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• SQL SERVER – What is Spatial Database? – Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep Dive into Spati

  - by pinaldave

  What is Spatial Database? A spatial database is a database that is optimized to store and query data related to objects in space, including points, lines and polygons. While typical databases can understand various numeric and character types of data, additional functionality needs to be added for databases to process spatial data types. (Source: Wikipedia) Today I will be talking about the same subject at Microsoft TechEd India. If you want to learn about how to spatial aspect of data and how to integrate them with SQL Server this is the perfect session for you. Spatial is very special concept of SQL Server and I really like how it is implemented in SQL Server. In general Performance Tuning and Query Optimization is something I always have enjoyed in my professional life. Index are my best friends and many time, by implementing and many time by removing I have improved the performance of the system. In this session, I will be talking about Index along with Spatial Data. As Spatial Database is very interesting concept, I will cover super short but very interesting 10 quick slides about this subject. I will make sure in very first 20 mins, you will understand following topics Introduction to Spatial Database One line definition Understanding Spatial Indexing Index Internals Query/Performance Tuning Query Hinting/Cost Analysis Spatial Index Catalog Views Performance Troubleshooting Finding Optimal Index using Spatial Index SP Common Errors Index Maintenance This slides decks will be followed by around 30 mins demo which will have story of geometry, geography, index internals and performance tuning. If you are interested in learning how GIS works and how SQL Server out of the box supports this wonderful tools, you will really like how the story is told. I am sure all people who attend the event will know how the Bangalore is positioned on the map of India. I will take example of Bangalore and Hyderabad and demonstrate how index can improve the performance. Well there are lots of story to tell in the session, and I will be opening this session with the beautiful script of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus created by Michael J. Swart. I will also demonstrate few real life scenario where I will be talking about Spatial Database and its usage. Do not miss this session. At the end of session there will be book awarded to best participant. My session details: Session 3: Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep Dive into Spatial Indexing Date: April 14, 2010 Time: 5:00pm-6:00pm Microsoft SQL Server 2008 delivers new spatial data types that enable you to consume, use, and extend location-based data through spatial-enabled applications. Attend this session to learn how to use spatial functionality in next version of SQL Server to build and optimize spatial queries. This session outlines the new geography data type to store geodetic spatial data and perform operations on it, use the new geometry data type to store planar spatial data and perform operations on it, take advantage of new spatial indexes for high performance queries, use the new spatial results tab to quickly and easily view spatial query results directly from within Management Studio, extend spatial data capabilities by building or integrating location-enabled applications through support for spatial standards and specifications and much more. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Index, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Spatial Database

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• How to prepare for a telephone interview: ‘Develop an Interview Cheat Sheet’

  - by Maria Sandu

  At Oracle we often do telephone interviews in different stages of the process with candidates, due to the fact that we hire native speakers into other countries. On this blog we already have an article with tips and tricks for phone interviews that can help you during the telephone interviews. To help you prepare even better for a telephone interview we would like to introduce you the basics of developing a cheat sheet. The benefit of a telephone interview is that you will be sitting at home, at your table or desk, during the interview, and not in front of someone. So use this to your advantage. The Monster website has some useful and interesting tips and tricks for developing a cheat sheet. Carole Martin, who wrote this article, says that a cheat sheet will help you feel more prepared and confident when speaking to managers over the phone. Important to keep in mind is that you shouldn't memorise what's on the sheet or check it off during the interview. Only use your cheat sheet to remind you of key facts. Here are some suggestions to include on it: • Divide a piece of paper in 2 by drawing a line. Write on one side of the paper a list of requirements as mentioned in the job description. On the other side list your qualities to fulfill the requirements of the employer. This will help you in answering questions about why you are the best candidate for the job and how you fit the role. • Do research on the company, the industry sector and the competitors, so you will get a feeling for the company’s business and can ask more in-depth questions. • Be prepared for the most used introduction question: “Tell me a bit about yourself”. Prepare a 60-second personal statement or pitch in which you summarise who you are and what you can offer, so you will be able to sell yourself from on the very beginning. • Write down a minimum of 5 good examples to answer behavioral interview questions ("Tell me about a time when..." or "Give me an example of a time..." ). These questions are used by interviewers to see how you deal with similar situations as you might encounter in the job. Interviewers use this question as past behaviour is scientifically proven to be the best predictor for future behaviour. • List five questions to ask the interviewer about the job, the company and the industry to help you get a good understanding if the role and company really fit your needs and wants. To get some inspiration check this article on inc.com • Find out how much you are worth on the job market and determine your needs based on your living expenses, especially when moving abroad. • Ask for permission from the people you plan to use as a reference. Also make sure you have your CV at hand and an overview of your grades. Feel free to comment on this article and let us know what your experience is with developing a cheat sheet for a telephone interview. Good luck with the preparation of your sheet.

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• DevConnections Slides and Samples Posted

  - by Rick Strahl

  I’ve posted the slides and samples to my DevConnections Sessions for anyone interested. I had a lot of fun with my sessions this time around mainly because the sessions picked were a little off the beaten track (well, the handlers/modules and e-commerce sessions anyway). For those of you that attended I hope you found the sessions useful. For the rest of you – you can check out the slides and samples if you like. Here’s what was covered: Introduction to jQuery with ASP.NET This session covered mostly the client side of jQuery demonstrated on a small sample page with a variety of incrementally built up examples of selection and page manipulation. This session also introduces some of the basics of AJAX communication talking to ASP.NET. When I do this session it never turns out exactly the same way and this time around the examples were on the more basic side and purely done with hands on demonstrations rather than walk throughs of more complex examples. Alas this session always feels like it needs another half an hour to get through the full sortiment of functionality. The slides and samples cover a wider variety of topics and there are many examples that demonstrate more advanced operations like interacting with WCF REST services, using client templating and building rich client only windowed interfaces. Download Low Level ASP.NET: Handlers and Modules This session was a look at the ASP.NET pipeline and it discusses some of the ASP.NET base architecture and key components from HttpRuntime on up through the various modules and handlers that make up the ASP.NET/IIS pipeline. This session is fun as there are a number of cool examples that demonstrate the power and flexibility of ASP.NET, but some of the examples were external and interfacing with other technologies so they’re not actually included in the downloadable samples. However, there are still a few cool ones in there – there’s an image resizing handler, an image overlay module that stamps images with Sample if loaded from a certain folder, an OpenID authentication module (which failed during the demo due to the crappy internet connection at DevConnections this year :-}), Response filtering using a generic filter stream component, a generic error handler and a few others. The slides cover a lot of the ASP.NET pipeline flow and various HttpRuntime components. Download Electronic Payment Processing in ASP.NET Applications This session covered the business end and integration of electronic credit card processing and PayPal. A good part of this session deals with what’s involved in payment processing, getting signed up and who you have to deal with for your merchant account. We then took a look at integration of credit card processing via some generic components provided with the session that allow processing using a unified class interface with specific implementations for several of the most common gateway providers including Authorize.NET, PayFlowPro, LinkPoint, BluePay etc. We also briefly looked at PayPal Classic implementation which provides a quick and cheap if not quite as professional mechanism for taking payments online. The samples provide the Credit Card processing wrappers for the various gateway providers as well as a PayPal helper class to generate the PayPal redirect urls as well as helper code for dealing with IPN callbacks. Download Hope some of you will find the material useful. Enjoy.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  

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• List of blogs - year 2010

  - by hajan

  This is the last day of year 2010 and I would like to add links to all blogs I have posted in this year. First, I would like to mention that I started blogging in ASP.NET Community in May / June 2010 and have really enjoyed writing for my favorite technologies, such as: ASP.NET, jQuery/JavaScript, C#, LINQ, Web Services etc. I also had great feedback either through comments on my blogs or in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn where I met many new experts just as a result of my blog posts. Thanks to the interesting topics I have in my blog, I became DZone MVB. Here is the list of blogs I made in 2010 in my ASP.NET Community Weblog: (newest to oldest) Great library of ASP.NET videos – Pluralsight! NDepend – Code Query Language (CQL) NDepend tool – Why every developer working with Visual Studio.NET must try it! jQuery Templates in ASP.NET - Blogs Series jQuery Templates - XHTML Validation jQuery Templates with ASP.NET MVC jQuery Templates - {Supported Tags} jQuery Templates – tmpl(), template() and tmplItem() Introduction to jQuery Templates ViewBag dynamic in ASP.NET MVC 3 - RC 2 Today I had a presentation on "Deep Dive into jQuery Templates in ASP.NET" jQuery Data Linking in ASP.NET How do you prefer getting bundles of technologies?? Case-insensitive XPath query search on XML Document in ASP.NET jQuery UI Accordion in ASP.NET MVC - feed with data from database (Part 3) jQuery UI Accordion in ASP.NET WebForms - feed with data from database (Part 2) jQuery UI Accordion in ASP.NET – Client side implementation (Part 1) Using Images embedded in Project’s Assembly Macedonian Code Camp 2010 event has finished successfully Tips and Tricks: Deferred execution using LINQ Using System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch class to measure the elapsed time Speaking at Macedonian Code Camp 2010 URL Routing in ASP.NET 4.0 Web Forms Conflicts between ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanels & jQuery functions Integration of jQuery DatePicker in ASP.NET Website – Localization (part 3) Why not to use HttpResponse.Close and HttpResponse.End Calculate Business Days using LINQ Get Distinct values of an Array using LINQ Using CodeRun browser-based IDE to create ASP.NET Web Applications Using params keyword – Methods with variable number of parameters Working with Code Snippets in VS.NET  Working with System.IO.Path static class Calculating GridView total using JavaScript/JQuery The new SortedSet<T> Collection in .NET 4.0 JavaScriptSerializer – Dictionary to JSON Serialization and Deserialization Integration of jQuery DatePicker in ASP.NET Website – JS Validation Script (part 2) Integration of jQuery DatePicker in ASP.NET Website (part 1) Transferring large data when using Web Services Forums dedicated to WebMatrix Microsoft WebMatrix – Short overview & installation Working with embedded resources in Project's assembly Debugging ASP.NET Web Services Save and Display YouTube Videos on ASP.NET Website Hello ASP.NET World... In addition, I would like to mention that I have big list of blog posts in CodeASP.NET Community (total 60 blogs) and the local MKDOT.NET Community (total 61 blogs). You may find most of my weblogs.asp.net/hajan blogs posted there too, but there you can find many others. In my blog on MKDOT.NET Community you can find most of my ASP.NET Weblog posts translated in Macedonian language, some of them posted in English and some other blogs that were posted only there. By reading my blogs, I hope you have learnt something new or at least have confirmed your knowledge. And also, if you haven't, I encourage you to start blogging and share your Microsoft Tech. thoughts with all of us... Sharing and spreading knowledge is definitely one of the noblest things which we can do in our life. "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime" HAPPY NEW 2011 YEAR!!! Best Regards, Hajan

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

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Mike Wolf, Colin Eberhardt, Mike Snow(-2-, -3-), David Kelley(-2-, -3-), Jesse Liberty(-2-), Erik Mork, Jeff Blankenburg, Laurent Duveau, and Jeremy Likness(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "The definitive guide to Notification Window in Silverlight 4" Laurent Duveau WP7: "Making the MS Adcontrol REALLY work on phone 7" David Kelley Silverlight 5: "Silverlight 5: In the Trenches" Mike Wolf From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight 5: In the Trenches How many people can discuss Silverlight 5 'In the Trenches' ... apparently Mike Wolf can, and that's just what he's done in the post to whet your whistle (do people say that any more?) for when we can all get our hands on the bits. Visiblox, Visifire, DynamicDataDisplay – Charting Performance Comparison Colin Eberhardt responds to reader requests, and revisits his Charting Performance after also some discussion with David Anson about the Silverlight Toolkit. This time including Dynamic Data Display which is quite impressive in the ratings... check out the post and the code. Win7 Mobile Back Arrow Key Interception The simple fact is heavy bloggers rise, like Cream, to the top of my list, and I've been missing some goodness from Mike Snow... he's blogging WP7 stuff now... first up of the 'missed' ones is this one on intercepting the Back Arrow Key. Animating the Color of an Object Switching back to Silverlight in general, Mike Snow's next post is on Animating color of an object, such as text foreground. Tombstoning on the Win7 Mobile Platform And now back to WP7, Mike Snow is discussing Tombstoning... discussing the various aspects of it, and some code to use, if you haven't gotten your head around this one yet. What I tell Designers to give me... Integrating and Digital Zen David Kelley has a post up describing what he needs from designers to get his job done... I heard him discussing this at the Firestarter, and didn't realize he had written it up... these 8 items are things learned by doing, and should be discussed with your designers. Making the MS Adcontrol REALLY work on phone 7 David Kelley also has a post up discussing how to really get the Ad control working on WP7 apps... since I've seen lots of posts about this, having a definitive explanation from someone that's doing it is a good thing. Performance Optimization on Phone 7 In a break from his norm of discussing UX, David Kelley is talking about performance on WP7 devices in this post. Windows Phone From Scratch #10 – Visual State Part 2 When I saw Jesse Liberty's latest post, I realized I had missed his Part 2 of VSM for WP7 ... don't you miss it... this completes the good stuff from number 9 :) Windows Phone From Scratch #11 – Behaviors Jesse Liberty's latest Windows Phone from Scratch is up... and he's talking about Behaviors this time out... more of an overview or introduction to behaviors, but all good Show 112: Scott Guthrie on Silverlight 5 Erik Mork's latest Sparkling Client podcast is up and he was able to get some time with Scott Guthrie at the Firestarter. What I Learned in WP7 – Issue #1 Jeff Blankenburg decided to do another series, only this one isn't promised as every day... it's "What I Learned in WP7" ... and the first is up... good interesting bits found surrounding the WP7 device. The definitive guide to Notification Window in Silverlight 4 Laurent Duveau has a great post up that will have you doing Silverlight 'toast' notifications in no time... good descriptions and source. Lessons Learned in Personal Web Page Part 1: Dynamic XAML Jeremy Likness has rebuilt his personal website in Silverlight and is sharing some of that experience on his blog. This first post discusses the dynamic content. He used Jounce, of course, and included the Silverlight Navigation Framework, and... you can download all the source Lessons Learned in Personal Web Page Part 2: Enter the Matrix Jeremy Likness's second post about building his website is all about the 'Matrix' page ... pretty cool stuff... check it out... I think it looks great Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• SQL SERVER – Merge Operations – Insert, Update, Delete in Single Execution

  - by pinaldave

  This blog post is written in response to T-SQL Tuesday hosted by Jorge Segarra (aka SQLChicken). I have been very active using these Merge operations in my development. However, I have found out from my consultancy work and friends that these amazing operations are not utilized by them most of the time. Here is my attempt to bring the necessity of using the Merge Operation to surface one more time. MERGE is a new feature that provides an efficient way to do multiple DML operations. In earlier versions of SQL Server, we had to write separate statements to INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE data based on certain conditions; however, at present, by using the MERGE statement, we can include the logic of such data changes in one statement that even checks when the data is matched and then just update it, and similarly, when the data is unmatched, it is inserted. One of the most important advantages of MERGE statement is that the entire data are read and processed only once. In earlier versions, three different statements had to be written to process three different activities (INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE); however, by using MERGE statement, all the update activities can be done in one pass of database table. I have written about these Merge Operations earlier in my blog post over here SQL SERVER – 2008 – Introduction to Merge Statement – One Statement for INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE. I was asked by one of the readers that how do we know that this operator was doing everything in single pass and was not calling this Merge Operator multiple times. Let us run the same example which I have used earlier; I am listing the same here again for convenience. --Let’s create Student Details and StudentTotalMarks and inserted some records. USE tempdb GO CREATE TABLE StudentDetails ( StudentID INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, StudentName VARCHAR(15) ) GO INSERT INTO StudentDetails VALUES(1,'SMITH') INSERT INTO StudentDetails VALUES(2,'ALLEN') INSERT INTO StudentDetails VALUES(3,'JONES') INSERT INTO StudentDetails VALUES(4,'MARTIN') INSERT INTO StudentDetails VALUES(5,'JAMES') GO CREATE TABLE StudentTotalMarks ( StudentID INTEGER REFERENCES StudentDetails, StudentMarks INTEGER ) GO INSERT INTO StudentTotalMarks VALUES(1,230) INSERT INTO StudentTotalMarks VALUES(2,255) INSERT INTO StudentTotalMarks VALUES(3,200) GO -- Select from Table SELECT * FROM StudentDetails GO SELECT * FROM StudentTotalMarks GO -- Merge Statement MERGE StudentTotalMarks AS stm USING (SELECT StudentID,StudentName FROM StudentDetails) AS sd ON stm.StudentID = sd.StudentID WHEN MATCHED AND stm.StudentMarks > 250 THEN DELETE WHEN MATCHED THEN UPDATE SET stm.StudentMarks = stm.StudentMarks + 25 WHEN NOT MATCHED THEN INSERT(StudentID,StudentMarks) VALUES(sd.StudentID,25); GO -- Select from Table SELECT * FROM StudentDetails GO SELECT * FROM StudentTotalMarks GO -- Clean up DROP TABLE StudentDetails GO DROP TABLE StudentTotalMarks GO The Merge Join performs very well and the following result is obtained. Let us check the execution plan for the merge operator. You can click on following image to enlarge it. Let us evaluate the execution plan for the Table Merge Operator only. We can clearly see that the Number of Executions property suggests value 1. Which is quite clear that in a single PASS, the Merge Operation completes the operations of Insert, Update and Delete. I strongly suggest you all to use this operation, if possible, in your development. I have seen this operation implemented in many data warehousing applications. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Joins, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Merge

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• Travelling MVP #1: Visit to SharePoint User Group Finland

  - by DigiMortal

  My first self organized trip this autumn was visit to SharePoint User Group Finland community evening. As active community leaders who make things like these possible they are worth mentioning and on spug.fi side there was Jussi Roine the one who invited me. Here is my short review about my trip to Helsinki. User group meeting As Helsinki is near Tallinn I went there using ship. It was easy to get from sea port to venue and I had also some minutes of time to visit academic book store. Community evening was held on the ground floor of one city center hotel and room was conveniently located near hotel bar and restaurant. Here is the meeting schedule: Welcome (Jussi Roine) OpenText application archiving and governance for SharePoint (Bernd Hennicke, OpenText) Using advanced C# features in SharePoint development (Alexey Sadomov, NED Consulting) Optimizing public-facing internet sites for SharePoint (Gunnar Peipman) After meeting, of course, local dudes doesn’t walk away but continue with some beers and discussion. Sessions After welcome words by Jussi there was session by Bernd Hennicke who spoke about OpenText. His session covered OpenText history and current moment. After this introduction he spoke about OpenText products for SharePoint and gave the audience good overview about where their SharePoint extensions fit in big picture. I usually don’t like those vendors sessions but this one was good. I mean vendor dudes were not aggressively selling something. They were way different – kind people who introduced their stuff and later answered questions. They acted like good guests. Second speaker was Alexey Sadomov who is working on SharePoint development projects. He introduced some ways how to get over some limitations of SharePoint. I don’t go here deeply with his session but it’s worth to mention that this session was strong one. It is not rear case when developers have to make nasty hacks to SharePoint. I mean really nasty hacks. Often these hacks are long blocks of code that uses terrible techniques to achieve the result. Alexey introduced some very much civilized ways about how to apply hacks. Alex Sadomov, SharePoint MVP, speaking about SharePoint coding tips and tricks on C# I spoke about how I optimized caching of Estonian Microsoft community portal that runs on SharePoint Server and that uses publishing infrastructure. I made no actual demos on SharePoint because I wanted to focus on optimizing process and share some experiences about how to get caches optimized and how to measure caches. Networking After official part there was time to talk and discuss with people. Finns are cool – they have beers and they are glad. It was not big community event but people were like one good family. Developers there work often for big companies and it was very interesting to me to hear about their experiences with SharePoint. One thing was a little bit surprising for me – SharePoint guys in Finland are talking actively also about Office 365 and online SharePoint. It doesn’t happen often here in Estonia. I had to leave a little bit 21:00 to get to my ship back to Tallinn. I am sure spug.fi dudes continued nice evening and they had at least same good time as I did. Do I want to go back to Finland and meet these guys again? Yes, sure, let’s do it again! :)

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• JavaScript Browser Hacks

  Recently during one of my client side scripting classes, I was trying to show my students some basic examples of JavaScript as an introduction to the language.  My first basic example was to show an alert box using JavaScript via the address bar. The student’s reaction to my browser hack example really caught me off guard in a good way. After programming with a language for close to 10 years you start to lose the "Awe Cool!" effect that new learners of a language experience when writing code. New learns of JavaScript are the reason why I created this post. Please enjoy. Note: Place JavaScript in to address bar and then press the enter key. Example 1: JavaScript Alert box displaying My name: John Doe Javascript:alert('My name: \n John Doe') ; Example 2: JavaScript alert box displaying name entered by user. javascript:alert('My name: \n ' + prompt('Enter Name','Name')) ; Example 3: JavaScript alert box displaying name entered by user, and then displays the length of the name. javascript:var name= prompt('Enter Name','Name'); alert('My name: \n ' + name); alert(name.length); If you notice, the address bar will execute JavaScript on the current page loaded in the browser using the Document Object Model (DOM). Additionally, the address bar will allow multiple lines to be executed sequentially even though all of the code is contained within one line due to the fact that the JavaScript interpreter uses the “;” to indicate where a line of ends and a new one begins. After doing a little more research on the topic of JavaScript Browser Hacks I found a few other cool JavaScript hacks which I will list below. Example 4: Make any webpage editableSource: http://www.openjason.com/2008/09/02/browser-hack-make-any-web-page-editable/ javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0; Example 5: CHINESE DRAGON DANCING Source: http://nzeyi.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/dwrajaxjavascript-hacks-the-secrets-of-javascript-in-the-adress-bar/ javascript:R=0;x1=0.1;y1=0.05;x2=0.25;y2=0.24;x3=1.6; y3=0.24;x4=300;y4=200;x5=300;y5=200;DI=document.links; DIL=DI.length;A=function(){for(i=0;i-DIL;i++){DI[i].style. position='absolute';DI[i].style.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+ x5;DI[i].style.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++;}; setInterval('A()',5);void(0); Example 6: Reveal content stored in password protected fields javascript:(function(){var s,F,j,f,i; s = “”; F = document.forms; for(j=0; j Example 7: Force user to close browser windowSource: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=767053 javascript:while(1){alert('Restart your brower to close this box!')} Learn more about JavaScript Browser Hacks.

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• Parallelism in .NET – Part 19, TaskContinuationOptions

  - by Reed

  My introduction to Task continuations demonstrates continuations on the Task class.  In addition, I’ve shown how continuations allow handling of multiple tasks in a clean, concise manner.  Continuations can also be used to handle exceptional situations using a clean, simple syntax. In addition to standard Task continuations , the Task class provides some options for filtering continuations automatically.  This is handled via the TaskContinationOptions enumeration, which provides hints to the TaskScheduler that it should only continue based on the operation of the antecedent task. This is especially useful when dealing with exceptions.  For example, we can extend the sample from our earlier continuation discussion to include support for handling exceptions thrown by the Factorize method: // Get a copy of the UI-thread task scheduler up front to use later var uiScheduler = TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext(); // Start our task var factorize = Task.Factory.StartNew( () => { int primeFactor1 = 0; int primeFactor2 = 0; bool result = Factorize(10298312, ref primeFactor1, ref primeFactor2); return new { Result = result, Factor1 = primeFactor1, Factor2 = primeFactor2 }; }); // When we succeed, report the results to the UI factorize.ContinueWith(task => textBox1.Text = string.Format("{0}/{1} [Succeeded {2}]", task.Result.Factor1, task.Result.Factor2, task.Result.Result), CancellationToken.None, TaskContinuationOptions.NotOnFaulted, uiScheduler); // When we have an exception, report it factorize.ContinueWith(task => textBox1.Text = string.Format("Error: {0}", task.Exception.Message), CancellationToken.None, TaskContinuationOptions.OnlyOnFaulted, uiScheduler); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The above code works by using a combination of features.  First, we schedule our task, the same way as in the previous example.  However, in this case, we use a different overload of Task.ContinueWith which allows us to specify both a specific TaskScheduler (in order to have your continuation run on the UI’s synchronization context) as well as a TaskContinuationOption.  In the first continuation, we tell the continuation that we only want it to run when there was not an exception by specifying TaskContinuationOptions.NotOnFaulted.  When our factorize task completes successfully, this continuation will automatically run on the UI thread, and provide the appropriate feedback. However, if the factorize task has an exception – for example, if the Factorize method throws an exception due to an improper input value, the second continuation will run.  This occurs due to the specification of TaskContinuationOptions.OnlyOnFaulted in the options.  In this case, we’ll report the error received to the user. We can use TaskContinuationOptions to filter our continuations by whether or not an exception occurred and whether or not a task was cancelled.  This allows us to handle many situations, and is especially useful when trying to maintain a valid application state without ever blocking the user interface.  The same concepts can be extended even further, and allow you to chain together many tasks based on the success of the previous ones.  Continuations can even be used to create a state machine with full error handling, all without blocking the user interface thread.

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• SOA Suite 11g Asynchronous Testing with soapUI

  - by Greg Mally

  Overview The Enterprise Manager test harness that comes bundled with SOA Suite 11g is a great tool for doing smoke tests and some minor load testing. When a more robust testing tool is needed, often times soapUI is leveraged for many reasons ranging from ease of use to cost effective. However, when you want to start doing some more complex testing other than synchronous web services with static content, then the free version of soapUI becomes a bit more challenging. In this blog I will show you how to test asynchronous web services with soapUI free edition. The following assumes that you have a working knowledge of soapUI and will not go into concepts like setting up a project etc. For the basics, please review the documentation for soapUI: http://www.soapui.org/Getting-Started/ Asynchronous Web Service Testing in soapUI When invoking an asynchronous web service, the caller must provide a callback for the response. Since our testing will originate from soapUI, then it is only natural that soapUI would provide the callback mechanism. This mechanism in soapUI is called a MockService. In a nutshell, a soapUI MockService is a simulation of a Web Service (aka, a process listening on a port). We will go through the steps in setting up the MockService for a simple asynchronous BPEL process. After creating your soapUI project based on an asynchronous BPEL process, you will see something like the following: Notice that soapUI created an interface for both the request and the response (i.e., callback). The interface that was created for the callback will be used to create the MockService. Right-click on the callback interface and select the Generate MockService menu item: You will be presented with the Generate MockService dialogue where we will tweak the Path and possibly the port (depends upon what ports are available on the machine where soapUI will be running). We will adjust the Path to include the operation name (append /processResponse in this example) and the port of 8088 is fine: Once the MockService is created, you should have something like the following in soapUI: This window acts as a console/view into the callback process. When the play button is pressed (green triangle in the upper left-hand corner), soapUI will start a process running on the configured Port that will accept web service invocations on the configured Path: At this point we are “almost” ready to try out the asynchronous test. But first we must provide the web service addressing (WS-A) configuration on the request message. We will edit the message for the request interface that was generated when the project was created (SimpleAsyncBPELProcessBinding > process > Request 1 in this example). At the bottom of the request message editor you will find the WS-A configuration by left-clicking on the WS-A label: Here we will setup WS-A by changing the default values to: Must understand: TRUE Add default wsa:Action: Add default wsa:Action (checked) Reply to: ${host where soapUI is running}:${MockService Port}${MockService Path} … in this example: http://192.168.1.181:8088/mockSimpleAsyncBPELProcessCallbackBinding/processResponse We now are ready to run the asynchronous test from soapUI free edition. Make sure that the MockService you created is running and then push the play button for the request (green triangle in the upper left-hand corner of the request editor). If everything is configured correctly, you should see the response show up in the MockService window: To view the response message/payload, just double-click on a response message in the Message Log window of the MockService: At this point you can now expand the project to include a Test Suite for some load balance tests etc. This same topic has been covered in various detail on other sites/blogs, but I wanted to simplify and detail how this is done in the context of SOA Suite 11g. It also serves as a nice introduction to another blog of mine: SOA Suite 11g Dynamic Payload Testing with soapUI Free Edition.

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• Data Quality and Master Data Management Resources

  - by Dejan Sarka

  Many companies or organizations do regular data cleansing. When you cleanse the data, the data quality goes up to some higher level. The data quality level is determined by the amount of work invested in the cleansing. As time passes, the data quality deteriorates, and you need to repeat the cleansing process. If you spend an equal amount of effort as you did with the previous cleansing, you can expect the same level of data quality as you had after the previous cleansing. And then the data quality deteriorates over time again, and the cleansing process starts over and over again. The idea of Data Quality Services is to mitigate the cleansing process. While the amount of time you need to spend on cleansing decreases, you will achieve higher and higher levels of data quality. While cleansing, you learn what types of errors to expect, discover error patterns, find domains of correct values, etc. You don’t throw away this knowledge. You store it and use it to find and correct the same issues automatically during your next cleansing process. The following figure shows this graphically. The idea of master data management, which you can perform with Master Data Services (MDS), is to prevent data quality from deteriorating. Once you reach a particular quality level, the MDS application—together with the defined policies, people, and master data management processes—allow you to maintain this level permanently. This idea is shown in the following picture. OK, now you know what DQS and MDS are about. You can imagine the importance on maintaining the data quality. Here are some resources that help you preparing and executing the data quality (DQ) and master data management (MDM) activities. Books Dejan Sarka and Davide Mauri: Data Quality and Master Data Management with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 – a general introduction to MDM, MDS, and data profiling. Matching explained in depth. Dejan Sarka, Matija Lah and Grega Jerkic: MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-463): Building Data Warehouses with Microsoft SQL Server 2012 – I wrote quite a few chapters about DQ and MDM, and introduced also SQL Server 2012 DQS. Thomas Redman: Data Quality: The Field Guide – you should start with this book. Thomas Redman is the father of DQ and MDM. Tyler Graham: Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Master Data Services – MDS in depth from a product team mate. Arkady Maydanchik: Data Quality Assessment – data profiling in depth. Tamraparni Dasu, Theodore Johnson: Exploratory Data Mining and Data Cleaning – advanced data profiling with data mining. Forthcoming presentations I am presenting a DQS and MDM seminar at PASS SQL Rally Amsterdam 2013: Wednesday, November 6th, 2013: Enterprise Information Management with SQL Server 2012 – a good kick start to your first DQ and / or MDM project. Courses Data Quality and Master Data Management with SQL Server 2012 – I wrote a 2-day course for SolidQ. If you are interested in this course, which I could also deliver in a shorter seminar way, you can contact your closes SolidQ subsidiary, or, of course, me directly on addresses [email protected] or [email protected]. This course could also complement the existing courseware portfolio of training providers, which are welcome to contact me as well. Start improving the quality of your data now!

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• IntelliTrace As a Learning Tool for MVC2 in a VS2010 Project

  - by Sam Abraham

  IntelliTrace is a new feature in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition. I see this valuable tool as a “Program Execution Recorder” that captures information about events and calls taking place as soon as we hit the VS2010 play (Start Debugging) button or the F5 key. Many online resources already discuss IntelliTrace and the benefit it brings to both developers and testers alike so I see no value of just repeating this information.  In this brief blog entry, I would like to share with you how I will be using IntelliTrace in my upcoming talk at the Ft Lauderdale ArcSig .Net User Group Meeting on April 20th 2010 (check http://www.fladotnet.com for more information), as a learning tool to demonstrate the internals of the lifecycle of an MVC2 application.  I will also be providing some helpful links that cover IntelliTrace in more detail at the end of my article for reference. IntelliTrace is setup by default to only capture execution events. Microsoft did such a great job on optimizing its recording process that I haven’t even felt the slightest performance hit with IntelliTrace running as I was debugging my solutions and projects.  For my purposes here however, I needed to capture more information beyond execution events, so I turned on the option for capturing calls in addition to events as shown in Figures 1 and 2. Changing capture options will require us to stop our debugging session and start over for the new settings to take place. Figure 1 – Access IntelliTrace options via the Tools->Options menu items Figure 2 – Change IntelliTrace Options to capture call information as well as events Notice the warning with regards to potentially degrading performance when selecting to capture call information in addition to the default events-only setting. I have found this warning to be sure true. My subsequent tests showed slowness in page load times compared to rendering those same exact pages with the “event-only” option selected. Execution recording is auto-started along with the new debugging session of our project. At this point, we can simply interact with the application and continue executing normally until we decide to “playback” the code we have executed so far.  For code replay, first step is to “break” the current execution as show in Figure 3.   Figure 3 – Break to replay recording A few tries later, I found a good process to quickly find and demonstrate the MVC2 page lifecycle. First-off, we start with the event view as shown in Figure 4 until we find an interesting event that needs further studying.  Figure 4 – Going through IntelliTrace’s events and picking as specific entry of interest We now can, for instance, study how the highlighted HTTP GET request is being handled, by clicking on the “Calls View” for that particular event. Notice that IntelliTrace shows us all calls that took place in servicing that GET request. Double clicking on any call takes us to a more granular view of the call stack within that clicked call, up until getting to a specific line of code where we can do a line-by-line replay of the execution from that point onwards using F10 or F11 just like our typical good old VS2008 debugging helped us accomplish. Figure 5 – switching to call view on an event of interest Figure 6 – Double clicking on call shows a more granular view of the call stack. In conclusion, the introduction of IntelliTrace as a new addition to the VS developers’ tool arsenal enhances development and debugging experience and effectively tackles the “no-repro” problem. It will also hopefully enhance my audience’s experience listening to me speaking about  an MVC2 page lifecycle which I can now easily visually demonstrate, thereby improving the probability of keeping everybody awake a little longer. IntelliTrace References: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee336126.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd264944(VS.100).aspx

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• Agile Database Techniques: Effective Strategies for the Agile Software Developer – book review

  - by DigiMortal

     Agile development expects mind shift and developers are not the only ones who must be agile. Every chain is as strong as it’s weakest link and same goes also for development teams. Agile Database Techniques: Effective Strategies for the Agile Software Developer by Scott W. Ambler is book that calls also data professionals to be part of agile development. Often are DBA-s in situation where they are not part of application development and later they have to survive large set of applications that all use databases different way. Of course, only some of these applications are not problematic when looking what database server has to do to serve them. I have seen many applications that rape database servers because developers have no clue what is going on in database (~3K queries to database per web application request – have you seen something like this? I have…) Agile Database Techniques covers some object and database design technologies and gives suggestions to development teams about topics they need help or assistance by DBA-s. The book is also good reading for DBA-s who usually are not very strong in object technologies. You can take this book as bridge between these two worlds. I think teams that build object applications that use databases should buy this book and try at least one or two projects out with Ambler’s suggestions. Table of contents Foreword by Jon Kern. Foreword by Douglas K. Barry. Acknowledgments. Introduction. About the Author. Part One: Setting the Foundation. Chapter 1: The Agile Data Method. Chapter 2: From Use Cases to Databases — Real-World UML. Chapter 3: Data Modeling 101. Chapter 4: Data Normalization. Chapter 5: Class Normalization. Chapter 6: Relational Database Technology, Like It or Not. Chapter 7: The Object-Relational Impedance Mismatch. Chapter 8: Legacy Databases — Everything You Need to Know But Are Afraid to Deal With. Part Two: Evolutionary Database Development. Chapter 9: Vive L’ Évolution. Chapter 10: Agile Model-Driven Development (AMDD). Chapter 11: Test-Driven Development (TDD). Chapter 12: Database Refactoring. Chapter 13: Database Encapsulation Strategies. Chapter 14: Mapping Objects to Relational Databases. Chapter 15: Performance Tuning. Chapter 16: Tools for Evolutionary Database Development. Part Three: Practical Data-Oriented Development Techniques. Chapter 17: Implementing Concurrency Control. Chapter 18: Finding Objects in Relational Databases. Chapter 19: Implementing Referential Integrity and Shared Business Logic. Chapter 20: Implementing Security Access Control. Chapter 21: Implementing Reports. Chapter 22: Realistic XML. Part Four: Adopting Agile Database Techniques. Chapter 23: How You Can Become Agile. Chapter 24: Bringing Agility into Your Organization. Appendix: Database Refactoring Catalog. References and Suggested Reading. Index.

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• Customize Team Build 2010 – Part 12: How to debug my custom activities

  In the series the following parts have been published Part 1: Introduction Part 2: Add arguments and variables Part 3: Use more complex arguments Part 4: Create your own activity Part 5: Increase AssemblyVersion Part 6: Use custom type for an argument Part 7: How is the custom assembly found Part 8: Send information to the build log Part 9: Impersonate activities (run under other credentials) Part 10: Include Version Number in the Build Number Part 11: Speed up opening my build process template Part 12: How to debug my custom activities Part 13: Get control over the Build Output Part 14: Execute a PowerShell script Part 15: Fail a build based on the exit code of a console application       Developers are “spoilt” persons who expect to be able to have easy debugging experiences for every technique they work with. So they also expect it when developing custom activities for the build process template. This post describes how you can debug your custom activities without having to develop on the build server itself. Remote debugging prerequisites The prerequisite for these steps are to install the Microsoft Visual Studio Remote Debugging Monitor. You can find information how to install this at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bt727f1t.aspx. I chose for the option to run the remote debugger on the build server from a file share. Debugging symbols prerequisites To be able to start the debugging, you need to have the pdb files on the buildserver together with the assembly. The pdb must have been build with Full Debug Info. Steps In my setup I have a development machine and a build server. To setup the remote debugging, I performed the following steps Locate on your development machine the folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\Remote Debugger Create a share for the Remote Debugger folder. Make sure that the share (and the folder) has the correct permissions so the user on the build server has access to the share. On the build server go to the shared “Remote Debugger” folder Start msvsmon.exe which is located in the folder that represents the platform of the build server. This will open a winform application like   Go back to your development machine and open the BuildProcess solution. Start the Attach to process command (Ctrl+Alt+P) Type in the Qualifier the name of the build server. In my case the user account that has started the msvsmon is another user then the user on my development machine. In that case you have to type the qualifier in the format that is shown in the Remote Debugging Monitor (in my case LOCAL\Administrator@TFSLAB) and confirm it by pressing <Enter> Since the build service is running with other credentials, check the option “Show processes from all users”. Now the Attach to process dialog shows the TFSBuildServiceHost process Set the breakpoint in the activity you want to debug and kick of a build. Be aware that when you attach to the TFSBuildServiceHost that you debug every single build that is run by this windows service, so make sure you don’t debug the build server that is in production! You can download the full solution at BuildProcess.zip. It will include the sources of every part and will continue to evolve.

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• MongoDB usage best practices

  - by andresv

  The project I'm working on uses MongoDB for some stuff so I'm creating some documents to help developers speedup the learning curve and also avoid mistakes and help them write clean & reliable code. This is my first version of it, so I'm pretty sure I will be adding more stuff to it, so stay tuned! C# Official driver notes The 10gen official MongoDB driver should always be referenced in projects by using NUGET. Do not manually download and reference assemblies in any project. C# driver quickstart guide: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/CSharp+Driver+Quickstart Reference links C# Language Center: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/CSharp+Language+Center MongoDB Server Documentation: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Home MongoDB Server Downloads: http://www.mongodb.org/downloads MongoDB client drivers download: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Drivers MongoDB Community content: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/CSharp+Community+Projects Tutorials Tutorial MongoDB con ASP.NET MVC - Ejemplo Práctico (Spanish):http://geeks.ms/blogs/gperez/archive/2011/12/02/tutorial-mongodb-con-asp-net-mvc-ejemplo-pr-225-ctico.aspx MongoDB and C#:http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/87757/MongoDB-and-C C# driver LINQ tutorial:http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/CSharp+Driver+LINQ+Tutorial C# driver reference: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/CSharp+Driver+Tutorial Safe Mode Connection The C# driver supports two connection modes: safe and unsafe. Safe connection mode (only applies to methods that modify data in a database like Inserts, Deletes and Updates. While the current driver defaults to unsafe mode (safeMode == false) it's recommended to always enable safe mode, and force unsafe mode on specific things we know aren't critical. When safe mode is enabled, the driver internal code calls the MongoDB "getLastError" function to ensure the last operation is completed before returning control the the caller. For more information on using safe mode and their implicancies on performance and data reliability see: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/getLastError+Command If safe mode is not enabled, all data modification calls to the database are executed asynchronously (fire & forget) without waiting for the result of the operation. This mode could be useful for creating / updating non-critical data like performance counters, usage logging and so on. It's important to know that not using safe mode implies that data loss can occur without any notification to the caller. As with any wait operation, enabling safe mode also implies dealing with timeouts. For more information about C# driver safe mode configuration see: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/CSharp+getLastError+and+SafeMode The safe mode configuration can be specified at different levels: Connection string: mongodb://hostname/?safe=true Database: when obtaining a database instance using the server.GetDatabase(name, safeMode) method Collection: when obtaining a collection instance using the database.GetCollection(name, safeMode) method Operation: for example, when executing the collection.Insert(document, safeMode) method Some useful SafeMode article: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4604868/mongodb-c-sharp-safemode-official-driver Exception Handling The driver ensures that an exception will be thrown in case of something going wrong, in case of using safe mode (as said above, when not using safe mode no exception will be thrown no matter what the outcome of the operation is). As explained here https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/mongodb-user/mS6jIq5FUiM there is no need to check for any returned value from a driver method inserting data. With updates the situation is similar to any other relational database: if an update command doesn't affect any records, the call will suceed anyway (no exception thrown) and you manually have to check for something like "records affected". For MongoDB, an Update operation will return an instance of the "SafeModeResult" class, and you can verify the "DocumentsAffected" property to ensure the intended document was indeed updated. Note: Please remember that an Update method might return a null instance instead of an "SafeModeResult" instance when safe mode is not enabled. Useful Community Articles Comments about how MongoDB works and how that might affect your application: http://ethangunderson.com/blog/two-reasons-to-not-use-mongodb/ FourSquare using MongoDB had serious scalability problems: http://mashable.com/2010/10/07/mongodb-foursquare/ Is MongoDB a replacement for Memcached? http://www.quora.com/Is-MongoDB-a-good-replacement-for-Memcached/answer/Rick-Branson MongoDB Introduction, shell, when not to use, maintenance, upgrade, backups, memory, sharding, etc: http://www.markus-gattol.name/ws/mongodb.html MongoDB Collection level locking support: https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-1240 MongoDB performance tips: http://www.quora.com/MongoDB/What-are-some-best-practices-for-optimal-performance-of-MongoDB-particularly-for-queries-that-involve-multiple-documents Lessons learned migrating from SQL Server to MongoDB: http://www.wireclub.com/development/TqnkQwQ8CxUYTVT90/read MongoDB replication performance: http://benshepheard.blogspot.com.ar/2011/01/mongodb-replication-performance.html

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• SQLAuthority News – Public Training Classes In Hyderabad 12-14 May – Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008

  - by pinaldave

  After successfully delivering many corporate trainings as well as the private training Solid Quality Mentors, India is launching the Public Training in Hyderabad for SQL Server 2008 and SharePoint 2010. This is going to be one of the most unique and one-of-a-kind events in India where Solid Quality Mentors are offering public classes. I will be leading the training on Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008 Query Optimization & Performance Tuning. This intensive, 3-day course intends to give attendees an in-depth look at Query Optimization and Performance Tuning in SQL Server 2005 and 2008. Designed to prepare SQL Server developers and administrators for a transition into SQL Server 2005 or 2008, the course covers the best practices for a variety of essential tasks in order to maximize the performance. At the end of the course, there would be daily discussions about your real-world problems and find appropriate solutions. Note: Scroll down for course fees, discount, dates and location. Do not forget to take advantage of Discount code ‘SQLAuthority‘. The training premises are very well-equipped as they will be having 1:1 computers. Every participant will be provided with printed course materials. I will pick up your entire lunch tab and we will have lots of SQL talk together. The best participant will receive a special gift at the end of the course. Even though the quality of the material to be delivered together with the course will be of extremely high standard, the course fees are set at a very moderate rate. The fee for the course is INR 14,000/person for the whole 3-day convention. At the rate of 1 USD = 44 INR, this fee converts to less than USD 300. At this rate, it is totally possible to fly from anywhere from the world to India and take the training and still save handsome pocket money. It would be even better if you register using the discount code “SQLAuthority“, for you will instantly get an INR 3000 discount, reducing the total cost of the training to INR 11,000/person for whole 3 days course. This is a onetime offer and will not be available in the future. Please note that there will be a 10.3% service tax on course fees. To register, either send an email to [email protected] or call +91 95940 43399. Feel free to drop me an email at [email protected] for any additional information and clarification. Training Date and Time: May 12-14, 2010 10 AM- 6 PM. Training Venue: Abridge Solutions, #90/B/C/3/1, Ganesh GHR & MSY Plaza, Vittalrao Nagar, Near Image Hospital, Madhapur, Hyderabad – 500 081. The details of the course is as listed below. Day 1 : Strengthen the basics along with SQL Server 2005/2008 New Features Module 01: Subqueries, Ranking Functions, Joins and Set Operations Module 02: Table Expressions Module 03: TOP and APPLY Module 04: SQL Server 2008 Enhancements Day 2: Query Optimization & Performance Tuning 1 Module 05: Logical Query Processing Module 06: Query Tuning Module 07:  Introduction to the Query Processor Module 08:  Review of common query coding which causes poor performance Day 3: Query Optimization & Performance Tuning 2 Module 09:  SQL Server Indexing and index maintenance Module 10:  Plan Guides, query hints, UDFs, and Computed Columns Module 11:  Understanding SQL Server Execution Plans Module 12: Real World Index and Optimization Tips Download the complete PDF brochure. We are also going to have SharePoint 2010 training by Joy Rathnayake on 10-11 May. All the details for discount applies to the same as well. Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Training, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• It&rsquo;s ok to throw System.Exception&hellip;

  - by Chris Skardon

  No. No it’s not. It’s not just me saying that, it’s the Microsoft guidelines: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229007.aspx  Do not throw System.Exception or System.SystemException. Also – as important: Do not catch System.Exception or System.SystemException in framework code, unless you intend to re-throw.. Throwing: Always, always try to pick the most specific exception type you can, if the parameter you have received in your method is null, throw an ArgumentNullException, value received greater than expected? ArgumentOutOfRangeException. For example: public void ArgChecker(int theInt, string theString) { if (theInt < 0) throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("theInt", theInt, "theInt needs to be greater than zero."); if (theString == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("theString"); if (theString.Length == 0) throw new ArgumentException("theString needs to have content.", "theString"); } Why do we want to do this? It’s a lot of extra code when compared with a simple: public void ArgChecker(int theInt, string theString) { if (theInt < 0 || string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(theString)) throw new Exception("The parameters were invalid."); } It all comes down to a couple of things; the catching of the exceptions, and the information you are passing back to the calling code. Catching: Ok, so let’s go with introduction level Exception handling, taught by many-a-university: You do all your work in a try clause, and catch anything wrong in the catch clause. So this tends to give us code like this: try { /* All the shizzle */ } catch { /* Deal with errors */ } But of course, we can improve on that by catching the exception so we can report on it: try { } catch(Exception ex) { /* Log that 'ex' occurred? */ } Now we’re at the point where people tend to go: Brilliant, I’ve got exception handling nailed, what next??? and code gets littered with the catch(Exception ex) nastiness. Why is it nasty? Let’s imagine for a moment our code is throwing an ArgumentNullException which we’re catching in the catch block and logging. Ok, the log entry has been made, so we can debug the code right? We’ve got all the info… What about an OutOfMemoryException – what can we do with that? That’s right, not a lot, chances are you can’t even log it (you are out of memory after all), but you’ve caught it – and as such - have hidden it. So, as part of this, there are two things you can do one, is the rethrow method: try { /* code */ } catch (Exception ex) { //Log throw; } Note, it’s not catch (Exception ex) { throw ex; } as that will wipe all your important stack trace information. This does get your exception to continue, and is the only reason you would catch Exception (anywhere other than a global catch-all) in your code. The other preferred method is to catch the exceptions you can deal with. It may not matter that the string I’m passing in is null, and I can cope with it like this: try{ DoSomething(myString); } catch(ArgumentNullException){} And that’s fine, it means that any exceptions I can’t deal with (OutOfMemory for example) will be propagated out to other code that can deal with it. Of course, this is horribly messy, no one wants try / catch blocks everywhere and that’s why Microsoft added the ‘Try’ methods to the framework, and it’s a strategy we should continue. If I try: int i = (int) "one"; I will get an InvalidCastException which means I need the try / catch block, but I could mitigate this using the ‘TryParse’ method: int i; if(!Int32.TryParse("one", out i)) return; Similarly, in the ‘DoSomething’ example, it might be beneficial to have a ‘TryDoSomething’ that returns a boolean value indicating the success of continuing. Obviously this isn’t practical in every case, so use the ol’ common sense approach. Onwards Yer thanks Chris, I’m looking forward to writing tonnes of new code. Fear not, that is where helpers come into it… (but that’s the next post)

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• SharePoint OCR image files indexing

  Introduction This article describes how to setup indexing of the image files (including TIFF, PDF, JPEG, BMP...) using OCR technology. The indexing described below utilizes Microsoft IFilter technology and as such is not specific to SharePoint, but can be used with any product that uses Microsoft indexing: Microsoft Search, Desktop search, SQL Server search, and through the plug-ins with Google desktop search. I however use it with Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 2003. For those other products, the registration may need to be slightly different. Background  One of the projects I was working on required a storage of old documents scanned into PDF files. Then there was a separate team of people responsible for providing a tags for a search engine so those image documents could be found. The whole process was clumsy, labor intensive, and error prone. That was what started me on my exploration path. OCR The first search I fired was for the Open Source OCR products. Pretty quickly, I narrowed it down to TESSERACT (http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/). Tesseract is an orphaned brain child of HP that worked on it from 1985 to 1995. Then it was moved to the Open Source, and now if I understand it correctly, Google is working on it. With credentials like that, it's no wonder that Tesseract scores one of the highest marks on OCR recognition and accuracy. After downloading and struggling just a bit, I got Tesseract to work. The struggling part was that the home page claims that its base input format is a TIFF file. May be my TIFFs were bad, but I was able to get it to work only for BMP files. Image files conversion So now that I have an OCR that can convert BMP files into text, how do I get text out of the image PDF files? One more search, and I settled down on ImageMagic (http://www.imagemagick.org/). This is another wonderful Open Source utility that can convert any file into image. It did work out of the box, converting any TIFF files into bitmaps, but to get PDF files converted, it requires a GhostScript (http://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/gs864/gs864w32.exe). Dealing with text PDFs With that utility installed, I was cooking - I can convert any file (in particular PDF and TIFF) into bitmap, and then I can extract the text out of the bitmap. The only consideration was to somehow treat PDF files containing text differently - after all, OCR is very computation intensive and somewhat error prone even with perfect image quality and resolution. So another quick search, and I have a PDFTOTEXT (ftp://ftp.foolabs.com/pub/xpdf/xpdf-3.02pl4-win32.zip) - thank God for Open Source! With these guys, I can pull text out of PDF in an eye blink. However, I would get nothing for pure image PDFs, but I already have a solution for that! Batch process It took another 15 minutes to setup a batch script to automate the process: Check the file extension If file is a PDF file try to extract text out of it if there is more than certain amount of text in the file - done! if there is no text, convert first page into bitmap run OCR on the bitmap For any other file type, convert file into bitmap Run OCR on the bitmap Once you unzip the attached project, check out the bin\OCR.BAT file. It will create a temporary file in the directory where your source file is with the same name + the '.txt' extension.Continue span.fullpost {display:none;}

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• Last GUID used up - new ScottGuID unique ID to replace it

  - by Eilon

  You might have heard in recent news that the last ever GUID was used up. The GUID {FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF} was just consumed by a soon to be released project at Microsoft. Immediately after the GUID's creation the word spread around the Microsoft campuses around the globe. Microsoft's approximately 100,000 worldwide employees then started blogging, tweeting, and facebooking about the dubious "achievement." The following screenshot shows GUIDGEN (the Windows tool for creating GUIDs) with the last ever GUID. All GUIDs created by projects at Microsoft must be registered in a central repository for record keeping. This allows quick-fix engineers, security engineers, anti-malware developers, and testers to do a quick look up of an unknown GUID and find out if it belongs to Microsoft. The following screenshot shows the Microsoft GUID Tracker internal application and the last few GUIDs being used up by various Microsoft projects. What is perhaps more interesting than the news about the GUID is the project that used that last GUID. The recent announcements regarding the development experience for the Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7S) all involve free editions of Visual Studio 2010. One of the lesser known developer tools is based on a resurrected project that many of you are probably familiar with, but have never used. The tool is in fact Microsoft Bob 7 Series (MB7S). MB7S is an agent-based approach for mobile phone app development. The UI incorporates both natural language interfaces and motion gesture behaviors, similar to the Windows Phone 7 Series “Metro” interface. If it works, it will help to expand the breadth of mobile app developers. After the GUID: The ScottGuID It came as no big surprise that eventually the last GUID would be used up. Knowing this, a group of engineers at Microsoft has designed, implemented, and tested a replacement to the GUID: The ScottGuID. There are several core principles of the ScottGuID: 1. The concepts used in ScottGuIDs must be easily understood by a developer who is already familiar with GUIDs 2. There must exist a compatibility layer between ScottGuIDs and GUIDs 3. A ScottGuID must be usable in a practical manner in non-computing environments 4. There must exist ScottGuID APIs for all common platforms: Win32/Win64/WinCE, .NET (incl. Silverlight), Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS (incl. iPhone OS), Symbian, RIM BlackBerry, Google Android, etc. 5. ScottGuIDs must never run out ScottGuID use cases One of the more subtle principles of the ScottGuID is principle #3. While technically a GUID could be used in any environment, it was not practical to do so in terms of data entry and error detection. In order to have the ScottGuID be a true universal ID it must be usable in non-computing environments. Prior to the announcement of the ScottGuID there have been a number of until-now confidential projects. One of the tools that will soon become public is ScottGuIDGen, which is in essence an updated version of GUIDGEN that can create ScottGuIDs. The following screenshot shows a sample ScottGuID. To demonstrate the various applications of the ScottGuID there were test deployments around the globe. The following examples are a small showcase of the applications that have already been prototyped. Log in to Hotmail: Pay for gas: Sign in to Twitter: Dispense cat food: Conclusion I hope that this brief introduction to the ScottGuID shows how technology can continue to move forward, even when it appears there is a point that cannot be passed. With a small number of principles, a team of smart engineers, and a passion for "getting it right" the ScottGuID should last well past our lifetimes. In the coming months expect further announcements regarding additional developer tools, samples, whitepapers, podcasts, and videos. Please leave a comment on this post if you have any questions about the ScottGuID or what you would like to see us do with it. With ScottGuID, the possibilities are nearly endless and we want to stretch their reach as far as possible.

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• Hello World Pagelet

  - by astemkov

  Introduction The goal of this exercise is to give you a basic feel of how you can use Pagelet Producer to proxy a web page We will proxy a simple static Hello World web page, cut one section out of that page and present it as a pagelet that you can later insert on your own application page or to your portal page such as WebCenter Portal space or WebCenter Interaction community page. Hello World sample app This is the static web page we will work with: Let's assume the following: The Hello World web page is running on server http://appserver.company.com:1234/ The Hello World web page path is: http://appserver.company.com:1234/helloworld/ Initial Pagelet Producer setup Let's assume that the Pagelet Producer server is running on http://pageletserver.company.com:8889/pagelets/ First let's check that Pagelet Producer is up and running. In order to do that we just need to access the following URL: http://pageletserver.company.com:8889/pagelets/ And this is what should be returned: Now you can access Pagelet Producer administration screens using this URL: http://pageletserver.company.com:8889/pagelets/admin This is how the UI looks: Now if you connect to the internet via proxy server, you need to configure proxy in Pagelet Producer settings. In the Navigator pane: Jump To - Settings Click on "Proxy" Enter your proxy server configuration: Creating a resource First thing that you need to do is to create a resource for your web page. This will tell Pagelet Producer that all sub-paths of the web page should be proxied. It also will allow you to setup common rules of how your web page should be proxied and will serve as a container for your pagelets. In the Navigator pane: Jump To - Resources Click on any existing resource (ex. welcome_resource) Click on "Create selected type" toolbar button at the top of the Navigator pane Select "Web" in the "Select Producer Type" dialog box and click "OK" Now after the resource is created let's click on "General" sub-item a specify the following values Name = AppServer Source URL = http://appserver.company.com:1234/ Destination URL = /appserver/ Click on "Save" toolbar button at the top of the Navigator pane After the resource is created our web page becomes accessible by the URL: http://pageletserver.company.com:8889/pagelets/appserver/helloworld/ So in original web page address Source URL is replaced with Pagelet Producer URL (http://pageletserver.company.com:8889/pagelets) + Destination URL Creating a pagelet Now let's create "Hello World" pagelet. Under the resource node activate Pagelets subnode Click on "Create selected type" toolbar button at the top of the Navigator pane Click on "General" sub-node of newly created pagelet and specify the following values Name = Hello_World Library = MyLib Library is used for logical grouping. The portals use the "Library" value to group pagelets in their respective UI's. For example, when adding pagelets to a WebCenter Portal space you would see the individual pagelets listed under the "Library" name. URL Suffix = helloworld/index.html this is where the Hello World page html is served from Click on "Save" toolbar button at the top of the Navigator pane The Library name can be anything you want, it doesn't have to match the resource name at all. It is used as a logical grouping of pagelets, and you can include pagelets from multiple resources into the same library or create a new library for each pagelet. After you save the pagelet you can access it here: http://pageletserver.company.com:8889/pagelets/inject/v2/pagelet/MyLib/Hello_World which is : http://pageletserver.company.com:8889/pagelets/inject/v2/pagelet/ + [Library] + [Name] Or to test the injection of a pagelet into iframe you can click on the pagelets "Documentation" sub-node and use "Access Pagelet using REST" URL: This is what we will see: Clipping The pagelet that we just created covers the whole web page, but we want just the "Hello World" segment of it. So let's clip it. Under the Hello_World pagelet node activate Clipper sub-node Click on "Create selected type" toolbar button at the top of the Navigator pane Specify a Name for newly created clipper. For example: "c1" Click on "Content" sub-node of the clipper Click on "Launch Clipper" button New browser window will open By moving a mouse pointer over the web page select the area you want to clip: Click left mouse button - the browser window will disappear and you will see that Clipping Path was automatically generated Now let's save and access the link from the "Documentation" page again Here's our pagelet nicely clipped and ready for being used on your Web Center Space

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• asynchrony is viral

  - by Daniel Moth

  It is becoming hard to write code today without introducing some form of asynchrony and, if you are using .NET (e.g. for Windows Phone 8 or Windows Store apps), that means sooner or later you have to await something and mark your method as async. My most recent examples included introducing speech recognition in my Translator By Moth phone app where I had to await mySpeechRecognizerUI.RecognizeWithUIAsync() and when moving that code base to a Windows Store project just to show a MessageBox I had to await myMessageDialog.ShowAsync(). Any time you need to invoke an asynchronous method in your code, you have a choice to make: kick off the operation but don’t wait for it to complete (otherwise known as fire-and-forget), synchronously wait for it to complete (which will entail blocking, which can be bad, especially on a UI thread), or asynchronously wait for it to complete before continuing on with the rest of the method’s work. In most cases, you want the latter, and the await keyword makes that trivial to implement.  When you use the magical await keyword in front of an API call, then you typically have to make additional changes to your code: This await usage is within a method of course, and now you have to annotate that method with async. Furthermore, you have to change the return type of the method you just annotated so it returns a Task (if it previously returned void), or Task<myOldReturnType> (if it previously returned myOldReturnType). Note that if it returns void, in some cases you could cheat and stop there. Furthermore, any method that called this method you just annotated with async will now also be invoking an asynchronous operation, so you have to make that change in the body of the caller method to introduce the await keyword before the call to the method. …you guessed it, you now have to change this caller method to be annotated with async and have its return types tweaked... …and it goes on virally… At some point you reach the root of your user code, e.g. a GUI event handler, and whoever calls that void method can already deal with the fact that you marked it as async and the viral introduction of the keywords stops there… This is all wonderful progress and a very powerful mechanism, and I just wish someone had written a refactoring tool to take care of this… anyone? I mentioned earlier that you have a choice when invoking an asynchronous operation. If the first time you encounter this you wish to localize the impact of all these changes and essentially try to turn the asynchronous behavior into synchronous by blocking - don't! For reasons why you don't want to do that, read Toub's excellent blog post (and check out the rest of his blog with gems on async programming starting with the Async FAQ). Just embrace the pattern knowing that when you use one instance of an await, you'll propagate the change all the way to the root user code method, e.g. typically an event handler. Related aside: I just finished re-writing my MessageBox wrapper class for Phone projects, including making it work in Windows Store projects, and it does expect you to use it with an await :-). I'll share that in an upcoming post for those of you that have the same need… Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• Changing the action of a hyperlink in a Silverlight RichTextArea

  - by Marc Schluper

  The title of this post could also have been "Move over Hyperlink, here comes Actionlink" or "Creating interactive text in Silverlight." But alas, there can be only one. Hyperlinks are very useful. However, they are also limited because their action is fixed: browse to a URL. This may have been adequate at the start of the Internet, but nowadays, in web applications, the one thing we do not want to happen is a complete change of context. In applications we typically like a hyperlink selection to initiate an action that updates a part of the screen. For instance, if my application has a map displayed with some text next to it, the map would react to a selection of a hyperlink in the text, e.g. by zooming in on a location and displaying additional locational information in a popup. In this way, the text becomes interactive text. It is quite common that one company creates and maintains websites for many client companies. To keep maintenance cost low, it is important that the content of these websites can be updated by the client companies themselves, without the need to involve a software engineer. To accommodate this scenario, we want the author of the interactive text to configure all hyperlinks (without writing any code). In a Silverlight RichTextArea, the default action of a Hyperlink is the same as a traditional hyperlink, but it can be changed: if the Command property has a value then upon a click event this command is called with the value of the CommandParameter as parameter. How can we let the author of the text specify a command for each hyperlink in the text, and how can we let an application react properly to a hyperlink selection event? We are talking about any command here. Obviously, the application would recognize only a specific set of commands, with well defined parameters, but the approach we take here is generic in the sense that it pertains to the RichTextArea and any command. So what do we require? We wish that: As a text author, I can configure the action of a hyperlink in a (rich) text without writing code; As a text author, I can persist the action of a hyperlink with the text; As a reader of persisted text, I can click a hyperlink and the configured action will happen; As an application developer, I can configure a control to use my application specific commands. In an excellent introduction to the RichTextArea, John Papa shows (among other things) how to persist a text created using this control. To meet our requirements, we can create a subclass of RichTextArea that uses John's code and allows plugging in two command specific components: one to prompt for a command definition, and one to execute the command. Since both of these plugins are application specific, our RichTextArea subclass should not assume anything about them except their interface. public interface IDefineCommand { void Prompt(string content, // the link content Action<string, object> callback); // the method called to convey the link definition } public interface IPerformCommand : ICommand {} The IDefineCommand plugin receives the content of the link (the text visible to the reader) and displays some kind of control that allows the author to define the link. When that's done, this (possibly changed) content string is conveyed back to the RichTextArea, together with an object that defines the command to execute when the link is clicked by the reader of the published text. The IPerformCommand plugin simply implements System.Windows.Input.ICommand. Let's use MEF to load the proper plugins. In the example solution there is a project that contains rudimentary implementations of these. The IDefineCommand plugin simply prompts for a command string (cf. a command line or query string), and the IPerformCommand plugin displays a MessageBox showing this command string. An actual application using this extended RichTextArea would have its own set of commands, each having their own parameters, and hence would provide more user friendly application specific plugins. Nonetheless, in any case a command can be persisted as a string and hence the two interfaces defined above suffice. For a Visual Studio 2010 solution, see my article on The Code Project.

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• Book &ldquo;Team Foundation Server 2012 Starter&rdquo; published!

  - by Jakob Ehn

  During the summer and fall this year, me and my colleague Terje Sandstrøm has worked together on a book project that has now finally hit the stores! The title of the book is Team Foundation Server 2012 Starter and is published by Packt Publishing. You can find it at http://www.packtpub.com/team-foundation-server-2012-starter/book or from Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/1849688389                          The book is part of a concept that Packt have with starter-books, intended for people new to Team Foundation Server 2012 and who want a quick guideline to get it up and working. It covers the fundamentals, from installing and configuring it, and how to use it with source control, work items and builds. It is done as a step-by-step guide, but also includes best practices advice in the different areas. It covers the use of both the on-premises and the TFS Services version. It also has a list of links and references in the end to the most relevant Visual Studio 2012 ALM sites. Our good friend and fellow ALM MVP Mathias Olausson have done the review of the book, thanks again Mathias! We hope the book fills the gap between the different online guide sites and the more advanced books that are out. Check it out and please let us know what you think of the book! Book Description Your quick start guide to TFS 2012, top features, and best practices with hands on examples Overview Install TFS 2012 from scratch Get up and running with your first project Streamline release cycles for maximum productivity In Detail Team Foundation Server 2012 is Microsoft's leading ALM tool, integrating source control, work item and process handling, build automation, and testing. This practical "Team Foundation Server 2012 Starter Guide" will provide you with clear step-by-step exercises covering all major aspects of the product. This is essential reading for anyone wishing to set up, organize, and use TFS server. This hands-on guide looks at the top features in Team Foundation Server 2012, starting with a quick installation guide and then moving into using it for your software development projects. Manage your team projects with Team Explorer, one of the many new features for 2012. Covering all the main features in source control to help you work more efficiently, including tools for branching and merging, we will delve into the Agile Planning Tools for planning your product and sprint backlogs. Learn to set up build automation, allowing your team to become faster, more streamlined, and ultimately more productive with this "Team Foundation Server 2012 Starter Guide". What you will learn from this book Install TFS 2012 on premise Access TFS Services in the cloud Quickly get started with a new project with product backlogs, source control, and build automation Work efficiently with source control using the top features Understand how the tools for branching and merging in TFS 2012 help you isolate work and teams Learn about the existing process templates, such as Visual Studio Scrum 2.0 Manage your product and sprint backlogs using the Agile planning tools Approach This Starter guide is a short, sharp introduction to Team Foundation Server 2012, covering everything you need to get up and running. Who this book is written for If you are a developer, project lead, tester, or IT administrator working with Team Foundation Server 2012 this guide will get you up to speed quickly and with minimal effort.

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• Routes for IIS Classic and Integrated Mode

  - by imran_ku07

       Introduction:             ASP.NET MVC Routing feature makes it very easy to provide clean URLs. You just need to configure routes in global.asax file to create an application with clean URLs. In most cases you define routes works in IIS 6, IIS 7 (or IIS 7.5) Classic and Integrated mode. But in some cases your routes may only works in IIS 7 Integrated mode, like in the case of using extension less URLs in IIS 6 without a wildcard extension map. So in this article I will show you how to create different routes which works in IIS 6 and IIS 7 Classic and Integrated mode.       Description:             Let's say that you need to create an application which must work both in Classic and Integrated mode. Also you have no control to setup a wildcard extension map in IIS. So you need to create two routes. One with extension less URL for Integrated mode and one with a URL with an extension for Classic Mode.   routes.MapRoute( "DefaultClassic", // Route name "{controller}.aspx/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults ); routes.MapRoute( "DefaultIntegrated", // Route name "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults );               Now you have set up two routes, one for Integrated mode and one for Classic mode. Now you only need to ensure that Integrated mode route should only match if the application is running in Integrated mode and Classic mode route should only match if the application is running in Classic mode. For making this work you need to create two custom constraint for Integrated and Classic mode. So replace the above routes with these routes,     routes.MapRoute( "DefaultClassic", // Route name "{controller}.aspx/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }, // Parameter defaults new { mode = new ClassicModeConstraint() }// Constraints ); routes.MapRoute( "DefaultIntegrated", // Route name "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }, // Parameter defaults new { mode = new IntegratedModeConstraint() }// Constraints );            The first route which is for Classic mode adds a ClassicModeConstraint and second route which is for Integrated mode adds a IntegratedModeConstraint. Next you need to add the implementation of these constraint classes.     public class ClassicModeConstraint : IRouteConstraint { public bool Match(HttpContextBase httpContext, Route route, string parameterName, RouteValueDictionary values, RouteDirection routeDirection) { return !HttpRuntime.UsingIntegratedPipeline; } } public class IntegratedModeConstraint : IRouteConstraint { public bool Match(HttpContextBase httpContext, Route route, string parameterName, RouteValueDictionary values, RouteDirection routeDirection) { return HttpRuntime.UsingIntegratedPipeline; } }             HttpRuntime.UsingIntegratedPipeline returns true if the application is running on Integrated mode; otherwise, it returns false. So routes for Integrated mode only matched when the application is running on Integrated mode and routes for Classic mode only matched when the application is not running on Integrated mode.       Summary:             During developing applications, sometimes developers are not sure that whether this application will be host on IIS 6 or IIS 7 (or IIS 7.5) Integrated mode or Classic mode. So it's a good idea to create separate routes for both Classic and Integrated mode so that your application will use extension less URLs where possible and use URLs with an extension where it is not possible to use extension less URLs. In this article I showed you how to create separate routes for IIS Integrated and Classic mode. Hope you will enjoy this article too.   SyntaxHighlighter.all()

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• Hello World - My Name is Christian Finn and I'm a WebCenter Evangelist

  - by Michael Snow

  12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}  Good Morning World! I'd like to introduce a new member of the Oracle WebCenter Team, Christian Finn. We decided to let him do his own intros today. Look for his guest posts next week and he'll be a frequent contributor to WebCenter blog and voice of the community. Hello (Oracle) World! Hi everyone, my name is Christian Finn. It’s a coder’s tradition to have “hello world” be the first output from a new program or in a new language. While I have left my coding days far behind, it still seems fitting to start my new role here at Oracle by saying hello to all of you—our customers, partners and my colleagues. So by way of introduction, a little background about me. I am the new senior director for evangelism on the WebCenter product management team. Not only am I new to Oracle, but the evangelism team is also brand new. Our mission is to raise the profile of Oracle in all of the markets/conversations in which WebCenter competes—social business, collaboration, portals, Internet sites, and customer/audience engagement. This is all pretty familiar turf for me because, as some of you may know, until recently I was the director of product management at Microsoft for Microsoft SharePoint Server and several other SharePoint products. And prior to that, I held management roles at Microsoft in marketing, channels, learning, and enterprise sales. Before Microsoft, I got my start in the industry as a software trainer and Lotus Notes consultant. I am incredibly excited to be joining Oracle at this time because of the tremendous opportunity that lies ahead to improve how people and businesses work. Of all the vendors offering a vision for social business, Oracle is unique in having best of breed strength in market (or coming soon) in all three critical areas: customer experience management; the middleware and back-end applications that run your business; and in the social, collaboration, and content technologies that are the connective tissue between them. Everyone else can offer one or two of the above, but not all three unified together. So it is a great time to come board and there’s a fantastic team of people hard at work on building great products for you. In the coming weeks and months you’ll be hearing much more from us. For now, we’ll kick things off with some blog posts here on the WebCenter blog. Enjoy the reads and please share your thoughts with me over Twitter on @cfinn.

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