pros - Page 50 - Developer IT

drupal (CMS) or codeigniter (MVC) for creating a new web application?

- by ajsie

im going to create a new web application that is very customized. it will contain images, that are fully searchable - in a very, very customized way. when you click on the pictures you can add comments and so on. it requires users to be registered, but the registration/login process will be highly customized too. at the moment im using CodeIgniter for this. But i've read a lot of posts about CMS like Drupal and it sounds like i could let it handle basic stuff, maybe design and other front end work. i have no experience with CMS, in fact, i just started to use a MVC framework like CI and was impressed of how much easier it gets to start developing. so i wonder, if i'm going to create this kind of application, could i use drupal and then add the usual stuff, as i was going to do with CodeIgniter, like controllers, views, models, config files, my own libraries and so on? how does it work on a system like Drupal. how do you code PHP with it as with any MVC framework. it sounds like it has a lot of modules, i just wonder, if i can use it as a MVC framework but have the benefit of having all these basic stuff and design ready to use? cause then it sounds like the best "library" to provide for a web application from scratch. or is it difficult to create a customized app with it? i guess it has modules like images and users, but then how could i customize these so that every image has tags on it and country information, or have every user subscribing to changes to an image, that email will be sent to users and so on? cause i guess its easy to install a module. the question is, how do i customize it. maybe i don't need all that table columns. maybe i want to add/remove business logic. what are the pros and cons with using Drupal for this? is it even the right way to go? can you make a Stackoverflow with Drupal? Facebook? Twitter? Youtube? assuming that you know php of course. share your thoughts cause im totally new on creating a web application! thanks

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Circular database relationships. Good, Bad, Exceptions?

- by jim

I have been putting off developing this part of my app for sometime purely because I want to do this in a circular way but get the feeling its a bad idea from what I remember my lecturers telling me back in school. I have a design for an order system, ignoring the everything that doesn't pertain to this example I'm left with: CreditCard Customer Order I want it so that, Customers can have credit cards (0-n) Customers have orders (1-n) Orders have one customer(1-1) Orders have one credit card(1-1) Credit cards can have one customer(1-1) (unique ids so we can ignore uniqueness of cc number, husband/wife may share cc instances ect) Basically the last part is where the issue shows up, sometimes credit cards are declined and they wish to use a different one, this needs to update which their 'current' card is but this can only change the current card used for that order, not the other orders the customer may have on disk. Effectively this creates a circular design between the three tables. Possible solutions: Either Create the circular design, give references: cc ref to order, customer ref to cc customer ref to order or customer ref to cc customer ref to order create new table that references all three table ids and put unique on the order so that only one cc may be current to that order at any time Essentially both model the same design but translate differently, I am liking the latter option best at this point in time because it seems less circular and more central. (If that even makes sense) My questions are, What if any are the pros and cons of each? What is the pitfalls of circular relationships/dependancies? Is this a valid exception to the rule? Is there any reason I should pick the former over the latter? Thanks and let me know if there is anything you need clarified/explained. --Update/Edit-- I have noticed an error in the requirements I stated. Basically dropped the ball when trying to simplify things for SO. There is another table there for Payments which adds another layer. The catch, Orders can have multiple payments, with the possibility of using different credit cards. (if you really want to know even other forms of payment). Stating this here because I think the underlying issue is still the same and this only really adds another layer of complexity.

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PHP Shared Sessions across Domain

- by bigstylee

Hi, I have seen a few answers to this on SOO but most of these are concerned with the use of subdomains, of which none have worked for me. The common one being that the use of session.cookie_domain, which from my understanding will only work with subdomains. I am interested in a solution that deals with deals with entirely different domains (and includes the possibility of subdomains). Unfortunately project deadlines being what they are, time is not on my side, so I turn to SOO's expertise and experience. The current project brief is to be able to log into one site which currently only stores the user_id in the session and then be able to retrieve this value while on a different domain within the same server enviroment. Session data is being stored/retrieved from a database where the session id is the primary key. I am hoping to find a "light wieght" and "easy" to implement solution. The system is utlising an in-house Model View Controller design pattern, so all requests (including different domains) are run through a single bootstrap script. Using the domain name as a variable, this determines what context to display to the user. One option that did look like to have potential is the use of a hidden image and using the alt tag to set the user id. My first impressions suggest this immediately seems "too easy" (if possible) and riddled with security flaws. Disscuss? Another option which I considered is using the IP and User Agent for authentication but again I feel this not going to be a reliable option due to shared networks and changing IP addresses. My third option (and preferred) which I considered and as yet not seen discussed is using htaccess to fool the user into thinking that they are on a different domain when infact apache is redirecting; something like www.foo.com/index.php?domain=bar.com&controller=news/categoires/1 but displays to the user as www.bar.com/news/categories/1 foo.com represents the "main site domain" which all requests are run through and bar.com is what the user thinks they are accessing. The controller request dictates the page and view being requested. Is this possible? Are there other options? Pros/Cons? Thanks in advanced!!!

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SQL SERVER – Developer Training Resources and Summary Roundup

- by pinaldave

It is always pleasure for any author when other renowned authors in the industry write about you. Earlier I wrote a five part blog series on Developer Training and I have received a phenomenal response to the series. I have received plenty of comments, questions and feedback. I thought it would be nice to sum up the whole series as well answer a few of the questions received. Quick Recap Developer Training - Importance and Significance - Part 1 In this part we discussed the importance of training in the real world. The most important and valuable resource any company is its employee. Employees who have been well-trained will be better at their jobs and produce a better product. An employee who is well trained obviously knows more about their job and all the technical aspects. I have a very high opinion about training employees and it is the most important task. Developer Training – Employee Morals and Ethics – Part 2 In this part we discussed the most crucial components of training. Often employees are expecting the company to pay for their training and the company expresses no interest in training the employee. Quite often training expenses are the real issue for both the employee and employer. There are companies that pay for 100% of the expenses and there are employees who opt for training on their own expense during their personal time. Training is often looked at as vacation by employee and employers and we need to change this mind-set. One of the ways is to report back the learning to your manager and implement newly learned knowledge in day-to-day work. Developer Training – Difficult Questions and Alternative Perspective - Part 3 This part was the most difficult to write as I tried to address a few difficult questions and answers. Training is such a sensitive issue that many developers when not receiving chance for training think about leaving the organization. The manager often feels pressure to accommodate every single employee for training even though his training budget is limited. It is indeed the responsibility of the developer to get maximum advantage from the training. Training immediately helps organizations but stays as a part of an employee’s knowledge forever. Developer Training – Various Options for Developer Training – Part 4 In this part I tried to explore a few methods and options for training. The generic feedback I received on this blog post was short and I should have explored each of the subject of the training in details. I believe there are two big buckets of training 1) Instructor Lead Training and 2) Self Lead Training. The common element between both the methods is “learning material”. Learning material can be of any format – videos, books, paper notes or just a plain black board. Instructor-led training is a very effective mode but not possible every single time. During the course of the developer’s career, one has to learn lots of new technology and it is almost impossible to have a quality trainer available on that subject at that time. Books are most effective and proven methods, however, it always helps if someone explains the concepts of the book with a demonstration. In recent times I have started to believe in online trainings which leads to a hybrid experience. Online trainings take the best part of the books and the best part of the instructor-led training and gives effective training in a matter of hours. Developer Training – A Conclusive Summary- Part 5 In this part, I shared what I was continuously thinking about developer training. There is no better teacher than oneself. There is no better motivation than a personal desire to learn new technology. Honestly there is nothing more personal learning. That “change is the only constant” and “adapt & overcome” are the essential lessons of life. One cannot stop the learning and resist the change. In the IT industry “ego of knowing all” and the “resistance to change” are the most challenging issues. Once someone overcomes them, life is much easier. I believe that proper and appropriate high quality training can help to address the burning issues. Opinion of Friends I invited a few of my friends to express their opinion about developer training and here are their opinions. I am listing them here in the order of the blog post publishing date. Nakul Vachhrajani - Developer Trainings-Importance, Benefits, Tips and follow-up Nakul’s sums of many of the concepts which are complementary to my blog posts. Nakul addresses the burning question of developer training with different angles. I am personally very impressed by his following statement - “Being skilled does not mean having just a stack of certifications, but it also means having an understanding about the internals of the products that you are working on – and using that knowledge to improve the efficiency & productivity at the workplace in turn resulting in better products, better consulting abilities and a happier self.” Nakul also suggests the online training options of Pluralsight. Vinod Kumar - Training–a necessity or bonus Vinod Kumar comes up with excellent follow up on developer training. Vinod is known for his inspirational writing about SQL Server. Vinod starts with a story of a student who is extremely eager to learn the wisdom of life from a monk but the monk does not accept him as a disciple for a long time. The conversation between student and monk is indeed an essence of all learning. We all want to learn quickly and be successful but the most important thing in life is to have the right attitude towards learning and more so towards life. The blog post end with a very important thought about how to avoid the famous excuse – “I don’t have enough time.” Ritesh Shah - Training – useful or useless? Ritesh brings up very important concept related to training. Ritesh in his meticulous style explains why training is an important and lifelong process. Training must not stop at any age but should continue forever. The moment training stops, progress stops along with. Paras Doshi - Professional Development Resource Paras is known for his to–the-point writing, and has summarized the five part series very precisely. He read the five part series and created a digest summary of the blog post. If you are in a rush and have no time to read my five series – I suggest you read his blog post. Training Resources I am often asked what the best resources for learning new technology are. This is the most difficult question EVER. There are plenty of good training resources available. When it is about training our needs are different, our preference of learning is different and we all have an opinion. Additionally, we all are located in different geographic locations worldwide and there is no way one solution will fit all. However, let me list a few of the training resources which I have built so far and you can consume them if you find it relevant to your need. SQL Server Books SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers SQL Wait Stats SQL Programming Joes 2 Pros SQL Server Video Tutorials SQL Server Questions and Answers SQL Server Performance: Indexing Basics SQL Server Performance: Introduction to Query Tuning SQL in Sixty Seconds Series of Sixty Seconds Learning Video on YouTube Trust me worldwide web is very big and there are plenty of high quality learning materials available worldwide – trainer-led as well online. I suggest you explore various options and make the best choice for yourself. Remember, training is your personal journey and it should never stop. Are you ready? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Developer Training, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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IIS7 web farm - local or shared content?

- by rbeier

We're setting up an IIS7 web farm with two servers. Should each server have its own local copy of the content, or should they pull content directly from a UNC share? What are the pros and cons of each approach? We currently have a single live server WEB1, with content stored locally on a separate partition. A job periodically syncs WEB1 to a standby server WEB2, using robocopy for content and msdeploy for config. If WEB1 goes down, Nagios notifies us, and we manually run a script to move the IP addresses to WEB2's network interface. Both servers are actually VMs running on separate VMWare ESX 4 hosts. The servers are domain-joined. We have around 50-60 live sites on WEB1 - mostly ASP.NET, with a few that are just static HTML. Most are low-traffic "microsites". A few have moderate traffic, but none are massive. We'd like to change this so both WEB1 and WEB2 are actively serving content. This is mainly for reliability - if WEB1 goes down, we don't want to have to manually intervene to fail things over. Spreading the load is also nice, but the load is not high enough right now for us to need this. We're planning to configure our firewall to balance traffic across the two servers. It will detect when a server goes down and will send all the traffic to the remaining live server. We're planning to use sticky sessions for now... eventually we may move to SQL Server session state and stateless load balancing. But we need a way for the servers to share content. We were originally planning to move all the content to a UNC share. Our storage provider says they can set up a highly available SMB share for us. So if we go the UNC route, the storage shouldn't be a single point of failure. But we're wondering about the downsides to this approach: We'll need to change the physical paths for each site and virtual directory. There are also some projects that have absolute paths in their web.config files - we'll have to update those as well. We'll need to create a domain user for the web servers to access the share, and grant that user appropriate permissions. I haven't looked into this yet - I'm not sure if the application pool identity needs to be changed to this user, or if there's another way to tell IIS to use this account when connecting to the share. Sites will no longer be able to access their content if there's ever an Active Directory problem. In general, it just seems a lot more complicated, with more moving parts that could break. Our storage provider would create a volume for us on their redundant SAN. If I understand correctly, this SAN volume would be mounted on a VM running in their redundant VMWare environment; this VM would then expose the SMB share to our web servers. On the other hand, a benefit of the shared content approach is that we'd only need to deploy code to one place, and there would never be a temporary inconsistency between multiple copies of the content. This thread is pretty interesting, though some of these people are working at a much larger scale. I've just been discussing content so far, but we also need to think about configuration. I don't know if we can just use DFS replication for the applicationHost.config and other files, or if it's best to use the shared configuration feature with the config on a UNC share. What do you think? Thanks for your help, Richard

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SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Introduction – Day 1 of 31

- by pinaldave

List of all the Interview Questions and Answers Series blogs Posts covering interview questions and answers always make for interesting reading. Some people like the subject for their helpful hints and thought provoking subject, and others dislike these posts because they feel it is nothing more than cheating. I’d like to discuss the pros and cons of a Question and Answer format here. Interview Questions and Answers are Helpful Just like blog posts, books, and articles, interview Question and Answer discussions are learning material. The popular Dummy’s books or Idiots Guides are not only for “dummies,” but can help everyone relearn the fundamentals. Question and Answer discussions can serve the same purpose. You could call this SQL Server Fundamentals or SQL Server 101. I have administrated hundreds of interviews during my career and I have noticed that sometimes an interviewee with several years of experience lacks an understanding of the fundamentals. These individuals have been in the industry for so long, usually working on a very specific project, that the ABCs of the business have slipped their mind. Or, when a college graduate is looking to get into the industry, he is not expected to have experience since he is just graduated. However, the new grad is expected to have an understanding of fundamentals and theory. Sometimes after the stress of final exams and graduation, it can be difficult to remember the correct answers to interview questions, though. An interview Question and Answer discussion can be very helpful to both these individuals. It is simply a way to go back over the building blocks of a topic. Many times a simple review like this will help “jog” your memory, and all those previously-memorized facts will come flooding back to you. It is not a way to re-learn a topic, but a way to remind yourself of what you already know. A Question and Answer discussion can also be a way to go over old topics in a more interesting manner. Especially if you have been working in the industry, or taking lots of classes on the topic, everything you read can sound like a repeat of what you already know. Going over a topic in a new format can make the material seem fresh and interesting. And an interested mind will be more engaged and remember more in the end. Interview Questions and Answers are Harmful A common argument against a Question and Answer discussion is that it will give someone a “cheat sheet.” A new guy with relatively little experience can read the interview questions and answers, and then memorize them. When an interviewer asks him the same questions, he will repeat the answers and get the job. Honestly, is he good hire because he memorized the interview questions? Wouldn’t it be better for the interviewer to hire someone with actual experience? The answer is not as easy as it seems – there are many different factors to be considered. If the interviewer is asking fundamentals-related questions only, he gets the answers he wants to hear, and then hires this first candidate – there is a good chance that he is hiring based on personality rather than experience. If the interviewer is smart he will ask deeper questions, have more than one person on the interview team, and interview a variety of candidates. If one interviewee happens to memorize some answers, it usually doesn’t mean he will automatically get the job at the expense of more qualified candidates. Another argument against interview Question and Answers is that it will give candidates a false sense of confidence, and that they will appear more qualified than they are. Well, if that is true, it will not last after the first interview when the candidate is asked difficult questions and he cannot find the answers in the list of interview Questions and Answers. Besides, confidence is one of the best things to walk into an interview with! In today’s competitive job market, there are often hundreds of candidates applying for the same position. With so many applicants to choose from, interviewers must make decisions about who to call back and who to hire based on their gut feeling. One drawback to reading an interview Question and Answer article is that you might sound very boring in your interview – saying the same thing as every single candidate, and parroting answers that sound like someone else wrote them for you – because they did. However, it is definitely better to go to an interview prepared, just make sure that you give a lot of thought to your answers to make them sound like your own voice. Remember that you will be hired based on your skills as well as your personality, so don’t think that having all the right answers will make get you hired. A good interviewee will be prepared, confident, and know how to stand out. My Opinion A list of interview Questions and Answers is really helpful as a refresher or for beginners. To really ace an interview, one needs to have real-world, hands-on experience with SQL Server as well. Interview questions just serve as a starter or easy read for experienced professionals. When I have to learn new technology, I often search online for interview questions and get an idea about the breadth and depth of the technology. Next Action I am going to write about interview Questions and Answers for next 30 days. I have previously written a series of interview questions and answers; now I have re-written them keeping the latest version of SQL Server and current industry progress in mind. If you have faced interesting interview questions or situations, please write to me and I will publish them as a guest post. If you want me to add few more details, leave a comment and I will make sure that I do my best to accommodate. Tomorrow we will start the interview Questions and Answers series, with a few interesting stories, best practices and guest posts. We will have a prize give-away and other awards when the series ends. List of all the Interview Questions and Answers Series blogs Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Interview Questions and Answers, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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WWDC and Tech Ed: A Tale of Two DevCons

- by andrewbrust

Next week marks the first full week of June. Summer will feel in full swing and it will be a pretty big season for technology. In seeming acknowledgement of that very fact, both Apple and Microsoft will be holding large developers conferences starting Monday. Apple will hold its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in lovely San Francisco and Microsoft will hold its Tech Ed conference in muggy, oil-laden yet soulful New Orleans. A brief survey of each show reveals much about the differences in each company’s offerings, strategy, and approach to customers and partners. In the interest of full disclosure, I must explain that I will be speaking at Microsoft’s Tech Ed show, and have done so, on and off, since 2003. I have never been to an Apple conference and, as readers of this blog may know, I acquired my first ever Apple product 2 months ago when I bought an iPad on the day of that product’s launch. I think I have keen insights into Microsoft’s conference. My ability to comment on Apple’s event ranges somewhere between backseat driver and naive observer. Just so you know. Although both shows cater to their respective company’s developers, there are a number of differences in the events’ purposes and content approaches. First off, let’s consider each show as a news and PR vehicle. WWDC will feature Steve Jobs’ keynote address and most likely will be where Apple officially reveals details of its 4th-generation iPhone. Jobs will likely also provide deep background information on the corresponding iPhone OS release. These presumed announcements will make the show a magnet for the tech press and tech blogger elite. Apple’s customers will be interested too, especially since the iPhone OS release will likely be made available to owners of existing iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad devices. Tech Ed, on the other hand, may not be especially newsworthy at all. The keynote address will be given by Bob Muglia, who is President of the company’s Server and Tools Division, and he’ll likely be reviewing things more than previewing them. That’s because the company has, in the last 6-8 months, already released new versions of a majority of its products, including Windows, Office, SharePoint, SQL Server, Exchange, its Azure cloud platform, its .NET software development layer, its Silverlight Rich Internet Application (RIA) technology and its Visual Studio developer suite. Redmond’s product pipeline has functioned more like a firehose of late, and the company has a ton of work to do to get developers up to speed on everything that’s new. I know I keep saying “developers,” but in Tech Ed’s case, that’s not really accurate. In North America, Tech Ed caters to both developers and IT pros (i.e. technologists who work with physical IT infrastructure, as well as security and administration of the server software that runs on it). This pairing has, since its inception, struck some as anomalous and others, including many exhibitors, as very smart. Certainly, it means Tech Ed ends up being a confab for virtually all professionals in Microsoft’s ecosystem. And this year, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence (BI) conference will be co-located with Tech Ed, further enhancing that fusion effect. Clearly then, Microsoft’s show will focus on education, as its name assures us. Apple’s will serve as both a press event and an opportunity to get its own App Store developer channel synced up with its newest technology advances. For example, we already know that iPhone OS 4.0 will provide for a limited multitasking capability; that will only work well if people know how to code to it in a capable way. Apple also told us its iAd advertising platform will be part of the new OS, and Steve Jobs insists that’s to provide a revenue opportunity for developers. This too, then, needs to be explicated and soaked up buy the faithful. A look at each show’s breakout session lineup provides some interesting takeaways. WWDC will have very few Mac-specific sessions on offer, and virtually no sessions that at are IT- or “Enterprise-“ related. It’s all about the phone, music players and tablets. However, WWDC will have plenty of low-level, hardcore tech coverage of such things as Advanced Memory Analysis and Creating Secure Applications, as well as lots of rich media-related content like Core Animation and Game Design and Development. Beyond Apple’s proprietary platform, WWDC will also feature an array of sessions on HTML 5 and other Web standards. In all, WWDC offers over 100 technical sessions and hands-on labs. What about Tech Ed’s editorial content? Like the target audience, it really runs the gamut. The show has 21 tracks (versus WWDC’s 5) and more than 745 “learning opportunities” which include breakout sessions, demo stations, hands-on labs and BIrds of a Feather discussion sessions. Topics range from Architecture talks like Patterns of Parallel Programming to cloud computing talks like Building High Capacity Compute Applications with Windows Azure to IT-focused topics like Virtualization of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Farm Architecture. I also count 19 sessions on Windows Phone 7. Unfortunately, with regard to Web standards and HTML 5, only a few sessions are offered, all of them specific to Internet Explorer. All-in-all, Apple’s show looks more exciting and “sexier” than Tech Ed. Microsoft’s show seems a lot more enterprise-focused than WWDC. This is, of course, well in sync with each company’s approach and products. Microsoft’s content is much wider ranging and bests WWDC in sheer volume of sessions and labs. I suppose some might argue that less is more; others that Apple’s consumer-focused offerings simply don’t provide for the same depth of coverage to a business audience. Microsoft has a serious focus on the cloud and a paucity of coverage on client-side Web standards; Apple has virtually no cloud offering at all. Again, this reflects each tech titan’s go-to-market strategy. My own take is that employees of each company should attend the other’s event. The amount of mutual exclusivity in content may make sense in terms of corporate philosophy, but the reality is that each company could stand to diversify into the other’s territory, at least somewhat. My own talk at Tech Ed will focus on competitive analysis around Microsoft’s BI products. Apple does not today figure into that analysis. Maybe one day it will.

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Too Many Kittens To Juggle At Once

- by Bil Simser

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

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How do I determine if my controller is in IDE or AHCI mode in Linux?

- by philcolbourn

I have an old MacBook Pro 4,1 (early 2008) - but I suspect an answer would apply to many MacBook Pros. It has an Intel IDE/SATA controller (ICH8M/ICH8M-E). I have installed a patched MBR that is supposed to put my controller into AHCI mode. It does this by setting some controller port value that I don't understand. This seems to work as I get this from lspci: 00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801HM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) IDE Controller (rev 03) 00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801HM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 03) Now most, perhaps all, sites that provide a solution (enabling AHCI) suggest that after a sleep/wake cycle that a controller will revert to IDE mode due to how Apple support Windows. They recommend disabling sleep. From author of patchedcode.bin I think Enabling AHCI for Windows on MacBooks NB: I do not have bootcamp installed and I do not have Windows installed. Is there a way to prove that my controller is in IDE or AHCI mode? Background Data Using patchedcode.bin MBR I get this in syslog: Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 1.860955] ahci 0000:00:1f.2: version 3.0 Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 1.861052] ahci 0000:00:1f.2: irq 45 for MSI/MSI-X Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 1.861117] ahci 0000:00:1f.2: AHCI 0001.0100 32 slots 3 ports 1.5 Gbps 0x1 impl SATA mode Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 1.861120] ahci 0000:00:1f.2: flags: 64bit ncq sntf pm led clo pio slum part ccc ems Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 1.861130] ahci 0000:00:1f.2: setting latency timer to 64 Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 1.880880] ACPI: Video Device [GFX0] (multi-head: yes rom: no post: no) Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 1.880983] scsi2 : ahci Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 1.884552] scsi3 : ahci Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 1.886932] scsi4 : ahci Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 1.886998] ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m2048@0xdb504000 port 0xdb504100 irq 45 Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 1.887000] ata4: DUMMY Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 1.887002] ata5: DUMMY Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 2.204103] ata3: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300) Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 2.204656] ata3.00: ATA-8: FUJITSU MHY2200BH, 0081000D, max UDMA/100 Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 2.204662] ata3.00: 390721968 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32), AA Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 2.205324] ata3.00: configured for UDMA/100 Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 2.205554] scsi 2:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA FUJITSU MHY2200B 0081 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5 Using my original MBR I get this from syslog: Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.622861] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.1: version 2.13 Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.622869] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.1: power state changed by ACPI to D0 Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.622924] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.1: setting latency timer to 64 Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.623339] scsi0 : ata_piix Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.623730] scsi1 : ata_piix Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.623765] ata1: PATA max UDMA/100 cmd 0x8108 ctl 0x811c bmdma 0x80e0 irq 21 Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.623767] ata2: PATA max UDMA/100 cmd 0x8100 ctl 0x8118 bmdma 0x80e8 irq 21 Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.623810] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.2: MAP [ Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.623811] P0 -- -- -- ] Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.623866] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.2: setting latency timer to 64 Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.624241] scsi2 : ata_piix Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.624558] scsi3 : ata_piix Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.624862] ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x80f8 ctl 0x8114 bmdma 0x8020 irq 18 Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.624865] ata4: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x80f0 ctl 0x8110 bmdma 0x8028 irq 18 Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 1.208879] ata3.00: ATA-8: FUJITSU MHY2200BH, 0081000D, max UDMA/100 Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 1.208882] ata3.00: 390721968 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32) Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 1.208961] ata1.01: ATAPI: MATSHITA DVD+/-RW UJ-867S, 1.00, max UDMA/33 Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 1.216186] ata3.00: configured for UDMA/100 Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 1.224396] ata1.01: configured for UDMA/33

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Exploring the Excel Services REST API

- by jamiet

Over the last few years Analysis Services guru Chris Webb and I have been on something of a crusade to enable better access to data that is locked up in countless Excel workbooks that litter the hard drives of enterprise PCs. The most prominent manifestation of that crusade up to now has been a forum thread that Chris began on Microsoft Answers entitled Excel Web App API? Chris began that thread with: I was wondering whether there was an API for the Excel Web App? Specifically, I was wondering if it was possible (or if it will be possible in the future) to expose data in a spreadsheet in the Excel Web App as an OData feed, in the way that it is possible with Excel Services? Up to recently the last 10 words of that paragraph "in the way that it is possible with Excel Services" had completely washed over me however a comment on my recent blog post Thoughts on ExcelMashup.com (and a rant) by Josh Booker in which Josh said: Excel Services is a service application built for sharepoint 2010 which exposes a REST API for excel documents. We're looking forward to pros like you giving it a try now that Office365 makes sharepoint more easily accessible. Can't wait for your future blog about using REST API to load data from Excel on Offce 365 in SSIS. made me think that perhaps the Excel Services REST API is something I should be looking into and indeed that is what I have been doing over the past few days. And you know what? I'm rather impressed with some of what Excel Services' REST API has to offer. Unfortunately Excel Services' REST API also has one debilitating aspect that renders this blog post much less useful than it otherwise would be; namely that it is not publicly available from the Excel Web App on SkyDrive. Therefore all I can do in this blog post is show you screenshots of what the REST API provides in Sharepoint rather than linking you directly to those REST resources; that's a great shame because one of the benefits of a REST API is that it is easily and ubiquitously demonstrable from a web browser. Instead I am hosting a workbook on Sharepoint in Office 365 because that does include Excel Services' REST API but, again, all I can do is show you screenshots. N.B. If anyone out there knows how to make Office-365-hosted spreadsheets publicly-accessible (i.e. without requiring a username/password) please do let me know (because knowing which forum on which to ask the question is an exercise in futility). In order to demonstrate Excel Services' REST API I needed some decent data and for that I used the World Tourism Organization Statistics Database and Yearbook - United Nations World Tourism Organization dataset hosted on Azure Datamarket (its free, by the way); this dataset "provides comprehensive information on international tourism worldwide and offers a selection of the latest available statistics on international tourist arrivals, tourism receipts and expenditure" and you can explore the data for yourself here. If you want to play along at home by viewing the data as it exists in Excel then it can be viewed here. Let's dive in. The root of Excel Services' REST API is the model resource which resides at: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model Note that this is true for every workbook hosted in a Sharepoint document library - each Excel workbook is a RESTful resource. (Update: Mark Stacey on Twitter tells me that "It's turned off by default in onpremise Sharepoint (1 tickbox to turn on though)". Thanks Mark!) The data is provided as an ATOM feed but I have Firefox's feed reading ability turned on so you don't see the underlying XML goo. As you can see there are four top level resources, Ranges, Charts, Tables and PivotTables; exploring one of those resources is where things get interesting. Let's take a look at the Tables Resource: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables Our workbook contains only one table, called ‘Table1’ (to reiterate, you can explore this table yourself here). Viewing that table via the REST API is pretty easy, we simply append the name of the table onto our previous URI: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables('Table1') As you can see, that quite simply gives us a representation of the data in that table. What you cannot see from this screenshot is that this is pure HTML that is being served up; that is all well and good but actually we can do more interesting things. If we specify that the data should be returned not as HTML but as: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables('Table1')?$format=image then that data comes back as a pure image and can be used in any web page where you would ordinarily use images. This is the thing that I really like about Excel Services’ REST API – we can embed an image in any web page but instead of being a copy of the data, that image is actually live – if the underlying data in the workbook were to change then hitting refresh will show a new image. Pretty cool, no? The same is true of any Charts or Pivot Tables in your workbook - those can be embedded as images too and if the underlying data changes, boom, the image in your web page changes too. There is a lot of data in the workbook so the image returned by that previous URI is too large to show here so instead let’s take a look at a different resource, this time a range: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Ranges('Data!A1|C15') That URI returns cells A1 to C15 from a worksheet called “Data”: And if we ask for that as an image again: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Ranges('Data!A1|C15')?$format=image Were this image resource not behind a username/password then this would be a live image of the data in the workbook as opposed to one that I had to copy and upload elsewhere. Nonetheless I hope this little wrinkle doesn't detract from the inate value of what I am trying to articulate here; that an existing image in a web page can be changed on-the-fly simply by inserting some data into an Excel workbook. I for one think that that is very cool indeed! I think that's enough in the way of demo for now as this shows what is possible using Excel Services' REST API. Of course, not all features work quite how I would like and here is a bulleted list of some of my more negative feedback: The URIs are pig-ugly. Are "_vti_bin" & "ExcelRest.aspx" really necessary as part of the URI? Would this not be better: http://server/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/Model/Tables(‘Table1’) That URI provides the necessary addressability and is a lot easier to remember. Discoverability of these resources is not easy, we essentially have to handcrank a URI ourselves. Take the example of embedding a chart into a blog post - would it not be better if I could browse first through the document library to an Excel workbook and THEN through the workbook to the chart/range/table that I am interested in? Call it a wizard if you like. That would be really cool and would, I am sure, promote this feature and cut down on the copy-and-paste disease that the REST API is meant to alleviate. The resources that I demonstrated can be returned as feeds as well as images or HTML simply by changing the format parameter to ?$format=atom however for some inexplicable reason they don't return OData and no-one on the Excel Services team can tell me why (believe me, I have asked). $format is an OData parameter however other useful parameters such as $top and $filter are not supported. It would be nice if they were. Although I haven't demonstrated it here Excel Services' REST API does provide a makeshift way of altering the data by changing the value of specific cells however what it does not allow you to do is add new data into the workbook. Google Docs allows this and was one of the motivating factors for Chris Webb's forum post that I linked to above. None of this works for Excel workbooks hosted on SkyDrive This blog post is as long as it needs to be for a short introduction so I'll stop now. If you want to know more than I recommend checking out a few links: Excel Services REST API documentation on MSDNSo what does REST on Excel Services look like??? by Shahar PrishExcel Services in SharePoint 2010 REST API Syntax by Christian Stich. Any thoughts? Let's hear them in the comments section below! @Jamiet

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SQL SERVER – A Quick Look at Logging and Ideas around Logging

- by pinaldave

This blog post is written in response to the T-SQL Tuesday post on Logging. When someone talks about logging, personally I get lots of ideas about it. I have seen logging as a very generic term. Let me ask you this question first before I continue writing about logging. What is the first thing comes to your mind when you hear word “Logging”? Now ask the same question to the guy standing next to you. I am pretty confident that you will get a different answer from different people. I decided to do this activity and asked 5 SQL Server person the same question. Question: What is the first thing comes to your mind when you hear the word “Logging”? Strange enough I got a different answer every single time. Let me just list what answer I got from my friends. Let us go over them one by one. Output Clause The very first person replied output clause. Pretty interesting answer to start with. I see what exactly he was thinking. SQL Server 2005 has introduced a new OUTPUT clause. OUTPUT clause has access to inserted and deleted tables (virtual tables) just like triggers. OUTPUT clause can be used to return values to client clause. OUTPUT clause can be used with INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE to identify the actual rows affected by these statements. Here are some references for Output Clause: OUTPUT Clause Example and Explanation with INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE Reasons for Using Output Clause – Quiz Tips from the SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Output Clause in Simple Examples Error Logs I was expecting someone to mention Error logs when it is about logging. The error log is the most looked place when there is any error either with the application or there is an error with the operating system. I have kept the policy to check my server’s error log every day. The reason is simple – enough time in my career I have figured out that when I am looking at error logs I find something which I was not expecting. There are cases, when I noticed errors in the error log and I fixed them before end user notices it. Other common practices I always tell my DBA friends to do is that when any error happens they should find relevant entries in the error logs and document the same. It is quite possible that they will see the same error in the error log and able to fix the error based on the knowledge base which they have created. There can be many different kinds of error log files exists in SQL Server as well – 1) SQL Server Error Logs 2) Windows Event Log 3) SQL Server Agent Log 4) SQL Server Profile Log 5) SQL Server Setup Log etc. Here are some references for Error Logs: Recycle Error Log – Create New Log file without Server Restart SQL Error Messages Change Data Capture I got surprised with this answer. I think more than the answer I was surprised by the person who had answered me this one. I always thought he was expert in HTML, JavaScript but I guess, one should never assume about others. Indeed one of the cool logging feature is Change Data Capture. Change Data Capture records INSERTs, UPDATEs, and DELETEs applied to SQL Server tables, and makes a record available of what changed, where, and when, in simple relational ‘change tables’ rather than in an esoteric chopped salad of XML. These change tables contain columns that reflect the column structure of the source table you have chosen to track, along with the metadata needed to understand the changes that have been made. Here are some references for Change Data Capture: Introduction to Change Data Capture (CDC) in SQL Server 2008 Tuning the Performance of Change Data Capture in SQL Server 2008 Download Script of Change Data Capture (CDC) CDC and TRUNCATE – Cannot truncate table because it is published for replication or enabled for Change Data Capture Dynamic Management View (DMV) I like this answer. If asked I would have not come up with DMV right away but in the spirit of the original question, I think DMV does log the data. DMV logs or stores or records the various data and activity on the SQL Server. Dynamic management views return server state information that can be used to monitor the health of a server instance, diagnose problems, and tune performance. One can get plethero of information from DMVs – High Availability Status, Query Executions Details, SQL Server Resources Status etc. Here are some references for Dynamic Management View (DMV): SQL SERVER – Denali – DMV Enhancement – sys.dm_exec_query_stats – New Columns DMV – sys.dm_os_windows_info – Information about Operating System DMV – sys.dm_os_wait_stats Explanation – Wait Type – Day 3 of 28 DMV sys.dm_exec_describe_first_result_set_for_object – Describes the First Result Metadata for the Module Transaction Log Impact Detection Using DMV – dm_tran_database_transactions Log Files I almost flipped with this final answer from my friend. This should be probably the first answer. Yes, indeed log file logs the SQL Server activities. One can write infinite things about log file. SQL Server uses log file with the extension .ldf to manage transactions and maintain database integrity. Log file ensures that valid data is written out to database and system is in a consistent state. Log files are extremely useful in case of the database failures as with the help of full backup file database can be brought in the desired state (point in time recovery is also possible). SQL Server database has three recovery models – 1) Simple, 2) Full and 3) Bulk Logged. Each of the model uses the .ldf file for performing various activities. It is very important to take the backup of the log files (along with full backup) as one never knows when backup of the log file come into the action and save the day! How to Stop Growing Log File Too Big Reduce the Virtual Log Files (VLFs) from LDF file Log File Growing for Model Database – model Database Log File Grew Too Big master Database Log File Grew Too Big SHRINKFILE and TRUNCATE Log File in SQL Server 2008 Can I just say I loved this month’s T-SQL Tuesday Question. It really provoked very interesting conversation around me. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Optimization, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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Week in Geek: IPv6 Capable Smartphones Compromise User Privacy Edition

- by Asian Angel

This week we learned how to “clone a disk, resize static windows, and create system function shortcuts”, use 45 different services, sites, and apps to help read favorite sites, add MP3 support to Audacity (for saving in MP3 format), install a Wii game loader for easy backups and fast load times, create a Blue Screen of Death in any color, and more. Photo by legofenris. Weekly News Links Photo by The H Security. IPv6: Smartphones compromise users’ privacy Since version 4 of the iOS operating system, Apple’s iPhones, iPads and iPods have been capable of handling IPv6, and most Android devices have been capable since version 2.1. However, the operating systems transfer an ID that discloses information about their users. Dumb phones can be attacked too Much of the discussion of security threats to mobile phones revolves around smartphones, but researchers have found that less advanced “feature phones,” still used by the majority of people around the world, also are vulnerable to attack. SCADA exploit – the dragon awakes The recent publication of an exploit for KingView, a software package for visualising industrial process control systems, appears to be having an effect. Threatpost reports that both the Chinese vendor Wellintech and Chinese CERT (CN-CERT) have now reacted. Sophos: Spam to get more malicious Spam is becoming more malicious in nature as trickery tactics change in line with current user interests, according to a new report released Tuesday by Sophos. Global spam traffic rebounds as Rustock wakes Spam is on the rise after the Rustock botnet awoke from its Christmas slumber, according to Symantec. Cracking WPA keys in the cloud At the forthcoming Black Hat conference, blogger Thomas Roth plans to demonstrate how weak WPA PSKs can be cracked quickly and easily using Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. Microsoft Security Advisory: Vulnerability in Internet Explorer could allow remote code execution Provides a link to more details about the vulnerability and shows a work-around/fix for the problem. Adobe plans to make it easier to delete Flash cookies in web browsers The new API, NPAPI:ClearSiteData, will allow Flash cookies – also known as Local Shared Objects (LSO) – to be deleted directly in the browser’s settings. Firefox beta getting new database standard The ninth beta version of Firefox is set to get support for a standard called IndexedDB that provides a database interface useful for offline data storage and other tasks needing information on a browser’s computer. MetroPCS accused of blocking certain Net content MetroPCS is violating the FCC’s recently approved Net neutrality rules by blocking certain Internet content, say several public interest groups. Server and Tools chief Muglia to leave Microsoft in summer 2011 Microsoft veteran and Server & Tools Business (STB) President Bob Muglia is leaving Microsoft, according to an email that CEO Steve Ballmer sent to employees on January 10. Report: DOJ nearing decision on Google-ITA The U.S. Department of Justice is gearing up for a possible formal antitrust investigation into whether or not Google should be allowed to purchase travel software company ITA Software, according to a report. South Korea says Google Street View broke law Police in South Korea reportedly say Google broke the country’s law when its Street View service captured personal data from unsecure Wi-Fi networks. The backlash over Google’s HTML5 video bet Choosing strategies based on what you believe to be long-term benefits is generally a good idea when running a business, but if you manage to alienate the world in the process, the long term may become irrelevant. Google answers critics on HTML5 Web video move Google responded to critics of its decision to drop support for a popular HTML5 video codec by declaring that a royalty-supported standard for Web video will hold the Web hostage. Random TinyHacker Links A Special GiveAway: a Great Book & Great Security Software The team from 7 Tutorials has a special giveaway running during the month of January. Signed copies of their latest book, full 1-year licenses of BitDefender Internet Security 2011 and free 3-month trials for everyone willing to participate. One Click Rooting For Android Phones Here’s a nice tool that helps you root your Android phone effortlessly. New Angry Birds Free version 1.0 Available in the App Store. Google Code University Learn programming at Google Code University. Capture and Share Your Favorite Part Of a YouTube Video SnipSnip.it lets you share only the part of the video that you like. Super User Questions More great questions and answers from this past week’s popular topics at Super User. What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for? Does OS X support linux-like features? What is the easiest way to make a backup of an entire hard disk? Will shifting from Wireless to Wired network result in better performance? Is it legal to install Windows 7 Home Premium Retail inside VMware virtual machine? How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Enjoy reading through our hottest articles from this past week. The 50 Best Ways to Disable Built-in Windows Features You Don’t Want The Best of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 How to Upgrade Windows 7 Easily (And Understand Whether You Should) The Worst of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: Basic Noise Removal One Year Ago on How-To Geek More great articles from one year ago filled with helpful geeky goodness for you to enjoy. Share Text & Images the Easy Way with JustPaste.it Start Portable Firefox in Safe Mode Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate Available, Here’s How to Fix Your Incompatible Extensions Protect Your Computer from “Little Hands” with KidSafe Lock Prying Eyes Out of Your Minimized Windows Custom Crocheted Cylon-Cthulhu Hybrid What happens when you let your Cylon Centurion figure and your crocheted Cthulhu spend too many lonely nights together? A Cylon-Cthulhu hybrid, of course! You can get your own from the Cthulhu Chick store over on Etsy. Note: This is not an ad…Ruth is a friend of ours, and this Cylon-Cthulhu hybrid makes the perfect guard for the new MVP trophy in our office. The Geek Note Whether it is a geeky indoor project or just getting outside, we hope that you and your families have a terrific fun-filled weekend! Remember to keep sending those great tips in to us at [email protected]. Photo by qwrrty. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Upgrade Windows 7 Easily (And Understand Whether You Should) The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: Basic Noise Removal Install a Wii Game Loader for Easy Backups and Fast Load Times The Best of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 The Worst of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 HTG Projects: How to Create Your Own Custom Papercraft Toy Firefox 4.0 Beta 9 Available for Download – Get Your Copy Now The Frustrations of a Computer Literate Watching a Newbie Use a Computer [Humorous Video] Season0nPass Jailbreaks Current Gen Apple TVs IBM’s Jeopardy Playing Computer Watson Shows The Pros How It’s Done [Video] Tranquil Juice Drop Abstract Wallpaper Pulse Is a Sleek Newsreader for iOS and Android Devices

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SQL Server Split() Function

- by HighAltitudeCoder

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

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Exploring the Excel Services REST API

- by jamiet

Over the last few years Analysis Services guru Chris Webb and I have been on something of a crusade to enable better access to data that is locked up in countless Excel workbooks that litter the hard drives of enterprise PCs. The most prominent manifestation of that crusade up to now has been a forum thread that Chris began on Microsoft Answers entitled Excel Web App API? Chris began that thread with: I was wondering whether there was an API for the Excel Web App? Specifically, I was wondering if it was possible (or if it will be possible in the future) to expose data in a spreadsheet in the Excel Web App as an OData feed, in the way that it is possible with Excel Services? Up to recently the last 10 words of that paragraph "in the way that it is possible with Excel Services" had completely washed over me however a comment on my recent blog post Thoughts on ExcelMashup.com (and a rant) by Josh Booker in which Josh said: Excel Services is a service application built for sharepoint 2010 which exposes a REST API for excel documents. We're looking forward to pros like you giving it a try now that Office365 makes sharepoint more easily accessible. Can't wait for your future blog about using REST API to load data from Excel on Offce 365 in SSIS. made me think that perhaps the Excel Services REST API is something I should be looking into and indeed that is what I have been doing over the past few days. And you know what? I'm rather impressed with some of what Excel Services' REST API has to offer. Unfortunately Excel Services' REST API also has one debilitating aspect that renders this blog post much less useful than it otherwise would be; namely that it is not publicly available from the Excel Web App on SkyDrive. Therefore all I can do in this blog post is show you screenshots of what the REST API provides in Sharepoint rather than linking you directly to those REST resources; that's a great shame because one of the benefits of a REST API is that it is easily and ubiquitously demonstrable from a web browser. Instead I am hosting a workbook on Sharepoint in Office 365 because that does include Excel Services' REST API but, again, all I can do is show you screenshots. N.B. If anyone out there knows how to make Office-365-hosted spreadsheets publicly-accessible (i.e. without requiring a username/password) please do let me know (because knowing which forum on which to ask the question is an exercise in futility). In order to demonstrate Excel Services' REST API I needed some decent data and for that I used the World Tourism Organization Statistics Database and Yearbook - United Nations World Tourism Organization dataset hosted on Azure Datamarket (its free, by the way); this dataset "provides comprehensive information on international tourism worldwide and offers a selection of the latest available statistics on international tourist arrivals, tourism receipts and expenditure" and you can explore the data for yourself here. If you want to play along at home by viewing the data as it exists in Excel then it can be viewed here. Let's dive in. The root of Excel Services' REST API is the model resource which resides at: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model Note that this is true for every workbook hosted in a Sharepoint document library - each Excel workbook is a RESTful resource. (Update: Mark Stacey on Twitter tells me that "It's turned off by default in onpremise Sharepoint (1 tickbox to turn on though)". Thanks Mark!) The data is provided as an ATOM feed but I have Firefox's feed reading ability turned on so you don't see the underlying XML goo. As you can see there are four top level resources, Ranges, Charts, Tables and PivotTables; exploring one of those resources is where things get interesting. Let's take a look at the Tables Resource: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables Our workbook contains only one table, called ‘Table1’ (to reiterate, you can explore this table yourself here). Viewing that table via the REST API is pretty easy, we simply append the name of the table onto our previous URI: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables('Table1') As you can see, that quite simply gives us a representation of the data in that table. What you cannot see from this screenshot is that this is pure HTML that is being served up; that is all well and good but actually we can do more interesting things. If we specify that the data should be returned not as HTML but as: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables('Table1')?$format=image then that data comes back as a pure image and can be used in any web page where you would ordinarily use images. This is the thing that I really like about Excel Services’ REST API – we can embed an image in any web page but instead of being a copy of the data, that image is actually live – if the underlying data in the workbook were to change then hitting refresh will show a new image. Pretty cool, no? The same is true of any Charts or Pivot Tables in your workbook - those can be embedded as images too and if the underlying data changes, boom, the image in your web page changes too. There is a lot of data in the workbook so the image returned by that previous URI is too large to show here so instead let’s take a look at a different resource, this time a range: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Ranges('Data!A1|C15') That URI returns cells A1 to C15 from a worksheet called “Data”: And if we ask for that as an image again: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Ranges('Data!A1|C15')?$format=image Were this image resource not behind a username/password then this would be a live image of the data in the workbook as opposed to one that I had to copy and upload elsewhere. Nonetheless I hope this little wrinkle doesn't detract from the inate value of what I am trying to articulate here; that an existing image in a web page can be changed on-the-fly simply by inserting some data into an Excel workbook. I for one think that that is very cool indeed! I think that's enough in the way of demo for now as this shows what is possible using Excel Services' REST API. Of course, not all features work quite how I would like and here is a bulleted list of some of my more negative feedback: The URIs are pig-ugly. Are "_vti_bin" & "ExcelRest.aspx" really necessary as part of the URI? Would this not be better: http://server/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/Model/Tables(‘Table1’) That URI provides the necessary addressability and is a lot easier to remember. Discoverability of these resources is not easy, we essentially have to handcrank a URI ourselves. Take the example of embedding a chart into a blog post - would it not be better if I could browse first through the document library to an Excel workbook and THEN through the workbook to the chart/range/table that I am interested in? Call it a wizard if you like. That would be really cool and would, I am sure, promote this feature and cut down on the copy-and-paste disease that the REST API is meant to alleviate. The resources that I demonstrated can be returned as feeds as well as images or HTML simply by changing the format parameter to ?$format=atom however for some inexplicable reason they don't return OData and no-one on the Excel Services team can tell me why (believe me, I have asked). $format is an OData parameter however other useful parameters such as $top and $filter are not supported. It would be nice if they were. Although I haven't demonstrated it here Excel Services' REST API does provide a makeshift way of altering the data by changing the value of specific cells however what it does not allow you to do is add new data into the workbook. Google Docs allows this and was one of the motivating factors for Chris Webb's forum post that I linked to above. None of this works for Excel workbooks hosted on SkyDrive This blog post is as long as it needs to be for a short introduction so I'll stop now. If you want to know more than I recommend checking out a few links: Excel Services REST API documentation on MSDNSo what does REST on Excel Services look like??? by Shahar PrishExcel Services in SharePoint 2010 REST API Syntax by Christian Stich. Any thoughts? Let's hear them in the comments section below! @Jamiet

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Is the Cloud ready for an Enterprise Java web application? Seeking a JEE hosting advice.

- by Jakub Holý

Greetings to all the smart people around here! I'd like to ask whether it is feasible or a good idea at all to deploy a Java enterprise web application to a Cloud such as Amazon EC2. More exactly, I'm looking for infrastructure options for an application that shall handle few hundred users with long but neither CPU nor memory intensive sessions. I'm considering dedicated servers, virtual private servers (VPSs) and EC2. I've noticed that there is a project called JBoss Cloud so people are working on enabling such a deployment, on the other hand it doesn't seem to be mature yet and I'm not sure that the cloud is ready for this kind of applications, which differs from the typical cloud-based applications like Twitter. Would you recommend to deploy it to the cloud? What are the pros and cons? The application is a Java EE 5 web application whose main function is to enable users to compose their own customized Product by combining the available Parts. It uses stateless and stateful session beans and JPA for persistence of entities to a RDBMS and fetches information about Parts from the company's inventory system via a web service. Aside of external users it's used also by few internal ones, who are authenticated against the company's LDAP. The application should handle around 300-400 concurrent users building their product and should be reasonably scalable and available though these qualities are only of a medium importance at this stage. I've proposed an architecture consisting of a firewall (FW) and load balancer supporting sticky sessions and https (in the Cloud this would be replaced with EC2's Elastic Load Balancing service and FW on the app. servers, in a physical architecture the load-balancer would be a HW), then two physical clustered application servers combined with web servers (so that if one fails, a user doesn't loose his/her long built product) and finally a database server. The DB server would need a slave backup instance that can replace the master instance if it fails. This should provide reasonable availability and fault tolerance and provide good scalability as long as a single RDBMS can keep with the load, which should be OK for quite a while because most of the operations are done in the memory using a stateful bean and only occasionally stored or retrieved from the DB and the amount of data is low too. A problematic part could be the dependency on the remote inventory system webservice but with good caching of its outputs in the application it should be OK too. Unfortunately I've only vague idea of the system resources (memory size, number and speed of CPUs/cores) that such an "average Java EE application" for few hundred users needs. My rough and mostly unfounded estimate based on actual Amazon offerings is that 1.7GB and a single, 2-core "modern CPU" with speed around 2.5GHz (the High-CPU Medium Instance) should be sufficient for any of the two application servers (since we can handle higher load by provisioning more of them). Alternatively I would consider using the Large instance (64b, 7.5GB RAM, 2 cores at 1GHz) So my question is whether such a deployment to the cloud is technically and financially feasible or whether dedicated/VPS servers would be a better option and whether there are some real-world experiences with something similar. Thank you very much! /Jakub Holy PS: I've found the JBoss EAP in a Cloud Case Study that shows that it is possible to deploy a real-world Java EE application to the EC2 cloud but unfortunately there're no details regarding topology, instance types, or anything :-(

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April Oracle Database Events

- by Mandy Ho

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} April 17-18, 2012 – Moscow, Russia Oracle Develop Conference The Oracle database developer conference, Oracle Develop, will visit Moscow, Russia and Hyderabad, India this spring. Oracle Develop includes a database development track, which contains .NET sessions and hands-on lab led by an Oracle .NET product manager. Register today before the event fills up. http://www.oracle.com/javaone/ru-en/index.html Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} April 24, 26 – San Diego, CA & San Jose, CA ISC2 Leadership Regional Event Series Oracle at (ISC)2 Security Leadership Series: Herding Clouds -- Managing Cloud Security Concerns and Expectations Join us for his interactive day-long session where industry leaders, including Oracle solution experts, will talk about how to: dispel the top Cloud security myths minimize "rogue Cloud" implementations identify potential compliance pitfalls and how to avoid them develop contract language for your cloud providers manage users across your fractured datacenter leverage existing technologies to protect data as it moves from the enterprise to the cloud http://www.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=146972&src=7239493&src=7239493&Act=228 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} April 22-26, 2012 – Las Vegas, NV IOUG Collaborate 12 From April 22-26, 2012, Oracle takes Las Vegas. Thousands of Oracle professionals will descend upon the Mandalay Bay Convention Center for a weeks worth of education sessions, networking opportunities and more, at the only user-driven and user-run Oracle conference - COLLABORATE 12. Your COLLABORATE 12 - IOUG Forum registration comes complete with a bonus- a full day Deep Dive education program on Sunday! Choose from numerous hot topics, including Real World Performance, High Availability and more, presented by legendary and seasoned Oracle pros, including Tom Kyte and Craig Shallahamer. http://www.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=143637&src=7360364&src=7360364&Act=5 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} Independent Oracle User Group (IOUG) Regional Events: April 16, 2012 – Columbus, Ohio Ohio Oracle Users Group Higher Performance PL/PQL and Oracle Database 11g PL/SQL New Features – Featuring Steven Feuerstein http://www.ooug.org/ Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} April 26, 2012- Irving, TX Dallas Oracle Users Group Oracle Database Forum: 5-7PM Oracle Corporation, 6031 Connection Drive Irving, TX http://memberservices.membee.com/538/irmevents.aspx?id=64 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} Apr 30, 2012- Los Angeles, CA Real World Performance Tour A full day of real world database performance with: Tom Kyte, author of the ever popular AskTom Blog, Andrew Holdsworth, head of Oracle's Real World Performance Team, and Graham Wood, renowned Oracle Database performance architect. Through discussion, debate and demos, they’ll show you how to master performance engineering topics like: Best practices for designing hardware architectures and how to spot and fix bad design. How to develop applications that deliver the fastest possible performance without sacrificing accuracy. New for 2012! Updates on Enterprise Manager, Exadata, and what these technologies mean to your current systems. http://www.ioug.org/Events/ADayofRealWorldPerformance/tabid/194/Default.aspx

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SQL SERVER – Data Sources and Data Sets in Reporting Services SSRS

- by Pinal Dave

This example is from the Beginning SSRS by Kathi Kellenberger. Supporting files are available with a free download from the www.Joes2Pros.com web site. This example is from the Beginning SSRS. Supporting files are available with a free download from the www.Joes2Pros.com web site. Connecting to Your Data? When I was a child, the telephone book was an important part of my life. Maybe I was just a nerd, but I enjoyed getting a new book every year to page through to learn about the businesses in my small town or to discover where some of my school acquaintances lived. It was also the source of maps to my town’s neighborhoods and the towns that surrounded me. To make a phone call, I would need a telephone number. In order to find a telephone number, I had to know how to use the telephone book. That seems pretty simple, but it resembles connecting to any data. You have to know where the data is and how to interact with it. A data source is the connection information that the report uses to connect to the database. You have two choices when creating a data source, whether to embed it in the report or to make it a shared resource usable by many reports. Data Sources and Data Sets A few basic terms will make the upcoming choses make more sense. What database on what server do you want to connect to? It would be better to just ask… “what is your data source?” The connection you need to make to get your reports data is called a data source. If you connected to a data source (like the JProCo database) there may be hundreds of tables. You probably only want data from just a few tables. This means you want to write a specific query against this data source. A query on a data source to get just the records you need for an SSRS report is called a Data Set. Creating a local Data Source You can connect embed a connection from your report directly to your JProCo database which (let’s say) is installed on a server named Reno. If you move JProCo to a new server named Tampa then you need to update the Data Set. If you have 10 reports in one project that were all pointing to the JProCo database on the Reno server then they would all need to be updated at once. It’s possible to make a project level Data Source and have each report use that. This means one change can fix all 10 reports at once. This would be called a Shared Data Source. Creating a Shared Data Source The best advice I can give you is to create shared data sources. The reason I recommend this is that if a database moves to a new server you will have just one place in Report Manager to make the server name change. That one change will update the connection information in all the reports that use that data source. To get started, you will start with a fresh project. Go to Start > All Programs > SQL Server 2012 > Microsoft SQL Server Data Tools to launch SSDT. Once SSDT is running, click New Project to create a new project. Once the New Project dialog box appears, fill in the form, as shown in. Be sure to select Report Server Project this time – not the wizard. Click OK to dismiss the New Project dialog box. You should now have an empty project, as shown in the Solution Explorer. A report is meant to show you data. Where is the data? The first task is to create a Shared Data Source. Right-click on the Shared Data Sources folder and choose Add New Data Source. The Shared Data Source Properties dialog box will launch where you can fill in a name for the data source. By default, it is named DataSource1. The best practice is to give the data source a more meaningful name. It is possible that you will have projects with more than one data source and, by naming them, you can tell one from another. Type the name JProCo for the data source name and click the Edit button to configure the database connection properties. If you take a look at the types of data sources you can choose, you will see that SSRS works with many data platforms including Oracle, XML, and Teradata. Make sure SQL Server is selected before continuing. For this post, I am assuming that you are using a local SQL Server and that you can use your Windows account to log in to the SQL Server. If, for some reason you must use SQL Server Authentication, choose that option and fill in your SQL Server account credentials. Otherwise, just accept Windows Authentication. If your database server was installed locally and with the default instance, just type in Localhost for the Server name. Select the JProCo database from the database list. At this point, the connection properties should look like. If you have installed a named instance of SQL Server, you will have to specify the server name like this: Localhost\InstanceName, replacing the InstanceName with whatever your instance name is. If you are not sure about the named instance, launch the SQL Server Configuration Manager found at Start > All Programs > Microsoft SQL Server 2012 > Configuration Tools. If you have a named instance, the name will be shown in parentheses. A default instance of SQL Server will display MSSQLSERVER; a named instance will display the name chosen during installation. Once you get the connection properties filled in, click OK to dismiss the Connection Properties dialog box and OK again to dismiss the Shared Data Source properties. You now have a data source in the Solution Explorer. What’s next I really need to thank Kathi Kellenberger and Rick Morelan for sharing this material for this 5 day series of posts on SSRS. To get really comfortable with SSRS you will get to know the different SSDT windows, Build reports on your own (without the wizards), Add report headers and footers, Accept user input, create levels, charts, or even maps for visual appeal. You might be surprise to know a small 230 page book starts from the very beginning and covers the steps to do all these items. Beginning SSRS 2012 is a small easy to follow book so you can learn SSRS for less than $20. See Joes2Pros.com for more on this and other books. If you want to learn SSRS in easy to simple words – I strongly recommend you to get Beginning SSRS book from Joes 2 Pros. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: Reporting Services, SSRS

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SQL SERVER – Create a Very First Report with the Report Wizard

- by Pinal Dave

This example is from the Beginning SSRS by Kathi Kellenberger. Supporting files are available with a free download from the www.Joes2Pros.com web site. What is the report Wizard? In today’s world automation is all around you. Henry Ford began building his Model T automobiles on a moving assembly line a century ago and changed the world. The moving assembly line allowed Ford to build identical cars quickly and cheaply. Henry Ford said in his autobiography “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” Today you can buy a car straight from the factory with your choice of several colors and with many options like back up cameras, built-in navigation systems and heated leather seats. The assembly lines now use robots to perform some tasks along with human workers. When you order your new car, if you want something special, not offered by the manufacturer, you will have to find a way to add it later. In computer software, we also have “assembly lines” called wizards. A wizard will ask you a series of questions, often branching to specific questions based on earlier answers, until you get to the end of the wizard. These wizards are used for many things, from something simple like setting up a rule in Outlook to performing administrative tasks on a server. Often, a wizard will get you part of the way to the end result, enough to get much of the tedious work out of the way. Once you get the product from the wizard, if the wizard is not capable of doing something you need, you can tweak the results. Create a Report with the Report Wizard Let’s get started with your first report! Launch SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) from the Start menu under SQL Server 2012. Once SSDT is running, click New Project to launch the New Project dialog box. On the left side of the screen expand Business Intelligence and select Reporting Services. Configure the properties as shown in . Be sure to select Report Server Project Wizard as the type of report and to save the project in the C:\Joes2Pros\SSRSCompanionFiles\Chapter3\Project folder. Click OK and wait for the Report Wizard to launch. Click Next on the Welcome screen. On the Select the Data Source screen, make sure that New data source is selected. Type JProCo as the data source name. Make sure that Microsoft SQL Server is selected in the Type dropdown. Click Edit to configure the connection string on the Connection Properties dialog box. If your SQL Server database server is installed on your local computer, type in localhost for the Server name and select the JProCo database from the Select or enter a database name dropdown. Click OK to dismiss the Connection Properties dialog box. Check Make this a shared data source and click Next. On the Design the Query screen, you can use the query builder to build a query if you wish. Since this post is not meant to teach you T-SQL queries, you will copy all queries from files that have been provided for you. In the C:\Joes2Pros\SSRSCompanionFiles\Chapter3\Resources folder open the sales by employee.sql file. Copy and paste the code from the file into the Query string Text Box. Click Next. On the Select the Report Type screen, choose Tabular and click Next. On the Design the Table screen, you have to figure out the groupings of the report. How do you do this? Well, you often need to know a bit about the data and report requirements. I often draw the report out on paper first to help me determine the groups. In the case of this report, I could group the data several ways. Do I want to see the data grouped by Year and Month? Do I want to see the data grouped by Employee or Category? The only thing I know for sure about this ahead of time is that the TotalSales goes in the Details section. Let’s assume that the CIO asked to see the data grouped first by Year and Month, then by Category. Let’s move the fields to the right-hand side. This is done by selecting Page > Group or Details >, as shown in, and click Next. On the Choose the Table Layout screen, select Stepped and check Include subtotals and Enable drilldown, as shown in. On the Choose the Style screen, choose any color scheme you wish (unlike the Model T) and click Next. I chose the default, Slate. On the Choose the Deployment Location screen, change the Deployment folder to Chapter 3 and click Next. At the Completing the Wizard screen, name your report Employee Sales and click Finish. After clicking Finish, the report and a shared data source will appear in the Solution Explorer and the report will also be visible in Design view. Click the Preview tab at the top. This report expects the user to supply a year which the report will then use as a filter. Type in a year between 2006 and 2013 and click View Report. Click the plus sign next to the Sales Year to expand the report to see the months, then expand again to see the categories and finally the details. You now have the assembly line report completed, and you probably already have some ideas on how to improve the report. Tomorrow’s Post Tomorrow’s blog post will show how to create your own data sources and data sets in SSRS. If you want to learn SSRS in easy to simple words – I strongly recommend you to get Beginning SSRS book from Joes 2 Pros. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: Reporting Services, SSRS

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Developing Mobile Applications: Web, Native, or Hybrid?

- by Michelle Kimihira

Authors: Joe Huang, Senior Principal Product Manager, Oracle Mobile Application Development Framework and Carlos Chang, Senior Principal Product Director The proliferation of mobile devices and platforms represents a game-changing technology shift on a number of levels. Companies must decide not only the best strategic use of mobile platforms, but also how to most efficiently implement them. Inevitably, this conversation devolves to the developers, who face the task of developing and supporting mobile applications—not a simple task in light of the number of devices and platforms. Essentially, developers can choose from the following three different application approaches, each with its own set of pros and cons. Native Applications: This refers to apps built for and installed on a specific platform, such as iOS or Android, using a platform-specific software development kit (SDK). For example, apps for Apple’s iPhone and iPad are designed to run specifically on iOS and are written in Xcode/Objective-C. Android has its own variation of Java, Windows uses C#, and so on. Native apps written for one platform cannot be deployed on another. Native apps offer fast performance and access to native-device services but require additional resources to develop and maintain each platform, which can be expensive and time consuming. Mobile Web Applications: Unlike native apps, mobile web apps are not installed on the device; rather, they are accessed via a Web browser. These are server-side applications that render HTML, typically adjusting the design depending on the type of device making the request. There are no program coding constraints for writing server-side apps—they can be written in Java, C, PHP, etc., it doesn’t matter. Instead, the server detects what type of mobile browser is pinging the server and adjusts accordingly. For example, it can deliver fully JavaScript and CSS-enabled content to smartphone browsers, while downgrading gracefully to basic HTML for feature phone browsers. Mobile apps work across platforms, but are limited to what you can do through a browser and require Internet connectivity. For certain types of applications, these constraints may not be an issue. Oracle supports mobile web applications via ADF Faces (for tablets) and ADF Mobile browser (Trinidad) for smartphone and feature phones. Hybrid Applications: As the name implies, hybrid apps combine technologies from native and mobile Web apps to gain the benefits each. For example, these apps are installed on a device, like their pure native app counterparts, while the user interface (UI) is based on HTML5. This UI runs locally within the native container, which usually leverages the device’s browser engine. The advantage of using HTML5 is a consistent, cross-platform UI that works well on most devices. Combining this with the native container, which is installed on-device, provides mobile users with access to local device services, such as camera, GPS, and local device storage. Native apps may offer greater flexibility in integrating with device native services. However, since hybrid applications already provide device integrations that typical enterprise applications need, this is typically less of an issue. The new Oracle ADF Mobile release is an HTML5 and Java hybrid framework that targets mobile app development to iOS and Android from one code base. So, Which is the Best Approach? The short answer is – the best choice depends on the type of application you are developing. For instance, animation-intensive apps such as games would favor native apps, while hybrid applications may be better suited for enterprise mobile apps because they provide multi-platform support. Just for starters, the following issues must be considered when choosing a development path. Application Complexity: How complex is the application? A quick app that accesses a database or Web service for some data to display? You can keep it simple, and a mobile Web app may suffice. However, for a mobile/field worker type of applications that supports mission critical functionality, hybrid or native applications are typically needed. Richness of User Interactivity: What type of user experience is required for the application? Mobile browser-based app that’s optimized for mobile UI may suffice for quick lookup or productivity type of applications. However, hybrid/native application would typically be required to deliver highly interactive user experiences needed for field-worker type of applications. For example, interactive BI charts/graphs, maps, voice/email integration, etc. In the most extreme case like gaming applications, native applications may be necessary to deliver the highly animated and graphically intensive user experience. Performance: What type of performance is required by the application functionality? For instance, for real-time look up of data over the network, mobile app performance depends on network latency and server infrastructure capabilities. If consistent performance is required, data would typically need to be cached, which is supported on hybrid or native applications only. Connectivity and Availability: What sort of connectivity will your application require? Does the app require Web access all the time in order to always retrieve the latest data from the server? Or do the requirements dictate offline support? While native and hybrid apps can be built to operate offline, Web mobile apps require Web connectivity. Multi-platform Requirements: The terms “consumerization of IT” and BYOD (bring your own device) effectively mean that the line between the consumer and the enterprise devices have become blurred. Employees are bringing their personal mobile devices to work and are often expecting that they work in the corporate network and access back-office applications. Even if companies restrict access to the big dogs: (iPad, iPhone, Android phones and tablets, possibly Windows Phone and tablets), trying to support each platform natively will require increasing resources and domain expertise with each new language/platform. And let’s not forget the maintenance costs, involved in upgrading new versions of each platform. Where multi-platform support is needed, Web mobile or hybrid apps probably have the advantage. Going native, and trying to support multiple operating systems may be cost prohibitive with existing resources and developer skills. Device-Services Access: If your app needs to access local device services, such as the camera, contacts app, accelerometer, etc., then your choices are limited to native or hybrid applications. Fragmentation: Apple controls Apple iOS and the only concern is what version iOS is running on any given device. Not so Android, which is open source. There are many, many versions and variants of Android running on different devices, which can be a nightmare for app developers trying to support different devices running different flavors of Android. (Is it an Amazon Kindle Fire? a Samsung Galaxy? A Barnes & Noble Nook?) This is a nightmare scenario for native apps—on the other hand, a mobile Web or hybrid app, when properly designed, can shield you from these complexities because they are based on common frameworks. Resources: How many developers can you dedicate to building and supporting mobile application development? What are their existing skills sets? If you’re considering native application development due to the complexity of the application under development, factor the costs of becoming proficient on a each platform’s OS and programming language. Add another platform, and that’s another language, another SDK. On the other side of the equation, Web mobile or hybrid applications are simpler to make, and readily support more platforms, but there may be performance trade-offs. Conclusion This only scratches the surface. However, I hope to have suggested some food for thought in choosing your mobile development strategy. Do your due diligence, search the Web, read up on mobile, talk to peers, attend events. The development team at Oracle is working hard on mobile technologies to help customers extend enterprise applications to mobile faster and effectively. To learn more on what Oracle has to offer, check out the Oracle ADF Mobile (hybrid) and ADF Faces/ADF Mobile browser (Web Mobile) solutions from Oracle. Additional Information Blog: ADF Blog Product Information on OTN: ADF Mobile Product Information on Oracle.com: Oracle Fusion Middleware Follow us on Twitter and Facebook Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter

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Why do we (really) program to interfaces?

- by Kyle Burns

One of the earliest lessons I was taught in Enterprise development was "always program against an interface". This was back in the VB6 days and I quickly learned that no code would be allowed to move to the QA server unless my business objects and data access objects each are defined as an interface and have a matching implementation class. Why? "It's more reusable" was one answer. "It doesn't tie you to a specific implementation" a slightly more knowing answer. And let's not forget the discussion ending "it's a standard". The problem with these responses was that senior people didn't really understand the reason we were doing the things we were doing and because of that, we were entirely unable to realize the intent behind the practice - we simply used interfaces and had a bunch of extra code to maintain to show for it. It wasn't until a few years later that I finally heard the term "Inversion of Control". Simply put, "Inversion of Control" takes the creation of objects that used to be within the control (and therefore a responsibility of) of your component and moves it to some outside force. For example, consider the following code which follows the old "always program against an interface" rule in the manner of many corporate development shops: 1: ICatalog catalog = new Catalog(); 2: Category[] categories = catalog.GetCategories(); In this example, I met the requirement of the rule by declaring the variable as ICatalog, but I didn't hit "it doesn't tie you to a specific implementation" because I explicitly created an instance of the concrete Catalog object. If I want to test the functionality of the code I just wrote I have to have an environment in which Catalog can be created along with any of the resources upon which it depends (e.g. configuration files, database connections, etc) in order to test my functionality. That's a lot of setup work and one of the things that I think ultimately discourages real buy-in of unit testing in many development shops. So how do I test my code without needing Catalog to work? A very primitive approach I've seen is to change the line the instantiates catalog to read: 1: ICatalog catalog = new FakeCatalog(); once the test is run and passes, the code is switched back to the real thing. This obviously poses a huge risk for introducing test code into production and in my opinion is worse than just keeping the dependency and its associated setup work. Another popular approach is to make use of Factory methods which use an object whose "job" is to know how to obtain a valid instance of the object. Using this approach, the code may look something like this: 1: ICatalog catalog = CatalogFactory.GetCatalog(); The code inside the factory is responsible for deciding "what kind" of catalog is needed. This is a far better approach than the previous one, but it does make projects grow considerably because now in addition to the interface, the real implementation, and the fake implementation(s) for testing you have added a minimum of one factory (or at least a factory method) for each of your interfaces. Once again, developers say "that's too complicated and has me writing a bunch of useless code" and quietly slip back into just creating a new Catalog and chalking any test failures up to "it will probably work on the server". This is where software intended specifically to facilitate Inversion of Control comes into play. There are many libraries that take on the Inversion of Control responsibilities in .Net and most of them have many pros and cons. From this point forward I'll discuss concepts from the standpoint of the Unity framework produced by Microsoft's Patterns and Practices team. I'm primarily focusing on this library because it questions about it inspired this posting. At Unity's core and that of most any IoC framework is a catalog or registry of components. This registry can be configured either through code or using the application's configuration file and in the most simple terms says "interface X maps to concrete implementation Y". It can get much more complicated, but I want to keep things at the "what does it do" level instead of "how does it do it". The object that exposes most of the Unity functionality is the UnityContainer. This object exposes methods to configure the catalog as well as the Resolve<T> method which is used to obtain an instance of the type represented by T. When using the Resolve<T> method, Unity does not necessarily have to just "new up" the requested object, but also can track dependencies of that object and ensure that the entire dependency chain is satisfied. There are three basic ways that I have seen Unity used within projects. Those are through classes directly using the Unity container, classes requiring injection of dependencies, and classes making use of the Service Locator pattern. The first usage of Unity is when classes are aware of the Unity container and directly call its Resolve method whenever they need the services advertised by an interface. The up side of this approach is that IoC is utilized, but the down side is that every class has to be aware that Unity is being used and tied directly to that implementation. Many developers don't like the idea of as close a tie to specific IoC implementation as is represented by using Unity within all of your classes and for the most part I agree that this isn't a good idea. As an alternative, classes can be designed for Dependency Injection. Dependency Injection is where a force outside the class itself manipulates the object to provide implementations of the interfaces that the class needs to interact with the outside world. This is typically done either through constructor injection where the object has a constructor that accepts an instance of each interface it requires or through property setters accepting the service providers. When using dependency, I lean toward the use of constructor injection because I view the constructor as being a much better way to "discover" what is required for the instance to be ready for use. During resolution, Unity looks for an injection constructor and will attempt to resolve instances of each interface required by the constructor, throwing an exception of unable to meet the advertised needs of the class. The up side of this approach is that the needs of the class are very clearly advertised and the class is unaware of which IoC container (if any) is being used. The down side of this approach is that you're required to maintain the objects passed to the constructor as instance variables throughout the life of your object and that objects which coordinate with many external services require a lot of additional constructor arguments (this gets ugly and may indicate a need for refactoring). The final way that I've seen and used Unity is to make use of the ServiceLocator pattern, of which the Patterns and Practices team has also provided a Unity-compatible implementation. When using the ServiceLocator, your class calls ServiceLocator.Retrieve in places where it would have called Resolve on the Unity container. Like using Unity directly, it does tie you directly to the ServiceLocator implementation and makes your code aware that dependency injection is taking place, but it does have the up side of giving you the freedom to swap out the underlying IoC container if necessary. I'm not hugely concerned with hiding IoC entirely from the class (I view this as a "nice to have"), so the single biggest problem that I see with the ServiceLocator approach is that it provides no way to proactively advertise needs in the way that constructor injection does, allowing more opportunity for difficult to track runtime errors. This blog entry has not been intended in any way to be a definitive work on IoC, but rather as something to spur thought about why we program to interfaces and some ways to reach the intended value of the practice instead of having it just complicate your code. I hope that it helps somebody begin or continue a journey away from being a "Cargo Cult Programmer".

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WIF, ADFS 2 and WCF–Part 2: The Service

- by Your DisplayName here!

OK – so let’s first start with a simple WCF service and connect that to ADFS 2 for authentication. The service itself simply echoes back the user’s claims – just so we can make sure it actually works and to see how the ADFS 2 issuance rules emit claims for the service: [ServiceContract(Namespace = "urn:leastprivilege:samples")] public interface IService { [OperationContract] List<ViewClaim> GetClaims(); } public class Service : IService { public List<ViewClaim> GetClaims() { var id = Thread.CurrentPrincipal.Identity as IClaimsIdentity; return (from c in id.Claims select new ViewClaim { ClaimType = c.ClaimType, Value = c.Value, Issuer = c.Issuer, OriginalIssuer = c.OriginalIssuer }).ToList(); } } The ViewClaim data contract is simply a DTO that holds the claim information. Next is the WCF configuration – let’s have a look step by step. First I mapped all my http based services to the federation binding. This is achieved by using .NET 4.0’s protocol mapping feature (this can be also done the 3.x way – but in that scenario all services will be federated): <protocolMapping> <add scheme="http" binding="ws2007FederationHttpBinding" /> </protocolMapping> Next, I provide a standard configuration for the federation binding: <bindings> <ws2007FederationHttpBinding> <binding> <security mode="TransportWithMessageCredential"> <message establishSecurityContext="false"> <issuerMetadata address="https://server/adfs/services/trust/mex" /> </message> </security> </binding> </ws2007FederationHttpBinding> </bindings> This binding points to our ADFS 2 installation metadata endpoint. This is all that is needed for svcutil (aka “Add Service Reference”) to generate the required client configuration. I also chose mixed mode security (SSL + basic message credential) for best performance. This binding also disables session – you can control that via the establishSecurityContext setting on the binding. This has its pros and cons. Something for a separate blog post, I guess. Next, the behavior section adds support for metadata and WIF: <behaviors> <serviceBehaviors> <behavior> <serviceMetadata httpsGetEnabled="true" /> <federatedServiceHostConfiguration /> </behavior> </serviceBehaviors> </behaviors> The next step is to add the WIF specific configuration (in <microsoft.identityModel />). First we need to specify the key material that we will use to decrypt the incoming tokens. This is optional for web applications but for web services you need to protect the proof key – so this is mandatory (at least for symmetric proof keys, which is the default): <serviceCertificate> <certificateReference storeLocation="LocalMachine" storeName="My" x509FindType="FindBySubjectDistinguishedName" findValue="CN=Service" /> </serviceCertificate> You also have to specify which incoming tokens you trust. This is accomplished by registering the thumbprint of the signing keys you want to accept. You get this information from the signing certificate configured in ADFS 2: <issuerNameRegistry type="...ConfigurationBasedIssuerNameRegistry"> <trustedIssuers> <add thumbprint="d1 … db" name="ADFS" /> </trustedIssuers> </issuerNameRegistry> The last step (promised) is to add the allowed audience URIs to the configuration – WCF clients use (by default – and we’ll come back to this) the endpoint address of the service: <audienceUris> <add value="https://machine/soapadfs/service.svc" /> </audienceUris> OK – that’s it – now we have a basic WCF service that uses ADFS 2 for authentication. The next step will be to set-up ADFS to issue tokens for this service. Afterwards we can explore various options on how to use this service from a client. Stay tuned… (if you want to have a look at the full source code or peek at the upcoming parts – you can download the complete solution here)

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The True Cost of a Solution

- by D'Arcy Lussier

I had a Twitter chat recently with someone suggesting Oracle and SQL Server were losing out to OSS (Open Source Software) in the enterprise due to their issues with scaling or being too generic (one size fits all). I challenged that a bit, as my experience with enterprise sized clients has been different – adverse to OSS but receptive to an established vendor. The response I got was: Found it easier to influence change by showing how X can’t solve our problems or X is extremely costly to scale. Money talks. I think this is definitely the right approach for anyone pitching an alternate or alien technology as part of a solution: identify the issue, identify the solution, then present pros and cons including a cost/benefit analysis. What can happen though is we get tunnel vision and don’t present a full view of the costs associated with a solution. An “Acura”te Example (I’m so clever…) This is my dream vehicle, a Crystal Black Pearl coloured Acura MDX with the SH-AWD package! We’re a family of 4 (5 if my daughters ever get their wish of adding a dog), and I’ve always wanted a luxury type of vehicle, so this is a perfect replacement in a few years when our Rav 4 has hit the 8 – 10 year mark. MSRP – $62,890 But as we all know, that’s not *really* the cost of the vehicle. There’s taxes and fees added on, there’s the extended warranty if I choose to purchase it, there’s the finance rate that needs to be factored in… MSRP – $62,890 Taxes – $7,546 Warranty - $2,500 SubTotal – $72,936 Finance Charge – $ 1094.04 Grand Total – $74,030 Well! Glad we did that exercise – we discovered an extra $11k added on to the MSRP! Well now we have our true price…or do we? Lifetime of the Vehicle I’m expecting to have this vehicle for 7 – 10 years. While the hard cost of the vehicle is known and dealt with, the costs to run and maintain the vehicle are on top of this. I did some research, and here’s what I’ve found: Fuel and Mileage Gas prices are high as it is for regular fuel, but getting into an MDX will require that I *only* purchase premium fuel, which comes at a premium price. I need to expect my bill at the pump to be higher. Comparing the MDX to my 2007 Rav4 also shows I’ll be gassing up more often. The Rav4 has a city MPG of 21, while the MDX plummets to 16! The MDX does have a bigger fuel tank though, so all in all the number of times I hit the pumps might even out. Still, I estimate I’ll be spending approximately $8000 – $10000 more on gas over a 10 year period than my current Rav4. Service Options Limited Although I have options with my Toyota here in Winnipeg (we have 4 Toyota dealerships), I do go to my original dealer for any service work. Still, I like the fact that I have options. However, there’s only one Acura dealership in all of Winnipeg! So if, for whatever reason, I’m not satisfied with the level of service I’m stuck. Non Warranty Service Work Also let’s not forget that there’s a bulk of work required every year that is *not* covered under warranty – oil changes, tire rotations, brake pads, etc. I expect I’ll need to get new tires at the 5 years mark as well, which can easily be $1200 – $1500 (I just paid $1000 for new tires for the Rav4 and we’re at the 5 year mark). Now these aren’t going to be *new* costs that I’m not used to from our existing vehicles, but they should still be factored in. I’d budget $500/year, or $5000 over the 10 years I’ll own the vehicle. Final Assessment So let’s re-assess the true cost of my dream MDX: MSRP $62,890 Taxes $7,546 Warranty $2,500 Finance Charge $1094 Gas $10,000 Service Work $5000 Grand Total $89,030 So now I have a better idea of 10 year cost overall, and I’ve identified some concerns with local service availability. And there’s now much more to consider over the original $62,890 price tag. Tying This Back to Technology Solutions The process that we just went through is no different than what organizations do when considering implementing a new system, technology, or technology based solution, within their environments. It’s easy to tout the short term cost savings of particular product/platform/technology in a vacuum. But its when you consider the wider impact that the true cost comes into play. Let’s create a scenario: A company is not happy with its current data reporting suite. An employee suggests moving to an open source solution. The selling points are: - Because its open source its free - The organization would have access to the source code so they could alter it however they wished - It provided features not available with the current reporting suite At first this sounds great to the management and executive, but then they start asking some questions and uncover more information: - The OSS product is built on a technology not used anywhere within the organization - There are no vendors offering product support for the OSS product - The OSS product requires a specific server platform to operate on, one that’s not standard in the organization All of a sudden, the true cost of implementing this solution is starting to become clearer. The company might save money on licensing costs, but their training costs would increase significantly – developers would need to learn how to develop in the technology the OSS solution was built on, IT staff must learn how to set up and maintain a new server platform within their existing infrastructure, and if a problem was found there was no vendor to contact for support. The true cost of implementing a “free” OSS solution is actually spinning up a project to implement it within the organization – no small cost. And that’s just the short-term cost. Now the organization must ensure they maintain trained staff who can make changes to the OSS reporting solution and IT staff that will stay knowledgeable in the new server platform. If those skills are very niche, then higher labour costs could be incurred if those people are hard to find or if trained employees use that knowledge as leverage for higher pay. Maybe a vendor exists that will contract out support, but then there are those costs to consider as well. And let’s not forget end-user training – in our example, anyone that runs reports will need to be trained on how to use the new system. Here’s the Point We still tend to look at software in an “off the shelf” kind of way. It’s very easy to say “oh, this product is better than vendor x’s product – and its free because its OSS!” but the reality is that implementing any new technology within an organization has a cost regardless of the retail price of the product. Training, integration, support – these are real costs that impact an organization and span multiple departments. Whether you’re pitching an improved business process, a new system, or a new technology, you need to consider the bigger picture costs of implementation. What you define as success (in our example, having better reporting functionality) might not be what others define as success if implementing your solution causes them issues. A true enterprise solution needs to consider the entire enterprise.

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Testing Workflows – Test-First

- by Timothy Klenke

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TimothyK/archive/2014/05/30/testing-workflows-ndash-test-first.aspxThis is the second of two posts on some common strategies for approaching the job of writing tests. The previous post covered test-after workflows where as this will focus on test-first. Each workflow presented is a method of attack for adding tests to a project. The more tools in your tool belt the better. So here is a partial list of some test-first methodologies. Ping Pong Ping Pong is a methodology commonly used in pair programing. One developer will write a new failing test. Then they hand the keyboard to their partner. The partner writes the production code to get the test passing. The partner then writes the next test before passing the keyboard back to the original developer. The reasoning behind this testing methodology is to facilitate pair programming. That is to say that this testing methodology shares all the benefits of pair programming, including ensuring multiple team members are familiar with the code base (i.e. low bus number). Test Blazer Test Blazing, in some respects, is also a pairing strategy. The developers don’t work side by side on the same task at the same time. Instead one developer is dedicated to writing tests at their own desk. They write failing test after failing test, never touching the production code. With these tests they are defining the specification for the system. The developer most familiar with the specifications would be assigned this task. The next day or later in the same day another developer fetches the latest test suite. Their job is to write the production code to get those tests passing. Once all the tests pass they fetch from source control the latest version of the test project to get the newer tests. This methodology has some of the benefits of pair programming, namely lowering the bus number. This can be good way adding an extra developer to a project without slowing it down too much. The production coder isn’t slowed down writing tests. The tests are in another project from the production code, so there shouldn’t be any merge conflicts despite two developers working on the same solution. This methodology is also a good test for the tests. Can another developer figure out what system should do just by reading the tests? This question will be answered as the production coder works there way through the test blazer’s tests. Test Driven Development (TDD) TDD is a highly disciplined practice that calls for a new test and an new production code to be written every few minutes. There are strict rules for when you should be writing test or production code. You start by writing a failing (red) test, then write the simplest production code possible to get the code working (green), then you clean up the code (refactor). This is known as the red-green-refactor cycle. The goal of TDD isn’t the creation of a suite of tests, however that is an advantageous side effect. The real goal of TDD is to follow a practice that yields a better design. The practice is meant to push the design toward small, decoupled, modularized components. This is generally considered a better design that large, highly coupled ball of mud. TDD accomplishes this through the refactoring cycle. Refactoring is only possible to do safely when tests are in place. In order to use TDD developers must be trained in how to look for and repair code smells in the system. Through repairing these sections of smelly code (i.e. a refactoring) the design of the system emerges. For further information on TDD, I highly recommend the series “Is TDD Dead?”. It discusses its pros and cons and when it is best used. Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) Whereas TDD focuses on small unit tests that concentrate on a small piece of the system, Acceptance Tests focuses on the larger integrated environment. Acceptance Tests usually correspond to user stories, which come directly from the customer. The unit tests focus on the inputs and outputs of smaller parts of the system, which are too low level to be of interest to the customer. ATDD generally uses the same tools as TDD. However, ATDD uses fewer mocks and test doubles than TDD. ATDD often complements TDD; they aren’t competing methods. A full test suite will usually consist of a large number of unit (created via TDD) tests and a smaller number of acceptance tests. Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) BDD is more about audience than workflow. BDD pushes the testing realm out towards the client. Developers, managers and the client all work together to define the tests. Typically different tooling is used for BDD than acceptance and unit testing. This is done because the audience is not just developers. Tools using the Gherkin family of languages allow for test scenarios to be described in an English format. Other tools such as MSpec or FitNesse also strive for highly readable behaviour driven test suites. Because these tests are public facing (viewable by people outside the development team), the terminology usually changes. You can’t get away with the same technobabble you can with unit tests written in a programming language that only developers understand. For starters, they usually aren’t called tests. Usually they’re called “examples”, “behaviours”, “scenarios”, or “specifications”. This may seem like a very subtle difference, but I’ve seen this small terminology change have a huge impact on the acceptance of the process. Many people have a bias that testing is something that comes at the end of a project. When you say we need to define the tests at the start of the project many people will immediately give that a lower priority on the project schedule. But if you say we need to define the specification or behaviour of the system before we can start, you’ll get more cooperation. Keep these test-first and test-after workflows in your tool belt. With them you’ll be able to find new opportunities to apply them.

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ANTS CLR and Memory Profiler In Depth Review (Part 2 of 2 – Memory Profiler)

- by ToStringTheory

One of the things that people might not know about me, is my obsession to make my code as efficient as possible. Many people might not realize how much of a task or undertaking that this might be, but it is surely a task as monumental as climbing Mount Everest, except this time it is a challenge for the mind… In trying to make code efficient, there are many different factors that play a part – size of project or solution, tiers, language used, experience and training of the programmer, technologies used, maintainability of the code – the list can go on for quite some time. I spend quite a bit of time when developing trying to determine what is the best way to implement a feature to accomplish the efficiency that I look to achieve. One program that I have recently come to learn about – Red Gate ANTS Performance (CLR) and Memory profiler gives me tools to accomplish that job more efficiently as well. In this review, I am going to cover some of the features of the ANTS memory profiler set by compiling some hideous example code to test against. Notice As a member of the Geeks With Blogs Influencers program, one of the perks is the ability to review products, in exchange for a free license to the program. I have not let this affect my opinions of the product in any way, and Red Gate nor Geeks With Blogs has tried to influence my opinion regarding this product in any way. Introduction – Part 2 In my last post, I reviewed the feature packed Red Gate ANTS Performance Profiler. Separate from the Red Gate Performance Profiler is the Red Gate ANTS Memory Profiler – a simple, easy to use utility for checking how your application is handling memory management… A tool that I wish I had had many times in the past. This post will be focusing on the ANTS Memory Profiler and its tool set. The memory profiler has a large assortment of features just like the Performance Profiler, with the new session looking nearly exactly alike: ANTS Memory Profiler Memory profiling is not something that I have to do very often… In the past, the few cases I’ve had to find a memory leak in an application I have usually just had to trace the code of the operations being performed to look for oddities… Sadly, I have come across more undisposed/non-using’ed IDisposable objects, usually from ADO.Net than I would like to ever see. Support is not fun, however using ANTS Memory Profiler makes this task easier. For this round of testing, I am going to use the same code from my previous example, using the WPF application. This time, I will choose the ‘Profile Memory’ option from the ANTS menu in Visual Studio, which launches the solution in its currently configured state/start-up project, and then launches the ANTS Memory Profiler to help. It prepopulates all of the fields with the current project information, and all I have to do is select the ‘Start Profiling’ option. When the window comes up, it is actually quite barren, just giving ideas on how to work the profiler. You start by getting to the point in your application that you want to profile, and then taking a ‘Memory Snapshot’. This performs a full garbage collection, and snapshots the managed heap. Using the same WPF app as before, I will go ahead and take a snapshot now. As you can see, ANTS is already giving me lots of information regarding the snapshot, however this is just a snapshot. The whole point of the profiler is to perform an action, usually one where a memory problem is being noticed, and then take another snapshot and perform a diff between them to see what has changed. I am going to go ahead and generate 5000 primes, and then take another snapshot: As you can see, ANTS is already giving me a lot of new information about this snapshot compared to the last. Information such as difference in memory usage, fragmentation, class usage, etc… If you take more snapshots, you can use the dropdown at the top to set your actual comparison snapshots. If you beneath the timeline, you will see a breadcrumb trail showing how best to approach profiling memory using ANTS. When you first do the comparison, you start on the Summary screen. You can either use the charts at the bottom, or switch to the class list screen to get to the next step. Here is the class list screen: As you can see, it lists information about all of the instances between the snapshots, as well as at the bottom giving you a way to filter by telling ANTS what your problem is. I am going to go ahead and select the Int16[] to look at the Instance Categorizer Using the instance categorizer, you can travel backwards to see where all of the instances are coming from. It may be hard to see in this image, but hopefully the lightbox (click on it) will help: I can see that all of these instances are rooted to the application through the UI TextBlock control. This image will probably be even harder to see, however using the ‘Instance Retention Graph’, you can trace an objects memory inheritance up the chain to see its roots as well. This is a simple example, as this is simply a known element. Usually you would be profiling an actual problem, and comparing those differences. I know in the past, I have spotted a problem where a new context was created per page load, and it was rooted into the application through an event. As the application began to grow, performance and reliability problems started to emerge. A tool like this would have been a great way to identify the problem quickly. Overview Overall, I think that the Red Gate ANTS Memory Profiler is a great utility for debugging those pesky leaks. 3 Biggest Pros: Easy to use interface with lots of options for configuring profiling session Intuitive and helpful interface for drilling down from summary, to instance, to root graphs ANTS provides an API for controlling the profiler. Not many options, but still helpful. 2 Biggest Cons: Inability to automatically snapshot the memory by interval Lack of complete integration with Visual Studio via an extension panel Ratings Ease of Use (9/10) – I really do believe that they have brought simplicity to the once difficult task of memory profiling. I especially liked how it stepped you further into the drilldown by directing you towards the best options. Effectiveness (10/10) – I believe that the profiler does EXACTLY what it purports to do. Features (7/10) – A really great set of features all around in the application, however, I would like to see some ability for automatically triggering snapshots based on intervals or framework level items such as events. Customer Service (10/10) – My entire experience with Red Gate personnel has been nothing but good. their people are friendly, helpful, and happy! UI / UX (9/10) – The interface is very easy to get around, and all of the options are easy to find. With a little bit of poking around, you’ll be optimizing Hello World in no time flat! Overall (9/10) – Overall, I am happy with the Memory Profiler and its features, as well as with the service I received when working with the Red Gate personnel. Thank you for reading up to here, or skipping ahead – I told you it would be shorter! Please, if you do try the product, drop me a message and let me know what you think! I would love to hear any opinions you may have on the product. Code Feel free to download the code I used above – download via DropBox

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Rosewill RSV-S5 and it's transferespeeds

- by DoomStone

I have just bought a Rosewill RSV-S5, I have installed 5x1,5Tb Western Digital Green disks in it. After that have I created a Raid5 on them all with the software that followed with the hardware. Not the raid it self works fine, but it is SLOW, I can only obtain a maximum of 25 MB/s, and if SABnzbd+ is downloading with 5 MB/s is it having a hard time streaming a normal DIVX (700 mb) movie. Is this normal or is there something wrong? Edit: should be able to handle 3 Gbps = 384 megabytes / second Edit 2: As you can see am I only downloading with 3,76 MB/s and I'm trying to watch V s02e08 (720p), but it is completely unwatchable, as I can see 30 sec, and the it buffers for 20 sec. Edit: Other information there might be required I'm running Windows Server 2008 R2, optimized for program performance. Windows is installed on a 60GB SSD. I have a 50 Mb/s internet connection and a 1 Gb/s LAN, all connected with Cat6 Ethernet cables. The MCE is using a Gigabyte EP35C-DS3R motherboard with 2 GB DDR2 ram. Edit 3: I have used chunk sizes for 128 KB Edit 4: I found this on newegg Pros: Enclosure for 5x2TB hard drive is fine. This is basically a rebranded San Digital TR5M-B product. For support Rosewill tells you to contact San Digital. No direct support from Silicon Image for the computer raid card. Cons: Includes computer Silicon Image 3132 raid card, extremely slow raid 5 write (our tests ~10MB/s). Compare to regular internal local drive write 30-60MB/s. We basically dumped the Sil3132 card and replaced with High Point RocketRaid 622 card for extra $69.99. Note for RR622, turn off ECRC (end to end CRC check) for card to work on IBM xserver. What took 12hrs to copy now took 2-3hrs. San Digital realized the problem and has the newer model TR5M-BP TowerRaid Plus that comes with High Point RocketRaid 622 card. Rosewill should discontinue this product and go with TR5M-BP. Could not get Silicon Image raid management software to work with complicated 2008R2 server with 10 NICs, application doesn't know how to talk to localhost port with all those NICs. No updates from Silicon Image and support from San Digital ignored. Gave up on Sil3132 card. Save yourself from a lot of headaches, get the RR622 card too if you are going to buy this product. Other Thoughts: The newer model is TR5M-BP TowerRaid Plus, comes with High Point RocketRaid 622 raid card for the PC instead of Silicon Image Sil3132. According to San Digital, raid 5 performance for Sil3132 read 80MB/s write 19MB/s, and RR622 read 154MB/s write 149MB/s. Our RR622 tests gave (8TB raid 5) write ~80-110MB/s copying 40GB file took 8mins. So I have now ordered a HighPoint RocketRAID 622 2P ext SATA III and hopes that it will solve my problems.

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