Search Results

Search found 9494 results on 380 pages for 'least squares'.

Page 356/380 | < Previous Page | 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360 361 362 363  | Next Page >

• Use Those Extra Mouse Buttons to Increase Efficiency

  - by Mark Virtue

  Did you know that the most commonly used mouse actions are clicking a window’s “Close” button (the X in the top-right corner), and clicking the “Back” button (in a browser and various other programs)?  How much time do you spend every day locating the Close button or the Back button with your mouse so that you can click on them?  And what about that mouse you’re using – how many buttons does it have, besides the two main ones?  Most mouses these days have at least four (including the scroll-wheel, which a lot of people don’t realize is also a button as well).  Why not assign those extra buttons to your most common mouse actions, and save yourself a bundle of mousing-around time every day? If your mouse was manufactured by one of the “premium” mouse manufacturers (Microsoft, Logitech, etc), it almost certain came with driver software to allow you to customize your mouse’s controls and take advantage of your mouse’s special features.  Microsoft, for example, provides driver software called IntelliPoint (link below), while Logitech provides SetPoint.  It’s possible that your mouse has some extra buttons but doesn’t come with its own driver software (the author is using a Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000, which amazingly is not supported by the Microsoft IntelliPoint software!).  If your mouse falls into this category, you can use a marvelous free product called X-Mouse Button Control, from Highresolution Enterprises (link below).  It provides a truly amazing array of mouse configuration options, including assigning actions to buttons on a per-application basis. Once X-Mouse Button Control is downloaded, its setup process is quite straightforward. Once downloaded, you can start the program via Start / Highresolution Enterprises / X-Mouse Button Control.  You will find the program’s icon in the system tray: Right-click on the icon and select Setup from the pop-up menu.  The program’s configuration window appears: It’s extremely unlikely that we will want to change the functionality of our mouse’s two main buttons (left and right), so instead we’ll look at the rest of the options on the right side of the window.  The Middle Button refers to either the third, middle button (found on some old mouses), or the pressing of the wheel itself, as a button (if you didn’t know you could press your wheel like a button, try it out now).  Mouse Button 4 and Mouse Button 5 usually refer to the extra buttons found on the side of the mouse, often near your thumb. So what can we use these extra mouse buttons for?  Well, clearly Close and Back are two obvious candidates.  Each of these can be found by selecting them from the drop-down menu next to each button field: Once the two options are chosen, the window will look something like this: If you’re not interested in choosing Back or Close, you may like to try some of the other options in the list, including: Cut, Copy and Paste Undo Show the Desktop Next/Previous track (for media playback) Open any program Simulate any keystroke or combination of keystrokes ….and many other options.  Explore the drop-down list to see them all. You may decide, for example, that closing the current document (as opposed to the current program) would be a good use for Mouse Button 5.  In other words, we need to simulate the keypress of Ctrl-F4.  Let’s see how we achieve this. First we select Simulated Keystrokes from the drop-down list: The Simulated Keystrokes window opens: The instructions on the page are pretty comprehensive.  If you want to simulate the Ctrl-F4 keystroke, you need to type {CTRL}{F4} into the box: …and then click OK. Assigning Actions to Buttons on a Per-Application Basis One of the most powerful features of X-Mouse Button Control is the ability to assign actions to buttons on a per-application basis.  This means that if we have a particular program open, then our mouse will behave differently – our buttons will do different things. For example, when we have Windows Media Player open, for example, we may wish to have buttons assigned to Play/Pause, Next track and Previous track, as well as changing the volume with the mouse!  This is easy with X-Mouse Button Control.  We start by opening Windows Media Player.  This makes the next step easier.  Then we return to X-Mouse Button Control and add a new “configuration”.  This is done by clicking the Add button: A window opens containing a list of all running programs, including our recently opened Windows Media Player: We select Windows Media Player and click OK.  A new, blank “configuration” is created: We repeat the earlier steps to assign buttons to Play/Pause, Next track and Previous track, and assign scrolling the wheel to alter the volume:   To save all our changes and close the window, we click Apply. Now spend a few minutes thinking of all the applications you use the most, and what are the most common simple tasks you perform in each of those applications.  Those tasks are then perfect candidates for per-application button assignments. There are many more configuration options and capabilities of X-Mouse Button Control – too many to list here.  We encourage you to spend a bit of time exploring the Setup window.  Then, most important of all, don’t forget to use your new mouse buttons!  Get into the habit of using them, and then after a while you’ll start to wonder how you ever tolerated the laborious, tedious, time-consuming process of actually locating each window’s Close button… Download X-Mouse Button Control Highresolution Enterprise Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add Specialized Toolbar Buttons to Firefox the Easy WayBoost Your Mouse Pointing Accuracy in WindowsMake Mouse Navigation Faster in WindowsVista Style Popup Previews for Firefox TabsStupid Geek Tricks: Using the Quick Zoom Feature in Outlook TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Download Videos from Hulu Pixels invade Manhattan Convert PDF files to ePub to read on your iPad Hide Your Confidential Files Inside Images Get Wildlife Photography Tips at BBC’s PhotoMasterClasses Mashpedia is a Real-time Encyclopedia

  Read the article

• TechEd 2010 Day One – How I Travel

  - by BuckWoody

  Normally when I blog on the first day of a conference, well, there hasn’t been a first day yet. So I talk about the value of a conference or some other facet. And normally in my (non-conference) blogs, I show you how I have learned to be a data professional – things I’ve learned how to do over the years. But in all that time, I don’t think I’ve ever talked about a big part of my job – traveling. I’ve traveled a lot throughout the years, when I’ve taught, gone to conferences, consulted and in my current role assisting Microsoft customers with large-scale database system designs.  So I’ll share a few thoughts about what I do. Keep in mind that I travel for short durations, just a day or so, and sometimes I travel internationally. For those I prepare differently – what I’m talking about here is what I do for a multi-day, same-country trip. Hopefully you find it useful. I’ll tag a few other travelers I know to add their thoughts.  Preparing for Travel   When I’m notified of a trip, I begin researching the location. I find the flights, hotel and (if I have to) a car to use while I’m away. We have an in-house system we use to book the travel, but when I travel not-for-Microsoft I use Expedia and Kayak to find what I need.  Traveling on Sunday and Friday is the worst. I have to do it sometimes (like this week) and it’s always a bad idea. But you can blunt the impact by booking as early as you can stand it. That means I have to be up super-early, but the flights are normally on time. I stay flexible, and always have a backup plan in case the flights are delayed or canceled.  For the hotel, I tend to go on the cheaper side, and I look for older hotels that have been renovated, or quirky ones. For instance, in Boise, ID recently I stayed at a 60’s-themed (think Mad-Men) hotel that was very cool. Always I go on the less expensive side – I find the “luxury” hotels nail me for Internet, food, everything. The cheaper places include all kinds of things, and even have breakfasts, shuttles and all kinds of things that start to add up. I even call ahead to make sure there’s an iron and ironing board available, since I’ll need those when I get there.  I find any way I can not to get a car. I use mass-transit wherever possible, and try to make friends and pay their gas to take me places. In a pinch, I’ll use a taxi. It ends up being cheaper, faster, and less stressful all around.  Packing  Over the years I’ve learned never to check luggage whenever I can. To do that, I lay out everything I want to take with me on the bed, and then try and make sure I’m really going to use it. I wear a dark wool set of pants, which I can clean and wear in hot and cold climates. I bring undies and socks of course, and for most places I have to wear “dress up” shirts. I bring at least two print T-Shirts in case I want to dress down for something while I’m gone, but I only bring one set of shoes. All the  clothes are rolled as tightly as possible as I learned in the military. Then I use those to cushion the electronics I take.  For toiletries I bring a shaver, toothpaste and toothbrush, D/O and a small brush. Everything else the hotel will provide.  For entertainment, I take a small Zune, a full PC-Headset (so I can make IP calls on the road) and my laptop. I don’t take books or anything else – everything is electronic. I use E-books (downloaded from our Library), Audio-Books (on the Zune) and I also bring along a Kaossilator (more here) to play music in the hotel room or even on the plane without being heard.  If I can, I pack into one roll-on bag. There’s not a lot better than this one, but I also have a Bag I was given as a prize for something or other here at Microsoft. Either way, I like something with less pockets and more big, open compartments. Everything gets rolled up and packed in, with all of the wires and charges in small bags my wife made for me. The laptop (and anything I don’t want gate-checked) goes on top or in an outside pouch so I can grab it quickly if I have to gate-check the bag. As much as I can, I try to go in one bag. When I can’t (like this week) I use this bag since it can expand, roll up, crush and even be put away later. It’s super-heavy canvas and worth the price. This allows me to not check a bag.  Journey Logistics The day of the trip, I have everything ready since I’m getting up early. I pack a few small snacks inside a plastic large-mouth water bottle, which protects the snacks and lets me get water in the terminal. I bring along those little powdered drink mixes to add to the water.  At the airport, I make a beeline for the power-outlets. I charge up my laptop and phone, and download all my e-mails so I can work on them off-line in the air. I don’t travel as often as I used to – just every month or so now, so I don’t have a membership to an airline club. If I travel much more, I’ll invest in one again – they are WELL worth the money, for the wifi, food and quiet if for nothing else.  I print out my logistics on paper and put that in my pocket – flight numbers, hotel addresses and phones for everything. That way if I have to make a change, I don’t have to boot up anything or even have power to be able to roll with the punches if things change.  Working While Away  While I’m away I realize I’m going to be swamped with things at the conference or with my clients. So I turn on Out-Of-Office notifications to let people know I won’t be as responsive, and I keep my Outlook calendar up to date so my co-workers know what I’m up to. I even update it with hotel and phone info in case they really need to reach me. I share my calendar with my wife so my family knows what I’m doing as well.  I check my e-mail during breaks, but I only respond to them in the evening or early morning at the hotel. I tweet during conferences. The point is to be as present as possible during the event or when I’m at the clients. Both deserve it.  So those are my initial thoughts. I’ll tag Brent Ozar, Brad McGeHee and Paul Randal, and they can tag whomever they wish. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

  Read the article

• Creating A SharePoint Parent/Child List Relationship&ndash; SharePoint 2010 Edition

  - by Mark Rackley

  Hey blog readers… It has been almost 2 years since I posted my most read blog on creating a Parent/Child list relationship in SharePoint 2007: Creating a SharePoint List Parent / Child Relationship - Out of the Box And then a year ago I improved on my method and redid the blog post… still for SharePoint 2007: Creating a SharePoint List Parent/Child Relationship – VIDEO REMIX Since then many of you have been asking me how to get this to work in SharePoint 2010, and frankly I have just not had time to look into it. I wish I could have jumped into this sooner, but have just recently began to look at it. Well.. after all this time I have actually come up with two solutions that work, neither of them are as clean as I’d like them to be, but I wanted to get something in your hands that you can start using today. Hopefully in the coming weeks and months I’ll be able to improve upon this further and give you guys some better options. For the most part, the process is identical to the 2007 process, but you have probably found out that the list view web parts in 2010 behave differently, and getting the Parent ID to your new child form can be a pain in the rear (at least that’s what I’ve discovered). Anyway, like I said, I have found a couple of solutions that work. If you know of a better one, please let us know as it bugs me that this not as eloquent as my 2007 implementation. Getting on the same page First thing I’d recommend is recreating this blog: Creating a SharePoint List Parent/Child Relationship – VIDEO REMIX in SharePoint 2010… There are some vague differences, but it’s basically the same…  Here’s a quick video of me doing this in SP 2010: Creating Lists necessary for this blog post Now that you have the lists created, lets set up the New Time form to use a QueryString variable to populate the Parent ID field: Creating parameters in Child’s new item form to set parent ID Did I talk fast enough through both of those videos? Hopefully by now that stuff is old hat to you, but I wanted to make sure everyone could get on the same page.  Okay… let’s get started. Solution 1 – XSLTListView with Javascript This solution is the more elegant of the two, however it does require the use of a little javascript.  The other solution does not use javascript, but it also doesn’t use the pretty new SP 2010 pop-ups.  I’ll let you decide which you like better. The basic steps of this solution are: Inserted a Related Item View Insert a ContentEditorWebPart Insert script in ContentEditorWebPart that pulls the ID from the Query string and calls the method to insert a new item on the child entry form Hide the toolbar from data view to remove “add new item” link. Again, you don’t HAVE to use a CEWP, you could just put the javascript directly in the page using SPD.  Anyway, here is how I did it: Using Related Item View / JavaScript Here’s the JavaScript I used in my Content Editor Web Part: <script type="text/javascript"> function NewTime() { // Get the Query String values and split them out into the vals array var vals = new Object(); var qs = location.search.substring(1, location.search.length); var args = qs.split("&"); for (var i=0; i < args.length; i++) { var nameVal = args[i].split("="); var temp = unescape(nameVal[1]).split('+'); nameVal[1] = temp.join(' '); vals[nameVal[0]] = nameVal[1]; } var issueID = vals["ID"]; //use this to bring up the pretty pop up NewItem2(event,"http://sp2010dev:1234/Lists/Time/NewForm.aspx?IssueID=" + issueID); //use this to open a new window //window.location="http://sp2010dev:1234/Lists/Time/NewForm.aspx?IssueID=" + issueID; } </script> Solution 2 – DataFormWebPart and exact same 2007 Process This solution is a little more of a hack, but it also MUCH more close to the process we did in SP 2007. So, if you don’t mind not having the pretty pop-up and prefer the comforts of what you are used to, you can give this one a try.  The basics steps are: Insert a DataFormWebPart instead of the List Data View Create a Parameter on DataFormWebPart to store “ID” Query String Variable Filter DataFormWebPart using Parameter Insert a link at bottom of DataForm Web part that points to the Child’s new item form and passes in the Parent Id using the Parameter. See.. like I told you, exact same process as in 2007 (except using the DataFormWeb Part). The DataFormWebPart also requires a lot more work to make it look “pretty” but it’s just table rows and cells, and can be configured pretty painlessly.  Here is that video: Using DataForm Web Part One quick update… if you change the link in this solution from: <tr> <td><a href="http://sp2010dev:1234/Lists/Time/NewForm.aspx?IssueID={$IssueIDParam}">Click here to create new item...</a> </td> </tr> to: <tr> <td> <a href="javascript:NewItem2(event,'http://sp2010dev:1234/Lists/Time/NewForm.aspx?IssueID={$IssueIDParam}');">Click here to create new item...</a> </td> </tr> It will open up in the pretty pop up and act the same as solution one… So… both Solutions will now behave the same to the end user. Just depends on which you want to implement. That’s all for now… Remember in both solutions when you have them working, you can make the “IssueID” invisible to users by using the “ms-hidden” class (it’s my previous blog post on the subject up there). That’s basically all there is to it! No pithy or witty closing this time… I am sorry it took me so long to dive into this and I hope your questions are answered. As I become more polished myself I will try to come up with a cleaner solution that will make everyone happy… As always, thanks for taking the time to stop by.

  Read the article

• Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.2 Event and its SNMP Interface

  - by user12609115

  Background The cluster event SNMP interface was first introduced in Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.2 release. The details of the SNMP interface are described in the Oracle Solaris Cluster System Administration Guide and the Cluster 3.2 SNMP blog. Prior to the Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.2 release, when the event SNMP interface was enabled, it would take effect on WARNING or higher severity events. The events with WARNING or higher severity are usually for the status change of a cluster component from ONLINE to OFFLINE. The interface worked like an alert/alarm interface when some components in the cluster were out of service (changed to OFFLINE). The consumers of this interface could not get notification for all status changes and configuration changes in the cluster. Cluster Event and its SNMP Interface in Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.2 The user model of the cluster event SNMP interface is the same as what was provided in the previous releases. The cluster event SNMP interface is not enabled by default on a freshly installed cluster; you can enable it by using the cluster event SNMP administration commands on any cluster nodes. Usually, you only need to enable it on one of the cluster nodes or a subset of the cluster nodes because all cluster nodes get the same cluster events. When it is enabled, it is responsible for two basic tasks. • Logs up to 100 most recent NOTICE or higher severity events to the MIB. • Sends SNMP traps to the hosts that are configured to receive the above events. The changes in the Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.2 release are1) Introduction of the NOTICE severity for the cluster configuration and status change events.The NOTICE severity is introduced for the cluster event in the 4.2 release. It is the severity between the INFO and WARNING severity. Now all severities for the cluster events are (from low to high) • INFO (not exposed to the SNMP interface) • NOTICE (newly introduced in the 4.2 release) • WARNING • ERROR • CRITICAL • FATAL In the 4.2 release, the cluster event system is enhanced to make sure at least one event with the NOTICE or a higher severity will be generated when there is a configuration or status change from a cluster component instance. In other words, the cluster events from a cluster with the NOTICE or higher severities will cover all status and configuration changes in the cluster (include all component instances). The cluster component instance here refers to an instance of the following cluster componentsnode, quorum, resource group, resource, network interface, device group, disk, zone cluster and geo cluster heartbeat. For example, pnode1 is an instance of the cluster node component, and oracleRG is an instance of the cluster resource group. With the introduction of the NOTICE severity event, when the cluster event SNMP interface is enabled, the consumers of the SNMP interface will get notification for all status and configuration changes in the cluster. A thrid-party system management platform with the cluster SNMP interface integration can generate alarms and clear alarms programmatically, because it can get notifications for the status change from ONLINE to OFFLINE and also from OFFLINE to ONLINE. 2) Customization for the cluster event SNMP interface • The number of events logged to the MIB is 100. When the number of events stored in the MIB reaches 100 and a new qualified event arrives, the oldest event will be removed before storing the new event to the MIB (FIFO, first in, first out). The 100 is the default and minimum value for the number of events stored in the MIB. It can be changed by setting the log_number property value using the clsnmpmib command. The maximum number that can be set for the property is 500. • The cluster event SNMP interface takes effect on the NOTICE or high severity events. The NOTICE severity is also the default and lowest event severity for the SNMP interface. The SNMP interface can be configured to take effect on other higher severity events, such as WARNING or higher severity events by setting the min_severity property to the WARNING. When the min_severity property is set to the WARNING, the cluster event SNMP interface would behave the same as the previous releases (prior to the 4.2 release). Examples, • Set the number of events stored in the MIB to 200 # clsnmpmib set -p log_number=200 event • Set the interface to take effect on WARNING or higher severity events. # clsnmpmib set -p min_severity=WARNING event Administering the Cluster Event SNMP Interface Oracle Solaris Cluster provides the following three commands to administer the SNMP interface. • clsnmpmib: administer the SNMP interface, and the MIB configuration. • clsnmphost: administer hosts for the SNMP traps • clsnmpuser: administer SNMP users (specific for SNMP v3 protocol) Only clsnmpmib is changed in the 4.2 release to support the aforementioned customization of the SNMP interface. Here are some simple examples using the commands. Examples: 1. Enable the cluster event SNMP interface on the local node # clsnmpmib enable event 2. Display the status of the cluster event SNMP interface on the local node # clsnmpmib show -v 3. Configure my_host to receive the cluster event SNMP traps. # clsnmphost add my_host Cluster Event SNMP Interface uses the common agent container SNMP adaptor, which is based on the JDMK SNMP implementation as its SNMP agent infrastructure. By default, the port number for the SNMP MIB is 11161, and the port number for the SNMP traps is 11162. The port numbers can be changed by using the cacaoadm. For example, # cacaoadm list-params Print all changeable parameters. The output includes the snmp-adaptor-port and snmp-adaptor-trap-port properties. # cacaoadm set-param snmp-adaptor-port=1161 Set the SNMP MIB port number to 1161. # cacaoadm set-param snmp-adaptor-trap-port=1162 Set the SNMP trap port number to 1162. The cluster event SNMP MIB is defined in sun-cluster-event-mib.mib, which is located in the /usr/cluster/lib/mibdirectory. Its OID is 1.3.6.1.4.1.42.2.80, that can be used to walk through the MIB data. Again, for more detail information about the cluster event SNMP interface, please see the Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.2 System Administration Guide. - Leland Chen 

  Read the article

• Too Many Kittens To Juggle At Once

  - by Bil Simser

  Ahh, the Internet. That crazy, mixed up place where one tweet turns into a conversation between dozens of people and spawns a blogpost. This is the direct result of such an event this morning. It started innocently enough, with this: Then followed up by a blog post by Joel here. In the post, Joel introduces us to the term Business Solutions Architect with mad skillz like InfoPath, Access Services, Excel Services, building Workflows, and SSRS report creation, all while meeting the business needs of users in a SharePoint environment. I somewhat disagreed with Joel that this really wasn’t a new role (at least IMHO) and that a good Architect or BA should really be doing this job. As Joel pointed out when you’re building a SharePoint team this kind of role is often overlooked. Engineers might be able to build workflows but is the right workflow for the right problem? Michael Pisarek wrote about a SharePoint Business Architect a few months ago and it’s a pretty solid assessment. Again, I argue you really shouldn’t be looking for roles that don’t exist and I don’t suggest anyone create roles to hire people to fill them. That’s basically creating a solution looking for problems. Michael’s article does have some great points if you’re lost in the quagmire of SharePoint duties though (and I especially like John Ross’ quote “The coolest shit is worthless if it doesn’t meet business needs”). SharePoinTony summed it up nicely with “SharePoint Solutions knowledge is both lacking and underrated in most environments. Roles help”. Having someone on the team who can dance between a business user and a coder can be difficult. Remember the idea of telling something to someone and them passing it on to the next person. By the time the story comes round the circle it’s a shadow of it’s former self with little resemblance to the original tale. This is very much business requirements as they’re told by the user to a business analyst, written down on paper, read by an architect, tuned into a solution plan, and implemented by a developer. Transformations between what was said, what was heard, what was written down, and what was developed can be distant cousins. Not everyone has the skill of communication and even less have negotiation skills to suit the SharePoint platform. Negotiation is important because not everything can be (or should be) done in SharePoint. Sometimes it’s just not appropriate to build it on the SharePoint platform but someone needs to know enough about the platform and what limitations it might have, then communicate that (and/or negotiate) with a customer or user so it’s not about “You can’t have this” to “Let’s try it this way”. Visualize the possible instead of denying the impossible. So what is the right SharePoint team? My cromag brain came with a fairly simpleton answer (and I’m sure people will just say this is a cop-out). The perfect SharePoint team is just enough people to do the job that know the technology and business problem they’re solving. Bridge the gap between business need and technology platform and you have an architect. Communicate the needs of the business effectively so the entire team understands it and you have a business analyst. Can you get this with full time workers? Maybe but don’t expect miracles out of the gate. Also don’t take a consultant’s word as gospel. Some consultants just don’t have the diversity of the SharePoint platform to be worth their value so be careful. You really need someone who knows enough about SharePoint to be able to validate a consultants knowledge level. This is basically try for any consultant, not just a SharePoint one. Specialization is good and needed. A good, well-balanced SharePoint team is one of people that can solve problems with work with the technology, not against it. Having a top developer is great, but don’t rely on them to solve world hunger if they can’t communicate very well with users. An expert business analyst might be great at gathering requirements so the entire team can understand them, but if it means building 100% custom solutions because they don’t fit inside the SharePoint boundaries isn’t of much value. Just repeat. There is no silver bullet. There is no silver bullet. There is no silver bullet. A few people pointed out Nick Inglis’ article Excluding The Information Professional In SharePoint. It’s a good read too and hits home that maybe some developers and IT pros need some extra help in the information space. If you’re in an organization that needs labels on people, come up with something everyone understands and go with it. If that’s Business Solutions Architect, SharePoint Advisor, or Guy Who Knows A Lot About Portals, make it work for you. We all wish that one person could master all that is SharePoint but we also know that doesn’t scale very well and you quickly get into the hit-by-a-bus syndrome (with the organization coming to a full crawl when the guy or girl goes on vacation, gets sick, or pops out a baby). There are too many gaps in SharePoint knowledge to have any one person know it all and too many kittens to juggle all at once. We like to consider ourselves experts in our field, but trying to tackle too many roles at once and we end up being mediocre jack of all trades, master of none. Don't fall into this pit. It's a deep, dark hole you don't want to try to claw your way out of. Trust me. Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt. In the end I don’t disagree with Joel. SharePoint is a beast and not something that should be taken on by newbies. If you just read “Teach Yourself SharePoint in 24 Hours” and want to go build your corporate intranet or the next killer business solution with all your new found knowledge plan to pony up consultant dollars a few months later when everything goes to Hell in a handbasket and falls over. I’m not saying don’t build solutions in SharePoint. I’m just saying that building effective ones takes skill like any craft and not something you can just cobble together with a little bit of cursory knowledge. Thanks to *everyone* who participated in this tweet rush. It was fun and educational.

  Read the article

• MSCC: Scripting - Administrator's­ toolbox of magic...

  Finally, we made it to have our April meetup - in May. The most obvious explanation is the increased amount of open source and IT activities that either the MSCC, the Linux User Group of Mauritius (LUGM), or the University of Mauritius Student's Computer Club is organising. It's absolutely incredible to see the recent hype of events here on the island. And I'm loving it! Unfortunately, we also had to deal with arranging for a location this time. It was kind of an odyssey as my requests (and phone calls) haven't been answered, even though I tried it several times - well, kind of disappointing and I have to look into that for future gatherings. In my opinion, it is essential that two parameters of a community meeting are fixed as early as possible: Location, and Date and time You can't just change one or both on the very last minute. Well, this time we had to do it due to unforeseen reasons, and I apologise to any MSCC member which couldn't make it to our April meetup. Okay, lesson learned but now back to the actual meetup report ... Shortly after the meeting I placed the following statement as my first impression: "Spontaneous and improvised :) No, seriously, Ish and Dan had well prepared presentations on shell scripting, mainly focused towards Bourne Again Shell (bash), and the pros and cons of scripting versus actually writing something in a decent programming language. I thought that I could cut myself out of the equation but the demand for information about PowerShell was higher than expected..." Well, it turned out that the interest in Windows PowerShell was high, as I even got a couple of questions on it via social media networks during the evening. I also like to mention that the number of attendees went back to what I would call a "standard" number of participation. This time there were 12 craftsmen, but again a good number of First Timers. Reactions of other attendees Here are some impressions and feedback from our participants: "Enjoyed the bash and powershell (linux / windows) presentations ..." -- Nadim on event comments "He [Daniel] also showed us some syntax loopholes in Bash that could leave someone with bad code." -- Ish on MSCC – Let's talk about Scripting   Glad to see a couple of first time attendees, especially students from the university itself. Some details on the presentations MSCC: First time visit at the University of Mauritius - Phase II Engineering Tower, room 2.9 Gimme some love ... bash and other shells Ish gave a great introduction into shell scripting as he spoke about existing shell environments and a little bit about their history. Furthermore, he talked about various built-in commands, the use of coreutils, the ability to daisy-chain multiple commands using pipes, the importance of the standard I/O streams and their file descriptors in advanced scripting techniques. Combined with a couple of sample statements in the Linux terminal on Ubuntu 14.04 machine it was a solid presentation. Have a closer look at his slides - published on his blog on MSCC – Let's talk about Scripting. Oddities of scripting After the brief introduction into bash it was Daniel's turn to highlight a good number of oddities when working with shell scripts. First of all, it should be clear that scripting is not supposed for any kind of implementations in terms of software but simply to automate administrative procedures and to simplify routine jobs on a system. One of the cool oddities that he mentioned is that everything (!) in a shell is represented by strings; there are no other types like integer, float, date-time, etc. that you'd like to use in a full-fledged programming language. Let's have a look at his sample:  more to come... What's the output? As a conclusion, Daniel suggests that shell scripting should be limited but not restricted to automatic repetitive command stacks and batch jobs, startup wrapper for applications in order to set up the execution environment, and other not too sophisticated jobs. But as soon as it might involve a little bit more logic or you might rely on performance it's better to write an application in Ruby, Python, or Perl (among others of course). This is also enables the possibility to test your code properly. MSCC: Ish talking about Bourne Again Shell (bash) and shell scripting to automate regular tasks MSCC: Daniel gives an overview about the pros and cons of shell scripting versus programming MSCC: PowerShell as your scripting solution on Windows operating systems The path of the Enlightened is long ... and tough. Honestly, even though PowerShell was mentioned without any further details on the meetup's agenda, I didn't expect that there would be demand to give a presentation on Microsoft PowerShell after all. I already took this topic out of the announcement but the audience wanted to have some information. Okay, then let's see what I could do - improvised style. While my machine booted and got hooked up to the projector, I started to talk about the beginnings of PowerShell from back in 2006, and its predecessors MS DOS and Command Prompt. A throwback in history... always good for young people. As usual, Microsoft didn't get it at that time. Instead of listening to their client's needs and demands they ignored the feasibility to administrate Windows server farms without any UI tools. PowerShell is actually a result of this, and seeing that shell scripting is a common, reliable and fast way in an administrator's toolbox for decades, Microsoft had to adapt from their Microsoft Management Console (MMC) to a broader approach. It's not like shell scripting was something new; it is in daily use by alternative operating systems like AIX, HP UX, Solaris, and last but not least Linux. Most interestingly, Microsoft is very good at renovating existing architectures, and over the years PowerShell not only replaced their own combination of Command Prompt and Scripting Hosts (VBScript and CScript) but really turned into a challenging competitor on the market. The shell is easy to extend with cmdlets, and open to other Microsoft products like SQL Server, SharePoint, as well as Third-party software applications. Similar to MMC PowerShell also offers the ability to administer other machine remotely - only without a graphical user interface and therefore it's easier to automate and schedule regular tasks. Following is a sample of a PowerShell script file (extension .ps1): $strComputer = "." $colItems = get-wmiobject -class Win32_BIOS -namespace root\CIMV2 -comp $strComputer foreach ($objItem in $colItems) {write-host "BIOS Characteristics: " $objItem.BiosCharacteristicswrite-host "BIOS Version: " $objItem.BIOSVersionwrite-host "Build Number: " $objItem.BuildNumberwrite-host "Caption: " $objItem.Captionwrite-host "Code Set: " $objItem.CodeSetwrite-host "Current Language: " $objItem.CurrentLanguagewrite-host "Description: " $objItem.Descriptionwrite-host "Identification Code: " $objItem.IdentificationCodewrite-host "Installable Languages: " $objItem.InstallableLanguageswrite-host "Installation Date: " $objItem.InstallDatewrite-host "Language Edition: " $objItem.LanguageEditionwrite-host "List Of Languages: " $objItem.ListOfLanguageswrite-host "Manufacturer: " $objItem.Manufacturerwrite-host "Name: " $objItem.Namewrite-host "Other Target Operating System: " $objItem.OtherTargetOSwrite-host "Primary BIOS: " $objItem.PrimaryBIOSwrite-host "Release Date: " $objItem.ReleaseDatewrite-host "Serial Number: " $objItem.SerialNumberwrite-host "SMBIOS BIOS Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSBIOSVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Major Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSMajorVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Minor Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSMinorVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Present: " $objItem.SMBIOSPresentwrite-host "Software Element ID: " $objItem.SoftwareElementIDwrite-host "Software Element State: " $objItem.SoftwareElementStatewrite-host "Status: " $objItem.Statuswrite-host "Target Operating System: " $objItem.TargetOperatingSystemwrite-host "Version: " $objItem.Versionwrite-host} Which gives you information about your BIOS and Windows OS. Then change the computer name to another one on your network (NetBIOS based) and run the script again. There lots of samples and tutorials at the Microsoft Script Center, and I would advise you to pay a visit over there if you are more interested in PowerShell. The Script Center provides the download links, too. Upcoming Events What are the upcoming events here in Mauritius? So far, we have the following ones (incomplete list as usual) in chronological order: Hacking Defence (14. May 2014) WebCup Maurice (7. & 8. June 2014) Developers Conference (TBA ~ July 2014) Linuxfest 2014 (TBA ~ November 2014) Hopefully, there will be more announcements during the next couple of weeks and months. If you know about any other event, like a bootcamp, a code challenge or hackathon here in Mauritius, please drop me a note in the comment section below this article. Thanks! My resume of the day Spontaneous and improvised :) The new location at the University of Mauritius turned out very well, there is plenty of space, and it could be a good choice for future meetings. Especially, having the ability to get more and more students into our IT community sounds like a great opportunity. Later during the day, I got some promising mails from Nadim regarding future sessions at the local branch of the Middlesex University. Well, we will see in the future... But for now this will be on hold until approximately October when students resume their regular studies. Anyway, it was a good experience at the university, and thanks again to the UoM Student's Computer Club that made the necessary arrangements for the MSCC!

  Read the article

• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #051

  - by Pinal Dave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 Explanation and Understanding NOT NULL Constraint NOT NULL is integrity CONSTRAINT. It does not allow creating of the row where column contains NULL value. Most discussed questions about NULL is what is NULL? I will not go in depth analysis it. Simply put NULL is unknown or missing data. When NULL is present in database columns, it can affect the integrity of the database. I really do not prefer NULL in the database unless they are absolutely necessary. Three T-SQL Script to Create Primary Keys on Table I have always enjoyed writing about three topics Constraint and Keys, Backup and Restore and Datetime Functions. Primary Keys constraints prevent duplicate values for columns and provides a unique identifier to each column, as well it creates clustered index on the columns. 2008 Get Numeric Value From Alpha Numeric String – UDF for Get Numeric Numbers Only SQL is great with String operations. Many times, I use T-SQL to do my string operation. Let us see User Defined Function, which I wrote a few days ago, which will return only Numeric values from Alpha Numeric values. Introduction and Example of UNION and UNION ALL It is very much interesting when I get requests from blog reader to re-write my previous articles. I have received few requests to rewrite my article SQL SERVER – Union vs. Union All – Which is better for performance? with examples. I request you to read my previous article first to understand what is the concept and read this article to understand the same concept with an example. Downgrade Database for Previous Version The main questions is how they can downgrade the from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2000? The answer is : Not Possible. Get Common Records From Two Tables Without Using Join Following is my scenario, Suppose Table 1 and Table 2 has same column e.g. Column1 Following is the query, 1. Select column1,column2 From Table1 2. Select column1 From Table2 I want to find common records from these tables, but I don’t want to use the Join clause because for that I need to specify the column name for Join condition. Will you help me to get common records without using Join condition? I am using SQL Server 2005. Retrieve – Select Only Date Part From DateTime – Best Practice – Part 2 A year ago I wrote a post about SQL SERVER – Retrieve – Select Only Date Part From DateTime – Best Practice where I have discussed two different methods of getting the date part from datetime. Introduction to CLR – Simple Example of CLR Stored Procedure CLR is an abbreviation of Common Language Runtime. In SQL Server 2005 and later version of it database objects can be created which are created in CLR. Stored Procedures, Functions, Triggers can be coded in CLR. CLR is faster than T-SQL in many cases. CLR is mainly used to accomplish tasks which are not possible by T-SQL or can use lots of resources. The CLR can be usually implemented where there is an intense string operation, thread management or iteration methods which can be complicated for T-SQL. Implementing CLR provides more security to the Extended Stored Procedure. 2009 Comic Slow Query – SQL Joke Before Presentation After Presentation Enable Automatic Statistic Update on Database In one of the recent projects, I found out that despite putting good indexes and optimizing the query, I could not achieve an optimized performance and I still received an unoptimized response from the SQL Server. On examination, I figured out that the culprit was statistics. The database that I was trying to optimize had auto update of the statistics was disabled. Recently Executed T-SQL Query Please refer to blog post  query to recently executed T-SQL query on database. Change Collation of Database Column – T-SQL Script – Consolidating Collations – Extention Script At some time in your DBA career, you may find yourself in a position when you sit back and realize that your database collations have somehow run amuck, or are faced with the ever annoying CANNOT RESOLVE COLLATION message when trying to join data of varying collation settings. 2010 Visiting Alma Mater – Delivering Session on Database Performance and Career – Nirma Institute of Technology Everyone always dreams of visiting their school and college, where they have studied once. It is a great feeling to see the college once again – where you have spent the wonderful golden years of your time. College time is filled with studies, education, emotions and several plans to build a future. I consider myself fortunate as I got the opportunity to study at some of the best places in the world. Change Column DataTypes There are times when I feel like writing that I am a day older in SQL Server. In fact, there are many who are looking for a solution that is simple enough. Have you ever searched online for something very simple. I often do and enjoy doing things which are straight forward and easy to change. 2011 Three DMVs – sys.dm_server_memory_dumps – sys.dm_server_services – sys.dm_server_registry In this blog post we will see three new DMVs which are introduced in Denali. The DMVs are very simple and there is not much to describe them. So here is the simple game. I will be asking a question back to you after seeing the result of the each of the DMV and you help me to complete this blog post. A Simple Quiz – T-SQL Brain Trick If you have some time, I strongly suggest you try this quiz out as it is for sure twists your brain. 2012 List All The Column With Specific Data Types in Database 5 years ago I wrote script SQL SERVER – 2005 – List All The Column With Specific Data Types, when I read it again, it is very much relevant and I liked it. This is one of the script which every developer would like to keep it handy. I have upgraded the script bit more. I have included few additional information which I believe I should have added from the beginning. It is difficult to visualize the final script when we are writing it first time. Find First Non-Numeric Character from String The function PATINDEX exists for quite a long time in SQL Server but I hardly see it being used. Well, at least I use it and I am comfortable using it. Here is a simple script which I use when I have to identify first non-numeric character. Finding Different ColumnName From Almost Identitical Tables Well here is the interesting example of how we can use sys.column catalogue views and get the details of the newly added column. I have previously written about EXCEPT over here which is very similar to MINUS of Oracle. Storing Data and Files in Cloud – Dropbox – Personal Technology Tip I thought long and hard about doing a Personal Technology Tips series for this blog.  I have so many tips I’d like to share.  I am on my computer almost all day, every day, so I have a treasure trove of interesting tidbits I like to share if given the chance.  The only thing holding me back – which tip to share first?  The first tip obviously has the weight of seeming like the most important.  But this would mean choosing amongst my favorite tricks and shortcuts.  This is a hard task. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

  Read the article

• What to Do When Windows Won’t Boot

  - by Chris Hoffman

  You turn on your computer one day and Windows refuses to boot — what do you do? “Windows won’t boot” is a common symptom with a variety of causes, so you’ll need to perform some troubleshooting. Modern versions of Windows are better at recovering from this sort of thing. Where Windows XP might have stopped in its tracks when faced with this problem, modern versions of Windows will try to automatically run Startup Repair. First Things First Be sure to think about changes you’ve made recently — did you recently install a new hardware driver, connect a new hardware component to your computer, or open your computer’s case and do something? It’s possible the hardware driver is buggy, the new hardware is incompatible, or that you accidentally unplugged something while working inside your computer. The Computer Won’t Power On At All If your computer won’t power on at all, ensure it’s plugged into a power outlet and that the power connector isn’t loose. If it’s a desktop PC, ensure the power switch on the back of its case — on the power supply — is set to the On position. If it still won’t power on at all, it’s possible you disconnected a power cable inside its case. If you haven’t been messing around inside the case, it’s possible the power supply is dead. In this case, you’ll have to get your computer’s hardware fixed or get a new computer. Be sure to check your computer monitor — if your computer seems to power on but your screen stays black, ensure your monitor is powered on and that the cable connecting it to your computer’s case is plugged in securely at both ends. The Computer Powers On And Says No Bootable Device If your computer is powering on but you get a black screen that says something like “no bootable device” or another sort of “disk error” message, your computer can’t seem to boot from the hard drive that Windows was installed on. Enter your computer’s BIOS or UEFI firmware setup screen and check its boot order setting, ensuring that it’s set to boot from its hard drive. If the hard drive doesn’t appear in the list at all, it’s possible your hard drive has failed and can no longer be booted from. In this case, you may want to insert Windows installation or recovery media and run the Startup Repair operation. This will attempt to make Windows bootable again. For example, if something overwrote your Windows drive’s boot sector, this will repair the boot sector. If the recovery environment won’t load or doesn’t see your hard drive, you likely have a hardware problem. Be sure to check your BIOS or UEFI’s boot order first if the recovery environment won’t load. You can also attempt to manually fix Windows boot loader problems using the fixmbr and fixboot commands. Modern versions of Windows should be able to fix this problem for you with the Startup Repair wizard, so you shouldn’t actually have to run these commands yourself. Windows Freezes or Crashes During Boot If Windows seems to start booting but fails partway through, you may be facing either a software or hardware problem. If it’s a software problem, you may be able to fix it by performing a Startup Repair operation. If you can’t do this from the boot menu, insert a Windows installation disc or recovery disk and use the startup repair tool from there. If this doesn’t help at all, you may want to reinstall Windows or perform a Refresh or Reset on Windows 8. If the computer encounters errors while attempting to perform startup repair or reinstall Windows, or the reinstall process works properly and you encounter the same errors afterwards, you likely have a hardware problem. Windows Starts and Blue Screens or Freezes If Windows crashes or blue-screens on you every time it boots, you may be facing a hardware or software problem. For example, malware or a buggy driver may be loading at boot and causing the crash, or your computer’s hardware may be malfunctioning. To test this, boot your Windows computer in safe mode. In safe mode, Windows won’t load typical hardware drivers or any software that starts automatically at startup. If the computer is stable in safe mode, try uninstalling any recently installed hardware drivers, performing a system restore, and scanning for malware. If you’re lucky, one of these steps may fix your software problem and allow you to boot Windows normally. If your problem isn’t fixed, try reinstalling Windows or performing a Refresh or Reset on Windows 8. This will reset your computer back to its clean, factory-default state. If you’re still experiencing crashes, your computer likely has a hardware problem. Recover Files When Windows Won’t Boot If you have important files that will be lost and want to back them up before reinstalling Windows, you can use a Windows installer disc or Linux live media to recover the files. These run entirely from a CD, DVD, or USB drive and allow you to copy your files to another external media, such as another USB stick or an external hard drive. If you’re incapable of booting a Windows installer disc or Linux live CD, you may need to go into your BIOS or UEFI and change the boot order setting. If even this doesn’t work — or if you can boot from the devices and your computer freezes or you can’t access your hard drive — you likely have a hardware problem. You can try pulling the computer’s hard drive, inserting it into another computer, and recovering your files that way. Following these steps should fix the vast majority of Windows boot issues — at least the ones that are actually fixable. The dark cloud that always hangs over such issues is the possibility that the hard drive or another component in the computer may be failing. Image Credit: Karl-Ludwig G. Poggemann on Flickr, Tzuhsun Hsu on Flickr     

  Read the article

• PeopleSoft Upgrades, Fusion, & BI for Leading European PeopleSoft Applications Customers

  - by Mark Rosenberg

  With so many industry-leading services firms around the globe managing their businesses with PeopleSoft, it’s always an adventure setting up times and meetings for us to keep in touch with them, especially those outside of North America who often do not get to join us at Oracle OpenWorld. Fortunately, during the first two weeks of May, Nigel Woodland (Oracle’s Service Industries Director for the EMEA region) and I successfully blocked off our calendars to visit seven different customers spanning four countries in Western Europe. We met executives and leaders at four Staffing industry firms, two Professional Services firms that engage in consulting and auditing, and a Financial Services firm. As we shared the latest information regarding product capabilities and plans, we also gained valuable insight into the hot technology topics facing these businesses. What we heard was both informative and inspiring, and I suspect other Oracle PeopleSoft applications customers can benefit from one or more of the following observations from our trip. Great IT Plans Get Executed When You Respect the Users Each of our visits followed roughly the same pattern. After introductions, Nigel outlined Oracle’s product and technology strategy, including a discussion of how we at Oracle invest in each layer of the “technology stack” to provide customers with unprecedented business management capabilities and choice. Then, I provided the specifics of the PeopleSoft product line’s investment strategy, detailing the dramatic number of rich usability and functionality enhancements added to release 9.1 since its general availability in 2009 and the game-changing capabilities slated for 9.2. What was most exciting about each of these discussions was that shortly after my talking about what customers can do with release 9.1 right now to drive up user productivity and satisfaction, I saw the wheels turning in the minds of our audiences. Business analyst and end user-configurable tools and technologies, such as WorkCenters and the Related Action Framework, that provide the ability to tailor a “central command center” to the exact needs of each recruiter, biller, and every other role in the organization were exactly what each of our customers had been looking for. Every one of our audiences agreed that these tools which demonstrate a respect for the user would finally help IT pole vault over the wall of resistance that users had often raised in the past. With these new user-focused capabilities, IT is positioned to definitively partner with the business, instead of drag the business along, to unlock the value of their investment in PeopleSoft. This topic of respecting the user emerged during our very first visit, which was at Vital Services Group at their Head Office “The Mill” in Manchester, England. (If you are a student of architecture and are ever in Manchester, you should stop in to see this amazingly renovated old mill building.) I had just finished explaining our PeopleSoft 9.2 roadmap, and Mike Code, PeopleSoft Systems Manager for this innovative staffing company, said, “Mark, the new features you’ve shown us in 9.1/9.2 are very relevant to our business. As we forge ahead with the 9.1 upgrade, the ability to configure a targeted user interface with WorkCenters, Related Actions, Pivot Grids, and Alerts will enable us to satisfy the business that this upgrade is for them and will deliver tangible benefits. In fact, you’ve highlighted that we need to start talking to the business to keep up the momentum to start reviewing the 9.2 upgrade after we get to 9.1, because as much as 9.1 and PeopleTools 8.52 offers, what you’ve shown us for 9.2 is what we’ve envisioned was ultimately possible with our investment in PeopleSoft applications.” We also received valuable feedback about our investment for the Staffing industry when we visited with Hans Wanders, CIO of Randstad (the second largest Staffing company in the world) in the Netherlands. After our visit, Hans noted, “It was very interesting to see how the PeopleSoft applications have developed. I was truly impressed by many of the new developments.” Hans and Mike, sincere thanks for the validation that our team’s hard work and dedication to “respecting the users” is worth the effort! Co-existence of PeopleSoft and Fusion Applications Just Makes Sense As a “product person,” one of the most rewarding things about visiting customers is that they actually want to talk to me. Sometimes, they want to discuss a product area that we need to enhance; other times, they are interested in learning how to extract more value from their applications; and still others, they want to tell me how they are using the applications to drive real value for the business. During this trip, I was very pleased to hear that several of our customers not only thought the co-existence of Fusion applications alongside PeopleSoft applications made sense in theory, but also that they were aggressively looking at how to deploy one or more Fusion applications alongside their PeopleSoft HCM and FSCM applications. The most common deployment plan in the works by three of the organizations is to upgrade to PeopleSoft 9.1 or 9.2, and then adopt one of the new Fusion HCM applications, such as Fusion Performance Management or the full suite of  Fusion Talent Management. For example, during an applications upgrade planning discussion with the staffing company Hays plc., Mark Thomas, who is Hays’ UK IT Director, commented, “We are very excited about where we can go with the latest versions of the PeopleSoft applications in conjunction with Fusion Talent Management.” Needless to say, this news was very encouraging, because it reiterated that our applications investment strategy makes good business sense for our customers. Next Generation Business Intelligence Is the Key to the Future The third, and perhaps most exciting, lesson I learned during this journey is that our audiences already know that the latest generation of Business Intelligence technologies will be the “secret sauce” for organizations to transform business in radical ways. While a number of the organizations we visited on the trip have deployed or are deploying Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and the associated analytics applications to provide dashboards of easy-to-understand, user-configurable metrics that help optimize business performance according to current operating procedures, what’s most exciting to them is being able to use Business Intelligence to change the way an organization does business, grows revenue, and makes a profit. In particular, several executives we met asked whether we can help them minimize the need to have perfectly structured data and at the same time generate analytics that improve order fulfillment decision-making. To them, the path to future growth lies in having the ability to analyze unstructured data rapidly and intuitively and leveraging technology’s ability to detect patterns that a human cannot reasonably be expected to see. For illustrative purposes, here is a good example of a business problem where analyzing a combination of structured and unstructured data can produce better results. If you have a resource manager trying to decide which person would be the best fit for an assignment in terms of ensuring (a) client satisfaction, (b) the individual’s satisfaction with the work, (c) least travel distance, and (d) highest margin, you traditionally compare resource qualifications to assignment needs, calculate margins on past work with the client, and measure distances. To perform these comparisons, you are likely to need the organization to have profiles setup, people ranked against profiles, margin targets setup, margins measured, distances setup, distances measured, and more. As you can imagine, this requires organizations to plan and implement data setup, capture, and quality management initiatives to ensure that dependable information is available to support resourcing analysis and decisions. In the fast-paced, tight-budget world in which most organizations operate today, the effort and discipline required to maintain high-quality, structured data like those described in the above example are certainly not desirable and in some cases are not feasible. You can imagine how intrigued our audiences were when I informed them that we are ready to help them analyze volumes of unstructured data, detect trends, and produce recommendations. Our discussions delved into examples of how the firms could leverage Oracle’s Secure Enterprise Search and Endeca technologies to keyword search against, compare, and learn from unstructured resource and assignment data. We also considered examples of how they could employ Oracle Real-Time Decisions to generate statistically significant recommendations based on similar resourcing scenarios that have produced the desired satisfaction and profit margin results. --- Although I had almost no time for sight-seeing during this trip to Europe, I have to say that it may have been one of the most energizing and engaging trips of my career. Showing these dedicated customers how they can give every user a uniquely tailored set of tools and address business problems in ways that have to date been impossible made the journey across the Atlantic more than worth it. If any of these three topics intrigue you, I’d recommend you contact your Oracle applications representative to arrange for more detailed discussions with the appropriate members of our organization.

  Read the article

• Windows Azure VMs - New "Stopped" VM Options Provide Cost-effective Flexibility for On-Demand Workloads

  - by KeithMayer

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/KeithMayer/archive/2013/06/22/windows-azure-vms---new-stopped-vm-options-provide-cost-effective.aspxDidn’t make it to TechEd this year? Don’t worry!  This month, we’ll be releasing a new article series that highlights the Best of TechEd announcements and technical information for IT Pros.  Today’s article focuses on a new, much-heralded enhancement to Windows Azure Infrastructure Services to make it more cost-effective for spinning VMs up and down on-demand on the Windows Azure cloud platform. NEW! VMs that are shutdown from the Windows Azure Management Portal will no longer continue to accumulate compute charges while stopped! Previous to this enhancement being available, the Azure platform maintained fabric resource reservations for VMs, even in a shutdown state, to ensure consistent resource availability when starting those VMs in the future.  And, this meant that VMs had to be exported and completely deprovisioned when not in use to avoid compute charges. In this article, I'll provide more details on the scenarios that this enhancement best fits, and I'll also review the new options and considerations that we now have for performing safe shutdowns of Windows Azure VMs. Which scenarios does the new enhancement best fit? Being able to easily shutdown VMs from the Windows Azure Management Portal without continued compute charges is a great enhancement for certain cloud use cases, such as: On-demand dev/test/lab environments - Freely start and stop lab VMs so that they are only accumulating compute charges when being actively used.  "Bursting" load-balanced web applications - Provision a number of load-balanced VMs, but keep the minimum number of VMs running to support "normal" loads. Easily start-up the remaining VMs only when needed to support peak loads. Disaster Recovery - Start-up "cold" VMs when needed to recover from disaster scenarios. BUT ... there is a consideration to keep in mind when using the Windows Azure Management Portal to shutdown VMs: although performing a VM shutdown via the Windows Azure Management Portal causes that VM to no longer accumulate compute charges, it also deallocates the VM from fabric resources to which it was previously assigned.  These fabric resources include compute resources such as virtual CPU cores and memory, as well as network resources, such as IP addresses.  This means that when the VM is later started after being shutdown from the portal, the VM could be assigned a different IP address or placed on a different compute node within the fabric. In some cases, you may want to shutdown VMs using the old approach, where fabric resource assignments are maintained while the VM is in a shutdown state.  Specifically, you may wish to do this when temporarily shutting down or restarting a "7x24" VM as part of a maintenance activity.  Good news - you can still revert back to the old VM shutdown behavior when necessary by using the alternate VM shutdown approaches listed below.  Let's walk through each approach for performing a VM Shutdown action on Windows Azure so that we can understand the benefits and considerations of each... How many ways can I shutdown a VM? In Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, there's three general ways that can be used to safely shutdown VMs: Shutdown VM via Windows Azure Management Portal Shutdown Guest Operating System inside the VM Stop VM via Windows PowerShell using Windows Azure PowerShell Module Although each of these options performs a safe shutdown of the guest operation system and the VM itself, each option handles the VM shutdown end state differently. Shutdown VM via Windows Azure Management Portal When clicking the Shutdown button at the bottom of the Virtual Machines page in the Windows Azure Management Portal, the VM is safely shutdown and "deallocated" from fabric resources.  Shutdown button on Virtual Machines page in Windows Azure Management Portal  When the shutdown process completes, the VM will be shown on the Virtual Machines page with a "Stopped ( Deallocated )" status as shown in the figure below. Virtual Machine in a "Stopped (Deallocated)" Status "Deallocated" means that the VM configuration is no longer being actively associated with fabric resources, such as virtual CPUs, memory and networks. In this state, the VM will not continue to allocate compute charges, but since fabric resources are deallocated, the VM could receive a different internal IP address ( called "Dynamic IPs" or "DIPs" in Windows Azure ) the next time it is started.  TIP: If you are leveraging this shutdown option and consistency of DIPs is important to applications running inside your VMs, you should consider using virtual networks with your VMs.  Virtual networks permit you to assign a specific IP Address Space for use with VMs that are assigned to that virtual network.  As long as you start VMs in the same order in which they were originally provisioned, each VM should be reassigned the same DIP that it was previously using. What about consistency of External IP Addresses? Great question! External IP addresses ( called "Virtual IPs" or "VIPs" in Windows Azure ) are associated with the cloud service in which one or more Windows Azure VMs are running.  As long as at least 1 VM inside a cloud service remains in a "Running" state, the VIP assigned to a cloud service will be preserved.  If all VMs inside a cloud service are in a "Stopped ( Deallocated )" status, then the cloud service may receive a different VIP when VMs are next restarted. TIP: If consistency of VIPs is important for the cloud services in which you are running VMs, consider keeping one VM inside each cloud service in the alternate VM shutdown state listed below to preserve the VIP associated with the cloud service. Shutdown Guest Operating System inside the VM When performing a Guest OS shutdown or restart ( ie., a shutdown or restart operation initiated from the Guest OS running inside the VM ), the VM configuration will not be deallocated from fabric resources. In the figure below, the VM has been shutdown from within the Guest OS and is shown with a "Stopped" VM status rather than the "Stopped ( Deallocated )" VM status that was shown in the previous figure. Note that it may require a few minutes for the Windows Azure Management Portal to reflect that the VM is in a "Stopped" state in this scenario, because we are performing an OS shutdown inside the VM rather than through an Azure management endpoint. Virtual Machine in a "Stopped" Status VMs shown in a "Stopped" status will continue to accumulate compute charges, because fabric resources are still being reserved for these VMs.  However, this also means that DIPs and VIPs are preserved for VMs in this state, so you don't have to worry about VMs and cloud services getting different IP addresses when they are started in the future. Stop VM via Windows PowerShell In the latest version of the Windows Azure PowerShell Module, a new -StayProvisioned parameter has been added to the Stop-AzureVM cmdlet. This new parameter provides the flexibility to choose the VM configuration end result when stopping VMs using PowerShell: When running the Stop-AzureVM cmdlet without the -StayProvisioned parameter specified, the VM will be safely stopped and deallocated; that is, the VM will be left in a "Stopped ( Deallocated )" status just like the end result when a VM Shutdown operation is performed via the Windows Azure Management Portal.  When running the Stop-AzureVM cmdlet with the -StayProvisioned parameter specified, the VM will be safely stopped but fabric resource reservations will be preserved; that is the VM will be left in a "Stopped" status just like the end result when performing a Guest OS shutdown operation. So, with PowerShell, you can choose how Windows Azure should handle VM configuration and fabric resource reservations when stopping VMs on a case-by-case basis. TIP: It's important to note that the -StayProvisioned parameter is only available in the latest version of the Windows Azure PowerShell Module.  So, if you've previously downloaded this module, be sure to download and install the latest version to get this new functionality. Want to Learn More about Windows Azure Infrastructure Services? To learn more about Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, be sure to check-out these additional FREE resources: Become our next "Early Expert"! Complete the Early Experts "Cloud Quest" and build a multi-VM lab network in the cloud for FREE!  Build some cool scenarios! Check out our list of over 20+ Step-by-Step Lab Guides based on key scenarios that IT Pros are implementing on Windows Azure Infrastructure Services TODAY!  Looking forward to seeing you in the Cloud! - Keith Build Your Lab! Download Windows Server 2012 Don’t Have a Lab? Build Your Lab in the Cloud with Windows Azure Virtual Machines Want to Get Certified? Join our Windows Server 2012 "Early Experts" Study Group

  Read the article

• Fragmented Log files could be slowing down your database

  - by Fatherjack

  Something that is sometimes forgotten by a lot of DBAs is the fact that database log files get fragmented in the same way that you get fragmentation in a data file. The cause is very different but the effect is the same – too much effort reading and writing data. Data files get fragmented as data is changed through normal system activity, INSERTs, UPDATEs and DELETEs cause fragmentation and most experienced DBAs are monitoring their indexes for fragmentation and dealing with it accordingly. However, you don’t hear about so many working on their log files. How can a log file get fragmented? I’m glad you asked. When you create a database there are at least two files created on the disk storage; an mdf for the data and an ldf for the log file (you can also have ndf files for extra data storage but that’s off topic for now). It is wholly possible to have more than one log file but in most cases there is little point in creating more than one as the log file is written to in a ‘wrap-around’ method (more on that later). When a log file is created at the time that a database is created the file is actually sub divided into a number of virtual log files (VLFs). The number and size of these VLFs depends on the size chosen for the log file. VLFs are also created in the space added to a log file when a log file growth event takes place. Do you have your log files set to auto grow? Then you have potentially been introducing many VLFs into your log file. Let’s get to see how many VLFs we have in a brand new database. USE master GO CREATE DATABASE VLF_Test ON ( NAME = VLF_Test, FILENAME = 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.ROCK_2008\MSSQL\DATA\VLF_Test.mdf', SIZE = 100, MAXSIZE = 500, FILEGROWTH = 50 ) LOG ON ( NAME = VLF_Test_Log, FILENAME = 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.ROCK_2008\MSSQL\DATA\VLF_Test_log.ldf', SIZE = 5MB, MAXSIZE = 250MB, FILEGROWTH = 5MB ); go USE VLF_Test go DBCC LOGINFO; The results of this are firstly a new database is created with specified files sizes and the the DBCC LOGINFO results are returned to the script editor. The DBCC LOGINFO results have plenty of interesting information in them but lets first note there are 4 rows of information, this relates to the fact that 4 VLFs have been created in the log file. The values in the FileSize column are the sizes of each VLF in bytes, you will see that the last one to be created is slightly larger than the others. So, a 5MB log file has 4 VLFs of roughly 1.25 MB. Lets alter the CREATE DATABASE script to create a log file that’s a bit bigger and see what happens. Alter the code above so that the log file details are replaced by LOG ON ( NAME = VLF_Test_Log, FILENAME = 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.ROCK_2008\MSSQL\DATA\VLF_Test_log.ldf', SIZE = 1GB, MAXSIZE = 25GB, FILEGROWTH = 1GB ); With a bigger log file specified we get more VLFs What if we make it bigger again? LOG ON ( NAME = VLF_Test_Log, FILENAME = 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.ROCK_2008\MSSQL\DATA\VLF_Test_log.ldf', SIZE = 5GB, MAXSIZE = 250GB, FILEGROWTH = 5GB ); This time we see more VLFs are created within our log file. We now have our 5GB log file comprised of 16 files of 320MB each. In fact these sizes fall into all the ranges that control the VLF creation criteria – what a coincidence! The rules that are followed when a log file is created or has it’s size increased are pretty basic. If the file growth is lower than 64MB then 4 VLFs are created If the growth is between 64MB and 1GB then 8 VLFs are created If the growth is greater than 1GB then 16 VLFs are created. Now the potential for chaos comes if the default values and settings for log file growth are used. By default a database log file gets a 1MB log file with unlimited growth in steps of 10%. The database we just created is 6 MB, let’s add some data and see what happens. USE vlf_test go -- we need somewhere to put the data so, a table is in order IF OBJECT_ID('A_Table') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE A_Table go CREATE TABLE A_Table ( Col_A int IDENTITY, Col_B CHAR(8000) ) GO -- Let's check the state of the log file -- 4 VLFs found EXECUTE ('DBCC LOGINFO'); go -- We can go ahead and insert some data and then check the state of the log file again INSERT A_Table (col_b) SELECT TOP 500 REPLICATE('a',2000) FROM sys.columns AS sc, sys.columns AS sc2 GO -- insert 500 rows and we get 22 VLFs EXECUTE ('DBCC LOGINFO'); go -- Let's insert more rows INSERT A_Table (col_b) SELECT TOP 2000 REPLICATE('a',2000) FROM sys.columns AS sc, sys.columns AS sc2 GO 10 -- insert 2000 rows, in 10 batches and we suddenly have 107 VLFs EXECUTE ('DBCC LOGINFO'); Well, that escalated quickly! Our log file is split, internally, into 107 fragments after a few thousand inserts. The same happens with any logged transactions, I just chose to illustrate this with INSERTs. Having too many VLFs can cause performance degradation at times of database start up, log backup and log restore operations so it’s well worth keeping a check on this property. How do we prevent excessive VLF creation? Creating the database with larger files and also with larger growth steps and actively choosing to grow your databases rather than leaving it to the Auto Grow event can make sure that the growths are made with a size that is optimal. How do we resolve a situation of a database with too many VLFs? This process needs to be done when the database is under little or no stress so that you don’t affect system users. The steps are: BACKUP LOG YourDBName TO YourBackupDestinationOfChoice Shrink the log file to its smallest possible size DBCC SHRINKFILE(FileNameOfTLogHere, TRUNCATEONLY) * Re-size the log file to the size you want it to, taking in to account your expected needs for the coming months or year. ALTER DATABASE YourDBName MODIFY FILE ( NAME = FileNameOfTLogHere, SIZE = TheSizeYouWantItToBeIn_MB) * – If you don’t know the file name of your log file then run sp_helpfile while you are connected to the database that you want to work on and you will get the details you need. The resize step can take quite a while This is already detailed far better than I can explain it by Kimberley Tripp in her blog 8-Steps-to-better-Transaction-Log-throughput.aspx. The result of this will be a log file with a VLF count according to the bullet list above. Knowing when VLFs are being created By complete coincidence while I have been writing this blog (it’s been quite some time from it’s inception to going live) Jonathan Kehayias from SQLSkills.com has written a great article on how to track database file growth using Event Notifications and Service Broker. I strongly recommend taking a look at it as this is going to catch any sneaky auto grows that take place and let you know about them right away. Hassle free monitoring of VLFs If you are lucky or wise enough to be using SQL Monitor or another monitoring tool that let’s you write your own custom metrics then you can keep an eye on this very easily. There is a custom metric for VLFs (written by Stuart Ainsworth) already on the site and there are some others there are very useful so take a moment or two to look around while you are there. Resources MSDN – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms179355(v=sql.105).aspx Kimberly Tripp from SQLSkills.com – http://www.sqlskills.com/BLOGS/KIMBERLY/post/8-Steps-to-better-Transaction-Log-throughput.aspx Thomas LaRock at Simple-Talk.com – http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/database-administration/monitoring-sql-server-virtual-log-file-fragmentation/ Disclosure I am a Friend of Red Gate. This means that I am more than likely to say good things about Red Gate DBA and Developer tools. No matter how awesome I make them sound, take the time to compare them with other products before you contact the Red Gate sales team to make your order.

  Read the article

• Dynamically creating a Generic Type at Runtime

  - by Rick Strahl

  I learned something new today. Not uncommon, but it's a core .NET runtime feature I simply did not know although I know I've run into this issue a few times and worked around it in other ways. Today there was no working around it and a few folks on Twitter pointed me in the right direction. The question I ran into is: How do I create a type instance of a generic type when I have dynamically acquired the type at runtime? Yup it's not something that you do everyday, but when you're writing code that parses objects dynamically at runtime it comes up from time to time. In my case it's in the bowels of a custom JSON parser. After some thought triggered by a comment today I realized it would be fairly easy to implement two-way Dictionary parsing for most concrete dictionary types. I could use a custom Dictionary serialization format that serializes as an array of key/value objects. Basically I can use a custom type (that matches the JSON signature) to hold my parsed dictionary data and then add it to the actual dictionary when parsing is complete. Generic Types at Runtime One issue that came up in the process was how to figure out what type the Dictionary<K,V> generic parameters take. Reflection actually makes it fairly easy to figure out generic types at runtime with code like this: if (arrayType.GetInterface("IDictionary") != null) { if (arrayType.IsGenericType) { var keyType = arrayType.GetGenericArguments()[0]; var valueType = arrayType.GetGenericArguments()[1]; … } } The GetArrayType method gets passed a type instance that is the array or array-like object that is rendered in JSON as an array (which includes IList, IDictionary, IDataReader and a few others). In my case the type passed would be something like Dictionary<string, CustomerEntity>. So I know what the parent container class type is. Based on the the container type using it's then possible to use GetGenericTypeArguments() to retrieve all the generic types in sequential order of definition (ie. string, CustomerEntity). That's the easy part. Creating a Generic Type and Providing Generic Parameters at RunTime The next problem is how do I get a concrete type instance for the generic type? I know what the type name and I have a type instance is but it's generic, so how do I get a type reference to keyvaluepair<K,V> that is specific to the keyType and valueType above? Here are a couple of things that come to mind but that don't work (and yes I tried that unsuccessfully first): Type elementType = typeof(keyvalue<keyType, valueType>); Type elementType = typeof(keyvalue<typeof(keyType), typeof(valueType)>); The problem is that this explicit syntax expects a type literal not some dynamic runtime value, so both of the above won't even compile. I turns out the way to create a generic type at runtime is using a fancy bit of syntax that until today I was completely unaware of: Type elementType = typeof(keyvalue<,>).MakeGenericType(keyType, valueType); The key is the type(keyvalue<,>) bit which looks weird at best. It works however and produces a non-generic type reference. You can see the difference between the full generic type and the non-typed (?) generic type in the debugger: The nonGenericType doesn't show any type specialization, while the elementType type shows the string, CustomerEntity (truncated above) in the type name. Once the full type reference exists (elementType) it's then easy to create an instance. In my case the parser parses through the JSON and when it completes parsing the value/object it creates a new keyvalue<T,V> instance. Now that I know the element type that's pretty trivial with: // Objects start out null until we find the opening tag resultObject = Activator.CreateInstance(elementType); Here the result object is picked up by the JSON array parser which creates an instance of the child object (keyvalue<K,V>) and then parses and assigns values from the JSON document using the types  key/value property signature. Internally the parser then takes each individually parsed item and adds it to a list of  List<keyvalue<K,V>> items. Parsing through a Generic type when you only have Runtime Type Information When parsing of the JSON array is done, the List needs to be turned into a defacto Dictionary<K,V>. This should be easy since I know that I'm dealing with an IDictionary, and I know the generic types for the key and value. The problem is again though that this needs to happen at runtime which would mean using several Convert.ChangeType() calls in the code to dynamically cast at runtime. Yuk. In the end I decided the easier and probably only slightly slower way to do this is a to use the dynamic type to collect the items and assign them to avoid all the dynamic casting madness: else if (IsIDictionary) { IDictionary dict = Activator.CreateInstance(arrayType) as IDictionary; foreach (dynamic item in items) { dict.Add(item.key, item.value); } return dict; } This code creates an instance of the generic dictionary type first, then loops through all of my custom keyvalue<K,V> items and assigns them to the actual dictionary. By using Dynamic here I can side step all the explicit type conversions that would be required in the three highlighted areas (not to mention that this nested method doesn't have access to the dictionary item generic types here). Static <- -> Dynamic Dynamic casting in a static language like C# is a bitch to say the least. This is one of the few times when I've cursed static typing and the arcane syntax that's required to coax types into the right format. It works but it's pretty nasty code. If it weren't for dynamic that last bit of code would have been a pretty ugly as well with a bunch of Convert.ChangeType() calls to litter the code. Fortunately this type of type convulsion is rather rare and reserved for system level code. It's not every day that you create a string to object parser after all :-)© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in .NET  CSharp   Tweet (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

  Read the article

• Video on Architecture and Code Quality using Visual Studio 2012&ndash;interview with Marcel de Vries and Terje Sandstrom by Adam Cogan

  - by terje

  Find the video HERE. Adam Cogan did a great Web TV interview with Marcel de Vries and myself on the topics of architecture and code quality.  It was real fun participating in this session.  Although we know each other from the MVP ALM community,  Marcel, Adam and I haven’t worked together before. It was very interesting to see how we agreed on so many terms, and how alike we where thinking.  The basics of ensuring you have a good architecture and how you could document it is one thing.  Also, the same agreement on the importance of having a high quality code base, and how we used the Visual Studio 2012 tools, and some others (NDepend for example)  to measure and ensure that the code quality was where it should be.  As the tools, methods and thinking popped up during the interview it was a lot of “Hey !  I do that too!”.  The tools are not only for “after the fact” work, but we use them during the coding.  That way the tools becomes an integrated part of our coding work, and helps us to find issues we may have overlooked.  The video has a bunch of call outs, pinpointing important things to remember. These are also listed on the corresponding web page. I haven’t seen that touch before, but really liked this way of doing it – it makes it much easier to spot the highlights.  Titus Maclaren and Raj Dhatt from SSW have done a terrific job producing this video.  And thanks to Lei Xu for doing the camera and recording job.  Thanks guys ! Also, if you are at TechEd Amsterdam 2012, go and listen to Adam Cogan in his session on “A modern architecture review: Using the new code review tools” Friday 29th, 10.15-11.30 and Marcel de Vries session on “Intellitrace, what is it and how can I use it to my benefit” Wednesday 27th, 5-6.15 The highlights points out some important practices.  I’ll elaborate on a few of them here: Add instructions on how to compile the solution.  You do this by adding a text file with instructions to the solution, and keep it under source control.  These instructions should contain what is needed on top of a standard install of Visual Studio.  I do a lot of code reviews, and more often that not, I am not even able to compile the program, because they have used some tool or library that needs to be installed.  The same applies to any new developer who enters into the team, so do this to increase your productivity when the team changes, or a team member switches computer. Don’t forget to document what you have to configure on the computer, the IIS being a common one. The more automatic you can do this, the better.  Use NuGet to get down libraries. When the text document gets more than say, half a page, with a bunch of different things to do, convert it into a powershell script instead.  The metrics warning levels.  These are very conservatively set by Microsoft.  You rarely see anything but green, and besides, you should have color scales for each of the metrics.  I have a blog post describing a more appropriate set of levels, based on both research work and industry “best practices”.  The essential limits are: Cyclomatic complexity and coupling:  Higher numbers are worse On method levels: Green :  From 0 to 10 Yellow:  From 10 to 20  (some say 15).   Acceptable, but have a look to see if there is something unneeded here. Red: From 20 to 40:   Action required, get these down. Bleeding Red: Above 40   This is the real red alert.  Immediate action!  (My invention, as people have asked what do I do when I have cyclomatic complexity of 150.  The only answer I could think of was: RUN! ) Maintainability index:  Lower numbers are worse, scale from 0 to 100. On method levels: Green:  60 to 100 Yellow:  40 – 60.    You will always have methods here too, accept the higher ones, take a look at those who are down to the lower limit.  Check up against the other metrics.) Red:  20 – 40:  Action required, fix these. Bleeding red:  Below 20.  Immediate action required. When doing metrics analysis, you should leave the generated code out.  You do this by adding attributes, unfortunately Microsoft has “forgotten” to add these to all their stuff, so you might have to add them to some of the code.  It most cases it can be done so that it is not overwritten by a new round of code generation.  Take a look a my blog post here for details on how to do that. Class level metrics might also be useful, at least for coupling and maintenance.  But it is much more difficult to set any fixed limits on those.  Any metric aggregations on higher level tend to be pretty useless, as the number of methods vary pretty much, and there are little science on what number of methods can be regarded as good or bad.  NDepend have a recommendation, but they say it may vary too.  And in these days of data binding, the number might be pretty high, as properties counts as methods.  However, if you take the worst case situations, classes with more than 20 methods are suspicious, and coupling and cyclomatic complexity go red above 20, so any classes with more than 20x20 = 400 for these measures should be checked over. In the video we mention the SOLID principles, coined by “Uncle Bob” (Richard Martin). One of them, the Dependency Inversion principle we discuss in the video.  It is important to note that this principle is NOT on whether you should use a Dependency Inversion Container or not, it is about how you design the interfaces and interactions between your classes.  The Dependency Inversion Container is just one technique which is based on this principle, but which main purpose is to isolate things you would like to change at runtime, for example if you implement a plug in architecture.  Overuse of a Dependency Inversion Container is however, NOT a good thing.  It should be used for a purpose and not as a general DI solution.  The general DI solution and thinking however is useful far beyond the DIC.   You should always “program to an abstraction”, and not to the concreteness.  We also talk a bit about the GRASP patterns, a term coined by Craig Larman in his book Applying UML and design patterns. GRASP patterns stand for General Responsibility Assignment Software Patterns and describe fundamental principles of object design and responsibility assignment.  What I find great with these patterns is that they is another way to focus on the responsibility of a class.  One of the things I most often found that is broken in software designs, is that the class lack responsibility, and as a result there are a lot of classes mucking around in the internals of the other classes.  We also discuss the term “Code Smells”.  This term was invented by Kent Beck and Martin Fowler when they worked with Fowler’s “Refactoring” book. A code smell is a set of “bad” coding practices, which are the drivers behind a corresponding set of refactorings.  Here is a good list of the smells, and their corresponding refactor patterns. See also this.

  Read the article

• Prioritizing Product Features

  - by Robert May

  A very common task in Agile Environments is prioritization.  Teams that are functioning well will prioritize new features, old features, the backlog, and any other source of stories for the team, and they’ll do it regularly. Not all teams are good at prioritizing according to the real return on investment that building stories will yield to the company.  This is unfortunate.  Too often, teams end up building features that are less valuable, and everyone seems to know it except perhaps the product owner!  Most features built into software are never even used.  Clearly, not much return for features that go unused. So how does a company avoid building features that add little value to the company?  This is a tough question to answer, but usually, this prioritization starts at the top with the executives of the company.  After all, they’re responsible for the overall vision of the company. Here’s what I recommend: Know your market. Know your customers and users. Know where you’re going and what you want to achieve. Implement the Vision Know Your Market We often see companies that don’t know their market.  Personally, I’m surprised by this.  These companies don’t know who their competitors are, don’t know what features make their product desirable in the market, and in many cases, get by with saying, “I’ve been doing this for XX years.  I know what the market wants!”  In many cases, they equate “marketing” with “advertising” and don’t understand the difference. This is almost never true.  Good companies will spend significant amounts of time and money finding out who they’re competing against and what makes their competitors successful in the marketplace.  Good companies understand that marketing involves more than just advertising.  Often, marketing is mostly research and analysis, not sales.  Until you understand your market, you cannot know what features will give you the best return on your investment dollar. Good companies have a marketing department and can answer the next important step which is to know your customers and your users. Know your Customers and Users First, note that I included both customers and users.  They’re often not the same thing.  Users use the product that you build.  Customers buy the product that you build.  It’s a subtle difference, but too often, I’ve seen companies that focus exclusively on one or the other and are not successful simply because they ignore an important part of the group. If your company is doing appropriate marketing, you know that these are two different aspects of your product and that both deserve attention to have a product that is successful in your target market.  Your marketing department should be spending a lot of time understanding these personas and then conveying that information to the company. I’m always surprised when development teams think that they can build a product that people want to use without understanding the users of that product.  Developers think differently than most people in the world.  They know what the computer is doing.  The computer isn’t magic to them.  So when they assume that they know how to build something, they bring with them quite a bit of baggage.  Never assume that you know your customer unless you’re regularly having interaction with them.  Also, don’t just leave this to Marketing or Product Management.  Take them time to get your developers out with the customers as well.  Developers are very smart people, and often, seeing how someone uses their software inspires them to make a much better product. Very often, because the users and customers aren’t know, teams will spend a significant amount of time building apps that are super flexible and configurable so that any possible combination of feature can be used.  This demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of the customer.  Most configuration questions can quickly be answered by talking to the customer.  In most cases, if your software requires significant setup and configuration before its usable, you probably don’t know your customers and users very well. Until you know your customers, you cannot know what features will be most valuable to your customers and you cannot build those features in a way that your customers can use. Know Where You’re Going and What You Want to Achieve Many companies suffer from not having a plan.  Executives will tell the team to make them a plan.  The team, not knowing their market and customers and users, will come up with a plan that doesn’t reflect reality and doesn’t consider ROI.  Management then wonders why the product is doing poorly in the market place. Instead of leaving this up to the teams, as executives, work with Marketing to understand what broad categories of features will sell the most product in the marketplace.  Then, once you’ve determined that, give this vision to the team and let them run with it.  Revise the vision as needed, but avoid changing streams frequently.  Sure, sometimes you need to, but often, executives will change priorities many times a month, leading to nothing more than confusion.  If the team has a vision, they’ll be able to execute that vision far better than they could otherwise. By knowing what products are most important, you can set budgetary goals and guidelines that will help you achieve the vision that was created. Implement the Vision Creating the vision is often where the general executives stop participating in the plan.  The team is responsible for implementing that vision.  Executives should attend showcases and and should remain aware of the progress that the team is making towards meeting the vision, however. Once a broad vision has been created, the team should break that vision down into minimal market features (MMF).  These MMFs should be sized using story points so that, using the team’s velocity, an estimated cost can be determined for each feature.  The product management team should then try to quantify the relative value of the MMFs based on customer feedback and interviews.  Once the value and cost of creating the feature is understood, a return on investment can be calculated.  The features should then be prioritized with the MMF’s that have the highest value and lowest cost rising to the top of features to implement.  Don’t let politics get in the way! Once the MMF’s have been prioritized, they should go through release planning to schedule them for implementation. Conclusion By having a good grasp on the strategy of the company, your Agile teams can be much more effective.  Each and every story the team is implementing will roll up into features that matter to the company and provide ROI to them.  The steps outlined in this post should be repeated on a regular basis.  I recommend reviewing them at least once per quarter to make sure that the vision hasn’t shifted and that the teams are still working on what matters most to the company. Technorati Tags: Agile,Product Owner,ROI

  Read the article

• Speaker at the German Visual FoxPro Developer Conference 2004

  The following is an excerpt from the UniversalThread conference coverage of the German Visual FoxPro Developer Conference 2004 written by Hans-Otto Lochmann, Armin Neudert and myself. TRACK Active FoxPro Pages Back in 1996 Peter Herzog invented a FoxPro based solution to provide intranet capabilities for one of his customers. Nearly at the same time Rick Strahl had the same task and created WestWind Web Connection (WWWC). The aspect that developers have to have a full Visual FoxPro development environment to create WWWC solutions was the starting point of a "personal sportive competition" of Peter to write his own solution. But the main aspect has to be that it doesn't rely on a full VFP version in order to run. The VFP runtime should enough and the source code has to be compiled and interpreted on the fly. So, as Microsoft released Active Server Pages a name for Peter's solution was found: Active FoxPro Pages (AFP). During the years many drawbacks, design aspects as well as technological hassles forced ProLib Software to refactor the product. This way many limits like DCOM configuration, file-based information transfer between Web server and AFP, missing features (like upload forms or other Web servers than IIS) and extensibility were eliminated. As a consequence ProLib Software decided to rewrite Active FoxPro Pages in mid of 2002 completely. Christof Wollenhaupt, before his marriage known as Christof Lange, and Jochen Kirstätter had to solve this task. AFP 3.0 was officially released at German Devcon in November 2002. Today AFP has six distributors world-wide and there is a lot more information available online than before version 3.0. Directly after a short welcome speech by Rainer Becker, Jochen Kirstätter - aka JoKi - opened today's AFP track and introduced the basic concepts how Active FoxPro Pages works in general, explained the AFP terminilogy and every single component, and presented a small Walk-Through about how to write an AFP-based Web solution. Actually his presentation slides themselves were an AFP Web application. This way it was easy to integrate accompanying AFP samples on the fly. Additionally it was shown that no Visual FoxPro development environment is needed to create a Web application. A simple text editor like NotePad or any WYSIWYG editor on the market is usable to fullfil customer's requirements.Welcome at least two new speakers - Nina Schwanzer and Bernhard Reiter. Both are working at ProLib Software and this year's conference is their first time as speakers. And they did their job very well. The whole session was kind of a "ping pong" game and those two complemented each other to keep the audience in tension. First, they described typical requirements a modern desktop application should fullfil - online registration and activation, auto-update capabilities, or even frontend to administer a Web application on a remote system via internet, and explained how possible solutions like Web Services (using the SOAP interface), DCOM, and even .NET might solve those requirements. But any of those ways has different drawbacks like complicated installation or configuration, or extraordinary download sizes. Next, they introduced a technology they developed and used in a customer's project: Active FoxPro Pages Remote Procedure Call (AFP RPC). [...]   In the next session JoKi described how to extend Active FoxPro Pages. On the one hand AFP provides a plugin interface, and on the other hand any addon for Visual FoxPro might be usable as well. During the first half he spoke about the plugin interface and wrote live a new AFP extension - the Devcon plugin. Later he questioned any former step and showed that a single AFP document may solve the problem as well. So, developing extensions is only interesting if they are re-usable and generic. At the end he talked about multiple interfaces for the same business logic. For instance plain VFP class, COM server and .NET integration. Currently there are several specialized AFP extensions for sending mail, for using cryptographic routines (ie. based on .NET classes), or enhanced methods to handle HTML/XML strings.Rainer Becker and Peter Herzog introduced a new development for Visual Extend (VFX) - an AFP form builder. With this builder creating an AFP Web form designed with Visual FoxPro's form designer was a matter of seconds. The builder itself is currently in pre-release status and will be part of the VFX framework in the future. It was very impressive to see that the whole design of a form as well as most parts of its functionality were exported to a combination of HTML, JavaScript and Active FoxPro Pages. At half-time Jürgen "wOOdy" Wondzinski and JoKi changed places with Rainer and Peter, and presented some Web solutions in AFP. [...] Visual FoxPro 9.0 und Linux Is Linux still a topic for Visual FoxPro developers based on the activities during this year? In his session Jochen Kirstätter - aka JoKi - went not through the technical steps and requirements on how to setup and run FoxPro on a Linux client. Instead, he explained what Linux actually is, and talked about the high variety of distributions. In fact there are a lot of distributions around but since some several years there are some specialized ones available: Live Distributions (aka LiveCDs).The intension of LiveCDs is to run a full-featured Linux operating system on any personal computer directly from a bootable medium, like CD, DVD, or even USB memory stick, without installation on a hard disk. One of the first Linux LiveCDs was made by Klaus Knopper and is well-known as Knoppix. Today, many other LiveCDs are based on the concepts of Knoppix. During the session Jochen booted Morphix, a very light-weighted LiveCD, on his notebook, and actually showed the attendees that testing and playing around with Linux is absolutely easy. Running a text processing application swept away most of the contrary aspects the audience had. Okay, where is the part about FoxPro? Well, there are several scenarios a customer might require usage of Linux, and actually with all of them FoxPro could deal with. I guess that one of the more common ones is the situation that a customer has a heterogeneous intranet with Windows clients and Linux servers, i.e. Windows XP Professional and any Linux distribution on their servers. Even in this scenario there are two variants hidden! Why? Well, on the one hand there is a software package called Samba, that provides Windows server capabilities to a Linux system, and on the other hand there are several SQL servers for Linux, like PostgreSQL, DB2 and MySQL. Either way, FoxPro is able to deal with these scenarios, but you as developer have to know what you are talking about with your customers. And even if there's no Windows operating system, you are able to provide a FoxPro-based solution. Using the wine library - wine stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator - you are able to run your VFP applications on Linux clients, too; but not without reading VFP's EULA. Licenses were also part the session, and Jochen discussed the meaning of Open Source and its misunderstanding throughout most developers. Open Source does not mean that it's without a fee. Instead, it stands for access to the source code of an application or tool. And, VFP itself is one of the best samples to explain Open Source due to fact that since years, VFP is shipped with the xSource.zip archive. [...]

  Read the article

• Time Tracking on an Agile Team

  - by Stephen.Walther

  What’s the best way to handle time-tracking on an Agile team? Your gut reaction to this question might be to resist any type of time-tracking at all. After all, one of the principles of the Agile Manifesto is “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”.  Forcing the developers on your team to track the amount of time that they devote to completing stories or tasks might seem like useless bureaucratic red tape: an impediment to getting real work done. I completely understand this reaction. I’ve been required to use time-tracking software in the past to account for each hour of my workday. It made me feel like Fred Flintstone punching in at the quarry mine and not like a professional. Why You Really Do Need Time-Tracking There are, however, legitimate reasons to track time spent on stories even when you are a member of an Agile team.  First, if you are working with an outside client, you might need to track the number of hours spent on different stories for the purposes of billing. There might be no way to avoid time-tracking if you want to get paid. Second, the Product Owner needs to know when the work on a story has gone over the original time estimated for the story. The Product Owner is concerned with Return On Investment. If the team has gone massively overtime on a story, then the Product Owner has a legitimate reason to halt work on the story and reconsider the story’s business value. Finally, you might want to track how much time your team spends on different types of stories or tasks. For example, if your team is spending 75% of their time doing testing then you might need to bring in more testers. Or, if 10% of your team’s time is expended performing a software build at the end of each iteration then it is time to consider better ways of automating the build process. Time-Tracking in SonicAgile For these reasons, we added time-tracking as a feature to SonicAgile which is our free Agile Project Management tool. We were heavily influenced by Jeff Sutherland (one of the founders of Scrum) in the way that we implemented time-tracking (see his article http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com/2007/03/time-tracking-is-anti-scrum-what-do-you.html). In SonicAgile, time-tracking is disabled by default. If you want to use this feature then the project owner must enable time-tracking in Project Settings. You can choose to estimate using either days or hours. If you are estimating at the level of stories then it makes more sense to choose days. Otherwise, if you are estimating at the level of tasks then it makes more sense to use hours. After you enable time-tracking then you can assign three estimates to a story: Original Estimate – This is the estimate that you enter when you first create a story. You don’t change this estimate. Time Spent – This is the amount of time that you have already devoted to the story. You update the time spent on each story during your daily standup meeting. Time Left – This is the amount of time remaining to complete the story. Again, you update the time left during your daily standup meeting. So when you first create a story, you enter an original estimate that becomes the time left. During each daily standup meeting, you update the time spent and time left for each story on the Kanban. If you had perfect predicative power, then the original estimate would always be the same as the sum of the time spent and the time left. For example, if you predict that a story will take 5 days to complete then on day 3, the story should have 3 days spent and 2 days left. Unfortunately, never in the history of mankind has anyone accurately predicted the exact amount of time that it takes to complete a story. For this reason, SonicAgile does not update the time spent and time left automatically. Each day, during the daily standup, your team should update the time spent and time left for each story. For example, the following table shows the history of the time estimates for a story that was originally estimated to take 3 days but, eventually, takes 5 days to complete: Day Original Estimate Time Spent Time Left Day 1 3 days 0 days 3 days Day 2 3 days 1 day 2 days Day 3 3 days 2 days 2 days Day 4 3 days 3 days 2 days Day 5 3 days 4 days 0 days In the table above, everything goes as predicted until you reach day 3. On day 3, the team realizes that the work will require an additional two days. The situation does not improve on day 4. All of the sudden, on day 5, all of the remaining work gets done. Real work often follows this pattern. There are long periods when nothing gets done punctuated by occasional and unpredictable bursts of progress. We designed SonicAgile to make it as easy as possible to track the time spent and time left on a story. Detecting when a Story Goes Over the Original Estimate Sometimes, stories take much longer than originally estimated. There’s a surprise. For example, you discover that a new software component is incompatible with existing software components. Or, you discover that you have to go through a month-long certification process to finish a story. In those cases, the Product Owner has a legitimate reason to halt work on a story and re-evaluate the business value of the story. For example, the Product Owner discovers that a story will require weeks to implement instead of days, then the story might not be worth the expense. SonicAgile displays a warning on both the Backlog and the Kanban when the time spent on a story goes over the original estimate. An icon of a clock is displayed. Time-Tracking and Tasks Another optional feature of SonicAgile is tasks. If you enable Tasks in Project Settings then you can break stories into one or more tasks. You can perform time-tracking at the level of a story or at the level of a task. If you don’t break a story into tasks then you can enter the time left and time spent for the story. As soon as you break a story into tasks, then you can no longer enter the time left and time spent at the level of the story. Instead, the time left and time spent for a story is rolled up from its tasks. On the Kanban, you can see how the time left and time spent for each task gets rolled up into each story. The progress bar for the story is rolled up from the progress bars for each task. The original estimate is never rolled up – even when you break a story into tasks. A story’s original estimate is entered separately from the original estimates of each of the story’s tasks. Summary Not every Agile team can avoid time-tracking. You might be forced to track time to get paid, to detect when you are spending too much time on a particular story, or to track the amount of time that you are devoting to different types of tasks. We designed time-tracking in SonicAgile to require the least amount of work to track the information that you need. Time-tracking is an optional feature. If you enable time-tracking then you can track the original estimate, time left, and time spent for each story and task. You can use time-tracking with SonicAgile for free. Register at http://SonicAgile.com.

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, April 15, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, April 15, 2010New ProjectsApplication Logging Repository (ALR): The ALR is a light-weight logging framework that allows applications to log events and exceptions to a central repository.Arkane.FileProperties.DSS: Arkane.FileProperties.Dss is a library for parsing the file header of a .DSS file (as used by Olympus digital dictaphone systems) to obtain time, v...B in conTrol project: This project enables controling log-in and locking your workstation automatically, identifyng you bluetooth.DarkBook: DarkBook is a personal library project.Direct2D for Microsoft .Net: Direct2D, DirectWrite and Windows Imaging wrappers for .Net. This library allows to access Direct2D, DirectWrite and Windows Imaging Windows API f...DJ Ware: DJ Ware is an extensible music player with plugin support and innovative features to organize and explore music files. It is developed with C#, WPF...gpsMe: gpsMe is a Windows Mobile 6.x mapping solution allowing to place the user on a personnalized map. The screen requirements are VGA or WVGA but, you ...jErrorLog: jErrorLog is an error logging component for use in DotNet 2.0 or later applications. It can log error messages to any of the following: database, e...KEMET_API: Java Library (open - source). This library is a help to study egyptian hieroglyphs.Meadow: A web site project for a Swedish floorball team called Slackers. Home page built with ASP.NET 2.0, ASP.NET AJAX and SQL Server 2005.Mustang Math: Mustang Math makes it easier for young children to practice basic math facts on the computer. No keyboard or mouse required - just say the answer!...Net.Formats.oEmbed: oEmbed format implementation in c#. oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows...Normlize O/R Mapper: Open source O/RM tool that participates with traditional inheritance object models as well as Hibernate/nHibernate style class shells. As I have t...N-Twill Twitter Client for VB.NET: Proyecto de cliente twitter hecho con la libreria TwitterVB2 y hecho en VB.net 2008.SIQM: Spatial Information Quality Management Toolset TIMETABLEASY Web: Under developmentTweetSharp: TweetSharp is a complete .NET library for micro-blogging platforms that allows you to write short and sweet expressions that fly to Twitter, Yammer...UISandbox: UISandbox is a sample C# source code showing how to deal with plugins requiring sandbox, when those plugins must interact with WPF application inte...WinForm SharePoint Web Part Manager: The SharePoint Web Part Manager is a WinForm tool using the SharePoint object model that enables developers and power users to add, update, delete,...WoW Character Viewer: View your World of Warcraft character (or anyone else's character), using this application. Written using Visual Basic Express 2008, then ported t...Xrns2XMod: Xrns2XMod converts from Renoise format (xrns) to mod or xm, which are more compatible formats playable from xmplay or vlc.New ReleasesArkane.FileProperties.DSS: 1.0 stable release: Executables and merge module for 1.0. (See documentation.)Bluetooth Radar: Version 2.0: Add IrDA reference for Bluetooth sending using Obex Add Project icon Add Bluetooth detection mode (Auto close application is there is no blueto...BUtil: BUtil 5.0 Alpha: Backup tasks adding.... in progressChronos WPF: Chronos v1.0 RC 1: Chronos v1.0 RC 1. Development will be feature frozen after this release, only bug fixes will be allowed. Updated nRoute assembly to v0.4 (http:...clipShow: Version 2.5: Release that addresses the canonical syntax issues in search discoverd by Tschachim (thanks again!). Also, the play list and play all menu items s...DarkBook: DarkBook alpha: Hi, here comes the alpha version of Darkbook. It has all the functions already but is still in developing. I hope it's helpful for you, at least it...DirectQ: Release 1.8.3a: Improvements to 1.8.2, which will be shortly be removed. This replaces the original 1.8.3 release from earlier today which had some late-breaking ...Effect Custom Tool for Visual Studio: Effect Custom Tool v1.1: Effect Custom Tool for Visual Studio is a visual studio 2008 extension that helps you generate c# classes from effect (*.fx) files for use with Xna...Folder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 1.4.3: This is the latest version of Folder Bookmarks (1.4.3), with general improvements. It has an installer - it will create a directory 'CPascoe' in My...gpsMe: gpsMe v0.3: Required Hardware Windows Mobile 6 .Net Compact Framework 3.5 integrated gps device VGA or WVGA screen (normally works on others)IST435: Lab 4 - Enterprise Level CMS with DotNetNuke: Lab 4 - Enterprise Level CMS with DotNetNukeThis is the "starter kit" that you must base your Lab 4 on. This lab must be completed in-class.Mouse Jiggler: MouseJiggle-1.1: 1.1 release of Mouse Jiggler, now with x64 compatibility and the ability to start jiggling on run with the --jiggle or -j command-line switch.Mustang Math: MustangMath.exe: This is a quick and dirty "0.1" prototype to demonstrate the speech recognition idea. It starts asking you questions automatically on launch and k...MvcContrib: a Codeplex Foundation project: 2.0.36.0 for MVC2 (RTW): Please see the Change Log for a complete list of changes. MVC BootCamp Description of the releases: MvcContrib.Release.zip MvcContrib.dll MvcC...Nito.LINQ: Beta (v0.3): New features for this release: Several new supported platforms (see below). PDBs that are source-indexed to the appropriate CodePlex changeset. ...OpenIdPortableArea: 0.1.0.2 OpenIdPortableArea: OpenIdPortableArea.Release: DotNetOpenAuth.dll DotNetOpenAuth.xml MvcContrib.dll MvcContrib.xml OpenIdPortableArea.dll OpenIdPortableAre...PokeIn Comet Ajax Library: PokeIn Sample with Library v0.2: New version of PokeIn library with sample. v0.2 There are new features in this release and no bug detected yet.Project Tru Tiên: Elements-test V1-fix (v2): Là EL test được fix tiếp theo bản fix V1, tạm gọi đây là bản fix V2 của ELtest Trong bản fix này EL được fix thêm vụ Quest, Quest chỉnh sửa đúng t...Rule 18 - Love your clipboard: Rule 18: This is the third public beta for the first version of Rule 18. This version has been updated to support Visual Studio 2010 RTM and .NET 4.0 RTM. ...SevenZipSharp: SevenZipSharp 0.62: Added: Extraction from SFX archives. Now it is possible to unrar RAR self-extractors, unzip ZIP self-extractors, etc. Extraction from DOC, XLS, (...SharePoint Labs: SPLab3001A-FRA-Level200: SPLab3001A-FRA-Level200 This SharePoint Lab will teach the persistence object layer that SharePoint uses to centraly store configuration data and o...TTXPathNavigator: TTXPathNavigator for VS2010: Version for Visual Studio 2010turing machine simulator: SDS: SDS documentVecDraw: VecDraw_0.2.25: Alpha release for test purposesWinForm SharePoint Web Part Manager: Beta 1: First release of the WinForm SharePoitn web part manager toolXrns2XMod: Xrns2XMod 0.5.1: Mod and XM conversion format - No sample data conversion at momentZip Solution: ZipSolution 5.3: Features: 1. Added WaitMsec for visual studio support with getting access to files in post build event; 2. Added ShowTextInToolbars to app.config ...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMost Active ProjectsRawrpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationFarseer Physics EngineIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleBlogEngine.NETjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesDotRasFacebook Developer Toolkit

  Read the article

• Clarity is important, both in question and in answer.

  - by gerrylowry

  clarity is important ... i'm often reminded of the Clouseau movie in which Peter Sellers as Chief Inspector Clouseau asks a hotel clerk "Does your dog bite?" ... the clerk answers "no" ... after Clouseau has been bitten by the dog, he looks at the hotel clerk who says "That's not my dog".  Clarity is important, both in question and in answer. i've been a member of forums.asp.net since 2008 ... like many of my peers at forums.asp.net, i've answered my fair share of questions. FWIW, the purpose of this, my first web log post to http://weblogs.asp.net/gerrylowry is to help new members ask better questions and in turn get better answers. TIMTOWTDI  =.  there is more than one way to do it imho, the best way to ask a question in any forum, or even person to person, is to first formulate your question and then ask yourself to answer your own question. Things to consider when asking (the more complete your question, the more likely you'll get the answer you require): -- have you searched Google and/or your favourite search engine(s) before posting your question to forums.asp.net; examples: site:msdn.microsoft.com entity framework 5.0 c#http://lmgtfy.com/?q=site%3Amsdn.microsoft.com+entity+framework+5.0+c%23 site:forums.asp.net MVC tutorial c#http://lmgtfy.com/?q=site%3Aforums.asp.net+MVC+tutorial+c%23 -- are you asking your question in the correct forum?  look at the forums' descriptions at http://forums.asp.net/; examples: Getting Started If you have a general ASP.NET question on a topic that's not covered by one of the other more specific forums - ask it here. MVC Discussions regarding ASP.NET Model-View-Controller (MVC) C# Questions about using C# for ASP.NET development Note:  if your question pertains more to c# than to MVC, choosing the C# forum is likely to be more appropriate. -- is your post subject clear and concise, yet not too vague? compare these three subjects (all three had something to do with GridView):     (1)    please help     (2)    gridview      (3)    How to show newline in GridView  -- have you clearly explained your scenario? compare:  my leg hurts   with   when i walk too much, my right knee hurts in the knee joint  compare:  my code does not work    with    when i enter a date as 2012-11-8, i get a FormatException -- have you checked your spelling, your grammar, and your English? for better or worse, English is the language of forums.asp.net ... many of the currently 170000++ forums.asp.net are not native speakers of English; that's okay ... however, there are times when choosing the more appropriate words will likely get one a better answer; fortunately, there are web tools to help you formulate your question, for example, http://translate.google.com/.  -- have you provided relevant information about your environment? here are a few examples ... feel free to include other items to your question ... rule of thumb:  if you think a given detail is relevant, it likely is -- what technology are you using?    ASP.NET MVC 4, ASP.NET MVC 3, WebForms, ...  -- what version of Visual Studio are you using?  vs2012 (ultimate, professional, express), vs2010, vs2008 ... -- are you hosting your own website?  are you using a shared hosting service? -- are you experience difficulties in just one browser? more than one browser? -- what browser version(s) are you using?   ie8? ie9? ... -- what is your operating system?     win8, win7, vista, XP, server 2008 R2 ... -- what is your database?   SQL Server 2008 R2, ss2005, MySQL, Oracle, ... -- what is your web server?  iis 7.5, iis 6, .... -- have you provided enough information for someone to be able to answer your question? Here's an actual example from an O.P. that i hope is self-explanatory: I'm trying to make a simple calculator when i write the code in windows application it worked when i tried it in web application it doesn't work and there are no errors what should i do ??!! -- have you included unnecessary information? more than once, i've seen the O.P. (original post, original poster) include many extra lines of code that were not relevant to the actual question; the more unnecessary code that you include, the less likely your volunteer peers will be motivated to donate their time to help you. -- have you asked the question that you want answered? "Does this dog bite?" -- are your expectations reasonable? -- generally, persons who are going to answer your questions are your peers ... they are unpaid volunteers ... -- are you looking for help with your homework, work assignment, or hobby? or, are you expecting someone else to do your work for you?  -- do you expect a complete solution or are you simply looking for guidance and direction? -- you are likely to get more help by first making a reasonable effort to help yourself first Clarity is important, both in question and in answer. if you are answering someone else's question, please remember that clear answers are just as important as clear questions; would you understand your own answer? Things to consider when answering: -- have you tested your code example?  if you have, say so; if you've not tested your code example, also say so -- imho, it's okay to guess as long as you clearly state that you're guessing ... sometimes a wrong guess can still help the O.P. find her/his way to the right answer -- meanness does not contribute to being helpful; sometimes one may become frustrated with the O.P. and/or others participating in a thread, if that happens to you, be kind regardless; speaking from my own experience, at least once i've allowed myself to be frustrated into writing something inappropriate that i've regretted later ... being a meany does not feel good ... being kind and helpful feels fantastic! Tip:  before asking your question, read more than a few existing questions and answers to get a sense of how your peers ask and answer questions. Gerry P.S.:  try to avoid necroposting and piggy backing. necroposting is adding to an old post, especially one that was resolved months ago. piggy backing is adding your own question to someone else's thread.

  Read the article

• Portal And Content - Content Integration - Best Practices

  - by Stefan Krantz

  Lately we have seen an increase in projects that have failed to either get user friendly content integration or non satisfactory performance. Our intention is to mitigate any knowledge gap that our previous post might have left you with, therefore this post will repeat some recommendation or reference back to old useful post. Moreover this post will help you understand ground up how to design, architect and implement business enabled, responsive and performing portals with complex requirements on business centric information publishing. Design the Information Model The key to successful portal deployments is Information modeling, it's a key task to understand the use case you designing for, therefore I have designed a set of question you need to ask yourself or your customer: Question: Who will own the content, IT or Business? Answer: BusinessQuestion: Who will publish the content, IT or Business? Answer: BusinessQuestion: Will there be multiple publishers? Answer: YesQuestion: Are the publishers computer scientist?Answer: NoQuestion: How often do the information changes, daily, weekly, monthly?Answer: Daily, weekly If your answers to the questions matches at least 2, we strongly recommend you design your content with following principles: Divide your pages in to logical sections, where each section is marked with its purpose Assign capabilities to each section, does it contain text, images, formatting and/or is it static and is populated through other contextual information Select editor/design element type WYSIWYG - Rich Text Plain Text - non-format text Image - Image object Static List - static list of formatted informationDynamic Data List - assembled information from multiple data files through CMIS query The result of such design map could look like following below examples: Based on the outcome of the required elements in the design column 3 from the left you will now simply design a data model in WebCenter Content - Site Studio by creating a Region Definition structure matching your design requirements.For more information on how to create a Region definition see following post: Region Definition Post - note see instruction 7 for details. Each region definition can now be used to instantiate data files, a data file will hold the actual data for each element in the region definition. Another way you can see this is to compare the region definition as an extension to the metadata model in WebCenter Content for each data file item. Design content templates With a solid dependable information model we can now proceed to template creation and page design, in this phase focuses on how to place the content sections from the region definition on the page via a Content Presenter template. Remember by creating content presenter templates you will leverage the latest and most integrated technology WebCenter has to offer. This phase is much easier since the you already have the information model and design wire-frames to base the logic on, however there is still few considerations to pay attention to: Base the template on ADF and make only necessary exceptions to markup when required Leverage ADF design components for Tabs, Accordions and other similar components, this way the design in the content published areas will comply with other design areas based on custom ADF taskflows There is no performance impact when using meta data or region definition based data All data access regardless of type, metadata or xml data it can be accessed via the Content Presenter - Node. See below for applied examples on how to access data Access metadata property from Document - #{node.propertyMap['myProp'].value}myProp in this example can be for instance (dDocName, dDocTitle, xComments or any other available metadata) Access element data from data file xml - #{node.propertyMap['[Region Definition Name]:[Element name]'].asTextHtml}Region Definition Name is the expect region definition that the current data file is instantiatingElement name is the element value you like to grab from the data file I recommend you read following  useful post on content template topic:CMIS queries and template creation - note see instruction 9 for detailsStatic List template rendering For more information on templates:Single Item Content TemplateMulti Item Content TemplateExpression Language Internationalization Considerations When integrating content assets via content presenter you by now probably understand that the content item/data file is wired to the page, what is also pretty common at this stage is that the content item/data file only support one language since its not practical or business friendly to mix that into a complex structure. Therefore you will be left with a very common dilemma that you will have to either build a complete new portal for each locale, which is not an good option! However with little bit of information modeling and clear naming convention this can be addressed. Basically you can simply make sure that all content item/data file are named with a predictable naming convention like "Content1_EN" for the English rendition and "Content1_ES" for the Spanish rendition. This way through simple none complex customizations you will be able to dynamically switch the actual content item/data file just before rendering. By following proposed approach above you not only enable a simple mechanism for internationalized content you also preserve the functionality in the content presenter to support business accessible run-time publishing of information on existing and new pages. I recommend you read following useful post on Internationalization topics:Internationalize with Content Presenter Integrate with Review & Approval processes Today the Review and approval functionality and configuration is based out of WebCenter Content - Criteria Workflows. Criteria Workflows uses the metadata of the checked in document to evaluate if the document is under any review/approval process. So for instance if a Criteria Workflow is configured to force any documents with Version = "2" or "higher" and Content Type is "Instructions", any matching content item version on check in will now enter the workflow before getting released for general access. Few things to consider when configuring Criteria Workflows: Make sure to not trigger on version one for Content Items that are Data Files - if you trigger on version 1 you will not only approve an empty document you will also have a content presenter pointing to a none existing document - since the document will only be available after successful completion of the workflow Approval workflows sometimes requires more complex criteria, the recommendation if that is the case is that the meta data triggering such criteria is automatically populated, this can be achieved through many approaches including Content Profiles Criteria workflows are configured and managed in WebCenter Content Administration Applets where you can configure one or more workflows. When you configured Criteria workflows the Content Presenter will support the editors with the approval process directly inline in the "Contribution mode" of the portal. In addition to approve/reject and details of the task, the content presenter natively support the user to view the current and future version of the change he/she is approving. See below for example: Architectural recommendation To support review&approval processes - minimize the amount of data files per page Each CMIS query can consume significant time depending on the complexity of the query - minimize the amount of CMIS queries per page Use Content Presenter Templates based on ADF - this way you minimize the design considerations and optimize the usage of caching Implement the page in as few Data files as possible - simplifies publishing process, increases performance and simplifies release process Named data file (node) or list of named nodes when integrating to pages increases performance vs. querying for data Named data file (node) or list of named nodes when integrating to pages enables business centric page creation and publishing and reduces the need for IT department interaction Summary Just because one architectural decision solves a business problem it doesn't mean its the right one, when designing portals all architecture has to be in harmony and not impacting each other. For instance the most technical complex solution is not always the best since it will most likely defeat the business accessibility, performance or both, therefore the best approach is to first design for simplicity that even a non-technical user can operate, after that consider the performance impact and final look at the technology challenges these brings and workaround them first with out-of-the-box features, after that design and develop functions to complement the short comings.

  Read the article

• Azure, don't give me multiple VMs, give me one elastic VM

  - by FransBouma

  Yesterday, Microsoft revealed new major features for Windows Azure (see ScottGu's post). It all looks shiny and great, but after reading most of the material describing the new features, I still find the overall idea behind all of it flawed: why should I care on how much VMs my web app runs? Isn't that a problem to solve for the Windows Azure engineers / software? And what if I need the file system, why can't I simply get a virtual filesystem ? To illustrate my point, let's use a real example: a product website with a customer system/database and next to it a support site with accompanying database. Both are written in .NET, using ASP.NET and use a SQL Server database each. The product website offers files to download by customers, very simple. You have a couple of options to host these websites: Buy a server, place it in a rack at an ISP and run the sites on that server Use 'shared hosting' with an ISP, which means your sites' appdomains are running on the same machine, as well as the files stored, and the databases are hosted in the same server as the other shared databases. Hire a VM, install your OS of choice at an ISP, and host the sites on that VM, basically the same as the first option, except you don't have a physical server At some cloud-vendor, either host the sites 'shared' or in a VM. See above. With all of those options, scalability is a problem, even the cloud-based ones, though not due to the same reasons: The physical server solution has the obvious problem that if you need more power, you need to buy a bigger server or more servers which requires you to add replication and other overhead Shared hosting solutions are almost always capped on memory usage / traffic and database size: if your sites get too big, you have to move out of the shared hosting environment and start over with one of the other solutions The VM solution, be it a VM at an ISP or 'in the cloud' at e.g. Windows Azure or Amazon, in theory allows scaling out by simply instantiating more VMs, however that too introduces the same overhead problems as with the physical servers: suddenly more than 1 instance runs your sites. If a cloud vendor offers its services in the form of VMs, you won't gain much over having a VM at some ISP: the main problems you have to work around are still there: when you spin up more than one VM, your application must be completely stateless at any moment, including the DB sub system, because what's in memory in instance 1 might not be in memory in instance 2. This might sounds trivial but it's not. A lot of the websites out there started rather small: they were perfectly runnable on a single machine with normal memory and CPU power. After all, you don't need a big machine to run a website with even thousands of users a day. Moving these sites to a multi-VM environment will cause a problem: all the in-memory state they use, all the multi-page transitions they use while keeping state across the transition, they can't do that anymore like they did that on a single machine: state is something of the past, you have to store every byte of state in either a DB or in a viewstate or in a cookie somewhere so with the next request, all state information is available through the request, as nothing is kept in-memory. Our example uses a bunch of files in a file system. Using multiple VMs will require that these files move to a cloud storage system which is mounted in each VM so we don't have to store the files on each VM. This might require different file paths, but this change should be minor. What's perhaps less minor is the maintenance procedure in place on the new type of cloud storage used: instead of ftp-ing into a VM, you might have to update the files using different ways / tools. All in all this makes moving an existing website which was written for an environment that's based around a VM (namely .NET with its CLR) overly cumbersome and problematic: it forces you to refactor your website system to be able to be used 'in the cloud', which is caused by the limited way how e.g. Windows Azure offers its cloud services: in blocks of VMs. Offer a scalable, flexible VM which extends with my needs Instead, cloud vendors should offer simply one VM to me. On that VM I run the websites, store my DB and my files. As it's a virtual machine, how this machine is actually ran on physical hardware (e.g. partitioned), I don't care, as that's the problem for the cloud vendor to solve. If I need more resources, e.g. I have more traffic to my server, way more visitors per day, the VM stretches, like I bought a bigger box. This frees me from the problem which comes with multiple VMs: I don't have any refactoring to do at all: I can simply build my website as if it runs on my local hardware server, upload it to the VM offered by the cloud vendor, install it on the VM and I'm done. "But that might require changes to windows!" Yes, but Microsoft is Windows. Windows Azure is their service, they can make whatever change to what they offer to make it look like it's windows. Yet, they're stuck, like Amazon, in thinking in VMs, which forces developers to 'think ahead' and gamble whether they would need to migrate to a cloud with multiple VMs in the future or not. Which comes down to: gamble whether they should invest time in code / architecture which they might never need. (YAGNI anyone?) So the VM we're talking about, is that a low-level VM which runs a guest OS, or is that VM a different kind of VM? The flexible VM: .NET's CLR ? My example websites are ASP.NET based, which means they run inside a .NET appdomain, on the .NET CLR, which is a VM. The only physical OS resource the sites need is the file system, however this too is accessed through .NET. In short: all the websites see is what .NET allows the websites to see, the world as the websites know it is what .NET shows them and lets them access. How the .NET appdomain is run physically, that's the concern of .NET, not mine. This begs the question why Windows Azure doesn't offer virtual appdomains? Or better: .NET environments which look like one machine but could be physically multiple machines. In such an environment, no change has to be made to the websites to migrate them from a local machine or own server to the cloud to get proper scaling: the .NET VM will simply scale with the need: more memory needed, more CPU power needed, it stretches. What it offers to the application running inside the appdomain is simply increasing, but not fragmented: all resources are available to the application: this means that the problem of how to scale is back to where it should be: with the cloud vendor. "Yeah, great, but what about the databases?" The .NET application communicates with the database server through a .NET ADO.NET provider. Where the database is located is not a problem of the appdomain: the ADO.NET provider has to solve that. I.o.w.: we can host the databases in an environment which offers itself as a single resource and is accessible through one connection string without replication overhead on the outside, and use that environment inside the .NET VM as if it was a single DB. But what about memory replication and other problems? This environment isn't simple, at least not for the cloud vendor. But it is simple for the customer who wants to run his sites in that cloud: no work needed. No refactoring needed of existing code. Upload it, run it. Perhaps I'm dreaming and what I described above isn't possible. Yet, I think if cloud vendors don't move into that direction, what they're offering isn't interesting: it doesn't solve a problem at all, it simply offers a way to instantiate more VMs with the guest OS of choice at the cost of me needing to refactor my website code so it can run in the straight jacket form factor dictated by the cloud vendor. Let's not kid ourselves here: most of us developers will never build a website which needs a truck load of VMs to run it: almost all websites created by developers can run on just a few VMs at most. Yet, the most expensive change is right at the start: moving from one to two VMs. As soon as you have refactored your website code to run across multiple VMs, adding another one is just as easy as clicking a mouse button. But that first step, that's the problem here and as it's right there at the beginning of scaling the website, it's particularly strange that cloud vendors refuse to solve that problem and leave it to the developers to solve that. Which makes migrating 'to the cloud' particularly expensive.

  Read the article

• OpenCV install problems on Studio 12.04 - broken dependencies

  - by Will

  I'm trying to follow the Ubuntu OpenCV documentation at OpenCV. The provided script has a line which executed for some time, taking away more packages than I expected (such as ubuntu-studio video); sudo apt-get -qq remove ffmpeg x264 libx264-dev When the script gets to the line below, it bombs; sudo apt-get -qq install libopencv-dev build-essential checkinstall cmake pkg-config yasm libtiff4-dev libjpeg-dev libjasper-dev libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev libdc1394-22-dev libxine-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev libv4l-dev python-dev python-numpy libtbb-dev libqt4-dev libgtk2.0-dev libfaac-dev libmp3lame-dev libopencore-amrnb-dev libopencore-amrwb-dev libtheora-dev libvorbis-dev libxvidcore-dev x264 v4l-utils ffmpeg The error msg is; E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages. I've since run Update-Manager, run sudo apt-get updates, rebooted, tried the above script line manually, and still no change. I've just run sudo apt-get install -f and nothing seemed to change. It did mention that some packages were no longer needed and could be removed by apt-get autoremove, so I ran that. It removed a number of packages, so I reran the install command above. Still same problem of held broken packages. I just ran sudo apt-get -u dist-upgrade Part of the response was; The following packages have been kept back: gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg I'm not sure what that means. I do know that it shows up in my Update-Manager and cannot be checked I then ran sudo dpkg --configure -a and then reran sudo apt-get -f install and the package was still not upgraded, though there was this very interesting comment; Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies: gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg : Depends: libavcodec53 (< 5:0) but it is not going to be installed or libavcodec-extra-53 (< 5:0) but 5:0.7.2-1ubuntu1+codecs1~oneiric2 is to be installed E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages. Then I ran sudo apt-get -u dist-upgrade It showed I had one held package, so I ran; sudo apt-get -o Debug::pkgProblemResolver=yes dist-upgrade It also exited without upgrading the package, so I ran; sudo apt-get remove --dry-run gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg:i386 And it gave me; *The following packages will be REMOVED: arista gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Remv arista [0.9.7-3ubuntu1] Remv gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg [0.10.12-1ubuntu1]* But when I reran sudo apt-get -u dist-upgrade It showed the package was still there. *The following packages have been kept back: gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.* Update: Just went into Synaptic PM and completely removed gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg Reran sudo apt-get -u dist-upgrade And was told; 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. However, when I ran the original apt-get to install opencv (first code at the top of this question), it still gave me the same broken package errors. So I tried $ cat /etc/apt/sources.list # # deb cdrom:[Ubuntu-Studio 11.10 _Oneiric Ocelot_ - Release i386 (20111011.1)]/ oneiric main multiverse restricted universe # deb cdrom:[Ubuntu-Studio 11.10 _Oneiric Ocelot_ - Release i386 (20111011.1)]/ oneiric main multiverse restricted universe # See http://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes for how to upgrade to # newer versions of the distribution. deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise main restricted deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise main restricted ## Major bug fix updates produced after the final release of the ## distribution. deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates main restricted deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates main restricted ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team. Also, please note that software in universe WILL NOT receive any ## review or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise universe deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise universe deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates universe deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates universe ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to ## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in ## multiverse WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu ## security team. deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise multiverse deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise multiverse deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates multiverse deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates multiverse ## N.B. software from this repository may not have been tested as ## extensively as that contained in the main release, although it includes ## newer versions of some applications which may provide useful features. ## Also, please note that software in backports WILL NOT receive any review ## or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security main restricted deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security main restricted deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security universe deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security universe deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security multiverse deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security multiverse ## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from Canonical's ## 'partner' repository. ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by Canonical and the ## respective vendors as a service to Ubuntu users. deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu precise partner # deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu oneiric partner ## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from Ubuntu's ## 'extras' repository. ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by third-party ## developers who want to ship their latest software. # deb http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu oneiric main # deb-src http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu oneiric main # deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/popinet/xUbuntu_11.04 ./ # disabled on upgrade to precise and then; $ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/* But I don't have enough reputation to post the results here (it says I need at least 10 reputation points to post more than 2 links), so I don't know how to provide the requested feedback. Then tried; $ sudo apt-get check [sudo] password for <abcd>: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done However, no resolution of the problem yet. What else do I need to do? Will an upgrade to Ubuntu Studio 13.xx solve this problem (or compound it)?

  Read the article

• SQL Server Split() Function

  - by HighAltitudeCoder

  Title goes here   Ever wanted a dbo.Split() function, but not had the time to debug it completely?  Let me guess - you are probably working on a stored procedure with 50 or more parameters; two or three of them are parameters of differing types, while the other 47 or so all of the same type (id1, id2, id3, id4, id5...).  Worse, you've found several other similar stored procedures with the ONLY DIFFERENCE being the number of like parameters taped to the end of the parameter list. If this is the situation you find yourself in now, you may be wondering, "why am I working with three different copies of what is basically the same stored procedure, and why am I having to maintain changes in three different places?  Can't I have one stored procedure that accomplishes the job of all three? My answer to you: YES!  Here is the Split() function I've created.    /******************************************************************************                                       Split.sql   ******************************************************************************/ /******************************************************************************   Split a delimited string into sub-components and return them as a table.   Parameter 1: Input string which is to be split into parts. Parameter 2: Delimiter which determines the split points in input string. Works with space or spaces as delimiter. Split() is apostrophe-safe.   SYNTAX: SELECT * FROM Split('Dvorak,Debussy,Chopin,Holst', ',') SELECT * FROM Split('Denver|Seattle|San Diego|New York', '|') SELECT * FROM Split('Denver is the super-awesomest city of them all.', ' ')   ******************************************************************************/ USE AdventureWorks GO   IF EXISTS       (SELECT *       FROM sysobjects       WHERE xtype = 'TF'       AND name = 'Split'       ) BEGIN       DROP FUNCTION Split END GO   CREATE FUNCTION Split (       @InputString                  VARCHAR(8000),       @Delimiter                    VARCHAR(50) )   RETURNS @Items TABLE (       Item                          VARCHAR(8000) )   AS BEGIN       IF @Delimiter = ' '       BEGIN             SET @Delimiter = ','             SET @InputString = REPLACE(@InputString, ' ', @Delimiter)       END         IF (@Delimiter IS NULL OR @Delimiter = '')             SET @Delimiter = ','   --INSERT INTO @Items VALUES (@Delimiter) -- Diagnostic --INSERT INTO @Items VALUES (@InputString) -- Diagnostic         DECLARE @Item                 VARCHAR(8000)       DECLARE @ItemList       VARCHAR(8000)       DECLARE @DelimIndex     INT         SET @ItemList = @InputString       SET @DelimIndex = CHARINDEX(@Delimiter, @ItemList, 0)       WHILE (@DelimIndex != 0)       BEGIN             SET @Item = SUBSTRING(@ItemList, 0, @DelimIndex)             INSERT INTO @Items VALUES (@Item)               -- Set @ItemList = @ItemList minus one less item             SET @ItemList = SUBSTRING(@ItemList, @DelimIndex+1, LEN(@ItemList)-@DelimIndex)             SET @DelimIndex = CHARINDEX(@Delimiter, @ItemList, 0)       END -- End WHILE         IF @Item IS NOT NULL -- At least one delimiter was encountered in @InputString       BEGIN             SET @Item = @ItemList             INSERT INTO @Items VALUES (@Item)       END         -- No delimiters were encountered in @InputString, so just return @InputString       ELSE INSERT INTO @Items VALUES (@InputString)         RETURN   END -- End Function GO   ---- Set Permissions --GRANT SELECT ON Split TO UserRole1 --GRANT SELECT ON Split TO UserRole2 --GO   The syntax is basically as follows: SELECT <fields> FROM Table 1 JOIN Table 2 ON ... JOIN Table 3 ON ... WHERE LOGICAL CONDITION A AND LOGICAL CONDITION B AND LOGICAL CONDITION C AND TABLE2.Id IN (SELECT * FROM Split(@IdList, ',')) @IdList is a parameter passed into the stored procedure, and the comma (',') is the delimiter you have chosen to split the parameter list on. You can also use it like this: SELECT <fields> FROM Table 1 JOIN Table 2 ON ... JOIN Table 3 ON ... WHERE LOGICAL CONDITION A AND LOGICAL CONDITION B AND LOGICAL CONDITION C HAVING COUNT(SELECT * FROM Split(@IdList, ',') Similarly, it can be used in other aggregate functions at run-time: SELECT MIN(SELECT * FROM Split(@IdList, ','), <fields> FROM Table 1 JOIN Table 2 ON ... JOIN Table 3 ON ... WHERE LOGICAL CONDITION A AND LOGICAL CONDITION B AND LOGICAL CONDITION C GROUP BY <fields> Now that I've (hopefully effectively) explained the benefits to using this function and implementing it in one or more of your database objects, let me warn you of a caveat that you are likely to encounter.  You may have a team member who waits until the right moment to ask you a pointed question: "Doesn't this function just do the same thing as using the IN function?  Why didn't you just use that instead?  In other words, why bother with this function?" What's happening is, one or more team members has failed to understand the reason for implementing this kind of function in the first place.  (Note: this is THE MOST IMPORTANT ASPECT OF THIS POST). Allow me to outline a few pros to implementing this function, so you may effectively parry this question.  Touche. 1) Code consolidation.  You don't have to maintain what is basically the same code and logic, but with varying numbers of the same parameter in several SQL objects.  I'm not going to go into the cons related to using this function, because the afore mentioned team member is probably more than adept at pointing these out.  Remember, the real positive contribution is ou are decreasing the liklihood that your team fails to update all (x) duplicate copies of what are basically the same stored procedure, and so on...  This is the classic downside to duplicate code.  It is a virus, and you should kill it. You might be better off rejecting your team member's question, and responding with your own: "Would you rather maintain the same logic in multiple different stored procedures, and hope that the team doesn't forget to always update all of them at the same time?".  In his head, he might be thinking "yes, I would like to maintain several different copies of the same stored procedure", although you probably will not get such a direct response.  2) Added flexibility - you can use the Split function elsewhere, and for splitting your data in different ways.  Plus, you can use any kind of delimiter you wish.  How can you know today the ways in which you might want to examine your data tomorrow?  Segue to my next point. 3) Because the function takes a delimiter parameter, you can split the data in any number of ways.  This greatly increases the utility of such a function and enables your team to work with the data in a variety of different ways in the future.  You can split on a single char, symbol, word, or group of words.  You can split on spaces.  (The list goes on... test it out). Finally, you can dynamically define the behavior of a stored procedure (or other SQL object) at run time, through the use of this function.  Rather than have several objects that accomplish almost the same thing, why not have only one instead?

  Read the article

• User Guide to Dropbox Shared Folders

  - by Matthew Guay

  Dropbox is an incredibly useful tool for keeping all your files synced between your computers and the cloud.  Here we’re going to look at how you can keep all of your team on the same page with Dropbox shared folders. Creating a Shared Folder Setting up a shared folder in Dropbox is easy.  Add the files you want to share to a folder in Dropbox on your computer, then right-click in the folder, select Dropbox, and then choose Share This Folder.   Alternately, log into your Dropbox account online, click the drop-down menu beside the folder you want to share, and click Share this folder. Now, enter the email addresses of the people you want to share the folder with, and optionally enter a message explaining why you’re sharing the folder. The people you invite will receive an email inviting them to view and join the shared folder.  If they haven’t signed up for Dropbox, they can directly signup; otherwise, they can simply log into their Dropbox account and start adding or editing files. Shared folders have a slightly different icon in your Dropbox.  Notice the shared folder on the left has an icon with 2 people, while the folder on the right that is not shared, shows previews of its contents. See Your Shared Folder’s History Whenever your collaborators with your shared folders add or change files, you will see a tooltip notification telling you what changed. You can also view the changes online.  Log into your Dropbox account in your browser and select the Events tab.  This shows all changes to your Dropbox, but you can view only the changes in your shared folder by selecting its name on the left sidebar. Now you can see all recent changes to your folder, and can also see who added or removed each file.   On the bottom of the page, you can even add a comment that all the collaborators will see. If someone deleted a file you still need, you can restore it by clicking its link in this online history.  Or, you can view any deleted files by right-clicking in your Dropbox folder in Explorer.  Select Dropbox, and then click Show Deleted Files.   Get Notified When a Change is Made You’re not always in front of your computer; you’ve got a life beyond your projects, after all (at least hopefully).  If you really want to stay connected to what’s happening with your project, though, you can easily do that no matter where you are. Your shared Dropbox folder’s history page offers an RSS feed of all changes to the folder.  Click  the Subscribe to this feed hyperlink. Now, in the popup that opens, click “Copy to clipboard” so you can use this RSS feed. You can subscribe to RSS feeds through many web browsers, email clients, dedicated feed readers, and more.  In Firefox, Internet Explorer 7/8, or Opera, you can paste the feed address into your address bar and subscribe to the feed directly in your browser.   However, subscribing to the feed in a desktop application won’t help you much when you’re away from your computer.  One great option is to subscribe in the popular Google Reader.  Then you can check your feed from any browser, on any computer or mobile device. To add your Dropbox feed to Google Reader, log into Google Reader (link below), click Add a subscription on the top left, paste your RSS feed from Dropbox, and click Add.   Now you can see any changes to files or folders in Google Reader. You can even add your feed to your iGoogle homepage.  Click the Add it Now button on the right in the front page of Google Reader to add your feeds to iGoogle.   Now you can see updates on your files from your homepage.  If you’re using a different computer, just login to your Google account to see what’s happening. You can also access your Google Reader feeds from many programs and apps for most major Smartphones including iPhone, Windows Phone, and Blackberry. Receive a Tweet or Text When Changes are Made If you’re a hyper-connected individual, chances are you send and receive tweets on the go.  If so, this might be the best way for you to get notified when changes are made to your Dropbox shared folder.  To do this, first create a new Twitter account to publish your changes through.  If you don’t want the whole world to see your updates, click Settings and set your new Twitter account to Private. Once the new account is created, follow it with your normal Twitter account so you’ll see updates. Now, let’s publish our Dropbox RSS feed to Twitter.  Create an account with Twitterfeed (link below). Once your account is setup, add your feed to it.  Name your feed, and enter your Feed address from Dropbox.  Click Advanced Settings to make your feed work just like you want. In Advanced Settings, change the frequency to “Every 30 mins” to make sure you’re updated on changes as quick as possible.  You can also change other settings if you like. Click “Continue to Step 2”, and then click Twitter under the available services to add your account. Make sure your signed into your new Twitter account, and then click Authenticate Twitter. Allow the application. Now, finally, click Create Service. Whenever a change is made, you will receive a tweet via your new Twitter account.  And since you can receive tweets via text message or many mobile applications, you’ll never be very far away from your Dropbox changes!   Conclusion Dropbox shared folders are a great way to keep your whole team working together on the same files in a project.  And with these handy tricks, you can keep up with your shared files wherever you are! There are a lot of cool things you can do with Dropbox make sure to check out our posts on adding Dropbox to the Windows 7 Start menu, Accessing Dropbox files from Chrome, and Syncing your Pidgin Profile Across Multiple PCs. Links Signup or access your Dropbox account Google Reader Tweet your feed with Twitterfeed Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How to Add and Manage Shared Folders on Windows Home ServerManage User Accounts in Windows Home ServerAdd "My Dropbox" to Your Windows 7 Start MenuComplete Guide to Networking Windows 7 with XP and VistaMoving Your Personal Data Folders in Windows Vista the Easy Way TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott FoxClocks adds World Times in your Statusbar (Firefox) Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7

  Read the article

• How I do VCS

  - by Wes McClure

  After years of dabbling with different version control systems and techniques, I wanted to share some of what I like and dislike in a few blog posts.  To start this out, I want to talk about how I use VCS in a team environment.  These come in a series of tips or best practices that I try to follow.  Note: This list is subject to change in the future. Always use some form of version control for all aspects of software development. Development is an evolution.  Looking back at where we were is an invaluable asset in that process.  This includes data schemas and documentation. Reverting / reapplying changes is absolutely critical for efficient development. The tools I use: Code: Hg (preferred), SVN Database: TSqlMigrations Documents: Sometimes in code repository, also SharePoint with versioning Always tag a commit (changeset) with comments This is a quick way to describe to someone else (or your future self) what the changeset entails. Be brief but courteous. One or two sentences about the task, not the actual changes. Use precommit hooks or setup the central repository to reject changes without comments. Link changesets to documentation If your project management system integrates with version control, or has a way to externally reference stories, tasks etc then leave a reference in the commit.  This helps locate more information about the commit and/or related changesets. It’s best to have a precommit hook or system that requires this information, otherwise it’s easy to forget. Ability to work offline is required, including commits and history Yes this requires a DVCS locally but doesn’t require the central repository to be a DVCS.  I prefer to use either Git or Hg but if it isn’t possible to migrate the central repository, it’s still possible for a developer to push / pull changes to that repository from a local Hg or Git repository. Never lock resources (files) in a central repository… Rude! We have merge tools for a reason, merging sucked a long time ago, it doesn’t anymore… stop locking files! This is unproductive, rude and annoying to other team members. Always review everything in your commit. Never ever commit a set of files without reviewing the changes in each. Never add a file without asking yourself, deep down inside, does this belong? If you leave to make changes during a review, start the review over when you come back.  Never assume you didn’t touch a file, double check. This is another reason why you want to avoid large, infrequent commits. Requirements for tools Quickly show pending changes for the entire repository. Default action for a resource with pending changes is a diff. Pluggable diff & merge tool Produce a unified diff or a diff of all changes.  This is helpful to bulk review changes instead of opening each file. The central repository is not your own personal dump yard.  Breaking this rule is a sure fire way to get the F bomb dropped in front of your name, multiple times. If you turn on Visual Studio’s commit on closing studio option, I will personally break your fingers. By the way, the person(s) in charge of this feature should be fired and never be allowed near programming, ever again. Commit (integrate) to the central repository / branch frequently I try to do this before leaving each day, especially without a DVCS.  One never knows when they might need to work from remote the following day. Never commit commented out code If it isn’t needed anymore, delete it! If you aren’t sure if it might be useful in the future, delete it! This is why we have history. If you don’t know why it’s commented out, figure it out and then either uncomment it or delete it. Don’t commit build artifacts, user preferences and temporary files. Build artifacts do not belong in VCS, everything in them is present in the code. (ie: bin\*, obj\*, *.dll, *.exe) User preferences are your settings, stop overriding my preferences files! (ie: *.suo and *.user files) Most tools allow you to ignore certain files and Hg/Git allow you to version this as an ignore file.  Set this up as a first step when creating a new repository! Be polite when merging unresolved conflicts. Count to 10, cuss, grab a stress ball and realize it’s not a big deal.  Actually, it’s an opportunity to let you know that someone else is working in the same area and you might want to communicate with them. Following the other rules, especially committing frequently, will reduce the likelihood of this. Suck it up, we all have to deal with this unintended consequence at times.  Just be careful and GET FAMILIAR with your merge tool.  It’s really not as scary as you think.  I personally prefer KDiff3 as its merging capabilities rock. Don’t blindly merge and then blindly commit your changes, this is rude and unprofessional.  Make sure you understand why the conflict occurred and which parts of the code you want to keep.  Apply scrutiny when you commit a manual merge: review the diff! Make sure you test the changes (build and run automated tests) Become intimate with your version control system and the tools you use with it. Avoid trial and error as much as is possible, sit down and test the tool out, read some tutorials etc.  Create test repositories and walk through common scenarios. Find the most efficient way to do your work.  These tools will be used repetitively, so inefficiencies will add up. Sometimes this involves a mix of tools, both GUI and CLI. I like a combination of both Tortoise Hg and hg cli to get the job efficiently. Always tag releases Create a way to find a given release, whether this be in comments or an explicit tag / branch.  This should be readily discoverable. Create release branches to patch bugs and then merge the changes back to other development branch(es). If using feature branches, strive for periodic integrations. Feature branches often cause forked code that becomes irreconcilable.  Strive to re-integrate somewhat frequently with the branch this code will ultimately be merged into.  This will avoid merge conflicts in the future. Feature branches are best when they are mutually exclusive of active development in other branches. Use and abuse local commits , at least one per task in a story. This builds a trail of changes in your local repository that can be pushed to a central repository when the story is complete. Never commit a broken build or failing tests to the central repository. It’s ok for a local commit to break the build and/or tests.  In fact, I encourage this if it helps group the changes more logically.  This is one of the main reasons I got excited about DVCS, when I wanted more than one changeset for a set of pending changes but some files could be grouped into both changesets (like solution file / project file changes). If you have more than a dozen outstanding changed resources, there should probably be more than one commit involved. Exceptions when maintaining code bases that require shotgun surgery, in this case, it’s a design smell :) Don’t version sensitive information Especially usernames / passwords   There is one area I haven’t found a solution I like yet: versioning 3rd party libraries and/or code.  I really dislike keeping any assemblies in the repository, but seems to be a common practice for external libraries.  Please feel free to share your ideas about this below.    -Wes

  Read the article

• Fun with Aggregates

  - by Paul White

  There are interesting things to be learned from even the simplest queries.  For example, imagine you are given the task of writing a query to list AdventureWorks product names where the product has at least one entry in the transaction history table, but fewer than ten. One possible query to meet that specification is: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p JOIN Production.TransactionHistory AS th ON p.ProductID = th.ProductID GROUP BY p.ProductID, p.Name HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10; That query correctly returns 23 rows (execution plan and data sample shown below): The execution plan looks a bit different from the written form of the query: the base tables are accessed in reverse order, and the aggregation is performed before the join.  The general idea is to read all rows from the history table, compute the count of rows grouped by ProductID, merge join the results to the Product table on ProductID, and finally filter to only return rows where the count is less than ten. This ‘fully-optimized’ plan has an estimated cost of around 0.33 units.  The reason for the quote marks there is that this plan is not quite as optimal as it could be – surely it would make sense to push the Filter down past the join too?  To answer that, let’s look at some other ways to formulate this query.  This being SQL, there are any number of ways to write logically-equivalent query specifications, so we’ll just look at a couple of interesting ones.  The first query is an attempt to reverse-engineer T-SQL from the optimized query plan shown above.  It joins the result of pre-aggregating the history table to the Product table before filtering: SELECT p.Name FROM ( SELECT th.ProductID, cnt = COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th GROUP BY th.ProductID ) AS q1 JOIN Production.Product AS p ON p.ProductID = q1.ProductID WHERE q1.cnt < 10; Perhaps a little surprisingly, we get a slightly different execution plan: The results are the same (23 rows) but this time the Filter is pushed below the join!  The optimizer chooses nested loops for the join, because the cardinality estimate for rows passing the Filter is a bit low (estimate 1 versus 23 actual), though you can force a merge join with a hint and the Filter still appears below the join.  In yet another variation, the < 10 predicate can be ‘manually pushed’ by specifying it in a HAVING clause in the “q1” sub-query instead of in the WHERE clause as written above. The reason this predicate can be pushed past the join in this query form, but not in the original formulation is simply an optimizer limitation – it does make efforts (primarily during the simplification phase) to encourage logically-equivalent query specifications to produce the same execution plan, but the implementation is not completely comprehensive. Moving on to a second example, the following query specification results from phrasing the requirement as “list the products where there exists fewer than ten correlated rows in the history table”: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ); Unfortunately, this query produces an incorrect result (86 rows): The problem is that it lists products with no history rows, though the reasons are interesting.  The COUNT_BIG(*) in the EXISTS clause is a scalar aggregate (meaning there is no GROUP BY clause) and scalar aggregates always produce a value, even when the input is an empty set.  In the case of the COUNT aggregate, the result of aggregating the empty set is zero (the other standard aggregates produce a NULL).  To make the point really clear, let’s look at product 709, which happens to be one for which no history rows exist: -- Scalar aggregate SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = 709;   -- Vector aggregate SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = 709 GROUP BY th.ProductID; The estimated execution plans for these two statements are almost identical: You might expect the Stream Aggregate to have a Group By for the second statement, but this is not the case.  The query includes an equality comparison to a constant value (709), so all qualified rows are guaranteed to have the same value for ProductID and the Group By is optimized away. In fact there are some minor differences between the two plans (the first is auto-parameterized and qualifies for trivial plan, whereas the second is not auto-parameterized and requires cost-based optimization), but there is nothing to indicate that one is a scalar aggregate and the other is a vector aggregate.  This is something I would like to see exposed in show plan so I suggested it on Connect.  Anyway, the results of running the two queries show the difference at runtime: The scalar aggregate (no GROUP BY) returns a result of zero, whereas the vector aggregate (with a GROUP BY clause) returns nothing at all.  Returning to our EXISTS query, we could ‘fix’ it by changing the HAVING clause to reject rows where the scalar aggregate returns zero: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) BETWEEN 1 AND 9 ); The query now returns the correct 23 rows: Unfortunately, the execution plan is less efficient now – it has an estimated cost of 0.78 compared to 0.33 for the earlier plans.  Let’s try adding a redundant GROUP BY instead of changing the HAVING clause: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY th.ProductID HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ); Not only do we now get correct results (23 rows), this is the execution plan: I like to compare that plan to quantum physics: if you don’t find it shocking, you haven’t understood it properly :)  The simple addition of a redundant GROUP BY has resulted in the EXISTS form of the query being transformed into exactly the same optimal plan we found earlier.  What’s more, in SQL Server 2008 and later, we can replace the odd-looking GROUP BY with an explicit GROUP BY on the empty set: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ); I offer that as an alternative because some people find it more intuitive (and it perhaps has more geek value too).  Whichever way you prefer, it’s rather satisfying to note that the result of the sub-query does not exist for a particular correlated value where a vector aggregate is used (the scalar COUNT aggregate always returns a value, even if zero, so it always ‘EXISTS’ regardless which ProductID is logically being evaluated). The following query forms also produce the optimal plan and correct results, so long as a vector aggregate is used (you can probably find more equivalent query forms): WHERE Clause SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE ( SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () ) < 10; APPLY SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p CROSS APPLY ( SELECT NULL FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ) AS ca (dummy); FROM Clause SELECT q1.Name FROM ( SELECT p.Name, cnt = ( SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () ) FROM Production.Product AS p ) AS q1 WHERE q1.cnt < 10; This last example uses SUM(1) instead of COUNT and does not require a vector aggregate…you should be able to work out why :) SELECT q.Name FROM ( SELECT p.Name, cnt = ( SELECT SUM(1) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID ) FROM Production.Product AS p ) AS q WHERE q.cnt < 10; The semantics of SQL aggregates are rather odd in places.  It definitely pays to get to know the rules, and to be careful to check whether your queries are using scalar or vector aggregates.  As we have seen, query plans do not show in which ‘mode’ an aggregate is running and getting it wrong can cause poor performance, wrong results, or both. © 2012 Paul White Twitter: @SQL_Kiwi email: [email protected]

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360 361 362 363  | Next Page >