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• Download Free Norton Antivirus 2012 with 6 months subscription

  - by Gopinath

  Norton, one of the most popular antivirus software Antivirus is now available as a free download with 6 months of subscription. Thanks to Facebook for teaming up with Symantec and providing Norton Antivirus 2012 for free to all its users. To grab your copy of Free antivirus, point your browser to http://us.norton.com/ps/loem/EN/Facebook/index.html and click on the download link. Without asking for any personal details or registration the download starts and you can follow the on screen instructions to install the antivirus. The antivirus is compatible with Windows PC and MAC OS. I tried installing on Windows 7 and the installation process started without any issues. But on Windows 8, the installer stopped after verifying the system requirements. The special offer also extends to Norton 360  which is available 50% discounted price. The original price for 1 year subscription of Norton 360 is around $90 and for Facebook users it’s available at $44.99. Update: Facebook is in partnership with many other antivirus vendors and providing antivirus software for free of cost. The other products are available for 6 months or more free subscription are: McAfee, Sophos Antivirus, Trend Micro. Please visit Facebook Security AV Market place for more details. Related: 5 Free Antivirus Applications For Windows

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• Data Web Controls Enhancements in ASP.NET 4.0

  Traditionally, developers using Web controls enjoyed increased productivity but at the cost of control over the rendered markup. For instance, many ASP.NET controls automatically wrap their content in <table> for layout or styling purposes. This behavior runs counter to the web standards that have evolved over the past several years, which favor cleaner, terser HTML; sparing use of tables; and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for layout and styling. Furthermore, the <table> elements and other automatically-added content makes it harder to both style the Web controls using CSS and to work with the controls from client-side script. One of the aims of ASP.NET version 4.0 is to give Web Form developers greater control over the markup rendered by Web controls. Last week's article, Take Control Of Web Control ClientID Values in ASP.NET 4.0, highlighted how new properties in ASP.NET 4.0 give the developer more say over how a Web control's ID property is translated into a client-side id attribute. In addition to these ClientID-related properties, many Web controls in ASP.NET 4.0 include properties that allow the page developer to instruct the control to not emit extraneous markup, or to use an HTML element other than <table>. This article explores a number of enhancements made to the data Web controls in ASP.NET 4.0. As you'll see, most of these enhancements give the developer greater control over the rendered markup. Read on to learn more! Read More >

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• Data Web Controls Enhancements in ASP.NET 4.0

  Traditionally, developers using Web controls enjoyed increased productivity but at the cost of control over the rendered markup. For instance, many ASP.NET controls automatically wrap their content in <table> for layout or styling purposes. This behavior runs counter to the web standards that have evolved over the past several years, which favor cleaner, terser HTML; sparing use of tables; and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for layout and styling. Furthermore, the <table> elements and other automatically-added content makes it harder to both style the Web controls using CSS and to work with the controls from client-side script. One of the aims of ASP.NET version 4.0 is to give Web Form developers greater control over the markup rendered by Web controls. Last week's article, Take Control Of Web Control ClientID Values in ASP.NET 4.0, highlighted how new properties in ASP.NET 4.0 give the developer more say over how a Web control's ID property is translated into a client-side id attribute. In addition to these ClientID-related properties, many Web controls in ASP.NET 4.0 include properties that allow the page developer to instruct the control to not emit extraneous markup, or to use an HTML element other than <table>. This article explores a number of enhancements made to the data Web controls in ASP.NET 4.0. As you'll see, most of these enhancements give the developer greater control over the rendered markup. Read on to learn more! Read More >Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Troubleshooting Application Timeouts in SQL Server

  - by Tara Kizer

  I recently received the following email from a blog reader: "We are having an OLTP database instance, using SQL Server 2005 with little to moderate traffic (10-20 requests/min). There are also bulk imports that occur at regular intervals in this DB and the import duration ranges between 10secs to 1 min, depending on the data size. Intermittently (2-3 times in a week), we face an issue, where queries get timed out (default of 30 secs set in application). On analyzing, we found two stored procedures, having queries with multiple table joins inside them of taking a long time (5-10 mins) in getting executed, when ideally the execution duration ranges between 5-10 secs. Execution plan of the same displayed Clustered Index Scan happening instead of Clustered Index Seek. All required Indexes are found to be present and Index fragmentation is also minimal as we Rebuild Indexes regularly alongwith Updating Statistics. With no other alternate options occuring to us, we restarted SQL server and thereafter the performance was back on track. But sometimes it was still giving timeout errors for some hits and so we also restarted IIS and that stopped the problem as of now." Rather than respond directly to the blog reader, I thought it would be more interesting to share my thoughts on this issue in a blog. There are a few things that I can think of that could cause abnormal timeouts: Blocking Bad plan in cache Outdated statistics Hardware bottleneck To determine if blocking is the issue, we can easily run sp_who/sp_who2 or a query directly on sysprocesses (select * from master..sysprocesses where blocking <> 0).  If blocking is present and consistent, then you'll need to determine whether or not to kill the parent blocking process.  Killing a process will cause the transaction to rollback, so you need to proceed with caution.  Killing the parent blocking process is only a temporary solution, so you'll need to do more thorough analysis to figure out why the blocking was present.  You should look into missing indexes and perhaps consider changing the database's isolation level to READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT. The blog reader mentions that the execution plan shows a clustered index scan when a clustered index seek is normal for the stored procedure.  A clustered index scan might have been chosen either because that is what is in cache already or because of out of date statistics.  The blog reader mentions that bulk imports occur at regular intervals, so outdated statistics is definitely something that could cause this issue.  The blog reader may need to update statistics after imports are done if the imports are changing a lot of data (greater than 10%).  If the statistics are good, then the query optimizer might have chosen to scan rather than seek in a previous execution because the scan was determined to be less costly due to the value of an input parameter.  If this parameter value is rare, then its execution plan in cache is what we call a bad plan.  You want the best plan in cache for the most frequent parameter values.  If a bad plan is a recurring problem on your system, then you should consider rewriting the stored procedure.  You might want to break up the code into multiple stored procedures so that each can have a different execution plan in cache. To remove a bad plan from cache, you can recompile the stored procedure.  An alternative method is to run DBCC FREEPROCACHE which drops the procedure cache.  It is better to recompile stored procedures rather than dropping the procedure cache as dropping the procedure cache affects all plans in cache rather than just the ones that were bad, so there will be a temporary performance penalty until the plans are loaded into cache again. To determine if there is a hardware bottleneck occurring such as slow I/O or high CPU utilization, you will need to run Performance Monitor on the database server.  Hopefully you already have a baseline of the server so you know what is normal and what is not.  Be on the lookout for I/O requests taking longer than 12 milliseconds and CPU utilization over 90%.  The servers that I support typically are under 30% CPU utilization, but your baseline could be higher and be within a normal range. If restarting the SQL Server service fixes the problem, then the problem was most likely due to blocking or a bad plan in the procedure cache.  Rather than restarting the SQL Server service, which causes downtime, the blog reader should instead analyze the above mentioned things.  Proceed with caution when restarting the SQL Server service as all transactions that have not completed will be rolled back at startup.  This crash recovery process could take longer than normal if there was a long-running transaction running when the service was stopped.  Until the crash recovery process is completed on the database, it is unavailable to your applications. If restarting IIS fixes the problem, then the problem might not have been inside SQL Server.  Prior to taking this step, you should do analysis of the above mentioned things. If you can think of other reasons why the blog reader is facing this issue a few times a week, I'd love to hear your thoughts via a blog comment.

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• Building services with .Net Part 1

  - by Allan Rwakatungu

  On the 26th of May 2010 , I made a presentation to the .NET user group meeting (thanks to Malisa Ncube for organizing this event every month … ). If you missed my presentation , we talked about why we should all be building services … better still using the .NET framework. This blog post is an introduction to services , why you would want to build services and how you can build services using the .NET framework. What is a service? OASIS defines service as "a mechanism to enable access to one or more capabilities, where the access is provided using a prescribed interface and is exercised consistent with constraints and policies as specified by the service description." [1]. If the above definition sounds to academic , you can also define a service as loosely coupled units of functionality that have no calls to each other embedded in the. Instead of services embedding calls to each other in their service code they use defined protocols that describe how services pass and parse messages. This is a good way to think about services if you’re from an objected oriented background. While in object oriented programming functions make calls to each other, in service oriented programming, functions pass messages between each other. Why would you want to use services? 1. If your enterprise architecture looks like this   Services are the building blocks for SOA . With SOA you can move away from the sphaggetti infrastructure that is common in most enterprises. The complexity or lack of visibility of the integration points in your enterprises makes it difficult and costly to implement new initiatives and changes into the business - and even impossible in some cases - as it is not possible to identify the impact a change in one system might have to other systems. With services you can move to an architecture like this Your building blocks from Spaghetti infrastructure to something that is more well-defined and manageable to achieve cost efficiency and not least business agility - enabling you to react to changes in the market with speed and achieve operational efficiency and control are services. 2. If you want to become the Gates or Zuckerburger. Have you heard about Web 2.0 ? Mashups? Software as a service (SAAS) ? Cloud computing ?   They all offer you the opportunity to have scalable but low cost business models and they built using services.  Some of my favorite companies that leverage services for their business models include  https://www.salesforce.com/ (cloud CRM) http://www. twitter.com (more people use twitter clients built by 3rd parties than their official clients) http://www.kayak.com/ (compares data from other travel sites to give information to users in one location) Services with the .NET framework      If you are a .NET developer and you want to develop services, Windows Communication Framework (WCF) is the tool for you. WCF is Microsoft’s unified programming model (service model) for building service oriented applications. ( Before .NET 3.0 you had several models for programming services in .NET including .NET remoting, Web services (ASMX), COM +, Microsoft Messaging queuing (MSMQ) etc, after .NET 3.0 the programming model was unified into one i.e. WCF ). Windows Communication Framework (WCF) provides you 1. An Software Development Kit (SDK) for creating SOA applications 2. A runtime for running services on the Windows platform Why should you use Windows Communication Foundation if you’re programming services?   1. It supports interoperable and open standards e.g. WS* protocols for programming SOAP services 2. It has a unified programming model. Whether you use TCP or Http or Pipes or transmitting using Messaging Queues, programmers need to learn just one way to program. Previously you had .NET remoting, MSMQ, Web services, COM+ and they were all done differently 3. Productive programming model You don’t have to worry about all the plumbing involved to write services. You have a rich declarative programming model to add stuff like logging, transactions, and reliable messages in-built in the Windows Communication Framework. Understanding services in WCF The basic principles of WCF are as easy as ABC A – Address This is where the service is located B- Binding This describes how you communicate with the service e.g. Use TCP, HTTP or both. How to exchange security information with the service etc. C – Contract This defines what the service can do. E.g. Pay water bill, Make a phone call A - Addresses In WCF, an address is a combination of transport, server name, port and path Example addresses may include http://localhost:8001 net.tcp://localhost:8002/MyService net.pipe://localhost/MyPipe net.msmq://localhost/private/MyService net.msmq://localhost/MyService B- Binding   There are numerous ways to communicate with services , different ways that a message can be formatted/sent/secured, that allows you to tailor your service for the compatibility/performance you require for your solution. Transport You can use HTTP TCP MSMQ , Named pipes, Your own custom transport etc Message You  can send a plain text binary, Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM) message Communication security No security Transport security Message security Authenticating and authorizing callers etc Behaviour You service can support Transactions Be reliable Use queues Support ajax etc C - Contract You define what your service can do using Service contracts :- Define operations that your service can do, communications and behaviours Data contracts :- Define the messages that are passed from and into your service and how they are formatted Fault contracts :- Defines errors types in your service   As an example, suppose your service service shows money. You define your service contract using a interface [ServiceContract] public interface IShowMeTheMoney {   [OperationContract]    Money Show(); } You define the data contract by annotating a class it with the Data Contract attribute and fields you want to pass in the message as Data Members. (Note:- In the latest versions of WCF you dont have to use attributes if you passing all the objects properties in the message) [DataContract] public Money {   [DataMember]   public string Currency { get; set; }   [DataMember]   public Decimal Amount { get; set; }   public string Comment { get; set; } } Features of Windows Communication Foundation Windows Communication Foundation is not only simple but feature rich , offering you several options to tweak your service to fit your business requirements. Some of the features of WCF include 1. Workflow services You can combine WCF with Windows WorkFlow Foundation (WWF) to write workflow type services 2. Control how your data (messages) are transferred and serialized e.g. you can serialize your business objects as XML or binary 3. control over session management , instance creation and concurrency management without writing code if you like 4. Queues and reliable sessions. You can store messages from the sending client and later forward them to the receiving application. You can also guarantee that messages will arrive at their destincation. 5.Transactions:  You can have different services participate in a transaction operations that can be rolled back if needed 6. Security. WCF has rich features for authorization and authentication  as well as keep audit trails 7. Web programming model. WCF allows developers to expose services as non SOAP endpoints 8. Inbuilt features that you can use to write JSON and services that support AJAX applications And lots more In my next blog I will show you how you can use WCF features to write a real world business service.               Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE 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-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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• BI and EPM Landscape

  - by frank.buytendijk

  Most of my blog entries are not about Oracle products, and most of the latest entries are about topics such as IT strategy and enterprise architecture. However, given my background at Gartner, and at Hyperion, I still keep a close eye on what's happening in BI and EPM. One important reason is that I believe there is significant competitive value for organizations getting BI and EPM right. Davenport and Harris wrote a great book called "Competing on Analytics", in which they explain this in a very engaging and convincing way. At Oracle we have defined the concept of "management excellence" that outlines what organizations have to do to keep or create a competitive edge. It's not only in the business processes, but also in the management processes. Recently, Gartner published its 2009 market shares report for BI, Analytics, and Performance Management. Gartner identifies the same three segments that Oracle does: (1) CPM Suites (Oracle refers not to Corporate Performance Management, but Enterprise Performance Management), (2) BI Platform, and (3) Analytic Applications & Performance Management. According to Gartner, Oracle's share is increasing with revenue growing by more than 5%. Oracle currently holds the #2 market share position in the overall BI Software space based on total BI software revenue. Source: Gartner Dataquest Market Share: Business Intelligence, Analytics and Performance Management Software, Worldwide, 2009; Dan Sommer and Bhavish Sood; Apr 2010 Gartner has ranked Oracle as #1 in the CPM Suites worldwide sub-segment based on total BI software revenue, and Oracle is gaining share with revenue growing by more than 6% in 2009. Source: Gartner Dataquest Market Share: Business Intelligence, Analytics and Performance Management Software, Worldwide, 2009; Dan Sommer and Bhavish Sood; Apr 2010 The Analytic Applications & Performance Management subsegment is more fragmented. It has for instance a very large "Other Vendors" category. The largest player traditionally is SAS. Analytic Applications are often meant for very specific analytic needs in very specific industry sectors. According to Gartner, from the large vendors, again Oracle is the one who is gaining the most share - with total BI software revenue growth close to 15% in 2009. Source: Gartner Dataquest Market Share: Business Intelligence, Analytics and Performance Management Software, Worldwide, 2009; Dan Sommer and Bhavish Sood; Apr 2010 I believe this shows Oracle's integration strategy is working. In fact, integration actually is the innovation. BI and EPM have been silo technology platforms and application suites way too long. Management and measuring performance should be very closely linked to strategy execution, which is the domain of other business application areas such as CRM, ERP, and Supply Chain. BI and EPM are not about "making better decisions" anymore, but are part of a tangible action framework. Furthermore, organizations are getting more serious about ecosystem thinking. They do not evaluate single tools anymore for different application areas, but buy into a complete ecosystem of hardware, software and services. The best ecosystem is the one that offers the most options, in environments where the uncertainty is high and investments are hard to reverse. The key to successfully managing such an environment is middleware, and BI and EPM become increasingly middleware intensive. In fact, given the horizontal nature of BI and EPM, sitting on top of all business functions and applications, you could call them "upperware". Many are active in the BI and EPM space. Big players can offer a lot, but there are always many areas that are covered by specialty vendors. Oracle openly embraces those technologies within the ecosystem as well. Complete, open and integrated still accurately describes the Oracle product strategy. frank

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• My ASP.NET news sources

  - by Jon Galloway

  I just posted about the ASP.NET Daily Community Spotlight. I was going to list a bunch of my news sources at the end, but figured this deserves a separate post. I've been following a lot of development blogs for a long time - for a while I subscribed to over 1500 feeds and read them all. That doesn't scale very well, though, and it's really time consuming. Since the community spotlight requires an interesting ASP.NET post every day of the year, I've come up with a few sources of ASP.NET news. Top Link Blogs Chris Alcock's The Morning Brew is a must-read blog which highlights each day's best blog posts across the .NET community. He covers the entire Microsoft development, but generally any of the top ASP.NET posts I see either have already been listed on The Morning Brew or will be there soon. Elijah Manor posts a lot of great content, which is available in his Twitter feed at @elijahmanor, on his Delicious feed, and on a dedicated website - Web Dev Tweets. While not 100% ASP.NET focused, I've been appreciating Joe Stagner's Weekly Links series, partly since he includes a lot of links that don't show up on my other lists. Twitter Over the past few years, I've been getting more and more of my information from my Twitter network (as opposed to RSS or other means). Twitter is as good as your network, so if getting good information off Twitter sounds crazy, you're probably not following the right people. I already mentioned Elijah Manor (@elijahmanor). I follow over a thousand people on Twitter, so I'm not going to try to pick and choose a list, but one good way to get started building out a Twitter network is to follow active Twitter users on the ASP.NET team at Microsoft: @scottgu (well, not on the ASP.NET team, but their great grand boss, and always a great source of ASP.NET info) @shanselman @haacked @bradwilson @davidfowl @InfinitiesLoop @davidebbo @marcind @DamianEdwards @stevensanderson @bleroy @humancompiler @osbornm @anurse I'm sure I'm missing a few, and I'll update the list. Building a Twitter network that follows topics you're interested in allows you to use other tools like Cadmus to automatically summarize top content by leveraging the collective input of many users. Twitter Search with Topsy You can search Twitter for hashtags (like #aspnet, #aspnetmvc, and #webmatrix) to get a raw view of what people are talking about on Twitter. Twitter's search is pretty poor; I prefer Topsy. Here's an example search for the #aspnetmvc hashtag: http://topsy.com/s?q=%23aspnetmvc You can also do combined queries for several tags: http://topsy.com/s?q=%23aspnetmvc+OR+%23aspnet+OR+%23webmatrix Paper.li Paper.li is a handy service that builds a custom daily newspaper based on your social network. They've turned a lot of people off by automatically tweeting "The SuperDevFoo Daily is out!!!" messages (which can be turned off), but if you're ignoring them because of those message, you're missing out on a handy, free service. My paper.li page includes content across a lot of interests, including ASP.NET: http://paper.li/jongalloway When I want to drill into a specific tag, though, I'll just look at the Paper.li post for that hashtag. For example, here's the #aspnetmvc paper.li page: http://paper.li/tag/aspnetmvc Delicious I mentioned previously that I use Delicious for managing site links. I also use their network and search features. The tag based search is pretty good: Even better, though, is that I can see who's bookmarked these links, and add them to my Delicious network. After having built out a network, I can optimize by doing less searching and more leaching leveraging of collective intelligence. Community Sites I scan DotNetKicks, the weblogs.asp.net combined feed, and the ASP.NET Community page, CodeBetter, Los Techies,  CodeProject,  and DotNetSlackers from time to time. They're hit and miss, but they do offer more of an opportunity for finding original content which others may have missed. Terms of Enrampagement When someone's on a tear, I just manually check their sites more often. I could use RSS for that, but it changes pretty often. I just keep a mental note of people who are cranking out a lot of good content and check their sites more often. What works for you?

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• Error Handling Examples(C#)

  “The purpose of reviewing the Error Handling code is to assure that the application fails safely under all possible error conditions, expected and unexpected. No sensitive information is presented to the user when an error occurs.” (OWASP, 2011) No Error Handling The absence of error handling is still a form of error handling. Based on the code in Figure 1, if an error occurred and was not handled within either the ReadXml or BuildRequest methods the error would bubble up to the Search method. Since this method does not handle any acceptations the error will then bubble up the stack trace. If this continues and the error is not handled within the application then the environment in which the application is running will notify the user running the application that an error occurred based on what type of application. Figure 1: No Error Handling public DataSet Search(string searchTerm, int resultCount) { DataSet dt = new DataSet(); dt.ReadXml(BuildRequest(searchTerm, resultCount)); return dt; } Generic Error Handling One simple way to add error handling is to catch all errors by default. If you examine the code in Figure 2, you will see a try-catch block. On April 6th 2010 Louis Lazaris clearly describes a Try Catch statement by defining both the Try and Catch aspects of the statement. “The try portion is where you would put any code that might throw an error. In other words, all significant code should go in the try section. The catch section will also hold code, but that section is not vital to the running of the application. So, if you removed the try-catch statement altogether, the section of code inside the try part would still be the same, but all the code inside the catch would be removed.” (Lazaris, 2010) He also states that all errors that occur in the try section cause it to stops the execution of the try section and redirects all execution to the catch section. The catch section receives an object containing information about the error that occurred so that they system can gracefully handle the error properly. When errors occur they commonly log them in some form. This form could be an email, database entry, web service call, log file, or just an error massage displayed to the user.  Depending on the error sometimes applications can recover, while others force an application to close. Figure 2: Generic Error Handling public DataSet Search(string searchTerm, int resultCount) { DataSet dt = new DataSet(); try { dt.ReadXml(BuildRequest(searchTerm, resultCount)); } catch (Exception ex) { // Handle all Exceptions } return dt; } Error Specific Error Handling Like the Generic Error Handling, Error Specific error handling allows for the catching of specific known errors that may occur. For example wrapping a try catch statement around a soap web service call would allow the application to handle any error that was generated by the soap web service. Now, if the systems wanted to send a message to the web service provider every time a soap error occurred but did not want to notify them if any other type of error occurred like a network time out issue. This would be varying tedious to accomplish using the General Error Handling methodology. This brings us to the use case for using the Error Specific error handling methodology.  The Error Specific Error handling methodology allows for the TryCatch statement to catch various types of errors depending on the type of error that occurred. In Figure 3, the code attempts to handle DataException differently compared to how it potentially handles all other errors. This allows for specific error handling for each type of known error, and still allows for error handling of any unknown error that my occur during the execution of the TryCatch statement. Figure 5: Error Specific Error Handling public DataSet Search(string searchTerm, int resultCount) { DataSet dt = new DataSet(); try { dt.ReadXml(BuildRequest(searchTerm, resultCount)); } catch (TimeoutException ex) { // Handle Timeout TimeoutException Only } catch (Exception) { // Handle all Exceptions } return dt; }

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• Web Services for Info Explorer Zones

  - by Anthony Shorten

  One of the most interesting uses for XAI and Configurable objects is the exposure of a query portal as a Web Service. Let me illustrate this with an example. Say you have an interface that requires a list of data from a number of product tables. In the past you would have to build a java program to do this with SQL then use an application service but it is now possible with just configuration. The first step in the process is to create the SQL you want to use for the interface. It can be any valid static SQL or use host variables for the WHERE clause (we call that filtered). Once you are happy with the SQL (and it performs acceptably) you can incorporate that SQL into a Info-Explorer Zone. You can use any of the explorer zone types but I typically recommend F1-DE-SINGLE as it supports a single SQL statement with multiple filters (up to 15) as well as hidden filters (up to 5). Hidden filters are typically not displayed in the UI for criteria (remember explorer zones can be used on the user Interface as well) but for web services they can be used as normal filters (this means you can use up to 20 filters all up). Once you are happy with the zone, you now need to define it as a Business Service. We have a generic service called FWLZDEXP which allows a explorer zone to be defined as a Business Service. If you open any Business Service based upon FWLZDEXP you will see some examples. The schema is standard and pretty self explanatory in terms of the structure. The schema pattern looks like this: Zone element - maps to the ZONE_CD element and the default value is the zone name you just created. This links the business service to the zone. Filter elements - You name the filters as you like but the mapField is set to Fx_VALUE where x is the filter number corresponding to the filter element in the zone definition. Hidden filter elements - You name the filters as you like but the mapField is set to Hx_VALUE where x is the filter number corresponding to the hidden filter element in the zone definition. results group - this holds the elements of the result set. Each element in your result set has a tagname and is linked to the COL_VALUE mapField and the row element is lists the SEQNO of the column. This corresponds to the column number in the results set in the zone. An example schema is shown below for the F1-USGRACML zone, which returns the access modes for a user group and application service filters. In the example, the userGroup and applicationService elements are the filters and the rows would contain a list of accessModeDescr. This is just a simple example to illustrate the point. There are lots of examples in the product that you can investigate. One recommendation, to save time, is that you copy the schema from one of the examples to save you typing it from scratch. You can simply modify the tags and other elements to suit your needs. Once the Business Service is defined it can simply be defined as a Web Service by registering an XAI Inbound Service using the Business Service definition as a basis. You now have a Web Service based upon a Info Explorer Zone. This is one of my favorite components as it allows interfaces to be simplified. This will be my last blog entry for this year. I hope you all have a great and safe Christmas and an even greater new year. Next year promises to be an exciting year and I look forward to communicating exciting developments we are working on at the moment as they are released.

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• Just released: a new SEO extension for the ASP.NET MVC routing engine

  - by efran.cobisi

  Dear users,after several months of hard work, we are proud to announce to the world that Cobisi's new SEO routing engine for ASP.NET MVC has been officially released! We even provide a free edition which comes at no cost, so this is something you can't really miss if you are a serious ASP.NET developer. ;)SEO routes for ASP.NET MVCCobisi SEO Extensions - this is the name of the product - is an advanced tool for software developers that allows to optimize ASP.NET MVC web applications and sites for search engines. It comes with a powerful routing engine, which extends the standard ASP.NET routing module to provide a much more flexible way to define search optimized routes, and a complete set of classes that make customizing the entire routing infrastructure very easy and cool.In its simplest form, defining a route for an MVC action is just a matter of decorating the method with the [Route("...")] attribute and specifying the desired URL. The library will take care of the rest and set up the route accordingly; while coding routes this way, Cobisi SEO Extensions also shows how the final routes will be, without leaving the Visual Studio IDE!Manage MVC routes with easeIn fact, Cobisi SEO Extensions integrates with the Visual Studio IDE to offer a large set of time-saving improvements targeted at ASP.NET developers. A new tool window, for example, allows to easily browse among the routes exposed by your applications, being them standard ASP.NET routes, MVC specific routes or SEO routes. The routes can be easily filtered on the fly, to ease finding the ones you are interested in. Double clicking a SEO route will even open the related ASP.NET MVC controller, at the beginning of the specified action method.In addition to that, Cobisi SEO Extensions allows to easily understand how each SEO route is composed by showing the routing model details directly in the IDE, beneath each MVC action route.Furthermore, Cobisi SEO Extensions helps developers to easily recognize which class is an MVC controller and which methods is an MVC action by drawing a special dashed underline mark under each items of these categories.Developers, developers, developers, ...We are really eager to receive your feedback and suggestions - please feel free to ping us with your comments! Thank you! Cheers! -- Efran Cobisi Cobisi lead developer Microsoft MVP, MCSD, MCAD, MCTS: SQL Server 2005, MCP

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• Localization with ASP.NET MVC ModelMetadata

  - by kazimanzurrashid

  When using the DisplayFor/EditorFor there has been built-in support in ASP.NET MVC to show localized validation messages, but no support to show the associate label in localized text, unless you are using the .NET 4.0 with Mvc Future. Lets a say you are creating a create form for Product where you have support both English and German like the following. English German I have recently added few helpers for localization in the MvcExtensions, lets see how we can use it to localize the form. As mentioned in the past that I am not a big fan when it comes to decorate class with attributes which is the recommended way in ASP.NET MVC. Instead, we will use the fluent configuration (Similar to FluentNHibernate or EF CodeFirst) of MvcExtensions to configure our View Models. For example for the above we will using: public class ProductEditModelConfiguration : ModelMetadataConfiguration<ProductEditModel> { public ProductEditModelConfiguration() { Configure(model => model.Id).Hide(); Configure(model => model.Name).DisplayName(() => LocalizedTexts.Name) .Required(() => LocalizedTexts.NameCannotBeBlank) .MaximumLength(64, () => LocalizedTexts.NameCannotBeMoreThanSixtyFourCharacters); Configure(model => model.Category).DisplayName(() => LocalizedTexts.Category) .Required(() => LocalizedTexts.CategoryMustBeSelected) .AsDropDownList("categories", () => LocalizedTexts.SelectCategory); Configure(model => model.Supplier).DisplayName(() => LocalizedTexts.Supplier) .Required(() => LocalizedTexts.SupplierMustBeSelected) .AsListBox("suppliers"); Configure(model => model.Price).DisplayName(() => LocalizedTexts.Price) .FormatAsCurrency() .Required(() => LocalizedTexts.PriceCannotBeBlank) .Range(10.00m, 1000.00m, () => LocalizedTexts.PriceMustBeBetweenTenToThousand); } } As you can we are using Func<string> to set the localized text, this is just an overload with the regular string method. There are few more methods in the ModelMetadata which accepts this Func<string> where localization can applied like Description, Watermark, ShortDisplayName etc. The LocalizedTexts is just a regular resource, we have both English and German:   Now lets see the view markup: <%@ Page Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<Demo.Web.ProductEditModel>" %> <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent" runat="server"> <%= LocalizedTexts.Create %> </asp:Content> <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> <h2><%= LocalizedTexts.Create %></h2> <%= Html.ValidationSummary(false, LocalizedTexts.CreateValidationSummary)%> <% Html.EnableClientValidation(); %> <% using (Html.BeginForm()) {%> <fieldset> <%= Html.EditorForModel() %> <p> <input type="submit" value="<%= LocalizedTexts.Create %>" /> </p> </fieldset> <% } %> <div> <%= Html.ActionLink(LocalizedTexts.BackToList, "Index")%> </div> </asp:Content> As we can see that we are using the same LocalizedTexts for the other parts of the view which is not included in the ModelMetadata like the Page title, button text etc. We are also using EditorForModel instead of EditorFor for individual field and both are supported. One of the added benefit of the fluent syntax based configuration is that we will get full compile type checking for our resource as we are not depending upon the string based resource name like the ASP.NET MVC. You will find the complete localized CRUD example in the MvcExtensions sample folder. That’s it for today.

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• The Low Down Dirty Azure Blues

  - by SGWellens

  Remember the SETI screen savers that used to be on everyone's computer? As far I as know, it was the first bona-fide use of "Cloud" computing…albeit an ad hoc cloud. I still think it was a brilliant leveraging of computing power. My interest in clouds was re-piqued when I went to a technical seminar at the local .Net User Group. The speaker was Mike Benkovitch and he expounded magnificently on the virtues of the Azure platform. Mike always does a good job. One killer reason he gave for cloud computing is instant scalability. Not applicable for most applications, but it is there if needed. I have a bunch of files stored on Microsoft's SkyDrive platform which is cloud storage. It is painfully slow. Accessing a file means going through layers and layers of software, redirections and security. Am I complaining? Hell no! It's free! So my opinions of Cloud Computing are both skeptical and appreciative. What intrigued me at the seminar, in addition to its other features, is that Azure can serve as a web hosting platform. I have a client with an Asp.Net web site I developed who is not happy with the performance of their current hosting service. I checked the cost of Azure and since the site has low bandwidth/space requirements the cost would be competitive with the existing host provider: Azure Pricing Calculator. And, Azure has a three month free trial. Perfect! I could try moving the website and see how it works for free. I went through the signup process. Everything was proceeding fine until I went to the MS SQL database management screen. A popup window informed me that I needed to install Silverlight on my machine. Silverlight? No thanks. Buh-Bye. I half-heartedly found the Azure support button and logged a ticket telling them I didn't want Silverlight on my machine. Within 4 to 6 hours (and a myriad (5) of automated support emails) they sent me a link to a database management page that did not require Silverlight. Thanks! I was able to create a database immediately. One really nice feature was that after creating the database, I was given a list of connection strings. I went to the current host provider, made a backup of the database and saved it to my machine. I attached to the remote database using SQL Server Studio 2012 and looked for the Restore menu item. It was missing. So I tried using the SQL command: RESTORE DATABASE MyDatabase FROM DISK ='C:\temp\MyBackup.bak' Msg 40510, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Statement 'RESTORE DATABASE' is not supported in this version of SQL Server. Are you kidding me? Why on earth…? This can't be happening! I opened both the source database and destination database in SQL Management Studio. I right clicked the source database, selected "Tasks" and noticed a menu selection called "Deploy Database to SQL Azure" Are you kidding me? Could it be? Oh yes, it be! There was a small problem because the database already existed on the Azure machine, I deployed to a new name, deleted the existing database and renamed the deployed database to what I needed. It was ridiculously easy. Being able to attach SQL Management Studio to remote databases is an awesome but scary feature. You can limit the IP addresses that can access the database which enhances security but when you give people, any people, me included, that much power, one errant mouse click could bring a live system down. My Advice: Tread softly and carry a large backup thumb-drive. Then I created a web site, the URL it returned look something like this: http://MyWebSite.azurewebsites.net/ Azure supports FTP, but I couldn't figure out the settings until I downloaded the publishing profile. It was an XML file that contained the needed information. I still couldn't connect with my FTP client (FileZilla). After about an hour of messing around, I deleted the port number from the FileZilla setup page….and voila, I was in like Flynn.   There are other options of deploying directly from Visual Studio, TFS, etc. but I do not like integrated tools that do things without my asking: It's usually hard to figure out what they did and how to undo it. I uploaded the aspx , cs , webconfig, etc. files. Bu it didn't run. The site I ported was in .NET 3.5. The Azure website configuration page gave me a choice between .NET 2.0 and 4.0. So, I switched to Visual Studio 2010, chose .NET 4.0 and upgraded the site. Of course I have the original version completely backed up and stored in a granite cave beneath the Nevada desert. And I have a backup CD under my pillow. The site uses ReportViewer to generate PDF documents. Of course it was the wrong version. I removed the old references to version 9 and added new references to version 10 (*see note below). Since the DLLs were not on the Azure Server, I uploaded them to the bin directory, crossed my fingers, burned some incense and gave it a try. After some fiddling around it ran. I don't know if I did anything particular to make it work or it just needed time to sort things out. However, one critical feature didn't work: ReportViewer could not programmatically generate PDF documents. I was getting this exception: "An error occurred during local report processing. Parameter is not valid." Rats. I did some searching and found other people were having the same problem, so I added a post saying I was having the same problem: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsazurewebsitespreview/thread/b4a6eb43-0013-435f-9d11-00ee26a8d017 Currently they are looking into this problem and I am waiting for the results. Hence I had the time to write this BLOG entry. How lucky you are. This was the last message I got from the Microsoft person: Hi Steve, Windows Azure Web Sites is a multi-tenant environment. For security issue, we limited some API calls. Unfortunately, some GDI APIS required by the PDF converting function are in this list. We have noticed this issue, and still investigation the best way to go. At this moment, there is no news to share. Sorry about this. Will keep you posted. If I had to guess, I would say they are concerned with people uploading images and doing intensive graphics programming which would hog CPU time.  But that is just a guess. Another problem. While trying to resolve the ReportViewer problem, I tried to write a file to the PDF directory to see if there was a permissions problem with some test code: String MyPath = MapPath(@"~\PDFs\Test.txt"); File.WriteAllText(MyPath, "Hello Azure");     I got this message: Access to the path <my path> is denied. After some research, I understood that since Azure is a cloud based platform, it can't allow web applications to save files to local directories. The application could be moved or replicated as scaling occurs and trying to manage local files would be problematic to say the least. There are other options: Use the Azure APIs to get a path. That way the location of the storage is separated from the application. However, the web site is then tied Azure and can't be moved to another hosting platform. Use the ApplicationData folder (not recommended). Write to BLOB storage. Or, I could try and stream the PDF output directly to the email and not save a file. I'm not going to work on a final solution until the ReportViewer is fixed. I am just sharing some of the things you need to be aware of if you decide to use Azure. I got this information from here. (Note the author of the BLOG added a comment saying he has updated his entry). Is my memory faulty? While getting this BLOG ready, I tried to write the test file again. And it worked. My memory is incorrect, or much more likely, something changed on the server…perhaps while they are trying to get ReportViewer to work. (Anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it). *Note: Since Visual Studio 2010 Express doesn't include a Report Editor, I downloaded and installed SQL Server Report Builder 2.0. It is a standalone Report Editor to replace the one not in Visual Studio 2010 Express. I hope someone finds this useful. Steve Wellens CodeProject

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• Sam Abraham to Speak about MVC2 at the Florida.Net Miramar .Net User Group on July 13 2010

  - by Sam Abraham

  I am scheduled to give a presentation at the Miramar .Net User Group on July 13, 2010 about MVC and the new features in MVC2. This will be similar yet will have more advanced content since the group had already had a introduction to MVC in a previous meeting. Here is the topic and speaker bio: Sam Abraham To Speak At The LI .Net User Group on June 3rd, 2010 As you might know, I lived and worked on LI, NY for 11 years before relocating to South Florida. As I will be visiting my family who still live there in the first week of June, I couldn't resist reaching out to Dan Galvez, LI  .Net User Group Leader, and asking if he needed a speaker for June's meeting. Apparently the stars were lined up right and I am now scheduled to speak at my "home" group on June 3rd, which I am pretty excited about. Here is a brief abstract of my talk and speaker bio. What's New in MVC2 We will start by briefly reviewing the basics of the Microsoft MVC Framework. Next, we will look at the new features introduced in the latest and greatest MVC2. Many new enhancements were introduced to both the MS MVC Framework and to VS2010 to improve developers' experience and reduce development time. We will be talking about new MVC2 features such as: Model Validation, Areas and Template Helpers. We will also discuss the new built-in MVC project templates that ship with VS2010. About the Speaker Sam Abraham is a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) and Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS ASP.Net 3.5) He currently lives in South Florida where he leads the West Palm Beach .Net User Group (www.fladotnet.com) and actively participates in various local .Net Community events as organizer and/or technical speaker. Sam is also an active committee member on various initiatives at the South Florida Chapter of the Project Management Institute (www.southfloridapmi.org). Sam finds his passion in leveraging latest and greatest .Net Technologies along with proven Project Management practices and methodologies to produce high quality, cost-competitive software.  Sam can be reached through his blog: http://www.geekswithblogs.net/wildturtle

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• Consolidating and Virtualizing with Oracle&rsquo;s Network Fabric

  - by Ferhat Hatay

  Server, storage and operating system virtualization technologies are already widely  deployed within datacenters, and are considered an integral component to drive cost  savings and agility. These technologies are now being combined with network  virtualization to usher in a new era of cloud computing. Oracle provides a networking fabric that delivers cloud-ready network services based on  Ethernet or InfiniBand fabrics that are tightly integrated with application infrastructure. Oracle’s network fabric provides the performance and manageability required for any  Oracle application environment or private cloud infrastructure. Logical architecture of Oracle’s network fabric. Oracle’s unique ability to deliver extreme performance and scale by tightly integrating  network services across application infrastructure is demonstrated in the Oracle Exalogic  Elastic Cloud and the Oracle Exadata Database Machine. These engineered solutions  offer up to 5X and 10X performance gains respectively compared to traditional multivendor architectures where the offerings are not engineered to work together. By integrating advanced networking capabilities across the entire hardware and software  stack, Oracle’s network fabric can help maximize application performance and scale,  reduce the number of network components, and simplify datacenter operations through  integrated network management and orchestration. The resulting business benefits are: Reduced acquisition costs Lower power and cooling costs Reduced management costs Faster deployment Greater agility in meeting changing business needs For more information see the whitepaper: Consolidating and Virtualizing Datacenter Networks with Oracle's Network Fabric.

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• SQL SERVER – Concurrency Basics – Guest Post by Vinod Kumar

  - by pinaldave

  This guest post is by Vinod Kumar. Vinod Kumar has worked with SQL Server extensively since joining the industry over a decade ago. Working on various versions from SQL Server 7.0, Oracle 7.3 and other database technologies – he now works with the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) as a Technology Architect. Let us read the blog post in Vinod’s own voice. Learning is always fun when it comes to SQL Server and learning the basics again can be more fun. I did write about Transaction Logs and recovery over my blogs and the concept of simplifying the basics is a challenge. In the real world we always see checks and queues for a process – say railway reservation, banks, customer supports etc there is a process of line and queue to facilitate everyone. Shorter the queue higher is the efficiency of system (a.k.a higher is the concurrency). Every database does implement this using checks like locking, blocking mechanisms and they implement the standards in a way to facilitate higher concurrency. In this post, let us talk about the topic of Concurrency and what are the various aspects that one needs to know about concurrency inside SQL Server. Let us learn the concepts as one-liners: Concurrency can be defined as the ability of multiple processes to access or change shared data at the same time. The greater the number of concurrent user processes that can be active without interfering with each other, the greater the concurrency of the database system. Concurrency is reduced when a process that is changing data prevents other processes from reading that data or when a process that is reading data prevents other processes from changing that data. Concurrency is also affected when multiple processes are attempting to change the same data simultaneously. Two approaches to managing concurrent data access: Optimistic Concurrency Model Pessimistic Concurrency Model Concurrency Models Pessimistic Concurrency Default behavior: acquire locks to block access to data that another process is using. Assumes that enough data modification operations are in the system that any given read operation is likely affected by a data modification made by another user (assumes conflicts will occur). Avoids conflicts by acquiring a lock on data being read so no other processes can modify that data. Also acquires locks on data being modified so no other processes can access the data for either reading or modifying. Readers block writer, writers block readers and writers. Optimistic Concurrency Assumes that there are sufficiently few conflicting data modification operations in the system that any single transaction is unlikely to modify data that another transaction is modifying. Default behavior of optimistic concurrency is to use row versioning to allow data readers to see the state of the data before the modification occurs. Older versions of the data are saved so a process reading data can see the data as it was when the process started reading and not affected by any changes being made to that data. Processes modifying the data is unaffected by processes reading the data because the reader is accessing a saved version of the data rows. Readers do not block writers and writers do not block readers, but, writers can and will block writers. Transaction Processing A transaction is the basic unit of work in SQL Server. Transaction consists of SQL commands that read and update the database but the update is not considered final until a COMMIT command is issued (at least for an explicit transaction: marked with a BEGIN TRAN and the end is marked by a COMMIT TRAN or ROLLBACK TRAN). Transactions must exhibit all the ACID properties of a transaction. ACID Properties Transaction processing must guarantee the consistency and recoverability of SQL Server databases. Ensures all transactions are performed as a single unit of work regardless of hardware or system failure. A – Atomicity C – Consistency I – Isolation D- Durability Atomicity: Each transaction is treated as all or nothing – it either commits or aborts. Consistency: ensures that a transaction won’t allow the system to arrive at an incorrect logical state – the data must always be logically correct.  Consistency is honored even in the event of a system failure. Isolation: separates concurrent transactions from the updates of other incomplete transactions. SQL Server accomplishes isolation among transactions by locking data or creating row versions. Durability: After a transaction commits, the durability property ensures that the effects of the transaction persist even if a system failure occurs. If a system failure occurs while a transaction is in progress, the transaction is completely undone, leaving no partial effects on data. Transaction Dependencies In addition to supporting all four ACID properties, a transaction might exhibit few other behaviors (known as dependency problems or consistency problems). Lost Updates: Occur when two processes read the same data and both manipulate the data, changing its value and then both try to update the original data to the new value. The second process might overwrite the first update completely. Dirty Reads: Occurs when a process reads uncommitted data. If one process has changed data but not yet committed the change, another process reading the data will read it in an inconsistent state. Non-repeatable Reads: A read is non-repeatable if a process might get different values when reading the same data in two reads within the same transaction. This can happen when another process changes the data in between the reads that the first process is doing. Phantoms: Occurs when membership in a set changes. It occurs if two SELECT operations using the same predicate in the same transaction return a different number of rows. Isolation Levels SQL Server supports 5 isolation levels that control the behavior of read operations. Read Uncommitted All behaviors except for lost updates are possible. Implemented by allowing the read operations to not take any locks, and because of this, it won’t be blocked by conflicting locks acquired by other processes. The process can read data that another process has modified but not yet committed. When using the read uncommitted isolation level and scanning an entire table, SQL Server can decide to do an allocation order scan (in page-number order) instead of a logical order scan (following page pointers). If another process doing concurrent operations changes data and move rows to a new location in the table, the allocation order scan can end up reading the same row twice. Also can happen if you have read a row before it is updated and then an update moves the row to a higher page number than your scan encounters later. Performing an allocation order scan under Read Uncommitted can cause you to miss a row completely – can happen when a row on a high page number that hasn’t been read yet is updated and moved to a lower page number that has already been read. Read Committed Two varieties of read committed isolation: optimistic and pessimistic (default). Ensures that a read never reads data that another application hasn’t committed. If another transaction is updating data and has exclusive locks on data, your transaction will have to wait for the locks to be released. Your transaction must put share locks on data that are visited, which means that data might be unavailable for others to use. A share lock doesn’t prevent others from reading but prevents them from updating. Read committed (snapshot) ensures that an operation never reads uncommitted data, but not by forcing other processes to wait. SQL Server generates a version of the changed row with its previous committed values. Data being changed is still locked but other processes can see the previous versions of the data as it was before the update operation began. Repeatable Read This is a Pessimistic isolation level. Ensures that if a transaction revisits data or a query is reissued the data doesn’t change. That is, issuing the same query twice within a transaction cannot pickup any changes to data values made by another user’s transaction because no changes can be made by other transactions. However, this does allow phantom rows to appear. Preventing non-repeatable read is a desirable safeguard but cost is that all shared locks in a transaction must be held until the completion of the transaction. Snapshot Snapshot Isolation (SI) is an optimistic isolation level. Allows for processes to read older versions of committed data if the current version is locked. Difference between snapshot and read committed has to do with how old the older versions have to be. It’s possible to have two transactions executing simultaneously that give us a result that is not possible in any serial execution. Serializable This is the strongest of the pessimistic isolation level. Adds to repeatable read isolation level by ensuring that if a query is reissued rows were not added in the interim, i.e, phantoms do not appear. Preventing phantoms is another desirable safeguard, but cost of this extra safeguard is similar to that of repeatable read – all shared locks in a transaction must be held until the transaction completes. In addition serializable isolation level requires that you lock data that has been read but also data that doesn’t exist. Ex: if a SELECT returned no rows, you want it to return no. rows when the query is reissued. This is implemented in SQL Server by a special kind of lock called the key-range lock. Key-range locks require that there be an index on the column that defines the range of values. If there is no index on the column, serializable isolation requires a table lock. Gets its name from the fact that running multiple serializable transactions at the same time is equivalent of running them one at a time. Now that we understand the basics of what concurrency is, the subsequent blog posts will try to bring out the basics around locking, blocking, deadlocks because they are the fundamental blocks that make concurrency possible. Now if you are with me – let us continue learning for SQL Server Locking Basics. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Concurrency

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• Five Point Partners Reviews Oracle Utilities Mobile Workforce Management 2.0

  - by caroline.yu

  Oracle recently provided Five Point Partners, Research and Analysis Division's Warren B. Causey and Bart Thielbar a one-hour briefing of Oracle Utilities Mobile Workforce Management 2.0. Based on that briefing, Warren and Bart provided an evaluation of the new software. The review notes that this is the first major rewrite of a mobile system. Oracle Utilities has made numerous updates in structure, architecture and functionality to the software that should well-position Oracle Utilities Mobile Workforce Management 2.0 for the current utility market. Additionally, the reviewers noted that one of the most significant improvements in the new version of Oracle Utilities Mobile Workforce Management is that it has moved to the same Java technical stack of other Oracle Utilities products. Utilities can deploy the software in multiple environments including Linux, Unix and Windows. This will simplify integration with existing Oracle products, as well as with other systems, thus potentially lowering cost of installation and ownership for utilities. Overall, Warren and Bart note that Oracle Utilities now has an impressive, state-of-the-art mobile workforce management system that utilities can readily deploy in a bundle with other Oracle solutions, or use as a stand-alone system with relatively easy integration to other utility systems. They state that Oracle Utilities Mobile Workforce Management 2.0 should significantly strengthen Oracle's competitive position in the mobile workforce management solution space. To take a look at the full review, click here.

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• MySQL Connect 8 Days Away - Replication Sessions

  - by Mat Keep

  Following on from my post about MySQL Cluster sessions at the forthcoming Connect conference, its now the turn of MySQL Replication - another technology at the heart of scaling and high availability for MySQL. Unless you've only just returned from a 6-month alien abduction, you will know that MySQL 5.6 includes the largest set of replication enhancements ever packaged into a single new release: - Global Transaction IDs + HA utilities for self-healing cluster..(yes both automatic failover and manual switchover available!) - Crash-safe slaves and binlog - Binlog Group Commit and Multi-Threaded Slaves for high performance - Replication Event Checksums and Time-Delayed replication - and many more There are a number of sessions dedicated to learn more about these important new enhancements, delivered by the same engineers who developed them. Here is a summary Saturday 29th, 13.00 Replication Tips and Tricks, Mats Kindahl In this session, the developers of MySQL Replication present a bag of useful tips and tricks related to the MySQL 5.5 GA and MySQL 5.6 development milestone releases, including multisource replication, using logs for auditing, handling filtering, examining the binary log, using relay slaves, splitting the replication stream, and handling failover. Saturday 29th, 17.30 Enabling the New Generation of Web and Cloud Services with MySQL 5.6 Replication, Lars Thalmann This session showcases the new replication features, including • High performance (group commit, multithreaded slave) • High availability (crash-safe slaves, failover utilities) • Flexibility and usability (global transaction identifiers, annotated row-based replication [RBR]) • Data integrity (event checksums) Saturday 29th, 1900 MySQL Replication Birds of a Feather In this session, the MySQL Replication engineers discuss all the goodies, including global transaction identifiers (GTIDs) with autofailover; multithreaded, crash-safe slaves; checksums; and more. The team discusses the design behind these enhancements and how to get started with them. You will get the opportunity to present your feedback on how these can be further enhanced and can share any additional replication requirements you have to further scale your critical MySQL-based workloads. Sunday 30th, 10.15 Hands-On Lab, MySQL Replication, Luis Soares and Sven Sandberg But how do you get started, how does it work, and what are the best practices and tools? During this hands-on lab, you will learn how to get started with replication, how it works, architecture, replication prerequisites, setting up a simple topology, and advanced replication configurations. The session also covers some of the new features in the MySQL 5.6 development milestone releases. Sunday 30th, 13.15 Hands-On Lab, MySQL Utilities, Chuck Bell Would you like to learn how to more effectively manage a host of MySQL servers and manage high-availability features such as replication? This hands-on lab addresses these areas and more. Participants will get familiar with all of the MySQL utilities, using each of them with a variety of options to configure and manage MySQL servers. Sunday 30th, 14.45 Eliminating Downtime with MySQL Replication, Luis Soares The presentation takes a deep dive into new replication features such as global transaction identifiers and crash-safe slaves. It also showcases a range of Python utilities that, combined with the Release 5.6 feature set, results in a self-healing data infrastructure. By the end of the session, attendees will be familiar with the new high-availability features in the whole MySQL 5.6 release and how to make use of them to protect and grow their business. Sunday 30th, 17.45 Scaling for the Web and the Cloud with MySQL Replication, Luis Soares In a Replication topology, high performance directly translates into improving read consistency from slaves and reducing the risk of data loss if a master fails. MySQL 5.6 introduces several new replication features to enhance performance. In this session, you will learn about these new features, how they work, and how you can leverage them in your applications. In addition, you will learn about some other best practices that can be used to improve performance. So how can you make sure you don't miss out - the good news is that registration is still open ;-) And just to whet your appetite, listen to the On-Demand webinar that presents an overview of MySQL 5.6 Replication.  

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• Where Next for Google Translate? And What of Information Quality?

  - by ultan o'broin

  Fascinating article in the UK Guardian newspaper called Can Google break the computer language barrier? In it, Andreas Zollman, who works on Google Translate, comments that the quality of Google Translate's output relative to the amount of data required to create that output is clearly now falling foul of the law of diminishing returns. He says: "Each doubling of the amount of translated data input led to about a 0.5% improvement in the quality of the output," he suggests, but the doublings are not infinite. "We are now at this limit where there isn't that much more data in the world that we can use," he admits. "So now it is much more important again to add on different approaches and rules-based models." The Translation Guy has a further discussion on this, called Google Translate is Finished. He says: "And there aren't that many doublings left, if any. I can't say how much text Google has assimilated into their machine translation databases, but it's been reported that they have scanned about 11% of all printed content ever published. So double that, and double it again, and once more, shoveling all that into the translation hopper, and pretty soon you get the sum of all human knowledge, which means a whopping 1.5% improvement in the quality of the engines when everything has been analyzed. That's what we've got to look forward to, at best, since Google spiders regularly surf the Web, which in its vastness dwarfs all previously published content. So to all intents and purposes, the statistical machine translation tools of Google are done. Outstanding job, Googlers. Thanks." Surprisingly, all this analysis hasn't raised that much comment from the fans of machine translation, or its detractors either for that matter. Perhaps, it's the season of goodwill? What is clear to me, however, of course is that Google Translate isn't really finished (in any sense of the word). I am sure Google will investigate and come up with new rule-based translation models to enhance what they have already and that will also scale effectively where others didn't. So too, will they harness human input, which really is the way to go to train MT in the quality direction. But that aside, what does it say about the quality of the data that is being used for statistical machine translation in the first place? From the Guardian article it's clear that a huge humanly translated corpus drove the gains for Google Translate and now what's left is the dregs of badly translated and poorly created source materials that just can't deliver quality translations. There's a message about information quality there, surely. In the enterprise applications space, where we have some control over content this whole debate reinforces the relationship between information quality at source and translation efficiency, regardless of the technology used to do the translation. But as more automation comes to the fore, that information quality is even more critical if you want anything approaching a scalable solution. This is important for user experience professionals. Issues like user generated content translation, multilingual personalization, and scalable language quality are central to a superior global UX; it's a competitive issue we cannot ignore.

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• When runs a product out of support?

  That is a question I get regularly from customers. Microsoft has a great site where you can find that information. Unfortunately this site is not easy to find, and a lot of people are not aware of this site. A good reason to promote it a little. So if you ever get a question on this topic, go to http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/search/Default.aspx. At that site, you can find also the details of the policy Microsoft Support Lifecycle Policy The Microsoft Support Lifecycle policy took effect in October 2002, and applies to most products currently available through retail purchase or volume licensing and most future release products. Through the policy, Microsoft will offer a minimum of: 10 years of support (5 years Mainstream Support and 5 years Extended Support) at the supported service pack level for Business and Developer products 5 years Mainstream Support at the supported service pack level for Consumer/Hardware/Multimedia products 3 years of Mainstream Support for products that are annually released (for example, Money, Encarta, Picture It!, and Streets & Trips) Phases of the Support Lifecycle Mainstream Support Mainstream Support is the first phase of the product support lifecycle. At the supported service pack level, Mainstream Support includes: Incident support (no-charge incident support, paid incident support, support charged on an hourly basis, support for warranty claims) Security update support The ability to request non-security hotfixes Please note: Enrollment in a maintenance program may be required to receive these benefits for certain products Extended Support The Extended Support phase follows Mainstream Support for Business and Developer products. At the supported service pack level, Extended Support includes: Paid support Security update support at no additional cost Non-security related hotfix support requires a separate Extended Hotfix Support Agreement to be purchased (per-fix fees also apply) Please note: Microsoft will not accept requests for warranty support, design changes, or new features during the Extended Support phase Extended Support is not available for Consumer, Hardware, or Multimedia products Enrollment in a maintenance program may be required to receive these benefits for certain products Self-Help Online Support Self-Help Online Support is available throughout a product's lifecycle and for a minimum of 12 months after the product reaches the end of its support. Microsoft online Knowledge Base articles, FAQs, troubleshooting tools, and other resources, are provided to help customers resolve common issues. Please note: Enrollment in a maintenance program may be required to receive these benefits for certain products (source: http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/#tab1)

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• Fusion CRM ISV program is gaining weight: Examples of certified add-on's

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  The Fusion CRM ISV program is gaining traction. Please find below few examples of the partners having certified their add-on's to seamlessly work on top of Oracle Fusion CRM. For more information, please contact [email protected] ·         Opportunity-to-Quote.  Big Machines now integrates seamlessly to Oracle Fusion CRM, enabling customers with complex products and services and multiple sales channels to streamline the entire opportunity-to-quote process, including product selection, configuration, pricing, quoting, and approval workflows.  Create a custom hyperlink in the Opportunity to invoke Big Machines CPQ application to create a quote and sync up with the Fusion CRM custom quote object using the CRUD operations. The quote can be updated using the custom button in the custom tab in the opportunity details. See: http://www.bigmachines.com/oracle.php  ·         SaaS Billing and Subscription Management.  Is your prospect/customer asking whether top billing partners support Fusion CRM?  Positioning an integrated CRM solution for billing usage and subscription based services?  Need to implement a billable solution on the Oracle Java Cloud Service?  Aria Systems and Zuora have recently engaged with Oracle to deepen their integrations to Fusion CRM and team with Oracle for joint opportunities.  ·         Google Apps, SharePoint, Email-CRM Integrations o   Do your prospects use Google Apps in their business operations?  A “Best of AppExchange” award winner recently completed their integration for Fusion CRM.  CirrusInsight plugs Fusion CRM web services directly into Gmail, allowing you to search existing opportunity or contact, provide account information, and create an interaction such as phone call, appointment, or email against a customer or contact in Fusion CRM directly from Gmail.  o   An EMEA / France based partner, Aryvart provides bi-directional synchronization of appointments and tasks between Google calendar and Oracle Fusion CRM. For customers, it means adopting Oracle Fusion CRM while continuing to use Google calendar for appointments. o   Looking to lower the barrier and expand in SharePoint accounts?  InFact Group (EMEA / France & Germany) provides Microsoft SharePoint Connector for Oracle Fusion CRM. With this solution, you can store documents attached to an opportunity, into Microsoft SharePoint repository. For customers, it means adopting Oracle Fusion CRM while continuing to collaborate across existing content management infrastructure. o   Need to connect to MacMail, GroupWise, or Outlook/Exchange?  Omni Technology is a partner whose Riva CRM Integration recently engaged for support Fusion CRM as a key platform. Migration Tools from competitive CRMs, to Oracle Fusion CRM.  Data Migration Tools from legacy CRMs, to Oracle Fusion CRM.  A partner with the tools and techniques to speed adoption, Conemis provides data integration tools to export data from legacy CRM, and import into Oracle Fusion CRM via WebServices APIs. For customers, it means reducing cost of data migration from legacy CRM system into Oracle Fusion CRM. 

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• West Palm Beach Dev Group August 2012 Meeting Recap

  - by Sam Abraham

  As the saying goes, it’s better late than never. Such is the case with my overdue West Palm Beach Dev Group August 2012 meeting report. Our August meeting was full of both knowledge and adventure. It comes as no surprise that the knowledge was brought to us by our favorite DotNetNuke Technical Evangelist, Will Strohl. Will introduced and thoroughly presented the new social features in DNN 6.2. Unfortunately, our meeting date coincided with Hurricane Isaac having just passed us by. Aside from road closures and floods that kept public schools closed for two days, our meeting host, PC Professor, had to close the school the day of our meeting on a short notice due to flooding which we found out about at midnight on the day of the event.  This left us scrambling to find an available alternate meeting location close enough to our original venue. Cancelling the meeting was always an option, but we opted to keep it as the very last resort. Luckily, we were fortunate to find a meeting room at the Hampton Inn only a few minutes away from our original location. Having heard of our challenge, our event sponsor, Applied Innovations, stepped-in and covered the meeting room cost in addition to the food and beverages. We would like to thank our volunteers and sponsors who made that event a success: Jess Coburn, CEO and Cara Pluff, Director of Sales at Applied Innovations, Dave Noderer for suggesting the alternate venue and Venkat Subramanian for his hard work keeping our members informed of the venue change and for being our event photographer.   We look forward to seeing you at our upcoming meetings: -September 25th, 2012 with Jonas Stawski, Microsoft MVP -October 23rd, 2012 with our Microsoft Developer Evangelist, Joe “DevFish” Healy -Ending an exciting year will be our November 27th meeting with Dycom Industries’ Senior Software Developer, Tom Huynh.   All the best, --Sam

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• Magic Mouse for Windows 7 (Touch Mouse)

  - by samsudeen

  Microsoft has unveiled the launch of the new product named “Touch Mouse” at the on going Consumer Electronic show (CES). This mouse allows us to do the normal mouse functions such as  Click, flick, scroll and swipe easily without using any buttons.The features of this mouse is similar to the “Magic Mouse” from Apple hence we can call this as “Microsoft’s Magic Mouse”. This mouse is designed specially for “Windows 7″ to expose the touch features of the OS as per the Microsoft’s below statement Touch Mouse brings a new dimension to Windows 7. By quickly responding to single finger gestures, it speeds up everyday tasks that are already fast in Windows 7: scrolling, panning, paging forward and back, docking, minimizing/ maximizing, showing desktop, and more. Touch Mouse also provides elegant touch functionality to non-touch Windows 7 PCs, so you can enjoy dynamic touch sensitivity at a fraction of the cost of a new PC. The below video clip explains the “Touch Mouse” features using the “Windows 7″ operating system   Touch Mouse This mouse will be launched only in June at an estimated price of $80. You can find more details about the “Touch Mouse” at the below  Microsoft web site. http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/touch-mouse/ This article titled,Magic Mouse for Windows 7 (Touch Mouse), was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• SQL Sharding and SQL Azure&hellip;

  - by Dave Noderer

  Herve Roggero has just published a paper that outlines patterns for scaling using SQL Azure and the Blue Syntax (he and Scott Klein’s company) sharding api. You can find the paper at: http://www.bluesyntax.net/files/EnzoFramework.pdf Herve and Scott have also just released an Apress book Pro SQL Azure. The idea of being able to split (shard) database operations automatically and control them from a web based management console is very appealing. These ideas have been talked about for a long time and implemented in thousands of very custom ways that have been costly, complicated and fragile. Now, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Scaling database access will become easier and move into the mainstream of application development. The main cost is using an api whenever accessing the database. The api will direct the query to the correct database(s) which may be located locally or in the cloud. It is inevitable that the api will change in the future, perhaps incorporated into a Microsoft offering. Even if this is the case, your application has now been architected to utilize these patterns and details of the actual api will be less important. Herve does a great job of laying out the concepts which every developer and architect should be familiar with!

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• HTML Presence Controls for Communications Server 14 CodePlex Project

  Showing Presence on the Web If youre running Office Communicator Server 2007 R2, you know that your only out-of-the-box option for showing presence on the web is to use the NameControl ActiveX control that ships as part of Office.  Being an ActiveX control, this obviously means that youre limited to Internet Explorer.  Also, nobody likes ActiveX controls What if you want to show the presence of users in a pure ASP.NET or HTML application and cant assume that the user has Communicator installed you need anASP.NET or HTML presence control.  HTML Presence Controls for Microsoft Communications Server 14 We recently worked with the UC team at Microsoft on a keynote demo for TechEd 2010 in New Orleans.  The demo was for a fictitious airline Fabrikam Airlines that wanted to show the presence of customer service and reservations agents on its website.  Customers could also start an instant message conversation with the agents using a Silverlight web chat window that used WCF to communicate with the backend UCMA application. We built HTML Presence Controls that use AJAX to poll a REST-based WCF service running in IIS and hosting a UCMA 3.0 presence subscription application.   Microsoft has graciously allowed us to publish these on CodePlex so that the development community can benefit from them:  http://htmlpresencecontrols.codeplex.com/ We will be maintaining the CodePlex project as new builds of UCMA 3.0 become available.  Check out the project home page on CodePlex for some more in-depth details on how the controls are implemented. ASP.NET Server Control Implementation Were providing an ASP.NET Server Control implementation that you can use stand-alone or in a GridView or Repeater (or other layout control).  The control has properties that allow you to control its appearance, e.g. you can choose whether or not to show the contacts name or availability text. You can also use the server control in a layout control such as a GridView by putting it in a TemplateColumn and binding to the Sip Uri in the data source. Disclaimer Once we started working on these, we realized why Microsoft hasnt shipped such controls as part of the product.  There are some tradeoffs you have to be aware of when using these controls, heres the high level. Privacy The backend UCMA 3.0 application that subscribes to presence of contacts runs as a trusted application and can thus retrieve the presence of any user in the organization.  Theres currently no good way in UCMA to apply any privacy rules to ensure that the consumer of the presence controls has permission to see the presence of the contacts that the controls are bound to.  Just to be absolutely crystal clear These controls provide a way to query the presence of any user in the organization, regardless of the privacy relationship between the person consuming the controls and the contacts whose presence is being displayed. Were exploring options for a design pattern that would allow you to inject some privacy controls.  Keep in mind though that you would most likely be responsible for implementing this logic, as there is currently no functionality in UCMA that allows you to do that. Polling the WCF REST Service The controls poll the backend WCF service to retrieve the presence of contacts - you can control the refresh interval so that they poll less often. We implemented a caching layer so that the WCF service is always communicating with a presence cache it never communicates directly with Communications Server.  For example, if your web page is showing the presence of sip:[email protected] and 500 people have the page open, the presence cache only contains one instance of the subscription Communications Server is not being polled 500 times for the presence of that contact. Once the presence of a contact changes, it is updated in the cache.  There are some server-based push mechanisms that would work nicely here, such as the one that Outlook Web Access 2010 uses.  Unfortunately we didnt have time to explore these options. Community Contribution Take a look at the project Issue Tracker, there are a couple of things we can use some help with.  Shoot me a note if youre interested in contributing to the project. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Home Energy Management & Automation with Windows Phone 7

  A number of people at Clarity are personally interested in home energy conservation and home automation. We feel that a mobile device is a great fit for bringing this idea to fruition. While this project is merely a concept and not directly associated with Microsofts Hohm web service, it provides a great model for communicating the concept. I wanted to take the idea a step further and combine saving energy in your home with the ability to track water usage and control your home devices. I designed an application that focuses on total home control and not just energy usage. Application Overview By monitoring home consumption in real time and with yearly projections users can pinpoint vampire devices, times of high or low consumption, and wasteful patterns of energy use. Energy usage meters indicate total current consumption as well as individual device consumption. Users can then use the information to take action, make adjustments, and change their consumption behaviors. The app can be used to automate certain systems like lighting, temperature, or alarms. Other features can be turned on an off at the touch of a toggle switch on your phone, away from home. Forget to turn off the TV or shut the garage door? No problem, you can do it from your phone. Through settings you can enable and disable features of the phone that apply to your home making it a completely customized and convenient experience. To be clear, this equates to more security, big environmental impact, and even bigger savings.   Design and User Interface  Since this panorama application is designed for win phone 7 devices, it complies with the UI Design and Interaction Guide for wp7. I developed the frame and page hierarchy from existing examples. The interface takes advantage of the interactive nature of touch screens with slider controls, pivot control views, and toggle switches to turn on and off devices (not shown in mockup). I followed recommendations for text based elements and adapted the tile notifications to display the most recent user activity. For example, the mockup indicates upon launching the app that the last thing you did was program the thermostat. This model is great for quick launching common user actions. One last design feature to point out is the technical reasons for supplying both light and dark themes for the app. Since this application is targeting energy consumption it only makes sense to consider the effect of the apps background color or image on the phones energy use. When displaying darker colors like black the OLED display may use less power, extending battery life. Other Considerations For now I left out options of wind and solar powered energy options because they are not available to everyone. Renewable energy sources and new technologies associated with them are definitely ideas to keep in mind for a next iteration. Another idea to explore for such an application would be to include a savings model similar to mint.com. In addition to general energy-saving recommendations the application could recommend customized ways to save based on your current utility providers and available options in your area. If your television or refrigerator is guilty of sucking a lot of energy then you may see recommendations for energy star products that could save you even more money! Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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