube was tolerable. Yet the 1 second performance afterward is clearly better. As significant as that is, imagine the user experience re: ad hoc interrogation. The difference between several minutes vs. one or two seconds is a game changer, literally changing the way users interact with their data—no mental context switching, no wondering when the results will appear, no preoccupation with the spinning mind-numbing hurry-up-&-wait indicators.  As we’ve commonly found elsewhere, columnstore indexes here provided performance improvements of one, two, or more orders of magnitude. Simplified Infrastructure: Because in this case a nonclustered columnstore index on a conventional DW table was faster than an Analysis Services cube, the entire SSAS infrastructure was rendered superfluous & was retired. PASS Rocks: Once again, the value of attending PASS is proven out. The trip to Charlotte combined with eager & enquiring minds let directly to this success story. Find out more about the next PASS Summit here, hosted this year in Seattle on November 4 - 7, 2014. DevCon BI Team Lead Nathan Allan provided this unsolicited feedback: “What we found was pretty awesome. It has been a game changer for us in terms of the flexibility we can offer people that would like to get to the data in different ways.” Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing.  I have documented here, the second in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from DevCon Security, a live customer production app for which performance increased by factors of from 10x to 100x for all report queries, including canned queries as well as reducing time for results for ad hoc queries from 5 - 7 minutes to 1 - 2 seconds. As a result of columnstore performance, the customer retired their SSAS infrastructure. I invite you to consider leveraging columnstore in your own environment. Let me know if you have any questions.

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  • Merge replication stopping without errors in SQL 2008 R2

    - by Rob Farley
    A non-SQL MVP friend of mine, who also happens to be a client, asked me for some help again last week. I was planning on writing this up even before Rob Volk (@sql_r) listed his T-SQL Tuesday topic for this month. Earlier in the year, I (well, LobsterPot Solutions, although I’d been the person mostly involved) had helped out with a merge replication problem. The Merge Agent on the subscriber was just stopping every time, shortly after it started. With no errors anywhere – not in the Windows Event Log, the SQL Agent logs, not anywhere. We’d managed to get the system working again, but didn’t have a good reason about what had happened, and last week, the problem occurred again. I asked him about writing up the experience in a blog post, largely because of the red herrings that we encountered. It was an interesting experience for me, also because I didn’t end up touching my computer the whole time – just tapping on my phone via Twitter and Live Msgr. You see, the thing with replication is that a useful troubleshooting option is to reinitialise the thing. We’d done that last time, and it had started to work again – eventually. I say eventually, because the link being used between the sites is relatively slow, and it took a long while for the initialisation to finish. Meanwhile, we’d been doing some investigation into what the problem could be, and were suitably pleased when the problem disappeared. So I got a message saying that a replication problem had occurred again. Reinitialising wasn’t going to be an option this time either. In this scenario, the subscriber having the problem happened to be in a different domain to the publisher. The other subscribers (within the domain) were fine, just this one in a different domain had the problem. Part of the problem seemed to be a log file that wasn’t being backed up properly. They’d been trying to back up to a backup device that had a corruption, and the log file was growing. Turned out, this wasn’t related to the problem, but of course, any time you’re troubleshooting and you see something untoward, you wonder. Having got past that problem, my next thought was that perhaps there was a problem with the account being used. But the other subscribers were using the same account, without any problems. The client pointed out that that it was almost exactly six months since the last failure (later shown to be a complete red herring). It sounded like something might’ve expired. Checking through certificates and trusts showed no sign of anything, and besides, there wasn’t a problem running a command-prompt window using the account in question, from the subscriber box. ...except that when he ran the sqlcmd –E –S servername command I recommended, it failed with a Named Pipes error. I’ve seen problems with firewalls rejecting connections via Named Pipes but letting TCP/IP through, so I got him to look into SQL Configuration Manager to see what kind of connection was being preferred... Everything seemed fine. And strangely, he could connect via Management Studio. Turned out, he had a typo in the servername of the sqlcmd command. That particular red herring must’ve been reflected in his cheeks as he told me. During the time, I also pinged a friend of mine to find out who I should ask, and Ted Kruger (@onpnt) ‘s name came up. Ted (and thanks again, Ted – really) reconfirmed some of my thoughts around the idea of an account expiring, and also suggesting bumping up the logging to level 4 (2 is Verbose, 4 is undocumented ridiculousness). I’d just told the client to push the logging up to level 2, but the log file wasn’t appearing. Checking permissions showed that the user did have permission on the folder, but still no file was appearing. Then it was noticed that the user had been switched earlier as part of the troubleshooting, and switching it back to the real user caused the log file to appear. Still no errors. A lot more information being pushed out, but still no errors. Ted suggested making sure the FQDNs were okay from both ends, in case the servers were unable to talk to each other. DNS problems can lead to hassles which can stop replication from working. No luck there either – it was all working fine. Another server started to report a problem as well. These two boxes were both SQL 2008 R2 (SP1), while the others, still working, were SQL 2005. Around this time, the client tried an idea that I’d shown him a few years ago – using a Profiler trace to see what was being called on the servers. It turned out that the last call being made on the publisher was sp_MSenumschemachange. A quick interwebs search on that showed a problem that exists in SQL Server 2008 R2, when stored procedures have more than 4000 characters. Running that stored procedure (with the same parameters) manually on SQL 2005 listed three stored procedures, the first of which did indeed have more than 4000 characters. Still no error though, and the problem as listed at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2539378 describes an error that should occur in the Event log. However, this problem is the type of thing that is fixed by a reinitialisation (because it doesn’t need to send the procedure change across as a transaction). And a look in the change history of the long stored procs (you all keep them, right?), showed that the problem from six months earlier could well have been down to this too. Applying SP2 (with sufficient paranoia about backups and how to get back out again if necessary) fixed the problem. The stored proc changes went through immediately after the service pack was applied, and it’s been running happily since. The funny thing is that I didn’t solve the problem. He had put the Profiler trace on the server, and had done the search that found a forum post pointing at this particular problem. I’d asked Ted too, and although he’d given some useful information, nothing that he’d come up with had actually been the solution either. Sometimes, asking for help is the most useful thing you can do. Often though, you don’t end up getting the help from the person you asked – the sounding board is actually what you need. @rob_farley

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  • Day 3 - XNA: Hacking around with images

    - by dapostolov
    Yay! Today I'm going to get into some code! My mind has been on this all day! I find it amusing how I practice, daily, to be "in the moment" or "present" and the excitement and anticipation of this project seems to snatch it away from me frequently. WELL!!! (Shakes Excitedly) Let's do this =)! Let's code! For these next few days it is my intention to better understand image rendering using XNA; after said prototypes are complete I should (fingers crossed) be able to dive into my game code using the design document I hammered out the other night. On a personal note, I think the toughest thing right now is finding the time to do this project. Each night, after my little ones go to bed I can only really afford a couple hours of work on this project. However, I hope to utilise this time as best as I can because this is the first time in a while I've found a project that I've been passionate about. A friend recently asked me if I intend to go 3D or extend the game design. Yes. For now I'm keeping it simple. Lastly, just as a note, as I was doing some further research into image rendering this morning I came across some other XNA content and lessons learned. I believe this content could have probably been posted in the first couple of posts, however, I will share the new content as I learn it at the end of each day. Maybe I'll take some time later to fix the posts but for now Installation and Deployment - Lessons Learned I had installed the XNA studio  (Day 1) and the site instructions were pretty easy to follow. However, I had a small difficulty with my development environment. You see, I run a virtual desktop development environment. Even though I was able to code and compile all the tutorials the game failed to run...because I lacked a 3D capable card; it was not detected on the virtual box... First Lesson: The XNA runtime needs to "see" the 3D card! No sweat, Il copied the files over to my parent box and executed the program. ERROR. Hmm... Second Lesson (which I should have probably known but I let the excitement get the better of me): you need the XNA runtime on the client PC to run the game, oh, and don't forget the .Net Runtime! Sprite, it ain't just a Soft Drink... With these prototypes I intend to understand and perform the following tasks. learn game development terminology how to place and position (rotate) a static image on the screen how to layer static images on the screen understand image scaling can we reuse images? understand how framerate is handled in XNA how to display text , basic shapes, and colors on the screen how to interact with an image (collision of user input?) how to animate an image and understand basic animation techniques how to detect colliding images or screen edges how to manipulate the image, lets say colors, stretching how to focus on a segment of an image...like only displaying a frame on a film reel what's the best way to manage images (compression, storage, location, prevent artwork theft, etc.) Well, let's start with this "prototype" task list for now...Today, let's get an image on the screen and maybe I can mark a few of the tasks as completed... C# Prototype1 New Visual Studio Project Select the XNA Game Studio 3.1 Project Type Select the Windows Game 3.1 Template Type Prototype1 in the Name textbox provided Press OK. At this point code has auto-magically been created. Feel free to press the F5 key to run your first XNA program. You should have a blue screen infront of you. Without getting into the nitty gritty right, the code that was generated basically creates some basic code to clear the window content with the lovely CornFlowerBlue color. Something to notice, when you move your mouse into the window...nothing. ooooo spoooky. Let's put an image on that screen! Step A - Get an Image into the solution Under "Content" in your Solution Explorer, right click and add a new folder and name it "Sprites". Copy a small image in there; I copied a "Royalty Free" wizard hat from a quick google search and named it wizards_hat.jpg (rightfully so!) Step B - Add the sprite and position fields Now, open/edit  Game1.cs Locate the following line:  SpriteBatch spriteBatch; Under this line type the following:         SpriteBatch spriteBatch; // the line you are looking for...         Texture2D sprite;         Vector2 position; Step C - Load the image asset Locate the "Load Content" Method and duplicate the following:             protected override void LoadContent()         {             spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(GraphicsDevice);             // your image name goes here...             sprite = Content.Load<Texture2D>("Sprites\\wizards_hat");             position = new Vector2(200, 100);             base.LoadContent();         } Step D - Draw the image Locate the "Draw" Method and duplicate the following:        protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime)         {             GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.CornflowerBlue);             spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteBlendMode.AlphaBlend);             spriteBatch.Draw(sprite, position, Color.White);             spriteBatch.End();             base.Draw(gameTime);         }  Step E - Compile and Run Engage! (F5) - Debug! Your image should now display on a cornflowerblue window about 200 pixels from the left and 100 pixels from the top. Awesome! =) Pretty cool how we only coded a few lines to display an image, but believe me, there is plenty going on behind the scenes. However, for now, I'm going to call it a night here. Blogging all this progress certainly takes time... However, tomorrow night I'm going to detail what we just did, plus start checking off points on that list! I'm wondering right now if I should add pictures / code to this post...let me know if you want them =) Best Regards, D.

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  • The Faces in the Crowdsourcing

    - by Applications User Experience
    By Jeff Sauro, Principal Usability Engineer, Oracle Imagine having access to a global workforce of hundreds of thousands of people who can perform tasks or provide feedback on a design quickly and almost immediately. Distributing simple tasks not easily done by computers to the masses is called "crowdsourcing" and until recently was an interesting concept, but due to practical constraints wasn't used often. Enter Amazon.com. For five years, Amazon has hosted a service called Mechanical Turk, which provides an easy interface to the crowds. The service has almost half a million registered, global users performing a quarter of a million human intelligence tasks (HITs). HITs are submitted by individuals and companies in the U.S. and pay from $.01 for simple tasks (such as determining if a picture is offensive) to several dollars (for tasks like transcribing audio). What do we know about the people who toil away in this digital crowd? Can we rely on the work done in this anonymous marketplace? A rendering of the actual Mechanical Turk (from Wikipedia) Knowing who is behind Amazon's Mechanical Turk is fitting, considering the history of the actual Mechanical Turk. In the late 1800's, a mechanical chess-playing machine awed crowds as it beat master chess players in what was thought to be a mechanical miracle. It turned out that the creator, Wolfgang von Kempelen, had a small person (also a chess master) hiding inside the machine operating the arms to provide the illusion of automation. The field of human computer interaction (HCI) is quite familiar with gathering user input and incorporating it into all stages of the design process. It makes sense then that Mechanical Turk was a popular discussion topic at the recent Computer Human Interaction usability conference sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery in Atlanta. It is already being used as a source for input on Web sites (for example, Feedbackarmy.com) and behavioral research studies. Two papers shed some light on the faces in this crowd. One paper tells us about the shifting demographics from mostly stay-at-home moms to young men in India. The second paper discusses the reliability and quality of work from the workers. Just who exactly would spend time doing tasks for pennies? In "Who are the crowdworkers?" University of California researchers Ross, Silberman, Zaldivar and Tomlinson conducted a survey of Mechanical Turk worker demographics and compared it to a similar survey done two years before. The initial survey reported workers consisting largely of young, well-educated women living in the U.S. with annual household incomes above $40,000. The more recent survey reveals a shift in demographics largely driven by an influx of workers from India. Indian workers went from 5% to over 30% of the crowd, and this block is largely male (two-thirds) with a higher average education than U.S. workers, and 64% report an annual income of less than $10,000 (keeping in mind $1 has a lot more purchasing power in India). This shifting demographic certainly has implications as language and culture can play critical roles in the outcome of HITs. Of course, the demographic data came from paying Turkers $.10 to fill out a survey, so there is some question about both a self-selection bias (characteristics which cause Turks to take this survey may be unrepresentative of the larger population), not to mention whether we can really trust the data we get from the crowd. Crowds can perform tasks or provide feedback on a design quickly and almost immediately for usability testing. (Photo attributed to victoriapeckham Flikr While having immediate access to a global workforce is nice, one major problem with Mechanical Turk is the incentive structure. Individuals and companies that deploy HITs want quality responses for a low price. Workers, on the other hand, want to complete the task and get paid as quickly as possible, so that they can get on to the next task. Since many HITs on Mechanical Turk are surveys, how valid and reliable are these results? How do we know whether workers are just rushing through the multiple-choice responses haphazardly answering? In "Are your participants gaming the system?" researchers at Carnegie Mellon (Downs, Holbrook, Sheng and Cranor) set up an experiment to find out what percentage of their workers were just in it for the money. The authors set up a 30-minute HIT (one of the more lengthy ones for Mechanical Turk) and offered a very high $4 to those who qualified and $.20 to those who did not. As part of the HIT, workers were asked to read an email and respond to two questions that determined whether workers were likely rushing through the HIT and not answering conscientiously. One question was simple and took little effort, while the second question required a bit more work to find the answer. Workers were led to believe other factors than these two questions were the qualifying aspect of the HIT. Of the 2000 participants, roughly 1200 (or 61%) answered both questions correctly. Eighty-eight percent answered the easy question correctly, and 64% answered the difficult question correctly. In other words, about 12% of the crowd were gaming the system, not paying enough attention to the question or making careless errors. Up to about 40% won't put in more than a modest effort to get paid for a HIT. Young men and those that considered themselves in the financial industry tended to be the most likely to try to game the system. There wasn't a breakdown by country, but given the demographic information from the first article, we could infer that many of these young men come from India, which makes language and other cultural differences a factor. These articles raise questions about the role of crowdsourcing as a means for getting quick user input at low cost. While compensating users for their time is nothing new, the incentive structure and anonymity of Mechanical Turk raises some interesting questions. How complex of a task can we ask of the crowd, and how much should these workers be paid? Can we rely on the information we get from these professional users, and if so, how can we best incorporate it into designing more usable products? Traditional usability testing will still play a central role in enterprise software. Crowdsourcing doesn't replace testing; instead, it makes certain parts of gathering user feedback easier. One can turn to the crowd for simple tasks that don't require specialized skills and get a lot of data fast. As more studies are conducted on Mechanical Turk, I suspect we will see crowdsourcing playing an increasing role in human computer interaction and enterprise computing. References: Downs, J. S., Holbrook, M. B., Sheng, S., and Cranor, L. F. 2010. Are your participants gaming the system?: screening mechanical turk workers. In Proceedings of the 28th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 - 15, 2010). CHI '10. ACM, New York, NY, 2399-2402. Link: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753688 Ross, J., Irani, L., Silberman, M. S., Zaldivar, A., and Tomlinson, B. 2010. Who are the crowdworkers?: shifting demographics in mechanical turk. In Proceedings of the 28th of the international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 - 15, 2010). CHI EA '10. ACM, New York, NY, 2863-2872. Link: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753846.1753873

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  • Create and Backup Multiple Profiles in Google Chrome

    - by Asian Angel
    Other browsers such as Firefox and SeaMonkey allow you to have multiple profiles but not Chrome…at least not until now. If you want to use multiple profiles and create backups for them then join us as we look at Google Chrome Backup. Note: There is a paid version of this program available but we used the free version for our article. Google Chrome Backup in Action During the installation process you will run across this particular window. It will have a default user name filled in as shown here…you will not need to do anything except click on Next to continue installing the program. When you start the program for the first time this is what you will see. Your default Chrome Profile will already be visible in the window. A quick look at the Profile Menu… In the Tools Menu you can go ahead and disable the Start program at Windows Startup setting…the only time that you will need the program running is if you are creating or restoring a profile. When you create a new profile the process will start with this window. You can access an Advanced Options mode if desired but most likely you will not need it. Here is a look at the Advanced Options mode. It is mainly focused on adding Switches to the new Chrome Shortcut. The drop-down menu for the Switches available… To create your new profile you will need to choose: A profile location A profile name (as you type/create the profile name it will automatically be added to the Profile Path) Make certain that the Create a new shortcut to access new profile option is checked For our example we decided to try out the Disable plugins switch option… Click OK to create the new profile. Once you have created your new profile, you will find a new shortcut on the Desktop. Notice that the shortcut’s name will be Google Chrome + profile name that you chose. Note: On our system we were able to move the new shortcut to the “Start Menu” without problems. Clicking on our new profile’s shortcut opened up a fresh and clean looking instance of Chrome. Just out of curiosity we did decide to check the shortcut to see if the Switch set up correctly. Unfortunately it did not in this instance…so your mileage with the Switches may vary. This was just a minor quirk and nothing to get excited or upset over…especially considering that you can create multiple profiles so easily. After opening up our default profile of Chrome you can see the individual profile icons (New & Default in order) sitting in the Taskbar side-by-side. And our two profiles open at the same time on our Desktop… Backing Profiles Up For the next part of our tests we decided to create a backup for each of our profiles. Starting the wizard will allow you to choose between creating or restoring a profile. Note: To create or restore a backup click on Run Wizard. When you reach the second part of the process you can go with the Backup default profile option or choose a particular one from a drop-down list using the Select a profile to backup option. We chose to backup the Default Profile first… In the third part of the process you will need to select a location to save the profile to. Once you have selected the location you will see the Target Path as shown here. You can choose your own name for the backup file…we decided to go with the default name instead since it contained the backup’s calendar date. A very nice feature is the ability to have the cache cleared before creating the backup. We clicked on Yes…choose the option that best suits your needs. Once you have chosen either Yes or No the backup will then be created. Click Finish to complete the process. The backup file for our Default Profile at 14.0 MB in size. And the backup file for our Chrome Fresh Profile…2.81 MB. Restoring Profiles For the final part of our tests we decided to do a Restore. Select Restore and click Next to get the process started. In the second step you will need to browse for the Profile Backup File (and select the desired profile if you have created multiples). For our example we decided to overwrite the original Default Profile with the Chrome Fresh Profile. The third step lets you choose where to restore the chosen profile to…you can go with the Default Profile or choose one from the drop-down list using the Restore to a selected profile option. The final step will get you on your way to restoring the chosen profile. The program will conduct a check regarding the previous/old profile and ask if you would like to proceed with overwriting it. Definitely nice in case you change your mind at the last moment. Clicking Yes will finish the restoration. The only other odd quirk that we noticed while using the program was that the Next Button did not function after restoring the profile. You can easily get around the problem by clicking to close the window. Which one is which? After the restore process we had identical twins. Conclusion If you have been looking for a way to create multiple profiles in Google Chrome, then you might want to add this program to your system. Links Download Google Chrome Backup Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Backup and Restore Firefox Profiles EasilyBackup Different Browsers Easily with FavBackupBackup Your Browser with the New FavBackupStupid Geek Tricks: Compare Your Browser’s Memory Usage with Google ChromeHow to Make Google Chrome Your Default Browser TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Tech Fanboys Field Guide Check these Awesome Chrome Add-ons iFixit Offers Gadget Repair Manuals Online Vista style sidebar for Windows 7 Create Nice Charts With These Web Based Tools Track Daily Goals With 42Goals

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  • Profiling Startup Of VS2012 &ndash; SpeedTrace Profiler

    - by Alois Kraus
    SpeedTrace is a relatively unknown profiler made a company called Ipcas. A single professional license does cost 449€+VAT. For the test I did use SpeedTrace 4.5 which is currently Beta. Although it is cheaper than dotTrace it has by far the most options to influence how profiling does work. First you need to create a tracing project which does configure tracing for one process type. You can start the application directly from the profiler or (much more interesting) it does attach to a specific process when it is started. For this you need to check “Trace the specified …” radio button and enter the process name in the “Process Name of the Trace” edit box. You can even selectively enable tracing for processes with a specific command line. Then you need to activate the trace project by pressing the Activate Project button and you are ready to start VS as usual. If you want to profile the next 10 VS instances that you start you can set the Number of Processes counter to e.g. 10. This is immensely helpful if you are trying to profile only the next 5 started processes. As you can see there are many more tabs which do allow to influence tracing in a much more sophisticated way. SpeedTrace is the only profiler which does not rely entirely on the profiling Api of .NET. Instead it does modify the IL code (instrumentation on the fly) to write tracing information to disc which can later be analyzed. This approach is not only very fast but it does give you unprecedented analysis capabilities. Once the traces are collected they do show up in your workspace where you can open the trace viewer. I do skip the other windows because this view is by far the most useful one. You can sort the methods not only by Wall Clock time but also by CPU consumption and wait time which none of the other products support in their views at the same time. If you want to optimize for CPU consumption sort by CPU time. If you want to find out where most time is spent you need Clock Total time and Clock Waiting. There you can directly see if the method did take long because it did wait on something or it did really execute stuff that did take so long. Once you have found a method you want to drill deeper you can double click on a method to get to the Caller/Callee view which is similar to the JetBrains Method Grid view. But this time you do see much more. In the middle is the clicked method. Above are the methods that call you and below are the methods that you do directly call. Normally you would then start digging deeper to find the end of the chain where the slow method worth optimizing is located. But there is a shortcut. You can press the magic   button to calculate the aggregation of all called methods. This is displayed in the lower left window where you can see each method call and how long it did take. There you can also sort to see if this call stack does only contain methods (e.g. WCF connect calls which you cannot make faster) not worth optimizing. YourKit has a similar feature where it is called Callees List. In the Functions tab you have in the context menu also many other useful analysis options One really outstanding feature is the View Call History Drilldown. When you select this one you get not a sum of all method invocations but a list with the duration of each method call. This is not surprising since SpeedTrace does use tracing to get its timings. There you can get many useful graphs how this method did behave over time. Did it become slower at some point in time or was only the first call slow? The diagrams and the list will tell you that. That is all fine but what should I do when one method call was slow? I want to see from where it was coming from. No problem select the method in the list hit F10 and you get the call stack. This is a life saver if you e.g. search for serialization problems. Today Serializers are used everywhere. You want to find out from where the 5s XmlSerializer.Deserialize call did come from? Hit F10 and you get the call stack which did invoke the 5s Deserialize call. The CPU timeline tab is also useful to find out where long pauses or excessive CPU consumption did happen. Click in the graph to get the Thread Stacks window where you can get a quick overview what all threads were doing at this time. This does look like the Stack Traces feature in YourKit. Only this time you get the last called method first which helps to quickly see what all threads were executing at this moment. YourKit does generate a rather long list which can be hard to go through when you have many threads. The thread list in the middle does not give you call stacks or anything like that but you see which methods were found most often executing code by the profiler which is a good indication for methods consuming most CPU time. This does sound too good to be true? I have not told you the best part yet. The best thing about this profiler is the staff behind it. When I do see a crash or some other odd behavior I send a mail to Ipcas and I do get usually the next day a mail that the problem has been fixed and a download link to the new version. The guys at Ipcas are even so helpful to log in to your machine via a Citrix Client to help you to get started profiling your actual application you want to profile. After a 2h telco I was converted from a hater to a believer of this tool. The fast response time might also have something to do with the fact that they are actively working on 4.5 to get out of the door. But still the support is by far the best I have encountered so far. The only downside is that you should instrument your assemblies including the .NET Framework to get most accurate numbers. You can profile without doing it but then you will see very high JIT times in your process which can severely affect the correctness of the measured timings. If you do not care about exact numbers you can also enable in the main UI in the Data Trace tab logging of method arguments of primitive types. If you need to know what files at which times were opened by your application you can find it out without a debugger. Since SpeedTrace does read huge trace files in its reader you should perhaps use a 64 bit machine to be able to analyze bigger traces as well. The memory consumption of the trace reader is too high for my taste. But they did promise for the next version to come up with something much improved.

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